Leaving the game after (nearly) 10 years
Hi everyone,
I know that this post doesn't really matter, as I'm not big on the forums or in content creation or anything but I just deleted the game after playing (and spending $) for nearly ten years. I started playing this game in early 2015 just before I graduated high school and I loved it. I loved collecting fun champions and taking on somewhat challenging content from time to time. Nowadays, I feel like I consistently collect mediocre champions and then am gaslit by YouTubers into thinking that they are great, when in reality they are just fine but not widely useable in meaningful game modes (I'll talk more about this later).
Anyways, I just wanted to write a post on why I'm leaving the game here as a method to both give some insight to the devs. Also I guess I just want to talk about why I feel I've been pushed to this conclusion (yes, I do feel pushed, I've been trying very hard to justify myself continuing to play this game for around a year now). I'm going to try not to be obscenely negative here, and give as moderate views as possible.
My reasons for leaving the game:
1) Burnout
This is the easy one and it is no one's fault. Everyone burns out from doing the same thing over and over again. We all have different tolerance levels and mine has been growing smaller for this game since about 2022, though champions decisions that I'll talk about in 2023 - 2024 definitely sped this process up for me. It is a testament to the game design that it took me nearly 8 years (until 2022) of near daily play before I go to this point. Kudos to the devs.
2) How I feel playing this game (frustrated, disappointed, hateful)
Here's a question for you: Do you have fun when you play this game? I think that I used to, but those days are over. Long gone are the days where I looked forward to playing quests and opening crystals. Now I do it because I feel like it's a chore to check off my list (and sunk cost fallacy). Certainly, I get that the game is designed that way. And throughout the pandemic even when I felt that it was a chore, I was still enjoying the game play enough not to mind the chore and looked at it as part of my daily checklist. But nowadays I genuinely dislike most of the time I spend playing this game. I attribute my burnout most to battlegrounds, new champion design, the ramping up of monetization, and absurd RNG of crystal opening at this point in the game.
3) Battlegrounds
This (like the rest of my post, but this bullet point in particular) is completely a me problem, and I'll own that. I don't like who I am playing battlegrounds. It makes me very frustrated because I get out drafted, or the AI isn't cooperative, or because I get out played and it frustrates me (#3 is probably the most common cause of my failures). I'm fairly good at this game. I was (until it was decided that the AI should be god like) great at intercepting, both light and medium. I can reparry, bait specials, bob and weave, all that jazz. I mention this in case anyone reads this post and thinks that I was a pleb who needed to git gud. I don't like battlegrounds because the rewards for anyone who isn't in the top 100 players at the end of the month is garbage. This month was the first time I felt like I had a good amount of battlegrounds currency in the entire lifetime of the game mode. However, this month's GC meta (Crit me) has been a cluster **** of frustration and was the metaphorical straw that broke my back into deleting this game. How do you go about designing multiple champions who cannot be intercepted and then go and make a meta that requires intercepting? Come on guys. Once again, another example of making decisions to annoy your player base. This is a common theme, and one of the main things that has pushed me away.
4) New Champions
This is the big one. If there was one main reason I'm leaving, it is this. The champion design that started with Photon/Kindred and has only gotten worse leaves me flabbergasted. It is obvious to me that Kabam devs think that this game has been too easy? Which I don't get. Sure, it isn't the most difficult game in the world, but I don't really want to fight the most difficult dark souls bosses every day, and new ones thrown into the pile monthly to learn. Maybe most of you do, I don't know. Take a champion that nowadays people say is "well designed", Photon. Her special attacks while in pure light form are undexable and unblockable. This is absurd. Now, you could try to nuke her before she gets there, certainly there are champions to allow this like Kate or Mantis, in crit me meta this pool expands. But I have to ask myself, why design the champion this way? Why design something that you cannot interact with once you pass an easily passable threshold? The answer is so that players are so frustrated that they spend loads of money to buy the next champion that counters this horrendous defender. Now you may read the previous sentence and say "Well of course! This is a game, the devs need to make money!" Personally, I'm not fine with the Apple business model of "We're creating a problem that you have to pay us money to fix." I think that it is a shady business practice and it has pushed me away. I'm not a fan of champions who force you to take unavoidable damage for playing the designed game (bullseye, Onslaught, Enchantress), punish you for using advanced fighting techniques in the game (Negasonic, Spiderpunk, Destroyer) or have unavoidable and overpowered power gain mechanics (Destroyer, White Tiger, Serpent, and this whole AW meta). No, not all of the champions I just listed are amazing defenders and impenetrable walls of tank, but they all have these frustrating mechanics that are difficult to avoid without a perfect or near perfect counter. When the game was just somewhat difficult defenders (like Rintrah, Terrax, Super Skull) that could be ramped up difficulty by nodes sets, and who you only had to kill one-six times per quest, I was fine with the difficulty. I was excited by it, even. Because there was an end in sight for the madness, and once I beat it for the sixth time I knew that I wouldn't have to deal with that brand of frustration again. Nowadays, every single time I encounter any one of these champions I know that I have to relive this frustration daily, and it has made me quite jaded.
The other big problem with the new champions is that they're garbage attackers. I see YouTubers complain about "over powered champions" that shouldn't be in the game like Kitty Pryde or Hercules and I'm genuinely confused. Is it not fun to feel like you have lots of power in your hands? Isn't it fun to feel like you can piledrive your way through the challenges put in front of you? Well, it's fun for me, at least. Yes, I got bored using Herc (not Kitty, I think that she's the most fun champion in the game, hate on me if you wish), so I just stopped using him to give me more of a challenge. Because with all of these people complaining about power champions, I feel like the game devs got the idea that they needed to make more mediocre attackers. No one wants to pull **** from a crystal, but almost even worse is pulling champions who are basically ****, but have minute situational uses. Like my god, look at the attackers this year. Iron Heart is so close to good that it isn't funny. Everyone knows how to make her really good, too. Extend the lifetime of her debuffs or give her a reliable way to refresh them. Any other year that's how she would have been designed (look at Kate Bishop or Omega Sentinel as my proof). But no, we can't get that, because then she'd be a broadly useable champion, which it seems as though the devs are against. The list of these almost decent champions goes on. Negasonic, Beta Ray Bill, Prowler, White Tiger, Silver Sable (LMFAO). None of these champions are widely used on attack in battle grounds. I'd guess that very few are routinely used in questing either. So I have to ask myself, what's the point of these champions? The answer that I can come up with is that KABAM doesn't want us have broad use champions anymore. They want you bringing specific counters to every fight. But none of the game modes work that way. I can't just choose negasonic because my opponent chose bullseye. I have to be lucky enough to draft her. Most of the champions drafted for attack are 2022 champions or earlier (with the notable exceptions of KB, Vox (the love of my life thank you KABAM for making such a wonderful champion), and Werewolf). Yes, I know that most champions are from earlier years, but you get my point. Most champions drafted for attack are 2022 or earlier, most drafted for defense are 2023 or later (or were buffed in 2023 or later). I don't have the data for that statement, I am making a generalization that probably doesn't fully stand up to in depth scrutiny, feel free to correct me if I am particularly wrong abut my last statement.
The coupling of frustratingly difficult defenders with the drought of invigoratingly powerful attackers pushed me away from this game the hardest. I want to feel powerful playing these legendary characters. None of the new champions make me feel this way (god except for Vox. Wow you guys seriously killed it with that champion. Kudos. Love Vox. Vox supremacy).
PS. Jesus Christ just put the best champions into the 7* pool. I'm so tired of hearing that "Oh CGR would be so overpowered if he were in the pool." No, he'd be the kind of champion that you get exceptionally excited to pull. Instead, the 7* pool is only filled with okay attackers and god level defenders. Power creep exists because you have to keep moving forward. Power creeping your defenders without matching with attackers just makes people mad. Stop banking on frustrating your community to make money.
5) AI, lag, and bugs
This one was always going to be here. I'm not going to say much, just that this has gotten absurd. The amount of bugs that get through play testers (I'm not convinced play testers exist) is downright shameful. I will admit that in recent months I think this has gotten better. Except for AI. My goodness, the AI in this game plays at the level of a professional sports player. Stop that. I should be able to reliably intercept, parry, and bait special attacks (with the exception of a select few defenders). It seems like every time the playerbase discovers and masters a new technique (reparry, light intercepts, etc) the AI learns it and makes it significantly less reliable within a year. For those of you too new to this game to remember, "intercepting" at all didn't become a common thing until around 2018-2019. Now it's not only a requisite to play the game, but now you need to know that the AI has learned to punish your intercepts and throw a special while you're performing an intercept. Stop evolving the AI. Once again, you're just making an already technically challenging game more frustrating.
Lag is just comedically laughable at this point. What are we doing that we cannot create a game that plays smoothly. This wasn't a problem for the first 6 years of the game. And now you're discussing introducing a 60fps version of the game? It can't even reliably run on its current frame rate. Good heavens.
6) RNG
This is a long post (very long, longer than I expected, sorry) so these last few I'm going to keep short. The odds in this game are abysmal. You want me to pay $10 for a crystal that has a 3% chance of getting me a 7*??? That is a joke. Even if I do get a 7* there far fewer useful champions to me in that crystal than there are garbage that I'll use once every blue moon. So I can't even get excited opening these crystals. Which is really really sad, as that is what a gotcha game (which this is basically one) is meant to do, push you to get excited to open new crystals. I've played quite a few gotcha games in my time, and this one has by far the lowest odds and highest price to get a new character or even a useful character out of any of them. I've never been able to excuse it, but it is just getting worse and worse as the 7* continues to get pumped full of mediocre attackers making the ratio of great champion/mediocre champion/great defender ever more skewed to grabbing something either unusable or something that only makes your roster better at pissing other people off rather than powering yourself up.
7) Monetization
I buy **** on this game. I'm not free to play, I never have been. I probably spend ~$80 per month on average. And although my partner looks on with horrified eyes when I describe this to him, I've never minded spending a bit. "After all, I play this more than any other video game." I told myself. The devs deserve some money from the player base for their work. But the level of monetization in the last year has gotten out of hand. It used to be that only July 4 and Cyber weekend (maybe Christmas too) you'd get huge spender events. Now there's one every fricken month. My god. And all it does it make the economic caste system of this game more prevalent. Despite the fact that I've been playing for a long time, I'm going up mostly against people with 7 more R3 7* than me.
The older and "wiser" I get, the more I look at micro transaction games as unethical, and the more that this game pushed big spending days and opportunities, the more that I've been pushed away by the idea of supporting this game structure (tell that to my SWGOH account though... oops)
8) YouTubers
Last one, I swear. I mentioned this at the top, so I thought I'd elaborate a bit. First of all, I love you Brian Grant. I'm probably still going to watch your live streams. You're a gem to the community and, from what I can tell by this parasocial association, a really great guy.
My big problem with YouTubers is that they aren't holding this game accountable enough. The reality is that most are just saying things that gas the devs up. And certainly, the devs should be gassed up sometimes. There's no doubt that this game is an achievement to be proud of. But my gosh, every champion that gets released isn't the next coming of the Savior. I think that this started with Lagacy (love ya dude, not meaning that I don't like you or your content) over hyping Morbius last year. But since then it has gotten out of hand. Every month I see videos talking about how crazy and awesome these new champions are. Then if you look at what champions are being routinely used 6 months later, none of those champions are anywhere to be seen. No, BRB is not a meta shifting champion. No, Werewolf by Night is not the best mystic champion in the game. No (this one is the most atrocious), Titania is not the best champ in the game period. In reality, the champions being put out in MCOC are FINE. It's time we start just saying that. If you don't like saying that because it doesn't let you make flashy enough thumbnails and titles, push the devs to make better champions.
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This post was 100% my opinion, and it was made on the same day I quit the game. This post may be overly negative, I recognize that and accept that many people will read it and disagree with every point I make. I'd imagine that there aren't many people who've been playing this game consistently as long as I have (early 2015), so I thought I'd explain why I'm leaving. I purposely didn't write what I like about the game here, because it isn't relevant to why I'm leaving. If the devs read this and are interested in what I think is going well and like, they can email me. If I didn't mention it on this list, I probably like it (yes even AQ and AW).
