Words of experience / goodbye

What has this game turned into?

I used to be amused by War Robots.  Started before matchmaking was a thing, when the fights were gear based and monetization was familiar.  Note, I refuse to spend money on mobile games, and seeing how this game turned out, I am glad that Pixonic didn’t get any.  The closest I came was considering a haechi for cash when they came out, but the ludicrousness of the price ($200) was obvious. 

As we all know, reason hit the fan about year ago for this game.

When matchmaker hit, it was broken quickly by the players and has yet to be fixed.  The first few months as I battled in silver and gold, I didn’t like being pummeled by more experienced (or rich) players with a 20-40% advantage.  Well, this game was always a HUGE time sink (think YEARS of upgrading) especially if you are FTP and like to play with whatever you want, instead of the same equipment forever.  The whole first 6 months of playing, the carrot was that eventually I would have some equipment to level 12 and play a fair game. 

The most competitive and fun games are on an even playing field.

Of all the negative development going on, MK2 was the worst.  When it hit, I realized that all the time (MONTHS!) I had spent to get to an even playing field just went down the drain and maybe backward a few months.  My gear was 9 to 11 at the time.  Now, the more experienced (but mostly rich) players had a 40-60% advantage with gear only easily attainable by money.

Note, the gear for money, DIESS, is no fun to play with.  Well, maybe fun to drive, but certainly not fun to hunt down and kill.  The game is no longer a slow moving strategy game, but another boring FPS.  Well, there are much better in that genre than War Robots! (think COD, HALO).

Confession: I tried tanking and got to see what it was like on the other side of the pain train.

During events, I grinded (ground?) through the tasks and got some great gear.  The events kept me playing for a few more months as I was still marginally competitive.  I was introduced to tanking by the beacon tasks (thanks pixonic!).  Well, if I could get faster kills and wins after the beacons, then I started tanking on purpose.  Also, It was fun to play lower level different gear.  I have been as high as champion to as low as Bronze 3 in the last year.  Currently at Diamond 1 / Expert 3 using non-meta gear. 

How was tanking?  At first it is exhilarating to not get pounded into the ground by higher geared players.  I would purposefully hunt people who were seal clubbing, and would put a higher level meta bot in the hanger in case I found someone who was obviously farming, and give them a bad day.  That was fun.  When I did try farming (using high level meta gear in lower leagues) the game lost its challenge and with it, the fun.

Why play with 5 bots when you could revert your hanger to have only 1?

Now that I quit, I’ll let you in on a fun secret.  When the extra hanger feature came out, you could swap bots into the second hanger from the first hanger, and if there was a bot in the second hanger, it would go back into inventory.  The result was you could manipulate the two hangers to have one bot in
the hanger.  Pixonic must have realized this, and has since patched it so the two bots will swap places.

Playing with 1 or 2 bots is more fun than 5! You can level up your smaller hanger faster.  You can go all out, and leave to a new game quickly.  I settled on 2.5 bots as the optimum.  2 is not enough variety, and 3 means if you hit a squad of pain, you have to endure it that much longer.  Warning, you will be put in LPQ if you play with 1 bot and get wiped out by red too fast.

Test server was good times

Playing on the test server was much more fun than the regular game ever was.  Even playing field!! Same gear to all.  And maybe the occasional glitch that made you invincible muahahahaha.  One was the inquisitor with 0 seconds of cooldown for stealth.  Another was the schutze from hell (didn’t
register any health loss).  With the schutze glitch, I equipped a thunder and found another schutze to pound on and got the most damage in a match I ever had: 3.4M.

When the haechi was tested, I was one of the people stating it should have reduced health similar to the carnage for example.  Pixonic ignored the testers input.  So, I gave up on trying to help pixonic improve the game.

The latest outrage was forcing people to play TDM.  On the test server, it was great believe it or not.  You could spawn next to campers and get
revenge, sort of like BR.  However, on the live server it is now a horrible mode filled with campers and players with no motivation to press battle lines.  At
least KotH is better in that regard.  I liked BR and Dom, and liked when we could choose between them separately.

(Dis)honorable mentions:

Random Queue

Mk2 gear

$200 to $300 for new, game-breaking gear

Gambling

Hanger bays for 7500g?!

Inaction on tanking

Inaction on sorting inventory

laggy game play

Things I learned to hate

After this 1.5 year experience with War robots.  I am instant deleting ANY mobile game with even a hint of the social crimes employed in the monetization of War Robots: (not-so)”random” lootboxes, waiting for upgrades (YEARS?!), unfair games!

TLDR:
War robots is not fun to play anymore.  If you are new, give up now.  It doesn’t get better.  Sorry to be negative. Goodbye.