The Depressed Veterans Club
Jan 9, 2023 18:27:43 GMT -5
Cdr. Crimmins, Sgt. Beacon, and 10 more like this
Post by 079 on Jan 9, 2023 18:27:43 GMT -5
This is where I shall dump all of my frustrations and reflections about the game from the past two months, since even though I will soon somewhat contradict the validity of this notion, I do want to keep emotional/rambly stuff out of General Discussion, at least the stuff I write anyway.
So as I had said, I had another break over the past month, but while I did play a ton of Minecraft as I said, the other reason is one that goes far deeper and is far larger to me, and that is just how far the game has went off the deep end in the past couple of months. To make sure we all are on the same page, the term “going off the deep end” is a common metaphor when analyzing fictional media that denotes when a work, often suddenly and thereafter constantly, embraces increasing complexity in how its universe works when simplicity was the norm. For a game like War Robots, this is two fold: Pixonic has devoted itself to creating a lore-rich fictional universe around the game, something nobody really asked for, and of course, all of the crazy game mechanics that comprise today’s battles. Pixonic either thought more complex meant better, or this was a side effect of their increasingly less original robots/weapons and, well, greed. Either way, the simple, quirky game from 2014-2017 is long gone, and we now find ourselves on the deep end of the metaphorical pool, with the bottom nowhere in sight, despite claims over the years that, time and time again, we have hit rock bottom.
I’ve been on record saying that the Spectre/Shocktrain meta was the worst meta this game had ever seen. In some ways, it still is: it truly marked the end of classic War Robots, even more than the Dash robots did, and it is arguably still the most oppressive meta the game has ever seen, being one of only two metas so far where five of the same robot in a hangar was the best hangar (the other meta being the EMG Hawk, but Pixonic nerfed it so fast it that it did not have the time to scar players the way the Spectre did). Well, in the latter half of 2022, Pixonic managed to make me change my mind, not once, but twice, and twice a row at that.
For a while I thought the Seraph meta was actually better than the Fafnir meta, as Seraph’s finite flight time and lack of Shieldbreaker kept it in enough check to make me prefer it over pre-nerf Fafnir. However, when Pixonic released the pilot that boosted both flight time and speed, which completely mitigated Serpah’s disadvantages compared to Fafnir, and top players figured out increasingly broken builds/strategies for it, I decided Serpah was indeed worse than Fafnir, and coupled with the Bendy and Shieldbreaker Siren/Harpy spam everywhere, I decided, towards the end of this meta, just before the onslaught of Mars and Angler, that this was the worst meta yet, just barely worse than the Spectre/Shocktrian meta.
But then came Angler, and while Seraph had to wear me down over a couple months make me concede that it indeed was the worst, Angler dethroned it right out of the gate as the new worst meta this game has ever seen. While I still personally hate Scorpion more, I do think Angler is the worst robot ever, and for reasons similar to Scorpion, funny enough. Like Scorpion, I view Angler as a kind of betrayal of the principles that this game was built on. It has long been agreed on for most of us that a robot whose gimmick is “I can shoot you, but you cannot shoot me back” is the rock bottom of robot concepts. For a while, Scorpion was the realization of that to me, with its surprise tactics (with basically no way to prepare), stealth pilot, and option to leave any time, without consequence. While other robots were overall worse, even ones from Scorpion’s time, due to having less limitations than it, I always hated Scorpion for its ability to created one-sided battles at will. But then came Angler, which somehow made Scorpion’s concept worse. While Scorpion could be damaged during its ability by anyone, and EMP gave it a weakness that has led to its decline, Angler simply possess no such weaknesses. It has high durability, firepower, a strong shield, and decent speed, meaning you cannot crush it if you catch it like you can with Scorpion, and unlike Scorpion’s ability, which largely but not perfectly symbolized “I can shoot you, but you cannot shoot me back”, Angler’s ability is the literal personification of it. Combining Revana’s Transcendence and Cinder’s AoE attack, two of the most hated-by-players mechanics to ever be put in War Robots, and adding a blind attack at the end to reduce the already tiny amount of risk to the user, Angler’s ability is a low I honestly never thought possible. Add in Spear, a good candidate for the most broken weapon of all time, its lesser but still awful cousin Fainter, Mars, whose speed and turret are even more broken than its shield, and Skyros, who seems to switch off the brains of my teammates whenever it nears the home/side beacon, and yeah, this is the worst meta ever, easily. Spectre is probably jealous it did not wreak game balance this hard!
And of course, how could I forget the not meta related but arguably larger issues with the game, such as frustrating lack of obvious quality of life features, the hacking epidemic, player rug-pulls disguised as rebalances (boosters and drones), and ever-diminishing game stability. And lastly, the cherry to top it all off, the fact that Pixonic only does major balance updates once in a blue moon these days, meaning all the not or barely nerfed content has been adding up to create a while upper level to the meta that only heavy spenders have access to, especially with the past 6 month’s garbage events, meaning budget spenders and F2P are as downtrodden as ever. We were all hoping that Bendies, Kephri, Northlight, and Revenant would have gotten the boot by now, but here we are now, months past their supposed lifespan, only now getting uncertain promises of a balance update. Better late then never, but man is it late, maybe too late for some of us.
But, all of this really only explains my absence from the game (besides 6 Pack and the Time Drops, which I do still regularly attend), and not from the forum. Well, all of this goes into what I am about say, as well as just allowed me to vent some pent-up frustrations, which is what a rant is for right? Well, my absence from the forum for the past 30-ish days is not due to the above reasons, but my reasons stem from those reasons. My absence is due to me thinking the forum is just not as fun to be in as it once was, but not in the way one would initially think.
I ranted at length about various problems with War Robots above, and well, those opinions are hardly unique to me. Everyone hates Angler, Spear, and Northlight, and since Pixonic has been pushing the game’s predatory monetization farther than ever while being as reluctant as ever about a rebalance update to give everyone a breather, player moral is low right now, possibly the lowest it has ever been. And well, that inevitably bleeds into the forums, spawning the endless discussion and ranting about hackers, spenders, and Pixonic we all see today. Pixonic’s anti-consumer mentality has made the game so bad that identifying and studying hacks, purposely managing one’s position in the ranks against the game’s want for you to progress, and not engaging in the game outside of airtight fan operations like 6 Pack are no longer taboo, but serious, everyday subjects. Just think about that for a second and how, well, sad it is. Nobody here is at fault, it is just that the direction Pixonic has taken the game in the past half-year has warped the topics of discussion so much that we all have no choice but to face these heavier subjects head-on.
So, what is the point of me saying all this? Well, it’s a long, overly elaborate explanation for my sudden, unexplained absence in the forum this past month, as well as my overall more relaxed approach to the forum. I used to get snappy at people for going on for too long about a negative subject, especially if it was in General Discussion, but I now recognize things are just not the same anymore. It really has been weighing on me recently how much the game has went off the deep end in only 6 months, and how much the conversions here have changed as a result. I also used to frequently make long posts all the time, but now my posts are shorter and less frequent (but I still do a long one from time to time, heh heh). This is because I think the game and consequently the forum are at an all-time low, and well, that makes me not want to stay with either as much as I once did.
But, the doom and gloom does not reach forever. Assuming the rebalance arrives in the form the rumors say it will, which knowing Pixonic is only a maybe (it is oddly soon for Spear to be nerfed, after all), it will be a much, much needed breath of fresh air. Plus, with my copious Minecraft playing coming to a close, I can start to re-engage with this amazing community, which just like during the summer, I genuinely did miss interacting with. Plus, just because I do not want to play the game much right now does not mean I have to be on here less. Plus, while I wish things could go back to the way they were (who doesn’t, right?), I have started getting used to the new way of things here, and I am starting to get ideas for a big thread or two, so expect good things in the (possibly near) future! Just like on the battlefields of War Robots, changing my approach to things is often all that is needed to significantly improve my experience and the experiences I (hopefully) provide others.
But with all of that out of the way, I do have an undeniable truth that I must face now, and this may shock some of you… I think I have joined the “Depressed Veterans Club” that I coined a month or so ago as a joke! Half a year ago I was (mostly in Discord voice channels) picking on people like Cdr. Crimmins and Typhon Johnny for being cynical or “crusty old men” when they go on rants about the game, but now I have come around to their, and I’m sure most other’s, line of thinking. It only took the worst 6 months this game has ever seen to make me finally realize how far the game has fallen since I joined it in February 2017. So yeah, I’m one of you now, a disillusioned player who cannot stop reminiscing on the past and what could have been. I mean, after making this whole rant, it would be hard to argue otherwise, right!?
Well, there is the whole thing, right there in words. Normally I would say something like, “tell me your thoughts”, or “I look forward to the discussion”, but this time, I’m not necessarily here for that. This is a rant after all, so looking for feedback is not really the point. Unlike my guides or analyses, I have no long-term intention for players to be educated or draw inspiration from this. You may disagree with my interpretations of the game or forum, and that’s fine as always, but I will probably not be making any elaborations or changes to this based on what anyone thinks. Rather uncharacteristically, I typed this more for myself than for the enjoyment of others, and well, I enjoyed it! Sometimes rants can feel hollow or whiny to even their writer, but I found catharsis in finally venting about things I had for a while refrained from going on at length about. So, I’ll just say that I hoped you enjoyed this introspective explanation of my change in pace as if late, and are able to respect it if you do not agree with it. You’re of course free to respond, but like I said, I’m not here for any significant back-and-forth, not this time anyway. Until next time, commanders!
So as I had said, I had another break over the past month, but while I did play a ton of Minecraft as I said, the other reason is one that goes far deeper and is far larger to me, and that is just how far the game has went off the deep end in the past couple of months. To make sure we all are on the same page, the term “going off the deep end” is a common metaphor when analyzing fictional media that denotes when a work, often suddenly and thereafter constantly, embraces increasing complexity in how its universe works when simplicity was the norm. For a game like War Robots, this is two fold: Pixonic has devoted itself to creating a lore-rich fictional universe around the game, something nobody really asked for, and of course, all of the crazy game mechanics that comprise today’s battles. Pixonic either thought more complex meant better, or this was a side effect of their increasingly less original robots/weapons and, well, greed. Either way, the simple, quirky game from 2014-2017 is long gone, and we now find ourselves on the deep end of the metaphorical pool, with the bottom nowhere in sight, despite claims over the years that, time and time again, we have hit rock bottom.
I’ve been on record saying that the Spectre/Shocktrain meta was the worst meta this game had ever seen. In some ways, it still is: it truly marked the end of classic War Robots, even more than the Dash robots did, and it is arguably still the most oppressive meta the game has ever seen, being one of only two metas so far where five of the same robot in a hangar was the best hangar (the other meta being the EMG Hawk, but Pixonic nerfed it so fast it that it did not have the time to scar players the way the Spectre did). Well, in the latter half of 2022, Pixonic managed to make me change my mind, not once, but twice, and twice a row at that.
For a while I thought the Seraph meta was actually better than the Fafnir meta, as Seraph’s finite flight time and lack of Shieldbreaker kept it in enough check to make me prefer it over pre-nerf Fafnir. However, when Pixonic released the pilot that boosted both flight time and speed, which completely mitigated Serpah’s disadvantages compared to Fafnir, and top players figured out increasingly broken builds/strategies for it, I decided Serpah was indeed worse than Fafnir, and coupled with the Bendy and Shieldbreaker Siren/Harpy spam everywhere, I decided, towards the end of this meta, just before the onslaught of Mars and Angler, that this was the worst meta yet, just barely worse than the Spectre/Shocktrian meta.
But then came Angler, and while Seraph had to wear me down over a couple months make me concede that it indeed was the worst, Angler dethroned it right out of the gate as the new worst meta this game has ever seen. While I still personally hate Scorpion more, I do think Angler is the worst robot ever, and for reasons similar to Scorpion, funny enough. Like Scorpion, I view Angler as a kind of betrayal of the principles that this game was built on. It has long been agreed on for most of us that a robot whose gimmick is “I can shoot you, but you cannot shoot me back” is the rock bottom of robot concepts. For a while, Scorpion was the realization of that to me, with its surprise tactics (with basically no way to prepare), stealth pilot, and option to leave any time, without consequence. While other robots were overall worse, even ones from Scorpion’s time, due to having less limitations than it, I always hated Scorpion for its ability to created one-sided battles at will. But then came Angler, which somehow made Scorpion’s concept worse. While Scorpion could be damaged during its ability by anyone, and EMP gave it a weakness that has led to its decline, Angler simply possess no such weaknesses. It has high durability, firepower, a strong shield, and decent speed, meaning you cannot crush it if you catch it like you can with Scorpion, and unlike Scorpion’s ability, which largely but not perfectly symbolized “I can shoot you, but you cannot shoot me back”, Angler’s ability is the literal personification of it. Combining Revana’s Transcendence and Cinder’s AoE attack, two of the most hated-by-players mechanics to ever be put in War Robots, and adding a blind attack at the end to reduce the already tiny amount of risk to the user, Angler’s ability is a low I honestly never thought possible. Add in Spear, a good candidate for the most broken weapon of all time, its lesser but still awful cousin Fainter, Mars, whose speed and turret are even more broken than its shield, and Skyros, who seems to switch off the brains of my teammates whenever it nears the home/side beacon, and yeah, this is the worst meta ever, easily. Spectre is probably jealous it did not wreak game balance this hard!
And of course, how could I forget the not meta related but arguably larger issues with the game, such as frustrating lack of obvious quality of life features, the hacking epidemic, player rug-pulls disguised as rebalances (boosters and drones), and ever-diminishing game stability. And lastly, the cherry to top it all off, the fact that Pixonic only does major balance updates once in a blue moon these days, meaning all the not or barely nerfed content has been adding up to create a while upper level to the meta that only heavy spenders have access to, especially with the past 6 month’s garbage events, meaning budget spenders and F2P are as downtrodden as ever. We were all hoping that Bendies, Kephri, Northlight, and Revenant would have gotten the boot by now, but here we are now, months past their supposed lifespan, only now getting uncertain promises of a balance update. Better late then never, but man is it late, maybe too late for some of us.
But, all of this really only explains my absence from the game (besides 6 Pack and the Time Drops, which I do still regularly attend), and not from the forum. Well, all of this goes into what I am about say, as well as just allowed me to vent some pent-up frustrations, which is what a rant is for right? Well, my absence from the forum for the past 30-ish days is not due to the above reasons, but my reasons stem from those reasons. My absence is due to me thinking the forum is just not as fun to be in as it once was, but not in the way one would initially think.
I ranted at length about various problems with War Robots above, and well, those opinions are hardly unique to me. Everyone hates Angler, Spear, and Northlight, and since Pixonic has been pushing the game’s predatory monetization farther than ever while being as reluctant as ever about a rebalance update to give everyone a breather, player moral is low right now, possibly the lowest it has ever been. And well, that inevitably bleeds into the forums, spawning the endless discussion and ranting about hackers, spenders, and Pixonic we all see today. Pixonic’s anti-consumer mentality has made the game so bad that identifying and studying hacks, purposely managing one’s position in the ranks against the game’s want for you to progress, and not engaging in the game outside of airtight fan operations like 6 Pack are no longer taboo, but serious, everyday subjects. Just think about that for a second and how, well, sad it is. Nobody here is at fault, it is just that the direction Pixonic has taken the game in the past half-year has warped the topics of discussion so much that we all have no choice but to face these heavier subjects head-on.
So, what is the point of me saying all this? Well, it’s a long, overly elaborate explanation for my sudden, unexplained absence in the forum this past month, as well as my overall more relaxed approach to the forum. I used to get snappy at people for going on for too long about a negative subject, especially if it was in General Discussion, but I now recognize things are just not the same anymore. It really has been weighing on me recently how much the game has went off the deep end in only 6 months, and how much the conversions here have changed as a result. I also used to frequently make long posts all the time, but now my posts are shorter and less frequent (but I still do a long one from time to time, heh heh). This is because I think the game and consequently the forum are at an all-time low, and well, that makes me not want to stay with either as much as I once did.
But, the doom and gloom does not reach forever. Assuming the rebalance arrives in the form the rumors say it will, which knowing Pixonic is only a maybe (it is oddly soon for Spear to be nerfed, after all), it will be a much, much needed breath of fresh air. Plus, with my copious Minecraft playing coming to a close, I can start to re-engage with this amazing community, which just like during the summer, I genuinely did miss interacting with. Plus, just because I do not want to play the game much right now does not mean I have to be on here less. Plus, while I wish things could go back to the way they were (who doesn’t, right?), I have started getting used to the new way of things here, and I am starting to get ideas for a big thread or two, so expect good things in the (possibly near) future! Just like on the battlefields of War Robots, changing my approach to things is often all that is needed to significantly improve my experience and the experiences I (hopefully) provide others.
But with all of that out of the way, I do have an undeniable truth that I must face now, and this may shock some of you… I think I have joined the “Depressed Veterans Club” that I coined a month or so ago as a joke! Half a year ago I was (mostly in Discord voice channels) picking on people like Cdr. Crimmins and Typhon Johnny for being cynical or “crusty old men” when they go on rants about the game, but now I have come around to their, and I’m sure most other’s, line of thinking. It only took the worst 6 months this game has ever seen to make me finally realize how far the game has fallen since I joined it in February 2017. So yeah, I’m one of you now, a disillusioned player who cannot stop reminiscing on the past and what could have been. I mean, after making this whole rant, it would be hard to argue otherwise, right!?
Well, there is the whole thing, right there in words. Normally I would say something like, “tell me your thoughts”, or “I look forward to the discussion”, but this time, I’m not necessarily here for that. This is a rant after all, so looking for feedback is not really the point. Unlike my guides or analyses, I have no long-term intention for players to be educated or draw inspiration from this. You may disagree with my interpretations of the game or forum, and that’s fine as always, but I will probably not be making any elaborations or changes to this based on what anyone thinks. Rather uncharacteristically, I typed this more for myself than for the enjoyment of others, and well, I enjoyed it! Sometimes rants can feel hollow or whiny to even their writer, but I found catharsis in finally venting about things I had for a while refrained from going on at length about. So, I’ll just say that I hoped you enjoyed this introspective explanation of my change in pace as if late, and are able to respect it if you do not agree with it. You’re of course free to respond, but like I said, I’m not here for any significant back-and-forth, not this time anyway. Until next time, commanders!
