Eh, I don't think the players that are winning now are necessarily good. They are winning now because they were good before the update, and were smart / lucky enough to have a high number of legendary items in the inventory when the update dropped. With that as a kick starter, their advantage will only increase.
Before the update, I had a couple of mid-level mechs that were pretty well equipped for their levels. I never made a lucifer, but mostly at the legendary levels above that (gladiator, dragon, etc). I had started building an elite mech when i got bored with the grinding.
I got the email about the new update and thought I'd log in again to check it out. After playing a bunch yesterday and some more today, here's what I'm seeing:
1) Whoever has the most legendary items wins. At least in the old version i could learn from the people who were beating me and equip my mech in the same way. now i just have to bend over and take it.
2) I have a few level 18 legendary / epic items, so i can hold my own at that level. My level 30 mech is pretty much a cream puff, the only people I can beat are the new players achieving that level who have fewer legendaries than i do. I spent approx 500,000 credits that i had accumulated from before on boxes, and got one legendary and a couple of epics. The odds played out about right, but there is no way I'm going to grind long enough to put together a mech that can actually compete.
3) It is frustrating getting beat by Optimus and knowing there is no way I will ever get enough legendary items to beat him. At least in the old system, if i ran into someone I couldn't beat, i could just re-equip at a different level and fight there until i had enough money to match the build of my nemesis. Mostly, the people I couldn't beat were just better than i was, having figured out a good combination of weapons and the right way to use them. now, the people i can't beat might be better, but there is no way to make a fair fight to find out.
4) I like having the "practice mode" in single player once the campaign is finished, the pre-update single player mode was brutal after the campaign. I like the idea of the fusions, although it could probably use more work. Maybe some control over which portion of the item's stats are improved?
5) Rocket weapons are way overpowered at high levels. At level 18, energy still matters. At level 30, it doesn't. Stomp vs swords has been covered already, but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
6) The SM money system is broken now. I used to be able to look at the wiki, and plan out what upgrades i was going to target at a particular level and save accordingly. Decisions had to be made about how much to save vs how much to spend on kits and lesser upgrades, but those were decisions i got to make. Now, the system for higher level player is reduced to "win a bunch of games, throw the money in a slot machine and hope something cool comes up". Reading the older forum posts, clearly many other people also like to save their winnings for particular items, that mechanic is gone now.
If the motivation for the update was that "high level players were never choosing to play at their highest level", i don't see how this will fix it. now, it just speeds up the process that leads high level players to stop playing completely. if lucifers and other legendary torsos were too overpowered, then fix that problem, but don't throw out everything good about the game. making the game fun for the higher levels is how you'll keep people around longer, and even if you've succeeded making the lower level players less likely to be wiped out (debateable), the fun at level 30 is going to run out quickly. before, at least there was some fun in trying to make the perfect mech for each legendary torso in the lower levels... now that is gone.
the ability to carry mech outfits at multiple levels was one of the things i liked best about the game, that should have been built on, not eliminated by forcing all upgrades into the highest level. i had been hoping for the ability to save different combinations into memory, so that i could quickly swap from one mech to another. hoping for that now is pointless, since fighting at multiple levels is effectively gone for everyone except those who carried over a strong set of equipment from before.
i actually paid for tokens in the pre-update game, the first time i had ever spent money on an internet game like this. the 2X advantage to too big to pass up, and the price was reasonable to get it. i was disappointed when i realized that the high levels were a wasteland, but that was better than this. count me among those that would say eliminating the update is *not* going backwards, it would be a big improvement for the game as it stands today. i agree that something needed to be done to make the high levels more interesting, but this wasn't it.
for anyone interested, my mech is "Sensi". I had never dominated at any particular level, but had kept up a pretty decent winning percentage by copying those that were better than me. i especially enjoyed the close matches that would hinge on playing the right buff at just the right time, but that is just another aspect of the game that is gone now.
if this post isn't constructive enough, let me try another suggestion. Since the dev's seem interested in adding chance to the game, i would suggest that making the weapon damage variance higher will lead to more frequent "upsets", when a lower skilled player can get lucky and beat a better one. instead of a weapon having 30-33 damage, make it something like 15-33. The variance can be a little frustrating, but it would be a way to help lower level players survive the churn against better players while they learn how the game is played.
edit... forgot a few things
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