The Bazaar

Kiroy said:

healthy meta going

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The new meta is dogshit. A lot of the changes were needed, but they went way too heavy into charge and it's just back where it was.

This game has been going downhill every patch. The only way to get rewards right now is to play ranked. Ranked only seems to put you against everyone chasing meta builds. The internal balance is very poor, but slowly improving. Meanwhile the external balance is terrible and not improving. This leads to a situation where any single item that stands out on the strong character floods ranked.

All of this against a backdrop of no new items or characters to play. This means the gameplay experience is both frustrating (you aren't getting the good stuff) and boring (you can't easily switch builds and only a few items stand out).

They're going to need to make drastic changes if this is think to survive.

Would really appreciate if the currency rewards were spread over the entire win ladder instead of 4-7-10. Fine with the cosmetics being at 4/7/10, but you get so many wildly dumb ghosts after 7. Had a 1500burn, Multi x2, 115% Crit, 3.5second Flamethrower at 7 wins, failed to make it to 10

Kiroy said:

I think they’re balancing this way to make winning more randomized and sell more gems.

First few patches i hit 7 near 100% of times and 10 like 80%. Recently its closer to 50/20 cause they made early game coin flippy and late game really coin flippy.

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My problem is the entire game is designed for the casino effect where the interesting choices are something like you get a random enchanted or diamond item. But the reality is 99% of the time that is the wrong choice if you have a working build. So really the only way to win consistently is to do the same thing every run, and use builds that are consistent. Maybe 1/100 runs you get one rare item so powerful you can swap.

The other issue with that approach is as they've nerfed combos, it takes more and more pieces to get any sort of scaling engine online. And you need to scale if you want to win 10. So now it's like great, this rare item dropped that I can't ever use. I can't count the number of times I just immediately sell the rarest items in game (dumb space ship weapon, or dumb octopus weapon) because it's just useless. They can't have a "build your own adventure" game where everything is a carefully constructed combo.

I don't know how they can make all this work simultaneously.

This comes out today in open beta.

So the most recent patch has been much better balanced and more fun generally. They started doing "starting bundles" which include a variety of item types, skills and gold. They are tweaking that now in today's patch so there will be more consistent options.

Big new issue is the monetization strategy, they are going to have a subscription fee for faster battle pass xp, more chests, monthly free cosmetic, etc. No idea how much this will be. If it's like 2.99 a month probably fine, but probably won't be.

The bigger change is what the premium battle passes include, which is early access to 10 card packs for specific heroes. Once the month ends, anyone can buy it with in game currency. You will be able to activate or deactivate card packs you purchase to tailor your card pool.

Tons of people are going crazy over this. To me I'm a bit wary of the sell broken fix free cycle some games have, so we'll see. Overall I'm ambivalent until I see prices. I'm also not sure how diluting your card pool will be a good thing, it might be that you get more consistency by not running any new cards.

Used the above referral to give this a shot, actually pretty good fun and has been keeping me entertained the last couple evenings. If anyone else is thinking about giving a shot, here's another referral for the chain:


my current ranked run was going pretty well before server derped, kind of landed on all of the fire: