What the heck happened to this game?

[dethred]

I must admit that I actually really liked this game when I stopped playing it a couple months ago. Circumstances beyond my control prohibited me from playing it for any length of time, and well... there's no point in hopping on for 30 minutes here and there.

I just started playing again a few nights ago and I saw some improvements, but mostly it's just a disaster.

Performance/FPS - it's now at a quantifiable level commonly known as shit. Where I was once seeing 100% butter smooth performance from everything on max settings and a "Ultra" config in the Usersettings.ini file, its now noticeably poor on standard high settings (yes its a clean .ini file now). Visually, the graphics quality appears the same, but the shocking decline in performance is just an unmitigated disaster. This is 100% down to the software, as my gaming system remained essentially untouched during my brief Hiatus.

Gameplay - Where there used to be some decent battles and fun things to do in places like towers (camping the spawn jumps up top, or defending the staircases), its now just dreary and both sides just patiently wait for the point to flip and everyone still in the spawn to auto-suicide.


General gameplay - This is where it has completely collapsed in my opinion. I played for FOUR HOURS the other night, and it took until the 4th hour before I actually shot at an enemy with a gun. The entire defense mechanic of the game has been ruined, and now once the enemy sees a Zerg approaching, they just quick deploy to another area of the continent. Sure, its great for racking up certs... not having to fight for anything, but it ruins the entire game. This strategy is a natural progression of the inept structuring of the points system which overwhelmingly favors the attacker. The attacker also usually has the numbers advantage, which is still not resolved by making bases more difficult to capture.

So in essence: No real incentive to hold onto a base, its almost impossible to defend the base for which you have little incentive to defend, and-its-easier-for-the-attackers-to-take-the-base-that-is-almost-impossible-to-defend-for-which-you-have-little-incentive-for-even-defending-in-the-first-place. Whew.

At least when the game was relatively new and the populations were high, you would get spectacular battles and memorable moments therein. Now its just a matter of attaching yourself to a Zerg and go cap as many empty bases as possible... so you can get certs to upgrade the gun you've been working on... so that it fires a few shots every few hours.

Not to mention, all the weapons for which I used my paid-for-with-real-fucking-money Station Cash have been rendered ordinary or weak at best. Spend 3000 SC on liberator unlocks? Too bad, the liberator, which was pretty-well balanced in December, is almost completely useless. So much so, that in the four hours I mentioned above I saw TWO (2) liberators, and not once had the inclination to use one myself.

TLDR: In Short, if the game is going to devolve into a merry-go-round of Zergs capping empty bases, and no one is willing to defend a base, then what is the fucking point of the game?