(EDIT: The following post is a new enriched edition of a former publication of this blog.)
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It took Scopely only two days... two days during which some players had a little hope that finally their voice had been heard, that finally Scopely had brought a little - just a little - decency into this giant siphoning hole of a game, that there could be a way to come back to the (not so) old days where gaming was fun and the dedication as well as the penny invested meant something.
Alas, here she comes... She was leaked. She was teased. She was fantasised. But when reality strikes with that hammer (well, that dazing bazooka in this case), boy, does it hurt, and not only the wallet.
Of course every game needs a refresher once in a while, even more so when hitting the fourth year mark. For lack of greater creativity or maybe only for basic economic reasons, Scopely's Road To Survival gradually induces a power bottleneck that only a significant leap can overcome. It already happened two years ago after the release of... fencing Priya with her turn-one confusing loop that meant the end of the Epic characters. Like digital dinosaurs, they were wiped out from the face of the game to be replaced by the ultra-selective new class of recruits: the well-appointed legendaries. And together with that, all the money invested so far went to fumes. Overnight.
Anxious to sweeten to pill, Scopely made promises - something they had already done a few months before with the infamous Albert's letter that had pledged for a more player-focused experience as well as a closer relationship with customers... But this time would be different. The forthcoming legendary recruits would come in dribs and drabs. They would never be accessible in their 6-star form in the Premier wheel. This new class of characters would also come with special gear in order to promote them to higher tiers; said gear that would soon be available for farming by way of a recurring dedicated roadmap. And last but certainly not the least, all the former Epic recruits would progressively get the legacy treatment: the would access the legendary class in their own due time.
Anyone who had invested so much time and money in what used to be a fun game with fun people would be tempted to believe Scopely a second time around. And the more you play, the more you find reasons to keep being blind to the steadily ramping in power and price with each and every new feature release. Deemed to not be game-changing (game-breaking?) enough, the legendaries rapidly saw their overall stats improved so that Epic recruits turned out to be conclusively and irrefutably useless. The mods were introduced soon after, another layers of upgrades to push the boundaries of power strength a little further. Then, a few months down the road, the second generation of legendaries hit the shelf whilst the available resources to compete was going forever more scarce.
When 2019 started, Scopely presented RTS players a new meta-breaking character every week, ensuring in the meantime that the ways to access new recruits would become significantly harder: lowering the odds, scrapping off of the Premier wheel all other valuable recruits except the featured promotional one, multiplying the secondary collections without disclosing beforehand what it was for... Yet, it was not enough, so why not shaking the combat balance with a new AI and introduce wacky new skills to RNG-up some more? Done and done. But we kept believing it could not get worse. Because we had to.
However, at some point even the more dedicated players could not help wondering where does it end? The once mocked gap between F2Ps and P2Ps became a genuine matter of concern. After all, don't we all participate to the same show? We stopped being completely deaf to the sound of mobile RPGs reality bell: it is no longer about having fun with a bunch of folks, it is not about strategy, or an immersive environment, or creativity... it transformed into a trivial way to lure people into spending forever more, without boundaries or ethical compass, but tapping directly and abusively into the detrimental toxic human behaviours.Â
What game publishers dream of achieving - a vast engaged community of players (financially) supporting a flagship title thanks to the ties and the routine associated, could finally bite back simply when we decided to unite. We started to say enough! We understood that the connections we had created do not necessarily stop with the game, they are in fact the real meat of the game: the good, the epic and the fun that ever happened in RTS, it happened thanks to us, the players. That's when #PlayersUnited began.Â
What then? Scopely responded with another round of promises... The great RTS player base was right: something gotta give. Let's be more player-centric! Let's create a NDA-bound Players Counsel without disclosing the selection criteria, and of course, bring in some players that even did not apply for it. Let's release those legacies. Let's refresh the Survivor's Club so that players do not spend 25 bucks a month only to get more roster space, which is mainly occupied by trainers and Epic recruits waiting to get the promised legacy treatment. Hey, let's update the depots, and the wheels, and the war crates! But more importantly, let's release Arenas - a new openly Pay-To-Win gameplay and throw the Veteran rings in the reward structure!!!
Moment of silence.
RTS has always entailed a significant dose of spending for those wishing to top everything and everyone. Yet cunning players could make do and be competitive without having to spend the amount of a nice GT car every year. But with Arenas, these are the days where you now need to spend coins to play, the only event (to date) where players can get veteran rings which are required to further upgrade the already fully upgraded and fully moded  characters.
It is worth noting that from now on recruits display their statistics in the Veteran Level 30 (which will soon be further extended to level 50), and not their crude basic numbers. The problem is that it is likely to take many months to the wast majority of players before reaching that level, unless, of course, they outspend the competition in the Arenas. And if they don't, rest assured that any legendary recruit VET30 will simply not cut it by the time they organically get there. Well, this is actually not true: any second generation VET30Â legendary character is already about 3,000 points behind any S-Class recruit aggregated basic stats... Let us not speak about a potential - yet soon coming - VET50 S-Class... Please, go pull for those blue keys and those ice cream cones at once!Â
Thus, thank you Scopely for your third (?) set of promises. Thank you for your last update that only met the bare minimum standards. Thank you for your secret NDA-bound Players Council, soon to be remembered as the Phone Calls, Vol.2. Thank you for releasing Priya and resetting every player's roster another time around, just two days after having pledged for better taking into account our concerns. Thank you for Arenas, a genuinely new gameplay (from Marvel Strike Force): we surely had too many coins after trying to complete this ocean of aimless collections popping up like popcorn. Thank you for the Veteran rings, because... well, thank you anyway. Thank you for releasing some legacies that will definitely help us fare better against teams... that are 8 to 12 months old. Thank you for finally resolving the long overdue Territories bugs... sorry, that is for another update, we can surely wait for another year. But, above all, thank you Scopely for being so predictable, because now, more than ever...
... we are #PlayersUnited.Â