C'mon could you be more dramatic?
Rare treats their community very well. They are open, honest and welcoming. How on earth have you been 'patronised' by them?
Push microtransactions with partners..? Well, I must have dreamt up the 5 huge free updates and also somehow missed an insidious ploy to spend money within the game.
There's the store they're planning to implement but it was removed from the anniversary update because the pets weren't up to their internal standards?
Who cares if they're trying to push numbers?
'Vaping slot pulling addicts?' I never understand people who insult a games audience because it doesn't cater to whatever it is they're upset about.
Sure there's plenty to criticise like any other game. You have some valid points but it's hard to take you seriously when you post something as over dramatic as this.
Rare hired a good PR team. They speak to the userbase the way that big companies speak to their consumers. There has been a noted contrast between the transparency and community interaction that Rare did during the alpha and what their community outreach has turned into now. It feels significantly less authentic. As someone who has followed the game since the alpha, they literally used to provide actual data and analytics behind how the users were interacting with the game. Now all we get are weekly videos where they reframe positives from whatever the last update is, and barebones patch notes that completely ignore longstanding issues. It wasn't until this week's patchnotes that Rare actually started noting hitbox issues (pertaining to Arena). In their latest content video, the first line of dialogue is literally "As if this schmorgesborg of features that landed with the SoT anniversary, weren't enough" if that isn't patronizing, I don't know what is...
I don't want to get into a debate with you about microtransactions, we can save that for another thread. But literally this game was released with like 4 or 5 different things that you had to buy in order to get custom cosmetics, from things like overpriced hard drives and controllers to things like Chips Ahoy cookies (whose parent company is a Microsoft client). I refute that microtransactions are necessary for modern game development and games-as-service, but we don't need to get into that here.
Am I being hyperbolic in calling SoT diehards "slot pulling vaping addicts?", perhaps? But have you interacted with many people in the late-game of SoT. There are literally some of the most unhappy people that I have encountered in all of gaming, and many of these people are just griding the small dopamine rushes that they get from unlocking x tedious commendation. On the flipside, ever since Summit1g started streaming everyone thinks that they are good at PvP until they're not, and then many just want to throw a tantrum. Is this a symptom of gaming in general, sure. But it's something that has gotten markedly worse overtime in this game. Which stands in stark contrast to Rare's stated purpose of making the game inclusive and accessible.
Then there is the fact that the game clearly has some underlying hardware/software limitations (see:revamp of physics system in a previous patch), where that instead of improving things like AI, they just artificially bump "difficulty" by making "tough" enemies bullet sponges. Skeleton lords anyone?
It literally took them like 6 months to tone down ridiculous things like the rate at which you get hit by volcano projectiles.
I can't tell you how many people stated adamantly that one can simply dodge volcano projectiles by "gitting gud." A subset of people simply refuse to acknowledge that the best "expert" strategies for dealing with volcanoes is simply tanking (with a galleon) or just waiting it out (during solo play). The tanking strategy is even less fun because many of the projectiles have splash damage that can kill you even when you are in covered areas (like the lower deck of the galleon).
Some users also refuse to acknowledge environmental stacking, where you have a probability chance of multiple things like volcano/kraken/skeleton ship occurring all at once. No matter how good you are, there is always that percentage chance that you will have a session where it feels like all of the environmental RNG factors are stacked against you. You might still complete the voyage, but in the amount of time it would normally take you to do three.
Perhaps this is controversial, but all of these design decisions have really been to the game's detriment. Devil's Roar is not more difficult, it's just a "necessary" annoyance that you need to put up with for efficiently reaching Athena's 10. To make matters worse, once you are Athena's 10, I have little interest in doing anything in that region outside of grinding for specific commendations.
In the end I think this decision to design environmental factors around "annoyance" rather than fun/rewarding has really made the game less accessible and fun. To make matters worse, DR remains an isolated region from the base game and therefore a subset of every server has the potential of multiple ships who are doing activities in that region and that region alone. Which totally breaks the normal forced encounters that occur in the primary 3 regions.
