I might add a more detailed response in the morning but, to be fair, it takes about a hundred hours to hit endgame where the most prevalent and damning problems are. While it could be argued that someone had gotten their money’s worth in grinding, I disagree. In games like this, that are designed to be played for hundreds of hours if not thousands, 99.9% of the game is endgame. No one does Recruit and thinks, “This is what I signed up for.” It was virtually impossible for any of us early adopters to be exposed to the slew of gamebreaking issues or the degree to which the game was incomplete until considerable time had been invested to reach the point at which we all actually wanted to play. VT2 isn’t the only game guilty of taking advantage of its grind to mask major issues (pretty common MMO practice but it’s still unacceptable) but off the top of my head I can’t think of another game that’s grifted me this hard in terms of just how buggy and unfinished it was relative to what they were marketing once you reached endgame. Also, there really isn’t a lot of actual content in the game; 6-7 hours worth of unique material, tops, yet it’s padded ad infinitum thanks to the lazy RNG system that denies players something as simple as a hat to make their character look the way they want it to. Hundreds of hours to maybe get something that almost any other game would make accessible for very little effort. We play because the rewards are heavily RNG gated (more on that later). This kind of system is always a huge red flag for me as it signals low confidence that enough people would continue to play a game solely on its fundamental gameplay merits. I’m not saying that’s the case here, but that’s how it comes across.
Another important consideration is that the game wastes a lot of the players’ time through crashes, dropped hosts, director bugginess, general bugginess, and other pretty fundamental issues. For example, it took us over five hours yesterday to compete a legend challenge that we actually easily finished on our first attempt but, due to buggy b’s, , were screwed out of. On subsequent runs the game wouldn’t grant credit despite the challenge conditions being met repeatedly, and we had backend error crashes, host disconnects, or director bugginess all night long before finally getting it at like 3AM. On one particularly annoying attempt, we spent 15min kiting and proc’ing the challenge to finally realize it was absolutely 100% bugged and when we ended it, we got recruit boxes… So the game knew we were in a legend instance for the level content but somehow thought we were recruit for rewards and I’m guessing challenge purposes… A massive chunk of my hours fall into that kind of bs category. Hell, tonight I was in the slow process of trying to “speed run” solo the Righteous Stand legend challenge when the backend kicked everyone out… Tons of tedious kiting while whittling down event mobs utterly wasted. It happens way too often. Yeah, we still get gameplay… But it’s kinda like you’re playing Risk and 3/4 of the way through every game someone comes in and just kicks the table over for no reason. Quickly becomes an exercise in frustration.
I stuck with it because I see its potential and the devs had a lot of goodwill bucks stored up in my books from my experience with VT1. All I want to be able to do is sing the game’s praises and make cool YouTube videos of it but I’m not going to plug a game I can’t wholeheartedly recommend to friends with a straight face in its current state. All that goodwill is spent now thanks to atrocious customer service. I’ve simply run out of excuses to let them get away with things I wouldn’t tolerate in any other game. It just isn’t acceptable practice, especially not the way they’ve treated customers. Still zero indication they even recognize the fact the game’s Early Access is an issue because “it’s not the end of the world.”
Lastly, as for player motivation, this game is a raw, unadulterated skinner box. Don’t get me wrong, the core gameplay is fun but people wouldn’t be flushing thousands of hours of their lives down the drain to do levels they could, by now, run in legend in their sleep if it wasn’t for the operant conditioning behind pure RNG lootboxes driving almost every aspect of player behaviour. Virtually every aspect of the game has been slow roasted in RNG sauce then smothered in RNG gravy for maximum time-sucking potential. Again, I can’t think of another game off the top of my head that disrespects the player’s time to this extent. You could play for 1000 hours and not have a single thing you were after but continue to smash your head against the wall because of sunk cost fallacy and the way this game’s reward system triggers addictive behaviour. To make matters worse, some lucky noob could get what you’ve slaved away at on their first day. It’s a lazy, garbage, time wasting system and it represents the absolute worst in gaming a la “it’s a casino where instead of money we spend time and the prize is valueless.” Then, to make matters worse, they just failed to track critical stats, so everything you ever did just doesn’t count for the system that depends on those stats. That’s unacceptable without an appropriate response to the community of supporters who’ve already put up with a lot of crap and the response we got want even an apology. It was more like, “yep, we did that, so what?” Everything could be 100% forgivable if the community interaction wasn’t so god awful and they showed some appreciation for their customers.
