The Inflation of Movement Abilities

So: Obviously I keep coming across Axle in matches because every squad has one now. There is no escaping her. And I've had some time to observe her, observe how other players react to her, and to try and sort out my own coping mechanisms.

The conclusion I'm coming to is that the real problem isn't that she's fast. It's that she makes her entire squad fast. And sometimes people on other squads as well. It's exactly like playing Wildcard and coming upon an entire squad of Octanes. That's what drove me out of Wildcard. I encountered that nonsense exactly once and I never went back. Now I'm playing bots, where no live players other than myself should even be, and all I have to do now to spot the live enemies is look for the pink dots or the pink streaks. There is no more circumspection in this game. There is no more jockeying for position. There is no more thinking about how to handle the next engagement. It just happens and it happens as soon as an Axle sees you. One individual player, such as myself, might be able to react quickly enough to reset the terms of engagement, but my squadmates can't react that quickly, and so far at least, they never seem to want the reset. They want to engage and die. Axle is another nail in the coffin for mid-range play, and another nail in the coffin for any opponent with less than perfect accuracy. I don't know if they realized in design that this would be the outcome, but that's all this game is now: hyperactive close-range engagement. Get a fistful of Ritalin or go home.

And one more thing: It means something that we're all here talking about her tactical. And ONLY about her tactical. I've only seen her ultimate in use once so far and it seems pretty useless from what I saw. So another part of the problem is that her true superpower isn't an ultimate with a long cooldown. It's a tactical that can be endlessly reused. Every 18 seconds, and that gets shorter if she finds a cooldown hop up. And she will. Everyone does. Because it makes everything faster and all Respawn seems to care about anymore is whether or not they can use hyperactivity as the lure to pull children out of the finally failing Fortnite. Good luck with that, Respawn.