Week 1 Player's Review

@hayhor it is an actually, genuinely enjoyable shooter. It just has so many developer created issues that drag down how fun the game is at its core. 

Solos specifically would solve many issues that I've seen frequently pop up here on the boards. @1ronKeys could escape from having garbage teammates. I could actually focus on improving on a match to match basis, without having to worry about 1v3s every match. Casual players who WANT to play in squads but don't have friends have a mode specifically for them, and thus can reasonably punish people who queue for squads and leave early. The people who leave immediately after dying now have a mode specifically for them, meaning more team players in team play. It would also help with player retention, adding in a feature that's been requested since day 1 is a great way to get people who might've quit back into the game, and to keep people playing. Yet we STILL don't have it. 

I never touched on player retention in the actual review, but I think a big reason why they're slow to change and actually take a risk with the game (such as putting in solos which "supposedly" hurt newer player retention, or having alternate ways to enjoy the game like a TDM mode that focuses solely on combat skipping the tedium of looting) is because of their own history with their games. Titanfall 1 and 2 were amazing games with the same enjoyable fast-paced combat, yet neither of those games really blew up big. They were financial successes for sure, but months after their releases I never really heard too much about them despite watching creators who did TF1 and 2 content and also despite buying both games. Apex for them I theorize was supposed to be their saving grace, but after their massive popularity drop a few months after the game's release, I think it spooked them into damage control mode, adding in all these gimmicks and cash-grabs to keep new players interested instead of improving the game as a whole. 

Which is mind-boggling for me at least, because I remember back before things like battle-passes and gacha games existed, back before when the focus of the game wasn't to retain players, it was to produce an exceptional quality product. An amazing example of this is Team Fortress 2, that game was released 13 years ago and hasn't adopted any sort of gimmicky player retention nonsense like other games have. The community keeps that game alive, and the reason it can stay alive and keep making Valve money, is because they delivered an amazing product. A more recent example would be Deep Rock Galactic, that game has been out for nearly 3 years now, and yet their player base has only really increased due to the constant quality work that their team pushes out. It's not speedy by any means, but every update that's been pushed for them so far has been nearly bug-free, and constantly based on community feedback on their Discord, Reddit, and the Steam Discussion boards. 

It just makes me sad that the game is so enjoyable, yet so bogged down with mindless tedium.