my beef; some solutions

Doubt that this will be heard or considered, but this is a  game series that I hold very dear to me so it sucks to feel this way about the successor to the namesake. 

The big thing with me is despite how good the game feels to play, I'm constantly nagged by how terrible the progression is in this game is. I know we all gripe about how repetitive the challenges are, I get the game is early and there maybe hasn't been enough resources allocated to making them interesting. Big whoop. The thing is when I do all the available challenges, the only way of getting any form of "reward" for my time spent doing the challenges is to open loot crates. This choice alone lessens the impact of doing the challenges in the first place. Why not just make the shops physical places where we can just purchase the items with the credits? As we level up the district we just get access to more items and maybe newer areas of the shop. Why? For what purpose would we want to open loot boxes and then watch the same "Congratulations" graphic across our screen ad nauseam. They're not CS cases, when I'm opening the boxes I hardly look at the reward because its never the thing I want and I'll have to spend the next few evenings to get the currency to open enough of that box to get the thing I want. Oops! Unlucky! Terrible.

 It's clear to me that a good majority of the resources put into this game is into EA's favorite question to ask when developing a project these days. "How can we make money?" The game has a lot of time left in the oven and it really just feels like the direction is led by someone who hasn't skated before or had fun, smiled or felt satisfaction. So why in the hell would I be at all incentivized to spend any real world dollars on a game that doesn't value my time as a player. Truth be told in a perfect world, I'd take the complete product at full price over spending 40 dollars for an outfit with gacha mobile game style "progression". The thing that really sucks the most is the body of skate is here, but the soul is no where to be seen. I enjoy playing the game, I just don't enjoy the time I engage with it outside of messing around with its fun spots and gameplay. 

So where does this leave us? I don't know. I don't develop games, but if I was to be a dev I would:

• Drop the loot boxes. They suck no one likes them you guys did this before with Battlefront 2 and they sucked then. Its 2025 there's much better ways to have engaging and rewarding systems. Have the shops be physical and only accessible by fast traveling or going there. The shop tab you guys spent sooo much time on should be for just micro-transactions alone. Eliminating the redundancy of the shops just taking you to that same page. Get creative with how the shops look or just do a menu since you don't care. Additionally, get rid of that "Congratulations" graphic animation, it's serves no purpose other than to pop up on screen and wastes my time. Just have the item pop up in the corner with like a bouncing "New" on the corner of the item png before it goes away or something. 
• Bring back S.K.A.T.E and introduce various activities with your friends and a light competitive aspect with rewards. Why the horse style mode isn't in already baffles me. Truly a heartbreak. I guess you had to make sure that the people had ways of spending money before that so I get it. I personally would have put that in super early, but hey who likes fun, right? Also considering we have a little wacky physics sandbox why not try introducing some modes like tag where you turn on player collision for the group and see what kind of mischief can go on there. There are so many ways you can have players competing and you decide the Throwdown was the one to put in first. Riiiight... The thing is there is an opportunity to have some side progression with vs. modes by offering cosmetics obtained by competing with other players in them.
• Offer ways of obtaining district experience outside of challenges. The consensus is that the challenges are repetitive and well I agree. Why not have spots with marks on them you have to do a specific action on while you're skating around the district? Incentivizing exploration of the map. Maybe have hard to reach collectibles that give you some district experience. Possibly give us a reason for skating the community parks by giving rewards for your time spent in them experimenting. There are numerous things you could introduce outside of the 4 different challenges we have currently littering the map. Most players just play the game to mess around already, why not reward the player for messing around?

That's all I feel like listing off in this post on here. I'm sure if I really sat down and thought about it I could gripe for days on end about things you could've done. The game is early access, so maybe there's time. Or maybe not, I don't know what your soulless overlords have in mind for your quotas, but really most things can be forgiven. Just don't think they can be forgotten. Next update you guys do, I hope you take time to pave out some bugs and obtain any semblance of a vision because really there's nothing to stop me from just pulling out Skate 3 other the than convenience of this being ready and available on my PC. It does the same thing better and predates it by 15 years. I get its a different team behind the development, but come on. This project was green lit in 2020. It is 5 years later and now its just reaching early access. The original Skate was in development for 2 years from 2005 to 2007. We've been waiting for Skate to come back since Skate 3 in 2010. All this time and we're still waiting on the sequel to Skate 3. 

I'll probably play this product again here and there when updates come and to have a can to kick around with friends, but I'll be damned spending money on it or sing its praises.  I doubt I'll give much time to challenges or really anything that levels things up because it doesn't do much except give me oh so fun and interesting loot boxes. I won't get a Skate Pass because engaging with it requires me to do even more unfun repetitious tasks. For what? Just to get more whack stickers to not freely place on my deck, some generic profile icon no one pays attention to,  or dripless clothes for an already ugly character model in an unfinished game that is using the reputation of the finished good game that came before it to parade itself as a "reboot" of the series. I'm good homie. How about we make it rewarding to spend time in the game first and then you can have us buy cosmetics because you made the game fun to engage with.