3000+ hours veteran of early 2021. hear me out.
the game is fun, but...
the company is on par with some of the most annoying companies in the gaming industry.
- they are greedy as hell
- they do not remotely listen to feedback or even try to be on the older players' side (examples below)
- the content creation is overly competitive and the company's promises regarding creators were and are still limited from what I hear. (this is not my complaint)
- they are progressively removing the origin style of the game. (I cannot give an example on this)
- support mails including ban appeals are all automated, career applications are avoided and left unanswered. (example below)
- they have an entire team working on security integrity of the game, such as networked code. and they still fail to prevent game-breaking, cheating behavior, e.g. "tag all" and the various troll cheats.
some examples include:
- canyons. it was a whole community back in 2021-2022 and some of 2023 -- some of the other maps as well (e.g. old clouds, and mountains) -- this map had an update a few years ago, which is the same map to this day. It features a well-rounded change, adding ropes, ziplines and some revamped structures. -- The worst change is the ziplines. They indirectly ruined and completely took away the entire purpose of competitive canyons, the slippery walls, they're now easily accessible without any skill involved. the second worst part is how easily you can use this piece of tech, to loop around the map, indefinitely. Massively feedback was made to remove parts of this conflict, both coming from me and many other players. Feedback that was accepted by the community, but completely ignored by the company. Nothing happened since. Competitive canyon lobbies today, do not exist anymore, and I just explained why that is. Ziplines shouldn't exist and were never truly favored by the old canyon-community.
- clouds. used to be the most unplayed map, but still had an active competitive community like canyons. Now it doesn't even have any players, because they increased the map's overall size marginally and removed the core idea of what clouds was supposed to be. this map had accessibility in each direction, endless routes. and it was all voided, and turned into a new mechanic.
- "banned for cheating" -- if you try to appeal for a 'cheat-ban' you will get a delayed, automated response; telling you that reports are the reason. -- for reference I do programming and reverse engineering, I was doing some testing and have made some accidents once in a while. and trying to appeal them, knowing damn well what have banned me, I get the same answer every time. (yes I know that's all my fault) -- they also close the appeal entirely, so yeah, don't even try to appeal if you get banned. waste of time.
- when you load up the game using the quest headsets on the steam build, they occasionally get a bugged connection, making the audio sound robotic and unstable and gameplay feels slightly slowed down, this has been a thing since the game's release, this might be a problem on Meta's end, but it's worth noting, it has nothing to do with home network or connection strength/speeds.
- the game's garbage collection or rendering, is stupidly slow, and could be improved. this game should in no way or form be capable of lagging with a 5060 Ti and a medium-end CPU. (my specs are attached) -- I have the exact same graphic experience with a GTX 3060 (laptop) 🥀 -- there are no graphics settings whatsoever.
- the company seems more focused on newer players than older players, this is easily recognizable by their update format. e.g. the brainrot update...
however.
- updates are cool, some are lame but they hold their word with being live service and I gotta give it to them for actually being in contact with *some* creators. such as the creator cosmetics and in-game "video previews" of various creators.
- I am aware this game was not meant to be competitive, and I'm aware that not everyone can be satisfied, respectively.
while I know a lot of this is completely normal for tech companies these days, this is still my grudge against the game as a whole, I truly believe this company needs to be acquired by better management because lemming doesn't seem interested in actually developing the game people want to play.
also correction on my hours. 30% of the hours are on steam, another 30% approx. are on Meta PCVR (the Rift Build) -- the remaining 30% are from quest standalone, however I can't confirm those hours, because meta doesn't show it on standalone 🥀 -- I used to play primarily on a Q2, and I now play on Q3S (it sucks)
All in all, don't buy the game if you want anything to do with what I've said. Only buy it if you genuinely need the fitness and curious to play a social game that has to do with tagging. It's not a deep rabbit hole but there's a lot you can do, for a long time, I'll admit.
