Issues with Broken Ranks Recently

This is a long rant about some of the choices the devs are making in Broken Ranks (and I don't even mention the weekly system). Prompted by the portal event nerf and the dev's commentary on it, I talk about some of the problematic choices the devs are making, why they're bad, and better alternatives.

It's a long video, so sit back and relax. Or if you want a summary, here are the key points:

1. The 750 kill limit doesn't help players who can't play on weekends - if that's the goal of the limit, do something like the portal event where you have x entries to use during the week, or something like the weekly combat buff where you can take an "event buff" once during the week, which lasts 3 days and lets you kill event mobs while active. Then people who can't play during the weekends can still make the most of the event.

2. The 750 kill limit doesn't help slower classes keep pace with DPS - DPS can just do harder packs for more rewards, or at least finish the event faster and then do other things. Either way, stronger and faster characters get more value for their time still. The better solution is just to have a mix of valuable content - like hard group content where supports will be taken to help, solo content for DPS, and easy solo content for weaker players or supports who can't find groups. If all of that is good value for your time then all classes can get a lot out of the event.

3. The devs are lying about the event being unexpected good. They designed the event, picked the red levels that drop, picked the drop rate, and many devs are endgame players who understand how fast strong players will kill monsters. They knew exactly how good the event was and there was no reason to nerf it.

4. The devs say it should take ~1538 hours to farm enough shards to take an item to gold 3. So ~18k hours for 12 items, more if you have DPS swaps or dura upgrades. This is a truly absurd grind and we really should have events that speed it up significantly, no other game requires this much time.

5. Drifs are fun, but they've painted the devs into a corner where gear can no longer be varied like before. Players will use whatever has the most stats/res/capacity, and that means to introduce new gear that's worth using it must be better than existing gear. Before the drif system gear had unique psychoproperties and items of similar strength could coexist and be suitable for different situations or different classes.

6. Incrustation (in conjunction with drifs) has unbalanced the game and made it too easy, and getting gear to gold 3 is so important to your character's strength that you cannot argue that it should be reserved for the most committed players. Or at the very least, it's absurd to expect the most committed players to spend 18k+ hours just to incrust their gear on one character.

7. Finally, even if all of this is designed to suck as much money out of whales as possible, it's a poor choice. Non-whales will quit because absolutely no one looks at a game that takes 18k hours and gets excited. Whales will quit because they have no one to play with. And it's just not necessary. We already had the infinite whale treadmill of upgrades. People spend thousands and thousands of dollars on inhibitors for upgrades if they want to be the strongest, without completely unbalancing the game. Whales don't care if they're 10 times as strong as non-whales, or just 10% stronger - as long as they're stronger, they're happy. They'll get more groups, get to show off, and keep pushing to be stronger. But the bigger the divide between whales and non-whales, the more non-whales lose motivation and quit - and then the whales don't have anyone to impress. And then the whales have no reason to keep spending money.