Robocraft was near and dear to me. It's also the reason I don't bother with live service games anymore. In 2017-2018-ish, Robocraft was one of my favorite games, ever. Then they were able to take that game away from me and replace it with something I liked far less. This is inevitable for any live service game; if not replacing the game you liked with something else, then its removal altogether so that no one can play it anymore in any form. It sucks.

It’s with a heavy heart that we have to tell you all that we’re ceasing production on Robocraft 2 and closing Freejam as a studio. With the current market conditions and the server costs required to keep a game like RC2 running, we’re simply unable to launch or sustain development.

You know, if you let your customers run the servers themselves, we'd be able to keep playing the game and you wouldn't have to bear the burden of those costs!

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[–] NateSwift@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I started to fall off the game around when they reworked the chassis blocks to all be one tier. There was so much depth in balancing durability with trying to stay in the right tier. And having to actually protect your pilot seat.

Losing the specialization with the weapons and letting you out all of them in the same vehicle further removed any kind of tradeoffs and then the loot boxes completely ruined the progression system.

I wish they’d release server code, it would be sick to be able to run small community games

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The presence of tiers at all was what bothered me. The version I liked most did have light and heavy blocks with tradeoffs so you could have that depth without wreaking havoc on matchmaking by splitting your player base into 10 different pools.

[–] NateSwift@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ahh you may have played earlier than I did. Most of my playtime was around rise of the walkers. I think I started playing a couple months before the nano machine heal gun things.

I liked being able to pull higher tier stuff into lower tier games, and even grinding up the ladder before I was T10 it was pretty rare for it to feel super unfair.

[–] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I started playing at the end of 2015. I saw the game go through a bunch of different forms. The people pulling higher tier weapons into lower tier bots were mostly doing all-in strategies around that weapon, because they didn't have enough budget left for much else, IIRC. But it was going to be mathematically impossible to support to 10 tiers of 10v10 matches as the game went on anyway, and it became a really fun competitive game with no tiers in early 2017. Then they went for some kind of half-assed return to tiers at the end of 2018 that made no one happy.

[–] NateSwift@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I can totally see how matchmaking for 10 tiers would implode. It really requires a ton of new players or each tier to be unique enough to go back to