Recent reviews by Ghostpaw

I'm going with "Don't play"

I've been playing Tribes since 1998 and the alpha playtest just isn't worth it for me, because of the immense skill gap in the game making playing it a frustrating and, honestly, rage inducing waste of my time at this point.

Competent base attacking has no viable counters, especially on the map they've chosen for playtesting, and there's people playing who simply never stopped, and if you matchmade against them, you're literally trapped in spawn. Maybe that sounds like a boring ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ time and you want to leave? Well, too bad! If you leave any match and completely close the client, you are immediately reloaded into the same game to get your head smashed.

This is why we had autobalance and why we had a sense of sportsmanship for shuffling teams in early Tribes and even all the way to TF2 in games with community servers.

If I wanted to get raked over the coals by awful matchmaking and trapped in games I'd go play Overwatch.


Edit for additional comments:
Two playtest windows later and I'm not sure that anything has changed or inspired confidence here.

Firstly, I found it odd that the Spinfusor inertia moved from a weapon-specific fixed value to being a player-chosen variable. This feels like the team is making an attempt to make users figure out the game design for them, but not explicitly saying so. If anything this feels like a way to not just acknowledge but take advantage of the split skill player base by looking at the choices made by more advanced users while many new players have no idea what this even does or how it can affect their gameplay.

Secondly, the bomber mode was only a gross exaggeration of the skill gap problems. In a game state that already allows for skilled offense to run rampant and provides little to no insight for new players on how to run effective defense, this game mode felt like an almost mean spirited opportunity to let experienced players almost literally dunk on people trying to figure out the game.

Ultimately I'm not sure what the dev team is going to do about this onboarding problem, other than simply hoping that after go-live there's simply a larger pool of new and inexperienced players and the number of hard carry players is simply more diluted than their alpha.

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi ♥♥♥♥. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."

And i was like, ohok and he continues.

I stayed up an hour playing the latest build of this after a few previous dalliances and woooow is it funny. THK has great voice acting and witty writing and made me giggle or cackle way too loud too many times in the first hour to say anything other than this: THK is absolutely worth it.