Veterator wrote on Mar 13, 2012, 08:29:
Played this game the past couple days......been in beta for awhile but I can't stand to play arena for very long so I stopped playing for a month or two.

I have two big complaints about this game that are kind of related to each other.

1) Team stacking, you'll know it's happening when it takes like 2 minutes to fill the teams on the next map. Everyone is trying to stack into one side or the other but can't until someone gives up and picks the other team. When it's bad, it COMPLETELY ruins the fun of the game. It will literally end up being like 7 minutes of flag caps, with possible base camping to boot.

2) When the teams are not well rounded (sometimes due to stacking), the whole CTF experience becomes a big mess. If all the flag runners join one side, you have no one to chase them. If no one has forcefields, it's hard to stop them. When people have the extra packs and stuff it gives them advantages you as a non-flag runner player will never match even if you are a decent player. I think this is related to stacking because it tends to be high ranked players who are runners, because flag capping gives stupid amounts of score compared to everything else.


And far below the other two 3) The classes don't seem quite balanced. Raiders have a lot of kick, and when they get mobile jammers they are better than the Sentinel jammers.

Technicians have no good ability to kill heavy classes, and their primary role is defense with their stationary turrets and repair gun (which is crazy slow considering how easy stuff blows up). And when the gen is taken out, your turrets are dead and you lose any advantage you might have had. It's quite infuriating to try to play one, because often the gens are just left dead by others even though the lack of radar, turrets, and forcefields really hampers the ability to defend the base from the run by flag guys.

And I keep reading about how people thing sentinels are really good, but their sniper rifles only does 500 damage when it's fully charged. Friggin juggernaut can kill half your team with one shell...like 1300 damage to each target. If someone plays this class I'd love to hear why it's so good, even the claymores do pretty crap damage...takes 2 or 3 of them to kill a light target usually.


The balance of the classes is OK, even tolerable when teams are pretty even on skillset. But the imbalances become really noticeable when you are doing what should be your classes primary role and someone comes in and eats your lunch for 5 minutes of the match at a time.