I began playing Epic 7, a mobile PvP-centric game, when it released for global over four years ago. However, it wasn’t until I was watching Snowball regularly that I began to play it more aggressively on my tablet. Following her death I transitioned to emulating the game and casting the PvP portions, most notably being Guild War (fighting AI-controlled player-built teams) and RTA (E7 is one of the only mobile games in existence that allows you to play with people much less against them).
Since those dark days I have regularly and faithfully casted every single guild war except for the one on July 23rd ~3am 2021 when I was interrupted part-way through by Smokey’s fatal crisis.
I kept to casting the game primarily to keep my casting exercised. I believed that if I lost sight of regularly casting something I probably would have an even harder time returning.
It’s hard to say if that would have been the case, because life has proven incredibly merciless and bloody since I first picked it up. Even moreso the game’s quality has degraded rapidly over the last two years in particular. It began with the Rem/Violet meta and slowly degraded from that point, with high points including Rimuru, Green Luluca, ML Choux, and recently the Jenua, BM Haste rework and ML Senya release. These are just high points in the insane malice and broken shit they’ve introduced in the game in wild efforts to score quick cash grabs, only to sell “solutions” (or attempt to, in regards to ML landy and the score of characters allegedly intended to counter her that failed to do so). Just like Riot and Blizzard. The apple never seems to fall far from the tree. The game has also become increasingly hostile to F2P with the introduction of the Green Luluca event that demanded imprints (dupe character drops) for reasonable clearing, a move that polarized much of the game’s fairly approachable nature up to this point and was universally hated by everyone which is precisely why they kept doing it over and over afterwards.
Every one of these shitty blizzard-style games are obsessed with power and utility creep. Furthermore, it’s a mobile game. Poor balancing and decision making in design are a given.
The next major point of frustration is the gear system. Without spending a long time detailing it, Genshin Impact saw the utter shitfest that was E7’s gear system and doubled down on it. With a heavy bias towards low rolls and improper stats, gearing characters to any degree of competency was a years-long trial and I often went 6+ months of daily play without ever seeing a marginal piece of gear for a throwaway character or placeholder. The game’s gear drops and stat rolls are very clearly seed based and I’ve compared my results to many others across huge periods of time with consistently bad returns. There was never any point to doing events or farming or grinding or optimising my stamina in the end because I simply was never rewarded for the effort.
One of the ultimate slaps in the face as a designer and a gamer is the game’s increasing push to competitive play, including streams and tournaments. This sounds like it would be a good thing until you realize the entire game is governed by RNG.
The starting position on the ATB is based on speed and randomized to the point even 10+ points of speed difference can be jumbled past each other, which is an insane amount of gear at the high end to suddenly lose to RNG. The fastest player wins most of the time.
The next layer of RNG is the dreaded 15%. All debuffs in the game have a 15% chance to not occur. A recent fiasco of the Overlord collab with the signature hero’s timed death sentence debuff being arbitrarily resisted and rendering his entire kit worthless for the entire fight highlighted the insanity but it’s always been there. 15% is more like 50% and many recordings featured strings of 15%’s from characters with insane effectiveness (230+) vs ones that never build ER. Many of the game’s characters rely on debuff application to function. Without it, they cease to exist.
Furthermore, increasing numbers of heroes have been given abilities that arbitrarily remove debuffs. The first was Rem, whom simply deleted any debuffs on her and became immune to them when an ally died. Rem terrorized the game by easily soloing entire groups of units through a mix of a built-in AOE counter attack, plus a double-attack counterattack that applied armor break, and general immunity to debuffs thanks to her passive. The second you tried to attack her you were met with what was at the time an extremely hard to kill bruiser that would immediately counter and restore all of her health with an artifact. Counter-typing her (because Rock Paper Scissors is such a fun balancing design) didn’t work either and many times she solod my senya/roana groups.
Rem is years old and has been phased out of existence for a long time, a hint at how utterly insane and unhinged the game has gotten. What was once a silly and unbalanced if not at times entertaining 20-30 minutes every second week day became an extreme chore and a source of immense frustration.
So, I cut it loose. I deleted over 200+ videos of unprocessed E7 material and hours and hours of side commentary, left my guild and announced my departure to the few who had stuck around this long alongside me.
It’s very likely my predictions will be right, that the lack of an active casting project and the death of one of the last long-term pursuits I had kept to will very negatively effect any future effort to try to turn the tide. But there was simply no reason to remain, and after quitting everything else except for logging on FGO this ends the near decade Gacha experiment I began so long ago when my beloved cats were still alive. I quit all the other products I dabbled in ages ago, and now that Epic 7 joins them in the graveyard I come out of the experience having learned an immense amount of incredibly unpleasant truths about what gaming has become and what developers consider acceptable additions and changes to their products.
If Gameproc were still alive I’d write a post-mortem article to join the original one. As it is I’m not sure if I’ll bother doing so.
Soon after I set this down a new unrelated crisis began in my world, and I have barely had the time to piss myself.