Brawlhalla rant

[POMF =3]

Ive made a rant about this game awhile and I need to get this off my chest.

PASSIVNESS

Brawlhalla's number one problem in my opinion. Youre at a disadvantage if you play aggressively (You're at 1 frame disadvantage if someone whiffs an attack - brawl is a punish game), and since most of the game is focused on 1 v 1 or 2 v 2 fighting and only that, this fact makes brawlhalla not enjoyable. I dont have any idea on how to fix that, the devs chose this path and it sucks but I guess not many people care about this issue enough so they wont change it anytime soon. Ive actually seen some people who said that they enjoyed playing passively and just playing cat and mouse with the enemy in a fighting game, marvelous! Reads are bs - on higher levels its very hard to do since they're so many dodge options so brawl just becomes an advanced rock-paper-scissors game where guessing and luck is what wins the game and not your skills. This game is almost 7 years old! 7!!! Most of the issues in this post should've been fixed by now but apparently they care about other things.

BALANCE

A subjective topic but we all can admit that instead of balancing weapons, devs just buff random weapons in a circle instead of fixing them( you can look at weapon-win-statistics for that and judge for yourself). The hitboxes are stupid - its just a circle around your character, one which even goes beyond your characters silhouette. It was understandable at alpha stages but its been 7 years why havent they changed it??? Some sigs can be spammed more easily than others since some sigs have 0 recovery frames and move the character in an almost un-punishable position. You can practically spam your way to diamond, its insane. We still have heroes like Terros, Yellow man bad, Ulgrim, Scarlet and now Jayun/Mako that are constantly getting deserved hate for being broken and needing nerf/fix/change and yet nothing is ever done about it. All these broken features almost makes it look like the devs want us to rage to create interest, after all, being toxic isn't an issue in brawl, since there are so many taunts, post chat and the ability to reports that sadly do nothing.

TECHNICAL STUFF
Being a 7 year old game that looks worse than early-internet flash games you would think that it runs perfectly on any computer and youd be very wrong. The 60hz vs 144hz refresh rate input lag is atrocious making the game almost unplayable on higher levels. Servers always have issues and are generally not that good. It wouldnt be a big problem in games like Dota where you dont have to make split-second decisions but in brawl its unacceptable. If you dont live near the main servers or have a good computer - youre gonna have a worse time than someone who has and that wouldnt be a problem if not for my next point ---->

BRAWLHALLA'S WEIRD STATUS QUO
Look, I dont know much about game development, or how hard it is for a team like BMG to maintain Brawlhalla at its current stage so its maybe not fair for me to say what Im about to say but throughout my life I played many multiplayer games and I dont understand brawlhalla. Outside of its 1 v 1 or 2 v 2 this game has basically nothing else to offer. Its so boring I kinda get why most players are silver and only less than 10% are diamond. Ranked is getting less and less popular because of how bad it is. Most players play experimental and thats about it. After playing with every weapon and every character youre done experiencing the game - now youre only goal is to master it more than other players and thats it(inb4 every competitive multiplayer game is like this). There is no goal other than this. When you reach diamond youre done. With every win you earn mammoth coins that only pay for skin color, theres no incentive to keep playing. Not every multiplayer game is like this. Brawlhalla relies heavily on its competitive aspect that it completely disregards the "fun" side. Gamemodes are mainly trash - its like the 3 v 3 maps in LoL , they exist but nobody plays them. Gamemodes should be like surf maps in cs or dota in Wc3 or trade maps in Tf2, you get the point, they shouldnt be a "one gimmick 30 minutes play, get bored and never touch again" type of maps. Maybe im just giving brawlhalla too much credit. This game gets compared a lot with smash but have you seen smashes maps and characters? all filled with life, variety and personality. Its been 7 years and they haven't even made voices for the characters. All characters look alike cause its just the same silhouette copy pasted 50 times. Only difference are the sigs which are ok at best. If youre not paying for the game youre not gonna have any ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like in other games so get used to have the default skin with different colors. Maps are only different from one another by the size of the platform and if it moves or not which lacks creativity again, mainly because instead of thinking how we can make this game fun, the devs are thinking how we can make this game more competitive and boring. That means if youre not willing to spend time learning and watching guides you might as well stop playing the game because I doubt they'll change anything in the next 7 years.

I had more to say but this will do for now, feel free to discuss it in the comments ill answer

[76561198102799856]

I understand the frustration, so let's discuss:

Passive Play - The only reason this play-style is even viable is when you have many more aggressive players at your disposal and since being passive would be considered a hard-counter it's very obnoxious to deal with. There are two main problems causing this being:

• Spot-Dodge - being a huge culprit, being able to not only sit in a corner waiting for your opponent to make a move, but to also be able to dodge in place giving you a window of opportunity to punish is atrocious, this is why a lot of people don't like to engage much cause now you're forced to try and do all this ridiculous baiting over and over to the point of being tiresome which leads to people forfeiting the games or struggling, not to mention this can be even more annoying depending on what weapon you're dealing with (Ex. fighting someone playing hammer who likes to spot-dodge into neutral light attacks cause of the high priority it has). Unfortunately I don't see a solid solution for this, cause on one hand if you got rid of spot dodge then this would force players to actually move in a direction and give the aggressive player a window to punish them for the poor dodge, on the other hand this would mean they would need to implement an alternative means to GC attacks since without spot-dodging you can't do it and i'd doubt at this stage in the game, they won't really bother fixing the issue.
  
  
• Back-Dashing - With the addition of this mechanic in the past this without made them entire experience faster and to some degree more enjoyable, although of course makes passive play much faster now, i'm sure you've noticed players now who will go in for an attack, completely fail, but then back-dash repeatedly till you engage and make a mistake then 9/10 you'll get punished, this is highly annoying cause it deprives you from being able to apply any pressure due to them trying to reset the game to a neutral standpoint every time (Ex. Great-Sword players missing a side-light, but then immediately dashes and keeps repeating till they get somewhere). This In turn forces you to either play patient or do more baiting on your part which will get tiresome.
  
  People who tell you they "enjoy it" sure you may have some people who do, but most do it too:
  
  1. Cause they don't know how to engage so their only option is wait you out till you get exhausted and give up.
     
  2. Because it's the meta
     
  3. To basically troll to get a good laugh or two.
     
  4. Making your experience miserable by completely wasting your time cause they know most people patience levels are near zero so they'll see easy forfeit or sloppy play from irritated players.
     
  5. They have nothing better to clearly do, try picturing stalling out the timer for 8 minutes every game, who would really has the kind of time for that.
     
     "Why do people play fighting games only to not fight at all?" is my question.
     
     Balance - not much to say here, though I will say Great-sword I feel like has set quite the precedent for more power-creep in the near future. Hit-boxes are quite questionable too especially when you factor in 360 moves (Ex.Brynns D-Sig with spear) and crossovers with these added effects to sigs making the hit-boxes that much more misleading. Overall though, this is i'd say the most balanced game i've played considering even though there is a meta, if you know what you're doing every weapon and character is viable which I appreciate.
     
     Technical stuff Brawlhalla servers a garbage and the devs are aware, if you've watched the Reno reveal dev stream toward the end about 1:08:37 Foda and DinoHedron were answering questions about adding servers for middle-east north-africa, so Foda then says, "We know players want a better experience and with the servers far away from you your experience can be less than ideal, although still "Pretty good" realistically we're in a good spot if we're talking about fighting game net-code" with the simple fact you're able to "play" with someone across the ocean/country etc. but then turns around and says, "I play on EUR, I feel "ok" you know, "not great" and would be frustrated trying to rank on it" This Right there is them telling you their servers aren't where they should be performance wise and yet while telling you it's "pretty good" even though it's not, cause the issue in general is that these terrible servers are making this game more and more unplayable as time goes on and if you're aware the servers aren't even good enough where you can play a real match then how would the rest of your gaming experience be any less stressful? Let's not forget the "Get better internet" response when they don't even have the core problem fixed on their end, but will blame you.
     
     Brawlhalla's Weird Status Quo - Let's be real this games content is meager you'll only really enjoy the game if you're very competitive and like repetitive grinds, casual players will play the game for about 1-2 hours tops and either put the game down till their next session or eventually move on to other, better games. With a game that focuses on beating your opponent into the ground they give you little incentive to do so with gold being quite useless for buying anything except colors or legends themselves, the cooler character (crossovers) being locked behind pay-wall so paying to be part of the "event" and having any fun using favorite, nostalgic characters and the only thing to accomplish really is to grind to diamond rank, but unless you're going for high diamond rankings you'll eventually get bored very quickly.
     So to put it bluntly, there's 3 reasons why this game is so popular where even though people like myself hate it end up coming back it:
     
     
     1. Brawlhalla gimmick where you can play characters from movie/tv show franchises etc. usually being characters you either grew up with during child-hood or grown attached and being able to duke it out with those characters from other universes right here this alone has sparked interest in newcomers.
        
        
     2. This is by far the main reason, but there's no real "competition" as far as free to play games go, there's no other game like it as far as i'm aware and with no competition there's nothing left to go to with better polish and overall better experience, so if you want your fix with a game similar to brawl, well you only have this and people keep coming back even though they may hate it cause you have no options unless you pay for your games. I'd be willing to bet if there was competitor out there to brawl with better servers, quality of life improvements etc. then you'd see a decrease in the player-base cause you would now have another option.
        
        
     3. Very easily accessible on every platform, very easy to install/uninstall at any time.

[POMF =3]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Practicality®:

I understand the frustration, so let's discuss:

Passive Play - The only reason this play-style is even viable is when you have many more aggressive players at your disposal and since being passive would be considered a hard-counter it's very obnoxious to deal with. There are two main problems causing this being:

• Spot-Dodge - being a huge culprit, being able to not only sit in a corner waiting for your opponent to make a move, but to also be able to dodge in place giving you a window of opportunity to punish is atrocious, this is why a lot of people don't like to engage much cause now you're forced to try and do all this ridiculous baiting over and over to the point of being tiresome which leads to people forfeiting the games or struggling, not to mention this can be even more annoying depending on what weapon you're dealing with (Ex. fighting someone playing hammer who likes to spot-dodge into neutral light attacks cause of the high priority it has). Unfortunately I don't see a solid solution for this, cause on one hand if you got rid of spot dodge then this would force players to actually move in a direction and give the aggressive player a window to punish them for the poor dodge, on the other hand this would mean they would need to implement an alternative means to GC attacks since without spot-dodging you can't do it and i'd doubt at this stage in the game, they won't really bother fixing the issue.
  
  
• Back-Dashing - With the addition of this mechanic in the past this without made them entire experience faster and to some degree more enjoyable, although of course makes passive play much faster now, i'm sure you've noticed players now who will go in for an attack, completely fail, but then back-dash repeatedly till you engage and make a mistake then 9/10 you'll get punished, this is highly annoying cause it deprives you from being able to apply any pressure due to them trying to reset the game to a neutral standpoint every time (Ex. Great-Sword players missing a side-light, but then immediately dashes and keeps repeating till they get somewhere). This In turn forces you to either play patient or do more baiting on your part which will get tiresome.
  
  People who tell you they "enjoy it" sure you may have some people who do, but most do it too:
  
  1. Cause they don't know how to engage so their only option is wait you out till you get exhausted and give up.
     
  2. Because it's the meta
     
  3. To basically troll to get a good laugh or two.
     
  4. Making your experience miserable by completely wasting your time cause they know most people patience levels are near zero so they'll see easy forfeit or sloppy play from irritated players.
     
  5. They have nothing better to clearly do, try picturing stalling out the timer for 8 minutes every game, who would really has the kind of time for that.
     
     "Why do people play fighting games only to not fight at all?" is my question.
     
     Balance - not much to say here, though I will say Great-sword I feel like has set quite the precedent for more power-creep in the near future. Hit-boxes are quite questionable too especially when you factor in 360 moves (Ex.Brynns D-Sig with spear) and crossovers with these added effects to sigs making the hit-boxes that much more misleading. Overall though, this is i'd say the most balanced game i've played considering even though there is a meta, if you know what you're doing every weapon and character is viable which I appreciate.
     
     Technical stuff Brawlhalla servers a garbage and the devs are aware, if you've watched the Reno reveal dev stream toward the end about 1:08:37 Foda and DinoHedron were answering questions about adding servers for middle-east north-africa, so Foda then says, "We know players want a better experience and with the servers far away from you your experience can be less than ideal, although still "Pretty good" realistically we're in a good spot if we're talking about fighting game net-code" with the simple fact you're able to "play" with someone across the ocean/country etc. but then turns around and says, "I play on EUR, I feel "ok" you know, "not great" and would be frustrated trying to rank on it" This Right there is them telling you their servers aren't where they should be performance wise and yet while telling you it's "pretty good" even though it's not, cause the issue in general is that these terrible servers are making this game more and more unplayable as time goes on and if you're aware the servers aren't even good enough where you can play a real match then how would the rest of your gaming experience be any less stressful? Let's not forget the "Get better internet" response when they don't even have the core problem fixed on their end, but will blame you.
     
     Brawlhalla's Weird Status Quo - Let's be real this games content is meager you'll only really enjoy the game if you're very competitive and like repetitive grinds, casual players will play the game for about 1-2 hours tops and either put the game down till their next session or eventually move on to other, better games. With a game that focuses on beating your opponent into the ground they give you little incentive to do so with gold being quite useless for buying anything except colors or legends themselves, the cooler character (crossovers) being locked behind pay-wall so paying to be part of the "event" and having any fun using favorite, nostalgic characters and the only thing to accomplish really is to grind to diamond rank, but unless you're going for high diamond rankings you'll eventually get bored very quickly.
     So to put it bluntly, there's 3 reasons why this game is so popular where even though people like myself hate it end up coming back it:
     
     
     1. Brawlhalla gimmick where you can play characters from movie/tv show franchises etc. usually being characters you either grew up with during child-hood or grown attached and being able to duke it out with those characters from other universes right here this alone has sparked interest in newcomers.
        
        
     2. This is by far the main reason, but there's no real "competition" as far as free to play games go, there's no other game like it as far as i'm aware and with no competition there's nothing left to go to with better polish and overall better experience, so if you want your fix with a game similar to brawl, well you only have this and people keep coming back even though they may hate it cause you have no options unless you pay for your games. I'd be willing to bet if there was competitor out there to brawl with better servers, quality of life improvements etc. then you'd see a decrease in the player-base cause you would now have another option.
        
        
     3. Very easily accessible on every platform, very easy to install/uninstall at any time.
     [/quote] Yea I guess we agree on many things here. Honestly most of my frustration stems from the permanent input lag, the constant server lag and of things which are easily fixable but arent (hitboxes/spam etc). I have to buy a new pc and change my region just for this game to work properly it boggles my mind. You could fix the hitbox in a month and add recovery frames for some of the broken sigs/ change their large hitboxes in a month as well but for some reason they dont do it. Also I dont intend to buy any skins or anything like that since they just cost too much. Like, too too much. Well anyway, sadly there arent any accessible free games like that on the market thats true. Sadly I have to settle for this medicare mess of a game.

[Ser Lagsolot]

Bah whatever! You still play and it's still fun, whatever technicalities you have issue with don't overshadow the fact that this is a great game and people love it for better or worse. How many free Steam games cross that threshold? Not a lot, frankly, as a picky and generally upset gamer myself, Brawlhalla is a gold standard for me. Tons of dev support and community involvement, no brandishing of game breaking pay to win elements, and an E-sport arena for people to enjoy and dare I say bet on! So respectfully sir, with regard to your fair criticisms, to you I say... "F YOU!" Most of the games on this platform are terrible and rely on archaic business practices. This is one of the few that got it right.

Here's to seven more years of fun!