[O] Ceeg — Today at 17:23
@here Sorry about the ping folks, but we are LEAKING screenshots of upcoming content in return for positive Steam Review links 🙂 38 minutes remaining to get as many in here as possible. Double sized snippets if you turn a negative into a positive!

New Community manager broke Steam TOS to coerce reviews.

"Do not artificially influence review scores. Examples include: using multiple accounts to leave reviews; coercing other players to leave reviews; or accepting payments or other compensation to leave reviews."

OWI Community Manager tagged their whole discord server promising leaked screenshots of upcoming content in exchange for positive steam reviews.

You may note this review is negative, because that's really scummy behavior.

The publisher/developer Offworld Industries (OWI) has betrayed their playerbase and are willing to turn this game into a cash grab.

OWI hired a new CEO Vlad Cerald in 2022, who's background for many years has been mobile games (14 years '06-'20). Who's goal is money. "On my bucket list is to be part of a top 10 game franchise that generates massive revenue"

Shortly after Vlad joined in Jan '22, Tencent bought a minority stake in the company and appointed Gram Xu who is the general manager of Tencent Shooting Games to the board. This happened in March '22.

Dec '22, OWI approves firing EVERYONE (apparently only the CEO was left) at Periscope Games (devs of Post Scriptum, 1m+ copies sold) after years of neglecting them.

Feb '23, OWI releases PAID EMOTES, directly going back on their promise to not add such things.

In just over a year OWI has placed a mobile game dev who's goals are MONEY as their CEO. Partnered with Tencent, who is known to make cash grabs and force Chinese politics and laws on the rest of the world. Gutted their entire other development studio with no plans for the future (as far as I am aware), leaving an entire game dead in the water (hell their website isnt even https anymore, that just shows how little OWI cared about Post Scriptum). And has added PAID emotes, going directly against their own statements to never add paid content.

You can argue all day long about how this will help fund the game, because it will never be justified. Once you set down that road you either have to immediately turn around or continue. And with Tencent and Ceraldi at the wheel, money is all they care about.

The situation:
2022, OWI hires a new CEO whose whole career was focused on making cash-grab mobile games.
Tencent, a Chinese company, buys a seat in the board of directors.
2023, OWI adds paid emotes to a game they said they'd never add paid content to, and give very vague answers about their future monetisation plans.
To be continued...
So in light of that:

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人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權 示威游行 李洪志 法輪大法 大法弟子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门

Game tệ nhất, server đã ít còn cho phép tự động kick người mới chơi vậy ai mà mua game này chơi nữa !

I never ever do reviews of video games but this will be the first one after 1000 hours on squad. I really loved squad when I first got the game couple years back. It was amazing to come home speak in local chat with other gamers from the old call of duty days and talk smack and banter with the enemy team. It was fun, chill and lots of amazing games and squads were created. Slowly server by server the rules got more strict which although annoying was understandable as the game was growing. But then this is also where it took a turn for the worse. Around sometime last year, around winter was when I began to notice server clans really grow and as we all know people who make the rules tend to break them while enforcing it on others. I will name 3 reasons why the game will slowly die.

1) The servers with their clans are expanding rapidly which means they will always have players to play on their server. But this leads to the need of not really caring if you ban a random because you have people in your clan to join. Eventually you begin to get less strict on the rules with your clan members because they are part of your clan and a random is not. This lead to many scenarios where I a heli pilot and tank driver would often get threats of server ban if i didnt give helis over to clan members when told to. even if i was squad 1, the first to make a heli squad and the rules in each server i abide by say priority for vehicle goes to the first person who claims it no exception. When i question this I either got left alone or got banned. Most of the time the admins dont like you to question them or the rules because then they can just ban you. There is nothing you can even do because if you go to the discord of that server and submit a ticket the people in charge of admins they say "it was probably a accident" or "we will talk to them". meaning kick rocks and your ban stays. This is not exclusive to one server it has gotten so bad about 90% of servers are like this.

2) The next issue I have with squad now, that was never a problem before is this "communitybanlist.com/banned" message I get. Even on servers i've played on for months once they use this sht program, automatically I am banned. It literally takes 1 server to ban you to enroll you into this hit list depending on what box they check mark. If you tk you will probably just get a 1 day ban but if you question the admin which they call "abusive behavior against an admin" then you get added to the list. If you tell and admin they are stupid and 9/10 they are these discord mod simp boys then you can expect a ban. This concept of a community ban is going to lead to the death of squad. When you literally ban 1 person and it bans them in 20 servers automatically you can expect that player to either play less or not at all. Now the implications of this is slowly trickling in right now and you can expect more people to slowly distance themselves from squad and go into different games like hell let loose where this isnt an issue. The main reason im doing this review is because of this lazy form of "admin work" because these serves dont want to have admins watching the game making sure rules are fine because it can be boring but instead just have automatic bans regardless of reason. even though the rules of COC for servers is to have an admin in game at all times most dont do that now and have admins only on demand. Many times recently ive been in a server where someone flys a helicopter into the ground grabs a tank solo drives it into middle of no wherer abandons it and leaves. all the while for 20 mins the chat is spamming !admin with no one there.

3) admins who are discord mods. The admins have a power trip when you question them and are the biggest simps for female players. Kid you not when a female player joins their team they let them do anything. They all follow that individual around like puppys and dont play as a unit they bend the rules for that player or if someone questions "wtf are you guys doing? play the objective" they go ape sht ballistic and start being toxic, saying the worse offensive things with no penalty.

Final) In conclusion this game was a great one but due to the admin/ clan abuse of power and this sht community ban list system I can see squad in a year or two being a once great game that was amazing to play, into one that only the sweaty hands of discord admins will still play because no one will join. If you do decide to get this game dont get your hopes up and if you are like me you dont like to join clans and perform "basic training with promotions and community service events" then you will probably end up on a community ban list for questioning why the servers clan can heli ram you in the air but the rules say you cant. Or why admins get to say to people "stfu you ret.rd" but when someone tells the admin they are "stupid" they get banned. They rather you not question anything and accept it but god forbid you break the rules yourself or speak about the rule being broken cuz then u will basically be out of 90% of servers from one single ban.

Solution) The only solution I can see for squads redemption is either a harsh rule against servers having a clan that is opened to the public but instead they can only have a private server or if they launch several official servers with whitelist admins who dont play on that specific server at all. Actually they should make it so no admins of that clan can play on that server or risk a server penalty. The next thing they can do is implement a faster and easier way where we can report admin abuse or clan abuse. They can even just do surveys once a month for individuals who aren't associated with any clan to express concerns of any issues. That would be a good way to see which problem servers there are to be shut down and which are good standing.
But the biggest thing they can do is have an automatic server shut down on this community ban list program. Literally are killing away the fan base of squad and any gamers which will lead down the path of a dead game.

Obviously clan members and admins will disagree with me and down vote this. I am 100% positive but after spending months talking to random players about certain servers and this admin clan abuse it has became obvious this isn't exclusive to me but its to the whole public. Thats who this review is geared towards and will be the focus for.

We do not want micro-transactions. It does not belong in this game in any shape or form.

i can't connect any room server ... so " No ! " for me

This should be a positive review but I cant put it as such until the underlying issue is resolved.

Exploits.


This game is absolutely epic, but currently, because the Devs are trying to get the game to work on all PCs, including Potato PCs there are issues with the graphics and how it affects the gameplay.

Run the game at max settings and it looks beautiful, feels like you can hide in the long grass and behind trees etc.

Turn the graphics to low and lower the draw distance, the grass density falls off and at range nothing is rendered.

So snipers on hills that think they are in cover, are not in cover for people running on low graphics settings.
There is no render distance limit for players and vehicles, but there is for foliage. So you can think your on a hill hiding in the grass, but on my screen it looks like your just laying out in the open waiting to be shot!

I appreciate the need to allow graphics customisation, but when it causes game breaking issues like that it needs to be addressed pretty damn quick.

If they can fix that and I can run the game at max settings without thinking I'm at a disadvantage, I'll change my review to positive.

This game has 84,000+ Banned players
After 1100+ Hours.... DO NOT BUY! (Google: Community Ban list)

UPDATE 2024: The discord server fiasco promising leaked screenshots of upcoming content in exchange for positive steam reviews, breaking Steams TOS.
This post was a canary in the coal mine for many years.

2̶4̶,̶0̶0̶0̶+̶ 3̶4̶,̶0̶0̶0̶+̶ 4̶1̶,̶0̶0̶0̶+ 4̶7̶,̶0̶0̶0̶+ 84,000+ Bans !

BANS FOR A GAME WITH LESS THAN 10k PLAYERS
PLEASE DO NOT LOSE YOUR HARD EARNED MONEY

(84,000 Bans Updated Dec, 2023) Such an astronomical number when the game only has 8,000 active players...DO NOT BUY. I REPEAT DO NOT BUY

**You can be banned without evidence, without proof, without recorded evidence, nothing is posted to support what someone accuses you of, over reacting admins can justify a ban just by their word alone or someone who reports you out of spite.**