I'm going to preface this by stating that I do not hate the game. This is just a short list of things that I dislike about it.

The Design

Open any STW menu, and it'll look like Epic hired the first few artists from a Fiverr search result and used a bit of each one's work. Each new menu takes tidbits from the current BR design, but the rest are left in the Stone Age. From things like the wildlife having unique healthbars that are viewable from long range to the infamous banner page, you can find mismatched color, shades, and fonts everywhere you look. The Completed Quest log was also randomized, and finding the description of a past quest when trying to help out a new player becomes virtually impossible. These don't impact the gameplay, but its enough to raise eyebrows upon notice.

The Research Points

This is just a mobile game method of keeping up player retention over a long time. Why do early-level players have to constantly go to a page to claim their useless points to spam click on stats with such low values that they're essentially unnoticeable? This belongs in an idle clicker where getting the dopamine from seeing flashing colors is the purpose of the game, not a "survival tower defense" that costs full price and has 20-minute long missions, on average.

The Numbers

1. 58. 82. 106. 130. 145. 310. 33,600. These numbers sound like some sort of cipher from the ramblings of a madman, or like randomly generated numbers with no purpose. Instead these are some of the numbers you'll constantly see on your screen near the endgame, and my only question is why? Maybe the devs got their birthdays or favorite numbers permanently contained in their favorite game, but it doesn't change the fact that there's little method to the madness. At least the item power levels are in increments of 24 (at least for legendary items), but even that is yet another strange number. What ever happened to multiples of 10? BR has significant levels at level 100 and 200, and both of those make perfect sense. Now talk to your friend who is just starting to get into STW and they ask you, "What's the max level?", to which you respond 1) which level (why are there two levels in the game?) and 2) 310 or "130", both of which make no sense to the people who haven't stared at such numbers for the past half-decade. Epic has readjusted levels multiple times in the past, but 310 must be too significant to warrant such attention.

The Damage

The higher level you get, the bigger the number values get when it comes to dealing damage and the health of the husks. Once you get past 4 digits, the average player is only able to tell how good a weapon is based on the time it takes to kill a husk, not the absurdly random damage values locked behind a formula that might as well be a random number generator. If every basic Husk had 100 damage and their power level affected a defense stat lowering damage taken, a gun that deals 10 damage/10% per shot is much more easily comparable to one that does 5 damage/5% per shot. Alas, we instead have to resort to guides from the community on which of the hundreds of guns are actually viable. And don't even get me started on the crit meta.

The BluGlo

I'm sure that BluGlo was very important at some point in the game. I'm sure that in whichever Alpha build it originated in, it was very important to the lore and collecting it had a purpose. But now, it's just another minor annoyance in a game overflowing with them. You have to go out of your way to find enough of the infinitely spawning BluGlo on the map; it's not a challenge, it's just another time waster. You drop it whenever you get downed, which you would think marks it as significant; but no, you can go and pick it right back up, and you'll probably find 5 more on the way since the map is practically blue by the end of a mission. And if it's "lore-significant:" so what? You don't have to collect enough metal to build the Atlas or deploy the balloon on Lars' Van, so why does this have to be such a prerequisite for so many missions?

The Hoverboard

This is a pretty cool idea. A way to move faster than running in a mode whose code is too entangled to include movement like tactical sprinting, crouching, and mantling; what could go wrong? It takes a comically large amount of time to deploy, but that's not too bad on its own. The problem is that every time you take damage from anything that's not the storm, it completely resets the deployment timer. Even if you weren't riding it originally and was just in the middle of deploying, all it takes is one Gunslinger ready to snipe you from across the map to force you to return to holding down the build button for another few seconds. Combine this with bees and gas Lobbers that make a low-damage Area of Effect, and using the only viable transportation in the game just gets hit with another hurdle. I say viable because there are also the vertical and horizontal bounce pads, but for reasons beyond my comprehension, then being relegated to only a quarter tile while filling the entire trap area just puts me off from using them.

The Traps

The Battle is Building. Traps are a necessity for high level play once your guns and swords become pea shooters, and there's a decent variety of traps to suit your needs. But just like with guns, there's more options that exist than options that are useful. For instance, let's look at floors: you can use Wooden Floor Spikes to slow husks down to get hit by your stronger traps nearby, use Retractable Floor Spikes to deal big damage to every husk, or use a Tar Pit to slow the most down at the expense of low durability. Then…you have the Flame Grill. Its fire is especially strong against Nature Husks, but that's only a consistent benefit in less than 20% of missions. You also have the non-damaging Floor Freeze trap that displays a nice animation for the Husks who are too high-level to be affected for long enough for the trap to be useful. I could go through the other traps too–especially the ceiling ones–but there's always at least one trap deemed irrelevant when compared to its other counterparts.

The Weapons

Want to know if your gun is outclassed? See if you can find it in the Base Weapons section of the Collection Book. There's such a huge variety of weapons made, and they all have unique designs that makes their set recognizable, yet the amount that are considered viable can be counted on your hands. No wonder we don't get new guns anymore since everything is either worse than the Xenon, or it will make every past gun worse than itself. We only have 3 inventory slots for some reason so choosing what to actively use is a highly competitive process. Every now and then, you may choose one gun over another due to its elemental advantage, but a majority of the time, one overpowered Energy gun will be all that you will use for months. The only way to get around that is to make a mode that invalidates all your schematics and forces you to take a gamble on every chest you open–oh wait!

The Ventures

This is actually the most comical "addition" that the game has had. Imagine a mode where everything that you have grinded for for years is gutted, and you're stuck reliving when every enemy is a bullet sponge, and the game is more of a test of patience than skill. Now do that for hours just to boost your items by a couple of power levels. Even better, you can get vouchers that are a blast from the past, giving you access to the event items that new players need in order to stand a chance in modes like MSK, or you can get those random items that you missed for your Collection Book, and get enough XP to level up a gun from 10 to 20. You don't reap what you sow; you just get a little larger decimal point in your PL to flex against people who burned their hours in a different mode.

The Disappointment

I'm not going to delve into all the specifics since this sub has done that in much greater detail before me. From a cool horror/survival/sandbox idea to a plethora of dropped promises, we as players have been through enough. Nonetheless, we cannot judge what never existed; only what we have today. In a perfect world where our mode was more than a corpse that's only staying online out of obligation, maybe we wouldn't need XP for BR to draw in old players as daily $0.50 lost its value. If you're tired of FOMO, think about the fallacy-ridden excuse, "If you don't like the game, don't play it." Let your first event-exclusive hero fly by, and you'll see that nothing changes from the never-ending cycle of 20 minute missions that give no rewards other than incentives to spend money in the mode that actually matters.

And that's it. Am I expecting any of these to be "fixed?" Of course not; these are all features, not bugs, and some of them happen to be more of nuisances than others. If anyone wants to challenge this with positivity or feed into the negativity, feel free to share your thoughts.