I am honestly baffled at many of the decisions they've made in the past year. I started back in early 2020 back when Reserve was still a very new map. Game felt very fun to play back then. I feel like every wipe since then has been a slow downward spiral. To summarize:
- Found-in-raid changes made it so you can't sell a lot of stuff. I used to be able to sell the Slick off the guy I killed, which made PVP a viable way to make money mixed in with some looting. Now you have to separate PVP / Farming rubles, because losing a 1M+ kit is expensive, and even if you kill 2 chads, you might make 500k back selling their stuff to Mechanic/Ragman. This means players intentionally load in with crappy gear for the sole purpose of avoiding PVP and safely looting.
- Flea Market item restrictions/Trader Limits make it really hard to run certain loadouts. Certain weapon platforms are completely unviable to run since there is no way to get decent ammo in enough quantity. Hideout crafting is also very low quantity. Each wipe this gets more restrictive.
- Bitcoin Farm nerfs have made it arguably not worth the micromanagement, which makes the Hideout not worth it for the most part. I only progress my Hideout to get the Air Filter so I can max strength faster, otherwise I turn my generator off now, and don't even build the BTC Farm. Occasionally I will craft something. Meh.
- Lack of good In-Game Events. The Halloween event this year deserved to be panned the way it was. Random chance to spawn with a poison that kills you is not fun. Having your gun jam more is also not fun. Tagilla had really crappy loot (didn't even have his Rig/Helmet most the time), which is insane considering he had several thousand HP or something. It really felt like they didn't want players to acquire anything too valuable from this event. The last two wipes were a bit better at having events, but this one has been straight up awful.
- Raider/Boss loot lacking in a lot of cases, also VERY LOW % spawn rate. Most raiders/rogues have absolute garbage equipment. Feels like 1 in 20 that will have an Altyn or Hexgrid, let alone anything else useful. How come Rogue/Goon weapons have like 40 durability? I can't even sell these things to Mechanic they're so busted, yet they're able to laser me from 200 meters away just fine. People who survive to kill these cracked ass motherf***ers should be rewarded not punished. I also think the Goons should stay on a particular map for an entire day, and not switch every ~2 hours. Their spawn rate is low enough as it is without having to look at tracking websites to find them.
Honestly, everything above seems to tie into a common theme of making EVERYTHING scarce/unavailable. This may make RMT harder, but it seems like every time they make RMT nerfs, the RMT'ers just find ways around it. Yet the common player suffers for it.
In my opinion the game was in it's best place back in 2020 pre-FIR when players had real choice on what they wanted to buy/sell. Yes, people still ran the meta back then, but at least we could decide for ourselves what that was, and not rely on trader availability/limits.
The lack of good loot, low boss spawn %, and lack of events also means player retention is really bad right now. In previous wipes (even late-wipe) I could run meta kits and rush hotspots and there would be huge multi-team fights. Now I'm lucky to find one or two players that are semi-geared, otherwise it's mostly just Timmys ratting about.