I think I'm ready to take a break, but it's not because of the SB content

No hate on the game, it's having a good run, despite the ups and downs. This is the first time I'm not buying the battlepass in a long time. And it's not a principled decision -- I just don't have the interest. With Silksong out now, Hades II reaching 1.0, Ivalice Chronicles launching just after that, etc, I just don't see that interest returning.

Whenever people make these posts, they're going on about "why does it feel less fun to play this game now that I've sunk 11 billion hours into it?" As if any sane person is thinking they really want to play the same game over and over for their entire lives.

But you do also see games fall into worse and worse patterns, or focus so hard on trying to turn community sentiment into action that they fall on their faces repeatedly. Am I saying the devs need to ignore reddit? No, but what I am saying is that if you're going to pivot the focus of your game to an alternate mode within the original game, you need to actually make those changes. It needs to launch into that content, and you need to fix the UI to make it clear that things have changed.

You need to fix your player onboarding. You need to fix your UI. You need to fix your weekly chests. You need to adjust more than just your marketing. These are changes you can't make while being led around by the nose by your community.

I think the primary point the developers of LoR never fully reckoned with was that they were fighting an uphill battle against other gacha/mobile games by catering to west coast design sensibilities. You can't monetize like Genshin if you design like Hollywood -- it's a respectable decision to kneecap your success for artistic integrity, rather than catering to the lowest common denominator, but you have to understand that if you're not offering what they offer, you can't charge what they charge. You can't follow the industry standard if you're not designing to the industry standard.

The core issue at the heart of your designs? Your characters have an emotional state built into their personalities. None of them are capable of a human range of emotion, and so none of them are innately desirable. The whole point of avoiding cheap, popular tropes is to be able to ADD emotional complexity. Political complexity. SOMETHING to sink your teeth into. That's why you barely sold any skins -- not the designs themselves, but the fact that the majority of people don't emotionally connect with the characters enough to want to dress them up and play with them.

Sure, you've got a small dedicated player-base who DO connect with them, and you CAN make a niche product work, and you do have core mechanics that are so strong that your core player base will overlook literally everything else (like I have, historically), but you have to understand that it's niche, why it's niche, and who your audience is. You can't just follow whatever the previous round of stats told you about player engagement.

Tl;dr: The most frustrating games are the ones that get so much right that they fall just short of becoming great. I don't know if I'm quitting the game, but we're at an interesting inflexion point that I wanted to give my 2 cents on before cutting back my time with it.