People who were playing the Finals from the start of the game will understand what I mean. For those who didn't, I will explain:

Finals is a unique game, but it's not that popular and doesn't have tons of online. At release, and in the first months, it had MANY MORE players. However, due to a lot of reasons, it lost 80% of its playerbase in the first 2-3 months. One of the reasons was the really slow update rates. I'm talking not about content updates, but about some balancing and tweaking that were urgently needed. For example:

• Nuke meta(could one-shot everyone)
• RPG(could one-shot Light class)
• Double-barreled shotgun(could one shot anyone)
• Throwing knives(weapon without reloading with high damage)
• SCAR(low recoil and huge damage)

All these things on start were overpowered and required tweaking. However, they were untouched for literally MONTHS. I understand that some things require more than just changing some numbers in stats, but even simpler things were kept untouched. As a result, players were playing in a horrible toxic meta for a long time, and even after patches, some things still happened to be not fixed(like Nuke that after "fix"was done differently and stayed as a meta).

A lot of players criticized the developer for slow tweaking and balancing updates. And even after few years, there are still constant patches that make one class or weapon stronger/weaker, while others suffer. Another problem The FInals had, is that developers were "fixing" things nobody was asking for, which we will talk about later...

How does it correlate with Arc Radiers?

Good question. Arc is a bigger and more complex game, so it requires more statistics to collect and more work to do; nobody is arguing about it. And after today's update, I am really worried that devs will just go the same route as The Finals.

The project was released on October 30, and from that time, we saw basically 2 or 3 patches with some real changes to anything except some bugs... These are:

1. Patch 1.3.0, Venator nerf(still top-1 gun btw) and some tweaks to Grenade Launcher ammo
2. Patch 1.7.0, that "buffed" Bettina(still garbage) and buffed Stitcher
3. Patch 1.11.0, that nerfed Trigger Nade(still op) and nerfed Kettle(still good at level 4)

Maybe I forgot something, but I'm sure that's basically all. Other updates, in general, just make some minor tweaks to different in-game systems or just fixing some bugs.

So here again, the same situation like was in the Finals. A lot of problems, that require balancing. Not only in PvP, but also in PvE:

• Stitcher is still overpowered in PvP
• General superiority of white weapons over epic ones
• Poor balance of green, blue and purple guns
• Late spawns
• Superiority of free loadaouts over your normal loadouts
• Looting rats
• No point of killing Queen/Matriarch at end game
• A lot of high value looting spots are garbage
• Key rooms are bad as hell
• Problems with endgame loot value(nothing to search or loot at endgame)

And many others. And instead of tweaking at least some minor things, we are getting to the point that I mentioned at the end of The Finals block:

Changes that noone was asking for.

Do we really need a 1v3 mode? Did we really need the changes in price of grenade launcher ammo at ptach 1.2/3.0? Or did we need the Headwinds' changes of containers? The sale of loot for real money is thriving in the game, but Embarks only complicates the search for items...

Who was asking for all those changes... Are there no more serious problems that require faster reactions?

Almost 3 months passed since the game release, and we saw only few updates that really changed something. As I already mentioned, some tweaks require more work than just changing few values in the database, that's true.

But I see the same pattern that was in The Finals, when Embark tries to ignore certain even minor problems because they consider them insignificant. And I'm worried about that. Instead of making some low effort changes that the Community was asking for, or.. at least addressing it, they do things that no one asked for, again, like in their previous game.