Hello!  It’s me again, in case you remember the post from a few days ago.  I’ve been dying to come back to talk about it, but I decided to wait for it to end because I’m like 99.9% sure that my post might have had a little impact on what ended up happening to us.

I got called out by someone in my last post for keeping names anonymous.  My goal was to keep people anonymous and hopefully protect myself, buuuut that didn’t exactly work.  A lot of players saw my post and of course, they found me.  A couple players came from yellow and blue and shared some info that was kind of interesting to me.  One guy on Yellow told me a lot about their leader, Thanatos, saying he had a “Gojo mentality” on things, which I thought was kind of odd.  And then the following day, I got two comments from someone claiming to be Thanatos, basically stating they would completely annihilate our team in the most anime-villain way you could imagine.  I wanted to brush that off a some random guy acting like Thanatos either to mock him or scare me, but when I loaded into Gold Rush right after, Yellow had practically swallowed our whole team.  That guy I spoke to earlier never spoke to me again.  I told the team this and one guy on the team said they also spoke with someone from Yellow, but they started redacting their own messages from the chat.   One guy told me that someone on his team stated he was being fueled by “some Reddit posts he found about him,” which if true, would be hilarious and also terrifyingly petty?  There were many other things too like our first leader getting loads of mean messages that pushed him to retire his role, alliances that either blew up in our faces or never made it off the ground, and lots of talk about how this felt more like credit card flexing than an actual game.  It was just really messy.

I’m sure Thanatos is probably reading this and getting sooo much joy from it, which ticks me off, but it needs to be said.  I don’t mind people spending thousands on a mobile game, but to bully players and ruin their fun?  Just *why*?

I’ve learned a lot from this Gold Rush, specifically its flaws.  For starters, when it comes to capturing squares in this mode, you need a strong formation and Tatari with higher levels and tiers.  You face off against other players of other teams and the amount of your energy you spend depends on the strength of each player you match against.  If you were like me and only had T3 Tatari and faced off against someone like Thanatos who’s Tatari were fully maxed out, your run is over.  This means all the energy I spent is wasted, which sucks when you’re also at exhaustion.  Add on the fact that the team is constantly spreading through the field and tossing rally after rally, the feeling of completely uselessness sets in and makes the game so unfair.  And in that situation, *why would I spend my money on a battle I’m going to lose?*

This is something I’ve come to realize.  People keep acting like as long as whales are happy, why should the devs care, but I’ve always believed that any game like this needs to consider *every* player it gets, whether they’re high spenders or F2P.  Honestly, in the past few Rushes I’ve been in up until now, I’ve felt far more motivated to spend money because I actually felt like it would be the push my team needed to succeed in a critical moment.  There was also the factor of everyone being about the same level and our statistics were always really close day-by-day, so spending a few more dollars to throw another rally would mean the difference between securing the first place team for the League and second.  But this Rush?  Thanatos’s team was always in the lead by a whopping 40k kills by the end of this Rush.  In our league, my team ended in 44th with the lead team having 20k kills.  Why would I bother spending here when I’m not going to gain much in return?

I also don’t understand why this game would have things like player levels and gym ranks if not to use them in situations like this.  Why not use them to make matchmaking more precise and match players with others of a similar level?  Why throw them into a game with players they have no chance of beating?  For the money?  You don’t need weaker players to be there for that.  Heck, I feel like they’d actually make more money if they just had players matched in a more fair way.  

And for the record, the players I’ve teamed up with haven’t been much higher level than me, so being in the same league as Master Level players just makes no sense.  I know that Thanatos’s team had one Advanced player on their team, but I swear if that was the reason players like me ended up there, that’s messed up. 

I’m both worried and hopeful for Duneside.  It’s my first, but I’m hoping it’s even slightly better than this past Gold Rush was as it was exhausting in every sense of the word.  I think the best way to describe it was “toxic.”  Completely and utterly toxic.

This has been, by far, the most toxic Gold Rush I’ve participated in…