My point on the state of the game

Something like a month ago I reinstalled the game, I had good memories about playing phobies two years ago, so I returned playing it.
And sadly I found out the immense flaws the game has now.

It’s such a shame because I loved and still love a lot of things about this game, such as the unique concept/design, the sound effects, the ambience, the story telling. Those aspects are top notch, but sadly this game has some big big problems.

Since I returned, I got matched with a lot of players with higher, sometimes double, my level. This led to boring unwinnable games, or games when I somehow won just because they made terrible mistakes, but zero fun and zero strategy was involved.

Some games instead, were brutally ruined by the new broken phobie Le shovell. I mean, that thing can’t be in the game, or must be unlocked freely for all the players, because having such a low key cost phobie, with that impact on the game is ruining all the strategy, making some scenarios where I cannot walk up to my enemy and he can stand out of my range of everything.
And he wins just by panic points.

Also the last but maybe bigger problem, is that the game has the slowest ever progression.
At least for me, but I feel like I’m not going nowhere playing the game.
You need to play a lot for like 3/4 days, just to get one 3000 pack, then you need to open something like 3 of them just to find a new phobie, and then you find a useless phobie.
Simply put, you don’t feel rewarded enough for playing a lot.

F2P players will always be the vast majority of players of any freemium game, so it’s impossible to attract and keep the player base with such a slow progression rate, the quests are slow and boring, and they give you nothing useful most of the time.

I sadly just came to the conclusion this game isn’t worth the time I’m supposed to give it if I want to progress and be “competitive”.

I’m hoping the best for this game, but a lot of things need to change.



2 Likes

agreed.
Le shovell absolutely breaks the game.
the matchups are almost always unbalanced.
its been several weeks since I got a new phobie (I play this much more than I should like 2 hours every day on average prob)
quests are useless I never actually try and do them
games often have long stalemates where people group their phobies In one corner of the map and if I try to rush they snipe me down with inoc or smth mad annoying.

and they need to add more health to the heart imo the heart doesn’t have enough health sometimes your opponent will just rush your heart and there’s nothing you can do. I think this is a good feature but win you can a win a game without killing any of your opponents phobies just immediately rushing the heart there’s something wrong.

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Theres been a problem for a while with heart scaling where hearts health dont scale up to how much you can upgrade your stuff, making it gradually easier to heartrush the more you level up. That being said, even with this issue heartrushing is entirely map dependent. Some maps like lights out its almost impossible to heartrush someone. whereas some maps like mazeo its heartrush or lose. I personally feel like heartrushing should be a thing you can do but are not railroaded into. I dont want to prevent winning without killing phobies as A. Its good to encourage variety and B. Maps where the heart isnt in any danger tend to gravitate towards extreme stalemates.
As for le shovell though i do agree, le shovell fantome and attractor are completely jacked support units that give you ridiculous amounts of kill potential for relatively cheap, while remaining borderline untouchable. They were the three best units before they all got nerfed and theyre the three best units after they got nerfed.

I agree heartrushing should for sure be a thing, I never said it shouldn’t, however it is way too easy in some maps to do this. in one matchup I lost in less than 10 turns bc he spawned hi five and immediately went for my heart and I died.

Out of curiousity which map was this?

I think that they should add something where stress level or coffee or smth upgraded your hearts health and you could only play against players 1 or 2 tiers of upgraded heart above or below you

Last rites

(20 characters)

Yes absolutely agree if not the heart hp then something else to make the matchups at least kinda balanced

Ive mentioned this before on discord but i think limiting matchmaking like that is a problem for a number of reasons, you cant base matchmaking on levels too much or you get a variety of issues.

  1. Match queue times at any rank become slower and at high ranks become WAY slower.
  2. Whales who arent good at the game will be exclusively matched against top level pros who effortlessly destroy them.
  3. Pros can create level 1 accounts and skyrocket to soaf 3 by exclusively matching against new players.
  4. People like hopeloy who are at max level have like 4 people they could possibly face so they just never get a match.

That being said i still want to reduce the obvious feelsbad issue of facing overlevelled opponents, whether thats reducing level scaling (credit to karst for that suggestion) or my own personal suggestion of implementing an underdog system when facing overlevelled opponents.

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I feel like last rites is as easy to heart rush as it is heart defend. Its actually common for the game not to end in a heartrush at top ranks simply because people will just always have a unit covering the top. Ive noted a lot of my last rite games dont end in heartrushes due to this. A few still do, but id say its not an impossible map to defend heartrushes

Yeah you’re right, I was just saying that to make the balancing better. But a way to fix some of those issues could maybe be like once you get like foul or smth it’s the max upgrade for your heart so every low stress player could be faced with decent matches and anyone higher would still have everyone BUT new players for match making. Although it doesn’t fix every issue such as high rank players making alts but it would still be better right?