Ethan Stoltz

I’d like to start by saying this is a fantastic game at its core. As someone who has spent thousands of hours with it, I can’t help but applaud its core concept and design. That being said, for all the pros I can list about this game, it’s quality is sullied by a greedy upper management team who sacrifices the long term health of the game as well as player retention and enjoyment for short term monetary gain. Review bombing is not an ideal or positive way to seek change for any entertainment medium or product, but instead, in this particular case, is a last resort as the management only seem to respond to community feedback when their pocketbook is threatened. The current fashion in which the game’s progression economy is arranged is atrocious. Despite being a free to play game it is near necessity to spend money on the game in order to progress or even be able to play the game on a frequent basis in many cases. Speaking from experience as someone who has spent money on the game it took me nearly 1,000 hours of playtime to grind to the top of a tech tree for one country and this was prior to even more recent economy changes intended to make the game even more grind intensive. I love this game and I want to see it succeed, but in order for it to live on for years to come drastic changes need to be made to the game’s economy and progression systems. As does the development team’s attitude towards it’s player base.