aetherspawn
an hour ago
Great game, technically impressive, but the community can be quite mean and toxic. I played for around a year after having played other TA Spring RTS for a few years prior, and if you don’t follow the exact meta of the month (whatever that might be) in terms of build order and things, people can get really aggro and your team can vote to kick you and take your units.
Also, one particularly aggravating part of the community is that it’s considered courtesy to surrender once the front line is broken instead of playing the game out and letting the back eco players try and recover it.
The drafting for picking map spots is done in order of seniority, and the good players take all the low stress spots which leaves the newer players to take the more difficult spots. This feeds into a loop where the senior players get aggro at the new players for letting the front break down, but simultaneously they won’t take it themselves even though it’s the more important position.
I stopped playing because I felt like I had a lot of negative interactions in every 2nd or 3rd game. The front player blames the back player, the back player blames the front player, everyone flames the weakest player.
jpwgarrison
5 minutes ago
This is a common reaction and the response is common too: this is only the case if you follow the herd to 8v8 and the two club-like maps they fixate on. But if you study the community for 5 minutes first, you can walk past those two “pubs full of toxic jerks fighting” there are a dozen other options. Single player, PvE, 1v1 through 4v4 and FFA. These (smaller) game modes lack the level of drama you see in 8v8. You just have to go into the quiet restaurant with nerds playing chess and other board games instead of the obvious mess of a drunken bar across the street.
estearum
44 minutes ago
It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves. Every update to every game launches a large scale effort to find the "meta" which is then instantly disseminated to the most try-hard assholes on the Internet. Anyone who dares to develop their own strategy/style/loadout is up against hordes of people (a growing proportion every day) who just copy whatever the Youtubers figured out.
embedding-shape
9 minutes ago
> It's amazing the degree to which streaming/online communities around video games have destroyed the games themselves
I think they might destroy the streaming/online communities, but I wouldn't say it destroys the game itself. I play BAR, but never with random strangers, the game works fine, but I also don't participate in any "video game" communities or watch/play with streamers, so what you're saying sounds very foreign to me, and is more about the communities than the games themselves.
RugnirViking
an hour ago
Wow, that sounds awful. That's beyond optimising the fun out of a game, it's straight up refusing to have fun. One wonders what they get from it?
embedding-shape
7 minutes ago
Different people get different things out of video games (and everything, really). For some, the fun is learning, and the game stops being fun when you understand it (this is me). For others, the fun starts after they're learned, and starts being good at it, but still have competition with others. For yet others, mastering it and being the best is the fun.
All these groups of people sometimes play in the same lobbies, and what the players "gain" from the session can be very different depending on the person. There is no "right or wrong" way to play video games, or the right/wrong motivation for it, it's just different.
tasuki
22 minutes ago
> That's beyond optimising the fun out of a game
I'd even dare to say it's beyond all reason.
scns
29 minutes ago
Imaginary superiority
b3ing
32 minutes ago
Does it have a solo mode?
somat
4 minutes ago
No campain but there are stand alone scenerios you can play. There is also a fun swarm defense sort of thing(rapters) if you like tower defense style gameplay.
HeavyStorm
9 minutes ago
Yes!
Panzer04
an hour ago
This very much depends on the lobby. I don't think this is unique to BAR either - it's just that 8v8 is the most popular mode.
Lots of players mean more chances to get a toxic guy who doesn't recognise their own faults and blames others.
I actually just don't really agree about the assertion on player slots. If anything, the better players get the more likely they are to play a front slot, because they have an outside influence on the chances of their team winning.
aetherspawn
39 minutes ago
My OS floated around 10-15 and I virtually always ended up having to go front in every lobby, which is the position I hate the most because I don’t like playing my strategy game like an RPG - that is, micro-ing just a dozen of units and optimising every rocket or bullet hit or whatever, which is kind of what front is like.
Front has zero opportunity or resources available to build any kind of economy, and once the T2 units start coming through from the other side they feel very expendable. As the front player you build the same 1 or 2 units every single game and never really get to strategise.
What also enraged me is that the back players would have the nerve to make the front player “pay” for their T2 constructor units after working so hard to keep everyone alive, despite everyone knowing the front player has zero resources at any given time because it’s all going into units that are being meat grinded.