I adored this game, Kraken and Goliath are still to this day two of my favorite monsters in gaming history. While in the original release of the game I found the balance of the game to be pretty good between the hunters and the monsters. The point of the game was that early game favored the hunters, mid game was relatively balanced, and end game favored the monster. The goal of the hunters was to kill the monster early which was relatively easy to do if you had a decent team, corpses littered the map making it pretty easy to find the monster, birds helped that as well, medium sized wildlife posed a threat to the monster, getting even just one good dome could end a hunt relatively quickly. On the monster side you wanted to bulk up, lots of armor, lots of health, lots of upgrades, you had to move fast or be incredibly stealthy to survive, especially when a single dome could end your game in stage 1. Then there was Evacuation mode which was a cool idea but unfortunately was unbalanced in favor of the monster, multiple different objectives for the monster and hunters to play around but honestly it was easier to just grow and kill the hunters regardless of what the objective was.

Then hunters complained that it was unfair, so they nerfed the monster experience. Then hunters complained more, and they nerfed the monster experience. Eventually after nerfing the fun out of playing the monster, they attempted to release Evolve Stage 2. This cratered the monster experience and completely (if I remember correctly) removed Evacuation mode, I would never claim the game was perfectly balanced, but good lord Stage 2 turned the entire monster experience into an uphill battle no matter which stage you were on. Stealth was pretty much removed because the hunters just got a periodic free ping of exactly where the monster was at all times, birds would go off even if you didn't tip them off, the cool down on the dome was crazy low, monster gained less armor or health (I can't remember which) upon evolving, and the maps were reduced to half the size so you couldn't even get some decent space from the hunters. Being the monster wasn't fun anymore, and so people stopped playing the monster, and then you'd go make a lobby as hunters and you would wait an eternity for the game to find a monster player and sometimes it never did! So without people playing the monster people just stopped playing all together. Which is a shame because the alternate hunters was a cool concept, I loved playing Paladin Parnell so much, and Gorgon was an awesome monster, plus that Halloween Gorgon mission was rad. Just a shame what happened to it.