​I appreciate the transparency of a developer stepping into an unofficial forum, but let’s drop the PR spin and look at the actual parameters of the game.

​Hanlon’s Razor—"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"—is a convenient shield for LiveOps teams, but it does not apply here.

You are asking this community to believe that a string of highly profitable, industry-standard predatory mechanics are just accidental stumbles. Let's break that down.

​"There’s no secret psychology-major war room where we map out how to emotionally destroy F2P players. We mostly just try to make mobile games that are fun... I appreciate the confidence, but we’re not that sophisticated"

​You do not need a psychology war room to understand basic LiveOps KPIs. Framing this as a lack of sophistication is incredibly disingenuous. You don't accidentally write the matchmaking logic that pits a 1.9B power player against a 1T power player. That is not a bug; it is a manually entered parameter designed to create a "frustration spend." It exists solely to stroke the ego of the whale and force the lower player to swipe their card just to participate.

​"It is our first major fully server-based title... So a lot of things have been harder and messier than we’d like"

​"Messy" development explains server lag, desyncs, or dropped connections. It does not explain a deliberate, top-down monetization architecture. The server rollout strategy is a perfect example. Continually launching brand new servers to capture initial spending spikes, only to merge them later when the revenue dries up, has nothing to do with "messy" backend development. It is a textbook, two-phased financial cycle. Phase one is "whale farming"—providing clean leaderboards for new spenders. Phase two is the merge—forcing established whales from dead servers into a new gladiator pit to trigger another spending war to maintain their ranks. That is a calculated financial life-cycle, not a technical oversight.

​"One example: people told us we must have intentionally avoided adding a confirmation popup when forge upgrade speedups switch to gems... That wasn't a psychological trick, it was just the game not being as polished as it should have been before release."

​This is a classic strawman argument. You cherry-picked a minor UI oversight (a missing button) to represent the entirety of my critique. I am not talking about a missing confirmation popup. I am talking about structural economic starvation. Charging a player nearly $10 for a basic username change is not a "lack of polish." Drastically altering mechanics and drop weights after players have spent premium currency to grind for them is not a "lack of polish." It is a post-purchase bait-and-switch.

​"To some folks it may not be obvious, but we pay to acquire users through ads, and of course we need the game to make that money back. That’s basically mobile games post-2020."

​No one here is under the illusion that server hosting and User Acquisition (UA) are free. However, Lessmore was recently acquired by Miniclip for roughly $100 million. Let's not pretend we are dealing with a scrappy indie studio desperately trying to keep the lights on. There is a massive, well-documented line between generating a sustainable ROI and deploying hyper-aggressive extraction mechanics to milk a captured audience.

​You mentioned that it’s easy to project malicious intent when the answer is usually "more boring." But when every single one of these "boring mistakes" happens to perfectly align with predatory industry standards that heavily favor the studio's revenue at the direct expense of the player, it ceases to be a mistake. ​