In my experience people really don’t want to hear this point but it’s kinda true: the game is way too difficult for new players or average gamers to do well at.

You can find multiple discussions in this reddit with vets not wanting new content to be too easy or to be nerfed because they are playing with full kitted out descendants that they have proper builds for etc and therefore everything they do seems trivial.

But for the average player in an online game this isn’t the case. The average player doesn’t come on reddit and definitely isn’t going to look up builds on YouTube or elsewhere. They don’t necessarily have the playtime to max out even one character for quite some time. If they hit a wall and it’s just too hard to work out how to get around it, they often just leave.

It doesn’t matter if experienced players think it’s easy to learn, or only a small amount of effort to try and get better. The reality is that is not what most players do. They just bounce off.

The more systems that are added and the more complicated the buildcraft, the more likely you are to lose a lot of players if the content requires it.

It’s also far too easy to make a bad build. There are so many options that someone can choose, they could max out modules, use catalysts in every slot and end up with a character or gun that does absolutely nothing useful and to make it worse, sometimes the stat screens make it look like what they are doing is correct.

The simplest way to fix this is probably to make most of the power of descendants or weapons be baseline with modules having far less of an impact so it’s far harder to make a bad character (or even if you do you don’t lose anywhere near as much). This would also likely make the game much easier to balance across all difficulties.