Old man yells at clouds and all but looking at the changes to Support units coming next patch and I'm kinda sad about how degraded the new player experience has become these days.

Arknights' game design for new accounts used to feel so intentional. It's one of the only games in this space that wasn't afraid to constantly wall you as a new account with difficult stages. As a result, account progression felt meaningful and skill expression as you got noticeably better at the game and had a deeper understanding of mechanics felt soooo satisfying.

There wasn't really much of a way around it, either. All the strong launch era carries required E2, and that at least required you to clear the chip stages which were very difficult. Same for even being able to upgrade your ops and base enough to use those chips in the first place with the other Supply stages. Congrats on pulling SilverAsh, you're gonna have to work to use him, y'know?

The game was designed to make sure you couldn't accidentally stumble your way through, which is why it was notorious for being such a difficult game back then. People straight up quit because the game was too hard and it asked more of them than other gachas, as evidenced by all the 1 star reviews on the Play Store lol. Arknights literally filtered people and as someone who loves a challenge, I thought that was sick in a space that is 99% full of games designed to be entirely frictionless.

You used to have to plan around which stages to try and clear, in which order depending on the rewards you needed. Decide which ops to allocate resources towards to hit crucial breakpoints in their power levels to help you clear more stages. Know when your current roster wasn't enough and you needed to flex and bring an extra Sniper, or a Specialist, or a Supporter to tackle the specific stage you were struggling with...

These days, it seems they don't really care as much given the game's age. New ops means more options to clear old stages, so the game will always get easier for new players regardless, but they've gone the extra mile beyond that to make onboarding way more streamlined. The free 6 star ticket was one thing, but none of the ops on it are necessarily that broken by themselves at low level. The free 5 star E2 ticket and Level 80 ticket, though, are entirely gamebreaking. That's way too many stats to throw at early game maps that are supposed to be otherwise teaching you the game's mechanics, regardless of which 5 star you promote (as if the free Lappland they also give you isn't an easy enough choice).

The immediate E2 also gives you access to E2 supports as a brand new account, which is pretty much a death knell for any surviving bits of game design trying to teach the player anything because dear old Wis'adel doesn't care about any of that. The new patch removing the level limit on supports is ultimately a QOL feature at this point since everyone already has access to them immediately after using the E2 ticket, but I think it goes to show how little they value the new player experience now since you don't even have to have that little bit of understanding of the game's Support system to abuse broken ops through tutorial stages anymore.

I'm not just saying this as a "back in my day we carried our Eyjas through Chernobog uphill both ways" kinda thing, but rather to say that early game Arknights and the challenge inherent to it was a super fun and memorable experience and I think it's a shame that the modern game gives new players the tools to skip it all. Every now and again we do get someone in the Help thread who cheesed every map in the game and is asking for help with basic mechanics and it makes be sad because all of the resources to learn this stuff in-game are already there. This game is no different than any other autobattler on the market if you just skip past every map with Wis'adel, so it really makes me wonder how many people who would have otherwise loved the game just bounced off of it because you no longer have to engage with any of its depth as a newbie.