#rwby: amity arena | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

waheelawhisperer · 6 months

Note

regarding my last ask, you mention RWBY: Amity Arena as being particularly bad. i have never heard of this game before

if you have time, and are willing to humor me yet again, i would love to hear your wisdom

First of all, I'm sorry it took me a week to answer this. Work has been absolutely brutal (I've regularly been leaving the office between 8:00 and 9:00 PM for like 2 weeks now) and I really haven't had time for anything that takes actual effort. Please bear in mind that A) I'm tired as hell, and B) this game shut down in early 2021 so everything I'm telling you is based on memory that would potentially be spotty even if I was at my best.

To start with, I'll give you a brief explanation of what Amity Arena was before getting into the reasons why it sucked ass. RWBY: Amity Arena was a PVP mobile game where the goal was to destroy your opponent's base (which consisted of a central tower and two turrets to defend it) located at the other end of the map using a collection of units derived from the show. Each player had a deck of eight units, which they could deploy into one of two lanes corresponding to the two turrets. The units in question would advance toward the opposing tower, eventually converging on the base structure, and could potentially wander between them via the use of skills or by targeting enemies that stood close enough to the border for them to lock onto and follow.

The player deployed their characters by expending a resource called Aura. The player had a maximum of eight Aura, which regenerated at a set rate over time. Each unit cost a fixed amount of Aura, ranging from 1 to 8. The order of the cards (representing the units) in the player's prebuilt deck was shuffled at the start of the match and then cycled in order as the player deployed units. The player could hold four (I think?) cards in their hand at a time, and as they played a card, the next card in the deck would appear in their hand.

There was a great deal of unit variety: units were broken up into melee and range, grounded and aerial, and some cards could deploy singular strong units and others deployed swarms of weaker units (for example, Scythe Ruby deployed one powerful fighter, while White Fang Gunners deployed three relatively weak ranged fighters), and some cards had special skills they could activate to gain an advantage (Shadow Blake, for example, could dash a short distance and leave behind a targetable clone, making her very good at drawing aggro and switching rapidly between lanes, while Shield Pyrrha could throw her shield, dealing damage to all units in its path).

(If you've noticed something about the naming convention for the units above, you're on the right track: I'm about to talk about the gacha system)

So, there were a few ways to actually acquire units to add to your deck: first, you had to progress far enough up the ranks to actually unlock them. There were specified tiers that you moved up through by winning enough, and each tier gave you access to a broader selection of units. After every game, you'd get a randomly generated crate that you could open to get currency and copies of cards. Once you had a card, you could upgrade it with additional copies, and you could use the currency you got to buy stuff in the shop (new units, cosmetics, crates, premium currency, etc). I'm not going to go into exactly how the different currencies worked, mostly because I don't remember, so suffice it to say that like a lot of other mobile games, you could buy shit with real money and it fucking sucked.

Like every gacha game (or game with gacha elements), the rates were awful. Units were divided into four rarities: Normal, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. The unit distribution in each rarity was reasonably balanced early on, but as the developers added more units, it started to skew toward the Legendary category because adding new basic units didn't make money and adding rarer units did.

To give you an example of how much money, consider this: I remember one of the relatively big-name players (inasmuch as a RWBY mobile game has big-name players) would regularly roll for units on release so he could stream himself using them and give the playerbase an idea of what they did. When Sienna Khan released, this man spent 800 fucking dollars trying to get her. He wasn't even going for duplicates. He just wanted the character.

(IIRC this guy spent low 5 digits total on this game, it was insane)

This was an egregiously bad incident that didn't represent the average player experience, but I'm including it to point out that trying to even acquire new units, much less stay competitive by enhancing your cards with duplicate copies, could get real tough real fast.

(You also had to go for duplicate copies of your core units, because matchups could swing significantly if the opposing units had enough of a level advantage - say, by allowing them to survive burst from a unit that would counter them at equivalent levels)

This is before we get into the way the game balance was consistently and completely fucked. I won't bother listing every single instance, but I will go over some of the more egregious mistakes in terms of unit design. Let's start with...

Neon Katt: Probably the single most hated character throughout all of Amity Arena's run, Neon Katt somehow managed to be more annoying in the game than she was in the show. Upon deployment, Neon skates toward the opposing tower and taunts all units that enter her range. Sounds like an okay unit idea, right? Well, you're not wrong, but they fucked up the concept. First, Neon is cheap as hell (costs 2 Aura). Second, she was initially invincible until she hit a turret, so she could run down a lane and get chip damage for free while also providing utility in the form of her taunt (Neon was a major contributor to the godawful chip meta where you just spammed long-range skills that could hit structures and avoided interacting with your opponent as much as possible until the game was over). Third, her weight value was Heavy at launch, meaning she could actually push other units, which lead to the hilarious and annoying Disco Bear strat (deploying Neon behind an Ursa Major, an extremely strong, slow, and durable tank) and pushing it at top speed into the turret while preventing it from taking damage along the way.

Nobody liked this. The playerbase begged for nerfs. The devs eventually patched out Disco Bear by making her weight Light and decreased the range of her taunt or some shit idr, but it took seven fucking months to get an actual nerf, which they did by changing her from being invincible to having an HP value of 20. Normally, that would mean she dies in one hit, but they set it up so that she only takes one damage per hit, meaning you had to hit her 20 fucking times before she'd finally die. They eventually nerfed it down to 14 or 15 or something, but then they buffed it back to 20, so fuck them and fuck Neon lol

Baby Death Stalkers: Not as obviously obnoxious as the rest of this list, but they warped the meta in insidious ways by invalidating a shitton of single-target melee units. Baby Death Stalkers dropped five relatively fragile melee units with high damage and attack speed for the low, low cost of 1 Aura, allowing players to both hold a cost-effective counter to a large number of units in reserve and cycle their deck at minimal cost when necessary. Baby Death Stalkers hard countered most single-target melee units without an AoE skill or high attack speed because you could drop them around the target and force them to land five attacks to clear them, during which time the Baby Death Stalkers could attack uninterrupted with their high damage and attack speed as the target killed one, turned, reacquired a target, and repeated the process. This was how you got the comical and frustrating sight of in-universe badasses like Ren and Winter getting their asses kicked by five baby scorpions.

Using Baby Death Stalkers to counter a higher-value card often gave the player a 2+ Aura advantage, something that could rapidly snowball, and even if there wasn't a target in the field to hard counter, you could just drop them in front of one of your own higher-value units as a cheap meatshield or toss them out to cycle your deck by drawing a new card for minimal cost.

Jinn: Jinn is what happens when you think Neon isn't obnoxious enough and decide to make a unit that's actively worse for the game. She's also what happens when you look at the issues with both the playable meta and the game experience as a whole and think "that's not a bug, it's a feature!".

To start with, Jinn was a Legendary card, which meant that not only was the game continuing to release a disproportionate amount of higher-rarity cards (that made money), actually getting her was a pain in the ass. Yay, gacha.

Jinn was capable of stopping time around any unit for 7 seconds (i.e. everything caught in the blast was essentially frozen as it was. It couldn't take action, but nor could it be harmed). This meant she could be used to protect vital units by freezing them so that they didn't take damage from active effects or weren't prioritized by enemy units or to counteract enemy threats by freezing them until the player could deploy a counter or bring a skill off cooldown, and she could do it for two Aura. This is already insanely strong, but Jinn was a structure, meaning she'd just sit out on the field without moving into range of the enemy and could be used multiple times if she survived until her skill cooldown refreshed, and her incredibly low cost meant she could both provide enormous amounts of utility insanely cheaply and help cycle the deck as needed.

To make matters worse, Jinn was very obviously not playtested, both because she was broken as shit and because she initially stayed on the field long enough that if you could cycle the deck quickly enough, you could deploy two copies of her and make your towers permanently invincible, forcing a draw at worst. You could literally just say "fuck it" and prevent your opponent from even having a win condition.

(and also some of her early interactions were bugged as shit - if she used her ability on certain units during their skill animations, she could make them invincible and jump structures to the top of their priority list, so if this happened you had an unstoppable juggernaut hell-bent on destroying your towers to the exclusion of all else)

Finally, Jinn enabled a shitton of other cards that would've otherwise been okay without a get-out-of-jail-free card vs. their counters. Some of the cards I talk about later just got... so much fucking worse with Jinn. Holy shit.

White Fang Gunner Barracks: This was honestly the card that gave rise to the worst meta I've ever played. White Fang Gunner Barracks was a structure that would periodically spawn a White Fang Gunner (relatively weak ranged unit), which was pretty forgettable initially because it took a while and only spawned one at a time for a cost of 5 Aura, but then they fucking buffed it so that it spawned two at a time. It also spawned three Gunners upon expiring or being destroyed. Three White Fang Gunners is a 2-Aura value as it is. That means it only has to spawn enough Gunners to grant 3 Aura in value to pay for itself. It spawns 2 Gunners per wave. Each Gunner is worth two thirds of an Aura unit. One wave is worth 1 1/3 of an Aura unit. If the structure survives to spawn 3 waves (which it almost always did unless you had one of its small number of counters on hand to deploy immediately and the opponent couldn't protect it from those counters with Jinn), it's not just paying for itself, it's giving you more value than its cost (6 Aura vs. 5)... and it could just keep spawning Gunners. This thing stayed on the field for 45 seconds. It spawned a wave of Gunners every 7 seconds. That's 6 waves of Gunners if not stopped - 12 total Gunners from the waves, 3 Gunners from the destruction/expiration effect, for a cumulative 15 Gunners and 9 Aura of value. Admittedly, it took time for the Gunners to build up, but once they did, they could mow down a tower in seconds and you had to constantly dedicate a response to them, while the Barracks was a set-and-forget card that let the player using it focus on other parts of the battle while it did its thing.

Gunner Barracks defined the meta for six straight months. Every team had to have one of its small number of counters, all of which could be negated by Jinn and most of which were higher-rarity than Barracks and thus it was easy to level up Barracks to the point where it could survive the burst/DoT output of units that ostensibly dealt with it. This was genuinely the least fun I have ever had playing this game.

Chip Meta: I won't go into the Artillery Arena chip meta a ton, but there was a very obnoxious point in the game's lifespan where the primary method of winning was to use cards with long-range abilities that targeted enemy turrets directly to chip them down with minimal response. It was boring and uninteractive and most people hated it, much like they hated the way the abundance of AoE and presence of Baby Death Stalkers invalidated both large swarms of units and a number of single-target units.

Launcher Nora and Rifle Pyrrha: These two units were late additions to the game that were meant to help provide counterplay to the bullshit that was the White Fang Gunner Barracks, among other things, but they were annoyingly overtuned on launch and the game died before anyone could bother balancing them properly.

Launcher Nora was a unit with massive attack range (one of the three highest in the game, iirc, and one of the very few units that could outrange turrets with their basic attacks) and high AoE damage. Being a Rare card, she was easy to upgrade, which meant that she'd often just barely survive things meant to kill her, and her absurd range meant even getting to her without a skill with the range to either close the gap or just outright hit her could be extremely difficult. If properly protected, Launcher Nora could just sit on the field and tear your base and forces to pieces with very little counterplay.

Rifle Pyrrha wasn't as bad, but she was still an example of the devs kind of rushing stuff out and not giving a shit. Rifle Pyrrha was a cheap (3 Aura) ranged unit that had a long-ranged active skill automatically kited backwards after every basic attack, making it hard for melee units to catch up to her. She absolutely shat on things like the stream of Gunners coming out of the Barracks, but represented just... one more frustrating thing to play against in a game already full of them.

This isn't even getting into the way so many units and interactions were outright bugged and how much shit just didn't work. The Apathy were a unit that periodically duplicated and initially had no cap on the number of copies they could create, meaning that if you left them alone long enough, they'd just fucking spawn enough additional Apathies to crash your goddamn phone. Checkmate was supposed to make allied units in its AoE temporarily invincible and sometimes just didn't. Sienna Khan's skill regularly bugged out. Etc etc.

Compounding every one of the game's problems was the fact that the developers were extremely unresponsive and regularly ignored community feedback. Neon went untouched for ages despite the community crying out for changes at every level of play, units like Jinn and Barracks took far too long to be addressed for the community's satisfaction, even basic QoL changes or new features the community had been begging for for years never got implemented... Like, it was real bad. Units were extremely over- or undertuned and stayed that way for a long time, patches gradually went from addressing large numbers of units to only addressing a few, the devs stopped responding...

And eventually the game just died. The incompetent balancing drove players away (the playerbase decreased to the point where most people who still bothered with the game could identify the bots the devs seeded the lower levels of the ladder with so that newer players had someone to play). The devs went AWOL around December 2020 and just kinda stopped pushing shit and the team running the social media (official Twitter, community Discord, etc) admitted that they had no idea what the fuck was going on. The game went a month or two without any new content while the community wondered what the hell was happening and posted memes to cope, and then there was an official announcement that the game was shutting in January 2021. I don't know if the devs just sucked or if the killing blow was really Rooster Teeth's influence. I know RT had a hand in it because they were pushing the dev team very hard to ship new units in time for Volume 7 of the main show's release and that led to a lot of the problems mentioned above with the game balance, but I don't know how much responsibility each party bears.

Well, that's my half-remembered history of Amity Arena. As with almost everything else Rooster Teeth has ever touched, it remains an object lesson of what not to do.

Sorry it took so long, I've been very busy.

#rwby #rwby amity arena #amity arena.

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