War Robots Exposed: How the Spring 2017 Update Changed Everything

War Robots has been considered by many to be one of the best games available on the Android platform. However, with the Spring 2017 update —the largest update of the game's history— came the games biggest controversy; turning what many considered a balance-focused game into more of a pay-to-win system. 

Back in February of 2017, it wouldn't have been uncommon to see YouTubers —who's channels were built around the game— openly announcing their retirement from War Robots content, with relatively the same complaints about it. In many of their minds, not only had it become a pay to win system, but one littered with arbitrary gambling mechanics that de-stabilized the flow of progression in the game.

One such YouTuber, Loyd Le-Mar, uploaded a video entitled "No More War Robots", where he outlines complaints regarding the game-play mechanics, describing it like this:

Needless to say, I now find the gameplay in its current state to be shallow and uninteresting to the point where most matches are eye-rollingly predictable, and vacuous affairs. The way weapons and robots have been adjusted have served to speed up and simplify combat engagements, to a large degree, resulting in far less engagement from me as a player.

You can listen to the full video here:

Other regular YouTube players like Phoenix, outline a different set of reasons for quitting War Robots. This player —in his video— seems convinced that the game's matchmaking system is rigged in a way that pits non-paying players against high-level paying players with premium weapons deliberately.

How the Spring 2017 update ruined the currency

The game originally had two currencies: Silver and Gold. Like most free-to-play games with microtransactions, silver was the standard —more abundant— currency with an emphasis on entry-level weapons and mechs, and is the one and only way to make upgrades to them. Gold was the Premium currency that not only buys the premium mechs and weapons, but allows players to skip the hours and sometimes days long upgrade timers. They also had the added drawback of being much harder to obtain from gameplay, meaning players often had to buy them in order to get any meaningful amount to do anything with.

That all changed in spring of 2017, when the in-game economy was almost completely overhauled in order to introduce more currencies into the game. This game now has a total of six (count 'em) SIX different currencies to manage in game. In addition to Silver and Gold, we now have Research, (a lot of weapons and mechs require it to buy, and are not exchangeable) which can only be generated over a timer system after purchasing with Silver, then there's the Components, which are a currency in themselves that are unique to specific mechs and weapons. If that wasn't confusing enough, we now have a clan based currency that you can only generate in a squad, and nearly all the American mechs can only be purchased with it.

The loot system is a glorified Bingo game

This is the "Black Market" wheel. It takes 10 tickets to spin a bronze chest, and your reward almost always look like the above image. In order to gain enough to spin a bronze chest,  you have to play between 2 to 5 games, and complete each game with a victory just to get roughly 10 tickets.

Unfortunately for players, everything but the research can be won on a bunch of dubious, and highly questionable gambling systems. One in particular you can participate in by earning (or buying) yet another currency called tickets, which you can use to spin a wheel on the appropriately dubiously named "Black Market." In lough of a more traditional, more passive microtransacion integration, the game introduced weapons, mechs and what many are calling gambling mechanics into the game via what I can only describe as a series of rigged slot machines.

Though this might not seem so bad on the surface, (Considering these things are not uncommon for a mobile game,) there is a catch:  These slot machines share a wheelhouse with components, Silver bonuses, slot machine tickets, gold, and even temporary 12-hour premium memberships, all sharing the same space as the components for dozens of premium mechs and weapons, making it extremely difficult  --if not just short of impossible-- to get the item or upgrade you want.

Not only that, but the black market itself is a lootbox system disguised as a slot machine. How do I know this? Well, for one, entering the black market from your hangar gives you the option of three obvious overwatch-inspired loot boxes, ranging from bronze, which costs 10 tickets, silver, which costs 100 tickets for one spin, and Gold chests, which costs a whopping 1000 tickets for a single spin.

Keep in mind; outside of outright buying the tickets you need, you would have to win roughly 4 games (Which on average takes around 8 minutes per-game) just to get enough to buy a spin in a bronze chest, so you can imagine how many hours you would have to work to get 100, let alone 1000 tickets.

now, about the spins... Yeah, they're not what you would call 'organic'. Let's put it that way. The giant wheel of mostly useless bullshit spins about as believably as a career politician's campaign promises. There are storylines in porn films more believable than the wheel in the black market. There is a point where the wheel slows down, only to stop somewhat abruptly in order to avoid even a sliver of chance that you might get something useful. The bronze chests are merely an exercise in futility, giving you silver when you don't need it, gold in single-digit numbers and exactly five or ten components of whatever mech or weapon you have absolutely no interest in building. Silver is roughly identical in that regard, only you receive a higher number of whatever you don't want, and if you're lucky, you'll get about 30 gold after the ten trillionth spin, as well as several of the same G.I. Pattons and Boa mechs that it lands on in order to avoid giving you anything useful.

Is the Black Market system rigged?

This is generally what you can expect from spending 100 tickets in a Bronze chest. 

Like a runner dodging gunfire from an agent in the Matrix, I got the impression that the game was bending over backward trying to avoid giving me anything even remotely useful until I shelled out at least 400 gold for tickets. To me, the way the cursor would throw on the brakes like a led mannequin driving toward a stop sign if the arrow looked like it might go within 3 pixels of an actual worthwhile prize was more than a little questionable. One time, my spotty wifi connection dropped while I was in the black market without my knowlege, and what I found was that the spinning animation kept going for more than 60 seconds. This gave me an idea: Since everything in the game --from its menus to its title screen-- was an always-on DRM system, I would try the experiment again, disconnecting the wifi abruptly so that once I spin, the thing would just sit there spinning. I would then reconnect in order to see if the animation concluded, and guess what? It didn't. It just picked an item for me. It was the same useless trite I always get, only this time without the ceremonial spinning animation.

The 'Other' gambling mechanics?

Oh, but that's not the only asinine gambling mechanic a player would have to deal with. In the upper left-hand corner of our hangar, we see a series of pick-a-card casino things that give the ability to exclude three out of twelve cards. the main prize is a lot of components for one type of mech or weapon, surrounded by silver bonuses and a few gold bonuses that you're very unlikely to get. Once the cards are excluded, your cards are then shuffled, and you are expected to believe that once the cards are unshuffled, you would then have to rely on luck or instinct in order to win a useful item that isn't a bunch of silver. Of course, like any good scam that preys on compulsory gambling habits, the first card is always free. The second card is 8 gold, and the gold required to reveal the cards after that multiplies by a factor of 2 for every card you reveal. The number of times you can reveal cards is limited only by how much gold you sling into this glorified ponzi scheme.

The rewards you get, and in what order, depend only on what you exclude; not what card you pick once the game starts. the act of picking a mystery card is ceremonial at best, and deceitful at worst.

The reason I keep inferring that this is a scam is because despite what Pixonic would like players to believe, your selections in this mode are not random chance. They are selected for you, based on a formulaic system that narrows the order in which you receive rewards based on what you excluded, prioritizing only the most useless cards in the beginning in order to prey on your curiosity. If you exclude three of the highest silver rewards, no matter what card you select, you would either get a premium membership for 12 hours, or one of the other silver rewards. The second card will be something useless, and only the third card will get you components for the mech or weapon you want, and it will always --ALWAYS-- be the lowest number of components. The highest reward is always locked behind the last card left, which, by that time, you would have already spent roughly 400 gold unlocking all the cards.

If you exclude three of the biggest gold rewards, your first card will be the lowest number of components, and your third will either be cash, or a premium membership. As usual, in order to get the most out of the system, you have to spend the most gold unlocking cards, with the highest reward always being the last card. 

In other words, no matter what three cards you select, the system is rigged. Your cards are selected for you, and the act of pointing and clicking on a card is ceremonial at best. You are only paying gold to see what cards the game selected for you, in an order that makes useful cards the most expensive. It's a scam.

Bullshit component system

Yeah, let's talk about the components for a moment. If the black market wasn't enough of an exercise in futility for you, you may want to take a look at the incredibly roundabout way that the game expects you to built certain mechs and weapons from component parts. The best mechs are locked behind a system where you either have to gamble for the parts in one of Pixonic's very fraudulent gambling mechanics, or you can buy the components on the timed "offers" screen in exchange for either real money, gold, or the research currency you have to farm using a combination of silver and timers.

everything costs 10,000 components to build, yet bronze chests give you between 7 and 30 components for a spin, and that's only if the game lets you win the components at all.

Weapons you have to build from components can be bought 450 components at a time, and are paired with specific mech components that are always less than 120. Doesn't sound so bad, right? Well there's yet another catch: It takes roughly 5 hours before you can buy whatever you just bought again, sometimes at wildly different prices. Did I mention that Everything you need to build successfully costs 10,000 components? So unless you're willing to fork over at least a hundred dollars, it may take at least a month before you can actually build the thing you're trying to use. 

Seriously, think about that for a second. Let's imagine for a moment that you're trying to build a Hover --the least expensive premium mech you build from components-- and you have to buy components for it 120 components at a time, at 500 gold, over the course of 5 hours at a time. That's 5 million gold, that has to be spent over the course of two and a half weeks, if you exclude things like sleeping for 8 hours. That's just another incentive to buy more gold, in order to even have a shot at getting this shit. Buying a hover by exchanging research currency for the Component parts currency takes well over a month by comparison, when you factor in the time it takes to generate research is about 3 hours for every 80 units of research.

The infamous Black Friday sale

speaking of dubious list prices with sales that are more than a little questionable, nothing in Pixonic's history has raised more red flags than that time in November of 2017 when they set list prices for mechs that looked like this...

Image courtesy of http://war-robots-forum.freeforums.net/thread/17107/deceptive-fraudulent-black-friday-deals

for the low low price of $159.99, you too can have an imaginary walking death machine that doesn't physically exist from a mobile third-person shooter. Seriously, the image above may look like a massive rip off, but don't worry. The snake oil salesmen over at Pixonic are a merciful lot. You see, the Raijin, Fujin, and Carnage heavy mechs are all %85 off, but only for a limited time!!

What's that, you say? At no point in any area of the game did you even have the option of buying a mech with cash to begin with? You've never seen the original list price anywhere before the sale? Nah, don't worry about it. I'm sure Pixonic wouldn't pull this out of their asses in order to make the idea of paying 23.00 for a giant mecha-spider that doesn't exist appealing or anything. Nothing shady going on there, folks.

I'm sure this reddit user by the name Frankenstooge is mistaken when he suggested that this deceptive, fraudulent price with no evidence may be violating federal law in the United States.

Severely broken premium weapons?

I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that these balance-destroying premium weapons are a pay-to win mechanic. For example, you can upgrade to your heart's content, your Tumblas medium missile launcher on level 8, and it would be small potatoes being thrown by the world's most effeminate CareBears compared to a level 5 Orkan medium missile launcher. The Orkan is a 1200 gold-costing proverbial pinata of bullshit, able to fire double the rate of the silver-costing Tumblas, and does nearly triple the damage, travels almost twice as fast, and has 32 rounds. You can equip two identical mechs at the same upgrade level, with one having the Tumblas and the other having an Orkan, have them on opposite teams,  and the fight would still look like a Ford Focus trying to square up with an Aircraft carrier. Having two medium weapon mounts on any mech, with both mounts occupied by Orkans will make your health bar vanish faster than Hillary Clinton's emails during a corruption investigation.

There are a lot of premium weapons in the game so unbalanced that they make EA's battlefront II look like the scales of justice outside of the Washington supreme court. In the past, most hard mounts on most mechs were dominated by light weapons, so in the past, it would have been a viable strategy to buy some Molot light canons and upgrade them enough to make them effective long range damage-dealers. However, these weapons got silently nerfed in Spring of 2017, making even level 8 Molot MKIIs about as effective against an opponent as throwing trimmed fingernails and bits of wet tissue paper at an Abrams tank during World War II.

The Punisher range of weapons didn't get it any better. After all, unlike the Molot, its maximum effective range is diminished the further you are from your target. After the Spring update, however, the only effective range this weapon seems to have is to walk within twelve inches of your opponent and having the punisher planted firmly up your opponent's ass.

Leagues are designed to keep you paying for upgrades

War robots has become a game who's victory, rather than being determined by skill, is instead determined by who shoots first, and who paid more money before shooting in the first place. And if you think you can pay your way ahead of the cycle, you will eventually get promoted to a higher "league."

Oh, what's that you say? Leagues? Oh, those are the player groups that Pixonic's algorithm decide you're allowed to compete against. So if you're in Silver league 3 like I was a few days ago, as I was finally able to balance my upgrades in a way that allowed me to be even remotely competitive, I found myself in Silver League 2 out of nowhere. It wasn't long before I was being savagely raped by Orkan players with Kumiho mechs sprinting all over the place. My heavy mechs at level 8 and 9 were rendered obsolete in the face of these South Korean ten-year-olds with access to Tony Stark's credit card information.

Conclusion

Back in 2016 when I originally reviewed War Robots, I was pleasantly surprised that it was a good, well balanced game with very few drawbacks. I went into playing the game, expecting it to be every bit the money-grubbing con job wrapped around a solid game mechanic that it inevitably has become, but was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't back then.

Nowadays, This game falls into most of the same negative stereotypes that in no small way contributed to mobile gaming's abysmal reputation. This game took full advantage of the lootbox craze of 2017, and the gameplay suffers because of it.

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