u/Awesome_Bruno

As I personally wasn't following sumo until 2024, I missed out on peak Takakeisho, but he is a wrestler I am quite fascinated by, with him being a 29 (now 30) year old stablemaster, slimming up so much you would never guess he used to do sumo at highest level, and being an overall great guy in the sport, and can't help but wonder what would have been have he been promoted to yokozuna.

Looking at his record, he ended up taking 4 cups - 3 of which at were at Ozeki, alongside 5 second places, yet never made Yokozuna. Twice he met the minimum requisites:

in 2020 he achieved second place, and followed it up with a win in a playoff

in 2023 he achieved second place in a playoff, and followed it up with a win

What was the opinion like at the time? Did people expect him to make it, was it a 1 win shy off of making it situation, or what happened?

Since he didn't end up promoted, he couldn't take the proper time off to rest and heal and ended up making his injuries worse trying to hold his Ozeki rank, and ended up retiring at just 29. IMO a clear case where a yokozuna promotion during his first "yoko run" would have been not only justified, but would have let him be a top tier contented for many more years and hence would be great for sumo as a whole.

And then Takekeisho somehow mustered another "yoko run" in 2023, and still didn't get the nod, which could have also saved his career. Isn't the whole point of the yokozuna rank to protect the top talent from the relentless tournament schedule, to give them time to rest, and in return get absolute top tier sumo? It's almost like the JSA didn't want him in the sport.

Does it exist?

Plenty new features and reworks, noticed so far:

EXP rate is 3x, but all exp from TBC and WOTLK is squished into 1-60, so you won't hit 60 very quickly - server been up for 25 ish hours and highest level is 55, and you need 3 million xp from 55-56

Buffed crafting and quest rewards - can craft blue items aplenty for yourself

Everyone can have skinning, mining, herbing + 2 main professions

Slightly buffed classes - as a Shaman, you get level 1 weapon strike spell, LB cost heavily reduced so ele is viable, some talents are buffed - Clearcasting proc lasts 4 casts instead of 2 for example

World creatures is also buffed to compensate for stronger players, and there's extra spawns

Rare creatures HEAVILY buffed - they are basically minibosses, soloing them is possible but hard, and they drop more and better loot

Invasions - towns are periodically invaded by hordes of mobs, rare mobs, and a boss at the end - you get a bunch of green items, one blue, good xp and a 15% xp buff

Dungeons are a bit harder to compensate for stronger players, and drop some extra gear, and have an NPC inside for quests, doable by both factions

Every class can be every race

DKs from level 1

Autolearning spells

For endgame idk much, there's supposed to be 4 raids open, and some mythic+ dungeons

Seems like a really nice server, a LOT OF WORK put into it, but I don't see anyone talking about it at all, people should try it out - it launched just yesterday and everyone is leveling

Rant warning

What made this game good was the tactical gameplay, each round trying to outposition and outplay your opponent, games swinging from round to round, it used to be a true gem.

Returning to this game after taking a break, all my 30 ish games since returning, opponents went for a cheese strat that either wins on the spot or loses horribly. It's not fun at all. Full frontal one sided deploy, or the all screen range tech mountain rush, a bunch of other one-offs (steel balls range from moving + mobile beacons, fortress shield + fang).

All games were decided based on initial positioning, and knowing (or not knowing) the counter to the cheese. Noone tries to adapt, just force the strat harder. The tactical back and forth gameplay that made me fall in love with this game is gone.

I was wondering why this game keeps declining in playerbase - but I wonder no more. Truly, who wants to play this cheese meta shit? Only the cheesers. All regular players are gone. Devs adding more cheese strats and tech have killed the game and turned into a cheese fiesta. Truly sad, there is no other game like Mechabellum, and it's been ruined by horrible new additions and balancing.

Rant over, ill check back in half a year to see if the direction turned around, give it one more shot before uninstalling and forgetting, because I don't want to give up on this (in the past) great game for good, but my hopes aren't high.

Prefacing this with the note that I am very much looking forward to this game being fully done and hoping it will succeed.

This game is not in a steady ready for a full launch. It needs at least a year if not two of both content development and a mountain of polishing.

It can be solved by an Early Access period - but it should be a proper EA, lasting a couple years, with a finished and polished game on the other side of it ready for wide release with a fresh server reset (but EA server should be kept running as it's own thing)

Things that are blocking even an EA release:

1. Performance - the game chugs horridly, 1-2 second freezes at times, it's close to unplayable. Some fights much more than others. I don't know if it's an engine issue, server issue or what - it's not user software related though. Massive problem that has to be #1 priority.

2. Economy - a much lesser issue, but still an important one to get right before any kind of launch. Gold economy is quite bad (probably due to lack of gold from selling gear), ascension stones and books are a pain in the ass to farm for higher rarity units, gear economy is off - campaign gear and dungeon gear are different sets, and it seems you need almost top rolled lvl 16 tier 4 gear to have a shot in dungeon stages that can drop tier 5 gear at all. Reduce the amount of sets, and make campaign gear sets drop from dungeons as well - or add a slightly lower difficulty "campaign gear" boss as a difficulty bridge.

With performance fixed and economy tweaked (and tested in the next beta), the EA can launch, but please don't overhype it as a finished product to the masses, or the game will acquire a bad reputation that it will be very hard to get out of.

Things that need work, but can be done during EA

1. Animations - While there are some that are fine or even good, many feel completely off. Biggest offender for me is the "victory" animations your lead character does. Comically bad. Bosses also feel very robotic in their movement, and way too static when it's not their turn. Quite a lot of work here.

2. The UI/UX - some minor stuff here and there, but also some absolutely major failures in basic things. Initially I completely bounced off of the game - and the couple friends I started playing with as well - purely because of this. While it gets the job done when you're used to it, the initial impression and experience is awful. It's something that the devs and QA completely missed, as they are used to navigating it already, but believe me (and many many others), it is a big issue, a point of friction within the first 15 minutes of playing, that will make many quit right there.

3. Lack of original content - copying good things from Raid is fine and all, but besides some relatively small differences that you won't even notice for a couple hours or days of playing, the game feels like a budget 1:1 copy of Raid, with nothing to distinguish itself. Raid players happy with it have no need to switch to Godforge, and Raid players unhappy with it will not switch to a close copy of it. There needs to be something that jumps out right away thats the "it" this game has over raid, that people can point to when telling their friends to play Godforge with them.

Personal issues that put me off:

1. Balance by watering everything down - this might be a controversial take, but to me so many of the heroes feel samey, good enough but not great, hardly any hero after reading their kit grabbed me as something interesting. Generic dps with some acid, generic dps with def down, generic dps with blaze, generic protect and shield guy with atk down, generic protect and shield guy with def up. etc. Almost every hero also follows the formula of

• basic attack with not quite 100% chance for an effect, book it to 100%

• a 5 turn cd AoE/stronger single target core attack with a similar effect as the basic(or aoe buff/heal for support characters), book it to 3 turn cd

• and ultimate that's supposed to "round out" the kit, but ultimates are so high cost andunreliable when they come online that you can't really count with them, unless you build an ultimate spam team

• a weak passive that just makes the hero slightly better at what's he already doing

Hardly any heroes have evocative and fun kits that make you go "oh wow I really wan't to use this unit". It's all just - yeah if I need a generic dps that does blaze, this guy is it, or if I need a generic healer that also buffs radiance, this chick does that. It almost feels like the devs made a couple heroes and then completely ran out of ideas and just populated the game with 200 generic bland characters with no soul.

2. Antifun boss design - the bosses also come with a full buff bar of "anti cheese" passives - feels like the devs are trying to get ahead of players cheesing the content, but forgot to make the fights fun. Almost nothing works well against bosses, unless it's explicitly allowed to work. So you build units with that one specific thing boss is weak to, and against that one specific thing boss uses against you, but they don't even go all out with "must do" mechanics, so you can just brute force them, and with the lack of books and ascension stones to make specialist heroes, making one strong squad and brute forcing is the most logical and economical approach, which is not fun at all.

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All that said, I believe this game CAN make it, but it has a lot of work ahead of it, and it shouldn't be rushed to the wide public, as games like this often only get one shot to actually make it

Come join, 300 peaks every day so far, great community, no rush.

Not my server, just rising awareness, so people don't miss out on the best phases!

edit: forgot the server link https://nostrumwow.com/download

My brain just can't stop thinking about this card, and if there perhaps is a hidden deck for it, has anyone here been able to get some play out of it (or has had it used against them) in a way that made you go "oh wow, this card isn't actually completely unplayable" ?

[[Pox Plague]]