I mean, the game was fun until V1.2 (if that's the version with all saber styles implemented into Open). Can you remind me when was it that you started to greatly influence the game?
I initially joined because i thought sabering had some poor aspects & the most glaring ones were not getting fixed due to the dev team somewhat starting to die at the time, in v0.1.9. Yeah that amazing stagger patch where you'd stagger every single time you got hit and had/reached below half BP. There were a number of other issues i wanted to address due to noticing them in-game and being annoyed at them - that's the same process everyone goes through when playing, i just played a ton at the time.
Main sabering things/issues that i've changed completely compared to v0.1.9:
1) removed that obnoxious stagger happening all the time
2) removed being able to PB randomly in any state such as while knocked down
3) removed PB being based on saber collision thus requiring to aim into the ground to make it work at best possible and still then being very unreliable (despite what many of the old players might have said, that is just a fact, and you could completely get around PB with simple attacking strategies far easier to do than in current days), now PB is based on camera aim which was originally an idea from Serath
4) changed BP drain cooldown being high enough to make 2 chained yellow swings only drain BP once, now is short enough for even blue swing chains to drain BP on every attack
5) removed mutual bodyhits which occurred instead of parries because parries only triggered on saber/saber collision
6) halfswings made all of similar speeds, instead of being extremely slow or even spinning around in lots of directions compared to some other much faster directions, for all styles
7) adding cyan/purple into open mode
8) readding blocking animations when hit (like in RC1) instead of nudge
9) making saber swings be harmful and interact only in their middle attacking phase
I started to "greatly influence the game" (i.e. experimenting with sabering changes) with the release of v1.0, where issues 1) 2) 4) were addressed. I believe you & everyone felt this was an improvement. With v1.1 came 3) 5) 7) 9) which are the major changes that some old players like yourself didn't like. Cyan/purple was only added due to the community asking for it, while the three other things were my own initiative to try and make the system far more consistent, which came at the cost of a lot of feelings of precise control you had over your saber. However there were still alot who liked it, so i wasn't prompted to revert all of this. Though trying to reintroduce some of these things partially is something that's been up in the air in my mind for a long time, in order to improve those feelings of control while not reducing the great consistency of the current system. On the other hand 6) and 8) were added in v1.4 in an attempt to learn what we could from the older systems in order to improve the current one (v1.3), i.e. adding blocking animations which means interrupts. Interrupts didn't exist in the entirety of v0 nor v1 until v1.4. 6) was added because with camera aim-based PB all those slower halfswing directions were basically useless, while even before camera aim-based PB they were still very underused simply because of being so slow which just makes them bad compared to the fast ones.
Now for what you personally really hate, i believe the main thing is 3), the addition of camera aim-based PB, because due to that you no longer have the freedom to attack in whatever direction you want and only care about timing/positioning. You now have to also care about swing direction. It is a fact that before v1.1 most swing directions were underused, not only because lots of them were very slow but also because there was no point in using them because they couldn't be PBed reliably even if someone kept doing the same one all the time. Then i think the other things you wouldn't like are 6), because everyone pre-v1.1 loved to do that left yellow halfswing all the time since it was by far the fastest. Then probably you'd dislike 8) because it forces players to care about when they're getting hit and base their timings around that, instead of doing whatever they want and only caring about their own offense. In short these mechanics have added lots of new factors you need to take into account, making the system harder to play and requiring adaptation to your opponent, rather than just using your muscle memory to do pre-learned combos which are enough to beat most people by default. I think you would also dislike 5) because it removes some of that precision feeling and somewhat "dumbs down" the swinging experience.
Well sorry. While there are some things about feelings of freedom that i agree were good, there were also very retarded things. Aiming into the ground to PB, having only 1 or 2 halfswing directions that mattered, i can't consider these things good even when i was also accustomed to them from years of playing.
