What's with the sudden popularity of Legends?

[Jetpack Swordman]

I've asked this in-game a few times over the last few weeks, as well as around some of the discord communities and gotten conflicting answers. The major reason I've heard was that one of the most popular EU legends server shut down because the owner left the community and now those EU players are heading to [tR] Deathstar and other NA servers to RTM to Legends.
Sometime since, there's been new EU Legends servers that have popped up, but there's still generally more legends pop than open pop on NA. Is there other reasons why Legends has remained this popular?
Note: I don't think legends is undeserving of the sudden popularity. I actually have a good bit of fun with it. I just miss having consistent open pop.

 

[Valkyrie]

Legends is mostly playing by players in need of instant fun and freedom.

While Open (After 4 years of chaos EU side) gently goes back to its original design : A competitive gamemode with care for balance and high skill ceilling.

Giving the evolution of the internet (From a nerd thing in the 2000 to widely used in the 2010), and the new baby boom in the year 2000-2005 we can now observe a increased number of players, but not necessarily the same that were originally playing the Open mode for its competitiveness. Therefore Legends suits perfectly their needs, for the most part.

 

[Jetpack Swordman]

While Open (After 4 years of chaos EU side) gently goes back to its original design : A competitive gamemode with care for balance and high skill ceilling.

Giving the evolution of the internet (From a nerd thing in the 2000 to widely used in the 2010), and the new baby boom in the year 2000-2005 we can now observe a increased number of players, but not necessarily the same that were originally playing the Open mode for its competitiveness. Therefore Legends suits perfectly their needs, for the most part.

Not going to lie, I don't entirely understand this. I don't know how things are from the EU side but I, and I'm sure many others, have never seen open as a dedicated competitive mode. Maybe that's what it was intended as by design but it really is a kind of whatever you make it mode, that arguably offers the most player freedom of all the available gamemodes. Sure legends has a lot more interesting stuff going for it but I feel the point and class system gives players a much higher degree of freedom which is why it's been popular all these years on NA.
Also I mostly just am curious why it's remained popular on the NA side, as even after the EU players began to go back to legends on their own servers it seems NA has started to play it more. I'm wondering if it's still the EU players every so often RTM'ing on NA servers, or if currently active NA players have just naturally transitioned from preferring open to preferring legends.

 

[Valkyrie]

There used to be different sort of players, casual, tryhards and the population of trolls was pretty low (6 years or more ago). in EU open we always had a really satisfying skill ceilling, various teams were looked uppon (And way before that point in time). Things took a turn when the troll population slowly increased (My previous message about the internet and baby boom, are the two major effect). A new sort of gameplay was looked uppon : Having the most fun by any means, some times at the expense of the original design of the game.
Which in my oppinion is totally fine, but considering there was a huge gap between those wanting a lobby filled with likeminded "tryhard" and some other who didn't really payed much attention to that, mostly played the game as a way to relax and have a good laugher (It's amazing at that, wonderful game)

Things in NA how I perceive it can be pretty different, to my experience (and it's mostly a few occasions only) the casual player are way more common, aswell as new players (Which makes sense, it's an American mode and community at first)
Which can automatically translate into a different approach, as to how to get the fun out of the content available. Also NA seemingly has had difficulties with maintaining a structural clan or hosting service over time, that would adapt to the players need and their evolution. Not saying EU did any better, I personally could say alot regarding this.

To summerize the reason why Legends is getting popular in NA lately we have to look on the servers available to that region, and there hasn't been one coming as a leader in the matter. Not quiete yet. While EU had a Legends server for a reasonable time, which became active and grew interest on all regions. It was still a somewhat "recent" gamemode at the time.
There has been numberous attempt in NA to host and provide servers for it, but it doesn't seem to have had a similar impact as we can observe in EU for it.

So basically NA is eager to play Legends on a server in their region, because they barely have had the chance unless they would come all laggy in EU server, which isn't the most appealing experience...

 

[Farseunleashed]

There's quite a few factors to this. At first it was seen as more of a safe haven for trolls to troll around in, but recently its become more and more "tryhard", and its easy to see why. The classes in legends have so many tools that good/veteran players are able to utilize the class' potential to ridiculous levels, and as such also be able to fully express their skill in the game. The skill ceiling on Legends is far higher than on open because of the amounts of tools there are for each class and just the sheer amount of classes there are. After playing legends for a while I personally find it hard to go back to open. The really good legends players are the scariest MB2 players there are in the game currently. The top few there are have incredible aim, good dueling skills and really good awareness, and they know how to utilize each class to its full potential.

Its definitely not balanced in any means though. Technically the classes there between rebs/imps are kinda mirrored to be balanced for the most part, but the main issue legends currently faces is team(skill)stacking

All in all I suspect the main reason the popularity of legends has risen is because of the same reason I tend to play it more often now as well, and that is just the sheer amount of tools you have at your disposal, as well as the "timewasting" culture from 1-2 years ago dying out. Not only that, but some styles, like purple, which see almost no use in open, are more viable on legends because of tweaks, be it increased saber length, increased swing speeds, chain speeds, bp amount and so on.

Overall legends is a pretty great gamemode, so its no surprise it has grown in popularity.