I actually pre-ordered this game and participated in the games "Key to the City" event, which was basically an open beta before official release. At first I loved the game. I spent a good 2 hours in the social district pimping out my character. I played my 10 hours.. Then found about 5 extra promo codes and created dummy accounts so I could continue playing because I liked the game so much. During the KTTC event I did experience a few failures inherent in the game. The seriously flawed matchmaking system, lame single player missions, horribly unbalanced weapons, and aimbotters. I was willing to see past this at first, and after about a month from the games official release they improved the matchmaking system, and have definitely moved in the right direction towards refining how the missions play. They even improved much of the weapon issues but at the same time they broke other weapons. The weapon balance issues however are always expected in a new action shooter game, it can take a while to flesh all that out.
There are a few reasons why now I am a more casual player of this game, and I certainly hope they fix these problems soon. One huge issue is the current amount of people aimbotting in this game. It has seriously gotten to ridiculous levels. Legit players are even asking aimbotters how/where to aquire the 3rd party aimbotting programs in game, just so they can play against other botters without getting their asses handed to themselves. The game has the PunkBuster symbol on the loading screen, yet you can safely kill the background process while playing the game with no consequence. When they actually turned PB on server side, about 3 weeks after release, they introduced game breaking lag that really pissed off a lot of their player base.
Another huge reason is RTW's lack of communication and customer service with their player base about correcting current issues. If you ask them what they are doing about botters, they always in an almost preprogrammed way say "We are working on the issue.". This complete indifference on RTW's part has led to a group of APB players to start their own
"Wall of Shame" to dish out their own brand of e-justice against the botting problem. This really should not be necessary. The gamers responsibility for the game ends when they pay the company for the product. As a customer I really don't demand much. It's not like I'm asking for them to give me sexual favors, just solid answers and actually addressing the issue. A lot can be done with just sincere communication. Overall they come off as just not caring, and companies who don't care about their customers usually don't turn much of a profit. That's probably one of the reasons they are currently in administration (bankruptcy) and are currently trying to sell the IP/assets for the game.
RTW raised $50 Million dollars for the development of this game and originally started development 5 years ago. In the first month of release they only sold 10 thousand copies in North America. Since the game was released on June 29th of this year the game has had a constantly dwindling player base. I honestly hope this game does not get shut down. I really want it to succeed, but if I had a hand in the purchase of the IP, the only reason I would buy it would be to get my hands on the code for the fantastic customization features of the game.
Overall, I really would not suggest buying this game. At least not before a more responsible company actually picks up the game with the intention of fixing the gigantic mess this game has been since inception.
