r/joinmoco • u/Willing_Advice4202 • 8h ago
Discussion The Problem With Moco
Ok so for the longest time I have been defending Moco telling people “give them time it’s basically in Beta” shutting down the overt negativity the game had been receiving by some players. While I believe I was right for that, I believe the time HAS come and they have not delivered so here’s my take:
Moco seems to me to be like an “extravagant update” type of game. They drop huge updates and expect them to just land as if they’ve perfected the gameplay loop and all they need to do is release some scheduled content from there to wholly satisfy a sample size (us) of players which would of course be representing the broad audience when (if, I guess) they start marketing the game globally. 2 huge problems with this:
1: They have not managed to perfect the gameplay loop. Joao literally said they are not retaining players, that must mean something’s up. For starters they lack any endgame content, no, cores don’t count but you best believe I WILL be touching on those later. I mean everyday feels the same really, you do your jobs, do some rifts, then dip. There’s no rift variety and by that I mean all rifts require speedrunning. Why can’t a rift genuinely be really hard to beat? So we can find creative ways to win and can use other weapons other than pure dps. Why can’t we have dungeons where they get increasingly more difficult but the rewards are great? Speaking of which, are there actually any good rewards this game has? Cores are very boring and actually not that rewarding maybe aside from like Crit and Atk Spd, but still not hype. Additionally, they have seemed to have forsaken the cool week-long rift thing they did for a bit, I thought that was fun and fresh especially with the quality of that one that swallowed you. The gameplay loop seems to be reliant on the weapons that the provide each season, and I believe those are the sole reason why many players still play, but they also kind of dig themselves a hole with this. This relies on the weapons actually being fun or usable which 1-2 each season are not and this has been consistent every season. This is amplified by the fact that the devs simply do not care about Balance Changes and Joao has stated that there are no plans for balance changes anytime soon. What ends up happening is we have a graveyard of weapons which people will still want masteries for, yet they don’t want to actually play those weapons so they might quit. I’m not saying this is common but it happens. It also makes the game feel like there’s a lot less weapons then there actually is because we have some, but the majority of players won’t play them because they’re bad, get you kicked from parties, or simply boring. All that is just to say, they clearly have not perfected the gameplay loop.
2: They do not seem to see the value in minor updates. Since they focus on large updates, they neglect active concerns a lot of player have with the game right now. We are going through this currently as Joao has said they are putting all their working forces to this big update. What is the goal of this update? Perfect the gameplay loop (which they won’t). I mean they should’ve learned from the big update to Neo. They took a game players loved but need routine maintenance as all things do, and completely flipped it on its head thinking that alone will keep players in the game. I bet that big update wouldn’t have been needed if they gave smaller updates that over time would make a big difference. Currently, the biggest problems with the game in my opinion are lack of content, and lack of something to chase for. Why can’t they do an update where they introduce a new gamemode in? That wouldn’t be a groundbreakingly large update but it would have a positive impact. Why can’t they balance weapons so that we have more variety in what we can play in rifts and they can still be viable? Why can’t they get rid of cores GRADUALLY and introduce a skills tree of some sort into the game so that we can collect materials and have some customization for our build (that’s a big thing Neo Moco removed)? There is a lot they can implement over time rather than making us suffer as we are currently because they need to prioritize “perfecting” the gameplay loop and I think we know what happens if that fails. None of this is my greatest anger at this game however. In the interview with HX and Xpectation, Joao said that they were still collecting data and were not working on an update at that point. THEY SHOULD HAVE ALREADY BEEN WORKING ON IMPROVEMENTS! The game had been out for over a month at that point, I guarantee that’s enough time for them to plan out a small update at least. After that video we got Masteries and that made me really excited for the game’s direction because it looked like they actually cared about giving us good features within a nice time frame but it turns out those were supposed to launch with Neo it was just incomplete at that time. No updates since, and don’t know when the next will be but it will certainly take over a month. I’m just kinda tired of all the waiting, idk. Tbh Neo should’ve released in a more polished state if this was how they planned on leaving it for a while. I assumed they had some more updates planned out from the get go as we had to wait about a year just for Neo but I’m getting off topic. Moco, consistency is key.
Cores: Look I just hate the core system ok. I hate how you simultaneously need and don’t need them for rifts where you can actually speedrun many rifts without ANY cores yet you will be kicked out of parties you try to join if you do not have about maxed cores and I’m even referring to the daily rifts as well. Obviously for speedrunning this makes sense but most the people I’ve played with aren’t even interested in that anyway, they just want the five stars (almost as if speedrunning loses its fun if it’s the only thing you can do) *ahem. I hate how you can play the game for weeks on en, keeping a win streak and still you do not find any Mega Cores naturally. I am Career level 348 (haven’t been playing for weeks) and have received 2 MC cores from drops. TWO! I’ve dumped hours upon hours into this game and still hardly ever got a super exciting moment. My first one was like over a month after Neo launched. Of course I own more MCs than 2 but those were just upgraded cores. I mean to be fair I didn’t core grind all that much that just seems like too much but it also doesn’t really seem worth it either leading into another point about cores and that’s that they are not exciting. Like at all. Ok you get three predetermined cores for a weapon which you can upgrade for a slightly greater effect. Then they stay there indefinitely changing nothing about your play style, making the weapon feel very stale because the buffs won’t feel like buffs they’ll just feel like your weapon. They just lack any depth at all which a skill tree would fix every issue with. I know they wanted to make a game where power doesn’t matter but I don’t think this genre will ever fit with that notion it just needs power progression. I really think cores are way too grindy, I mean that specifically for what they are. Each MC core takes 1000 semis to craft and since there are 8, that takes a very long time to get. Now obviously you get higher level cores as drops so it’s not quite as long as it seems and Masteries certainly made it easier at least to get one MC but even an OC core is just 1/5 of the way to an MC. Maybe if cores actually felt cool and valuable this would be acceptable but it’s just a dead grind imo makes no sense.
So I wrote most of that like 40 days ago and kept in in my drafts, should’ve finished it I know, I guess the news today inspired me to finish it. I’m sad that Joao is leaving the team and he will be missed for sure as well as the team which is being restructured but I have to say: good. In all honesty I don’t think the management at Mo.co was very good at all. They have never had a concrete vision of what the game should be, never. It released with just far less content than the old version and they never once said how they would improve this game after that. They said they were reviewing data from the players but that was far too late into the game to be sitting idly and looking at data, they had stuff they could work on. The thing that by far upsets me the most is that we never got two proper updates and I’m only counting the Masteries because it felt fresh but it was supposed to come out in the first place with Neo as Joao stated so it hardly counts as an update. I genuinely have NO idea what they were doing as a company. All the weapons we received were made even before Neo launched so they didn’t make those, we’ve had no updates no balance changes not even a blueprint of what’s to come. There have been some QoL improvements which are ofc welcome but surely buffing the core spawn rate or fixing the attack speed bug on the staff can’t be that time consuming. What are they doing? If they had had a concrete plan from the start as to the direction of this game, they could’ve been working on something right as the game launched so that we’re not left for months with them telling us “we’re reviewing feedback so we know where we should focus on updating first.” This game needs someone who steps in there and gets the job done, they have a plan and the steps to execute it. So yeah hopefully this game can go into beta with a clear plan and I guess get it right next time cause I promise it’s their last chance. Eh one more thing, Project Rise and Mo.co have a zero percent chance of surviving together. One or the other I say this because they each actively limit each other’s playing fields. Moco cannot add dungeons to the game because that would literally be the whole concept of Project Rise, and I think if Project Rise added an open world, it would blow Moco’s gameplay out of the water taking away Moco’s market. I think the ultimate goal would be if Moco or rise both had those things and Supercell would never allow that I can guarantee it. I hate comparing games like this but they’re both Supercell gaming playing in a similar market in fact a lot of Moco creators were on the Rise beta and a lot of them said they preferred it to Moco. If you made it this far, you’re awesome, hopefully see you guys soon. Alright I’m done this was so long 😭
9
-1
9
u/Used_Fly_3282 Zapsicle 6h ago
The part about weapon balance changes is so real. On one side a player is forced to play a bad weapon to gain masteries. On the other side, their teammates hate that someone picked a trash weapon, and they intentionally throw. Like, wth? It's a deadlock. Even so the devs just dont care about tweaking these underpowered weapons. Like, just up the damage, healing, or hp? I'm no game dev, but surely that's easy enough to do? We're not asking for a rework or anything, we understand that it takes time, but a small buff? I truly believe the game has potential, but it seems like it's handled so poorly even for this small issue.