I’m pretty sure they added autopilot, camera relative steering, and boosted agility, in an attempt to smooth the learning curve for new players, to convert more app downloads into customers.
Battle Bay is actually quite a difficult game to control for some people. You have a ship and turret moving independently, which requires quite good spacial rotation. I do think that a lot of people who install the game, just spend a few mins bumping into walls, and then immediately uninstall, because it’s annoying to learn.
I don’t know how well this plan worked. Even when your ship drives itself, you still need to deal with the targeter (which after a year of playing, and 11k games, I still have no idea how to control).
I have, personally, removed autopilot from my interface so that I don’t accidentally click it, but I don’t think it’s a bad feature... I think the amount of time and effort that must have gone into programming it, was a colossal waste; but it’s not ‘bad’.
However, people abusing it to grind events while AFK, is definitely bad: an issue that people predicted here, literally, the day it was released. Although most of the warnings were lost under the mountain of salt that followed the accompanying agility-fail.
It is ironic that the devs would put so much effort into developing a feature, that would otherwise make an automated ‘bot’ impossible. For anyone wanting to develop a bot, Rovio did the hard part for them.
However, let’s not forget that there is another component to this — Mines. The fact that someone could potentially AFK, leave a program to click Mine, and still walk away with decent damage, really serves to illustrate just how stupidly overpowered Mines have become.
It’s a shame, because I like using Mines, I like the idea of Mines being used strategically, but I can’t envision any implementation where strategic placement of Mines can exist without mindless spamming being just as powerful (if not more so).
This might be controversial, but I’ve started to feel that Mines should just be removed from the game, or nerfed into some niche build that you hardly ever see (like Frost). I say this as someone who has a legendary Mine, and is on the way to getting a 2nd legendary. Unless the devs can think of a way to make Mines useful, without spam being even more useful, the game would be better off without them.
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