It seems like it would be safe to say that the reaction to this fes has been lukewarm overall? I'll throw my two cents in before the thread ends so that next thread doesn't have an immediately controversial topic.
>Tea Party fes
I can live with it. It stings a bit because 3 and 3.5 felt weighted to a certain school/schools, but I'm happy that it happened.
>Word salad on skills
A genuine concern, but an unsurprising development- skills can only be put together in so many combinations before you have literal duplicates. Aside from that, the kits are pretty interesting. Good designs, I actually like Mika's simplicity the most.
>sMika locking purples into two characters
It's possible that they added purple to be an experimental weapon type, but it's very sad that any purple who does damage is now likely on the bench until purple LUN raids. They have to have some grand plan with purple, this feels silly.
>Gwent
I liked Sheside more. They could have done a racing game. Yes I'm mildly disappointed at this, but it's like your soup being a bit colder than you'd like.
>Yellow Tiph
Tiphareth's an interesting raid, I'm excited to see the comps this makes.
>LUN Hod
This gives me a headache, but I like the CC crew so I can't be upset.
>T2-T6 droprate buff
Actually a very nice change, I hope that they don't make T11 terrible to counteract this.
>Limited selector ticket
A mixed bag, apparently? No collabs makes sense, but I can see why they'd do this for roster completionists. It also helps them focus the recruit banner to be more modern banners. While it likely is an indicator that powercreep might get a bit worse in the future, I think this was a good move by Nexon strategically.
>Pyroxene shop
I've come to the realization that this is mainly for whales in the game, so I can't be that upset. It would be better, but an obvious stretch, if it gave a suggestion to newer senseis to not use this shop until later, but Nexon trying to capitalize a bit on their 1% is logical.
>UE60
It's cool, but I think that this is an undertoned bonus compared to the previous UE tiers.
>Special Dangles
Makes me hate the train fight more because that might've taken time away from chibidevs making dangles. I'll concede this may be petty, though.
>Archive pool
This definitely makes sense for them to have done this, but I think it would be better for them to have toggles per farmable student- maybe I want to get spooked by Miyako in order to raise her stars quicker. We'll see.
<Battlepass
This one's a controversial one and has a lot to unpack. I think part of the outrage comes from this not existing when it is the industry standard, giving Blue Archive a percieved "high road" to some. I think that concerns over this are also reasonable, since the idea of a paid battlepass tier typically includes some really good item that the free players just don't get.
However, I agree that the battlepass, if it remains how it currently is, isn't a bad addition due to it being no different from a monthly with a few other items being moved around. I will ultimately withold judgment on this until we see more about it.
I'll conclude by saying that I was initially upset over most of these announcements, but after taking some time to try and understand what they mean, I'm more neutral on the matter. This does lead to an interesting topic with the different tiers of consumers with online service games, where F2P players would be hurt particularly bad with a BP going extreme and thus hurting word-of-mouth, but whales now have further means to enrich the company as well as potentially show off cool new things (in the case of whale influencers).