User blog comment:ShinnyShin/The Problems with the Fifth Anniversary Update/@comment-24458118-20180920135824

First of all, great post. It's so good to read gems like this, that unfortunately get lost and drown between seas of Sonic fanfictions. It's appreciated.

Second, pretty massive block of text incoming. You've been warned.

About the update, what can I say, same old story. Play 24/7 to get the cars or say goodbye to them, your usual titanic list of game-breaking bugs, pointless events catered towards bootlickers and designed to mock everyone else... I REALLY miss the time when they would release all cars through TLEs and you could buy them with credits. I can't even remember the last time we had one of those, I mean, we barely even get BP cars nowadays. I wish we could go back to the times before all that R&D and EDD bullshit, when you could actually BUY cars and the game wasn't going down the gutter like a limp turd.

Back to the events, I actually did 68 of the 90 quests for the anniversary event one afternoon on the first day (my god), but after that I only did three more before the event ended. After reading the numbers, I realized it wasn't worth the grind, and I mostly ignored it through the remaining 9 days. The A9 championship was a 100% waste of time. I managed to beat it with the Golf at stock and without spending a thing, but for what? 20k credits? Yay? I'm never playing A9, so I essentially did it for nothing. Indeed, a waste of time. The anniversary TLE was the worst though, and even though it gave me the last two BPs I needed for the Civic, there's no denying that it was a total joke and a big "F you" from GL. They held those 500 tokens from a string and laughed as they watched us jump up to reach them and fall short every time, as if we were their playthings. All in all, the events were just mindless grindfests, wastes of code or just insulting, and they were all advertised as "amazing presents" for the big anniversary. What an insult to the loyal playerbase.

Lastly, regarding the future, seeing how this game is so hostile to newcomers (remember when they turned essential cars such as the Sesto and Veneno into token cash-grabs?), it doesn't look good. The only players that remain are the veterans, while the newbies are scared away by all the blatant P2W schemes and the WWIII-esque landscape that is the abomination we call MP. Then, the veterans get bored and leave, and the game dies. Also, seeing how GL's shameful, intrusive attempts to promote A9 aren't working and are instead pissing people off and making them hate it, I'd say they got a hard time coming. One they definitely deserve.