User blog:McLarenP1 Boy/Everything Wrong With Asphalt 8 (New Ver.)

Several points are taken and reworded from Mike458's User blog:Mike458/Everything Wrong With Asphalt 8 (REPOST) blog post.

I made this blog post as my final goodbye to this place since I have permanently retired from Asphalt 8. Its quality and playability have gone to nothing right before my eyes.

Problems
1. Credits are extremely hard to earn. Even Forza Motorsport 7 is less of a grinding hell than this game.

2. Customer Care is worthless and unusable when it comes to fixing problems (evident from some reviews).

3. Terrible, rubberbanding AI in terms of racing.

4. The game forces microtransactions down the player's throat to continue performing well in Career, Multiplayer, etc. without being forced to waste months or years of nonstop grinding; worse, many of the microtransactions are overpriced (e.g. $100 for ). Again, even Forza Motorsport 7 is less of a grinding hell than this game.

5. Fuel for Events is very stupid and restrictive. In fact, there was once an event that required 24 Fuel.

6. Vehicles are too tedious/difficult to obtain in terms of Credits grinding.

7. Older vehicles lose their competitiveness in several months or a year at most. Remember the once-competitive Mercedes-Benz Biome? It's now dead thanks to the "OP cars arms race", which will be described below.

8. Boosters are insanely overpriced and stupid, yet they are mandatory to stay in front of the competition, forcing hours and days of grinding or more microtransactions down the player's throat.

9. Upgrades for vehicles are too high; most vehicles (at least 60% of all vehicles in the game) now cost at least a million CR or more to be maxed out and another million for the Pro Kits. The worst examples of this are the BMW 3.0 CSL Hommage and Mosler Super GT, which have 8 upgrades that can only be bought with TK (Tokens).

10. Rewards in Time-Limited Events are really only entitled to players with the fastest and most difficult to obtain cars for that time period.

11. Multiplayer matchmaking system is completely broken and rigged when considering vehicle rank — any vehicle is immediately matched against another car with which it can never compete (e.g. Audi RS 4 Avant vs McLaren MP4/8, TVR Sagaris, etc.); at best, it can place only 4th or 3rd, and at worst, it will finish LAST.

12. The game depends too much on certain cars and not driver skill anymore.

13. Proto Keys, Enduro Invitations, and Championship Tires sometimes disappear for no reason (e.g. the game instantly disqualifies the player before the race starts, failing the race in the process).

14. Hackers are commonplace in all elements of the game and ruin the Time-Limited Events for everyone.

15. Pro Kits system is too flawed and expensive.

16. Tokens are almost impossible to come across and require many more microtransactions due to Tokens not being convertible to Credits and Tokens being in extremely high demand for anything in the game.

17. Every single part of the game is a money vacuum.

18. VIP System gives players an incentive to spend money, sucking them into the game's money vacuum; the worst example of this is the 2015 GTA Spano, which is a bonus car that can only be accessed after $4,000 is spent in the game total!

19. Season Tickets are a paid barrier blocking people from increasing their Multiplayer rating, which is now even harder thanks to the worsened Multiplayer matchmaking system!

20. The "OP car arms race" still continues to this day and forces microtransactions or hours worth of grinding on people just to keep up (e.g. Ferrari F50 became the top-ranking Class leaderboard car in its debut update, but in the next update, the ONUK Sazan LM was released and is superior over the F50 in all tracks). This is now endless.

21. Terrible Multiplayer — the starts are chaotic and half of the racers in the race are instantly knocked down by idiots touching them from behind, and Multiplayer races are more frustrating and rage-inducing than fun in general.

22. Ridiculously expensive decals — some decals are priced over either 420,000 CR or 2,100 TK. Thankfully, there are always racing games with great customization (Forza comes to mind) where we can remake these expensive decals and equip them on our cars for free!

23. Career Mode forces players to buy certain cars that are overpriced and uncompetitive just to complete some of the events. The same applies to the Tag Racing Season.

24. Not all tracks are still available for Quick Solo Race. Worse, Crimeloft defends this by wanting to "keep things interesting", even though the word "interesting" is getting overused, stale, and meaningless, just like the "But you don't have to do it" argument when it comes to game-breaking elements like loot boxes and forced microtransactions.

25. For some users, if the game is suspended and relaunched, the steering becomes unresponsive and very wonky.

26. Quick Solo Race lacks an adjustable amount of laps (always 2 except for Iceland, Tokyo, Venice, and Azure Coast), as well as the Unplugged, Flawless, Tag Racing, and Time Attack race modes.

27. Hosted multiplayer sessions are impossible.

28. Tag Racing cannot be used in Multiplayer.

29. Game feels very lacking in all aspects (even some parts of the vehicle list).

30. Players who play legitimately are getting banned for no reason whatsoever, even as the hackers are allowed to walk free.

31. Servers are notoriously unreliable. You bought a Pro Kit Box? Too bad, you now have to spend double the price just to get that box back solely because the servers glitched out on you.

32. Random rewards from Time-Limited Events now get taken away out of the blue (most likely due to hackers).

33. Fake speeds cause certain vehicles to go at a different speed (usually slower) compared to what their in-game displayed speed suggests. This is justified only by the fact that this game is a "wild arcade racer".

34. Community Managers on the Gameloft Forums for this game do nothing and are just puppets giving false hope to the community that their ideas are being implemented or not being implemented and yet the opposite of that happens.

35. Exclusive Deals — another part of the game's money vacuum. for a single Legendary Blueprint, for a single engine card,  for a single card of any type, and the list goes on and on.

36. The player base/fanbase — worthy of deserving a place in the most cancerous fanbases in history, the A8 player base/fanbase takes the game too seriously, cares only about having the fastest available car and doing knockdowns on everyone else in Multiplayer, and only having the "best" cars in the game, and don't care one bit about finishing the Career mode (which is impossible anyways outside of hacking). These same people moan about upcoming updates with new-to-the-game content, especially the Motorcycles Update, as well as cars having fake speed (see point #32). Furthermore, they continue to shun certain cars like the McLaren P1™ GTR, 1967 Chevrolet Impala, Arash AF10, etc. as "useless", which is another stale, outdated, overused meme that has lost its meaning. These cars, like with the other cars they deem "useful", are still required for completion of the game and the collections anyway. Their "useless car" narrative has proven to be a failure as they will never complete the game due to the Toyota Supra RZ (Mark IV), Scion FR-S, 9FF GT9 VMAX, etc. having been removed, as well as the rise of more Time-Limited Events that feature these cars as the top rankers. Other cancerous memes they push nonstop include the Shubham's identity meme, Dodge Dart GT (they keep calling this a "king" even as it is still the slowest car in the entire game; hell, it can't even beat a Quartz Regalia in Forza Horizon 3), and BeaSt GhoSt. None of these memes are funny, relevant, and useful anymore.

Adding on to point #36, the same players also bash perfectly good cars like the McLaren P1™, Lamborghini Sesto Elemento, McLaren MP4-31, etc. for the same reasons (e.g. "not MP-competitive"), as well as for stupid reasons like "it skids too much". Well, these players either need to learn how to control the car better or they don't have a lot of luck with these cars!

37. The player base/fanbase (continued) — these people will gang up on you like angry killer bees if you even slightly disagree with their false idols like TheHawtDawg1 (aka TheHeartlessDumbass1), Hypersonic (aka Bitchsonic), feuerrmFilms, etc. These people care more only about this waste of a game and having as many subscribers and views as possible than fixing their ruined lives. feuerrmFilms claimed that he had every car in Asphalt Xtreme, but this has been disproven, only further proving the cancerousness, clickbaitiness, and toxicity of the Asphalt 8 player base/fanbase. The Asphalt Community on Google+ is also completely corrupt and irrelevant. These same people also will defend the game if you even slightly criticize it.

38. Cars are seriously unbalanced and given improper performance. The last time I checked, the McLaren F1 did not outperform the P1 in any performance aspect whatsoever, not even the top speed. Also, the McLaren MP4-31, MP4-25, and MP4/8 would logically have been the outright fastest cars in the entire game since they can beat any road-going car or inferior race car on the track. Just because this is an arcade racer doesn't mean anything!

39. The car list keeps consisting of cars that made their video game debut in this game or another mobile racing game and are still stuck in mobile racing games when they should rightfully make a console racing game debut. These include but are not limited to:
 * Both nanoFlowcell cars
 * Both Sbarro cars
 * BMW 3.0 CSL Hommage
 * Ferrari GTC4Lusso
 * McLaren 675LT (still stuck in mobile games as of October 2017; we're not counting the Nintendo Switch game Gear·Club Unlimited)
 * Porsche 718 Boxster S
 * W Motors Fenyr SuperSport

40. The Asphalt Wiki on Wikia is mostly filled with anonymous users who ruin the experience for everyone. I have already had several anonymous users vandalize my user page, but thanks to Profoundly Quiet for locking my user page down so that only the registered users can edit it!

The Only 3 Positives
The only good things about this game are:

1. New vehicles and larger vehicle list (A8 was in fact the first mobile racing game with over 200 vehicles).

2. Improved graphics (at the expense of frame rate).

3. Decals that are mostly actually appealing (in fact, someone should remake the Mastery decals in Forza, as well as other unique decals. At the end of the day, Lazy Bitch, er, Little Vixen is a lazy designer who makes copypasted, low-quality, generic designs that somehow get her "legend painter" status; any of the decals in A8 are better than her "designs").

Conclusion
Asphalt 8 is now one of the worst and most flawed racing games around, given the countless faults and problems this game has. If you still want racing games on your mobile device, don't bother. Virtually every single freemium mobile game is a Pay-2-Win hellhole now. Instead, save up for an Xbox One or gaming PC and get a Forza game (in the latter case, only games from Forza Horizon 3 onwards are compatible with a Windows 10 PC) or a PS4 and a choice from either Driveclub or Gran Turismo Sport (however, good luck dealing with a small initial car list, a huge focus on multiplayer racing, and still-artificial car sounds). Project CARS 2 is also a really good choice for either PC, PS4, or Xbox One. You seriously cannot defend Asphalt 8 anymore. Now is the time to start planning on quitting the game for good. Start turning your life around for the better! I quit this mind-control game permanently, and I feel much better and more free as a result. You can, too!

P.S. If you find other problems in this game, feel free to tell me in the comments.

And for all your troubles, here is a reward: a P1 GTR in Forza Motorsport 7!