Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Blade Symphony - 8/20 hours

My quest to be moderately good at this game is not going well. I am currently down to roughly 50,000th best, and I think I'll be stuck there for a long, long time. Finding matches against people in the lowest leagues is really difficult, and when I actually managed to fight an iron league opponent, I got my ass handed to me so quickly it knocked me down to the bottom of oak. I've been practicing, though. I've played a few matches against masters. I'm not sure how much I'm learning from losing so quickly to people who are in a whole other world of skill, but at least I'm getting the time in.

The difficulty of finding a good match and the relative emptiness of the official servers made me think that perhaps I'd missed this game's golden age - the period when it had an active community that could support and fill all these dozens of servers from all over the world, and in which there was a diverse range of player skill levels, and thus rising and dropping in rank was relatively easy (you can only change rank when you fight an opponent in your same league - oak, iron, steel, diamond, and master).

However, looking at the store page, it appears Blade Symphony came out in May, 2014. So, I have to wonder, was the game not that popular, did it flare up and burn out quickly, or is this simply a problem with my perception of time? Seven months is an eyeblink. I've been doing this blog for almost that long, and it feel like I just started. And yet, I may well be witnessing the winter of Blade Symphony's existence. Sure, the game is super-short, and doesn't have much to offer anyone who is not interested in hard-core competitive play, but it's still so very young. It feels much to soon for it to be on the decline.

Or maybe I'm just bitter about my complete failure to get much traction on the competitive circuit, and the multiplayer is more than active enough for people who are serious about being part of the community.

That's just a little bit more likely.

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