I was also a big fan of the gear overhaul initially, until I saw how it was actually implemented and really came to dislike it. I just don’t see who it’s here for. It screws over newer players who are stuck with really poor gear, making the already punishing learning curve the game has significantly worse, and it screws over any experienced players by punishing anybody that actually wants to interact with the level prestige mechanic once they do get themselves to level 100. Meanwhile anybody who doesn’t prestige just permanently has even better gear than what previously existed and never needs to worry about the other tiers. And since there’s no reward for prestiging aside from a cosmetic badge, why should you interact with the system at all? Overall it was a poorly thought out and unbalanced update.

While some updates haven’t been great and some things desperately need to be reworked, I’ve still been really enjoying the game. Once you get to around level 40 and unlock all the original gear, you can largely pretend the gear overhaul never happened. The newer maps and map reworks are awesome (aside from the new-ish lighthouse map point hope, that thing sucks), and I don’t play frequently enough to get too bored of the basic gameplay loop. Playing on nightmare where you only get 2 evidence helps since it adds a bit more strategy to each round than just getting 3 pieces of evidence and leaving. The newly reworked media evidence is pretty fun too, where you get rewarded for getting videos and pictures of unique forms of evidence rather than taking 10 pictures of a pile of salt that somebody stepped in.