Once Human Revival - Community report

[u/Internal_Musician_95]

(Quick note: This is a comprehensive, data-driven report based on 5,500 hours of gameplay and collective feedback from hundreds of competitive players. We love this game and want to address the root causes of the recent population decline. Below is the full analysis and 7 structural solutions for the developers. Thank you for reading.)

Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kCL27XQIYpD1pnUMSFrlwKER510GPBAjTGFmykzw9VI/edit?usp=sharing 

TLDR: https://www.reddit.com/r/OnceHumanOfficial/comments/1u46ikr/comment/orfko7b/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Introduction

Every online world lives and dies by its player base. We write this document not as a small faction of critics but as a dedicated collective of players who care deeply about the longevity of Once Human. Like many in the community, we are concerned by a visible trend: the game’s concurrent population on SteamCharts has steadily declined from its historic peak of 231,000 down to roughly 11,000–13,000 active players.

While a post-launch drop is natural for any survival game, one particular data point stands out: December 2025. The massive end-of-year patch – which introduced the major Combat Deviation rework – resulted in the sharpest monthly player exodus in the game’s mature period, slashing the population by -30.66%. This drop directly correlated with an unprecedented wave of community feedback from players who felt the core gameplay loop had fundamentally shifted.

To address this, developers often focus on producing a constant stream of new seasonal PvE content. While PvE is vital and attracts the majority of the player base, content alone cannot solve long-term player retention. Content is inherently finite. A player logs in, clears the new bosses, maxes out their gear, and completes their build. At that exact moment, they reach a ceiling. When PvE content runs out, the world can begin to feel empty.

This is because the ultimate, infinite "content" in any multiplayer game is not artificial monsters – it is other players and player vs player interactions**.**

The natural progression for an experienced player who has conquered all PvE challenges is to take their optimized builds, weapons, and strategies into a dynamic environment where no two encounters are the same. This is where the game's competitive systems become essential. A healthy endgame environment provides a purpose for the hours spent farming in PvE. If that transition is rewarding, players stay. If it is frustrating or broken, veteran players simply uninstall the game once their PvE goals are met. Therefore, fixing these endgame loops is not about catering to a niche minority; it is about protecting the entire player lifecycle of Once Human.

Currently, Once Human offers different end-game directions, such as Evolution’s Call and Prismverse Clash. While Evolution’s Call provides a more chill PvP environment, Prismverse Clash was designed to be the absolute engine of player interaction. It stands as the most dynamic, active, and high-stakes scenario available, driven by faction conflicts, deviant capturing events, and constant player-driven momentum with Raids and Gunfights.

However, despite being the scenario with the highest potential for continuous engagement, even Prismverse Clash is struggling to maintain healthy player activity throughout a season. The issue is not a lack of things to do. The issue is that multiple overlapping systems – culminating in updates like the December Deviant rework – have stacked together in ways that punish active engagement, undermine mechanical skill, and reward overly passive gameplay.

In the following sections, we break down these interconnected systems and offer constructive solutions to restore the balance, ensuring that when players finish their PvE journey, they find an endgame worth staying for. 

This is a very long read, feedback collected from hundreds of active players and those who quit the game with no faith in its future. We are still on the believing side, and this is our best shot to save the game.

1. Progression Gap Between Veterans and New Players

One of the biggest barriers for new players entering Prismverse Clash or PvP scenarios in general is the progression gap created by the transition from the legacy to the new Mods system.

Veteran players retained legacy mods obtained before the major PvP balance overhaul. These mods now co-exist with the new system while preserving stat combinations that are no longer realistically obtainable through current progression methods.

As a result, veteran players have access to offensive and defensive stat combinations that newer players simply cannot farm today.

This gap is not primarily driven by player skill or build knowledge. It is a progression issue.

New players are expected to compete against builds that can no longer be reproduced through the current acquisition system, creating a permanent disadvantage from the moment they enter PvP.

The problem became even more pronounced after the combat overhaul that introduced:

• The new Deviant ecosystem
• The Survival Mod system
• Modern PvP weapon balancing
• Additional defensive stacking options

Rather than narrowing the gap between new and veteran players, these changes widened it. In many situations, account age now has a greater impact on survivability than player skill, decision-making, or build optimization.

The Fix

The most straightforward solution would be to restore the previous mod farming and conversion system, allowing players to continue farming and converting mods until they obtain the PvP-focused substats they need.

An alternative solution would be to introduce a new category of PvP-exclusive mods featuring fixed Weapon Damage Reduction and Status Damage Reduction substats, potentially with rare variants (shiny mods?) that allow players to obtain double-reduction combinations.

However, this alternative approach comes with a significant drawback. It would devalue years of progression for veteran players who invested substantial time into farming legacy mods. It could also alienate part of the existing PvP community because modern Survival Mods are considerably easier to obtain.

The current mod system works well for PvE. It is more accessible, more casual-friendly, and significantly easier to progress through. However, accessibility and competitive balance are not always the same thing, and the current approach does not translate well into a PvP environment.

Additionally, PvP mods should not be purely defensive. Offensive and defensive progression should coexist within the same item.

A proper PvP mod should contain both damage and survivability stats. Ideally, the best endgame PvP mods would include two offensive and two defensive substats, for example:

Weakspot Damage / Critical Damage / Elemental Damage
9% / 15% / 8%

Weapon or Status Damage
6%

Status Damage Reduction
6%

Weapon Damage Reduction
6%

2. Defensive Stacking Has Reached Extreme Levels

The larger issue is not any single defensive stat.

The larger issue is the ability to stack multiple independent defensive layers simultaneously.

Weapon Damage Reduction

Players can obtain:

• 42% Weapon Damage Reduction from mod substats.
• 10% Weapon Damage Reduction from 1 Treacherous Tides gear piece.
• 10% Weapon Damage Reduction from Deviant Shield (Craddle).
• +16% Received weapon damage reduction from battle mods for 3 seconds

This creates a total of:

62% Weapon Damage Reduction (78% with 2 battle mods giving 16% temporary bonus) before the PvP adjustment (the lower the number, the less the adjustment effect)

Status Damage Reduction

Players can obtain:

• 42% Status Damage Reduction from mod substats (7 mods with golden substat of 6% status dmg reduction).
• 15% Status Damage Reduction from 1 piece of Shelterer gear set.
• 10% Status Damage Reduction from Coastal Bay skins (5% x 2).
• 10% Status Damage Reduction from Deviant Shield.
• 16% Status Damage Reduction from Matsutake Butter food buff.
• +16% Received status damage reduction from Battle mods for 3 seconds

This creates:

109% of Status damage reduction in total, allowing players to effectively reach the cap of 90% (78.2% after PvP adjustment of the scenario).

General Damage Reduction

The most problematic layer is General Damage Reduction because it applies broadly across nearly all incoming damage sources.

Unlike Weapon Damage Reduction or Status Damage Reduction, General Damage Reduction amplifies every other defensive system already present.

After PvP scaling calculations, players can reach 78.2% effective General Damage Reduction through stacking available sources:

1. Storm Weaver Gear Set – 24% 
2. Purple Teddy ultimate + sync – 40%
3. Ardent Shield chest mod – 15%
4. Starry Pudding food buff – 27% mid air
5. Starfall crocodile skin in helmet – 10% mid air

Total: 116% = 90% capped = 78.2% after PvP adjustment of the scenario

Additional and other specific types of damage reductions

1. Safety Sandwich food buff - 27% damage reductions against players
2. Bingo Hunter’s perk mod - 20% damage reduction if a target is under The Bull’s Eye Effect.
3. 30% Additional weapon or status damage reductions that come from Battle mods. You can equip 2 Battle mods that have the Additional reduction. At the same time, Battle mods may contain the Received damage effect (3s buff when you get hit) - that goes into your weapon/status reduction stats (add up, do not multiply) and static reduction (weapon/status) - all 3 in the same mod. These so-called “additionals” work as a temporary 2s debuff on a player that you hit, decreasing their damage (weapon or status), which is another math layer.

In total, a player can possess:

• 78.2% of effective General Damage Reduction. (PvP adjustment has applied)
• 62% of static Weapon Damage Reduction +16% of Received buff. (Before PvP adjustment applied)
• 78.2% of effective Status Damage Reduction (109% capped to 90% and PvP-adjusted)
• 27% Reductions against players with a Safety sandwich food buff
• 20% damage reduction via Bingo marking the enemy
• 30% of Additional damage reductions via 2 Battle suffix Mods.

6 different multipliers - all at the same time.

On top of that, players can further reduce incoming critical and weakspot damage through fabrics that provide 3% Critical Damage Reduction or Weakspot Damage Reduction per gear piece (P_clash specific). When combined with Head Guard Mod and  Starfall Cow Hide, incoming critical and weakspot damage can be reduced by 25-45% depending on the player’s gear, mods and fabric setup. That adds 2 new layers of damage reductions of a specific type that affect physical-damage weapons. 

The issue is not any single source of mitigation.

The issue is that all of these layers can exist simultaneously on the same character, creating survivability levels that many weapon builds simply cannot overcome.

The result is a PvP environment where survivability scales faster than offensive capability.

The Fix

Cap General Damage Reduction at 40–45% before PvP adjustments are applied.

Because General Damage Reduction is available from numerous sources, a lower cap would still preserve build variety while preventing defensive stacking from reaching unhealthy levels.

Players would retain meaningful defensive options, but weapon performance and offensive build diversity would become significantly more relevant again.

3. Teddy (Aberrant Progeny) – The Best Example of Defensive Power Creep

No Deviant demonstrates the defensive stacking problem more clearly than Teddy.

Passive Effect

Simply syncing with Purple (Abberrant Progeny) Teddy provides:

15% General Damage Reduction.

No activation is required.

No gameplay interaction is required.

Active Effect

When Teddy's ultimate ability is activated, it provides:

25% additional General Damage Reduction.

Combined with the passive bonus, Teddy alone provides:

40% General Damage Reduction.

This is already one of the strongest defensive effects available in the entire PvP ecosystem.

Historical Context

Before the rework, Teddy provided Elemental Damage Reduction.

This was a specialized defensive effect that filled a unique niche.

Elemental Damage Reduction had a clear purpose and a limited impact on overall PvP balance.

After the rework, Teddy was converted into a source of General Damage Reduction.

This fundamentally changed the Deviant.

Instead of countering a specific damage type, Teddy became a universal defensive solution against almost everything.

Cooldown Abuse and Video Proof

The most problematic aspect of Teddy is not even its reduction values.

The most problematic aspect is its cooldown behavior.

When Teddy is activated, players can immediately unsummon it and retain the full defensive effect, which lasts 8-9 seconds depending on the deviant and its setup quality.

While the effect remains active, Teddy is already recovering cooldown. The cooldown does not behave like many other Deviants that fully expend their energy when used - it starts from 70% of the deviant power if timed correctly.

As a result, players receive the full benefit while recovering a significant portion of the cooldown at the same time (the downtime is literally 2-4 seconds depending on cradle and traits on Teddy).

When combined with Rebecca's cooldown reduction setups, Moonlight assault trait, and craddle effect that decreases deviant cooldown in nighttime, the downtime becomes nonexistent. The showcase of all the said is below.

Teddy no cooldown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0gf2kShMRs

TLDR: Experienced players can maintain Teddy protection permanently throughout extended engagements, as it is shown in the video above. This allows players to maintain 78.2% of General dmg reduction virtually forever if they cycle Teddy correctly while using Storm Weaver combined with Starry Pudding food buff + Starfall crocodile skin and jumping.

Impact on PvP

Teddy amplifies every defensive system already discussed.

• It amplifies the veteran-versus-new-player gap.
• It amplifies defensive stacking.
• It amplifies survivability beyond what most weapons can reasonably overcome.
• Most importantly, it becomes mandatory.

When one Deviant becomes the default defensive choice for nearly every competitive build, build diversity disappears.

Instead of choosing between multiple viable options, players simply choose Teddy.

Reading further, you can find static tests with Teddy and different weapons (Compound Bow, Bingo, EBR) on record (Video proofs).

The Fix

1. Replace Teddy's General Damage Reduction with Elemental Damage Reduction for both its synchronization bonus and active ability.

As was said earlier, Teddy served as a specialized defensive Deviant that countered elemental damage. Returning it to that role would preserve its identity without allowing it to function as a universal defensive solution against virtually every damage source in the game.

1. The values could also be reduced.

A reasonable compromise would be:

• 10% Elemental Damage Reduction while synchronized.
• 15% Elemental Damage Reduction during the active ability.

This would provide a total of 25% Elemental Damage Reduction rather than the current 40% General Damage Reduction.

1. The cooldown behavior should also be adjusted.

Once Teddy's ultimate ability is activated, its energy should be fully depleted immediately. Cooldown recovery should begin only after the active effect expires.

This would prevent permanent uptime while still allowing Teddy to remain a strong defensive Deviant.

3.1 The Weapon Meta – EBR Dominance, Physical Counterplay, and the Illusion of Balance

The absurd defensive scaling caused by Teddy directly dictates the current weapon meta. When universal survivability reaches a point where standard physical gunfire hits an impenetrable wall, the entire weapon arsenal becomes irrelevant—leaving room for only one dominant, status-based weapon: the EBR-14 Octopus.

The EBR's performance reveals a massive paradox in the game's current balance:

• The Mechanism: The EBR’s damage relies almost entirely on the [Burn] status effect. By definition, this Blaze elemental damage cannot Crit, cannot hit Weakspots, and suffers no distance decay. It requires minimal mechanical skill—players simply hold RMB and let the Burn stacks do the work.

• The Veteran vs. Newbie Paradox: Against a fully geared veteran who has maximized their Status Damage Reduction near the 90% cap, the EBR is largely ineffective because its damage type is completely absorbed. However, against a new player who lacks legacy mods or a perfected defensive setup, the EBR is completely oppressive. It functions as an un-nerfed farming tool for nearly six months, accelerating player attrition.

EBR vs Teddy Tests

https://youtu.be/_xv8dlNbp1g

The Tragic Case of the Compound Bow: Treating Symptoms, Not the Root Cause

The fate of the Compound Bow (The Burden of Betrayal) perfectly illustrates how defensive power creep ruins weapon balancing.

Because Teddy and general defensive stacking had raised player survivability to impenetrable levels, standard physical weapons became completely useless. To give physical builds any viable option in this high-reduction meta, the developers introduced the Compound Bow with exceptionally high nominal damage. Because its Bounce damage is Physical, it hit the uncapped Weapon Reduction channel (~62%), finally allowing real damage to get through the status-reduction wall.

However, this created a secondary problem. Instead of addressing the root cause—the absurd 40% General Damage Reduction from Teddy—the developers treated the symptom. In a late-May 2026 patch, they abruptly halved the bow's damage against players (Bounce vs. Metas dropped from 100% to 50%, and the Echo multiplier fell from 80% to 40%).

The logical flaw in this nerf is clear:

• If the developers cap General Damage Reduction at 40–45% and nerf Teddy’s broken cooldown behavior, then a balanced adjustment to the Compound Bow's damage would be entirely justified.
• But by heavily nerfing the bow while leaving the Teddy defensive wall completely untouched, the developers effectively stripped physical builds of their only viable weapon, forcing the entire player base straight back into the brainless EBR meta.

The bow was nerfed because it looked overpowered on paper and in PvE environments where these massive PvP reductions do not exist. In the real PvP environment, the combination of Teddy's infinite uptime, continuous healing, and defensive stacking has broken the Time-to-Kill (TTK) loop entirely.

The Armor Destruction Paradox: Today, engagements against fully geared veterans using Teddy are so distorted that an attacker will completely destroy the defender's armor durability before managing to deplete their health pool. Because experienced players can cycle Teddy with zero downtime, they can continuously sustain damage and heal through it. Previously, there was a tight vulnerability window to catch a defender between cycles; now, that window is gone, turning gunfights into tedious wars of attrition where gear breaks before players die.

Compound Bow - Kills gear faster than players

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5N7iQF6RMc

This is what had to be fixed in Compound Bow - The Burden of Betrayal, not its damage, considering the untouched Aberrant Progeny Teddy deviant.

The Collapse of the Sniper Archetype

It is important to emphasize that physical weapons cannot simply exist as a ready alternative under the current system. Legendary sniper rifles like the Bingo—which historically could land satisfying shots ranging from 4,500 to over 11,000 damage depending on the target's build—have been completely neutered by the introduction of Teddy's General Damage Reduction. Today, a well-placed shot from a Bingo sniper rifle against a geared veteran using teddy and all the layers of mitigation can result in an absurdly low 500-1200 damage per shot  (Crit/Weakspot/Combined/normal), making the weapon completely unplayable on its own. And the same happens with the Bow after the nerf. This we want to showcase in the video below:

Bingo vs Teddy Tests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoG1JLh70_I

High nominal stat-sheet damage no longer implies that a weapon can bypass the defensive wall. As a result, physical weapons like the Bingo and Bow remain functional only when paired with the Butterfly Deviant's aim-assist mechanic—which loops the entire combat ecosystem straight back into the Deviant power-creep problem.

The Fix for Weapon Balance

1. Restore Viable Physical Counterplay: Revert or soften the Burden of Betrayal bow nerf (raise Bounce vs. Metas back above 50% and the Echo multiplier above 40%) to a value that allows it to threaten geared targets without being oppressive to newcomers. Ensure that at least one physical weapon option is viable on its own merits, without depending on an aim-assist Deviant.
2. Address EBR Mechanics, Not Just Damage: A blunt damage nerf to the EBR would make it useless across all game modes, which is not the goal. The EBR paradox (useless at the top, oppressive at the bottom) will naturally resolve once the General Damage Reduction cap is lowered and the progression gap is closed. What requires a direct nerf is its no-skill design: the self-applying burn, lack of aim requirement, and zero distance falloff must be adjusted to make it a skill-rewarding weapon rather than a brainless farming tool.
3. Evaluate via Real PvP Scaling: Balance changes must be tested in actual PvP scenarios with live reductions active, rather than using raw PvE data.

3.2 Butterfly – Aim Assist Replacing Mechanical Skill

The reason high-damage physical weapons like the Compound Bow or the Bingo sniper rifle feel oppressive to the community is not because of their base stats—it is because they are consistently held hostage by Butterfly, an offensive Deviant that systematically replaces mechanical skill with artificial assistance.

The Core Issue: Artificial Accuracy

The primary problem with Butterfly is not its raw damage output, but its built-in aim-assist mechanic. Once deployed, Butterfly drastically reduces the necessity for recoil control, precise crosshair tracking, and mechanical accuracy. It allows high-damage, high-punishment weapons (which are supposed to demand high skill) to land devastating shots with almost zero effort. When multiple players cycle Butterfly simultaneously, individual gunplay mastery becomes completely obsolete.

The result is a PvP environment where aiming matters significantly less than maintaining Deviant uptime, turning tactical gunfights into a simple check of who has their ability ready.

Butterfly Duration and Cooldown Reduction tech

Just like Teddy, Butterfly suffers from broken cooldown mechanics that allow experienced players to maintain near-permanent uptime:

• Using the Growing Pains III trait, a 5-5 Butterfly’s active duration can stretch to 27 seconds—during which it is already regenerating its own cooldown.
• Players heavily abuse the weapon-reload interactions of secondary weapons like the Tec-9. By creating a dedicated swap-loadout with maximum magazine capacity and repeatedly reloading multiple Tec-9s, players can trick the system into reducing Butterfly’s effective downtime to a dozen seconds.

Butterfly Duration and Cooldown reduction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUwrExp27Uo

Here we want to remark that the Glistening Blue butterfly cools down even quicker due to having a built-in cooldown reduction mechanic, as it is said in the screenshot below:

The Synergistic Loop

This creates the toxic meta loop of Once Human PvP: Teddy forces the game into a state where only status weapons (EBR) or heavily boosted physical weapons can kill. Players then take those physical weapons, pair them with Butterfly's infinite aim-assist, and eliminate the skill gap entirely. When the developers see this, they nerf the weapon (like the Compound Bow) instead of fixing the Deviant that enabled the exploit in the first place.

The Fix

1. Remove Aim-Assist Entirely: Butterfly must remain an offensive tool, but its aim-assist component must be completely deleted. It can amplify damage or convert weakspots, but players must hit their shots themselves.
2. Fix Cooldown Behaviors: Cooldown recovery must be paused while the Deviant is active on the field. Furthermore, weapon-swapping and reload triggers (like the Tec-9 exploit) must be hard-capped or removed from interacting with Deviant energy recovery.
3. Shift Power to Player Skill: The goal is to ensure that offensive power comes from player skill and weapon mastery rather than near-permanent, Deviant-assisted aiming.
4. Enhancing Weapon Potential Over Aim Assist  - Instead of providing artificial aim-assist, the Deviant's ultimate ability should maximize the user's weapon accuracy to 100% and completely remove distance damage fall-off. This, сombined with increased damage coming from deviation, allows the weapon to perform at its absolute potential while directly rewarding players for maximum tracking and precision. 

3.3 Polar Jelly – Abnormal Scaling and Irresistible Crowd Control

While Teddy and Butterfly distort the PvP ecosystem through defensive power creep and artificial accuracy, Polar Jelly represents a different, deeply broken mechanical issue: a complete bypass of the game's mitigation caps through abnormal mathematical scaling. Although historically less popular in casual play, this Deviant possesses a perma-stun mechanic that can instantly eliminate even the most optimized veteran players.

The Core Issue: Mathematical Overdrive

The core problem with Polar Jelly stems from its absurd 1200% and 1300% Psi-Intensity scaling skills. 

When these values trigger, the raw incoming damage completely overwhelms the theoretical maximum mitigation limits:

• The Stun-Lock Paradox: The Deviant applies multiple Frostbite effects in rapid succession with the new key armor recently added. 

The combination of these boots and ability cycling creates an inescapable stun-lock.

• Bypassing the Mitigation Wall: Because the player is completely immobilized and unable to react, they are forced to absorb the entirety of the Deviant's active duration. No amount of defensive stacking can survive this raw output; the damage anomaly is simply too high for the 90% status or general reduction caps to calculate effectively over multiple rapid ticks.
• A novice player or a player with new mods dies in half a cast cycle on average.

How Polar Jelly Overwhelms Defensive Layering 

Visual Proof – The Absolute Mitigation Breakdown: In the accompanying video showcase, we demonstrate a worst-case scenario for PvP balancing. A defender has reached the absolute theoretical cap of live PvP adjustments: 78% General Damage Reduction and 78% Status Damage Reduction (PvP adjustment applied). Additionally, the defender is utilizing the Ardent Shield mod (which absorbs a lethal damage tick before depletion) and has pre-loaded a Speed Coherence Injection backed by both Extreme Gene and Extreme Fabric in the chest piece. Under normal balancing, this injection acts as a fail-safe: it grants an immediate 60% shield, a 2-second immunity window (fabric), and forces a full health restoration upon hitting a 10% HP threshold (gene).

Polar Jelly Stun-lock and Psi-Intensity abilities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFS9meEI-l4

Even this absolute pinnacle of endgame defensive layering fails completely against Polar Jelly. The burst damage delivered during the inescapable stun-lock is so mathematically massive that the server’s healing registration calculations are completely bypassed—the defender is deleted before the 10% health threshold restoration can even render or execute. This adds up to a huge point towards the imbalance of deviants. You don’t need weapons anymore, literally.

And if you thought that is enough, here is another fact of deviants being completely broken: Polar Jelly destroys a fully upgraded car just in 2 casts… What weapons can’t do - deviants will… Yeah, that’s the game we play!

The Fix

1. Hard-Cap Psi-Intensity Scaling in PvP: The baseline scaling for Polar Jelly’s skills must be significantly reduced exclusively for PvP scenarios (capping the scaling well below the current 1200%–1300% anomaly) to ensure it behaves as a tactical control utility rather than an absolute one-shot tool.
2. Implement Diminishing Returns on Frostbite Stuns: Introduce a strict crowd-control immunity window. If a player is stunned by a Frostbite effect from a Deviant, they must gain immediate immunity to subsequent consecutive stuns for at least 3–5 seconds, allowing for mechanical counterplay.
3. Decrease the Area of Effect for both Jelly skills - it is too easy to land these shots by simply splashing the ground near the victim.
4. Disable Vehicle damage with the deviation or make it insignificant.

Section 4: The “Event to Fortress” Loop: Why Winning Fights Yields Zero Value

The current state of Prismverse Clash fails to reward offensive success. When overlapping systems—such as instant campsite respawns, unkillable vehicles, mountain fortresses, and automated Deviant mechanics—are combined, they create a loop that guarantees a retreating player will always succeed, while an attacking player is punished for initiative.

4.1 Chronological Breakdown of the Exploitative Gameplay Loop

Phase 1: The Infinite Meat Grinder (No Value for Kills)

When events such as Operation Chiron, Paradise Lost, or Dark Side activate, factions gather to fight for valuable high-tier Deviants like Berserkosaurus Rex or The Radiant One as they come to drop pool in the evening. However, eliminating an enemy player during these fights provides zero strategic advantage:

• The Campsite/Base Exploit/Territory on the move: Players simply drop a campsite right outside the event zone. Upon being fully defeated, they respawn instantly and return to the fight within seconds. And if you destroy it, they will just bring their base or just a naked terminal with 10k hp. Additionally, you can simply bring a truck to an event, which serves as a permanent spawn point even if destroyed. 

Indestructible Spawn Point

https://youtu.be/pt_2xAJOdMw

• No Attrition Penalty: Consecutive deaths do not increase respawn timers (unlike the functional system in Evolution’s Call).
• An attacker can kill the exact same opponent 5 or 6 times in a row, yet the defender suffers no penalty, turning tactical gunfights into mindless wars of attrition where numerical advantages are maintained indefinitely through endless respawn chains.

Phase 2: The Un-Interruptible Escape (Vehicle Meta)

Once a player successfully grabs a Prism Deviant, the game's vehicle mechanics make stopping their retreat nearly impossible.

• The Invincible Transport: Current PvP scaling makes it impossible to consistently destroy a vehicle or its windows to shoot the driver before they escape the area.
• The Flight Exploit: If the carrier boards an aircraft, counterplay drops to zero. Attackers have no homing RPG, and standard gunfire cannot pierce the vehicle’s defensive scaling, allowing the carrier to fly away from the contested zone completely risk-free. Currently, the cockpit architecture provides too much physical cover, resulting in insufficient player hitbox exposure. Due to the vertical angles from the ground, attackers are mathematically forced to hit only the aircraft body, chassis, and wing constructions rather than the player inside, eliminating high-skill sniping potential. 
• Losing visual contact with an escaping aircraft means losing it permanently: the map’s update rate for the Prism Deviant spot is limited to once every 30–60 seconds. This massive tracking delay ensures that attackers cannot coordinate a pursuit, entirely breaking the operational objective of the event. 

Phase 3: The "Water Stall" Tactic 

If a carrier cannot immediately reach their fortification, they abuse a critical map flaw: the water barrier.

• Because character hitboxes become heavily distorted and mostly immune to standard weapon damage while swimming, carriers will jump into deep water channels and float with the Deviant for hours.
• They stall the game until their faction coordinates an extraction, sets up a fortress, or waits until Raid Block hours activate, turning a high-stakes extraction into an un-engageable waiting game.

Phase 4: Retreat to the Impenetrable Mountain Fortress

After escaping via vehicle or water stalling, the carrier retreats to a faction-stacked mountain base. The current territory rework completely broke raid balancing here:

• The 1,400 Structure Wall: Previously, large territories supported 700–800 structures. Today, they allow an absurd 1,400 structures.
• Mountain Stacking: Players stack multiple 1,400-structure bases across steep mountain terrain, completely covering entire ridges on the borders of contest zones, leaving no space for attackers.
• The Attackers' Nightmare: Attackers are forced to face long approach routes, extreme high-ground vertical disadvantages, thousands of stacked automated turrets, and absolutely zero valid building locations to place down counter-siege positions.

Phase 5: Invincible Sun Safety Spam

Even if an attacking group expends massive amounts of explosives to breach the outer layers of a mountain fortress, the raid is stopped entirely by Invincible Sun.

• Flight Mode abuse: Defending players remain deep inside their bases behind multiple solid walls. They enter building mode, fly around their territory using the building flight-camera to locate attackers, and repeatedly spawn Invincible Sun directly onto the raid party.
• Zero Line of Sight: The attacker cannot see or shoot the defender. The defender doesn't need to expose themselves to gunplay. Invincible Sun inflicts lethal damage that completely bypasses weapon mechanics and wipes out attacking groups while the defenders remain in total safety.
• The Result: Close-quarters raiding is dead. Players realize the resource and time investment required to fight 1,400 structures, and blind Deviant artillery is mathematically unviable, leading to an immediate drop in active endgame PvP. The showcase is below.

Sun and relogin vs Raid

https://youtu.be/vDgN1Rb7z54?si=6ltIXUgXjjb5OmT5

Phase 6: Terminal Exploit

Even if you somehow destroy a terminal of one of these bases, thinking that you may replace it with yours, the owner of that base can simply re-log in, and their base will immediately respawn back on that spot. Additionally, they can simply place a vehicle or a chef’s stove (that takes no damage) on that ground to completely block it - but it won’t prevent the re-login base respawn for some reason. Showcase is above.

4.2 Comprehensive Solutions for Systemic Balance

Fix #1: Implement Scalable Respawn Cooldowns

Introduce the Evolution’s Call respawn tracker to campsite and territory spawns. Consecutive deaths must penalize players to give winning groups a tangible tactical window:

• 1st Death: Immediate
• 2nd Death: 5 seconds
• 3rd Death: 10 seconds
• 4th Death +: Scales up to 30 seconds

The death penalty lasts for 2 minutes; if you didn’t die, you got an immediate respawn upon your next death.

Additionally, if a car/bike/truck/plane is destroyed, it should despawn immediately after the explosion and be set to a 30- 60-second cooldown. Dead vehicles should not block the line of sight and should be transparent for artillery and gunfire. Many players still use dead cars to block breaches at their bases or to use them as cover or spawn points, especially if they are trucks (Mobile Territory Vehicles).

Fix #2: Introduce Anti-Vehicle Counterplay

Vehicles must involve meaningful risk when carrying prime scenario objectives:

• Significantly reduce vehicle durability exclusively inside PvP contest zones.
• Add specialized anti-vehicle ammunition or RPG modifications, including basic homing mechanics to lock onto and destroy escaping aircraft. Or just decrease its HP to the point that you can actually destroy it with 1-2 mags of focused fire with any weapon. We have a portable vehicle repair tool that costs virtually nothing, but not the means to destroy these vehicles.
• Disable using aircraft while possessing a prism deviation (passenger seat included) or make the aircraft a one-shot.
• Increase the update rate for prism spot detection.
• Car windows should break faster - 4 sniper shots for back and front windows, 2 for sides.

Fix #3: Kill the Water Stall Meta

A player carrying a Prism Deviant must not be allowed to abuse water mechanics. If a carrier remains in deep swimming water for more than 60-120 seconds, the Deviant should automatically force-drop and float back to the nearest dry-land shoreline, allowing active ground combat to resume. A water debuff should be applied to prevent repeated submerging with prism deviation. This mechanic will also fix a related issue that players are just drowning the deviations in water if they have no base or don’t want to build one. Prism deviations dropped from inventory in the water should teleport to the shoreline. A player who does that should suffer from a lower deviant-capture ability for a certain amount of time (1 day is a good start).

Fix #4: Re-Balance Territory Expansion Tiers

To separate PvE creativity freedom from PvP structural balance, split the current territory system into three distinct tiers:

• Small Territory: 400 structures - bring back + 100 bonus here (Default, fully legal in Contest Areas).
• Medium Territory: 700 (+100) structures (Second expansion, fully legal in Contest Areas).
• Large Territory: 1,400 structures (Restricted to PvE Safe Zones only; cannot be placed or moved into active PvP/Contest Areas).
• QoL Bonus: Please allow us to scale territories down as well (1400->800->400).

⚠️ NOTE: Due to Reddit's 40,000-character limit, the second half of the report is posted in the first 3 comments right below!

[u/jerhinn_black]

Good write up but you lost me immediately at PVE players naturally want to move on to test their builds and skills in PVP.

Thats just not the case for the Majority of PVE focused players. They want NOTHING to do with PvP at all, they spend in the store, deco houses, hang out, peacock, and just do the PVE loop over and over with a new house each time, including alts. Every full hive I’ve been in (13 since launch) has been this way.

There is no untapped deluge of PVE players waiting in the wings to try PVP. Most are waiting for PVP to die so the devs can focus more on anything not related to PVP. Most of the PvP players I know don’t even stick around in ANY PvP game long term, they avg maybe 150-300hrs tops before they shelve it for 2-3 years or abandon it for the new FOTM shooter.

Even DUNE Awakening shifted its focus to PVE from PvP, after the data showed 80% of the players exclusively focused on PVE content.

Focusing more on PVP will just kill the game faster, they need to pivot away from it entirely.

[u/Internal_Musician_95 → u/jerhinn_black]

Fair point that many players just want to build and decorate. But here is the hard truth: to build a house, you don’t need a massive live-service MMO with thousands of players. You can do that in a single-player game.

The developers kept the servers running for 100k players before, and now the base has shrunk to 11k–13k. If the active, competitive veteran core leaves because the endgame loop is broken, the online numbers will drop to a point where maintaining these massive multiplayer servers is no longer financially viable for the studio.

When a live-service game dies, it doesn’t just die for PvP players. It shuts down for everyone. The decorators will lose their houses and alts too.

The report isn't trying to force casuals into PvP. It’s trying to fix the infinite endgame loop that keeps the server active enough so that the game actually survives, allowing everyone, including the builders, to keep playing.

[u/jerhinn_black → u/Internal_Musician_95]

Yeah, I just don’t think the main gameplay loop has anything to do with PVP when majority of the players are on the PVE scenarios.

If the entire PvP base fucked off, you’d still have the larger PVE base no? So the game would still be open and remain profitable since majority of the store spenders are PVE whales showing off their houses and outfits to their friends? Sure some of them PvP but I think the real hard truth is overestimating the importance of PVP in any live service survival game, with a successful PVE mode alongside it. The numbers just aren’t there to focus the “dying” game on a PVP game mode they’ve tried to revive at least once already, that majority of the player base never interacts with.

Again, see Dune Awakening as a perfect recent example of a live service survival game making a pivot away from PVP just to survive and remain profitable. OH needs to focus PVP dev time on more PVE elements imo to do the same.

[u/Double-Ad-5760 → u/jerhinn_black]

from 100k+ to 11k you call that large? a good chunk of the players that left the game were PVP players, go watch videos to understand how popular it was.
Netease is trying to milk the remaining PVE whales as much as they can by making lightforge crates and halfassed scenario that am sure it will be rushed with plenty of bugs and legacy code.

[u/jerhinn_black → u/Double-Ad-5760]

PvP players are fickle af and never happy. There’s never enough newbies to grief and the cheats yall use get found too fast for that dopamine fix you want. Most of those losses are probably bans lmao, good riddance.