Ooh, boy, I have a lot to write up about this.
When I first started playing, I initially did it on mobile. The game was free, there was quite more people, it was chaotic but fun finding out how to actually play. The web and PC versions were actually shit, because they were built on Flash at the time, instead of Unity like the mobile version, so I stuck with the latter for a while, but I did buy it on Steam eventually for ease of convenience.
At some point later in the timeline, the botting incident happened. Simply put, it was impossible for the devs to manage the huge amount of racist and troll bots, so they had the game become paid for their last resort. This worked, but everyone agrees that it dramatically slowed any possible future growth of it.
And also, with Adobe dropping support for Flash and everything, the devs had to hurry and develop an actual Unity version of the game for Web/PC to replace that outdated, ugly engine. But as a consequence, the game stopped updating content.
So the game was in a stalemate for about 2 years. I never got into ranked myself but I'm aware that there was a particular meta that made the town faction really strong if the RNG blessed you with retributionist.
Ok, too much lore. But where was I at the time?
At some point of 2019, I was mindlessly playing the game on and off, trying my best to get some of the miscellaneous achievements on public games. Some of them are really hard to pull off, and not really because of skill, so I felt at the time that the 100% completion was going to be an impossible task.
Enter some random guy on a gaming Discord I was in, which drops a screenshot of their ToS completion. We all were dumbfounded. How is this even possible?
"Well, the truth is, you can get achievements on custom matches" they said.
And then the roar happened. I organized custom matches with some of the guys at the time, and did our best to get far ahead.
There were a couple of caveats to this:
-There were no private matches, actually. There was a single custom lobby for every server, and the english one usually had some random guy as a host trying to fill their 13-jesters room. So we had to switch to the spanish server to be sure no one would bother us (and in the rare case it happened, I could talk them out of it).
-Communication was complicated. We had to say our roles in advance to plan who to hang, who to kill, where to douse and hex, etc. with the limited time the game gave us.
-GRIND. The game has currently around 47 roles, I think (it was the same back then). And every role has their own "win 25 times" achievements. So by simple math you had to win more than a thousand goddamn times. Every match was, at most, 5 minutes, counting lobby joining, naming, finding out about roles, planning everything to finish by day 2 if possible... And you couldn't win every time, of course! Because sometimes you can't get the role you wanted to win on, and get stuck with an already completed one. It was better to refresh the game and log in back.
-Everyone got tired of organizing matches and matching free time, so I was left alone with a portuguese guy who wanted to complete the game at all costs. So I took it upon myself: bought the game 8 more times to create alt accounts (you can only start custom games with a minimum of 7 players, after all), installed it on my two phones, had 6 different game tabs open, bought the 3-scroll bundles a couple of times to get those so-desired Juggernaut scrolls, for a secret role that could only appear by an extra layer of RNG (the 'neutral killing' role) on Coven, and it was so fucking rare that it was better to spend those 8 dollars instead of losing your sanity. The portuguese guy was mostly AFK unless I told them to do something or they had to join a new lobby, so I was managing 6-8 accounts on my own.
And thus, after 330 hours across a whole year, we both could get all achievements.
What did I lose in consequence? I would never have the same patience for active grind achievements ever again. I was literally so happy to finally be done with this piece of shit.
I did not hate the game, though. With the Unity upgrade it looks modern! The game was, reiterating, plenty of fun to learn, and there probably are people still playing, if they aren't moving to Traitors on Salem, a new game by the devs.
But I cannot, in good faith, recommend this for those 80 thousand points on SteamHunters.
When I first started playing, I initially did it on mobile. The game was free, there was quite more people, it was chaotic but fun finding out how to actually play. The web and PC versions were actually shit, because they were built on Flash at the time, instead of Unity like the mobile version, so I stuck with the latter for a while, but I did buy it on Steam eventually for ease of convenience.
At some point later in the timeline, the botting incident happened. Simply put, it was impossible for the devs to manage the huge amount of racist and troll bots, so they had the game become paid for their last resort. This worked, but everyone agrees that it dramatically slowed any possible future growth of it.
And also, with Adobe dropping support for Flash and everything, the devs had to hurry and develop an actual Unity version of the game for Web/PC to replace that outdated, ugly engine. But as a consequence, the game stopped updating content.
So the game was in a stalemate for about 2 years. I never got into ranked myself but I'm aware that there was a particular meta that made the town faction really strong if the RNG blessed you with retributionist.
Ok, too much lore. But where was I at the time?
At some point of 2019, I was mindlessly playing the game on and off, trying my best to get some of the miscellaneous achievements on public games. Some of them are really hard to pull off, and not really because of skill, so I felt at the time that the 100% completion was going to be an impossible task.
Enter some random guy on a gaming Discord I was in, which drops a screenshot of their ToS completion. We all were dumbfounded. How is this even possible?
"Well, the truth is, you can get achievements on custom matches" they said.
And then the roar happened. I organized custom matches with some of the guys at the time, and did our best to get far ahead.
There were a couple of caveats to this:
-There were no private matches, actually. There was a single custom lobby for every server, and the english one usually had some random guy as a host trying to fill their 13-jesters room. So we had to switch to the spanish server to be sure no one would bother us (and in the rare case it happened, I could talk them out of it).
-Communication was complicated. We had to say our roles in advance to plan who to hang, who to kill, where to douse and hex, etc. with the limited time the game gave us.
-GRIND. The game has currently around 47 roles, I think (it was the same back then). And every role has their own "win 25 times" achievements. So by simple math you had to win more than a thousand goddamn times. Every match was, at most, 5 minutes, counting lobby joining, naming, finding out about roles, planning everything to finish by day 2 if possible... And you couldn't win every time, of course! Because sometimes you can't get the role you wanted to win on, and get stuck with an already completed one. It was better to refresh the game and log in back.
-Everyone got tired of organizing matches and matching free time, so I was left alone with a portuguese guy who wanted to complete the game at all costs. So I took it upon myself: bought the game 8 more times to create alt accounts (you can only start custom games with a minimum of 7 players, after all), installed it on my two phones, had 6 different game tabs open, bought the 3-scroll bundles a couple of times to get those so-desired Juggernaut scrolls, for a secret role that could only appear by an extra layer of RNG (the 'neutral killing' role) on Coven, and it was so fucking rare that it was better to spend those 8 dollars instead of losing your sanity. The portuguese guy was mostly AFK unless I told them to do something or they had to join a new lobby, so I was managing 6-8 accounts on my own.
And thus, after 330 hours across a whole year, we both could get all achievements.
What did I lose in consequence? I would never have the same patience for active grind achievements ever again. I was literally so happy to finally be done with this piece of shit.
I did not hate the game, though. With the Unity upgrade it looks modern! The game was, reiterating, plenty of fun to learn, and there probably are people still playing, if they aren't moving to Traitors on Salem, a new game by the devs.
But I cannot, in good faith, recommend this for those 80 thousand points on SteamHunters.
2 Comments
Thank you!
That new Salem game was released after this review, and it ended up being similar, with achievements for 25 wins per role and that stuff. Kind of unfortunate, but it seems the devs like those milestones.
That new Salem game was released after this review, and it ended up being similar, with achievements for 25 wins per role and that stuff. Kind of unfortunate, but it seems the devs like those milestones.
TheQuietGamer
2 years ago