Alright, gunner update's here, game's not dead and whoop-dee-frickin-doo . I'm not going to join those who blindly cherish this update and would definitely like YOU, reading this, to put that unnecessary hype away and listen for a little bit. I'm not here to ruin your new favourite day, I'd just simply like to point out a few things. Yes, this is rant which tries to be more than just another rant. We'll see how it goes, eh?

149.

That is the number of recipes introduced (excluding that star1 one) in the latest patch accorind to the patch notes. That's awesome, right? Well, yes and...not quite. You see, it's nice to have a whole lot of new things to play with, new and old players alike can have a lot of genuine fun with these items. The problem is, that every single one of those recipes are indeed, Basil-locked.I've talked to every single NPC vendor in HoH, and couldn't find a piece of new equipment. This baffled me. Would those items really be only on the Basil item rotation?

Some of you may not know, but a long time ago there was no "Hall of Heroes". Every single recipe in the game was from the arcade, from Basil. Whether it was D4, D13 or D23, you were always looking out for those "sought-after" recipes to make a few cr profit and to possibly put a smile on someones face (other than yours of course, you got some crowns to be happy about). It was very inconvenient, oh yes, but it was...fun. This then changed to the current system with the introduction of missions, for better or worse. Most items were introduced in the HoH and in the supply depot, for convenience's sake. Boss-related and very few others remained Basil-only. So much for those who sold the other recipes I guess. Basil could sell any recipe in the game, so things became a little bit more chaotic: some recipes worth a fortune, some were unsellable. You could still make a lot of profit provided Basil had the items you were looking for.

But I'm not here to reminisce of the time gone. All I'm saying is: with the introduction of the new recipes, the chances of getting a certain weapons's (hell even just a certain weapon line's recipe for starters) recipe is incredibly, infuriatingly low. For those who're wondering: No, the number of recipes Basil offers is not increased. So yeah, it's painful to hunt those new toys down at the moment. I really wanted to get my hands on that Shadow Blitz, or even the Shadow/Freeze Magnus.

But this can be fixed, easily, like there's a number of ways to do so and I'm sure even you've thought of some already, reader. What truly frustrates me here, what caused me to break out in this massive rant is that they just released some gated content...again. They shamelessly just made the whole experience of getting these guns a tiresome, unnecessarily complicated, luck-based mess.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, there was almost nothing in the past 8 or so months that I couldn't do before in this game. Really unimpressed with the kat-armors, the scarab-hunt was a joke, all events basiclly repeated and that was it. I'm not blaming OOO for this, I accept that they might have problems. However, I do not accept their decisions. Every single time somekind of content comes out, there's always a catch. You need IDs, you need tickets, you need shadow keys, you need this, you need that. Yeah, nobody likes it when people just blaze through the content you so preciously created. But right now, there's nothing NEWthat you could DO with those guns. For Christ's sake, why lock them away with Basil? Why make their acquisition such a tedious experience? It's not like you haven't thought it would end up like this, with a clusterf*ck of recipes stuffed into Basil, I'm sure of that.

All I wanted to do was get a new gun and shoot some gremlins...and it's not like leveling items is not nerve-racking in itself.

But now I have to go through countless Basils to have a chance at getting one or two recipes needed. I could buy them from other players for a lot more sure, but you know, I'm more of a "do it yourself" kind of knight. So I ran, I ran through levels that I did for hundreds of times, faced off against monsters that I've slain God-knows how many of, completed puzzles (which never really challenged anyone) yet again just to have my hopes crushed by Basil. Again...and you know what I felt?

Nothing. Nothing at all. No fun or any sort of enjoyment, no motivation, not even anger... just emptiness... That made me realise what SK has become to me...it's just like a sweet shadow, a piece of memories I'm very fond of, a tiny bit of nostalgia, a remarkable thing of my past which I can't go back to however hard I try.

So thanks for reading this if you did, draw your own consequences and ready your pitchforks if you may. I will listen to what you've got to say.

Edit: Please keep discussion about the new update in the discussion thread here. Thanks!