Even more insane if they actually enforced specific loadouts in different tiers of the Arcade to get a better perspective of how players at different power levels can deal with spiked monsters

Like, wow, I'm surprised, all the players on the test server running with triple UVs on all their 5 star armor and weapons had no problem with Tier 1 arcade? Must be balanced lol, just release it, no further testing needed

What's that? The fresh install in Proto gear is getting farmed by a Spiked Mecha knight gang and they just lost all their Sparks of Life? If only we had some way of predicting this

Wasn't surprised that this event would be buns based on the player feedback and I knew GH wasn't going to listen to the majority of complaints. Attack speed and movement speed to certain enemies are so overtuned that even if one has lightning fast reflexes it wouldn't be quick enough due to the small delay input from shielding or moving around. You would need to be absolutely pixel perfect to block an attack something at you in a microsecond. The spike requirements are quite a lot given that a casual player wouldn't be able to get the 5* during this event, but at least it gives some incentive to play arcade more so that's a plus I guess. Other than that energy market very low atm which is fine for energy but sucks for crowns; also given spikes on AH are selling like hotcakes except with how predictable human nature can be, greed and profit will be the main priority.

(Hey though at least you can get fire crystals by trading with spikes instead of energy, that's great! :D)

I didn't take part in the test server since why would I if they're not going to listen, and I play other games if anything that have better dev support than here. The server issues I can say are due to people exploiting the danger rooms for infinite enemy respawns for higher spike drops and hopefully that gets fixed. While that should lead to an increase in spikes sold around, again, human nature. Same way as how the current ultra-wealthy are hoarding most of the world's wealth lol.

Also not surprised a few people already have the 5* gun and I told my Discord server that there's going to be maybe ten or more overall that would have it done and maxed out with very high UVs by the start of the weekend, and I was right. I saw one (not going to name them) say they did it while having a job but that's not the case. The spikes are tradeable and one can run alts in the game to make the grind much less, therefore they bought spikes in bulk without running the levels and/or used alts to get spikes faster. The people I seen have the 5* are either the regular merchants or vets that played the game for a while that have a ton of energy/crowns, or those that spend tons of money into the game. A casual player would probably not do any of that.

I don't see it as FOMO since there's no actual new content. What I mean by that is no new missions that continue the main story, no new boss(es) that we can face off, or no new arcade levels that are completely different from the ones we normally see. I'm already over it because it's been years since we had the last content update. The gun itself also reduces the skill gap much more since people are going to rely on it more compared to other weapons; same way with the mixer/orbitgun. Highly sought after because they're the 'easy mode' weapons. You can say brandishes are as well in terms of the charge, but that isn't consistent compared to regular shots from diskguns that cover an arc area. With the slicer line now there's one that can cover all enemies not weak to elemental damage, and has STUN chance. Pair that with anyone having a mixer/orbitgun and you literally have the other damage resistance types covered with CC (mandolin/mixer)/DOT (orbitgun) statuses and an offensive play from a distance without having to think much on defense because almost all enemies won't be able to reach you.

Anyway event had a bad rollout and game is unplayable for some due to server issues. Quick fix is restarting it but it's only temporary until GH can patch it. People see this as 'AH MAH GAHD NEW CONTENT THANKS GH YOU'RE THE BEST PLZ MARRY ME!'... when it's not new content. It's just adding a buff element to existing enemies that make them faster and stronger to make it seem like a souls-game where the approach failed hard. Also the new content is just a F2P gun that works similarly to the less than 1% obtainable ones. Nothing new aside from normal damage and stun. Also the event is limited so there's that too.

Tl;dr: Event released botched, servers potatomaxxing, no 'new' content, whales or people running alts already having the 5* two days after public release, my perspective that won't mean much of anything which is okay, that's it.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Tbh as a tester, I was expecting this patch to cook a little bit longer on the test server, up to a week after the last patch(to polish things up).
Because during testing. I keep focusing on stats on the mob with the provided level from the arcade. But after playing around on live. I think some mobs still have their stats overtuned and lightning fast (surprisingly Jelly cubes, quick silvers). Danger-room mobs also scaled poorly.
Not to mention the exploit which being brought up during the test feedback. But here we are.

"The speed, attack, and defense buffs that mobs drop no longer let you pick them up while you have a buff active which is bad, not sure this was an intentional change but definitely a bad change."

This is actually a quirk of normal mode, it has always been this way.