Quarterpounders? Really? What's the deal with them?
walk speed too fast, walking QPs catch up with sprinting mercs and hit them, their damage is only slightly less than that of FPs, even more prone than FPs to do follow up attacks, no distinct raged state animations, annoying head/body HP ratio promoting spam shooting, tend to spawn in huge packs (up to 6), dilute the stats of big zed kills. It's the same issue at its core as with the FAMAS. Why develop distinct animaiton for their raged state? Why even develop a distinct monster? Let's just copy/paste FPs, reuse the same calm movements animations and ship it to production! A lazy and disrespectful design approach one should be ashamed of.
Seasonal zed skins were already there at that time too, so I don't know what you're smoking. But I do agree that they got old very fast.
Clowns -- summer 2017. Nutcrackers -- winter 2017/2018. Vampires -- autumn 2018, just like I said. And no official way to turn this freakshow off.
I also believe you are misguided by saying it's "casual gamer oriented" ... Not only is it a blatant lie that makes you look like a hypocrite (how can you blame casual gaming, and then complain about EDARs and Spawnrage?) , but casual gaming should REALLY stop being considered as a bad thing. Not every has the same gamer profile, and the "git gud" trope really needs to stop. A game doesn't have to be hard to be fun, although it should poses challenges that everyone should be able to overcome after a while : the time needed, the techniques used might differ. But it should be doable for everyone.
It should be obvious that some games are harder, some are easier. There's a spectrum. Some games are more hardcore than others. Not every gamer plays every game. Gamers find what's suitable for them. That's why games have difficulty settings and that's why most games are niche games that target specific audience. Historically, KF franchise has been a very skill oriented and very deep from the skill ceiling standpoint game. By design, it places this game into a hardcore bucket that targets the hardcore audience. I know that this game targets people like me, and I'm a tryhard, by the way it's designed. No surprise that I want the game to stay that way, because I enjoy it, because it was designed for people like me. And of course I absolutely hate everything that breaks this approach and I'm unapologetic about it.
And don't get me wrong : I do actually agree with you that KF2 got a few too many updates that brought a lot of technical problems AND blasted away the balance the game had between perks and skill trees. There ARE too many weapons. And tweaks, meaningful ones, are just non-existent at that point. But I feel like you're not blaming the right things.
Yes, they did. And may be I'm not always blaming the right things, nobody is perfect, but I don't enjoy EDARs and don't enjoy QPs and low quality design that ruins the initial higher quality standard of the game.
As for my initial comment : an updated game is a lively game. You may like it or not (I don't either! ) but the game would have died way sooner if they stopped updating the game in 2018. Here, even if it's mostly to complain about the new additions, I do come back to the game every 2-3 months to see what's new, to complete the seasonal objectives, and goof around. Hardly the best bragging rights for Tripwire, sure. But at least we're still here. I would have probably moved on to other things if they stopped 3-4 years ago.
Well, I wouldn't. The KF community, for example, is roughly 10% of the KF2 community these days head count wise, but they still play it although the game didn't have any official updates for quite a while. I'd be happy if the same was true for KF2. I never enroll in betas, I never crave for new content, I never lifted my finger to go out of my way to complete a single achievement, I'm here to just pop heads and it annoys me when something (e.g. updates) ruin this experience.