Every so now and again you see Reddit posts about “BAR’s community is toxic” and far less of the time you see someone saying “actually, they’re all very nice.” The real problem in my opinion is that the TA style games are outright hostile to new blood.

One of the first lobbies I entered was called a “noob lobby.” The community has a broken stair here where they will call games “noob games” and then they actually don’t mean new players. So walking in to the server browser and assessing yourself as a new, low-skill player, and going i nto a lobby that linguistically invites other people who are bad at the game to come try it out–well, you already failed the first test. BAR uses a speial version of english.

My first “noob lobby” involved some Don character joining in and immediately voting to kick the newbies out of the game. When his bid failed, he would just wait for the game to start and quit. This happened multiple times–with players even telling people to get over themselves it’s a noob lobby–until people got tired of flapping that he was able to get a “boss vote,” lock down the room to high level players only and kicked out all of the newbies. So the first round online was an experience in being actively excluded from a newbie room.

In the halcyon days of Skullgirls and Starcraft 2 access to failure was pretty cheap. You pretty much hit play and get thrown in to a box with someone more skilled than you, get ruined, repeat until the rank system lowers you to where you belong (or just keeps curbstomping you, in Skullgirlss case, because there weren’t enough low skill players and the gae would give up and pair you with a master level player anyway). The experience was hot garbage. But it was as much hot garbage as your tolerance for pain on a given day. If you sit there and take your 5,000 hours of curbstomps (somewhat exaggerated, but David Sirlin notes a broken stair of the FG and RTS genres is the sheer brutality of the onboarding experience) you can try out some things and get a little further or get stomped in a different way. Its a workable process where you drive yourself to the limits of your pain tolerance.

BAR, however, doesn’t have that ability. Lobbies are locked to “chevrons,” meaning you can’t play unless you have so many hours registered to an account. Spectation gives half credit. So the new player experience is “don’t play the game for sixty hours first.” This is on top of TA style games usual failure to communicate their mechanics to anyone. It has been pretty much the standing policy of TA game players to “just go on YouTube and watch a few hundred hours of replays before playing.” Which is not generally a sane standard even by RTS. Fighting Game players–as much salt as I have for them–do not think that you should watch a hundred hours of replays before you pick up the stick. They’re adamant about their “learn combos” and are generally unhelpful, also unwelcoming people, but those games tend to demand clarity. There is a lab mode right there for you to spend your hundreds of hours reiting the same combo in to. Itsa a tedious experience, but its a tedious experience spent actually actioning within the game.

RTS tend to have a tutorial or some kind of campaign as an onboarding mechanimsm. TA games tend to skip that part. Despite having relatively simple economics of “there are two resources and they work like operational expenses instead of capital expenses,” the games continuously absolutely fail to communicate how simple it is to everyone. The amount of times a caster has to explain this sentence is truly ridiculous. So, yeah. The first thing you do in BAR is sit and wait.

There is also an “OpenSkill” lock on rooms. Once you sit out your 60 hours in the penalty box you get to find a room where you can actually sit and play. Twenty is the starting value and often set as the lock for newbie rooms. So if you are in two or three winning games with high level players–which I was–you aare now locked out of the low chevron rooms. Back to the penalty box to sit and wait.

This is on top of the usual RTS brutality, the extremely heavy snowball effect in the BAR economy, and metas being alost strict mandates on the two most popular maps. Those are bad enough before adding the fact that about half the time you are just waiting to fall in to a category that actually lets you make the attempt and fail.

Its a truly uninspired start, and it makes me sad because the Total Annihilation lineage could do so much better for itself.