it's not what it used to be.

the main economic, energetic and communal domain of the game is essentially merely a skinloader for sexaddicted arab oil-sheiks, beady-eyed and dopamine-crazed streamers soyja(c)king-off on video while wasting young people's youth, an offshore bank account for marketclicking chinese hyperautists minmaxing capital gains to the yen, r-selected hypothyroid cheaters with an inferiority-complex, jaded americans, rabid turks, cracked-out russians and doomergloomed europeans waiting for the end that never comes.

the menus are unintuitive, the interfaces without character.
the game—unsatisfying, lifeless, bland, artificial and full of rules.
there's no grittiness. nothing is out of place.
there is no reason to go outside the ever-so shrinking meta. there are normal choices, and bad choices. normal guns, bad guns. nothing is annoying, nothing is inconvenient, giddy or scatterbrained. nothing is fun, worthwhile, or particularly rewarding. the game is like a walk from the cubicle to the pod—ordinary, regular, sane, like the perfect SSRI, a gamedevs prozac dream.

no wacky guns for funky occasions, no earrape negev, no weird but beautiful and charming maps, no lining up totally demented but skillbased wallbangs, no fast movements, no enemy team voicechat during half-time. nothing is offensive. no blasphemy, no casualties to adventure.

the space is becoming narrower and narrower, options and variability have been squeezed out like in a bureaucratic twist. the inherent craziness of the game has been taken out, it feels overly optimized in its base elements like gun mechanics and stats and maps, but it leaves no openness and play for those that want to exploit normalcy through creativity and spiritedness.

in their mission to make everything perfect for everybody and their promise to cater to community, threats, slowness and lifelessness of others, the edge and the impurity has been taken out and replaced with its arid and joyless counterpart.