Plazma burst is... something, pb2 today is unrecognizable from the pb2 that existed then/Back in 2015 we had BoZ, GeNo, YrN, Itami, Legends, etc. Now we only have YrN and even then we don't really play the game that much anymore. With the decline in skill based clans and ranked being less and less active and with the majority of the players that still play ranked being nobs it's much easier to rank up. I can gain enough sp to get me to 10th in a matter of hours if the time is right and there is more then 4 people in my sp range in the map. With PL dying out completely due to.... recent bans ranked in pb2 has become an age of the past and if you want to actually play pb2 for it's combat portion you have 2 options:
One: Play in custom deathmatch matches where you deal with annoying modified weapons where you are often in a slow motion based map
Two: make an ranked match wait 5-10 minutes for someone to join, you kill them once and then they leave.
Or if you are lucky you can find an active stryde-sniper match or max teabag's area 51 map. Even then you still contend with nobs and tryhards.
Ultimatly i'm a newgen i can't really speak for the past as i was not there but i have heard accounts and i can safely say that it was better back then, we may have better graphics, weapons and map building tools now but the game just isn't what it used to be. When flash died the game lost half it's regular players, i'm not even kidding we used to have 110 on daily now we're down to 56 and at night it's dead. even back in 2019 things were better than this and that was just a year ago.
that's for ranked, as for the custom area things aren't looking great either. Clan wise custom based clans were able to recruit more members than if they were skill based with application systems. For one in a custom based clan you will almost never see an application system in 2019 or 2020 all of them were short on members and desperately needed them. Clans like R!OT, UDPR, GTR and Dark clan managed to recruit in large numbers over time due to this, but this came at a cost, quality. What made clans like BoZ, YrN and GeNo survive for so long was due to them recruiting quality members that would stick with the clan, when you just say:
"Oh we don't care who gets in as long as they can type and shoot a gun"
it works in the short run less the long run. Me being a clan leader from experience recruitment was always a painful task and it would take in 2020 during peaks of activity at least 7-8 hours to get one recruit and he would usually leave after a day or two or go inactive.
Given that only two out of the four clans i mentioned earlier survived to this day holding on what little members they have left it's only a matter of time before those clans unfortunately perish
as for custom as a whole it's largely populated by guests which are often just players that wanna hide their account name for whatever the reason is.
So Eric, my message to you is: pb2 is dying i know you are working your ass off while contending with your real life working on this game but we need something to get hype up again before the game as a whole dies. I've always been optimistic but i can say for the rest of the community along with myself that we're kinda spent waiting for it. it's been several years now if you can atleast for us give us a range of when it will be released or spoil some new features that will come in the game to get hype up again that would be great.
Thank you - Canada777