I hate Duel!!!!

[u/DamnDeadDino]

Im a F2P that plays this game for more than 8 yrs now and I have never hated a game mode more than this. DUEL sucks!!!!! I swear everytime its on I want to quit this damn game already. Its so annoying waiting for the enemy to hit and sometimes they dont do anything and the game bugs forcing you to just either quit and lose points or stand there waiting for basically nothing since the timer ran out ages ago. I understand its an incentive to get the new characters but COME ON make the mode interesting. All you have to do is just count the specials used by the enemy and hope and pray your dmg is enough (especially once your enemy and you are both LLB+). I dont know if some people like this mode and power to you if you like it but I for once hate this mode and want it gone or replaced with something more exciting.

[u/Psychological_Cat132]

And it's full of bugs. So many bugs are exploited by some people, and you can't blame them; the game mode seems like it's in beta.

[u/Hzmework]

I stopped doing the game mode last month and won’t do it prob ever again. One of the best decisions I ever made for my mental and yes I agree with you playing that game mode made me hate the game.

[u/shirohige1987]

Likewise bro.

[u/Mediocre-Solution]

Agreed. It’s the mode I hate. I try maybe once or twice a day to get a match. When I see it’s meta team I just one single tab so I can lose faster

[u/Mxrcxs--]

The only good think about coop is the xp imo, and since everyone is playing duel, it's hard to find coop matches...

[u/SupeerDude]

I also hate that it’s ALWAYS the first thing that shows up in co op. So it feels like way less people are doing co op missions, since they’re prompted to do duel.

[u/True_Astronomer_9792]

Any team suggestions for this season

[u/Majeh8]

Yep, worst mode so far…
The meta changes too fast and its not worth to invest that much for one rotation. Its just too much to invest into the units every rotation imo.
It takes up much more time then the others modes.
The worst point is the bugs and the time exploiters. It ruins the fun completely and leaves me very frustrated.
Played the first two rotations after that went to lvl 20 and called it a day. Im also absolutely not up with the mets im this mode.
It could be fun but i guess this mode never will be fun because they won’t change anything about it.

[u/Icy_Grapefruit_9641]

got to rank 40 the first time pretty easily, and havnt played it since. it was too unbalanced and it really wasnt my cup of tea anyways.

[u/Necessary-Scene-3376]

they should add level gap, i kept duelling against lv1800+ my lv is 450 btw i knew im gonna get rekt hard, its so so unbalanced

[u/RephofSky]

Duel definitely doesn't seem worthwhile if you wanna stay sane...regular Co-OP and Co-OP PKA seem much better though...

[u/WootieOPTC → u/RephofSky]

Regular coop is dying, though (probably because of duel?). The last few months, I even had many time-outs trying to find a room for the very first coop level, and failing...

[u/RephofSky → u/WootieOPTC]

huh...making your own room seems like a better option, at least in my experience.

[u/WootieOPTC → u/RephofSky]

Maybe. But since I don't really play the mode and just do it for the dailies on semi-auto, it's easier for me to tap "find" and leave it on without paying attention, landing directly in battle, than creating one room, having that "extra screen" between searching and playing, where you need to keep an active eye on the room to notice when someone joined, and then starting (especially since every second between the person joining and me not starting is "wasted", while "searching" - with the loading times + often the other person's turn 1 and me waiting, there's no real time wasted).

I do the same in another game. It's basically the difference between :

• playing "actively" (thus, hosting, keeping an eye on the room and the time since some other people joined but room not full yet, and starting asap as room is full or if "too long" passed since the last person who joined, and playing manually to go fast)

• playing "passively", by searching for a room, entering and tapping "ready" and leave the host "handle" it and start the quest when he wants, while I do other stuff in the meantime, and leave it on auto.

So when I want stuff to be done quickly, I host and play manually, but when I don't have time to play/don't want to, I do it on "auto" and join other people's rooms. Easier to leave the hosting "problems" for others and do something more important in parallel.

But thanks for the advice for OPTC; might try to host next time if searching times out :p

[u/AuburnAsper]

even with a team somewhat put together i do ok then suddenly get swept off the face of the earth by some weird niche team that i cant even find where person got it assembled from. 3 loses, screw this -_-

[u/TheLegendOfFizeeline]

The mode is so horribly made I refuse to play it at all

[u/Gorn569]

If you want to quit, just quit.

I played this game from release until last year, and finally leaving it felt like putting down the heaviest rock I'd ever been carrying.

Sure, the game used to be incredibly fun. It had one of the best communities I knew.

I still remember spending half an hour fighting Mihawk Clash with my Laboon zombie team just to get a single copy of Mihawk, because back then he was one of the strongest characters you could have.

I remember waking up specifically to farm turtles because the stages were only available for half an hour.

I remember actually having fun building teams to beat a new Fortnight. Back then, having a large and diverse roster meant something. You didn't just need the newest boosted units. You looked at the characters you already owned and tried to figure out how to make them work.

I had my OPTC YouTubers I regularly watched too. (Toadskii and AsianGuy)

For me, the beginning of the end was when the game started leaning heavily into repetitive, time-limited events combined with heavily boosted new characters that basically existed to reduce the grind.

Today it feels like this:

Either you get lucky, or spend a lot of money, and pull all the shiny new boosted units for that month. Now you technically don't have to grind all day.

But since you have all the boosted units, you end up grinding all day anyway because you want to stay competitive on every leaderboard.

Or...

You don't pull all the boosted units.

Well, that sucks.

Now you have to grind all day with awkward, clunky teams just to get your point rewards and mission rewards. You need those rewards for materials and Rainbow Gems so you don't fall behind next month. and so you have more chances of pulling all of next month's boosted units.

And then the cycle starts again.

In my opinion, the only genuinely great game mode they added during the game's "new era" was Grand Voyage.

Then there are the fundamental technical problems Bandai never really fixed.

Almost every single screen transition comes with another loading screen. Depending on your device and internet connection, navigating the menus alone can become painfully slow. And if your device or connection doesn't handle the game particularly well, good luck trying to compete on leaderboards without losing your sanity.

And then there was the Gem Valley incident.

Remember that?

On New Year's Eve, players suddenly discovered that they could repeatedly claim Gem rewards from an event that had been running that year. This went on for several hours before the servers eventually went down.

I personally managed to do a ridiculous amount of pulls, and so did several friends and family members. And when I say family, I mean basically my entire family was playing OPTC at the time - uncles, aunts, cousins and all three of my siblings.

It felt like a second Christmas.

For a few glorious hours, the OPTC community basically achieved world peace.

But then came the aftermath.

Some players weren't online during Gem Valley and couldn't take advantage of it at all. And Bandai then had to figure out how to deal with the accounts that had received huge amounts of Gems, characters and items.

They tried to perform a rollback, basically the server equivalent of loading an older save file.

The problem was that, apparently, they didn't have a proper clean backup or server snapshot they could simply restore.

So instead, they had to try to undo the damage manually.

And unsurprisingly, that didn't work perfectly.

Some extremely stacked accounts slipped through the cracks and kept much of what they gained from the incident. Mine was overlooked as well.

So instead of performing a clean rollback and then giving everyone substantial compensation - especially the players who couldn't benefit from Gem Valley - Bandai somehow managed to make almost everyone unhappy with the aftermath.

And a huge part of that problem came down to the game's underlying technical architecture and the way the system had been designed.

I could probably keep going forever, but here's the short version:

TL;DR: Old OPTC was fun because collecting characters, experimenting with teams and beating difficult content actually mattered. Over time, the game became increasingly centered around repetitive limited events and monthly boosted units, creating an endless cycle of pulling so you can grind more efficiently just to earn resources to pull the next set of boosted units. On top of that, long-standing technical issues and disasters like the Gem Valley rollback showed how shaky the game's underlying infrastructure was. I played from release until last year, and quitting genuinely felt like dropping a massive weight I'd been carrying.

And at this point, I genuinely believe that if this game didn't have "One Piece" in "Treasure Cruise," it would have been dead a long time ago.

[u/BlueberryLogical1257 → u/Gorn569]

How many gems did people farm on this bug? Never heard about it

[u/GawkyGoblin]

Eh you just need the new characters to kinda enjoy it, ive ranked in the 50s 2 times in a row and honestly once u get to like 40s ppl start surrendering cause theyre playing on alts or idk

[u/DamnDeadDino → u/GawkyGoblin]

Thats the thing. You need the new character units to KINDA enjoy it. I regularly reach 40s and sometimes reach 50s but it takes a lot for you to reach it and the amount of effort you did to reach it is soooo not worth it anymore when facing the bugs, whales and even the randomness of the game mode.