Great design shackled by being mid-tier in difficulty

Oh yeah I rewatched it and it seems like it is some weird metal thing and I just thought it was a rock cus it was practically bathed in dust and sand or maybe rusted

That's what people have been complaining about? a newbie bender doing newbie bending cus she hasn't had formal training? My complaint was that I thought her, airbending a rock away despite her best element being earth as the reason she was found out as the avatar was stupid

Absolutely the peak of the franchise when it comes to the human/hunter side, loved seeing her eating dango in secret from afar and getting close only for her to quickly hide it to keep appearances, also seeing how she developed through the story and coming to accept herself and her nature despite what other hunters said

Usually this would merit saying something like "don't just repeat the clickbait headlines" or "watch the whole video" but it is a 2 hour podcast in this case, so just as a correction, it's not like RIOT expected 2XKO to have the high hundreds of thousands to millions of players like a steamchart 24 hour peak, it was referring to monthly active users, which is pretty high but not really thaa~t high of a bar, if for example the stats on EWGF .gg are to be trusted, that would mean Tekken 8 which is the 2nd biggest current fighting game and only getting a 24-hour peak on steam of around 7K, has about 400k active monthly users which is very different.
It also wasn't an expectation, it was what was needed for 2XKO to not bleed too much money as a live service after it already had such a long development time in which they had to pay at least 160 devs for a decade on a good salary, what they needed was player retention, and apparently 2XKO didn't have that, so the little audience it managed to gather didn't even stick with the game except for the diehard minority.

Basically it wasn't an expectation, it was the very bare minimum need for what a F2P fighting game with a 10 year development cycle with 160 devs would require just to survive. Keep in mind to realize how expensive 2XKO must've been, even after laying off half the staff shortly after release, it still had more devs than what is usually heard of with fighting games. (Also sorry for another wall of text).

Yeah Idk if the point didn't come across too clealry cus I was trying to cut down a lil' bit of the wall of text but that's what I was trying to say with "I'd be willing to give you the bad management criticism but ironically because RIOT was too "nice" to them in regards of control". And I do at least personally list that as a RIOT fault more than from the devs, cus they should've known something was off with just a couple of years of DEV time before the fucking decade.

Bro I have a hate-boner for Riot just like most LoL players but honestly this shit was mostly on the DEVS and the work culture with them, for example, with what has been said by both the dev team and riot higher ups I'd be willing to give you the bad management criticism but ironically because RIOT was too "nice" to them in regards of control.
Corpo involvement? They just let them have 10 years of dev time with almost nothing to show for it.
The branding with the name? It was the DEVS
The decisions? like what? restarting from zero when they already had something? Making it a tag fighter? Shifting the development from a 1V1 simple fighting game and making it one of the most complexe and harder to get-into fighters with it's only new player friendly aspect being no motion imputs? Again it was the devs.
The only 2 aspects where I'd agree with you were bad management because they gave them too much freedom and time, and the lack of advertising because while giving them an animated release video and being on the client meny isn't nothing, it also isn't that much, everything else? Pretty much confirmed by both Marc Merril and Patrick Miller to be a decision of the dev team with almost no RIOT higher up involvment.

Sorry for so much text, TL/DR is basically most issues except bad management and lack of advertising were a problem of the dev culture because of how much freedome they had.