I've played other pull and fuse collecting games, so when I starting RAID I noticed it had one feature that made it more interesting to me, the Factions. Other games have lots of legendaries and epics and in the end you only use a few of them. RAID's Faction Wars system makes it so you develop a team for each faction. The 15 Crypts make it so you actually have a use for 75 champions, in addition to the other aspects of the game. 

During the first few weeks I was levelling uncommons and ascending them. I was using every shard. I booked out the uncommons easily this way. When I got a rare that increased the strength of a faction, I made sure that was leveled up by the time their crypt opened up. And if I pulled an epic, it was a cause for celebration. My goal was to beat stage 7 in every crypt. I also spent a lot of time farming the dungeons for gear to power these teams.

It was fun. Even getting a new rare for a faction was a happy event. Getting an epic was really cool!

Then I started to read the guides. I stopped taking this faction approach and started thinking about farming xp for food champions. I spent weeks leveling in 12-3 to upgrade Ronda. Then I farmed more food in the hope of a new legendary which never dropped. That left me wondering if I should upgrade an epic or keep waiting. Last week I fielded opinions and was surpised to have two rares recommended because of the Clan Boss, of all things. I'd been doing the two clan boss keys every day, of course, but had no idea it was important. So I watched some YouTube videos and saw that it is because Clan Boss has the best drops. 

This led me to the belief that all my epics are "garbage". I got 2 more Sacred, 3 more Void, and 6 more Ancient shards over this time and every pull, I felt, was "garbage". All 3 new epics, nstead of being a cause of celebration, were huge disappointments. I can usually shrug off a bad pull with "well I am F2P and so it goes", but the various ratings systems had me thinking all my efforts were for naught.

And then someone told me not to pull except during a 2x event! Even to save up Mystery shards because I would need about 1600 of them for a fusion event. Here I had been saving up till 270 gems, buying 3 Ancient shards over and over, and using them immediately. This was how I was strengthening my factions. A 2x event happened, and I had not been stockpiling. That's why I was getting bad pulls, clearly. I was not being patient.

So now I'm faced with 2 options other than quitting: restart or repair. 

But there is a 3rd option and that is to go back to playing wrong. Think about it. If I play wrong again, I could look at those three new epics and see how they fit into their factions, maybe they will even be new leaders for their factions. And even though all my void pulls were rares, they might be better on their factions' teams simply because they are void affinity.

The right way to play seems like drudgery: weeks spent grinding and fusing focused on one champion at a time. I would rather be thinking about the 75 faction team members. The right way involves postponing the pulls instead of using them as you get them. To be honest, I do not believe the three voids I used the last few days would have had a better result during today's 2x void event. And I've found this with a sacred shard, too. The event was, IF you pull a legendary you'd get 2. Pfft... IF pigs could fly we'd have bacon wings, too. The future of this game, to me, looks miserable; full of ramped up expectations, unfulfillable wishes, and a constant sense of failure. So I'm not inclined to start over.

I think I am going to go back to playing wrong. I'll stop hoping for the moon and appreciate the hand I've been dealt. It's perfectly OK to have a different reason for playing. I like the artwork. I like the champions. I'm going to enjoy all of them and stop calling them "garbage". I'm going to waste gems on buying Ancient shards. I'm going to waste energy farming dungeons for gear. I'm going to measure my success by which crypt levels I can beat.

I hope in this way to bring back the sense of enjoyment that made me want to play this game in the first place. Thanks for reading this far. Thanks also for the advice. If your enjoyment comes from having the best Arena team and farming Clan Boss, that's great. For me it only brings a sense of failure and the belief that my account is full of useless trash.

That said, I'll go see what those 3 "garbage" epics really mean to my teams. :)