I've been playing games for over 3 decades of my life both casually and competitively.

As much as I would love to see this game become more popular and be able to retain new players, I feel there are some major detractors preventing the game from being seriously competitive.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a Plarium hater and play Mech Arena, which I thoroughly enjoy from a competitive balance perspective (the common and uncommon mechs are actually playable late game),  I feel RAID is far off from being anywhere near as good.

Lets start with the basics:

1. Legal compliance issues around loot chance mechanics. This is actually a big one, games are required to provide statistics around the chances. Yes you get an indicator for getting legendaries from a sacred shard, but you do not get the odds for a specific legendary. Same with artifact upgrades. This actually breaches Apple's terms and conditions for app vendors as well as general laws in any states and jurisdictions.
2. Extremely poor balance between uncommon, common, rare, epic and legendary heroes - even heroes in general. Competitive games strive for balance, even card games like MTG Arena strive to keep the meta balanced by banning cards and introducing new cards to counter established meta.

Now lets go over some specific changes made recently:

1. Empowerment system strictly supports pay to win players and cannot be used with other rarity champions. This feature is geared towards making money off players that constitute less than 1% of the player base.
2. Dupe System : there is no real mechanism in place to ensure competitive players obtain at least 1 copy of meta defining champions (which should actually be nerfed to ensure balance is maintained).

I can go over more points but will leave it to other community members to add to the list.

What Mech Arena does right compared to RAID: 

1. Provide percentage chance for every loot box outcome, this meets legal compliance.
2. Once you acrue a mech or weapon it is unique and you can't use the same weapon/mech in your other battle slots. RAID can learn something in this space.
3. High element of player skill determining success of battle, rather than player spending power.

I will be winding down the amount I spend in RAID and may even cancel my subscription, but as a whole I am very disappointed in the development choices as of late and feel that 2022 may be a turning point in the revenue growth due to greed outweighing playability.