It may not be what you want to hear but if i had taken a long break and knew what the game is like now, i wouldn't come back.
The game is as buggy as ever if not possibly more and the new UI's are sincerely awful. Hit reg is completely a lottery and the current Meta is long range laser and gauss builds. Brawling is now very hard and rare.
The Grind is still far too long.
They have specialised and quirked some mechs to the hilt for narrow minded builds but this means that some mechs like the griffin for example seem completely gimped now (imo of course). While of course the inverse is true of some other mechs and they're complete annihilators.
The game is still a massive resource hog and is incapable of operating smoothly on low spec machines or laptops.
BUT, the mech artist (whatever he's called) for the most part is a genius a lot of the mechs look fantastic (still think the clan mechs walk and run animations and the king crab for that matter are nothing short of comical).
There is now a lot of variety in mechs and loadouts and this is the main reason i stick around.
Tournaments at the weekends are to be avoided as all the worst play-styles come out (looking at Lurm boats). and ELO and matchmaker is completely erratic, some matches are very close and exciting others are basically - why bother. Seemingly a lot of the latter at the moment. The Tukayyid event recently has sent a lot of my regular team mates packing, i didn't take part and i'm glad i didn't.
I should of quit by now but something's keeping me here even if the new mechlab is doing its hardest for me to finally put the final nail in.
Edited by mad kat, 12 June 2015 - 04:05 AM.