This project is a total disaster in terms of game design and technical competence, and deserves to still have the 'early access' tag. There are two primary reasons for that.
tldr: game is fundamentally broken, devs don't play so don't understand why and how it's broken, playerbase is mostly consisting of 1000+ hour jaded players who openly use exploits and prole grief everyone, there's admin abuse, updates are random and change things that never needed to be changed. You should have played this game a year ago, in v14-15; right now, it's trash.
1. There is no design direction; updates are random and unfocused. Whatever a developer wants to be added, it will be, with no thought. Aztec death whistle? Yes. Why?
2. Developers don't play their own game, and thus, lack the perspective and experience of an actual player; they don't understand it. They don't craft the Aztec death whistle.
These two issues combined explain some of the stranger changes and features in updates that damaged the game, and brought it down to its current 60 a day average playercount. Some examples:
V16 reworked Dealernet (accessible from terminals, dealer/banker only) into Night Market (3 public stands accessible by anyone), removed banking in paystations, and removed paystations on half the shops on the new map. This has eliminated shopkeepers as a population subgroup. They stopped playing. V19b was almost entirely about reversing V16's disastrous changes.
V17a doubled anamnecyte gains across the board, without adjusting ANYTHING else for it. Neither economy, nor murder penalties, nor fate costs, nothing at all. The result was: rampant murder epidemic, extreme credit inflation making them worthless, and a rogue infestation that persisted until V19b. V18 went further into clown territory and even removed the social barrier to becoming rogue, so the entire update was characterized by them massacring everyone on surface 24/7.
Doubled anamnacytes lasted from V17a to V19b, from Oct 25th '25 to Jul 16th '26, almost a year. Anamnecytes are a currency used for changing your fate (character class), and your pay at a rate of 10 credits per anamnecyte.
V16 first put a barrier to theft, a delay to taking items. Theft was a huge problem before that, and there was no way to punish theives without losing anamnecytes for technically illegal murder. V18 allowed theft again, combat-flagging the thief. The problem with this is 99.9% of thieves are Proles, a zero anam fate; death is meaningless to them. They just come back and steal again. This was certainly not considered when theft system was being designed, because it assumes that the thief cares about his life; he does not, and any Prole main would know that, but no vellocet developer is a Prole player, or at all an aneurism player. However, what V18 had actually introuduced, was 'bandage tech': offer a bandage to your fellow Cortex/Scum member, and if they immediately take it (technically stealing the item), they are now legally killable by every single player on the server. And you would be at no loss for blasting them with a shotgun. Still a thing.
V19 introduced the Bazaar on Misery, which was meant to be a commercial zone, for dealers to trade with scum. Not a single mechanic was introducted to facilitate this behavior. Bazaar ended up as a camping spot for Cortex and nothing else. That update also drastically reduced the amount of scum stashes, which rendered the faction unplayable due to lack of arms and supplies; not a single server rot commenced in the entirety of V19.
V19a 'fixed' the loot issue by removing the 'one item per container per loot cycle' restriction; this resulted in, again, extreme item inflation. Before V19a, the actual formula for amount of items spawned was 4 items per player, but only one item per container. This was a brilliant system and the foundation of economic balance throughout all of aneurism's lifetime since its release. It evenly distributed item spawns everywhere - scarcity would only be felt with high playercounts before V19a. V19's loot problem was a mapping issue - Misery was unplayable for scum, but Nightmare - the old map - was fine, because it had many item stashes, specifically: 26 bins, 18 dumpsters and 30 scum stashes, totalling 74, which means item spawn rate capped out at mere 19 players. V19a would spawn 240 items at 60 players, randomly scattered across dumpsters OR scum stashes. Idk the exact spawn rate for V19b, but it made scum unplayable as they were in V19, again, through extreme item scarcity; this time this is not a mapping issue, but a foundational problem with loot distribution, a problem that is self-inflicted. The old loot system was a core feature of the game, and what made economy work in the past.
There are many other issues.
Thematic:
"A dystopian simulator where your choices shape a decaying city." Hunger? Nothing to Proles and Corpsmen. Cortex oppression? Mostly impacts other Cortex (search-teamkilling), nothing to the free Proles. What you will see instead is proles punching cops, then running around hoping they'd accidentally shoot nearby neutrals, or other Cortex. All at zero loss to the prole player. Game corrals you into maining Prole because it is the most privileged fate, free and inconspicuous. If you are an anamnecyte costing non-Cortex fate and committed aggression in sight of proles, they WILL attack and probably kill you, because it's free, so why not? And even Cortex are very often murdered by proles just because losing -5 to them is less than the 25 anamnacyte investment lost by the fent-leaning (disconnected) limitator.
Mechanical:
There's an absurd amount of exploits and tech enabled by poorly coded mechanics, well known by remaining playerbase. A lot was patched, much remains. Reconnection breaks many things like responsibility for bleed or activating IEDs. Reconnection disables your speed buffs. Standing on someone to force them to drop items they hold. Stealing rations in civil centers through walls. Free scum teamkilling. Buff duration reset. Air reset. Bleed clear. Vent limitation orders and server rots. Breaking sepsis. Free nailtrap teamkilling. Legal theft from pharmacilities and distilleries. Destroying neuros with nailtraps. Soda/gate/pot/ration factory suicide tech. Legal laundry theft. Valta zealots. Astral projection. Push tech. Underground proles. Limit farming. Corpsman exploits. Inflicting -10s through healing. Etc.
Managerial:
The community manager, who informs updates, sometimes appears on servers; but he doesn't engage in the game's systems; he never crafts, he spawns in guns, he doesn't grind anams, he consoles setfate ^ whatever; he is immune to griefing normal players are subject to, and because of that, he has no understanding of an actual player's perspective. He will spawn in a Rot Bomb in the first hour of server wipe, before a single wartime happened, not even aware that scum players don't ever craft them at all, as they're suboptimal; but again, he does not craft them, so he has no understanding of a player's considerations when selecting what explosive to spawn in. He does not know what 'underground laundry exit' means when called over radio, despite claiming 1200 hours on the game. He will spawn in a laundry table in underground, fill it with tons of drugs and LMGs, and when you kill him in darkness over it, he will use the admin panel to kill you, like a juvenile gmod darkrp admin would. Or if you interrupt his larp sessions on surface through murder, he will inflict full sepsis on you out of spite. Then he will continue larping as banker, in cafe he bought with spawned money, on lease with known griefers. It's a preference, but I had a better opinion on aneurism when it was an actual 'no rules, only mechanics' kind of experience.
Example: [url=https://medal.tv/games/aneurism-iv/clips/n6wISi03JQSNlErxj]
Also servers are dog trash, constant rubberbanding. Just terrible. Was better a year ago. It's expired.
