Scars of Honor Players Draw a Line on Mobile, Combat, and Tiny Races — May 29, 2026

If you wanted a neat, tidy snapshot of what Scars of Honor players care about right now, this chat wasn’t it. It was better. It was messy, opinionated, occasionally derailed by tacos and mountain biking, and full of the kind of arguments MMO communities always have when they can smell possibility in the air.

The big mood was simple enough: players are excited, but they’re also deeply suspicious of anything that smells like feature creep. Mobile support, cross-platform ambitions, action-combat envy, Linux compatibility, race wishlists — every thread eventually ran into the same wall. People want the game to be good more than they want it to be everywhere, for everyone, all at once.

Mobile Sounds Great Until You Say Botting Out Loud

The hottest argument of the day was mobile, and the pushback was immediate. Not because players think phones are inherently cursed, exactly, but because they’ve seen what happens when an MMO starts designing around the broadest possible device spread. One player summed up the more forgiving position neatly: releasing on mobile is fine if the design stays PC-first. That little condition did a lot of work.

The harsher camp didn’t even bother sugarcoating it. Mobile was described as a massive audience and, in the same breath, an “unnecessary can of worms.” The fear wasn’t just UI compromises or simplified systems. It was the ugly old MMO trio of RMT, botting, and malicious behavior, with several players arguing that a multi-platform launch would only multiply those problems. One person pointed out that mobile botting isn’t necessarily easier in itself — it’s just easier to scale, especially when someone can run a small army of clients off one machine.

That’s the thing about this debate: nobody was pretending the market isn’t huge. Players openly acknowledged that mobile is enormous in parts of Asia, Western Europe, and lower-GDP regions. The argument was whether chasing that audience now would kneecap the game before it has a chance to stand up. In this chat, the answer leaned heavily toward yes.

There was some room for a softer middle ground. A few people liked the idea of playing on PC at home and then hopping onto mobile during a commute or coffee break. Another user tried to turn the whole thing into a poll — PC, mobile, or both — which at least briefly gave the conversation the energy of a community referendum instead of a pre-launch panic spiral. Naturally, someone added a fourth option: put the game down, go outside, and get some vitamin D from “that yellow ball in the sky.”

That joke landed because it cut through a real tension. MMO players absolutely love convenience right up until convenience threatens the kind of game they actually want. And in this chat, convenience was losing.

The Community Would Rather Wait Less Than Dream Bigger

If mobile was the spark, scope was the bonfire. Several players made the same practical point from different angles: Scars of Honor is being built by an indie team, and indie teams do not get to hand-wave platform expansion like it’s a bullet point on a publisher slide.

One of the sharper comparisons came from outside the game entirely. If giants like Activision Blizzard and Microsoft still haven’t taken World of Warcraft to console, then cross-platform MMO development clearly isn’t some casual side quest. The implication was obvious: if the biggest companies in the genre treat that move carefully, why on earth should a smaller studio sprint into it?

The timeline anxiety was real, too. One player guessed that trying to launch cross-platform simultaneously could shove release all the way to 2030 or 2031, which prompted the kind of gallows humor MMO communities specialize in. Another replied that they’d be a mummy by then. Fair enough.

What mattered here wasn’t just platform preference. It was a broader community instinct that the studio’s resources should go into making one version work properly first. Launch the core game. Stabilize it. Then, years later, maybe revisit bigger platform ambitions. That’s not flashy, but it’s the kind of opinion you get from people who’ve watched too many online games drown in their own roadmap.

Players Want Better Combat — Just Not the Same Better

No MMO chat stays away from combat discourse for long, and this one definitely didn’t. The provocation was blunt: why can’t Scars of Honor have combat like Black Desert Online, Aion 2, or Lost Ark instead of what one frustrated player called “clunky” backwards evolution?

That complaint got plenty of resistance. Some of it was aesthetic. One player dismissed Aion 2’s style as little more than spamming a few buttons while combos play themselves. Another went even harder on the sensory overload, saying the flashy effects were headache-inducing enough to require meds and a nap. That’s not exactly a glowing endorsement of modern spectacle combat.

The interesting part is that this wasn’t just old-school tab-target loyalists yelling at action fans to get off their lawn. The conversation split into a few distinct camps.

The anti-flash crowd has a point

A handful of players weren’t arguing against responsiveness or impact. They were arguing against visual chaos. Motion blur got singled out for immediate exile, and there was a broader complaint that some modern combat systems become unreadable once larger group fights kick off. One player linked an eight-person clip as a warning shot: if things already look wild there, what happens when scale increases?

Others pushed back by noting that many games let you tone down effects in settings. But even that had limits. You can reduce brightness and visual clutter; you can’t magically remove every spin, lunge, and camera-whipping animation if that’s how the combat is built.

The ability-bar fight is really a depth fight

Another branch of the discussion zeroed in on skill counts. One side argued for full utility bars and more reactionary gameplay, saying larger toolkits create depth. The other side had no patience for bloated rotations, with WoW dragged in as an example of a game moving away from 30-plus-button excess.

That immediately triggered counterfire. For at least one player, having only five skills is a snooze, especially in PvP. They argued that macros and consolidation can clean up the interface without flattening the underlying complexity, and pointed to Final Fantasy XIV as a better model for PvE: a lighter baseline rotation, but plenty of reactive tools layered on top.

Someone even wandered into advanced macro theory, talking about modifier combinations, combat-state conditionals, cooldown tracking, and dynamic priority systems. Which is a very MMO-community way of saying: players will absolutely build their own cockpit if you give them enough buttons.

Tab-target still has defenders, and they sound pretty confident

Late in the chat, one player cut through the noise with a straightforward endorsement of Scars of Honor’s current direction. They prefer tab-target here, they think the game already does it well, and while combat still needs work, they don’t think a shift toward action combat fits.

That may be the most useful takeaway from the whole argument. The community doesn’t agree on what “good combat” looks like in the abstract. But there is a meaningful chunk of players who don’t want Scars of Honor chasing the latest action-MMO fashion just because other games are louder and shinier.

Faction Numbers, Broken Builds, and the Tiny Race Problem

Playtest chatter drifted in and out of the day’s bigger debates, but when it showed up, it was revealing. One player noted that Sacred Order having more players than Domination wasn’t exactly shocking — not when orcs aren’t available yet. Another answered with a simpler theory: humans are popular because people like ordinary races.

That little exchange says a lot about faction and race expectations. Players are already reading population trends through the lens of fantasy identity, and they’re already imagining how dramatically those numbers could shift once more monstrous options arrive.

Then came the race wishlist chaos. Someone floated community suggestions for tiny races like Halfelin and Kobold. The rejection was immediate and absolute from one corner: “We absolutely do not need any tiny races.” Naturally, goblins and gnomes were invoked in protest. MMO players can forgive a lot, but they will never stop fighting over who gets to be knee-high and annoying.

The playtest balance talk was even sharper. One player wondered how many of the 111,000 kills recorded during testing came from what they described as the “1 Shot Pally” and “Unlimited Range Ranger” builds, guessing those two accounted for roughly three quarters of the total. That’s not hard data so much as community-side exasperation, but it paints a clear picture of what stuck in people’s minds.

And then there was the bitter little joke that probably wasn’t entirely a joke: the missing playtest statistic should have been “200+ speedhackers not banned.” You can hear the weariness in that line. Players will tolerate imbalance for a while. They get much less charitable when cheating enters the room.

Linux Hope Sneaks In Through Proton

Buried among the louder arguments was one of the more practical platform conversations of the day: Linux support. A player asked whether the game would support Linux natively or via Proton/Wine, and the answer from the community was cautious but encouraging.

According to players in chat, Proton was working well during the last test, with one person specifically mentioning CachyOS. There was also a note that native Linux and Mac support had at least been planned for later down the road, though nobody claimed to have fresh official info.

That kicked off a brief but familiar operating-system sidebar. Linux got pitched as the escape hatch from bad Microsoft updates and a way to retain full ownership and control over your system. Another player, apparently new to the whole thing, got a quick explanation and came away convinced that Microsoft’s nonsense is, in fact, nonsense.

It was a small exchange, but it matters. MMO communities are full of players who will jump through compatibility hoops if they think a game is worth it. The fact that Proton reportedly worked at all is the kind of detail that can quietly win goodwill long before any official support matrix catches up.

General Chat Did What General Chat Does Best

Not every thread was about systems design and platform strategy, and honestly, thank God for that. The room kept swerving into the kind of off-topic banter that reminds you these communities are social spaces first and feedback engines second.

There was a brief detour into the success of 007 First Light, with players marveling at its first-day sales and joking that Crimson Desert might have a new sheriff in town. There was a side conversation about The Boys finale. Somebody posted clips. Somebody else complained about actor casting in the upcoming Supergirl movie. A work chat broke out about Austin job sites, trade skills, historical renovations, data centers, and whether coding is still the safe bet people think it is in the age of AI spending sprees.

Then the whole thing wandered into land development, woods getting cleared for subdivisions, Midwest acreage, and a quick plea to keep politics out of chat before it got too spicy. Classic general channel survival instinct.

The funniest stretch came when several players collectively decided there are so few MMOs worth playing that touching grass might be the move. That somehow evolved into taco-bar logistics, hiking, mountain biking on a bad knee, and a sincere invitation to go get tacos and see the Backrooms movie. If you’ve ever spent time in an MMO community between tests, you know this exact vibe: half restlessness, half digital picnic planning.

There was also a more human note near the end. One player asked if anyone wanted to play Vermintide II or Darktide, then admitted they were tired of playing co-op games alone and felt lonely. Another answered from the opposite end of the spectrum, saying they’re used to being a lone wolf in MMOs and only group when necessary. A third split the difference, saying solo play gets boring and they’d rather tackle content with a dedicated group.

That’s a tiny conversation, but it gets at something central to Scars of Honor and games like it. People don’t just argue about mechanics because they care about mechanics. They argue because they’re trying to picture the kind of social life the game will support.

The Real Theme Was Restraint

What stood out most in this chat wasn’t any single request. It was the community’s repeated instinct to say no — no to mobile-first compromises, no to runaway scope, no to chasing every action-combat trend, no to pretending anti-cheat problems are minor, and, for at least one very determined player, no to tiny races.

That kind of restraint can sound negative, but for an MMO in development, it’s probably healthy. Players aren’t asking Scars of Honor to be everything. They’re asking it to pick a lane and survive long enough to matter. In a genre littered with games that tried to do too much too soon, that’s not fear talking. That’s experience.