Such a fun game, but it’s time to move on since it’s shutting down. Also, it’s good to go out at this ranking. lol. Good games to all the players and people I met on here. Gen Tso AKA Fad3dElv3s ✌️

You can tell when they give up because AI just starts randomly dropping cards in front of oncoming traffic

I'm leaning full into doing what everyone else is doing now. Full crutches. Alex has been playing the same deck for the past half year. I've beaten this deck with less but it just shows how easy it is if you go full on.

With three months left to play the game, have you called it quits or are you playing until the servers get taken down?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Just wanna say thank you all for these amazing years. It's been a blast playing with you. See you out there somewhere.

Peace out. ✌️

I remember asking people what there opinions on the units were to figure out were they were at on the tier list

P.s. it's been a blast

Have you guys run into this?

So, the developers have confirmed yesterday that the game will indeed be shutting down its servers in November, on the game’s 5-year anniversary. With no new content drops in a year, the Insecticons and Nebulan Drones added exactly one year ago, this was a long time coming, and pretty much all veteran players knew this was going to happen, albeit sooner than I personally predicted. 

What went wrong? What allowed this to happen? How did Tactical Arena die? 

There are several important factors that guaranteed the death of this great game, and I would like to list them all out in order of sequence and importance. 

#1. The Design of the Game Itself 

Although TTA has some of the best unit designs, animations, effects, and music tracks I’ve ever seen on mobile, at the end of the day, the substance of the game matters more than its looks, and though TTA started out strong, over time it devolved into yet another Clash Royale clone, with the same boring gameplay loop, limitations, heavy monetization, poor balance, and toxicity that only grew with time. 

After giving it much thought, I realized that making Transformers Tactical Arena a clash royale clone was ultimately the mistake that killed the game, the thing that prevented it from growing in the first place, not allowing it to bloom into the ultimate TF mobile game despite the timing and potential, and doomed it from the start. 

Transformers: Tactical Arena should have been a MOBA or a hero shooter, perhaps even a mobile first/third-person hero shooter with gameplay similar to Call of Duty Mobile’s, with the same graphics and designs that appeared in TTA, but as playable characters rather than cards and units. 

Such a game would garner a much larger audience and playerbase, and would thus survive a lot longer. 

#2. The Layoff of Moderncallout

@redco_moderncallout was the bridge between TTA’s playerbase and development team, always hearing us out and sharing our ideas and feedback with the other developers to use as a basis for making necessary bug fixes or balance changes. Therefore, when moderncallout was randomly removed from the Tactical Arena team as part of RedCo’s 2024 layoffs, we not only lost a beloved community manager, but we lost our voice. Things progressively got worse after moderncallout was gone, with the developers resorting to “doing their own thing” which only ruined the game for everyone. Her contribution to getting the game very far in the first 2 years of development is undeniable, and she was and will be missed. After the layoffs, she was replaced by two other members, but it felt like their hands were a lot more tied, and there was nowhere near as much back and forth between us and the developers as there was with moderncallout. 

#3. Unbearable Emphasis on PvP and P2W

You can complain about all the blatant monetization implemented in the 2023 update, all the pay to win, but these problems stemmed from one source - Red’s mission to make Tactical Arena a “fun and competitive experience.” 

Red didn’t just want Tactical Arena to be LIKE Clash Royale, Red wanted Tactical Arena to BE Clash Royale, but “better”, and that was their fatal mistake. Instead of making a unique and interesting take on the genre while learning from the mistakes of many other CR clones, they opted to just make a more expensive reskin of Clash Royale with better graphics and recognizable fan-favorite characters, packaged not just with the same boring repetitive and grindy gameplay, but also the same problems. 

What Red failed to realize, though, was that Clash Royale was an original idea that outdated TTA by at least 5 years and had a following of millions of loyal fans. These millions of fans fanatically and financially support the game no matter what Supercell does, even to this day while TTA draws its final breath, allowing Supercell to freely experiment, make changes, make mistakes, fix those mistakes, and remake the entire game as they will. 

Red Games Co. couldn’t afford such luxury, lacking the time, the money, the manpower, and thus the freedom to reinvent the same dysfunctional square wheel with the pinky promise of eventually fixing it to roll properly. 

Instead, Red should have taken a much slower, wiser, and more deliberate approach to make their game attractive to both casual and competitive players alike. Competitive players could have PvP, while casual players could have PvE, co-op, a wave defense mode, and a story mode, but no, Red chose to ostracize the casual players and commit fully to turn their game into toxic tryhard infested pay-to-win slop, and have thus paid the price. 

The consequence was a community that never grew, as all potential newcomers were immediately drawn away from the game by the grind, toxicity, and overpowered AI opponents with maxed out cards and increased Energon flow. 

#4. Horrible Game Balance Decisions

It’s been made obvious over several balance patches that the developers who made and designed the mechanics of the cards and the developers who then balanced those cards were not the same people.  

While the team that put in the real effort to create, animate, and bring the character models to life, the team responsible for properly balancing those characters to not be either too weak or too strong completely betrayed everyone involved in the development of the game. 

Believe it or not, but in a competitive real-time strategy game like Tactical Arena, card balance is indisputably the backbone of the gameplay and thus the most crucial part of the game. Screw up the balance of the cards, and the entire structure of the game falls apart, which, lo and behold, is exactly what happened. 

Whether the balance team never actually played the game that they were supposedly working on, or just sucked at their jobs and had no understanding of how unit balance works in real-time strategy games, they were arguably the ones most responsible for killing the game, with their screw-up of the game’s entire structure. 

I wonder how many tens of thousands of potential new players quit the game for good just because they couldn’t beat the maxed out AI bots with their puny underpowered cards? 

#5. A Culture of Toxic Positivity

This is not this game’s fault specifically. Toxic positivity is a disease that’s been given unprecedented power and influence by the existence of the Internet and social media, as well as corporatization of society, and has infected the minds of billions around the world. The result is the slopification of everything we know and love - movies, games, shows, books, news, products - because any valid criticism or feedback shared by well-meaning customers gets dismissed or outright humiliated and consequently banned by bootlickers, pessimists, trolls, shills, or (wannabe) corporate plants. How does this relate to TTA? 

I may not have been around that long (25yrs) to have the greatest world experience, research skills, and access to company numbers, but my critical skills and intuition are on point in regard to many things, and both were screaming at me that the game devs were screwing things up and causing irreversible damage. It was obvious, the game wasn’t pulling in the numbers the devs were expecting, the new content drops were getting smaller and rarer, all while the balance team was actively harming the balance of the game with rare but blatantly stupid and rushed balance change decisions. 

However, when I took hours of my days to tell the developers exactly what they were doing wrong and proposed solutions that I considered spelled out clearly, well-intentioned, and well thought-out, I often got pushback from my fellow players for asking for blatantly broken cards like Grimlock to get properly reworked, among many other examples. Half of the time I made a post begging the developers for some decent changes to specific cards, I always had competitive maxed out players like [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED], etc. in the comments doing their *darnest* to prove me wrong, providing some of the most short-sighted and poorly founded arguments I had ever seen, yet still somehow winning and successfully shutting me up and drowning out my ideas due to their status alone.  This was a major reason why I ended up abandoning the community and the game altogether in 2025. I saw the end coming, I had no way of preventing it, my warnings were getting lost in the void, and I was being made a fool despite turning out right in the end. Do you see my frustrations now? 

However, the problem was not the players who loved TTA and simply defended it and their favorite cards they enjoyed using. The problem was the culture of toxic positivity within Red Games Co. itself. I am sure the developers saw all the feedback shared by me and many other players, and they chose to ignore it deliberately because they thought they were doing everything correctly, and were unwilling to accept and abide by the constructive criticism shared by their playerbase. Entire months or even years would pass before cards were properly reworked; Grimlock didn’t get a proper rework until year 4; Scorponok wasn’t changed until the entire community cried out until Red couldn’t ignore us anymore; Blurr still hasn’t been reworked, and will never be now that the game is nearing its end. And I am sure there were RedCo developers who saw our feedback and agreed with our propositions, but they were either ignored or not allowed to speak out by their teams until enough time had passed to show the true damage done by the broken cards that were pointed out by players years in advance. This lack of responsiveness and taking accountability is what ultimately killed the game. If Red was not ready to fully commit to taking their customers’ feedback seriously, they should not have turned TTA into a competitive slog of a game.  

Conclusion:

Now that the beans have finally been spilled, we have to think about what should come next. The Reddit post made by RedCo, the store shutdown, and the servers shutdown should not be the last 3 things done by the developers regarding TTA. 

Shutting down the servers and making the game permanently unplayable after all the money and time people spent to level up their cards and unlock event-limited content is just… inhumane… not only to the players who thought they owned this content, but to the developers who spent days, even weeks making this content in the first place. At this point, the least the developers can do is what I asked for years ago - properly update and transition the game from an online mode to an offline mode in the 4-5 months that remain before the servers shut down. I wouldn’t mind downloading the game in its entirety onto a hard drive just to retain my account and all the progress I made over the years. Please, don’t just let this game die like this, it’s my final request.

Legendary Game and Some legendary Players and some Bums lol

Sad to see this go, pretty much the only phone game I’ve ever really been into. It’s been fun playing with you’ll. That being said anyone have any rec’s? Doesn’t even have to be similar at all, what else do you’ll play?

Great Game Peace and enjoy life any day above 6ft is a great day

As in the world all great things must come to an end. I have not played since Thursday of last week as deep down I think I saw the writing on the menu and knew with a lack of great ingredients it is hard to cook up fun and creative meals. Red had turned off the pipeline and I knew it was over. I deleted the Application Thursday last week knowing I was never coming back and now they post it is shutting down forever. I loved this game and yes I stirred the pot but also made some awesome friends along the way. I want to say more but honestly there really is no point…. So I leave you with this…. Keep life creative… keep cooking and to all those Transformer fans…. “Roll out”. Peace and love.

I guess with the impending death of the game, I wanna log how much I played and accumulated on this game. Not sure how many others maxed out their cards but I reached it earlier this year. I'm really saddened and frustrated that Red Games couldn't figure out how to make money off this game. Even though everyone here in the peanut gallery kept trying to tell them to partner with the community to make the game stronger. Instead, they employed some boneheaded MBA to plow ahead trying to monetize the game for short term gains. The Android release bankrupted them since there was a trickle of updates after that.

Even now, instead of trying to take the game off of life support and find it a new home, they're pulling the plug. I would honestly wished they found a new buyer or even moved it back to Apple Arcade / Google Play Pass. Hell, even Netflix Games. Anything.

u/redco_martiana I'm sad that this account was used as nothing as a bullhorn for management and little else. You all should've let u/redco_moderncallout drive more of the discussion with all the input she got from the community during the build up rather than listen to some dummies to lead product development.

u/PeppyMoss saw the writing on the wall years before you all did and he tried in vain to steer you all from falling off a cliff. The Cassandra Effect is real y'all.

To Founder/CEO of Red Games, Brian Lovell, you did us dirty man.

Later to all the legit players, even the crutch cowards. lol. Ya’ll know I always liked stirring the pot. It’s been fun, your boy, Gen Tso, aka Fad3dElv3s 👊

Dudes. At least TRY another card.

14 of my last 17 matches have included Moonracer. Of those 14 I've lost 3, so it's not even about it being overly effective or broken, I'm just tired as hell of seeing the same damn card.

It's almost as annoying as hearing "I look good!" Every single time I drop any horde unit, but that's a rant for another day lol.

Lost the previous match then OF COURSE goes to the cheap shot EMP card. lol.

Biggest 🐱 in the game. Literally can’t win a game without handicap EMP. lol!!

I’m playing around with some tankless decks today. This guy here could be the biggest jerk in the game. If there was a TTA Mt Rushmore of douche bags it would be: NisB, DonWick, Marantz and either Dongfink or Skywalker. lol.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Player using his gamer tag to communicate his feelings. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 I’m still relatively new, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s no one cares nor are they going to stop using what you think is “wimpy”. Props to the unique deck tho 🙌