The small minded business approach to what (was) a fun game is sad.
This model is to force 3x as many ad views on us, nothing more. They must have enough churn and make enough off Hacks buying drivers that long time users are irrelevant. I've been playing just over a year and six months of it has been frustration with laggy swing meters, annoying kitten balls, et al and most recently this shot FX thing that causes me hit the chat while setting spin.
And about that churn? When I joined I bragged to friends I'd found a game where people were polite: it was so refreshing. Now I get cursed at a few times a session with ever more vile usernames and avatars being displayed all the time. The level of the conversation has dropped considerably. I realize this is from a guy named MadMan using a llama avatar. I can only think how much better the community was before my time. ;)
Rather than being mad about it I think I'll go dust off old games I paid for which were fully functional from the start and see how I can go about playing them again, even if I have to virtualize Windows to do so.
I thought I found a unicorn among the freemium shenanigans. Turned out to be a goat wearing a party hat with 'gobble gobble' turkey balls.
GG