[2019] If this game is going to survive another year, the devs need to prioritize performance and polish before "competitive" content.

Not much more to say than what is in the title.

Everyone knows there are immense amounts of bugs in the game, lots of performance issues, even purchasing items sometimes gives you the wrong item. The most recent patch has added (some) content, but taken 5 steps back as far as performance and bugs go..

The dev team needs to prioritize making the game polished and enjoyable to play before they even think about competitive gameplay.

This patch is actually a bit worrisome, if this is the direction they intend to go. This patch was launched without any external testing (no test servers), and the majority of issues that were present and spoken about endlessly still exist or are worse now.

What did this new patch really give us? Backwards steps in performance and... 1 new boss that seems like a modder made it (no recolors of shrowd effect, etc....). I won't go into my grievances with Trials mode as far as the boss "design" goes, but the fact that they're already using leaderboards is a joke.

PHX Lab atm has a good base for a game that they are currently steering incorrectly. Whoever decided to launch a competitive gamemode with this amount of bugs, and then some of the new ones like the time-freezing and lower difficulty behemoth in trials (which completely ruins the point of the trials anyway, and makes it impossible for other players to get rewards due to things like a 0:08 second kill time), is out of their mind.

Polish the game first. Sure, people will get bored and leave to play something else. But they'll come back if you have a game that plays well, performs well, and isn't riddled with embarrassing bugs.

Let's be honest, the majority of the gaming community that tries this game (or hasn't tried it for these reasons) doesn't think it has any staying power whatsoever. There are huge amounts of comments like "It's decent enough for some fun before MH Iceborne" and "It looked fun but it's barely playable".

Seriously, focus on fixing the game first. Content second. Any of us that really enjoy the game already would much rather have a smooth platform to launch tons of content from than a broken foundation that is bound to sink under the weight of more broken content.

TL;DR: Focus on fixing the base game before you add competitive content. Make performance the priority, fix the bugs, invest in test servers. etc...