Lately I've been playing on Riichi City, a shameless clone of Mahjong Soul with some tweaks to the systems, and, uh, rather more risque character designs. I wasn't crazy about this client when it first came out, but I signed up for a big tournament that's going to be using it, and that got me wondering how it was doing lately.
Once I played a round I started doing outrageously well, and since my results are so great yet suck so much on Tenhou and Soul, welp, I'm on Riichi City right now. Just hit 5dan and broke into the next-to-top lobby, where there are only about 20 other players at any given time. Can't imagine how empty the top lobby is.
The good: Significantly less grindy rank system than Soul with an actual Elo equivalent. The "quote" button next to emotes allows you to actually pop off with character voice lines during matches, and mine says "Oh-hohoho!"
The bad: Amateurish Live2D and emotes don't approach Soul Low player population gets rough when you move up the ranks
The ????: There's a difference between "gacha game horny" character design and "porn game horny" character design and City errs towards the latter
I suspect that by removing Elo ranks and making ranking up more about grinding than winning, Soul actually offered a balm to the stressed-out players of extremely hardcore mahjong clients like Tenhou and captured the casual riichi crowd just as the game's starting to get better known around the world. So bringing that back, but also having an "anime girls" client... I'm not sure if that mix works out for the developer.
We'll see if City sticks around, and I hope it does because it's the only online client I've got a good record on right now!
