I’m gonna whine, because I feel like there have been 2 changes in the last few months that have made the game less fun for me, and they’re both connected.
1 - Arcane traitstones. They just don’t drop enough. I’ve got heaps of ideas for fun teams I’d like to try, but no way of ever getting enough traitstones to actually upgrade the troops to use them.
2 - Pay to win. Yeah, it’s getting to this stage, and it’s related to the traitstones. Since there’s no reasonable way to get the ones you want, you need to buy them. And they’re EXPENSIVE. $50 for the brown pack? That’s almost the cost of a AAA pc game title, not a microtransaction on a phone game. So those who DO buy those packs upgrade their legendary troops, and I have the extremely not-fun experience of trying to beat through Celestias or Gloom Leafs with full traits.
What’s the alternative? Save up glory and wait and hope that the traitstone combination will happen to be sold for glory that week? The one I’m looking for hasn’t come up yet. I’ll just keep waiting another week. Then when it finally happens, I hope the team I’m going to build around it works, or that a counter for it isn’t introduced the very next week, otherwise I’ve blown my glory load on something useless.
Just a minor rant. If my guild hadn’t increased the minimum trophy contributions, I’d definitely be playing less.
Just so it’s not a complete whine thread, I have several solutions:
1 - Unlimited refunds on troops so we can at least get our hard earned resources back and try new and interesting builds.
2 - Increase arcane traitstone drop-rate, both in chests and games (or reduce amount required to upgrade).
3 - Introduce a crafting system so we can make our own arcanes out of lesser versions.
4 - Lower the price of arcanes in the cash shop, or make them purchasable for gems.
I don’t expect this thread to get a lot of traction, but I feel better after writing it.
I’ve said the same things in days before 109 and again after. I completely agree. I also agree you won’t get much sympathy but I’m giving you at least one person that agrees. All I’m hoping is that the next update puts the fun back in the game. Cost of troop building is too high. The battles take twice as long for the most part. The AI can and does get 6, 7, 8 matches each turn to my one. All of this adds up to a lot less fun and a hell of a lot more grind.
The only thing keeping me in the game is the hope it will get better. Unfortunately I am one who has invested a lot of cash in the game for those stones and I hate the idea of walking away and wasting all that money. Not a nice position to be in after falling in love with this game.
Arcane Traitstones. God yes. They don’t drop enough. But it feels good when they do! I almost want to print screen it when it happens.
Pay to win. I am play-for-free (sorry devs). I am level 301 and there isn’t much around at the moment that beats my dragon team. Yes, it was a long road of tiny evolutions before I got it to where it is.
Yes, I struggled quite a few times.
I’m not able to drop $50 on a pack of resources that I probably won’t even use all of, and I have destroyed my ability to grind, so I just play the game.
I can buy several of each bundle. I bought 7 bunni’nogs. (That’s not exceptional, either. Many players would have bought many more.)
These days, I need every arcane traitstone they throw into the glory packs. It’s insane. No longer can I save my glory!
So… how do you get to this point? The place where I’m at, where you can afford things, and can feel like you’re playing and progressing?
Level your kingdoms. I got my kingdoms to 5, and the ones that tribute gold to 6, and my home to 7. Then one by one, I made them all 10.
Join a guild. Guilds give you keys, maps, souls, and masteries, and double your login gold bonus.
I log in as often as possible to collect my tributes. Hourly, where possible.
Get to rank 1 as soon as possible each and every week.
Now I’m working on making as many gold stars as possible.
Pretty much agree with @bluebehir on every point. Also play-for-free (sorry as well, devs ), with good stock of glory from the mentioned suggestions. (Bought 8 copies of the Sea Troll this week.)
In the mean time, until you’ve got plenty of glory at your disposal,
I will suggest those attempting to grind traitstones to work at fully traiting Dust Devil.
Matches last under a minute even with the enemy collecting 4+ gem matches.
Both @bluebehir and @Zelfore pretty much hit the nail on the head. I feel your pain on the traitstones but understand that this is the way the game is and just get on and make the best of it (but for love of god drop me that damn 4th swamp arcane for MERCY’s sake).
When we make these wonderful suggestions of crafting and trading lesser traits for harder to get one’s I think some people often forget this game needs cash spent on it to keep the servers running and wages paid. There always has to be something thats needed that can only be got with a lot of play to roundly encourage those with fatter wallets and less patience to pay. While those of us that freeload have to grind.
Look on the bright side - you are smarter than the AI. If they ever upgrade that, you will laugh at the times when you were complaining about enemy traits!
I’ve noticed a lot of games with similar in-game shop prices, and it does indeed perplex me.
It’s not solely the fact they ask for such high sums of money, but what they offer in exchange for it feels…sub-par.
One would assume that a company would instead market an array of small(Truly MIRCO) cost transactions in an attempt to get players to spend willingly under the impression it’s not so much. Which in turn could build upon itself after several “no big deal” purchases.
They have the 15 days of gems for $5, which is a jumping point.
It’s not like they need to stray away from big price points, but those that are dropping crazy amounts of cash into the game will do so even if the price markers are lower…in theory it would increase over-all profit from all types of players as you lower the bar of " That’s too expensive!" to “It’s only a small amount, why not?”.
I would imagine (and I am no expert) that they are following some tried and tested business model for this F2P game. Going by the numbers some cruncher somewhere would have worked out the best profit return options I am guessing.
Hmmm imaging an guessing in the same paragraph, yes I am 100% certain I don’t know
In order to argue that, you’d have to have a solid amount of examples of games to base the notion that very small transactions don’t tempt enough players to bite.
Even then, the bane of both arguments is it largely depends on the game play being addicting enough to lure players to the point they even consider to pay money let alone attempt to argue P2W topics.
A curious part of my mind is what demographics of people are spending $100-$1,000 of dollars on these rather simplistic small time games.
Are they bored socially awkward millionaire children?
Or the gambling addicts that don’t honestly have absurd amounts of cash-flow, but end up being unable to stop their spending habits?
I guess you could substitute anyone that can’t stay their hand from spending.
Whether it be a hobby of spending tons of money on their cars and the applications tied to them.
A smoker (Those pack are crazy expensive…add in some individuals go through 1 pack a day?)
Really the list goes on of those that either can’t help it or just don’t care and spend all their cash in one place.
That would be the most logical point of view trying to vision the type of person to buy $49.99 package deals for a rather simple game on a monthly basis.
Step #1 - introduce things at difficult-to-achieve levels.
Step #2 - based upon how well people are able to achieve those levels, adjust price / difficulty to match.
When dealing with in-game economies, it’s easy to adjust difficulty & price over time. But the deadly mistake is to introduce something that is too simple for many players to get quickly. So the smart play is always to err on the difficult & expensive side at first, to prevent that.
If you make things easy to get it lands on pay to win so micro transactions are set at high prices to prevent pay to win players. Rarily will someone pay for a 50$ pack to get a mythic card but will pay for a pack that lasts for 15 days for 5$.I guess you could say it is their way of controlling the fragile economy.
), with good stock of glory from the mentioned suggestions. (Bought 8 copies of the Sea Troll this week.)