Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-174.16.208.192-20130823185151

Hello everyone…

For what it’s worth, I wanted to re-evaluate my assessment for the current episode considering the introduction of the Rubies concept to episodes.



 1. Power Creeping / deck powers : The basic issue of the collection of long-standing decks is still there…along with obvious power creeping. Decks still hit a wall on overall power, and the value of top level cards still is much more limited than is generally understood. There’s seems to be no change to this issue. It could be solved by rotating an episode bonus on Elite cards as well as previous reward/raid cards. This was done about 4 months ago with putting a bonus on a “3” level card by Mobage in an episode. This idea just needs some expansion.

 2. The cheats/exploits:   As far as I see, they are still there and available to people, but have been somewhat lessened by how to space bridge now works and Mobage backing away from R5 raid cards. The package cube deals are still a major problem. Mobage could solve the cheating by taking out the package deals, and limiting how many times the space bridge can be run along with looking at space bridge transactions and banning people that are abusing how it works. More drastic fixes could be to eliminate the ranking system to de-couple people playing the game from having to compete against people cheating the Mobage coins system and having all rewards be points driven.

 3. Pay-to-Win: The game is still a strong pay-to-win at this point (if you want to get into the top tier). In putting in the rubies, they have dramatically scaled back an aspect of this issue in building a strong raid deck (removing the need for the paid space bridge for the deck), but they have, to a large level, transferred making a solid deck via money into buying battle cubes and potentially energon cubes. Credit where credit is due...rubies is a positive step. However…this issue could be eliminated totally by Mobage by limiting how many cubes can be bought – which at this point I can’t see happening without outside intervention (like Apple limiting how much can be spent in-game at some point). Chain buys should also be limited.

 4. The gambling aspect:   Massive change here. Likely a result of the Mobage legal team, Apple pressure, and the lawsuit in Japan. Every space bridge run how gives a value raid card. The rubies now gives Mobage a way to point to being able to get every raid card and be competitive without gambling money in the space bridge setup. Regardless of players feeling there were legal issues with this game or not…Mobage obviously has seen their vulnerability here due to the lawsuit in Japan and the customer feedback direct, and through Apple. At this point I’d say that this issue might be resolved, or close to it by the changes in the last ‘full’ episode and how the ‘chain’ episodes already work. The only suggestion that I could make would be to limit the bridge to only putting out one epp card a run, for 1 dollar each, and limit it to a set number of runs an account only (10 at most?).

 5. Price issue: This game has significantly decreased the price for a T1 run via the chain episodes, and the space bridge has been largely scaled back. I’m sure that Mobage is trying to spread the profits taken in on this game across a larger number of people instead of a heap on money taken in by only a small number of T1 players - which has driven the changes. I would propose that this be taken to a more fair conclusion however: limit how much can be spent in game every episode, and keep that cost down to something very reasonable. The price of playing this game at the T1 (or even T2 level for the most part) just doesn’t compare to other apps that can be bought still – even with the reduced prices.

 6. Game play issues: This game still is about the same as ever here...it’s a simple button masher. There’s very little in the way of intelligence in this game past putting together a card team. The mini-games are mindless, repetitive and boring. They need to introduce in some sort of card games or other sorts of games instead of shooting down missiles, simple “pick a card” games and killing the same old T3 cards over and over again. Stepping up the fun-factor of the mini-games would really give this game a lot more merit. The game relies on the paid-for ranking system far too much to generate the fun… (which is fun, sure, but in light of the paid-for aspect...is it not really still just a comparing of credit card bills?)



Comments? Did I miss anything new?



SSG1  