Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-9234979-20130702224508/@comment-9890645-20130703212453

Lower bosses will often die on the vine once the top-level bosses (now L8) come out to play.

The ally mechanic is part of the problem - it should only send out requests to people who have played recently (within the last hour or so), but it sends out requests completely at random, even amongst your allies.

Getting high level allies isn't easy. Many high-seeding players don't want many weak allies because then they'll need more help taking down those L8's when their 25% of ally requests all wind up on guys who will do less than 10m to the boss, and more so when their DP isn't absurdly high due to high spending. (I've top tiered twice and my highest DP was ~18K; even with that, I often needed to use 4 or more cubes to kill off an L8 I seeded.)

There is a reality to consider, as well, that paying players will slowly get fed up with the constant money grind that this game becomes. (We're seeing it now; this is the first event I haven't paid into.) The rate of dropout will eventually outpace the rate of entry of new spenders if the game's core doesn't change. This will make it harder on the guys who continue to spend, as they will have to pick up the brunt of the damage-dealing on a more consistent basis.

The biggest part of the problem is a necessary frugality with cubes. Cubes cost money and/or time to acquire, and each cube is worth anywhere from 200-67,000 xp, depending on what it's used on. Are you going to waste a cube on 7,900 points from a Beachcomber L1 when you can make 9x that spending it on a Bumblebee L8? If my safe 1-cube range on a Beachcomber is ~18 million (with 14k DP), I'm looking at that BC1 with 19m on it as a possible waste of a cube that could have had much more value had I just waited for an L8 to drop into my queue. This frugality leads people to wait for the snipe, which is more difficult with decreasing DP, and not "waste cubes," although that "wasting" could push a guy into someone else's snipe range. People (free and pay players alike) can't afford to take those risks when a later increase in value of cubes (more L8s being seeded later in an event) means unwise spending of cubes early in the event could cost them the tier they are playing for. Never mind the fear in the back of some players' heads that Mobage may start dropping X1's or some other new bosses and you just HAVE to have cubes saved for that.

And this is exactly as Mobage wants it; they want you to be in a position where you may just have to buy SOMETHING to achieve your goal, and if it's cubes that have no intrinsic value in game other than positioning you in a tier for an event that lasts a week or less, EVEN BETTER.

You CAN play for free - AFTER you've paid in already. I've finished second tier in three events and top tier in two and handed over a decent amount of money to Mobage for the privilege. I'll finish well in second tier this event without spending a dime on THIS event, but I already paid in for it by paying into previous events, and I'm aided in my quest by the network of strong allies I've built up over those events by proving my worth to them.