Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-9713390-20130621174237/@comment-184.148.133.90-20130625180757

I think there's a few things going on, but the biggest one is that there isn't really an incentive to scan for bosses. I'm sitting in 60th place with about 400 cubes left to spend, but any time I scan I end up spending at least one cube. If I just sit and snipe, I spend no cubes. My points efficiency is clearly much higher that way, and I maybe get to save some cubes for next round. I don't see a whole lot of bosses, though, and half of them are low level scourges or gnaws.

If the game was adjusted so that first attack had a 50% chance of giving a cube, and last attack had a 50% chance of giving a cube (or some system like that, I'm not saying that's exactly the answer), I think there would be a lot more incentive to blend scanning and sniping, and help queues would be a lot more active across the board. Alternatively, if every boss gave out one cube to a random participant when it's defeated, there would be more incentive to poke bosses, and less incentive to wait and try to snipe.

Either way, I think the dearth of help requests is a natural consequence of the incentive structure that's in place, along with the simple fact that it's easy for some of us to keep the app open at work and snipe, but harder to devote the attention to actually scanning. There's already a natural discouragement from scanning there, so for the game to stay active requires some adjustment to the incentive structure.

I do try and scan around 50 bosses a day, just to be a good citizen - I largely use my free cubes and cubes from levelling to scan, doing one-cube on whatever shows up and offering a help request. That's obviously not really optimal play for the most part. But it should be.