Board Thread:Current Episode Discussion/@comment-9605025-20150212021259/@comment-9890645-20150220012613

Rsgeiger wrote: Seriously...why do you play the game if all it does is piss you off.

Im sorry to rant off here a bit, but cmon! This is at least something new. It isnt a deception campaign, or an autobot campaign, it is a unified campaign. It is introducing me to lore I havent heard of before. It has new art, and doesnt take itself so seriously.

As a open question to the board, what are you guys really looking for? I mean I can understand the bugs stopping real gameplay causing issues, but dissing the content because it isnt one character or another?

I just think there needs to be some balance to all of this negative crap; it is everywhere and it is getting annoying. I like the community here but sometimes I really dont know what would make some members happy.

Anyway, rant over. Feel free to troll me back since I put out a big chunk of bait out there. Just try to keep it polite.

PS - I try to imagine  the invisible jet as being a Wheeljack invention of a remote controlled firework that just happens to shoot rockets ;D -start rant-

As someone who gave Mobage/DeNA/whatever a metric fuckton of money over 1.5 years - somewhere on the order of US$5,000 - to finish in T1 28 times, I'll tell you what I expected.

I expected episodes that worked. Meaning, I expected them to actually playtest episodes on even a rudimentary level, which they pretty much admit they don't do. The game is as cookie cutter as you can get, having only had four different types of episodes (and never all four at once, if I recall correctly)... yet, it seems that their coders can't get one of them done right twice in a row on a regular basis. The tweaks to the episodes - for "competitive balance" - are often made capriciously and carelessly; recall how players were initially accused of "exploiting" the game during SS:Marcelo Matere (my last episode) when it was actually the development team overcompensating with BC payout on bosses. Then, consider how many episodes are simply resource sinks. Half of the time, PVP turns into a complete clusterfuck (have they ever solved the "ghost boss" problem?), where some weeks they can't even get it started right? Now, campaign has been a thing for a good 1.5+ years, and, this week, they botched THE ROCKET GUYS THAT ARE IN EVERY MISSION. They're flat out incompetent when it comes to coding (or hiring the coders).

I expected episodes that were worth playing. As an example, since the second campaign episode, Evolve cards have been dumbed down to the point of uselessness (except R6 Mitt Magnus, notably also the first of its kind). As they make the raider cards and prizes higher and higher rarity - and, thus, more resource-costly to max out - they've never managed to balance the whole "giving you enough resources to use your prizes" part of the equation out, especially given that two of the three existing episode types effectively require you to max your team with maxed-out raid cards, which cost more and more resources to max out as they raise raider "rarity." So you pull all these fancy raiders and win all these prizes, and then wonder how the heck you're going to get them to a usable point.

I expected prizes that were worth playing (and spending) for. The fact remains that you pretty much require raiders in TVT and "Advance Ops" campaign missions; your prizes, even from the previous week, don't take you very far. By the time I quit, the only thing my prizes did for me in Raid were get me a little farther than last raid before I was requiring raiders to be competitive. Prizes used to mean something in PVP episodes, when that was a thing, but it's not, so they've lost a fair amount of value.

I expected to not feel like I was a mindless ATM/slave. Part of the reason I quit (both times that happened) was that the game stopped being fun for me, what with the financial and time costs one must incur to be T1 and the belligerence and/or obfuscating stupidity often received from their customer "service" representatives.

There are three media franchises I love, in descending order - Transformers, Star Trek and Doctor Who. The latter two have mobile games; ST's is BO-RING and it's only reboot characters (no Picard... frowny faces), and DW's is Candy Crush with bells and whistles. If it wasn't for my involvement with TFR, I'd be back to playing puzzle games on my mobile devices and obsessing over tourney-level MtG (which I don't like doing as I would flip my shit when I had bad tourneys; I'm playing a wonky combo deck now, went 0-4/0-8 - no wins - two weeks ago and a store employee was impressed I wasn't flipping tables).

Why would I be back to simply playing mobile puzzle games? Because Mobage/DeNA has abused the Transformers franchise to the point where it has disgusted lifelong TF fans such as myself where I couldn't bring myself to continue playing that crap at all, ever. And it was only my deep love for the TF franchise - and the two great communities here and at United - that kept me playing for as long as I had been, because Mobage/DeNA has done nothing but repeatedly kicked all of us in the nuts week in and week out with its inability to run a simple game in a stable fashion.

-end rant-