Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-10851814-20130628180025/@comment-11067648-20130703063614

76.28.194.86 wrote: it's only coming alive since all the high point stuff is out. it's plainly obvious this episode is dreadful overall.

4 million points is rank 330. at this stage last few episodes that would be like position 5000, lol. sure there are some folks paying it up and that's fine. however, that amount of people is WAY WAY WAY less this time, that's for sure.

mobage is just changing so much stuff so often to discern between paid decks and hard fought normal decks that WERE paid decks from prior episodes. they need to allow for some better effectiveness of full MTM decks going into the next episode.

they ARE going to need a credit sink very soon. with so many more players cube farming or just free cubing on the L8s (like I'm doing) we have more money than fort knox doing nothing. for the record I've been space bridging constantly and I have received ZERO R4s this episode. None. Mobage is definitely tweaking a lot of things to not even allow a chance card game to have any chance. It's worse than casino type of odds. They just want money and that doesn't even translate to FUN much anymore... I think there's some really simple things that can be done to improve the game for long term players. There is a short-term focus right now with episode cards becoming increasingly more powerful, no chance to get old episode cards once events end, etc etc. It's all short-termism for revenue growth here and now.

Some simple changes could help turn us into long term players with long term revenue benefits for Mobage to boot. Some of these ideas have already been voiced by others on this forum, I don't claim credit for them. But these 4 simple things would boost the game significantly.

1. A market for players to buy and sell cards from one another. A mechanism for direct trading of cards might get tricky, so just make it buy and sell using Mobacoins (which also promotes the use of Mobage's currency... are you listening Mobage). You can sell cards you don't want (R4s and above only?) for Mobacoins and then check the market for cards you do want and buy those. Make the prices a sliding scale on rarity and upgrade level of the card (ie. a lvl 65 card worth more than a lvl 1). Keep prices restrained - eg. 100 Mobacoins for a level 1 card, topping out at 300 Mobacoins for lvl 65. In this way, people can complete sets and MTM their episode cards.

2.  Add the past episode cards to the mix in the medal space bridges. So if you don't want to buy or sell a card, there is still a chance of pulling an episode card in a bridge (however slim those chances seemingly are). And, if you pull something you don't want you can always sell it in the market and someone who does want it can buy it.

3.  Make the Elite cards worth something. Someone had this idea on the forum and I think it is killer. Right now the Elite cards are pretty much useless. They are nearly all superseded by episode cards in terms of power. So how about aligning them to episodes by giving them episode bonuses - for example, during an event that features Starscream as an episode card, why not give the Elite Starscream card a 3x bonus for the duration of the episode too? Maybe not as high a bonus as the actual episode card - cause Mobage will want there to be a reason for players to get those by paying etc - but at least then those long term players who have got some Elite cards that never get used a chance to be rewarded for collecting them.

4.  Map out a coherent and credible plan for the future episode cards. Right now the cards are continually one-upping the previous episodes, leading to crazy imbalances that are not in keeping with the Transformers universe. Bumblebee's stats in this ep are the perfect example... sorry, but he is just not tougher than half the other characters in this game. It gives the impression there is no planning at all going on in the Mobage offices. And that Mobage is disrespecting the Transformers brand. So they should plan out now - like they did with the Lvl1, 2 and 3 cards - who should be stronger than who in the R4 and R5 cards (based on Transformers lore) and then just stick to it. Yeah, it might mean some events have some lower strength cards in there than the previous events, but mix it up, get creative. We'll all still play for them to complete our cyberdex and Mobage won't be offending the fans by creating imbalances that just aren't credible. (Note to Hasbro: lean on Mobage to make this happen. It is your franchise they are trashing with the current imbalances).

Phew! That was a bit longer than I intended.... but I think if Mobage took these steps it would make for a much better experience for all.