Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-72.77.162.76-20140207143619

First off, let me say a few things before you reply to this thread.

1) I am not looking to turn this in to a "Mobage Sucks!" thread.  There are enough of them on here, we don't need another.

2) If you are no longer playing this game, there's no need to pollute this thread with a reply stating "That's why I quit this game, etc"

Having said that, here's my recap of the first day of this new event. Like everybody else, I was assigned to a team of random players yesterday. I don't know exactly how many players make up a team since the previous/next buttons are disabled on the team screen, but if you view the deck of the last player in the list, you can swipe to the left/right to see other players.

I think the battle bonus via synthetic energon and the the bonus after each player attacks is a pretty good idea. It lets those players with weaker deck do better damage to a boss than the typical raid format where you were limited by deck power and number of cubes used. Of course this requires that all members of the team "chip in" on higher level bosses.

Half way through the yesterday's event, it became pretty obvious that there were only 4 or 5 real hitters on my team. I used the wall to determine where people were located and they were from all over the globe. There was only one other person that responded that was located in the USA in my same time zone. When I last checked, positions 1-3 had over 400k points, 4-5 had 250k-300k, and then it dropped down to 100k from there. Participation seemed to be lacking and in the end we lost the days' battle. Now what? Wait for day 2 to see what would happen.

I used to be able to 1 cube everything on day 1 in raid events. This time I could 1 cube to 68M. Anything after that required 2 cubes to kill (up to 129M). Net loss of 1 cube. Not really worth it considering that the points gained for MVP'ing low level bosses wouldn't do much to help me later on in the episode when there are 50k bosses to be had. I went through about 60BC yesterday trying to help my team win, but near the end it was mathematically impossible for us to catch up with the remaining time and lack of participation from other key players (who were probably asleep at this point being on another continent).

I did get 1/2 of Starscream from the Mobage rewards and got another 1/2 (both bots) from my first Gold Medal episode pull. Two halves even with the 5x bonus didn't do much to help my 1 cube ability. It was a crap shoot and most of the time I left about 600k on 129M hoping that the rest of the team would pick up the remaining, which they did. We used the wall to chat back and forth, but there was to team spirit going on. Combined with the lack of participants, I realized that this wasn't going to work very well.

Last night was the start of day 2. For the first 2 hours, I was the only one hitting anything. At first there were low level bosses I could 1 cube. That lasted for a while, then it jumped to 400+M bosses. I wasn't going to waste 15 cubes trying to MVP that nonsense, so I stopped playing. This morning, I noticed there were a few hitters. I seeded three HeavyTreads and they all escaped. I see three in my queue now with no possibility of getting killed. We are already 100k points behind the other team. It looks like a loss for day 2 as well.

So, again, what's the point?

Having lost on day 1 there is no way I can get anything worth while from the weekly win bonuses. Reason #1 not to continue.

I thought that I would hit up the Tiered SB to try and finish at least one of my x5 cards. The base price has gone up and there is no guaranteed episode card for the first Tier. Reason #2 not to continue.

It will cost 2k rubes to try and get the other half of my x5. The only way to get there is to kill bosses. With the high power and lack of participants on my team, the bosses won't die, therefore no rubies. Reason #3 not to continue.

So far I have 3 reasons to sit the rest of this one out and no reasons to continue. One may argue that I could spend all my BC and try for tiered rewards. I'm around 500 now, but to keep up I'd have to waste everything since my team doesn't participate. I'm not willing to do that.

I could start posting on the wall trying to get more participation. Yesterday's team did a little bit of chatting, but not much. I don't think I'm going to convince people to play harder if they are in the same boat as me. Basically if you're scanning bosses and can't kill them, you're stuck with them in your queue (with a limit of 3) until they timeout. So what are some options that would help this type of event be more successful?

1) Add a message count or some indicator to the wall icon.  Then you know someone is trying to communicate.  Right now, there's no notification so I don't bother to check it regularly.

2) Players can scan a boss, elect to battle and then back out of it.  This seeds the boss to the rest of the team with 0 damage done.  If you hit that boss, but don't kill it, then the original scanner hits the boss, they get credit for first hit.  I saw people seed 129M bosses with 0 damage, I'd chip in, then they'd come back, and 1 cube it.  They'd get first hit, MVP, AND finisher.  Thanks a lot!  If someone backs out of a boss battle, it should be treated as if they clicked "Retreat".  The boss shouldn't get seeded.  If it does, the scanning player should not get first hit credit if they did no damage.

3) At the end of the day, losing teams get disbanded.  I would say that any winning team where a player scores 0 points should have that player removed and replaced with an active player.  I know I joined the campaign on my kid's account, did nothing and ended up on a winning team and got rewards for it.  That's silly.  If you don't participate, you should not receive any rewards.  That way you aren't having players ride the coat tails of others and get rewards.

4) Bring back guaranteed episode cards on the SB as usual.  Since I can't guarantee a decent card from the SB, I won't put any money into it.

5) The team structure needs to be rethought.  I don't know how Mobage has determined who gets assigned to which team, but there is no real cooperative play with people you don't know.  You're thrown into a room of people and tell them "play as a team, but you're competing with one another to get daily bonuses for most energon scanned, mvp, etc".  It doesn't foster the team spirit.  I know my ally list is full of people that I have chatted with an have a vested interest in helping on a personal level since I feel I "know" them to a certain extent.  Here, there's none of that.

I think this event could be more successful if we were able to create our own teams. Some would say that doing so would stack the deck and limit the rewards to only a certain number of people. Possible, but that's no different from the raids we have now. I would venture to say that Mobage would make more money doing raids the old way than this way, and isn't that the bottom line?

The other option is to let us create our own teams. You have a button on your ally list screen that says "Create Team". It gives out an 8 digit code (similar to the friend request portion), and users can then join that team for the day. Teams must have X number of players before they can participate in the event. This would motivate players to play. You would be with people you know and have an interest in helping out. You would probably get more participation from the players on the team since you knew them.

These are just a few ideas that could help this type of event. If they stay the same, I don't see me participating much since it would be a huge cube drain. 