Board Thread:Current Episode Discussion/@comment-9890645-20140910233740/@comment-9890645-20140912174650

Corran.horn333 wrote:

Or when people start dropping off the game? Because the way it sits now, even T1 players are running low on resources trying to upgrade all of the lvl 7 or lvl 6 cards. A game company can't give people something for free for months on end and then pull it away and expect people to continue playing. Yes a game can be addictive, but the gaming landscape has so many entries, customers WILL leave. You're 1000% correct that we have many games vying for our interest. Many players will bail and switch if Mobage doesn't return some sanity to the episodes.

Also correct on T1 players running out of resources. Before the Beast Machines episode, I sat on a comfortable pile of credits in the 70-80 million range, and had plenty of medals to level up cards. However, the credit outlay for leveling cards with cards is quite massive (a pull of 400 golds fed to an R6 is ~500k credits, a process that must be repeated multiple times to MTM). Even though I largely "sat out" of Enter the Nightbird, the cost of leveling has cut me to around 25% of my credit stock (at ~18m as of this writing), and I've fed about half my stored medal stock to various cards. Even with the massive increase in payout on stored medals, soon I will reach a point that some other T1 players have reached where I cannot afford to MTM my cards anymore. (Note that, from Unicron Returns, I've leveled Unicron to MTM, one of his two weapons is maxed, and Starscream's RMC is maxed... But that's all.)

Credits are soon going to be a MAJOR problem for players since:

1. The credits for stopping the missiles in our favorite minigame has been cut in half for ALL episodes. Previously (and for whatever reason, because Mobage), this halving was only applied to Campaign episodes. Somewhere before the ridic boss buff happened, this half-credit business became the norm.

2. Also around the same time, the in-episode bonus for selling weapons cards was eliminated (without a warning to players). It's no surprise they cut this, as my original stockpile of credits came largely from ripping weapons medals and selling their contents, as weapons medals are largely inefficient for actually leveling R5 and R6 weapons (and somewhat inefficient on R4)... and they used to give a lot more weapons medals than currently.

Ultimately, if changes aren't made soon, even those of us who T1 with regularity will no longer be able to play the game without a significant weekly financial outlay... or not be able to play the game as we are accustomed. The problem lies in the episodic, point-accumulation nature of the game: There is no benefit to not maximizing your in-game play time. Stripping players of resources (BC, EC, credits, medals) forces those players to spend LESS time on TFL. If Mobage thinks that players who suddenly find this new "free time" forced on them will stay loyal to TFL, they got another thing coming.