Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-12524333-20130727181056/@comment-9890645-20130727222248

Don't know if you read my last blog post, but after I jokingly mentioned last Sunday in the chat that Mobage would be wise to feed me a Rampage half in medals as it would probably push me into more tiers of the SB... Within hours of making this comment, I pulled a Rampage alt and a Headstrong alt from golds, then pulled 3 more Rampage alts from golds over the final two days!!! FOUR Rampage alts and no bots. Hmm, nothing fishy about that.

To be honest, I haven't noticed any change in drop rate for R4 related to event spending.

Again, though, I cannot disagree with much of your reasoning.

As a gamer and student of game design, it's not uncommon for rules and such to be created without the understanding of how others will try and break them. (I'll give two examples below.) The real issue with Mobage is the stunning and total lack of foresight into understanding what would happen when you put a bunch of 30-something Transformers geeks (who are also some form of gamer) into this closed system. You could get away with this shit in a game marketed to kids/teens, NOT to a game whose main demographic is 30-4 year old males.

The two examples:

1. As a house rules designer for a card-based baseball game league, I set a rule the first year that simply said a relief pitcher cannot pitch more than two consecutive games. The first year, one manager drafted the two best relief pitchers, had the five worst-quality starting pitchers in the league, and pulled those starters after 2-3 innings and let one of the two relievers FINISH the game. Needless to say, the house rules on relief pitcher usage got a HUGE update before next season. (On average, we closed a rules loophole every year for our first six years.) This rule was actually updated again years later, when an abstract real-life situation created a card situation that wasn't properly covered by the house rules because it hadn't been an issue until then.

2. MtG's designers and developers regularly talk about cards that get played in ways they weren't intended, and sometimes change the rules of the game to reflect their desire to see certain strategies end. One such rules change just occurred a few weeks ago, in fact, and this is the second time the rule changed - the rule for legendary cards said one could be in play at a time, and if another was played, they would destroy each other. People were playing legendary cards they expected to see from others as an easy kill spell; now they've changed the rule so that each player may control one copy, and playing extra copies only affects your copies (you pick which one to keep).

Overall, my issue is this: Mobage is seeking to eliminate tactics that may allow people to circumvent the whole "spend $200+ to win" model they have so desperately tried to establish and so desperately try to claim is actually not the case. This is filthy to the highest degree.