Why I will never play this game, or this sort of game as its set up ever again.
Folks, I wanted to post a goodbye to this great community of transformers fans, and explain why I’ve turned my back on this game as it stands now. I would hope that my tirade here might help and/or convince some of you also.
1. This game is designed to be rigged from the start. Mobage is an expert at design of games like these.
The whole point of the game is for you to collect better and better cards to get a more ‘powerful’ deck. The issue is, it doesn’t matter how many top cards you collect, in the end and after an event multipliers wear off, the top card collection you are left with cannot and will not ever be able to compete with the new set of raid cards from a new event. There’s little actual value being gained by ‘winning’ top cards. You simply cannot ride on a ‘perfect’ R5 card deck for events to get into the top tiers the next week. In the end, the awards are in spirit only, but not able to be practically used to any level to get into the top the next event. The power creep is designed to make sure of this – bosses will always get more and more HP to keep up with stronger award cards. In short, after a small amount of ‘improvement’ that is designed not to really help much at all…you will simply run in place within a month or two on deck power…which gives you no point to continue on.
2. This game has multiple exploits and outright cheating is common, especially at the top tiers.
Yes...that’s right….this is coming from a top player that was in the top tiers for the last 2.5 months. I was ‘competing’ against a host of players getting themselves into the top of the listings by exploiting cheats. While they were paying very little for a massive amount of raid cards, I was paying a brick of cash just to get a worse episode hand. The people that are playing ‘fairly’ are paying their massive tax into the system, while a host of others (yes, even #1 winners sometimes) are cheating their way to the top of the ranks, making sure that positions in the leaderboard are taken up by themselves instead of the legitimate players. Mobage doesn’t care much at all about these cheaters and is doing little to fix the exploits – a small to moderate number of cheaters only raises the scores way up, forcing legitimate players to pay more and more to stay in the rankings. Anything lost by Mobage in sales by the cheaters is easily made up by the legitimate players paying to keep up. Mobage doesn’t need to put in company players to run up the scores and drive more sales…they simply need to conveniently allow for cheating and let independent and unscrupulous people run up the scores for them.
3. This is the worst sort of ‘Pay to Win’ game there is.
Look…there is no fairness here. There’s little to no skill involved. Once you learn the system that Mobage slightly tweaks episode to episode, the only way to the top is by paying (or, as stated above, cheating and paying some). There would be a solid correlation, if graphed, of how much money is paid to Mobage, as to where someone ends up on the leaderboard. You simply cannot ‘win’ without paying for the ‘win’. This has nothing at all to do with fairness – If you have the scratch, you win. If you don’t, you suck their wind. Anyone feeling arrogant or heady about being in a top rank and ‘beating’ others is being blind, and a little silly. You paid for it. They didn’t. The way I see it…maybe ‘they’ are the real winners. They didn’t pay massive amounts of money for, in the end, nothing.
4. This game is illegal, and exploits off human weaknesses.
One of the companies that Mobage works with and licenses processes out of is being prosecuted in Japan for….running illegal gamboling. The issue with games like these is that you are paying for POTENTIAL value, not guaranteed value in many cases. You are in effect rolling the dice to receive the potential value. This is not Smurf’s Village where what you pay for, you get. The ONLY value is getting the top cards, or the raid cards. There’s nothing physical gotten...so it’s not even like buying yourself a package of physical playing cards (like Magic). It’s exactly like playing at a jackpot machine. You win and get a reward of temporary value in a raid card, or you get literally nothing. No matter how any corrupt or corporation-friendly government wants to say it is…it’s gamboling. The internment-rewards system is a well-documented system and plays off some human weaknesses. Some people are more immune to this sort of thing, some less. I pick to be less. Think about how this game sucks you to it. It’s not the terrible game play…it’s this jackpot system.
5. This game is badly overpriced.
There are other games out there in the app stores of Apple and Goggle that are a buck. Standalone games….nothing… or very little to buy within them, AND constantly updated games…for a dollar. Sure, it can be argued that with a game like this, a server needs to be maintained, and there could be a small amount more development work involved in its episodes….however it simply doesn’t justify the money they are asking for. This is the ‘micropayments’ system gone insane. They are not asking for 10 cents a run of a space bridge…they are asking a buck just for a simple run. Top legitimate players shell out an insane amount of money (I averaged over 400 an episode to keep up in July at T1). Check your credit card bills. Seriously…think…what are you doing? There’s no justifiable way that Mobage can defend itself here in what it charges people…even the people only spending 5 bucks, or 10 bucks every week. You could have 10 paid for apps…solid apps…for the cost of paying-to-win in this game.
6. This game is not much of a game at all.
The only real entertainment of this game is the competition that it generates. The game itself is boring and grinding in a way that gets old when it’s born. This is why when an episode ends, you feel hollow and there is ‘nothing to do’. The only thing it has is the competition. If you take that ranking away in your head for a moment…you know as well as myself...that it’s a horrible game. And remember…people pay to compete and win. It’s something like allowing one football team to juice up, some even cheat with rules, and the other team not allowed to. Would you really be proud of yourself to beat that team if you were in the juiced team? On top of that…would you really even care to play the game at all if the game was boring and silly to play…and the one and only draw was to beat the other guys?
I could go on about some more things, but I wanted to keep my argument at the strongest points. I am walking away from an account with almost every R5 card issued and almost all the top guns…650 battle cubes sitting there, 1600 energon, 8 chains, large amounts of metals for upgrading…and I have realized that I only really lose if I keep on playing within a system like Transformers Legends is.
I am on Reddit as StarscreamG1, and well as I’m on World of Tanks (same, StarscreamG1). Come game with me there sometime if you are there. I will no longer come here or keep up with this game. There’s just no point in light of what this game really is, and what is really going on with it. Thanks for reading!
SSG – StarscreamG1