Thursday, January 31, 2013

General Update

This is a general update since I haven't really been active in responding to comments for the last week, which causes a pretty massive backlog, and I'm sorry for the ones I don't get to, but fortunately many people in the community here are pretty nice about replying and normally right on the money. So I decided I would cover a few quick topics.

1) Sylvan Labyrinth


The amount people have liked this event has varied based almost purely on their luck with bosses and maze flowers. Personally, I haven't been participating heavy in this event since and had no intention to until the second half. The reason is, I plan on using this event to recoup resources as opposed to go for rank (Lost 600HP on HW...QQ).

To do that I am going to count on the better maze flowers in the second half of the event. Also, I have just been doing 6 attacks and saving my resources until the better maze flowers come so I can recharge AP.

The event itself...isn't bad, but I don't like the changes. They've definitely tuned down the rate at which monsters come to up the value/use of CW. On top of this, the fact you need to kill 3 crappy bosses using 3 AP before a decent boss can be summoned is annoying. It's a nice way to get people with heavy attack decks to waste AP on bosses they don't even want to battle.

Personally, I just don't like it, but that shouldn't stop others from enjoying it quite a bit, and at least they made the rewards reasonable.

2) The Economy


I have several friends who quit after the last HW and even more that have been quitting recently. The economy is the prime reason.

Now, I will note that about two days after bazaar came out I noted that the steady decline in prices would never stop under the current system (pat myself on back). The reason is basic supply and demand in a system where there will always be more supply than demand. Once players get to SR, they never need HR again. Once players get to SSR, they never need SR again.

Now the concept I am going over is much bigger with more working parts than I am willing to write, but hopefully it's easy to understand.

In the game, your cards are like stock shares and HP is like money. You buy them, hold onto them, and expect them to hold value or gain value, and sometimes lose value. No matter what though, you expect them to stay close to the value you purchased them at.

As the value of cards dropped, people panicked and sold, causing the price to drop more, causing more people to panic and sell.

Now, everybody in the game has only 2 jobs, stockbroker or farmer. Your ability to make money is purely reliant on your ability to buy/sell/trade stocks. You can also farm your crops and sell them for a pittance if you wish to do that. Most players, are farmers until they gain the money/education to become stockbrokers.

Now, eventually, these stocks all become worth less and less, it gets harder and harder to buy/sell/trade stocks to earn enough to feed your family. Eventually, farming is paying as much as stockbrokering.

Here comes the best part, bills (events) are increasing in price the entire time. So as you make less and less, the 'bills' cost more and more. The only way to make up for this loss is cheat, which many players are doing.

Eventually, you will be farming/stockbrokering everyday and be left without enough to pay the bills if you're honest and only the cheaters will prosper.

What's the big deal?

Well, this is a pretty fun game overall, and I dislike the idea of everything being worth 1-10HP and events costing me 1000HP to compete in. Which is where the game is heading.

So if I'm so smart, how do we fix it?

Well, what we have here is NOT a free market. The market limits people to up to 5 trades a day. If this limitation was removed, Almost every rare would be removed from the market in order to skill up other cards. Many HR would also be removed from the market for the same exact purpose. The ability to sell their rares would give many players decent sums of HP/CW to purchase higher level cards taking some of them off the market.

Those HR/Rare with some value (claymore for example), would probably be purchased and re-listed at higher prices. Eventually they would level. They would never reach high prices they were at before Bazaar when trading required effort, but they would steady themselves. Because, eventually, if they hit a low enough price, they would be purchased constantly for skilled feeders.

As the system stands...it would be prime time for another anime based TCG to come on the market and steal all of mobages market.

I can tell you this. My Marvel War of Heroes site increased in traffic by 40% after HW was finished in Rage of Bahamut.


35 comments:

  1. Speaking of bazaar...im trying to do a sale on the bazaar for a FF Avian Birdman for 98 HP from my account to my wifes another. I setup the sale but cant see it in my wifes account. Had a friend check and he said he sees it. What gives? Any thoughts?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You and your wige are on different bazaar servers, I heard there were 2 servers but others have told me there are more, the one thing that is certain though is there is definitely more than one server.

      Delete
    2. I actually contacted Mobage about this, and they said that different accounts have different restrictions in terms of viewing Bazaar sales in order to prevent cheating, apparently.

      Delete
    3. It's to prevent bypassing the trade rules which they consider cheating.

      Delete
    4. Ok, so then i dont use a new event card and i should be fine?

      Thanks for the input.

      Delete
  2. The game is certainly in an interesting position right now. Players are frustrated and don't want to wait to get their "investments" back, while a select few are taking advantage of the decreased activity on a whole. The recent update Mob age made in regards to the trading system shows that they're aware of the game potentially running dry. It will be interesting to see if they compensate for this with the next event as things have drastically gotten worse since the end of the last holy war. The next one or two events may make or break the entire game.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I noticed that if you kill a monster that was shared by someone else, it counts towards the three needed to open Hell's Gate. I think the relatively lower spawn rate is to encourage orders to coordinate and work together - which isn't so bad considering the last few raid events haven't felt much "team-like".

    At some point, events (especially holy wars) are going to be a battle of cheaters going all out with full force attacks at the very top with the rest of the playerbase saying "fuqit" and trying to play a bit more efficiently with available resources.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I actually think that the 3 monsters -> bring big monsters is a very cool idea that brings about a new way of thinking and strategizing. For example, you can defeat 2, then wait for your stamina to recover and defeat the last one. And just like GB said, you can share monsters, as they will count if you discover them or if you vanquish them. The blue flowers give sylvan potions which you can hoard and use wisely for maximum value.

      Delete
  4. Buried in the notes is a new tidbit, if you've spawned a special mob (helvera, jabberwocky death) you will not be able to spawn another one until its dead or flees. So really only plan on getting one or two per 15 minute "Gates of Hell"(GoH) unlock. In this way you can hold your stam if you've already spawned one for when the GoH wears off and you must go kill three crap monsters again.

    ReplyDelete
  5. On the economy note, I started worrying as soon as I realized that the stamp campaigns were essentially permanent. I feel like a while ago the ratio of HRs to players was fairly low, because the population that spent money on the game was a pretty small percent and feeder accounts didn't get a ton of great stuff.

    Now, a feeder account gets, among other things, 6 LCP tickets per month, which have I believe a 1/4 chance each of a HR Or better, and usually get you HPs now. This has flooded the market with HR cards. If someone has 10 feeder accuonts they're getting 15 HR+ cards per month and 60 HP per month from those feeders just for logging in every day. When I started the game you got 4 LCPs through early quests, and then you actually needed to do something for more, such as place in events. I think the stamp campaigns started in October, and what I was at first excited for I now think is contributing to ruining the economy.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think Mobage knows what it is doing. You will find that every time they release new packs of cards they rank higher in the top grossing app store. This kind of game will always be pay to win. Since I personally don't pay for packs, I just enjoy building new rares even though I already owned those devalued HR cards. I can't foresee Mobage will change anything to the system in the future.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's foolish of them. They are sacrificing short term gains in exchange for larger gains down the road.

      The key with cash shop games is to make the player not feel like its pay to win. I can think of 10 different items that could have been added to the shop that could only be purchased that would net thousands more sales without making people feel like the game is becoming pay to win.

      The only reason they retain their current player base is that there isn't an acceptable alternative at this time.

      Delete
  7. Is there a roadmap of the maze anywhere? I'm taking so many wrong turns it's ridiculous and I always see the same guy has avoided the trap but no paths are marked as wrong.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think you need to be a part of an order for the paths to show up marked. And I believe the correct path changes depending on what order you are a part of.

      Delete
    2. I am part of an order and it's an order member that keeps avoiding traps. I was just at a 6-way fork where this guy avoided the trap but no path is marked. How many wrong turns have I taken? Five. Again. It's really annoying. I have asked how he does it but have yet to recieve an answer.

      Delete
    3. Thats your order's problem then. Say your order has 10 active members, and 10 members all avoid those traps? Ive only got 10 members in my order but they've done the job so well that i dun need to worry about the traps.

      Delete
  8. UDID faker not working anymore with ROB.After burning CW and HP with the current event and the prices of Cards decreasing, I can say that this game is slowly dying... MONEY WARS = AUTOQUIT.

    ReplyDelete
  9. What do you think is the best use of gems? I'm a low elo player and trying to wrap up my max hr decks, breaking into the sr field slowly. I don't want to waste 8 weeks of gems but 2000 for the sr card pack... I'll just never get there realistically unless there is a way to bump up to higher elo without spending tons of money.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dunno. I never pay attention to gems. I just buy LCP when I can from my accumulation and hope for luck.

      Delete
  10. Umm. Did anyone notice the drop in Devil Queen value? 26hp for a DQ? Lucarda, what's your opinion on this? 26hp equals 260 skilled hr cards for a guaranteed 9-10 skill enhancement on any card, even a Legend card?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That just sucks. Normally the odds for a Legend card to go from skill lvl 9 to 10 are 0.1% when using a high normal (or 1% when using 10 high normals). That's 1 out of every 100 tries with 10 high normals, equaling 1000 high normals, or 100hp. So the price has almost dropped to 25% it's worth. There are maybe a couple of explanations for this.

      1. There is an increase in the drop rate for DQ's, leading to an abundance of DQ's on the market, which naturally decreases the price (supply and demand). I did a check on the Bazaar and there are a lot of DQ's on the market. Maybe someone else can confirm a higher drop rate. If so, than Mobage is doing it on purpose to cut us out of one the final ways to get a lot of hp. Mobage doesn't want cards to be worth a lot of hp. Mobage wants us to buy hp.

      2. Less likely, but it frightens me just as much, the top players are not interested in DQ's anymore. Because A: they don't need it, since all there Legend cards are already skill lvl 10. Or B: they just don't care anymore and are abandoning the game. Which is a bad thing, because high lvl players were always the ones willing to spend a lot.

      Delete
    2. Imagine if you gave everybody in America a Rolex, over half of Americans would go sell it for $1000 because they don't need it and are happy to get something out of it. Then the market is flooded with people trying to get $1000 but then somebody says $900 because he wants his money faster. Then people panic because they see the price drop and all bend over and welcome that big wet wang into their backdoors as well selling there stuff for 700, 600, 500, etc.

      All the while intelligent buyers are watching this happen and laughing deciding to see how much deep dicking these guys are willing to take. Nobody wants to buy them because they see the price dropping, so people keep re-listing undercutting each other.

      The reason this virtually never happened before was there was adequate delay in buying/selling on forums. Players looked and saw DQs listed for $150HP and said, ok, that's what it sells for. If somebody wants it cheaper they have to negotiate, but the price is always LISTED as the same.

      I could go into an entire rant on inflationary and deflationary economics and how the Rage economy mimics the U.S. manufacturing industry, but I'll hold off on it for the sake of readers.

      Delete
    3. My theory is that they have realized that skilling/enhancing is one of the most boring things about RoB and are making it more accessible to players so they don't leave from realizing just how impossible it seems to be able to skill up a card.

      Notice that they have not only increased the supply of DQs by making them relatively common through silver coins and flower exchange but also they added the Devil Princess to further increase the supply with a similar card. They have also added a much greater flow of Angel Queens, as can be seen by getting one on almost every boss in the event and a very high probability with the silver coins.

      Let me tell you a secret about making money with games. Schemes that just directly exploit the customer never work. So saying "they are just trying to milk us for our money" is almost always wrong. The way to make more money is to make the game more accessible and to make the gamer happy. You can bet that almost every decision and change made by cygames is with the intent of making the largest percentage of players happy (while not necessarily succeeding). It usually doesn't seem like that for many of the hardcore players but that's because they are often a minority.

      Having said that, there was a big counterexample to that this weekend, the level up packs. Now that's a money making scheme since it doesn't add to the game at all.

      Delete
  11. Hey Lucarda, Any idea when will the next Holy War will take place or a possible time displacement (such as once a month or once in every 2 months etc.)

    And maybe you could give some inputs for the ORDER MASTER when it comes to HW. Should the Order Master focus of Defense or Offense? Hwat cards would you suggest to a order master?

    Thanks in advance sir. Love you BLOG :))

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I suggest everybody focus on offense after the previous update to HW. Between the chain and Shingeki people are just doing too much damage to stop.

      I imagine the next HW will start a week after the end of the event. I think they will try to fit it into February without going into the last week.

      Delete
  12. Here my deck atm. Pan skill 7 ifrit skill 10 sword valk skill ten Thor skill 3 and rabit skill 2. I was wondering wat the best god legend wing card there is. I don't kno if its iron or herc. I should proboly just go with another Thor so I don't have to waste HP but I would like to kno what the best legend wing card gods offer. I have 320 HP to upgrade my deck.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You aren't going to find a good Legend wing card for less that 1000 hp. Every Heracles I've seen went for at least 550 - 640 hp. If you're looking for a good wing card, I'd go with a second Thor. It's got 3000 more attack than your white rabbit and does 6% more damage to God's cards, and there's a few on sale for between 140 and 200 hp.

      Delete
  13. I highly suspect cure water will be the currency in the future rob market since ppl won't get constant supply from the daily free LCP. So, maybe it's time to exchange all your holy powder with cure water?

    ReplyDelete
  14. That only works if there's something to use the CWs for, as in CW events. Otherwise, everybody would be happy to trade magic circles.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Re a statement you made in your #1. I have no idea how you're considering the reward structure for Sylvan to be "reasonable".

    Perhaps you meant "more reasonable". But even that is a stretch. I find it nearly impossible to believe that many players will net win from the Player or Order rankings.

    Granted, if you don't look at the ranking rewards and only consider the monster kill and tier rewards then sure, there's a gain there, typically in junk cards and personal HP. But little else.

    The rest of the rewards are HORRIBLE for what they require to achieve, and the flower rewards are nothing more than random chance. Ugh. Terrible.

    I personally wish playing the game day to day would be the "sink" and the events would be a net gain IF people put in time, effort and resources. Terrible. What bothers me even more than the economy is the structure of the event rewards. (Although they're inexorably tied together)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Haha, I did mean more reasonable.

      But also, the fact that SSR/SR can be attained from maze flowers as well. Also, compared to the previous raid event and Holy Wars these rewards are a HUGE step up overall.

      Profitability still is difficult to maintain during this event.

      Delete
  16. Hi, I would like to ask for some advice. I got a Luminous Mage today (one of the new cards). However, since I'm demon realm, I would rather have a Mad Hatter. Luminous Mages are selling 18-20 hp right now. Would it be better to sell now or later? Also, Mad Hatters are pretty expensive (for me at least) so is there something better? I'm breaking into high rare/s rare and already have fully evolved trow elf, and Im working on lunar werewolf right now. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sell now, sell now! New cards always sell at a premium right away and drop fairly rapidly :)

      Delete