Okay, so it’s a decision based on profit rather than gameplay. The positive response from players when you give them free stuff is obvious, in the short-term.
When mythics were introduced you said it’s to conform to the industry standard of having a 1% drop as the rarest, rather than 4%. Also, paying players needed a more significant advantage in PvP which mythics gave them.
This lucky shrine is completely contradictory to that. Let’s assume you average about 450 gems from it and it comes every two weeks (like in Evertale?). Previously we’d get roughly 225 gems a month from events so you’re literally multiplying the number of free gems by 9x. Free players are now going to awaken mythics super easily, taking away the advantage spenders have. So you’re giving up paying players getting their competitive edge to make more money off the community as a whole, particularly players who cannot manage their spending when they’re rewarded with more gems (money) than they can handle.
The other issues are now:
Events give so few gems in comparison (1/9 of our total free income for completing all events?)
Legendary potions have much less value (we’re going to be playing with mostly mythics in the near future)
I fully accept this as the new norm in the game. I simply think it goes against a lot of what has been the decisions for the game’s economy over the last 5 years. I won’t speak out in anger and I’m sorry for being so negative about it @Dev_VKC. However, I would like to make a couple of requests:
Can you rebalance some of the rewards in events? Specifically, make legendary potions a lower tier item and perhaps increase their number plus introduce a 7* ticket as top rewards in some places.
Generally increase the number of gems given out by all events. Here I’m talking like double or maybe even triple.
Make leaderboards give significantly more gems, more so than the events have their gems increased. Since large amounts of free gems are now available this shouldn’t give too much of an advantage to specific individuals who win leaderboards.
These suggestions would have sounded ridiculous a week ago but with this new age we’re entering where the value of things have drastically shifted, the rest of the game needs to shift too. It will keep event content worth playing and the focus not entirely switching to the lucky shrine. We’ve seen how much people love the 6* ticket in Whale’s Treasure. It would be lovely to keep people excited to play events with the rewards they want to obtain.
Also people will now make sure to never have less than 1.2k gems so the rewards will feel absolutely pitiful imagine playing for 25 gems when you have 1.2k. The gems definitely have to increase by x5 or x8.
I whole-heartedly agree and the gacha definitely makes all the money side of the game actual gambling. However, the gameplay itself is not and I love that part of the game. It’s what I play the game for and it’s good enough that I don’t care about the gambling part.
If it was this simple all along why didn’t they just give us 10x the number of gems from events? The game has a gem economy and that’s a very important part for both game balance and profit making. This change has given that a huge shake-up because it’s been found to make more money when you ask everyone to hoard, for reasons like:
Many people spend to get up to the 1200 gems initially (new players are big for revenue in most of these games, so this is probably a big factor)
Spenders who you reward with lots of extra gems feel like awakening mythics is more affordable/achievable that they get greedy and spend more
Those who cannot hoard may become spenders to keep up with the, now larger, number of people with crazy collections or to keep getting back to the magic number of 1200 gems
Guesswhosback shared a personal experience of how this lucky shrine made a child use their dad’s credit card to buy up to 1200 gems. Let me share my own experience… two weeks ago my girlfriend asked me to lend her money to buy up to 30k soulstones in Evertale for this exact same deal. She had already bought many soulstones but didn’t quite have enough money due to some unexpected big payments this month. My girlfriend is a grown woman, not even a child, but still has a little trouble hoarding in games and generally being patient / resisting the urge to spend to take advantage of big deals. Since that time two weeks ago she’s already dropped below 30k soulstones (her new 0) once. I reckon she’ll probably mess up at some point and spend too much then she’ll need to buy more to get back to 30k.
These are the kind of realities that this new system creates. It’s very predatory on the kind of individuals who are not good at controlling their spending behaviour. Just wait and see how many members of our community here on the forum decide to spend over the next few months because they cannot patiently save up 1200 gems. Many of these people will be children using their parent’s money or adults using money they never would have assigned to spending on a video game.
I accept the reality of the marketing, even if I know it’s morally wrong. However, I will never say it’s good or that the Devs are doing a nice thing for us. They’re doing it purely for their own profits. The ONLY bonus for us is that free players can now play with the monsters that they haven’t had access to. However, this could have been done in many other ways and needed to happen soon so it’s not something to be particularly grateful for.
That’s based on VKCs statement saying they took it from evertale. Having numbers that are backing the „effectiveness“ of this thing means looking at numbers of a mechanic that returns every two weeks. So it’s fair to assume it will be the same in neo. What KD say, however, also remains true if it’s only every 4 or 6 weeks
In Evertale it’s coming every 2-3 weeks. Every aspect of this shrine is a direct copy over from Evertale and they’re even saying they’re modelling it on that so I think it’s a fairly safe assumption.
If they plan on doing it less frequently it’s easy enough to shift the numbers of my suggestions
I think like other decisions that have been made in Neo before, we have to adapt and see the purpose, for something many of us have been playing for years and we do not stop doing it. If there is a new direction and we like it, we will adapt… if not we will let it go.
The amount you get is 1.2x - 2x but it is weighted so you’re more likely to get on the lower end of that. Hence, the average is not 1.6x, it’s probably 1.4x or lower. Someone else here suggested that they may have different weightings on the 12 and 120 offerings so you get closer to the 2x on them, making you believe the 1200 gems offering will be the same. This is quite likely too.
Overall, the average is probably something close to 500 gems if you can take advantage of all the offerings. I’ll track my results and see if it’s this number or a bit lower. My first result was 519 gems (total of all four).
And I thought Gary was the only thing that could trigger KD to this extent. Turns out the Devs responding to gaps in high spending and free players (that everyone has been complaining about for YEARS) is what really gets him heated
Part of being a grown up is being accountable and controlling impulses, if someone can’t control the impulse to drop thousands of dollars when they can’t afford it, there’s a larger problem there.
It’s the implementation that crosses some moral grounds for me and detracts from the core aspects of a game being a game. That’s what got me heated.
For sure, but when the game is being tweaked to specifically target people who struggle with impulse control even more than it normally does you have to draw a line somewhere. There was a story on BBC news earlier this week about a woman on Instagram sharing a wellbeing program that supposedly made her beat cancer… twice. She was a complete fraud, choosing this marketing angle to get people to sign up to her program. From a business standpoint what she did illegally was fraud. However, it’s clear what she did was immoral to target vulnerable people. But there’s the extra layer… her actions were literally causing these people to be far more ill and potentially die.
Clearly that’s an extreme example of where it’s immoral on every level. However, point is there’s good business that profit maximises from their consumers and there’s business that goes to every length to squeeze what they can out of anyone susceptible to spending more than they should. For me, this shrine crosses that moral line a bit too much that I had to say something.
P.S. I’m right wing in my views but I sympathise greatly with vulnerable groups.
Ok Killerdog. I’m not in contact with the devs(well I’m friends with one on Discord but they’re understandably secretive). I have no information on their plans, nor their marketing strategy. Keep that in mind when I tell tell you this:
THEY. ARE. NOT. GOING. TO. ADD. FREE. MYTHICS. OR. MYTHIC. SHARDS. TO. THE. GAME.
If you want free to play players to get awakened mythics without spending years of their life playing hours per day(like you), then this is the best chance that we will get. And, absolute worst case scenario, everyone ends up with the exact same monsters, and the game becomes entirely about skill(isn’t that what you want anyway?). Worst case scenario, players no longer have to waste hours of their life on events that they don’t enjoy just to stay competetive without spending money.
I am aware that this is a marketing strategy, and I know that it is intended to make money. But consider your position. You are quite possibly the one player in the world who has a chance of getting this event canceled. Are you sure that you want to do that, just because this update breaks your personal idea of how the game should be? Do you really want to ruin what is likely the only chance F2P players will ever get to obtain Awakened mythics on a large scale based solely on your own opinion of the ideal game?
I don’t understand why everyone has to reject something this awesome just so some 10 yr old might use their parent’s card ! Parents have to be careful lol , expecting entire world to empathise these people is unjust IMO
