We've evaluated this thread and would like to explain a few things:
When we bought the game we first took the time to see how Tacticsoft's event schedule plays out, how people respond to them, how we feel playing with them and so on. A few things we concluded, concerning portals specifically, I felt like, frankly, they were extremely boring.
You click the mission, click auto-pilot and get your reward. No thinking, no strategy, no workshop required. If new, you may have to struggle a bit for the higher levels (if you feel like it), but really, even then, it's not strategy, it's just that you don't hit the required numbers yet.
Said reward wasn't bad per se, a free 30-45 tokens (40-50 cents) for clicking 2 buttons isn't the worst of deals, but I wouldn't call it "fun" and I personally believe games should aim to be fun first and foremost, rather fun than balanced, rather fun than fair, rather fun than anything else. We play to entertain ourselves, after all.
So we began experimenting.
Ultimately I hoped with harder portals, people would learn more about the game, play more in the workshop, think more on their actions and turn off the darn autopilot. We felt that, after struggling to finish it, they should feel like it was worth it (a sense of achievement and satisfaction) so we combined this with drastically higher reward reflecting the up to 30 minutes you may be spending on it (or more, if you're less experienced / have a lesser inventory).
Simultaneously, we felt this gave both motivation to improve your mech (better rewards) before you get into multiplayer, and more tokens for f2p-ers and small spenders to attempt to rise up a bit. With Hard and Easy you'd be pretty close to a premium pack and once you've had a few, insane would be achievable with enough strategy, and it would be a case mostly of reducing required revives.
This didn't really affect our business beyond perhaps a minor drop in income, we didn't see any correlation with retention or such (after all, newbs just kind of do what they can and go do something else if they can't manage yet, plenty of hard content that isn't doable for them yet in SM and they don't value tokens as much until they've stuck around for a few weeks to months already), but we hoped it would be more fun that way. I like a challenge and some early reactions I heard (frustration, persistence, and then great happiness on success) made me feel like we were on the right track.
This however doesn't deafen us to criticism - it is clear some players feel very scammed by the likely need to revive, discriminated by the difficulty and the last thing we wanted to do here is scam our playerbase and ruin an event they like.
As such, the next portal has been set to Tacticsoft's settings - slightly better gold than TS gave, the higher token option (45 opposed to 30) and slightly easier difficulty than the old TS ones so it should be achievable for every single player. A flat out improvement, even if not really my personal cup of tea, opposed to a potential 'ruin' of the portals. We intend to stick with this for the foreseeable future pending feedback.
Thank you for your feedback everyone!
I'm closing this topic as the subject has been solved and some of these conspiracies are a bit much. 🙂
.thumb.gif.bc3a83c1597503f952bceac0f61d35a8.gif)
khan got a reaction from Lord Gorgon in Appreciate everyone you want to appreciate thread
.thumb.jpeg.85ec587445962f6245c0a523a351ded2.jpeg)
khan got a reaction from MasterChief in Appreciate everyone you want to appreciate thread
khan got a reaction from Malthael in Appreciate everyone you want to appreciate thread
khan got a reaction from bumbum in - - - F l e x - T h r e a d - - -
khan got a reaction from epicspeedster in - - - F l e x - T h r e a d - - -
.thumb.gif.bc3a83c1597503f952bceac0f61d35a8.gif)
.thumb.jpeg.85ec587445962f6245c0a523a351ded2.jpeg)
