I began playing mobiles game 5 years ago. I’ve tried dozens of different games and played around half a dozen gacha games regularly. I quite Empires and Puzzles 3 years ago and never thought I’d come back. I looked in on the game once or twice over the intervening years and I found myself quite enjoying some of the new content in the game this time around. Lots of new heroes and the Small Tower events brought a new shine to the game for me.
However, I’ve never seen so many nerfs in any of the games I’ve played, mobile or otherwise.
SG has a constant beta test running. As I’m catching up to the latest in this game it seems clear that SG has released a drastically OP hero, Kalo, with the purposeful intention of nerfing it later. It also seems that whoever they have in charge of game balance is really screwing up or can’t do their job right because someone is over-ruling their decisions in order to release these OP, bait-and-switch heroes. Why nerf Azmia, for example, when you have a glaring case of Kalo on your hands just a few weeks later?
All of this is academic however, if players keep spending and SG can maintain a steady bottom-line. The player base seems strong at about 1 million daily players, if you calculate from the weekly tourney numbers, so don’t expect SG to change their tactics any time soon, unless they care about what their players think of them from a perspective of personal and professional integrity. If the latter is the case I highly recommend they issue an official apology over the Kalo release with a promise to strictly adhere to better balanced releases and changes in the future.
Common sense dictates that creating an adversarial relationship with your player base over OP heroes that routinely wreck the meta is a bad policy in general and will hurt you in the long run. However in a very simple, hero-pulling, dopamine hitting, match-3 game I just don’t know how much pressure the devs and execs will ever feel from their players. Time will tell.
In my mean time I came back to the game not to climb to the top of the meta, however chaotic it might be, but to enjoy the unique E&P asthetic and simple match-3 format. If game balance ends up being an issue at the level I play however my return to the game might be a lot more short lived than I had hoped. Then again, I’m sure I’ll find lots of good uses for the money I save by not playing this game and there’s plenty of competition out there for my gaming time and dollars. I just hope SG doesn’t wreck a game I’ve found myself enjoying again.
ZCat
