I should have waited half an hour to not respond when I was annoyed, and appreciate the feedback.
I want to clarify one thing. The problem with raid for me isn’t that it is hard to clear chests, it is that the higher I climb the more boring I find raid to be. Its better since the Telly nerfs because their is more variety, but it’s still mostly the same characters and same strategies over and over. I’m varying it some to do more 4-1 and 3-2 to make things less board dependent (and yes the boards are random), but the bottom line reality for me is that raid was much more fun while coming up and the higher my team goes the more boring raid is for me–just drudgery to clear chests mostly.
The players online (reddit and youtube, don’t remember names) weren’t top players, just well experienced with defense teams capable of keeping them in diamond. They didn’t cup drop to clear chests, they cup dropped because they found diamond raid to be boring. While it is fun to see if you can crack the top few thousand in a tourney and stuff like that, I don’t care at all about being a top raid player, it’s just more boring the higher you climb in my experience, which is a huge design flaw from my perspective.
I love tourneys because of the wide variety they offer, and think it is a disservice to have gem barriers to continues, because it’s puts a pay wall on one of the most fun experiences of the game. Pay walls should generally be for should be for summons, items, support like 2nd builder or aethestic items (avatar images, background, etc).
One last thought. I do data work for a living, and a few years ago, my company almost hired some data and programming consultants who do a wide variety
of data analytics work. One company they had worked for was EA, analyzing game and player data to try incentivize players to make more in game purchases. In a nut shell, the company would figure out how to design the game math to gradually increase difficulties in game scenarios so that players would first get highly engaged by a series of beatable fun challenges, and then be hit with a difficulty peak that would cause them to narrowly fail or die, a calculated ‘push point’ to get them to just buy a continue or have to redo a long, difficult challenge (they even had calculated how long those should be to make the most effective psychological push).
Basically, the company took and redesign the game not to be a gaming experience first, but a payment incentivizer first. I am not complaining about gaming companies making money–I’ll gladly throw $60-$70 on new console titles or $5-$10 a month on online games like this that are complex and fun and constantly developing new content and gaming experiences. But the gaming experience should be central always, not sometimes but at other times just mechanism to pass players between pay points.
It’s not as bad as some others, but I see these moments and feel this way about E&P frequently, even as I like the core game and building a giant army to mix and match to meet all challenges and events as needed.
I can’t remember feeling this way once about games I buy and play with my kids on the Switch. Maybe you buy a good game, maybe you get a bad one, but so far without exception you 100% buy a gaming experience. This games feels less and less like that with every Goblin Balloon, pop up ad or ‘push point’ I encounter.
One thing that would help peel this back for me a bit would be if they weren’t so rapacious about the gem/cash grabbing. Small potatoes like not gem blocking tourney continues would be a huge step in that direction imo.
