You laugh but your memes are funny. You should look into a webcomic style thing. Your stick figure art along with your world view would catch eyes.
I still recall with great humour my Internet hero David Thorne and his 7 legged spider to pay an electric bill. He was a pioneer for sure.
But Cyanide & Happiness certainly took the medium to another level.
I wish. I doubt anyone would pay me for my ridiculous stuff.
Other ridiculous ideas to add:
UberBeats - I drive up to your house and just blast music really loud
GrubGrub - Fresh lawn grubs delivered to you with your choice of hot sauce, teriyaki, or sweet & sour sauce
Okay, okay, jokes aside. Iâve honestly been thinking about learning how to make mobile games, making a relatively simplistic one and offering it as either donationware, or fully F2P with additional add-ons available for something like a dollar each.
Wouldnât be anything as intricate as E&P, but then, the price point also wouldnât be out of reach for anyone.
And no, it wouldnât be a direct competitor to this game either, as there would be no match-3 dynamics involved. Would most likely be single player type stuff mostly.
See it is this kind of thinking which leads to the idea in for adding costumes for event/ hotm/ S2 heroes.
There is no way at all that Lepus is weak or unusable. Complete nonsense.
Remember âThe million dollar homepageâ? 
Wish I had thought of it first.
Wish I had thought of a lot of things first.
Believe it or not, some inventions that actually exist today, I did think of before they became reality. Told my dad about them, seeking his advice because he usually knows what heâs talking about when it comes to financial stuff, and he told me they were non-starters.
sigh
Believe me or not I had the idea at the basis of Facebook in the nineties.
And spammed it on Fortunecity, if anyone remembers it at all 
Ah, the good old days when we could still believe in free software and free ideas on the internet 
I absolutely do believe you. Facebook was never something I would have thought of myself, because I didnât think there was a way to monetize it without charging a fee to use it.
Durrr⊠Zuckerberg said âIâll just sell all of the userâs personal information to advertisers!â Now why didnât I think of that? Maybe because Iâm not that evil. 
It all comes down to money
There was a clone of Angry Birds that fixed all the problems, but it died because there was no incentive to spend AND you could complete the game in days
I severely dislike the 5* HotM Business model, but it pays for the rest of the game ( see notes )
Only a single event makes me actively wonder about the bosses at SGG ( looking at you Tavern of Legends )
In the end, Empires is no more ethically questionable than any successful business.
And it is fun.
But so are local mom and pop businesses and indie games, and they can afford to be more ethical
5* HotM Business Model
Tavern of Legends
Ethical
Gacha games
FIN
Unfortunately, what is âethicalâ will always be open for debate. Some would argue that everything is ethical so long as it is legal. âWhatever the market will bearâ ; âany commodity is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for itâ etc.
So is it then ethical to charge $1000 for a bottle of water to a dehydrated man in the desert? Heâll die if he doesnât drink it, surely heâs willing to pay the price. But is it ethical?
âOh TGW, this is a video game, itâs not a bottle of water in a desert, stop comparing apples to oranges. Nobody needs to buy heroes in a video game.â
True. And nobody needs to buy a beer or a pack of cigarettes. So I guess whatever those manufacturers do is completely ethical and therefore should be completely unregulated.
Apples to oranges again?
Technically it could be argued that nobody needs electricity. Human beings survived for thousands of years without it. Why is it that electric companies are regulated?
Curious to me how people seemingly arbitrarily decide what is necessary and what is not. Everything from food to entertainment to health care. Different rules in different places for different things.
Guess I have my own ethical compass that says if a company is charging more than twice the cost of production for a product, that company is being unethical.
Doubly so if they also arenât paying their employees a suitable wage relative to the profits theyâre receiving, but thatâs a different matter, as I have no idea how well compensated SG employees are (or arenât)
The fact that this is âforbiddenâ to talk about other games here says a lot about SG⊠Fear ?
How long you gonna ignore the situation that many whales already moved on to another developing matching game?
If you canât keep up and improve your game, you get left behind. Acting like other games donât exist will lead you nowhere.
It has always been against the rules here to discuss directly competing games. Fear on their parts? Yes, probably mostly that. But also because they want us to talk about this game.
The only other games I mention on here by name are games that do not compete directly with this one. They are all PC and/or console titles. In the mobile game world? I donât know who is king, and I donât really care. If most or all of them are based on âfree to downloadâ followed by microtransaction lootbox crap after that? Pfffft let E&P rule them all. This game was my first and will also be my last dalliance into the great world of âgachaâ games. Got me once, shame on you (SG). Getch me again, well then thatâs just my own fault.
Play fair. They kindly allow us this space to discuss their game. You want to talk about other games, take it outside so to speak.
They allow a lot of stuff in here that amazes me. Thereâs threads hundreds long slagging SGG off. They havenât removed them, they are there for all to see.
But there is a line where the staff/mods will step in and take action.
Naming other games is Most Wanted number 1 of them and tbh itâs a fair request as far as Iâm concerned.
I agree with this.
They mostly let me criticize them up and down. Mostly.
I will go so far as to advise people not to invest money into this game unless they donât mind watching their money burn in exchange for many Dawas. But I will not go so far as to direct them to spend their money on some other clone that is likely much of the same thing, even if offered at a lower price point.
If I had found another game that was âlike this one, but betterâ⊠I would not be here at all.
Such a game probably does exist somewhere, but one gacha in one lifetime is more than enough for me.
We have been watching The Good Place on Netflix. Fun show. Lots of ethics.
The main problem with âLegal= Ethicalâ we have a huge justice system world wide and people still disagree with individual cases
So how do you define âLegalâ?
We will skip the finer points of frivolous versus chilling speech versus chilling actions versus enforcement versus punishment versus rehabilitation versus restitution and just say
actions have consequences and officers of the court are no more virtuous, or flawed, than any other human being
So âLegal= Ethicalâ is a system more accurately translates to âEthical if I do not suffer legal consequences from my actionsâ
So if you DO suffer legal consequences, does that retroactively make it unethical?
If you can afford a good legal defense but your customers cannot, are you allowed to take advantage of your customers?
It seems like âLegal= Ethicalâ replaces " Might makes right" with âLawyers make rightâ
I personally do not adhere to the idea that âwhatever is legal is therefore ethicalâ, but that is how most U.S. based businesses at least tend to operate. The idea behind it being, âif it was wrong, there would be a law against it; since there is no law against it, it is not wrongâ.
But of course, as you point out, when the companies themselves are funding the politicians that pass the laws⊠itâs impossible for the âaverage Joeâ to get fair representation under such a system.
ADDED: also, by the same token, I would actually argue that some actions that might be considered illegal in certain jurisdictions are not actually unethical⊠but I would also clarify that as my own personal opinion, and dependent on the act in question. My idea of âright vs. wrongâ probably does not match up perfectly with everyone elseâs ideas of âright vs. wrongâ. I canât mention specific instances without delving into controversial subjects, though.
Cerevan,
I agree with your very first post.
The company must show respect to its customers. This must be taken for granted. There are many ideas for improvements and I do not think they do not know how to do them or that they need someone in this forum to point them out. New and similar games exist with many new features and interesting changes from Empires & Puzzles. Iâm sure they have it all in mind. The point is to implement them in the game that we love to play so much. No one needs to stop it. But at some point, if nothing happens , itâs getting frustrating.
If I was SG, my thoughts would be: Why would I care?
SG has enjoyed first dibs when it officially launched the game in 2017 (though other players claimed theyâve played it far ahead) and has been basked by millions of downloads from various users and players. The same canât be said by these so-called competitors who try to imitate the success of the game, hoping to earn them hundreds of thousands of bucks, if not millions.
Me? I donât have the stomach of doing another match 3 game like this anymore as building up your heroes, base and whatnot would spell another 2+ years of my life.
Thatâs a strange statement in a game environment: you should play for the pleasure of playing not according to time considerations.
Time wise every single game is a waste 
Huh? Really? Well, looking back, Iâve never played games of the same theme. Before my stint in E&P (which began in May 2018), the mobile game I was hooked on was PokĂ©mon Go, playing it since 2016 (still being run by me sometimes and an officemate most of the time till now). Before PoGo, I was focused on Clash of Clans for over 2 years but left the game primarily because when the other players raid your base, they took a huge chunk of your resources, rendering it impossible to upgrade the necessary structures.
I donât think I will be playing games like CoC, PoGo and E&P. I want to do another PC or other console games, but I fear I donât have the time doing so since I am at the office most of the time.
It may be strange for you. But that is how things are in my case. So far. I still find enjoyment in the game. Donât spend much anymore except my time and effort. Still happy I am able to get decent heroes using free pulls via Censure Method. Just recently pulled Sir Roostley and Malicna yesterday in just a little over a dozen EHTs. I still have a dozen more but will hold on to them till next month, hoping to get Killhare and Jack OâHare (the 2 I am still missing from SpringVale), and maybe a 2nd Woolerton and the April HOTM.
Maybe you should try to compete with some of their features and freebies to players, then you donât need to worry.