Sometimes it takes just a little poke to make you wake up and rethink the whole thing. This is a brief story of a rethink and then the poke.
I gave up all my mobile games. I deleted all of them. The real start of that was having added one of the many farming games, which was quite absorbing but quite a timesink. I deleted it after narrowly missing a minor goal and thinking of how much babysitting the game needed to reach goals. And then that it is legitimately “babysitting” instead of playing. And then Spellstone, the P2W CCG I had been playing, went extra P2W and made me wonder how much I was getting out of any games I had on my phone.
That P2W bridge too far was the Ice Tunnel Dungeon, specifically the Winter’s Crusher custom card made for it. The dungeons are PvE events with soft caps based on how much money you have spent. As you go higher, the enemy heroes get stronger abilities, and their decks tier up to fully upgraded premium cards. Premium cards are a separate set only available with the cash shop currency, and they are stronger than their base set equivalents and keep getting stronger through the usual power creep that keeps people spending money. But then the events have custom cards that are even stronger than those, with no real thought of balance because they will never be in player hands.
For folks who don’t know this game, let me give you a quick sketch. This is a fully upgraded base set (F2P) card. It has 7 attack, 16 hit points, potentially buffs itself to 11 attack, ignores 4 layers of shield, and vampirically heals up to 3 hit points per round. Winter’s Crusher has 4 attack, 48 hit points, adds 5 layers of shielding to itself and its allies, heals itself and its allies for 4 hit points per round, and weakens all opposing attackers by 5; due to the current battleground effect, it also self-heals for 12 hit points per round, even if frozen. It effectively counters 26 points of damage against itself and 14 against each ally, versus the attacking frog that can buff itself up to 11 attack. That is one card in the enemy deck.
Someone did that on purpose. There was probably a meeting, and it had to pass review from a half-dozen people. Loss of faith in the developers’ judgment? I quit the game so hard it deleted all the games off my phone.
: Zubon
Boom Beach I was just bored with after sitting at the soft cap for a couple of months.
I only play two mobile games on a regular basis – Card Crawl and Boom Beach. Card Crawl is a single player card game that is very addictive. Great little game with some very finely tuned gameplay when I am stuck waiting for the wife in a mall, etc.
I have not tired of Boom Beach (I just hit lvl 59). It’s a great little game to play with others (free plug for Supreme Creme! clan), doesn’t take up any time at all, and it is not a direct PvP game (one of the reasons I gave up on Clash Royale). Plus Supercell is very generous with diamond gifts in BB so I rarely feel compelled to spend money on it.
Most importantly I haven’t hit the point in BB where it seems like “busy work” just for the sake of doing something. I also think Supercell has done a reasonable job keeping the game fresh by adding interesting events.
I just gave up on the Google Play Store entirely after spending a bit of money on Legacy of Discord – Furious Wings. Youtube had been spamming me with ads for this game (they were between 1/2 and 2/3 of the ads I was seeing), and the flying gameplay looked like it might be fun. I spent some cash to try to get to that part of the game more quickly, and when I’d unlocked all features found that that gameplay was not in the game. I contacted Google asking for a refund, sending them a youtube link to the relevant ad on the GTArcade’s channel. Their phone rep said I’d have to contact the developer and in the same breath said they’d had reports that the developer was ignoring attempts to contact them. Google pushes the ad, Google takes payment, Google gets a cut, and Google arbitrates whether they should be responsible for the false ad they’re publishing.
It’s e-books and humble mobile bundles from here on, for me.
Not to get you back into things, but totally to get you back into things, you should play CoC. It’s deeper BB with a much longer ‘to cap’ time. It’s also better in that the group event you can still contribute to at lower levels more meaningfully than you can in BB.
As for BB, I’m basically on auto pilot with both accounts, as they are also at the soft cap. Hopefully another HQ level is added soon.