Talk:GAME Update V2/@comment-217.238.180.67-20200312135341/@comment-132.170.15.255-20200313230213

What the devs don't seem to understand is that no game is sustainable if "getting stuff" is a goal in and of itself. I think most of us are driven in small part by the compulsion to collect things and achieve some sense of progress, but primarily by a desire to make sure we have what we need to enjoy the game--whether that means pushing forward in the story and seeing how things end, being able to rearrange our decks to try to beat event decks that are above our weight class, or whatever.

When you strike a good balance, the grind is grindy enough that some people will pay to you to ease the grind, but it's also fun enough that people will pay or grind for "progress" that essentially lets them unlock the next level of fun/grind. Sometimes that next level isn't even in the game yet--for those of us who started before Duels, and before most of the maps were out, our decks were already much stronger than the in-game content demanded, and we were essentially working towards the promise that there would be new, fun stuff coming, and that we'd need those stronger decks to do all that fun stuff.

The last few big moves by Hooligapps have only served to jack up the grind and take away the fun, but they're deluded if they think this will increase their revenue. Sure, every ruby or event card is "worth" more now since it's the equivalent of a lot more play-hours than it was last year, but would anybody play the game as it is now for more than a month or so and decide it was worth playing, let alone paying for?

More importantly, for those of us who have been around a while, they've pretty much shattered any faith we had in that implicit promise, that if we keep grinding and paying to keep up, the game will give us more worthwhile content. In the last year or so, we've had a ton of new features that individually add a lot of good, fun content to the game, but when you factor in all the bad changes and crappy management decisions, it's simply not as fun as it was last year, and I see that downward trend continuing.