ZackMacKenzie

I asked about this right after they added Event Pachinko, but I haven't seen anywhere that they've committed to adding it to the Pachinko-based contest(s). It's possible that there is a reason that they don't want to give credit for it.

I've been closely monitoring my progress in the weekly Mojo race, In spite of fighting (and WINNING) EVERY fight, EVERY half hour, my score hasn't updated in the last TWO (4-hr) updates. It didn't update any of the other close competitors, either. Before that, the values it reported didn't reflect what I actually tracked. I assumed that this was due to precisely when the data collection started and stopped for each 4-hr session. but now I'm wondering if it is working at all. That said, these matches have only been good for about 500 Mojo in the last 8h since I've been getting WAY more low-value fights than average- and high-value fights combined. (I've gotten 1-1-1 and 1-1-2 four times in the last 24h, vs just one above 72 and just 5 above 57 (96 is the maximum, 48 or 49 is the average). I know it was equally bad for others in my range (for the week) about 20-24 hours ago, because only one of the 10 players I tracked came anywhere close to my +337, and one actually moved backwards. Bad luck aside, it's hard to make strategic decisions when the system isn't providing ANY information, real-time or otherwise. Update: More ranking updates have passed without any change in scores. That's update(t), where t=0, t=4, t=8, t=12 and t=16 all showing the same values (3691, 3527, 3473 & 3406 for the top 4). Troubling.

I was thinking the same thing. The event notes imply it, and Lupa is standing with the Dark Lord on his battle page.

I profoundly disagree. It was always p2w game. I've spent nothing on this game and at no point did I think there was ANY realistic chance to keep pace with the small-time payers let alone the whales. I played because I could do well enough, and saw it as a challenge to try and compete in a game stacked against me. If I've had great results so far it's been sheer luck and maybe some good decisions here and there, not because the game wasn't p2w. How lucky have I been? I haven't failed to score at least ONE girl in every event since I started (53 girls, 3 months, 1 week). That's not to say that I haven't had frustratingly long dry spells or that I've never had to spend kobans to achieve that result. I mean, that is what they're there for! And I already know that the streak WILL end. Too many people have posted all too often about going several events without nabbing a girl for their harem to believe otherwise. And when that happens, you better believe that I'll be glad that a shard system is in place instead of having to start all over again. (IMHO) Sooner is better than later but later is at least as much better than never! Ultimately, opinion comes down to perception and personality. A person with high expectations is more likely to be disappointed by things failing to meet those expectations, and a person will low expectations is more likely to be pleasantly surprised when things exceed their expectations. This will even occur when they receive the same results overall! In our case, the main aspects of perception in play are how positively we value the excitement of achieving rare positive events; how positively we value the avoidance of common negative events (or how frustrated we are by common negative events); expectations based on our early experience (AKA conditioning); how we view change in general assessments of blame and responsibility. If you value 1 more than 2, you will probably prefer the old system even if the empirical results show it is worse. You probably like playing the lottery or slots. Tedium doesn't bother you and you live for that ecstatic high. If you value 2 more than 1, you will probably prefer the new system even if the empirical results show it is worse. You'd probably prefer blackjack — in all likelihood you'll still lose your money, but endless stretches of losing won't be anywhere near the problem as slots or lotteries. Number 3 is more complicated. If your early experiences with HH involved a healthy share of good luck, you will perceive negatively anything that may end that roll. You'll also be more likely to view a downturn in luck more negatively without any change in the system. This is where conspiracy theories are born. If your early experiences with HH involved a healthy share of bad luck, well, you might not be here to read this as you've likely walked away already. If you stuck it out, you'd perceive positively anything that could mitigate that bad luck, and would celebrate a change in luck even without a change in the system. In the long run, both these players results will look very similar, assuming their play style is similar, but their perception of the game's 'direction' generally reflects their early experience. Number 4 is a toughie. We're hard-wired for routines so mostly view change as a bad thing until it can be proven otherwise. Some of us have had such terrible, traumatic experiences with change that we find it hard to ever accept change, even when it has already been proven to be positive. There are people who view change as more of a neutral thing — a mixed bag of positive and negative, every one judged individually on its own merits. There are virtually no people at all that see change as generally preferable to routine! Pretty much the only time change is viewed positively by default is when we are bored, i.e. in a rut, and then the change has to be our decision and under our own control. It is notoriously hard to separate our emotions and instinctive distrust of change from our judgement. What makes people different is how much value they place in trying. #5 is about how we tend to attribute blame and responsibility instinctively. To protect our egos, which is generally a healthy thing to do, we'll often assign blame to external sources even when we've been the architects of our own failure. Similarly, we're quicker to take responsibility for positive outcomes even when we had little or no influence on them. How much of this occurs varies from person to person. What almost never occurs is self-reflection after the fact — were we reasonable or unreasonable in taking ownership or deflecting blame? There isn't a single person that wouldn't benefit from occasionally examining that particular behavior. To connect this to the situation at hand, there are almost certainly some that have seen an improvement in results and have attributed that to "I'm playing better" rather than "the game has changed for the better". Likewise, there are almost certainly those who have made bad choices and are blaming the game rather than our play strategies. If you see yourself in any of these characterizations, try to take a step back and look at things as objectively as you can, considering your experience as a whole rather than segments of good or bad. You may still feel the same way, but you might be surprised and find yourself seeing things in a more moderate, measured way. Even if you don't, you'll almost certainly be better equipped to support your opinion than if you impulsively post on a high or a low. Personally, this is why I keep such extensive statistics of my play. I know how likely I am to see things negatively if I rely on my emotional perception! The only way to keep myself from being down on everything all the time is to track things meticulously. Then, if I have a strong feeling one way or another I can check to see if the numbers actually support that feeling. A lot of people don't like stats, quoting "lies, damned lies and statistics." It is true that a person who wants to push an ideology can cherry-pick the numbers to present them in a way that at least superficially supports their point of view, and conveniently 'misplace' the inconvenient data that doesn't. You know who won't do that to you? You. You can always trust your own documented statistics as long as you track everything. If you forget from time to time you're either more likely to remember when things are going bad than good or vice versa, and your numbers will be skewed. Doing this takes a certain amount of patience and discipline, but it also helps develop patience and discipline, two traits that are sorely lacking in the age of social media. Just things to think about, if that's your thing.

It would indicate a scam if that had been everyone's experience. It hasn't been. I mentioned earlier that I got the last dozen or so shards in a short burst of 13 fights. What everyone is describing is simply the nature of randomness. We humans like order so much that we impose patterns on things that have no underlying pattern, and we likely always will.

They got worse before the system change, not specifically after. We're only a couple of days into the new system, which on paper looks a lot better than the old system. Further, many people are reporting that their results are better or at least comparable. I've seen few if any reports that it is worse. (Other than the snafu of the system being implemented on the last day of the last event...without warning.) So, I meant that leaving before the new system arrived made a lot more sense than leaving now.

Before I reply, I'll state that it is possible that I'm completely misunderstanding you for language reasons. If the response doesn't address what you really mean, then please forgive me, and ignore it. It sounds like you had an incredibly long, incredibly lucky streak. Then your luck became closer to the overall expectation, and maybe it was objectively bad for a while. So, you're disappointed. Makes sense. Most people would be. But you had to know that you were getting lucky because there were other people on the forum having worse luck, and eventually you would too. That's just how luck (and math) works. Now a new system that (virtually) prevents anyone's efforts from being completely wasted has been implemented and that's when you choose to leave? Usually people quit after things get worse, not better. And honestly, are you really saying that you didn't know that the game had a pay-to-win model from the start? Free games only have three ways to stay alive, because nothing in life is truly free... subjecting their users to massive amounts of advertising pay-to-win spyware / malware I suppose I could be wrong, but I'm afraid that at this point you sound like someone who had unrealistic expectations, and your complaints aren't going to carry much weight with the devs.

Milestones. 2 weeks ago... Today...

Fabienne achieved! By the numbers... 493 battles 102 shards 25 20-fight chunks chunks with no shards: 0 <---- This is the biggest surprise for me. best chunks: 6 hits giving 16 shards (closing 13 fights!) OR 6 hits giving 11 shards longest dry spell: 29 worst run: 1 shard from 45 fights number of back-to-back hits: 5 (best pair, 6 shards) longest hit streak: 3 (only 4 shards) best run: 9 shards from 4 fights OR 13 shards from 9 fights kobans spent: ~3,300 Leg'y affection items given BEFORE this weekend: 0 Leg'y affection items given past 2 days: 15!!! (incl. 3 lingerie) <---- not complaining, but did the drop rate for this change, or did my luck go from jet black to bright white? For comparison's sake, I ended last months Epic Days with 719 consecutive misses (150+150+150+269) spending 6,600 kobans. Also compare and contrast the only other Legendary Days I've seen, for Taria the Champion... Hit on the 3rd try, my best result by light years.

My luck turned and I was seeing higher Mojo opponents for quite a while. I even managed to pass @BananaJoy at around 40th! Then I went to sleep, Europe woke up, and order was restored to the universe.

That must leave you a TON of ymens just laying around. I guess you'll never lack books or affection items, and probably still have oodles left over. Let's hope for your sake that Clubs provide another way to spend ymens.

Wow. I didn't even think that was possible. AFAIK, the revival limit was 12, unless you got SUPER-lucky and got the magical 100 shard result. Good to know that there are other 'high' values in the hopper.

Fuck: Kalissa ... "She's Gotta Have It" Friend: Mavin ... "The Shape of Water" Marry: Sadly, none of them. Mani is too loli for my taste. Shao and I would NOT get along. Literally any one of the 5 Cupid's Love event girls would be a better choice than these two! HH ID: 1457585

I did 80-90 of those last week, dropping over 30M. Only managed 2. It'll be a long while before I'm ready to try again.

For the 1st time in my (short) HH career I may finish in the TOF Top 100 for a category. Sadly, it isn't one that pays out in kobans, but I'll take it anyway. I know how/why it happened but that hasn't dulled the shock any! With about a day left I've increased my Mojo by over 30% this week. However, I don't see it growing any in these last hours, which might be the difference between staying in and dropping out of the Top 100. I don't know how I'm supposed to keep it growing when all I'm seeing are opponents that are worth +1 (super common) to +6 (uncommon). Even when I have superior stats than an opponent the +1/-31 payout makes it pointless to bother with unless it is an absolute slam dunk. And even if I get super lucky and they're all slam dunks, +6 an hour isn't going to keep me in the top 100. Am I getting unlucky or is this generally how it goes? I don't expect to level before the time runs out, which further limits growth. Oh well. Even if I do drop out of the top 100, I'll still finish with FOUR categories in the top-1000. I don't recall whether I've managed as many as TWO yet. That's still something to enjoy, right?

Here are my early returns with the new system. Far from impressed at this point, but it IS still early. It took 157 battles against The Dark Lord to snag Val Red Battler. That ranks as my 5th best ( of 8 ) performance against TDL. The 3 worse results were 422 to drop, 481 to drop, and 150 without a drop (part of a 736 fight drought). It took 20 shard hits to reach the 100 needed. That means I collected 66,500 ymen less than I would have under the old system, assuming the same number of fights until the drop. The final hit took me from 99 shards to 111 (that was the biggest hit I've managed so far), so I collected 11 Epic Flowers as a bonus. The market sells them for 54,210 ymen and buys them back at 9,035. Using the geometric average of these values, i.e. the square root of (buy x sell), I received a bonus of over 243,000 ymen! That's roughly quadruple the 66,500 I 'lost' due to the shards system only paying out on misses. Sounds awesome, right? But, this was the absolute best-case scenario, hitting the maximum shards when sitting on 99%. In any case, this can only happen with Revivals and the 3 lowest trolls, where the shard cap is relatively high (12-69), and the ymen lost is low (3,500 - 7,500). It drops off and flips to a net loss very quickly as you move up the villain ladder and up the event ladder. From there I moved on to Edwarda. So far, I've only racked up 30 fights against her. I've got her whole orgy team so I can only get shards for Val Abraël. To this point, I've gotten ONE hit, for precisely ONE shard (on the 22nd attempt if that matters). While this is a VERY small sample size, it projects to 3000 fights to completion! On Edwarda! For a Revival Event that allegedly has a higher hit rate due to its short duration! The last part of my experience with the Attraction / Shard system was the final day of the Classic Event. I spent it battling Bremen. I hadn't won any of his team so shards were going to get spread across three different girls. Assuming the dev team made hit rates roughly similar, that means it would take almost 3 times as long to win ONE girl, but roughly the same amount of time to get all three. I managed to squeeze in 45 battles and hit 3 times for 12 shards total, spread over two of the three girls. Assuming this rate holds, I should have all three after 1,125 fights. That doesn't seem excessive at all. I'm 0-fer with Donatien after 470 tries and it took 1,078 fights to steal away Edwarda's last hostage. If the hit rate continues it will take 75 hits to get the 300 shards, or 25 per girl. That's 180,000 "lost" ymen per girl (24*7,500)! The maximum "over" one can get is hitting 7 shards from 99 for 6 extras. Using the same valuation as above, that's about 132,500 ymen value as a bonus, less than the loss. If you value the flowers at their full purchase price, AND the odds of hitting 1 - 7 shards on any hit is uniform, then the best outcome is a whopping ~325,250 ymen, but the average overage is still only ~162,500 ymen, or an expected loss of income. Remember, this is when optimistically valuing the flowers at full price, as though you actually need more Affection items, which may or may not be the case. Using the average or sell price results in an even more dismal bottom line. So, early analysis is that results are still pretty wildly disparate, and while we are "losing" ymens due to shard hits not paying out cash, the amount we're losing is not as large as we perceive SO LONG AS we still need affection items for our harem. If you're past that point, then yes, you are taking a huge hit and the bonuses (boni) you'll score won't come remotely close to recouping that loss. As always, YMMV.

Huh. That's not what I read earlier in the day, though that is what shows up now for me as well. I guess when they fixed the bug that caused the game to falsely track partial income for 1-to-99-shard girls they changed the text too? Regardless, I'll edit my post now. Thanks for pointing this out.

NP, I'm monitoring this thread too. I went strictly by the new blurb. It no longer mentions anything about odds for a girl/100 shard drop. In fact, it doesn't mention girls or shards at all. That led me to suspect that it had changed methods, or that the odds have declined as they have elsewhere to compensate for the change to the Attraction system. Once I learned that the equipment won in Event Pachinko was always the same class SS or Rainbow for the same slots, I lost interest in wasting kobans on this, so I wasn't willing to test my theory directly. Useless (IMHO) avatars, surplus affection items and duplicate, off-class or rainbow gear were not enough compensation for the (claimed average) of 3 or 4 losing spins it typically takes to get a hit on a girl. It also didn't help that my results were less than the advertised average. If it truly hasn't changed I'll amend my post to delete the (apparently) spurious claim / baseless belief.

I have a potentially interesting observation. 3 months in, I have 47 girls, all acquired under the old system. Under the new system I have 42 shards, spread across 3 girls (2 villain, 1 event) and which were earned from 8 'hits' of a total of 88 fights. NONE of those hits, full girl or shards, have ever happened on the 1st or last fight of the session! I usually burn as many combativity points as a boss needs to level up in each session, or a multiple of that number. (e.g. 10 or 20 for the Dark Lord, 7 or 14 for Edwarda, etc.) Also, other than overnight or before an event I rarely accumulate many combativity points before I use them, so the majority of the time these sessions are equivalent to advancing 1 level (5 to 10 each). That's a WHOLE bunch of sessions for there to have never been a hit on the 1st or last! (5384 total fights BTW.) It's very odd luck, unless others have seen the same thing...

Leagues provided a new personal best and personal worst this month. In general, feeling more frustrated than ever. This post will double as my 3-month status report. At the end of my 2nd month I felt that I was leveling way too fast. I come to e-gaming via tabletop gaming, particularly RPGs, where leveling is painstakingly slow, so that might account for that perception. The only place that seemed logical to sacrifice or scale back was league play. Historically, 95% of the rewards had been XP, vs. 5% in mostly kobans (and throwaway amounts of ymen and gear). So, I tentatively scaled back to playing only 1 out of every 2 League competitions. I was leaning towards scaling it further to 1 out of 3 weeks, which would not have made a difference in which Leagues I'd play since there was an enormous amount of 'padding' to keep me from demoting 2 weeks in a row. Either way it was a yo-yo between W3 & S1. For those that haven't seen my posts about 'tanking' this meant compromising my principles since I'm dead against it. As a result, I was going to finish 2nd-4th for the 2nd time. Fine. It's just W3, so no big deal. I was in 1st place with less than 6h left to play. That's a new best-cum-worst. I had looked at the #2 and #3 players to see if I should even consider spending kobans to stay ahead of them. I decided not to (see below*) because they were sufficiently behind me that they would have had to spend more kobans than they would gain by moving into 1st. Besides, they were both listed as likely Europeans and would have had to be up at a crazy hour to maximize their score (St.-Pierre-et-Miquelon aside). So, imagine my surprise when someone who wasn't even on my radar jumped into 1st place (by 1 point ) a whole 15 minutes later. Given that #2 &#3 would have had to overspend to overtake me, it is guaranteed that someone who was sitting farther back would have had to seriously overspend to accomplish the same feat. Given that at the end of the league run this person was the highest level active player, 3rd highest level player overall, 2.15x the average level and more than 2.5x the median level, I shouldn't be surprised that they won, but the HOW is beyond mind-boggling. So much for Nash's Equilibrium. If whales are so rich beyond belief that currencies have no meaning (only status does), then why bother playing for scraps? It's their game and we're just cannon fodder. No amount of luck and strategy is going to keep anyone competitive. If some people are so addicted to being 1st that they will accept a loss to avoid finishing in any other position what hope do the rest of the players have? (i.e. the "there's the gold medal winner and a bunch of losers" mindset, a la Trump.) I know I don't suck at this game, particularly since I seem to do fantastically in contests (1st/1st/1st in the last cycle, 1st/2nd/nowhere this time, nowhere=revival event effect for newbs), but in spite of that there doesn't seem to be much of a reward otherwise. I'm halfway proud of the fact that I've managed to get my kobans up to 5500 after leaving myself with just ten in the wake of January's Epic Days. It should be ~5900 within 10h or so. I haven't seen a legendary piece of equipment in the Market for over 50 levels, not even a useless Endurance or limited value Rainbow. If anything, the rate at which SSLs have shown up for me in pachinko has dropped from bad to OMG. I still don't see anywhere worth spending kobans, which diminishes the joy of amassing so many so quickly (without a monthly card) so much! A day into the Attraction era and I don't see much in the way of improvement for event or villain girls. The fact that the Attraction implementation has been used as yet another way to claw back access to ymen is another reason to be less than enthused with the state of the game today. It's getting too hard to engineer fun out of the system as it stands. (I wonder if the devs feel the same way about their part in the process.) I'm having to seriously consider whether it's worth continuing at all, only worth restarting and playing just the earliest levels where the whale density is lower, or walking away entirely for more entertaining expenditures of time. So, if I go long term quiet on the forums, you'll know why. They're so much less fun when Brassy's on hiatus, anyway. * I did make a couple of decisions to hold onto 1st for as long as I did. I noted that the koban reward for finishing top-100 in Tower of Fame categories was less than the difference between 1st and 2nd in W3 and beyond, so I abandoned my 'saving' of stat upgrades that I'd held back for 30+ levels — the stats are more valuable day-to-day in contests and leagues. Since I wasn't going through with that plan, I didn't 'need' to have almost 40M ymens in the bank and spent 30M on GPx10 to little effect. So, while I may not have pointlessly 'wasted' kobans I didn't get off scot-free in the process either. ZiM

Silly question... = OR ?

Today I encountered this bug with 5 minutes left before the daily reset. It didn't cost me anything, I'm just saying that it starts much earlier than a few seconds before the refresh time. HOWEVER, it is still happening 10 minutes AFTER the refresh time. Irrespective of the filter, clicking on any player who has fights remaining results in the page resetting instead of going to the combat setup screen. Looks like it's a new problem?

Can someone explain this? It seems similar to something posted earlier in the topic about not bothering to try for event girls from bosses on the first day, which also made no sense to me. Don't events start when they start and stay consistent until they end? Is the drop rate on day 1 not the same as days 2 through 4? If the only point is that the drop rate, maximum number of shards per hit and length of the event are the only limiting factor then I understand this part at least. (Even the luckiest person should fall well short of 100 shards when they need AT LEAST 34 hits — likely closer to 50 hits — in just 4 days to accumulate the 100 shards. Even with a substantial investment of kobans this will likely take 2 or more events to complete.)

Right. We are slightly more informed in two ways. First, we've been given an idea of the size of shard drops based on the bosses. Second, we'll have information regarding progress in all situations that use Attraction. We had neither before. Did you really expect more information than this? How would that work? Right again. We don't know yet whether we're better off in terms of odds. Other than trying the system out and using the results to decide whether the change is odds-transparent, a change in our favor or a change for the worse, there are very few options. Other than pointless worrying the only other thing we can do is try to predict whether the devs are more likely to do as they say they will do, or more likely to use this as an opportunity to screw us in some other way. Sadly, that opinion is entirely subjective and brings us back to pointless worrying. Ideally, the people on the test server will create a thread where people can post their results as accurately as possible, whether good bad or indifferent, and pool those results to estimate the overall performance. Compare that to what we think we were dealing with before and we have a tentative answer. If there aren't enough people on the test server willing/able to report results then we'll have to wait until it has been rolled out game-wide before we can estimate the value of the change. However, if we behave like cats — creatures that do what they please not what you want them to do — then people will be too apathetic or lazy to report their information and we'll never know for certain whether we're ahead, behind or on track compared to previously. It's really up to the player community., i.e. us

Has it been explicitly stated that shards never expire? (If they ever expire, go back to the old system!) It doesn't seem excessive to me that you get 'unlucky' and instead of getting a girl or two (or more) you only collect 75 and 60 shards for a classic event, and have to find the remaining 25 & 40 shards in an upcoming Epic/Legendary Days or at worst, the Revival event the year after. I'm not so convinced that this will hurt free players in the long run, though it seems likely that it will hurt in the short term. I've read enough posts from people who have failed to get a girl in an event, and then failed to get them AGAIN the next time around. This will happen less than before because we won't be starting from scratch in the subsequent events. So, we may get fewer of the brand new girls the first time they appear, but by the time they appear again we may have more of them than we would have had under the old system. Is patience a rare virtue? Sure, but if we really want a girl without having to wait we can spend kobans on her. We're going to spend them on something either way. Also, this change wasn't supposed to make free play more or less fun/productive. It was designed to give players a way to know whether it was worthwhile spending their kobans NOW. If an event is winding down and you have most of a girl's shards you might decide to go for it. If you have pitifully few of a girl's shards you'd probably decide that spending them now wouldn't pay off. Perhaps the type of event or the strength/appeal/utility of the girl will affect your decision. Until now we've been making these decisions completely blind and at the mercy of a downright merciless RNG. Going forward we'll be informed consumers. That's all this change was designed to do. If it does more that's icing. Honestly, if it is done right, and the overall girl acquisition rate doesn't change there's only one obvious "down" side: we'll have one less thing to complain about on the forums.