SoggyShorts

I have to echo @Pelinor's sentiments re: harem chat: why? I suppose it's benign for now, yet two more currencies to deal with, but it doesn't appear that the frames are an opportunity cost, so it's a sideshow that can be clicked through or ignored. And as @Xemnassaid, pics are good. It's why we started playing. I'm still hoping for actual gameplay improvements, things that don't force us to dig around in the harem as much, but we got this. Ambassadors... Jesus, no. Here, I echo @Xemnas's sentiments: not my type AT ALL, damned near terrifying, and this is a hentai game. It says so right in the title. Am I missing something? I'm not quite at Pelinor's assertion that this is the worst "patch" ever (patches fix bugs, they're not supposed to introduce new ones or add features, unless to correct a fault in a preexisting feature; sorry, but semantics matter). My view is that we dodged a bullet (for now) with the chat thing. Sooner or later, this will become something that we HAVE to do, and probably something else that we have to compete for or with. At this time, it's a benign, severely limited, and linear bug factory. At least, it wasn't hero equipment, (worse yet) girl equipment, or any of the other RPG grafts that are in the pipeline that are my own red line WRT this game.

I would like to echo @jjjgggin my appreciation for @Semiramis's comment. This is yet another step that removes us from the game world. I said something similar about the villain fights. We could be fighting ANY of them; removing them was a disconnection from the story and the world. Thank you, @Tom208for the fly-outs. If we're going to embrace "game as software" in UI design, your mods are making this new interface at least palatable. Just, in general, thank you. I'm a UI nazi, though nowhere near as eloquent as @Gnome Saying, who can define the errors in taxonomy. Thanks for your words as well. I believe that the mod probably met the goal of "mobile friendly," but at significant cost in connection to the game world. To be blunt, it smells of turd polish. That will eventually flash off, but for now, there's that distinct aroma. The kinder, gentler me will of course qualify that a little. We have a REALLY BIG MENU. I've always found the REALLY BIG MENU loathsome because it's REALLY BIG. But I'm a PC player and frequently fail to consider the experience of mobile players. That consideration eventually allowed me to retract my fangs and claws about the REALLY BIG MENU, at least to the point of forming a partial mental map and using it. That's double-edged, right? The REALLY BIG MENU is also a disassociation from the organic game world navigation. I use it when I am buried 4 or 5 clicks deep in some other game feature. Notably, champs or seasons. Oh, and pantheon, when I bother to bash my head against a centennial paywall. Presto, back in the game world. It's the ONLY feature of the REALLY BIG MENU I use because I know how deeply buried I am in UI jank. This new implementation does nothing to change any of that. We also have a top navigation. Some of it comes with the game, the most useful bits come from Tom. I rely on that navigation for movement between game elements and timers. There are A LOT of timers in this game. Nearly as many as there are currencies. Under the old UI, I could do the dance. Under this, it's quite a bit harder. And not knowing my ToF position without entering that sub-game is a major irritation; at lv 430 and lackadaisical about the gems nonsense, I'm a pusillanimous D3 player. Position, exact position matters. So, we have multiple ways of navigating the game, which is cool. We had those before this change. Which is where I come back to Semiramis's point: this change removed us from the game world. We lost something. That said, we also gained something. We have the option to have one of our girls on the (now useless) world screen. I kind of like it, probably because of how much CAN go wrong with that and DOES. But why does the popup of the girls' stats have to be there? We're selecting an image, not a fight team member. The popup interferes with scrolling. The major things this change doesn't address, perhaps because it wasn't designed to address them, are where I arrived at my "turd polish" conclusion. In CC or the sex champs, if I set a team and want to upgrade one of its members, I click on that girl and go right to her in the market. Good design. "Oh, you want to do something to this girl. Let me take you to the place where that's possible." "Cool, thanks." Of course I can't go back to where I was without several clicks, but why is this absent from our PvP teams? Why do we have to remember which girl we were planning to bump and then find her by scrolling through the harem? I frequently forget which one I was after and have to (for some inexplicable reason) drill deep into the Seasons subgame, and nowhere else, to find her again and start over. This game is increasingly and alarmingly (to me) PvP and competition focused. In the presence of multiple ways for us to fight each other, the means to do so need to be streamlined. But the new implementation does nothing to facilitate that. But then, I actually play the game, so things like this matter. In the interest of mobile friendliness, the pig has lipstick on. Woot. At least, I get to see some really bizarre stuff when I select some of the girls as waifus. Sometimes a leg and foot, sometimes a Kilroy. I'm entertained, if still frustrated.

<snark on> The problem is that bundle buying isn't properly incentivized. What we need, since we don't have enough resource draining contests already, is a weekly bundle buying contest. Not only would that allow us to insta-win the multiple daily contests (since nearly everything is a contest now and there's always a bundle to win the contests), but the top finisher could get an uber-exclusive 8* girl that's always blessed and beats any three Mythics. 2nd through 4th place finishers would receive tokens that allow them to insta-win daily contests (all of them). These tokens would auto-increment their scores to 1st place so that every other competitor in their bracket keeps burning resources to pass them. In addition to the ultra-exclusive girl, the top finisher would also receive 10x sniping tokens so that he can pass the 2nd through 4th place finishers (and everyone else) in his sleep. The tokens would be activated the night before and insta-win during the last second. THEN, the game would be "fun." <snark off>

I'm not a fan of additional contests that pit players against each other. While everything is more or less "elective" in the game and players can opt out, it's implicit that if we pass on these contests, we will be weaker than our peers. The tone of the game is increasingly to compete in bloodbath after resource draining bloodbath. No, thanks. Overall, though, the rewards for placement are generous and while I preferred dating tokens, it's nice to catch an additional girl now and then. I'm just not sure that I'll make a habit of running these weekly, if that's the plan for them. Perhaps I'll take a more opportunistic approach. If there's synergy with a daily contest, or if my cohort seems resource drained, then I'll run. I do miss the more or less solo play, with competition limited to ToF and Arena/Seasons. Simpler times, and more fun for me since I'm not a competitive player.

Alas that I have but one like to give. 😉 FWIW, my "perhaps, this will get harder" was in NO WAY a desire for it to. It was more of a prognostication. I remember the MidWinter Horror all too well and see the impact of ...unusual difficulty scaling every day in the Pantheon. I also did not wish to derail the Patch Notes thread with any detailed discussion of one feature, since that more properly belongs in the thread devoted to it. Just correcting the record in a reply rather than editing my post and providing positive (if reserved) feedback for the feature.

Boss Bang is the big show for the patch. The rest, more girls, more story, cool beans. The display bug for champs that was fixed not long ago is unfixed again, but no change to impression. It was jarring to see the old, low values again; I wondered if there'd been a silent nerf, but it's just that display bug again. My initial impression of Boss Bang was, "Oh dear god, I need to wear nose plugs because this is turning my brain to syrup, and I need to keep it from leaking out." And I definitely WAS alternately whimpering, cackling, and drooling after that many repetitive clicks. The gameplay is ...unexciting. Okay, it's boring. After reading the test server thread on the feature, I'm grudgingly intrigued. Yes, there's a bunch of badness to fix with the interface and @Liliatposed a very good work around to team selection (thanks for that!), but aside from the "click your way into the cackle factory" nature of actual gameplay, the feature could become quite engaging. Perhaps we were handed a lowball this time; I'm sure that this will get tougher. Or maybe I just glommed onto a successful team the first time around without really understanding the mechanics. Thank goodness, no timer or additional currency to manage.

Thank you for implementing the CC change. While I agree that capping them must happen too, this change removes some pain (caused by the previous change) and for many of us, this week is the drop-dead date by which the fix needed to be in place for us to get the girl.

I think that this is a symptom of the systematic overcorrection we've seen since I got my feet under me in this game and at least halfway figured things out. Too many orbs! Choke them off to near zero because we didn't anticipate that people would clean out the Pachinko pools! That one caused a LOT of players to spew hate. Since I "grew up" in an environment of abundance, that one hit me hard. And I hit back, just as hard. We're giving away too many kobans in Seasons! Let's nerf every other month! There went that five bucks per month in revenue from me. Players are getting the CC girls too easily, and they're getting them by cooperating! 3 major nerfs later, sex champs are no longer as viable an income stream and CC participation fell off a cliff as people stopped caring about it entirely. I pity anyone who's still chasing Any and Shtupra; those last two champs can suck near-limitless tickets. I believe that the PoA tasks were becoming stale. I've always treated the PoA's paid tier as elective. I bought in when I liked the girls and just did the free tier all the way through when I didn't. I thought that the brief extension of those tasks was a good move since when I paid, I could complete the entire event in a day on hoarded Seasons and Contest rewards. PoA was pretty nicely balanced, it just needed something elective to engage the well-funded, hoarders, and overachievers a bit longer. I think that we're seeing another overcorrection. Along those lines, I fully expect the GP monty haul to stop soon, and that the PoV rewards will either be scaled back or the stages will require far more shards. I believe this because as a free player, I finally have nearly enough of certain resources (XP and Aff items) to at least function. There's little on the continuum between scarcity and abundance in this game. If something seems just about right, that feels accidental rather than being the result of analysis of the game's many, MANY economies. Changes are reactive, in response to complaints about other changes. Things that are balanced and working properly are not immune to being skewed in response to something else that's broken. That kind of instability disincentivizes me (at least) from really pushing toward anything. I've become entirely opportunistic. I am now exposed to the real shard drop rates because I no longer buy packages and I use one combativity at a time. I'm exposed to the real koban economy because I don't buy monthly cards. I'm not affected by the ymen scarcity yet because I don't donate heavily in contests and rarely acquire girls that are expensive to upgrade anymore. I'm stuck in a kind of analysis paralysis: I play, but not assertively. Things that were achievable when I paid no longer are (and in truth, may never have been without paying). I'm not completely confident that the PoA will be tuned back to something reasonable as a result of all this vitriol, but I AM confident that we'll ignore it if it doesn't.

Well, this kills the last event that I actually enjoyed. PoA now joins the LONG list of events that involve chasing but not catching. This really puts me in a quandary because I hoarded resources for the LAST event that was achievable for me. How do I play now, and why? Do I completely ignore events (and most contests, which have become insane as folks predicted) and ...what? Burn down whatever regenerates ...why? To accomplish ...what? Accumulate mission and ToF kobans in numbers that are grossly insufficient to complete a fraction of what's put in front of me? Why? Worse yet, ratify this nonsense by PAYING for it? Not likely.

I think that the biggest wins in this patch are the GP rebalance and removal of avatars from MP. Those are solid wins, and I'm immensely grateful for them. Path of ...Valium? Rohypnol? Ketamine? (I agree that the "potions" are a bit date rapey) gives us something for essentially doing what we're already doing. It's a win, though how achievable the path is remains to be seen. But even without being able to complete it, or busting a F2P koban budget by buying into the other tier (I hoard kobans for PoA's), we get hoardable free stuff. Cool beans. Perhaps this gives less contest-aggressive free players an option: buy into the PoA at the end of the month or one or two PoV's, opportunistically, if they've been kicking butt getting shards. Options are good. Please make the reward window scroll horizontally though, for the sake of being consistent with other parts of the UI. OT for this thread, but cause for (guarded) optimism: the last survey asked actual questions. We were not presented with the usual choices: "Did you love it?" A) I loved it. B) I loved it enough to have sex with it. C) I had sex with it and still love it. I'm starting to feel like we're being listened to, and that perhaps the last couple of weeks' changes are Exhibit A for that. I'm still guarded about buying back in (in the form of monthly cards), so the (inevitable) inclusion of gems in the cards is off my radar.

I understand that we're still absorbing/integrating/balancing the gems feature. It would be great if the interface caught up. Thanks to the community script, we now have a summary of totals in the market, but the ergonomics of dealing with the gems are extremely frustrating. A relatively simple fix would be to hotlink team members back to the Market, as they are in the Sex Champs. That way, the work flow matches the thought process: "Oh, Blessings changed. I should bump some of the girls." <click on girl, into the Market, use some gems to awaken, add XP from the same screen> Harem loading speed is a bit better now, even for the bandwidth-constrained (that's me!). But without some logic in the interface, we have to go into the team in Seasons (and nowhere else, though the same team is used ubiquitously in PvP and PvE), remember which girl we want to bump, then into the Harem (wait for load times), search by name or sort by rarity and scroll... it's clunky. Also, if the equipment sale price reduction is here to stay, and I believe that it was an overcorrection, it would be really useful to be able to sort the harem by income.

It's a godsend. Thanks @Tom208 and @numbers, you guys are fantastic! And thanks for the tip, @MrXY. I haven't seen the stock game interface for so long that I'd be nervous about quitting if I turned the script off. 😉 Still snickering. Graveyard humor gets me EVERY time. Thanks for the laugh!

I just noticed something new. When opening the Market, any tab, there's a gem icon in the top right corner, directly under the Blessings button. Hovering there gives us a total of the gems we have of each type. Was this part of the patch or is this the work of the community script?

I'm not sure what I'm feeling. Relief not to have been nerfed for once, maybe. I like the change in Pachinko from prize OR gems to prize AND gems. Good change. More PoP's, good. Unless you're lower level and can't run them all. I maxed my pPoP's long ago but did note the change there and agree with @Bombathat it feels a little bait-and-switchy. I would have been similarly unhappy if I'd upgraded them on the strength of the 4th MyP orb. I was really hoping for some interface improvements and at least a partial rollback of the ymen nerf. The latter, more for actual game balance. I'm not really affected by the 90% equipment haircut, but I am positive that more junior players are. I maintain that the haircut is an overcorrection and that it needs to bump back in the other direction at least a bit. Perhaps 50% or 25% of previous values; 10% is going to crush people if it isn't already.

We can also change the channel. I think that's what the developers tend to forget: We can be enticed into spending money, but we cannot be coerced into it, no matter how heavily the game mechanics skew toward spending in order to succeed. I do like your analogy to commercials though. It's quite appropriate.

Oh, god, I hadn't considered the UI goat rope. <sigh> Very little frustrates me more than janky UI design. It makes me not want to click things. Maybe I'll skate by without having to interact with any of it before it's fixed. There's so much already that pulls my pin, notably that if you click on a member of your fight team, it sends you to the fight team editor rather than to that girl in your harem, or to the market with her preselected. That one gets to me A LOT. I don't bother to level max fight team members. Why? Because it's asspain.

I'm sure that this has been tried, but some kind of "voice from the field" (QA has sort of a negative connotation) is still absent. I mean in a more closed environment than an open Discord channel. HH is likely to be Kinkoid's flagship, so it's probably worth the founder's time to listen to that with the Community Manager, especially once he realizes that things are being conducted professionally. Then, he might loop some developers in rather than tell them to stay off the channel because we'll rip their heads off. 🙂 I get the problem though. Lack of direct communication with them is seriously frustrating since we're often asking the Community Manager to sell a change that he may not be fully vested in.

Well, we can't be induced to spend, only enticed. I still remember the early levels (because at 1.5 years, I'm an upstart at lv 380-ish). Before joining an active club, I was in the vacuum of solo play and hadn't dug into the forum all that hard. Asked my noob questions and returned to the game, and my assumptions about its design. "Oh, okay, I'm in a serious cash shortage. I guess that will lift once the harem grows to supply more income." So, fueled by REALLY cheap, $2 and $3 micro-purchases and a Silver card, I became a supporter of the game. That's the success story a year ago, before A LOT of changes. In my view, PoP's created a lot of the inflation we have seen. If you dumped kobans into the PoPs and were strong enough to run all three maxed (more money spent to do both; the PoP's were a solid win for the company) suddenly, there was an absolute torrent of ymen, via the GP10's. My prediction at the time: "The donate and sell items contests are going to go bazzitshit." They did. The "I cleared out EP" thread grew in length too. People's harem sizes exploded thanks to the steady stream of MP orbs. That was an extremely newer player friendly facet of PoPs and I joyfully if cautiously maxed them because of how many girls I was getting from there. Then a maniac in my club introduced me to the idea of insta-maxing the harem by koban-refreshing the Market over and over. Again, I was enticed, not induced. Here came the plat card, and I spent a good three or four months roasting through ymen, burning tickets to generate more income, and burning orbs in contests. I was in a spending fueled virtuous cycle: action begat results, begat need, begat spending, begat action. THAT is a game designer's happy place. My story would have been different with these sale prices. Absent the incentive to max the PoP's, which the drops from the onezies-twozies I would get with base level PoP's would demonstrate, I would have seen the game as a very slow-grow endeavor, from my perspective perpetually plagued by lack of ymen. I wouldn't KNOW that this used to be far easier, but that it was done to tune down the very top players. If I did, I'd say, "Eff this, next game." I would lack the commitment that spurs even micro-purchases because I'm not getting anywhere. At that point, I would come to believe that this is contrived to get me to spend. I would say, "Oh, wallet snake, next game." The PoP Ferris wheel of increasing spending would never have drawn me because it's not going to help me sufficiently to justify the real or in-game cost. I would be confronted by unmanageable sex champs, a CC that gets stronger if I hit it, perpetual lack of tickets, absurdly low returns from champ fights... cash problem, or Euros. Hmm. Billion ymen contest donations are how people manage excess. It's elective and it occasionally lands you some kobans. Hoarding them is kind of fun too. No big deal. However, what this may unintentionally do to newbies and frustrated but engaged level 200's: Big Deal. That's a major target market for enticement, and you just crippled them by solving a problem that really wasn't a problem. There are other target markets, though ironically, not the top players. But the level cohort below them, 400 or 450 up... the 300's building big harems... those markets still exist and they are largely unaffected by the change. If my story is at all familiar to anyone, this move is likely to contribute to choking spending enticement off at the root.

Roger, thanks. Would it be reasonable and accurate to say that Rosso is the principal idea person? In the example of the 90% market haircut, would it be reasonable to say that he put modification of the ymen economy on the implementation roadmap, and that someone else made the code change? Or to stay OT, that the Awakenings implementation is an element that he devised at some level or approved? I'm not attempting to point fingers or to build a Socratic argument, merely to understand the flow of information because I'm still on the idea of finding a way to help fix things. If the above is even reasonably accurate or highly plausible, then the feed-forward comes (as it did for this feature) from a relatively brief stay on the Test environment, and in a meta sense, from Discord chats with the founder, when he lays out his vision for the game's future and responds to questions. Post implementation, the feedback (or QA) comes from this forum, to the Community Manager, right? The Community Manager is generally a busy person since they have a number of business development and "face of the company" roles. As such, I would think that their time is quite valuable. Gaining their attention in a manner that resonates sufficiently for them to agree that an issue warrants reflection back into the company is pretty important. Are we doing that effectively? Can we improve on that?

I had some time to reflect on my tone while running errands this evening and realized that @FinderKeeper is quite right. And as you pointed out, @DvDivXXX, I erode what might otherwise be a well-reasoned post with that tone. Noted, correction made, and my apologies. @DvDivXXXwhat you describe above would indeed be fabulous. Yes, there are going to be tensions between the interests of developers of a for-profit game and the interests of the game's constituents. Not that we expect to be handed everything, far from it, but some semblance of enfranchisement would be really helpful and I believe healthy for the game. This isn't a Blizzard or EA game, and I'm glad of that. This team doesn't have the deep pockets of those companies, so they're doing things in a less formal way. That's actually pretty cool until we get ...well, what we've been getting for the last six months: some good, a lot of "WTF?" Perhaps my idea of presenting problems as fact checks deserves the jaundice that it got. I'm not on Discord and have no idea how wild and wooly things get. I was proposing a mode of communication that doesn't shut people down. Maybe it's too late for all that. Then again, if Rosso spent that much time listening to some of the elder statesmen, maybe not. It would be of tremendous benefit to Kinkoid if they essentially gain a QA department of unpaid volunteers... IF that QA department is able to influence decisions to the extent that a rollout is workable for the majority of the player base. There are a lot of smart and reasonable people on this forum, and the perspective they bring to a problem often changes my own. Why not the Developers', too? And if it is able to exert that influence, then the game's constituency gains enfranchisement. We NEED that. The tone of this thread has been much sharper than I've seen at any time during my nearly year and a half on this game. People are leaving. They've had enough. This isn't outrage. As someone very cogently put it upthread, outrage is proof of investment. Folks are beyond angry; they're done. I'm very close myself. The virtuous cycle you describe has to start somewhere, and in all likelihood enough of the pieces are already in place. It could be quite ad hoc: people wade in with their perspectives, driven by facts. One of the greatest examples I saw of this recently was by one of the number crunchers on the Patch Notes thread who graphed orb drops over time and demonstrated with data that the orb drops in PoP were nerfed. Facts, devoid of ranting. Hell, invite @GeorgeMTOto murder board what gets put in front of the developers. George is gruff and it can be a challenge at times to convince him that there's a problem, but he has corrected my thinking a number of times and I KNOW that he sees things a fair bit more holistically than many of us. Maybe it's just my turn to be overly optimistic, but I believe that a moderate voice presenting the fact-driven perspectives of the full constituency of player levels could be impactful and perhaps prevent an exodus.

I see far more pointed things than I have said, daily, even in this thread and on this page of this thread, and thought that my words would pass muster with you. Edited out.

To paraphrase, "Development time has been invested to create this f...eature. It's not right because we didn't really think it through, but we can always fix it later. It HAS to go live because money was spent on it. Else, it would be a sunk cost." My contention is that spending money on a bad idea is bad. But spending money on a bad idea, rolling with it anyway, spending MORE money on it to fix it, and losing a great deal of goodwill, belief in one's professionalism and thus willingness to support your game is FAR worse.

Alcohol works for me, up to a point. For acceptance of horrid facts, I turn to pot. 🙂

We often complain that the devs don't seem to play their own game sufficiently to understand its dynamics and the changes that the ...patches inflict on them. On us. Frankly, I doubt that the devs of any grinding game actually grind their own game because grinding is inherently a time-intensive activity. Instead, they rely on focus groups, Beta testers, bug bounties, etc to get their game running as intended. We have no idea if the game is running as the developers intended. We're frustrated, so we vent. The primary dev takes our frustration as personal attack, we still don't feel heard, full-stop, the shit show must go on. The thing is that they (he) may not know whether the game runs as HE intended. So, why don't we ask? Take it into passive-voice and you remove perceived personal attack. The format would be something like this: "After [patch X, patch Y, and patch Z], it has become impossible for mid tier players to obtain more than 50 shards on a CC girl in a month without spending thousands of kobans. The same player class generally also lacks the tickets to challenge the CC for a girl. Players who are done with the sex champs continue to have an abundance of tickets and are spending far fewer kobans to finish a CC girl. Casual players who spend no kobans have no chance. Does this work as intended?" This gives the dev an opportunity for candor: "Yes, it does." Okay, we're stuck with that, got it. However, he may also say, "No, that's not what we intended." That may lead to change. I think that for this to work, the person asking about intent on our behalf would need to be pretty much unimpeachable. My personal nomination would be @DvDivXXX . Not sucking up, but you do a fine job as a moderator remaining ...moderate. The "worst" you do is to like or love posts that express things more strongly than you would prefer to by virtue of being a mod. Whoever it is would then need to be armed with facts and as close to a consensus on the in-game reality at different levels as we can get. Always the same question format: Game change -> impact on different player tiers -> reflect back. Since data gathering and consensus building would all be occurring here in the forum, the devs can feel free to look at how we arrived at our assertion. Just trying to think of a way to rescue this wretched situation.

I couldn't agree more. Complexity CAN be engaging, especially in resource management or character development games. Good, meaning astute and engaged, players will figure out how to winkle out every single advantage while more casual players will be equally engaged at a more casual level. Engagement leads to profit IF the developer is good at managing the tension between ASKING for money and DEMANDING it. Remember that the PvP element isn't done. At a minimum, Curses are still coming (to the game, not just the Nerf Notes and Beta threads of the forum 😉 ). I'm not a PvP player in ANY game and have disliked the added emphasis on PvP in this one. I don't disagree with finding ways to use the girls that we acquire, but I resist the compounding complexity in the PvP part of this game. It's not a complexity I want to deal with. That's MY problem, not the devs'; games diverge from their original focus. Some survive, some don't. Adding a tower climb element to the game that I click on a few times per day, well, 4 times per engagement thanks to the unique visual styling of the coders' vision, isn't doing it for me either, but I don't mind it. But I DO mind PvP complexity, especially when it masks perpetual incumbent advantage, and I utterly fail to see how adding gates to leveling girls is anything other than a back-handed answer to "community feedback" about the long-running systemic lack of XP and Aff items. "THERE. Now, you don't need as many XP items. We 'fixed' it."