SoggyShorts

Well, if the developer is getting in the way of actually playing the game and doing everything imaginable to suck the joy from playing it, at least we can show each other our holes. 🙂

Indeed. I'm presently 900k XP and 300k Aff in the hole. Every time another one comes (unless she's a 1*, in which case I get to insta-upgrade her, woohoo!), every time I level, the gap widens. I was 200k XP in the hole and caught up on Aff (ahead, actually) when this mythic business started. Admittedly, I'm pretty disenfranchised with the game lately, so I tend to see the negative. However, it's interesting how much has unfurled just from this one change. If I don't want to level or acquire more girls because I cannot do anything with them, I don't need to compete in contests or spend kobans on events. With no kobans spent in the market (and no need for a plat card since the refresh discount isn't needed), there's little need for kobans at all. Seasons is done before mid-month, no reason to push there. ToF is ...ToF. It more or less takes care of itself. CC is a horror, not spending kobans (or indeed much time) on that. When you demolish the central premises of the game (leveling to get stronger and acquiring girls in order to build a bigger harem bonus), there really isn't much to do. Use up whatever has regenerated, get pissed off every time the market resets, and collect droppings from PoP's. I don't need a monthly card for any of that. My koban burn rate is now nil, unless I feel lazy and do a harem cash collection for 12 kobans. In about a month, because of one change, the game went from self-licking ice cream cone of koban demand, fueled by a steady input of my cash, to **crickets**.

Fair points both, George. I'll put a lid on it. However, in our defense, the conflation of those two events is pretty easy to make given the timing. It's plausible, though of course we have no way of knowing whether it's factual. But as you say, someone on the 4th floor of Kinkoid Corporate Headquarters didn't know about something that was in the purview of someone who works on the 8th floor of same and it went right by the program leads during the weekly stand-up meeting. Mistakes happen, and even if the optics are poor, it's best to move past them without giving them any more oxygen. End poke. I reviewed the gift code posting thread and yep, DvDivXXX pretty much covered that repeatedly, in bold. Senior moment? <shrug> Just because they haven't been posted lately doesn't mean that they're not permitted.

Indeed. 🙂 People who buy the pass but no card got hit the same way. Silver card holders are being docked in excess of what the developers' programming error gave them as a windfall. It's hard not to see this as petty and parsimonious. With so much goodwill evaporating lately over the mythic market shit show and the CC horror, it would behoove them to send out a survey. Shouldn't be difficult to work out who WAS a premium player, no longer is, but is still playing. If they were to ask questions that they may not really want the answers to, and ponder the responses, this is all recoverable. But that window is closing rapidly. At this point, I think the rules of the gift code posting thread should be relaxed. If the company is providing koban incentives to draw in new players, we have earned those same koban incentives just to keep putting up with this nonsense.

Ehh... I'm not sure. Someone on another thread brought up Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Mirrors would only confuse. "Who IS that guy, and why is he staring at me?" 🙂

I dropped my plat card this month and reverted to free play after a year of supporting them. The tin-eared mythic implementation removed a major incentive to have a plat card. I hadn't bought a season pass. Caught wind of this little stunt on another thread and I'm glad that I didn't buy in. I've bought the passes since the Seasons rollout; grudgingly at first, but I've come to consider it a good value. Until now. This cynical stunt just cost them ANOTHER subscription, not just for this month, but permanently. After a month with reduced rewards from not buying the pass, I'll be accustomed to those reduced rewards, just as I'm becoming accustomed again to manual cash collections, which is itself a cynical stunt that attempts to extract cash from players in return for getting a deliberately placed annoying feature out of the way. Has anyone noticed that not all the Patreon support classes even fit onto their "thank you" page, to say nothing about all the supporters? They don't seem very intent on actually thanking their supporters. Last I checked, a scroll bar is fairly easy to implement, but it's just not important enough to fix. Soon, if they keep going as they are, all of their supporters will fit easily. 🙂 I'd love to start a pool on what they're going to "fix" next. Go ahead, KK, wow us! You've been doing GREAT at that: "Wow, WTF were they THINKING?!"

I'm grateful that KK is providing all these reasons not to give them any money anymore. The market BS killed off a big reason to have platinum cards and is making it difficult to justify continuing to grow harems. CC has gone from being the most reviled feature in the game (in terms of its implementation) to flatline as more and more people just stop dealing with it entirely. They're taking square aim on the reasons to stay engaged and squashing them one by one. That's sure to end well for them. Meanwhile, over here in F2P land for nearly the first time since I started playing a year ago, I'm meditating on all the things that are paid perks. Like collecting harem cash. Most games are designed so that paying money enhances game play. This one attempts to extort money out of you in order to get a deliberately annoying design feature out of your way. It's immature game design. I'll put up with it until I don't. I no longer have any skin in the game. Just hanging around to see what they do next.

And here we are. New month, new CC cycle. The recent ...adjustment of the CC ...feature indicates to me that we are in fact supposed to play competitively: Exhibit A: The shitty finisher reward, which doesn't get improved no matter how much we bitch about it. We aren't SUPPOSED to help. Exhibit B: The fixed shard range. Before, we thought that we were helping the not-so-strong players by doing the heavy lifting. Not so; we made the CC much tougher that way. Now, casual hits remove shards from people who are aggressively seeking them. I believe that we have ALWAYS been penalized for helping because we created a steeper and steeper hill to climb every time we cycled the CC. Removing the RNG from the drop makes this far more obvious. Exhibit C : No free cooldown for platinum card holders. This is another irritating aspect of the ...feature that makes COMPLETE sense when you change your perspective on the CC and see it as intra-club competitive: spend more kobans than your club mate and you are guaranteed to receive a larger shard drop. The end. We squished out first CC this morning, to the chagrin of latecomers. A great deal of discussion ensued, along with some healthy speculation. Off the cuff, it seems that the CC drops ~50 shards. This, based on our personal drop rates. For example, I did 8% impression and got 4 shards. That 1 shard per 2% impression rate seems to hold generally true, so we can infer 50 shards for 100% impression. By itself, this makes the idea of every club member getting the girl utterly Quixotic. Even an extreme number of engagements, say 40, would only yield enough shards for 20 people to finish if the drop rate holds true. 40 engagements would be utterly unsustainable in koban cost and CC difficulty. This assumption is being disproven by forum traffic as results come in. The provisional drop calculation indicates 100 shards per CC. However, we did agree that the soundest strategy at this point is to: - Strengthen the little-help paradigm we used last month to no-help. Since casual hits remove shards, once done, do nothing. Do not hit. REVERSE the little-help paradigm (see below). Once done, hit ONCE. Hitting will sandbag people who are chasing shards. - >300's should stay off the first few CC's entirely while the not-as-strong players get theirs. The theory is that they will finish on the easier CC's and thus will finish faster, with fewer promotions. >300's should hit ONCE during the first few CC's because total participation is still part of the shard calculation. We will then get ours. We will do so on stronger CCs, but we are stronger and thus should end up consuming roughly the same number of tickets. Given the possibility, even likelihood that we need a LOT of CCs to finish with this kind of ludicrous drop rate, there is a strong probability that this will blow up in our faces. My own view on this is that I'm pushing 500 girls. It is far less impactful to me NOT to get another 5* girl than it is beneficial for someone with a smaller harem to GET one. The tweak demonstrates in cause-and-effect fashion that it is club-positive to do nothing, to stay the hell out of the way. I am content to do so while we let this unfold and I enjoin the club's heavies to do likewise.

I posit that this ...feature finally works as intended. The 180 degree flip in the dynamic makes complete sense. Before, maximum club participation increased everyone's shards. Now, casual hits negatively impact serious pursuit of shards. We played it cooperatively and continue to try to do so, but this isn't meant to be played cooperatively. It's designed for intra-club competition. Thus, the crappy finisher reward, which hasn't changed in 6 months, no matter how much we bitch about it: we're not supposed to be helping each other. Thus, the lack of free cooldown for platinum card holders: spend more kobans than your "team mates" and you will receive a larger fixed shard amount as a reward, guaranteed. In my club, we have some non-chatting, non-cooperating players who spend kobans like mad to get top spots (formerly, maximum range) and then disappear once they get theirs. With this new system, those players will thrive because that exact play style is rewarded by the feature's design. In fact, we ALL benefit from people getting the hell out of the way once they have theirs. The really amusing thing is that we can now sandbag each other after we finish (assuming that we do). Got yours? Don't want people in your club to get theirs? Keep hitting! The silver lining for me is that it has become a club-positive play style to ignore the feature altogether. Edit: It occurred to me that under the new dynamic, in clubs with level spreads, the stronger players will consume the easy CC's, leaving the weaker players to get theirs from the stronger CC's with no help (or very little help, lest we extend the pain). The club-positive thing to do would be for the stronger players to stay off the CC entirely until the not-so-strong get theirs. Edit 2: Our review of our freshly-squished CC revealed a drop rate of 1 shard per 2% impression. This seems to be consistent with what I saw upthread, more or less, possibly a bit low. We only had 16 hitters on it. If that metric is realistic, then it stands to reason that a CC drops 50 shards, yes? Has anyone confirmed this, or is our low turnout/quick kill responsible? If 50 shards per CC, it would be utterly Quixotic for a club to attempt for all of its members to finish. Even if only 20 members were committed to finishing, a 50-shard per CC drop rate would require 40 engagements, which is extremely onerous in koban refreshes and CC difficulty due to promotions.

Dezi (in Mythic Pachinko) is bugged. I've hit her 3x with 3-game spins. She does not appear in the harem as having 30 shards... or in any way at all.

Introducing a new girl before giving everyone a chance not to get Blet if they didn't get her the first time around seems erratic. At least, now, we all get to see how well the newly ...adjusted fixed shard system works with the whole club vying for shards. This should work out fabulously for players who were struggling to make a meaningful amount of impression while the rest of us sat on our hands. If anyone still believed that this is a cooperative feature, tomorrow should put the last nail into that coffin. By tomorrow night, we should have a very clear idea of the shard setpoints. And this thread will probably be on page 6. 😉 Welcome to the CC Beta program!

Not a bad idea. 🙂 I'll give you another extreme example of why the old system had to change. During the first month of the CC's, a strong player joined us. He was in a dead club and decided to solo the CC while there. You would expect that if you did 100% of the impression, you get the girl, right? Nope. He joined us with 12 shards. One of the things we don't know yet is how the fixed shard drops affect the current paradigm, under which the have's basically have to sit on their hands by doing one or a few rounds while the have-not's do the majority of the impression. We may find out that the have's no longer benefit the have-not's by contributing at all. Previously, even a single hit, because the % impression was less than that of people who put in many tickets, STILL contributed to people's range. We just have to go through a bunch of CC's collectively and let people plug the numbers in. The thing that hasn't changed, the pinch point for not-so-strong players, remains: it hasn't been about the number of tickets since the feature's inception; it has always been about % impression. Maybe changing the metric as you suggest WOULD be more fair, but we're on month 5 (?) of the feature with only two tweaks. As a sort-of-strong player, I'm relieved by this change, but I feel for the team mates who are still chasing shards.

POTENTIALLY less, maybe. Under the old system, shard RANGE was built on the percentage of total impression done on the CC when it was defeated. Some not-so-strong benefited by being awarded at or near the top of their range, and that's great. However, the range backfired spectacularly too. One of my club mates did sizable percentages of the overall impression and scored 1 shard. Eight times in a row. Another did the same and received 1 shard 6 times in a row. Try dropping 100+ tickets into a CC, along with kobans in order to spend that many tickets, and getting ONE shard. It's insanely frustrating and demoralizing. Reduced exposure to the RNG is a good thing. Not-so-strong players struggle to get the CC girls under either system because they do less impression per ticket and thus have to spend more tickets and more time than someone who is stronger. Under this one, we can at least hope that if you invest the tickets into doing a large proportion of the impression, you will receive a shard drop that is commensurate with your investment.

(Now) 12 days ago, we were handed a shit sandwich. Today, we got a response: "Well, here you go, now there's less shit on your sandwich." I'm not grateful for this because 13 days there was NO shit on my sandwich. I want my shit-free sandwich back. @Pelinordid a great job showing the absurdity of what they have given us: I'm doubtless missing some brain cells, thank you alcohol, but a marmoset can figure out that these items are a bad deal. Putting them in the market HIGHLIGHTS just how bad a deal they are. Give them as contest or event rewards. Toss them into the CC in place of the laughable rewards we currently get. But get them the hell out of the market or give us a proper way to gain XP and Aff. Roll it back. Re-think it. Get your shit out of my sandwich or I will go to a different deli.

The central issue of the broken XP and Aff system remains unaddressed, despite the big update. Market refreshes, the work-around by which we get it done despite this lapse, still cost 25% more in kobans than they did before the feature was implemented if we're over level 350. Fail. Speaking of big, that's one BIG menu! Shame that if you happen to be on a villain, the crumb trail overlays the Home button so you end up on the world map unless you click in just the right spot. With all that real estate, even this gameplay update is ...fail. I'm grateful that the CC shard range was made to go away though.

This thread and the shitshow that started it are now 11 days old. 11 days have seen quite a ...transformation in my little microcosm. Maybe like attracts like and everyone I know in this game is an incessant complainer. I sort of doubt it; even the longest-term players, the committed cheerleaders for it, are quiet. What I DO know is that among the 15 or so people I routinely communicate with, a small number I know, but this game isn't conducive to sidebars with non club members, seven have dropped Patreon support and let their cards expire. Some have downgraded to silver, most have just stopped supporting the game entirely. Our club's normally vibrant chat... the place is a tomb. The game's XP and Aff system is broken. It's been broken for the year I've been playing it (almost to the day). Apparently, it's been broken for a lot longer. This ...rollout was a nerve punch. It diminished the only viable work-around to this broken part of the game's dynamic. The consequence for me is that I don't want to level. I'm at 352, and every time I do, the XP and Aff shortfalls become larger. 2 weeks ago, I was nearly caught up on XP. Now, I'm 600k in the hole. I don't want to acquire new girls right now because I can't do much with them. Yes, I could click GP singles 3,200 times. That would net enough XP to max one legendary 3* girl and, after selling all the junk back, it would "only" cost 600m ymen. Pass. That's insanely boring and utterly unsustainable. I've played assiduously and aggressively for a year and I've done well. 476 girls in the harem, and I've spent a pretty good amount of money to get to that point. Now, full-stop. F2P is a short step away from "Free to Play Somewhere Else." Committed players are losing commitment. It's immaterial to me at this point whether we few, we (un)happy few forum users constitute a majority or minority of players. My reality is much closer to home: this Let-Them-Eat-Cake rollout, and the utter lack of timely responsiveness to complaints on the part of the developers, has crushed morale and activity in my club.

Yup. Your long term average of XP and Aff would likely change with more spins (small sample), but if this is how KK expects us to gain XP and Aff, it's utterly unaffordable. At least, you're starting with a positive balance. I know that it gets wiped out quickly, especially now that it's not being replenished anywhere near previous rates. I was near-zero when the change was implemented. And I effing REFUSE to refresh for things I won't buy. Probably coincidentally, I tend to get more mythics in the XP market than I do in the Aff market. My gameplay is already changing. I don't go after MP girls as assiduously as I did because I cannot level them. I just leveled myself and thought, "Crap, now the girls are ANOTHER level behind." My morale is seriously in the crapper. There isn't even a thought of renewing the plat card. All the talk of us complainers being in the minority is as disingenuous as the arguments for that are specious. This is utter joy-robbing nonsense.

I apologize in advance; this is likely to be a long-ish post. Today's contest is well-timed for me to test a theory, so I wanted to see if we've been "playing incorrectly" by using Market refreshes to keep our harems topped off. This, after learning that not just I, but my entire club has been "doing the CC wrong;" if I'm doing something that violates the devs' intent, then doing it correctly should alleviate much of the pain. I see that now with the CC and I want to see how this works out with the subject of this thread. My theory is that the only available source of bulk XP and Aff that the game gives us is GP. Yes, there are other sources: villains at certain tiers, Seasons, missions, but I mean bulk. Large quantities, albeit in small denominations. I couldn't test GP10's because I have orbs, so I did GP singles. I'm level 351, so a single spin cost me 621,500 ymen. So, 1,609 single spins equal 1b ymen. For (relative) brevity, I'll only focus on the XP item economics. The results surprised me a bit. Those 1609 spins netted: 118 XP items (17,250 XP) 243 Aff items (18,090 Aff) Pretty well-balanced, despite a 2:1 Aff vs XP item drop rate. And of course, that 1b ymen wasn't actually spent, just used since I get ~70% of it back during the next Sell Items contest. That's my long-term average from having done GP single spins for months before turning to Market refreshes. But this isn't the whole story. My current XP deficit is 496,158 and my Aff deficit is 207,789. This is why I mentioned upthread that I'm much more sensitive to the loss of XP via the Market than Aff. If I've been "playing wrong" by refreshing the Market, how many times would I have to do what I just did to close the XP deficit? Well, 496,158 / 17,250 = 28.8 times. At a cost of (300m ymen x 28.8) 8.64b ymen. My current XP deficit is somewhat of an outlier because I went bonkers yesterday in a vain effort to win the LC. Got plenty of girls but had few XP items with which to level them. The majority of the herd is currently 3 levels behind and I have 7 girls at lv 1, untouched. That's not a completely unreasonable scenario, but still an outlier because my play style changed because of the LC. They're contributing ~150k XP to that deficit (149,862). If I remove them entirely and recalculate the number of times I have to do 1609 GP single spins, I arrive at 346,296 / 17,250 = 20 times. x 300m ymen = 6b ymen. If I divide that by the average number of levels that the girls are behind, I would need 2b ymen per level to keep the girls topped off via GP singles. GP10's are ~10% cheaper if you buy the spins, but that doesn't really change the conclusion. This is utterly unrealistic. These are hideously expensive XP: (300m ymen / 17250 XP / 2=) 8695 ymen per XP. Compare that to the Market costs that were calculated upthread. I haven't been "playing wrong," and either has anyone else who refreshes the Market to level and upgrade their girls. It's the only cost-effective(ish) way to do it, and it costs kobans, lots of kobans, to do it. Fewer if you buy a plat card, but winning a contest by doing this constitutes a rebate for doing something that is expensive in both kobans and ymen. In addition to "We haven't been playing wrong," my second contention is that by providing a disincentive to refreshing the market, KK has squarely shot themselves in the foot by removing a steady koban drain for assiduous and well-funded players, as well as one of the major reasons for those well-funded players to buy a platinum card. We don't need the Market refresh discount anymore.

Fair enough. I labored under the misapprehension that this forum was the primary feedback mechanism. Since I don't do any social media outside the couple of games I play, that tends to be a black box for me. George cleared that up, as did you. I express gratitude to people when they correct a thinking error. @GeorgeMTOI apologize if I stretched your patience. Assuming that there's a significant amount of positive feedback, can we agree that this release was at best polarizing? At least as polarizing as the CC release? My own recency bias is in play ATM because of the CC. That's what George corrected. I have no first-hand knowledge of this since I'm not in the Beta program, but don't these types of issues point to too narrow a Beta program? I do realize that there's a great deal of alchemy involved in balancing free play against profit, and that delighting players, which ensures a game's long term viability, means challenging them and rewarding them for interaction, NOT necessarily by always giving them what they want. But there are logical flaws and math errors in this release that more eyes would almost certainly have caught. I still find the loss of Market slots lamentable and remain of the opinion that Market refreshes are a widely used work-around for the lack of availability of XP items in the game. I believe that the forum has blown up as hard as it has over this release, specifically WHERE it was released, because that work-around is something of a sacred cow. It's the primary way in which those of us who assiduously top of our girls get it done because no other feature in the game delivers XP items in sufficient quantities. I'm far more sensitive to the loss of XP items than Aff because Aff items tend to be readily available, or at least several orders of magnitude more available via GP single spins and to a lesser degree, villains at certain tiers than XP items are. XP was crunched before this release. More so, now. I'm asking if there's a way to be part of the solution. Perhaps more eyes, a greater spread in player levels and a broader cross section of paying and non-paying players (I realize I am making some assumptions there) would contribute to that alchemy I mentioned.

Okay, that's fair. Delivered in your generally curmudgeonly fashion, but fair. That was all-or-nothing thinking on my part. However, do you actually believe what you're saying about the players who dislike this feature being in the minority? Or are you wearing the Moderator hat when you say this? It strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. Not because I disagree with your assertion, or not solely because I disagree, but because I cannot find evidence in ANY of the places I can see, this forum, my own club, of even a minority, at any level and anywhere on the continuum of F2P to P2W, being happy with this. Is the silent, happy majority on Discord? How's your own XP item stash looking? You've frequently weighed in with the opinion that the developers do not correctly value XP items. Is this implementation (the manner of it, in the Market, for kobans rather than ymen) a move toward making that better?

Unless the limit is zero items, this is still a downgrade. Market refreshes are still a worse deal than they were before this ...feature. And it seems like this is being crammed down our throats. Can't put the mythic crap in its own tab, nooo. What would be the point of rolling something out if it didn't further diminish already diminishing returns? I look forward to all the great things they have planned for us. Almost as much as I look forward to cleaning all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue, because every enhancement to the game in recent memory has enhanced our ability to get and to do less unless we pay or pay more. Pleased to hear that they listened to the community. We were (for once) united in our disdain for something they did. They listened, selectively, and are leaving it in place. If I struggle as a paying player, next month should be a treat as I go F2P. Once the koban hoard is gone, so am I.

I think that our morale has really taken a hit. Our new strategy of letting the have-nots hit for range, no matter the time it takes, may improve things, but it's equally likely to tank the morale of people who need to devote 100+ tickets to getting a meaningful range. And it's RANGE. It could be 1 shard. I'm nervous about the rest of the month and have done my best to winge less. Several people are on the verge of rage-quitting and the hits just keep on coming with every release note. I believe that we need to just get through this month. Encourage the hoarding of dating tokens and essentially write this one off. I think that with our new strategy, the best we can hope for is to down 3 more, but I persist in believing that it's the right strategy because that's only 2 more opportunities for the CC to level. Newly joined members whose shards are in the single digits are essentially out of luck. Not because we don't want to help, but because the game mechanics do not allow us to help them to finish. Next month, next CC cycle, is a new opportunity. We stay the (new) course. Even though it violates our sense of fair play, of helping one another along, I believe that staying out of the way fits the feature as implemented. The finisher reward is anemic because we're not supposed to do as much. The shard range can be a shit sandwich, but we just create lots of progressively more pungent shit sandwiches for people who need shards by intervening. Perhaps some big drops will put some wind back into people's sails. I can't help but to think that if we play the feature as implemented, not the way we WISH it were implemented (since it's been live for 5 months with no changes that have brought it into congruency with our wishes), our morale will recover.

@Omnimundo makes a great point. I have been buying the plat card because of the market refresh perk. Done with all that. I'm tired of cringing every time there's a release note: "Oh-oh, NOW what?" We take for granted that market refreshes are how we keep our girls topped off. I find that strange. We have arrived at the same work-around to the problem that there's no way to do so by playing diligently. There's no way to grind XP and Aff items, we accept this, and we spend kobans to deal with the lack of game balance. The other way to gain some XP and Aff items in meaningful quantities is via GP single spins. The cost per item (and Aff items are HEAVILY biased for) becomes horrendous, but it's viable, it bleeds off cash for those with billions, and it feeds at least two contests. I can't really count the mid- to late-game villains' drops because those aren't grindable except through combativity refreshes. The game simply does not natively feature a way for us to top off the girls, except for the market work-around... which has now been torpedoed. Perhaps that was the idea: to force us to the GP singles and stop dropping billions into "donate" contests. A further suggestion (the above is mostly rumination): the Mythic XP items should NOT be to player level because this strongly favors higher level players. If the Mythic items were either cheaper in kobans or available in ymen, and available outside the market, I'd probably be okay. Make them analogous to (i.e. a slightly better deal in cost per XP or Aff) to Legendary items, make them scarce, and let me decide. Maybe the right play for me is to obtain some as I get new Legendary girls. One and done, save the Legendary XP items to catch up other girls. Maybe a lower-level player targets different items because they're closer to his or her maximum. And it's easy. Just add a tab to the Market and have one seller selling 8 random, mixed Mythic items. That helps to create scarcity to offset the "slightly better deal" that I'm proposing and it removes them from work-around play. However, if the intent of this ...feature is to force us into GP single spins, then fix the effing drop rate. It is utterly Quixotic to try to keep girls leveled from GP single spins. I tried this for months before capitulating and buying plat cards. Not possible. And thanks, @Fielfor keeping a level head and tabulating our rants into something presentable. You're doing Yeoman's work!

Thank you for catching this bit of absurdity! It nearly got lost among all the other absurdities of this ...update? Clusterf*ck? Latest tin-eared release? I had a laugh though; you're absolutely right! Good thing the user community does their due diligence and sanity checking for them; it gives the devs so much more time to do quality releases!

True statement. And I've seen lots of games die because devs skewed "their" game to the advantage of incumbents. "Veteran wins." The shell game is kept alive for a while, on the backs of players who are supplicants to that incumbency: "I'll spend my way to the top." The folks who are already there have little reason to spend, and once the supplicants realize that there's a glass ceiling, they become frustrated and stop spending. A decline in activity by mid-level players is a clear warning sign. Games flourish on the ephemeral quality of momentum. I agree with all points above: these items are of low utility (and unaffordable) to lower-level players while again skewing to the highest level players, for whom the insta-upgrades provide the greatest value. They don't belong in the Market. I'm confident that they will find their way into purchasable packages before long. Good place for them; at least, they are out of the way of F2P players. I'd like to suggest that they replace the anemic CC rewards for players who already have the girl.