lasergun

I buy every season pass. I buy every PoA. Every PoV. Refills for every Mythic Days and Legendary Days. If all of those resources on top of spending 6k kobans for two event cards still isn't enough to get these four girls, then KK this time you are truly out of your damn minds. I have 1150 girls. All but 32. I've slowly reduced my spending over the last year due to not liking the direction the game is going in plus little to no improvements made to the areas of the game that I feel need it. This might be what finally pushes me to quit. Not because I can't get all the girls anymore but because this makes it very clear to me how much I'm valued as a player and customer.

Unfortunately that's the situation we find ourselves in now. If I'm now getting 1/3 of the reward for the same amount of work as before, the incentive for me to do the work at all is more or less gone. It's just not worth the time to bother anymore. Will the club members who were less active before this change step up to pull their share of the weight? Of course not. Because the issue with champions wasn't that some players are too weak, or that they don't have enough tickets, or that some players were taking all the shards. It was simply that it's too tedious. The average player (in my club that's about 90% of the members) is unwilling to be constantly logged in to put in 2-3 fights every hour, and nobody wants to spend kobans on it over, say, MD or PoA.

Club champion change is awful and the patch notes prove just how tone-deaf this change is. Players were not "hoarding" shards, they were carrying their clubs on their backs. If you do more work than others, you deserve a bigger reward, period. All you've done is remove any incentive for anyone to do all the work. My club is not very large or active. It takes us about 5 days to beat the champion, because only a few members put in more than a handful of fights. We're now only going to get 3 shards for winning, which means it would take us over a year to actually unlock the girl. So now we've gone from a system where a select few (the ones who cared enough to actually participate in it) saw the benefits, to a system where nobody sees the benefits. The numbers could be double what they are and it still wouldn't be enough, at least for clubs of my size.

Did they forget to adjust the PoA objectives for the fact that this is only 5 days instead of the usual length? We have to do 350 fights but we'll only naturally generate a total of 240 combativity over the course of the event. Like... Hello? On top of PoV, a second PoA later this month, and Mythic/Legendary Days, this is... a bit much.

I have 902 girls. Of them, only 327 are upgraded. And it's obviously not for lack of trying. I've bought every single market item at every opportunity for years now, and it's just nowhere near enough. There is a clear and obvious deficit looking at this statistic alone. When you actually break the numbers down into what you get from the market each month vs the upgrade cost of each girl added to the game each month, the only way to even come close to keeping up is by doing the impossible and checking the market every six hours on the dot, which is obviously not a realistic expectation. I would say the biggest issue regarding affection when you reach this stage of the game is, I don't get to upgrade girls based on which ones look the best to me or which ones I'm most interested in. I have to stash all my items and only use them on girls who have good blessings for the week. That's what we should be doing with XP, not affection. They need to entirely sever the link between viewing the sexy content and performing well in the PvP. Gems and XP already act as a barrier to limit the number of competitively viable girls you can have, there's no point in having affection do that as well at this point.

You keep adding new things that we have to spend on but you don't increase our spending budget. Many players already felt pushed too far by Mythic Days and Path of Attraction, and now we have this to contend with as well. You should take the Seasons approach and make both girls obtainable on the free route, but make it much faster on the paid one. After all the recent nerfs, telling the players they need to spend more is not the move right now. That's the same issue that's plaguing affection items, by the way. The amount required shot up like 400% after mythic girls were added, but the amount given out only increased by like 1% from KC. You can't just endlessly give players more tasks to do and not give them any means to actually do them.

Sorry if it's already been posted, but is there anything to be aware of to avoid incorrectly using the mythic book that levels a girl instantly to 350? Like, will a Lvl 1 girl just stop at 50 because of awakening level gates, meaning you'd have to use it at 301 to get the most out of it?

Similarly, for years I didn't spend a penny on this game. What got me to finally budge was the opposite of what you'd expect: the more I was given for free (flood of orbs era), the more willing I became to spend money rather than the other way around. A card and season pass every month and maybe a bundle every now and then just to go from completing ~20% of the harem to 30% is not worth it in my eyes, but if we're taking about going from 80% to 90% or higher, suddenly "catch 'em all" becomes actually feasible and the offer is much more enticing. With the recent changes, especially gems, December will be the first time in a long time that I stop spending money on the game.

Months back, many players skipped two thirds of mythic girls because we could only use three girls in our team anyway, and why bother having a KH girl if you're Charm? Just when our combat teams were becoming complete, suddenly you needed seven girls, and their type didn't matter. And then blessings were added, so being competitive meant having as many girls as possible. Seems like with the current values, Kinkoid is poised to shoot themselves in the foot pretty badly when players realize there's no point in paying for mythic girls anymore if they can't afford the gems to upgrade them anyway, and no one is going to want to spend hundreds of dollars on gems+gifts on top of the "entry" cost for obtaining the girl. They'll have to be several magnitudes less stingy with the drops if they want to avoid that, and I just don't see that happening.

If we're talking about the concept, the issue is that to "catch up" you basically need to successfully overtake some players. And to overtake some players, you have to be given something that the other player isn't. Just looking at this system, that clearly isn't how it's designed to function. If everyone's getting stronger at the same speed, that isn't catching up... If you're 10,000th strongest player before the new system and still 10,000th strongest after it, did the gap really shrink? Sure, you're right that a player who plays every day will catch up to somebody who plays every other day, and also that the gap would close a lot faster if they just made the numbers more generous, but that's already a factor that exists within the game anyway simply by gaining XP, girls, and resources. If we all hit 750 with gems in a month, we're basically even. Agreed. And we're also even if we all hit 500 in a month with no gems. So setting aside that the numbers they've chosen are set to serve as a choke and not an aide, it would seem they've created a new gameplay system with the intent of solving a problem that didn't require a new system in order to be fixed. (This next part is more directed towards Kinkoid) How do weak players really catch up to strong players? You make things that strong players already have/are already finished with more available, not less, and you add new upgrade methods that aren't linked to current levels of progression. 1. So like, XP, money, these are things that once you finish "using," having more obviously does nothing for you. If everything I have is upgraded to the max, then it doesn't matter whether I get 100,000 bucks from selling an item or 1,000,000. But if I was getting 100,000 when I was Lvl 100, and players these days are getting 1,000,000... then they start catching up. That's one form of power creep, and it's completely normal. The issue here is that Kinkoid a) apparently wants to turn every aspect of the game into a microtransaction and b) seems to think that having any single aspect of the game "finished" is a bad thing that no player should ever achieve, which brings us to... 2. Creating a new form of power-ups is a good way to let new players catch up, provided everybody is starting on a level playing field. With gems, we're obviously not, because every one of your girls who is already upgraded presents you with an advantage. If girls could learn something like support skills, like +100 to each girl on the team's Charm stat, and the currency to unlock those skills was gems? That would be one way of helping weak players catch up*, because we all start with 0 gems and 0 girl skills unlocked. Normal mobile games periodically implement these types of new systems, and that helps newer players catch up, keeps the game fresh, and makes it so that even when a player finishes one thing (like hitting a level cap), they still have other things to do. (When you break it down, HH really still has all the same methods of becoming stronger today as it did years ago, it's just that now there are more activities to do in the game.) *but it has to be used in conjunction with increased resource availability, or something big enough that it has the potential to have more of an impact than the previous metric for strength, which is in this case girl level. like, a lvl 500 girl without the new thing is worse than a lvl 450 girl with it.

It's actually only good for them against an opponent who doesn't have the same benefits, in other words PvE. Against all others, it's very bad. Let's say you're a Lvl 50 player and you want to power up your legendary girl to compete with stronger players, let's just say they're Lvl 170. You need 1,260 gems for this. You can get, in general, X number of gems per month. For simplicity's sake we'll say exactly 1,260. And we'll also say that it takes 1 month to go from Lvl 1 -> 50, and another 3 months to go from Lvl 50 -> 170. What that means is in this scenario, the Lvl 50 player has 1,260 gems, and the Lvl 170 player has 5,040. So sure, while you benefit from being able to raise your girl as high as Lvl 200, the problem is that the player you want to catch up to has the benefit of doing the same. Except he has more resources than you since he's been playing longer, so his girl can reach as high as Lvl 450. Granted these numbers are made up, but you understand the concept behind it. In this way, this system doesn't help close the gap between old and new players at all, it actually widens it. The only way this benefits new players is if they decide to open their wallets and buy gems to catch up. For everyone else, it will make the strong stronger and the weak weaker. It gets even worse the higher up you go. That scenario was between two players who both started after the system was added. If you're comparing with players who started before, the difference is monstrous. I'm about Lvl 450 with about 900 girls. Let's be very conservative and say all my girls are epics and I've raised them all to Lvl 401 before the gem system. That's 2,840 gems per girl, or 2,556,000 total, and in reality it would be much higher after considering actual girl rarities. If this system gets added the way it is now, mark my words, there is absolutely no way that any low level players will ever have a single hope of catching up to any serious player without spending ludicrous amounts of real money. This is not a change that is F2P friendly in the slightest.

Allow me to tell you a cautionary tale. There once was a game called Hentai Clicker, a reimagining of Kinkoid's previous game which had all kinds of improvements. All pose art is animated and features clothed/underwear/nude states! Triple the number of scenes for each girl! Instead of just a couple sentences of flavor text, each scene has tons of dialogue, letting the personality and storyline of each girl really shine! Upgrading girls grants passive buffs, so no girl is useless! Amazing art! PVP? Not in my porn game! But then, trouble came-a-knockin'. Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. First came the game-breaking bugs. Then the artists were replaced and the art quality plummeted. Around that time, the issues with the game balance became glaringly obvious as players became stronger and stronger. The devs couldn't figure out how to please veterans and beginners alike, so events flip-flopped between way too difficult and way too easy. Players were getting bored with the game, so the designers tried to solve the problem by throwing new features and mechanics at it. More resource types! Less kobans! You know what this clicker game needs? JIGSAW PUZZLES! Except the pieces are all the same shape and animated in a way that makes it obnoxious to figure out where they go! Oh yeah, and it's bugged, so you might lose progress and be unable to get the girl without spending kobans. Enjoy! After the problems eventually became too big to ignore, new content was paused for months and an attempt was made to rethink the game design in a last-ditch effort to save it. And while it returned with a fancy main story and more girls, the framework of the game was largely unchanged aside from more new features to further convolute it. The baffling decision was also made to reset affection scene progress and move it to a new type of resource without any compensation given based on previous progress, so old players actually lost the ability to see any of the scenes that they had once unlocked. (Oh, and by the way. That jigsaw puzzle game which was like, universally despised? If I remember right, they just swept all the complaints under the rug and continued to shove it down our throats until the bitter end.) Long story short, Kinkoid's dead games (Remember the dating sim? No? That's because it was so bad that they had to can it before it ever got off the ground.) should have served as a massive warning sign to the people running the company that those handling the game design and balance are consistently failing the players across multiple projects. I'm still collecting my thoughts on this "gem" of a new feature, but for the time being it's obvious that nothing good will come of this upgrade system in its current form. Probably needs more jigsaw puzzles.

We need these gems just to level girls up? We won't be able to just give them XP books anymore unless we have the gems as well? ...Should I be using my item stash before this feature hits?

If the availability of a feature or resource is deemed too high, instead of reducing the availability, the better approach is to devalue it with something superior (like mythic girls did to legendary ones) or increase the amount needed by adding new things to use it on. I'm totally okay with spending half of my money on a new feature. But when you just take something away from the player like this, it only ends up with them feeling robbed, angry, and cheated. And perhaps the bigger problem is that there was zero warning given. It does sound as though those new things to use money on are coming. So the only question is, why was it considered necessary to massively reduce the player's resources at the same time instead of just increasing the price of upcoming new features to take into account the state of the current game economy? If this is an attempt to make current expenses (stat upgrades, buying market items, etc.) more relevant too, well, best to just accept that that aspect of the game stops serving as a barrier after a certain point and move on. There's nothing wrong with that, it's par for the course for basic resources like that to stop being a relevant factor in mobile games after getting far enough.

Give players a warning before making these kinds of changes, like you did when removing dating tokens. It's only fair. We obtained the items when they were worth X. That's what we should get for them. Not 10% of X. Not 50% of X. 100% of it. Do what you see fit with the items obtained after this point, but we should not see the value of the items we were holding onto suddenly destroyed overnight without warning.