Patch notes 31/07/19 discussion

[jelom]

Here are the new patch notes for 31/07/2019:

https://forum.hentaiheroes.com/index.php?/topic/10745-patch-notes-310719/

and only the text of it:

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Adventure

• Release of World 12 Quest 8:The jail was not a bad place after all, huh? And now you know your next destination. What new adventure is coming ahead?

 

Sex Champions

• The rewards from stage 1 to 4 will give 1 legendary item instead of 2.

 

Leagues

• New leagues scoring system is based on the percentage of the remaining ego plus a guaranteed base score:
  • In case of win, the guaranteed base score is 15 and the Bonus is equal to 10 times the percentage of Hero’s Ego at the end of the Performance
    • Example: if the Hero ends up on 24% of his Ego the result will be 15 points plus (10*24%)=2 points; So 17 points, in total.
  • In case of loss, the guaranteed base is 3 and the Bonus is equal to 10 times the percentage of Opponent’s Ego lost at the end of the Performance
    • Example if the Opponent ends up the Challenge with 16% of ego left the result will be 3 points plus (10*(100-16)%)=(10*84%)=8 points; So 11 points
• To minimize the impact of the changes on the next league rotation, these changes will be integrated at the end of the current league week, this wednesday.

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I suppose the new league scoring will finish with the rushing and ties for first place, but will change the use of boosters.

[GeorgeMTO]

Initial impression of this league scoring change is not positive. It might be better, but I don't see it as an overall benefit.

[Zamio]

probably designed to discourage rushing. Since you can no longer guarantee first place by just being the first to finish, even with 0 defeats.

[Scryehard]

I'm guessing the point of the scoring change is to make it so people can't just rush everyone and get the maximum possible points instantly. Now, even if you rush everyone and win every fight, someone could still steal the top spot from you if their fights went better. I personally enjoy the rush, so it's a bit of a bummer for me, but whatever. I can live with it.
Edit: Though come to think of it, since I'm a bit below the average level for the League bracket I play in, this is actually going to hurt me quite a bit, since I won't have many advantageous fights. When I rush it's usually a hit-or-miss whether I end up in 1st or just barely miss-out, but now even if I rush with boosters, I would probably not even end up in top 4.

I'm sadder that they're changing the gear reward from 2 to 1 for the Champions, though.

Edited July 29, 2019 by Scryehard

[Z-Wave]

Honestly I really like the new system, it allows for strategic players to gain a lot of advantage over whales without strategy and it tackles the scripting and account sharing problem effectively. Also it's not boring anymore once you've won against all the challenging opponents since now it matters how well you perform against every single player. And personally I think the base score + remaining ego score makes sense because ego is the go to performance indicator.

Yes, this might create new problems and probably will be exploitable at some point in the future, but compared to the flaws of the current system I see it as a huge improvement for now. 👍

[Lemus]

There's really no point in rushing now. But it makes sense to keep the hero constantly under the strongest boosters. In any case, the new system looks better than the old one in theory, and what practice will show you should look at.

The only thing I'm curious about is what rules will be used to round up the points. Just cut off the fractional part or by arithmetic laws. Simply put, having received, for example, 8,6 by the formula as a result the player will receive 8 or 9.

[Scryehard]

6 minutes ago, Z-Wave said:

whales without strategy

So now it favors whales WITH strategy.

[Z-Wave]

4 minutes ago, Lemus said:

The only thing I'm curious about is what rules will be used to round up the points. Just cut off the fractional part or by arithmetic laws. Simply put, having received, for example, 8,6 by the formula as a result the player will receive 8 or 9.

I'm guessing it will end up in rounding rather then cutting (makes more sense in my book). Only time will tell though...

2 minutes ago, Scryehard said:

So now it favors whales WITH strategy.

Yes, whales with strategy > non whales with strategy > whales without strategy. At least that's what I hope. And if KK happens to not raise the level 400 cap, eventually everybody will be a whale and strategy is the only remaining factor (although that's a very big "if" 😅).

[Chthugha]

It favors the strongest players, and it is a further discouragement to use charm. Olé. I will see how much of a disadvantage it is.

[MaybeRegret]

37 minutes ago, jelom said:

To minimize the impact of the changes on the next league rotation, these changes will be integrated at the end of the current league week, this wednesday.

People, who won first place in league this week probably very happy. 

[jelom]

This is the first change in PvP that could favor Knowhow instead of Hardcore. As KH ability is restoring ego, that means more remaining ego and more points at the end of the fight if you won, and if it lengthens the battle one more turn when losing, it means less ego from the opponent so also more points for you.

An important point that can help (a bit) lower level players over high level ones is that the points are awarded for remaining ego percentage and not absolute value of remaining ego, so when they win they need less ego to achieve points.

 

[Urist]

Could favor?

Any other class able to finish above 100% of their ego against an easy opponent?

I've recently returned to the game after several months, and I'm storming through Wanker right now. I regularly get a reassurance on the one and only hit of the fight, leaving me around 227k ego, 109.66% of my starting 207k. Would I get 26 points for that win?

[Eman]

The new system looks complicated. It will probably stop rushing, but we'll see what kind of problems it creates. It will be harder to see how good or bad we're doing and to predict where we'll end, tho.

Also, since this new system favors strategy, fighting the players with the worst affinity with the judge, being able to see the class of the players would be extremely useful and much better than the actual method, to click on them to find it out.

And, about the champions, the loss of one of the legendary items is a shame. You could have replaced one with a random book or gift instead (still legendary, though).

[Dmytro]

For very high level players, the league change resolves the issue of multiple perfect scores.  The change discourages rushing through the league, but encourages using boosters all the time (at 240 kobans/day for epic boosters).  With scoring based on percentage health, KH (who have healing) get an advantage against weaker opponents; it is possible that some players may choose to switch between KH and HC once a week mid-league.  You may also want more monostat gear against stronger opponents vs more rainbow gear against weaker opponents.

The champions change restores balance as legendary items are supposed to be legendary rather than common.  You could still get all your legendary equipment through level 400 from the champions, but if you win like every two levels, your equipment would then be like 10 or 15 levels out of date.

[Daniele]

Mmmh... Usually i like a more strategic system, but maybe this is too messed up...

Rushing is not advisable, even if you win all your fight you could end up fighting too many boosted players, losing a lot of bonus points. I think it would be better to fight unboosted players while you're using your best boosters. That means this system wants you to stay constantly fully boosted, to get as many bonus points as possible and also to prevent others from getting more points fighting you.

So, more kobans wasted for boosters, unpredictable results until the end, more RNG-based system (if you're lucky with harmony or judge's position you'll likely get more points), weaker players don't stand a chance, charm players with their pathetic specialty are fucked (yes, i'm charm), it's even more annoying to get demotion / avoid promotion...

I guess leagues are completely dead for me now, maybe it's time to move and stay in D3, just doing my free fights without even bother about boosters and my final score.

[Scryehard]

1 hour ago, Chthugha said:

 it is a further discouragement to use charm.

God damn it.

Devs, please fix Charm already. I'm begging you.

[Scryehard]

1 hour ago, Z-Wave said:

 

Yes, whales with strategy > non whales with strategy > whales without strategy.

Honestly, I think it still favors whales regardless of strategy, because whales can actually afford having boosts up constantly.

[linkdream]

The champions rewards were too good, so reducing them would re balance things a bit.

As for the league, we'll see how it turns out but for sure it's better than the stupid current system which favors rushing. And being a know-how player I'm happy because it will probably give us an advantage against hardcore. Poor charm though, it's like the devs don't care about that class.

Edited July 29, 2019 by linkdream

[sanjkame]

1 hour ago, jelom said:

An important point that can help (a bit) lower level players over high level ones is that the points are awarded for remaining ego percentage and not absolute value of remaining ego, so when they win they need less ego to achieve points.

 

I really don't understand how low level players can be helped with this change. If a high level player face a high level player or a low level face a low level they can win the fight with a low bonus, but if a low level face a high level he will obviously lose and probably with a miserable bonus, while the high level one gets a huge bonus for obliterate the opponent with his ego nearly untouched. The weak and the strong ones who don't have boosters will lose, and the other one will win, just like that

[Pornbird]

If I do all the fights I can not beat about 10 players out of 100.
Roughly speaking, the 10 players will generate more points against each other than me against them. The old ratio of worst case 3 to 1 tends to shift direction 3 to 2. That could be seen as an improvement. But those 10 players will get more and more points against the other 90 players than me, and I can not really change that, except maybe run around booster all the time.
It does not have much to do with a strategic approach like some writing.

To be honest, I find the current system much fairer than the new one.

And who was careful, yes, I probably belong to the profitors of the new system, because I also get more points than the 90 people who are supposedly weaker than me.
The Top 15 will be much easier to reach than now. But I do not have to hope for the first places any more.

[czaz]

With this new system it's to the point where I'm likely not even going to bother with it anymore.

[ZackMacKenzie]

As usual, just my two cents, mostly just opinion informed by a few facts and probabilities. Your mileage may vary.

 

1) Champions & Legendary Equipment

First, let's talk about the Champions change. It's not that surprising given how irrelevant ymen and equipment have become in the short term. What bothers me are the long term effects and the timing.

In the long term, the glut would have resolved itself without any need for heavy-handed intervention.  As the Champions continuously become more and more jaded by our performances it becomes harder and harder to impress them.  So long as this continues forever (as opposed to reaching some kind of a cap after all the end-rewards have been claimed) every Champion would reach 2 different milestones. First, they would reach a point where we can't impress them without running out of tickets. Second, they would reach a point where the 24-hour 10% decay of impression would exceed the amount we could achieve with our tickets in one day.  For people who have already capped out the story and can use energy, these milestones are merely delayed not prevented. After that, each champion becomes an increasingly wasteful koban drain. At some point, the number of kobans needed to beat them and earn those legendary items would be prohibitive and players would avoid those Champions.  Resouce tapped out. Mine depleted. Problem solved.  All they are good for now is a small number of ymen for whatever amount of excess tickets & energy you have left over. Kobans would net more ymen by fighting Roko Sensei.

The timing issue is that the change is happening immediately. For those of us who have been depleting our tickets daily, there is no real cost to this. For those of us who have been rationing our tickets, this is a big fat burn and rip off.  Those people made decisions based on rules that are changing AND are given no time to respond or adapt to the new rules.  If you stopped fighting a Champion because you earned his girl and were saving him for later exploitation, PSYCH! His exploitability has just been cut in half!  Loser!  Serves you right for actually making sensible decisions!  If you stopped fighting a Champion because he was too hard for now, same problem. Essentially, anyone who has been playing the long game and hasn't been exhausting their tickets is being screwed.

C'mon Kinkoid. Give people time to get their affairs in order!  Even many criminals are afforded that luxury!

 

2) Leagues

Welp, this should end rushing.  Nice!

Now why would Kinkoid voluntarily reduce players' incentive to spend kobans on rushing, i.e. reduce players' need to pay real money?

Given that question it is no surprise that this small victory is paid for in spades in many, many ways, including koban spending.

The compensation is they've massively increased the incentive to be boosted 100% of the time.  And not just boosted, but MAXIMALLY boosted.  Hold on...that's just 240 to 360 kobans-worth of spending each day, or roughly 2000 per week. Less when you consider that you get some boosters for free.  How is that going to make up for the losses Kinkoid incurs from rushing?  Simple.  Rushing was only performed by a small number of players per League group. And at worst, that was only going to cost them 4000 kobans (20 refills plus 12 kobans per refill for x15 battles).  Boosting is going to be fairly necessary for anyone trying to finish as high as they can, so the profits will come from the sheer number of players engaging in koban spending. Sure, the number of rushers was higher in Dicktator leagues but that is more than made up for by the fact that rushing made no economic sense at all in any of the Wanker (and some Sexpert) leagues.  Boosting will matter at all league levels.

To be as fair as i can possibly be, this change may be in anticipation of the next boss/world dropping boosters instead of ymen. If this is true, then Kinkoid felt that they needed to give us a 'way' to deal with the glut of boosters we'd be receiving. Even if this is true, the difference in performance value between common-rare-epic-legendary boosters makes the lower end boosters even less valuable in favor of the heavyweights and the troll will only rarely drop the best boosters.  Personally, I'd probably consider selling ALL of my commons and perhaps rares, too...except they sell for ymens (in spite of being bought with kobans) and the last thing I need right now is more ymen.  Besides which, ymen do nothing for my ability to buy better boosters from the market so selling even more useless boosters doesn't help the problem of having a lack of GOOD boosters AT ALL.  So, while this seems like a synergistic change, it really isn't.  Now, if the sell price changes from ymens to kobans, perhaps I'll change my tune, but given the fact that this wasn't mentioned in the Patch Notes, I won't be holding my breath.

The new system has very little in common with the old system in terms of how players conduct themselves.

The old system had a strategy (rushing), albeit one that many people didn't particularly like.  The strategy didn't overly favor good/smart players over bad ones, nor experienced players over newer players.  (Paying players had an advantage, but they should have an advantage.)  To be clear, those factors did matter but they weren't the be all or end all. Strategic players could make decisions that provided them with enough advantage to succeed in spite of their lack of wealth/tenure. Modest wins were still wins.

The new system changes the dynamic completely. Tenure has become much more important and wealth even more so.  Newer players could time their booster use to eke by wins against the more tenured players and that was all that mattered —  a win by an inch was every bit as good as a win by a mile.  Now, that won't help them one iota. As soon as their boosters expire those more tenured players will turn around and beat them to a pulp and make their strategic wins irrelevant.  For whales the advantage is even clearer. They will run whichever boosters make them the most unassailable 24-7-365, and will refresh the market as often as needed to ensure they can.

Does this solve rushing? It mostly does...for now.  With the level cap holding steady at 400 the upper leagues will soon enough reach a relative stasis where it will be increasingly difficult to gain marginal benefit over fellow players. At this point, players may wait for the chance to fight players in brief windows of unboosted-ness.  Finding them will be difficult since the snapshots only happen every 6 hours.  A player would have to be busy IRL AND quite unlucky for the snapshot to happen during their brief periods between boosts.  This might produce mini-rushes - let's call them surges (single refills rather than 300 wins worth of them) - to capitalize on others' misfortune.  Also, once it becomes a crap-shoot due to that parity the disincentive to rush declines.  When you have no idea whether your final score will be good enough to win or not whales have every reason to throw the dice and rely on "tie goes to whomever got there first" to push them over the top.  People with shallower pockets will have to settle for finding out where the chips lie at the deadline and concede ties to the bigger spenders.

More importantly, what does this change do to the other unpopular strategy, tanking?  Sadly, we're going to see even more of it!  People that have been getting by on strategy and wit will be outgunned by the new scoring system and will demote as far as they need to to get to a pool they can navigate.  The same will happen with weak tenured players since they will no longer be buoyed by trading 3-point wins to respectable showings & rewards.

Of the two 'problems' Kinkoid has fixed the lesser issue by making the bigger problem worse.  Well done!

What else will change?

Smarter players will have access to less information upon which to base decisions.  "Perfect" scores will become a thing of the past, so it will likewise be impossible to guesstimate where competitors stand.  It used to be a simple matter of looking at a competitor's score and dividing it by 3 to see if they might be on track for perfection or definitely were not on track.  We simply won't be able to check this any more!  No one will have a perfect score since no one will have 100% of their Ego remaining at the end of all their battles.  Further, it's remotely possible that incredibly lucky Know-How players will somehow finish with MORE THAN 100% of their Ego!  (Reassurance plus attackers go first could lead to this happening, though it's less and less likely as level and combat duration increases.)  Couple that with the fact that we still won't know how many opponents they've tackled, or which ones, to achieve their score and we're now completely in the dark.  Information is what allows for strategic decisions. The removal of information only favors the tenured and wealthy.

Speaking of Know-How, this change INCREASES the overall disparity between classes.  Know-How will probably see the most benefit from this change and Charm will be overwhelmingly  hurt the most.  More than ever the game becomes a two-tier system with HC & KH getting closer together in relative power and the already weakest Charm lagging even farther behind.

In terms of economics I think this change is beyond awful.  This change affects the only area of the game where whales significantly benefit from having fodder to feast upon.  The change skews things so far into their favor that free players, low-profit players and newer players will be frustrated to the point of quitting.  As those accounts rack up weeks of inactivity they'll drop down to W1 which will become massively bloated in size. The number of higher leagues will shrink to compensate.

This will hurt kinkoid's bottom line straight away.  New players will arrive in W1 with lots of unbeatable carcasses to contend with. Sure, they won't be competing and will finish with 0 points but the optics and entertainment levels will be terrible!  Newer players will be faced with negative questions. "Why have so many players quit?"  "What did they know that I don't know?"  They will also get the dopamine rush of winning less often because of those dead monsters.  If the new players are less engaged when they are just starting out their retention rate will be poor.  This all spells disaster for growing the income stream.  Some of this effect could be mitigated by removing dormant accounts but knowing the difference between a lost player and one who is taking a break (to move, to change jobs, to recover from illness/injury or to handle any other RL comes first issue) is impossible.

More importantly, in the long term the whales and sharks will suffer for the lack of fodder to prey upon.  When it's mostly whales and sharks swimming with whales and sharks the comparative advantage to spending resources drops.  Some number of them would engage in spending spirals for a brief time while others would lose incentive to pay for ever decreasing benefit. Those that surged would see declines in return on investment. Only the wealthiest would keep at it while others would respond to the RoI problem in one of two ways: play with less or no pay; or find another game where their money gets them more value.  Overall, whale engagement would decline, the most damaging game dynamic a pay-to-win game can experience!  There is a reason why these games are designed to appeal to the pleasure center of the brain and engage addictive behavior!  So, the likely long term effect is a short surge in spending will be followed by a permanent decline in spending.

In summary, this change should greatly lower the koban income of the people who need it the most, discourage new players and eventually erode the benefits whales gain from spending freely.  The cure is much worse than the disease.  To me, this change says that Kinkoid has decided that the game has almost run its course (i.e. the 'long term' and 'eventually' changes don't matter) and are looking for quick cash infusion before shifting their focus on Hentai Clicker or another yet to be announced new game.  If that isn't what they are thinking, then results of this change are most likely going to disappoint them beyond measure.  

[_shal_]

Like Zack, I also suspect even more players will now decide to drop to even lower league tiers, because winning+dominating >>>>> merely winning. As a frequent D2 member who can beat everyone there even though I'm still lower level than 70% of the field after 3 months at that tier, I suspect my route to top places has just become harder, simply because a not very competent level 360 account is gonna curbstomp the field to a degree I just can't, to the point that their greater gains from wins will even make up for their occasional stupid loss.

Edited July 29, 2019 by _shal_

[czaz]

13 minutes ago, ZackMacKenzie said:

As usual, just my two cents, mostly just opinion informed by a few facts and probabilities. Your mileage may vary.

 

1) Champions & Legendary Equipment

First, let's talk about the Champions change. It's not that surprising given how irrelevant ymen and equipment have become in the short term. What bothers me are the long term effects and the timing.

In the long term, the glut would have resolved itself without any need for heavy-handed intervention.  As the Champions continuously become more and more jaded by our performances it becomes harder and harder to impress them.  So long as this continues forever (as opposed to reaching some kind of a cap after all the end-rewards have been claimed) every Champion would reach 2 different milestones. First, they would reach a point where we can't impress them without running out of tickets. Second, they would reach a point where the 24-hour 10% decay of impression would exceed the amount we could achieve with our tickets in one day.  For people who have already capped out the story and can use energy, these milestones are merely delayed not prevented. After that, each champion becomes an increasingly wasteful koban drain. At some point, the number of kobans needed to beat them and earn those legendary items would be prohibitive and players would avoid those Champions.  Resouce tapped out. Mine depleted. Problem solved.  All they are good for now is a small number of ymen for whatever amount of excess tickets & energy you have left over. Kobans would net more ymen by fighting Roko Sensei.

The timing issue is that the change is happening immediately. For those of us who have been depleting our tickets daily, there is no real cost to this. For those of us who have been rationing our tickets, this is a big fat burn and rip off.  Those people made decisions based on rules that are changing AND are given no time to respond or adapt to the new rules.  If you stopped fighting a Champion because you earned his girl and were saving him for later exploitation, PSYCH! His exploitability has just been cut in half!  Loser!  Serves you right for actually making sensible decisions!  If you stopped fighting a Champion because he was too hard for now, same problem. Essentially, anyone who has been playing the long game and hasn't been exhausting their tickets is being screwed.

C'mon Kinkoid. Give people time to get their affairs in order!  Even many criminals are afforded that luxury!

 

2) Leagues

Welp, this should end rushing.  Nice!

Now why would Kinkoid voluntarily reduce players' incentive to spend kobans on rushing, i.e. reduce players' need to pay real money?

Given that question it is no surprise that this small victory is paid for in spades in many, many ways, including koban spending.

The compensation is they've massively increased the incentive to be boosted 100% of the time.  And not just boosted, but MAXIMALLY boosted.  Hold on...that's just 240 to 360 kobans-worth of spending each day, or roughly 2000 per week. Less when you consider that you get some boosters for free.  How is that going to make up for the losses Kinkoid incurs from rushing?  Simple.  Rushing was only performed by a small number of players per League group. And at worst, that was only going to cost them 4000 kobans (20 refills plus 12 kobans per refill for x15 battles).  Boosting is going to be fairly necessary for anyone trying to finish as high as they can, so the profits will come from the sheer number of players engaging in koban spending. Sure, the number of rushers was higher in Dicktator leagues but that is more than made up for by the fact that rushing made no economic sense at all in any of the Wanker (and some Sexpert) leagues.  Boosting will matter at all league levels.

To be as fair as i can possibly be, this change may be in anticipation of the next boss/world dropping boosters instead of ymen. If this is true, then Kinkoid felt that they needed to give us a 'way' to deal with the glut of boosters we'd be receiving. Even if this is true, the difference in performance value between common-rare-epic-legendary boosters makes the lower end boosters even less valuable in favor of the heavyweights and the troll will only rarely drop the best boosters.  Personally, I'd probably consider selling ALL of my commons and perhaps rares, too...except they sell for ymens (in spite of being bought with kobans) and the last thing I need right now is more ymen.  Besides which, ymen do nothing for my ability to buy better boosters from the market so selling even more useless boosters doesn't help the problem of having a lack of GOOD boosters AT ALL.  So, while this seems like a synergistic change, it really isn't.  Now, if the sell price changes from ymens to kobans, perhaps I'll change my tune, but given the fact that this wasn't mentioned in the Patch Notes, I won't be holding my breath.

The new system has very little in common with the old system in terms of how players conduct themselves.

The old system had a strategy (rushing), albeit one that many people didn't particularly like.  The strategy didn't overly favor good/smart players over bad ones, nor experienced players over newer players.  (Paying players had an advantage, but they should have an advantage.)  To be clear, those factors did matter but they weren't the be all or end all. Strategic players could make decisions that provided them with enough advantage to succeed in spite of their lack of wealth/tenure. Modest wins were still wins.

The new system changes the dynamic completely. Tenure has become much more important and wealth even more so.  Newer players could time their booster use to eke by wins against the more tenured players and that was all that mattered —  a win by an inch was every bit as good as a win by a mile.  Now, that won't help them one iota. As soon as their boosters expire those more tenured players will turn around and beat them to a pulp and make their strategic wins irrelevant.  For whales the advantage is even clearer. They will run whichever boosters make them the most unassailable 24-7-365, and will refresh the market as often as needed to ensure they can.

Does this solve rushing? It mostly does...for now.  With the level cap holding steady at 400 the upper leagues will soon enough reach a relative stasis where it will be increasingly difficult to gain marginal benefit over fellow players. At this point, players may wait for the chance to fight players in brief windows of unboosted-ness.  Finding them will be difficult since the snapshots only happen every 6 hours.  A player would have to be busy IRL AND quite unlucky for the snapshot to happen during their brief periods between boosts.  This might produce mini-rushes - let's call them surges (single refills rather than 300 wins worth of them) - to capitalize on others' misfortune.  Also, once it becomes a crap-shoot due to that parity the disincentive to rush declines.  When you have no idea whether your final score will be good enough to win or not whales have every reason to throw the dice and rely on "tie goes to whomever got there first" to push them over the top.  People with shallower pockets will have to settle for finding out where the chips lie at the deadline and concede ties to the bigger spenders.

More importantly, what does this change do to the other unpopular strategy, tanking?  Sadly, we're going to see even more of it!  People that have been getting by on strategy and wit will be outgunned by the new scoring system and will demote as far as they need to to get to a pool they can navigate.  The same will happen with weak tenured players since they will no longer be buoyed by trading 3-point wins to respectable showings & rewards.

Of the two 'problems' Kinkoid has fixed the lesser issue by making the bigger problem worse.  Well done!

What else will change?

Smarter players will have access to less information upon which to base decisions.  "Perfect" scores will become a thing of the past, so it will likewise be impossible to guesstimate where competitors stand.  It used to be a simple matter of looking at a competitor's score and dividing it by 3 to see if they might be on track for perfection or definitely were not on track.  We simply won't be able to check this any more!  No one will have a perfect score since no one will have 100% of their Ego remaining at the end of all their battles.  Further, it's remotely possible that incredibly lucky Know-How players will somehow finish with MORE THAN 100% of their Ego!  (Reassurance plus attackers go first could lead to this happening, though it's less and less likely as level and combat duration increases.)  Couple that with the fact that we still won't know how many opponents they've tackled, or which ones, to achieve their score and we're now completely in the dark.  Information is what allows for strategic decisions. The removal of information only favors the tenured and wealthy.

Speaking of Know-How, this change INCREASES the overall disparity between classes.  Know-How will probably see the most benefit from this change and Charm will be overwhelmingly  hurt the most.  More than ever the game becomes a two-tier system with HC & KH getting closer together in relative power and the already weakest Charm lagging even farther behind.

In terms of economics I think this change is beyond awful.  This change affects the only area of the game where whales significantly benefit from having fodder to feast upon.  The change skews things so far into their favor that free players, low-profit players and newer players will be frustrated to the point of quitting.  As those accounts rack up weeks of inactivity they'll drop down to W1 which will become massively bloated in size. The number of higher leagues will shrink to compensate.

This will hurt kinkoid's bottom line straight away.  New players will arrive in W1 with lots of unbeatable carcasses to contend with. Sure, they won't be competing and will finish with 0 points but the optics and entertainment levels will be terrible!  Newer players will be faced with negative questions. "Why have so many players quit?"  "What did they know that I don't know?"  They will also get the dopamine rush of winning less often because of those dead monsters.  If the new players are less engaged when they are just starting out their retention rate will be poor.  This all spells disaster for growing the income stream.  Some of this effect could be mitigated by removing dormant accounts but knowing the difference between a lost player and one who is taking a break (to move, to change jobs, to recover from illness/injury or to handle any other RL comes first issue) is impossible.

More importantly, in the long term the whales and sharks will suffer for the lack of fodder to prey upon.  When it's mostly whales and sharks swimming with whales and sharks the comparative advantage to spending resources drops.  Some number of them would engage in spending spirals for a brief time while others would lose incentive to pay for ever decreasing benefit. Those that surged would see declines in return on investment. Only the wealthiest would keep at it while others would respond to the RoI problem in one of two ways: play with less or no pay; or find another game where their money gets them more value.  Overall, whale engagement would decline, the most damaging game dynamic a pay-to-win game can experience!  There is a reason why these games are designed to appeal to the pleasure center of the brain and engage addictive behavior!  So, the likely long term effect is a short surge in spending will be followed by a permanent decline in spending.

In summary, this change should greatly lower the koban income of the people who need it the most, discourage new players and eventually erode the benefits whales gain from spending freely.  The cure is much worse than the disease.  To me, this change says that Kinkoid has decided that the game has almost run its course (i.e. the 'long term' and 'eventually' changes don't matter) and are looking for quick cash infusion before shifting their focus on Hentai Clicker or another yet to be announced new game.  If that isn't what they are thinking, then results of this change are most likely going to disappoint them beyond measure.  

And this is why I'm probably done with it. If a fighting system in a hentai game inspires that many words from people, it's too damn contrived and complex. I'm just here for the anime tiddies.

[_shal_]

22 minutes ago, ZackMacKenzie said:

This will hurt kinkoid's bottom line straight away.  New players will arrive in W1 with lots of unbeatable carcasses to contend with. Sure, they won't be competing and will finish with 0 points but the optics and entertainment levels will be terrible!  Newer players will be faced with negative questions. "Why have so many players quit?"  "What did they know that I don't know?"  They will also get the dopamine rush of winning less often because of those dead monsters.

Eh, W1 has been like that for at least half a year already. The usual season has 90-95 players on zero points. Most of the players who do have points have less than 100 at the end of the week. (45 is a popular score.) Actual regular activity doesn't start until W2.

Current example:

Edited July 29, 2019 by _shal_