Starting Set & Early Game: The Hardcore Advantage

[DvDivXXX]

Hi there,

First of all, please don't let my criticism fool you. I may rant or nitpick on a number of things, but I love this game. Thanks for making it!

Here, I'd like to address one thing I've noticed that seems pretty imbalanced for the early game in particular, and class balance in general. The game has a total of 7 girls of the "Starting" rarity. They're not all equal, far from it, but for the most part, they're just as good or, in some regards, even better than most girls of the "Common" rarity, except that they cost a lot less to level up and upgrade, so they're generally awesome to bank upon (both literally and for team fights), especially from the very beginning. They're the backbone of your progress in the early game, useful pretty deep into the mid game, and still good to have around in the late game if only for their high income. In short, they're essential.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, their distribution is strongly biased in favor of one class: Hardcore.

• We all start with Bunny, Hardcore, decent early fighter and... also the biggest moneymaker in the game, so a priority to upgrade regardless of specialty.
• Of the others, 3 are also Hardcore, 2 are Charm and only 1 is Know-How.
• 5 out of these 7 girls go all the way to 5 stars: 3 Hardcore (including Bunny!) but only 1 each of Charm and Know-How.
• While Sheheramazond can take a little while to drop from the first boss, you get Bunny and Ankyo guaranteed by the end of World 1, aka the tutorial...

This means that a player who starts with the Hardcore class can get a (very good) full 5-star line-up of their specialty earlier and for much cheaper than Know-How or Charm players can. The other two classes can only get a (free) full battle team of 5-star girls of their specialty by the end of World 3 or 4 at best, and 2 of their battle team members will be Commons instead of Starters, so they'll cost a lot more to level up. On top of that, as mentioned above, every new player should upgrade Bunny ASAP for income alone, but as a Hardcore player, you also get a head start for your battle team in the process.

This doesn't seem very fair, especially considering that your initial specialty is randomly assigned when you create your account, and a brand-new player typically won't know enough about the game at the start to notice or take advantage of these discrepancies. So, some players just happen to get a big boost in the early game by luck of the draw on their initial specialty (those who roll Hardcore), if they go for a matching line-up (which many don't, granted).

In my case, as you can see from the screenshot above, I'm in the low 70s in terms of level now. I started out as Charm (low roll), and I had already used my one free class change to move to Know-How long before I fully realized any of the above. Well, I only recently managed to get the 3 girls on my main battle team to 5 stars, whereas I've been facing a lot of Hardcore opponents with theirs fully upgraded since maybe 10-20 levels ago, and that cheap line-up is still very frequently seen and competitive at my current level.

I know that some of these girls used to only go to 3 stars, and were buffed later on, and I realize you can't have a perfect balance especially from the start, but this is a big advantage for one Class from the get-go, and it makes Hardcore players snowball compared to the other classes. Since Bunny is so special, maybe her Specialty could change to align with the player's class? Or maybe you could choose your first Starting girl along with your class at the very beginning, and if you pick Red Battler or Juliette instead of Bunny, then that girl could get the big income boost in your harem instead of her? Or you could buff Kimie to a 5 star girl, and switch Sheheramazond and Solveig around? I don't know, just some change so that the Starting set and early game options are more balanced for each class would be good, I think. That, and making the player choose their class instead of rolling it randomly for them, and possibly explain to them what each class does earlier in the game.

It doesn't impact me as much at my level, and I wouldn't want to start over and go Hardcore anyway, but this might improve the new player experience for others. Thanks for your time, and please keep up the good work!

Edited September 2, 2019 by DvDivXXX

[DvDivXXX]

Hey, thanks for the like!

Talk about a blast from the past... After 4 months since I posted this, I expected it to stay unnoticed forever. Your timing in reminding me of this thread is actually great, though! None of the things I pointed out have changed since then, and I actually have a bit more to add to it now.

I'm not interested in starting the game over time and again on multiple accounts (I tried that once on the test server and it felt like a chore), but I've started fooling around in GH just a couple of days ago (mainly because I was bored, and I wanted to see how well the remake holds up to the original). This is close enough to a restart for me to test a few things, while being just different enough, at least visually, that it doesn't feel as boring as actually restarting (at least not yet ^^).

Well, I gave my own advice from 4 months ago a try, because why wouldn't I? And here's what I can confirm (even though, I know, there are a few subtle differences here and there even mechanically: you get XP a lot faster in the early game in GH than in HH, for one thing).

Here is GH's Starting rarity set. Looks familiar? Yop, it's exactly the same as in HH, with the same imbalance in favor of HC over the other classes:

Obviously, for this experiment, I changed my class to HC right away, and I went on to claim my early-game Hardcore Advantage full force. And, yeah... Barely 2 days after I started (and without any effort or investment whatsoever, really), here I am:

Of course, I have ridiculously crappy equipment, my hero's stats are nowhere near up to date, and only my Alpha is roughly where it needs to be for my current level. But sure enough, I already have the battle team that can carry me to the mid game (if I keep playing lol), which is dirt cheap to upgrade, and includes the game's main moneymaker, who is also the strongest character I'll have access to for quite a while anyway. It looks like I could easily finish top 4 or maybe even win my very first W1 league, as well, and I mostly lose Arena fights to much older inactive accounts and/or players who bought some early bundles and have full legendary equipment sets. ^^

At this rate, I could probably progress ten times faster than I did on the main game, almost solely thanks to taking full advantage of this blatant imbalance (and sure, also because I've been playing for months and I know the game's mechanics very well now, compared to when I first started and was clueless, but still). Even if I were to eventually switch to KH after a few months, I would have more resources and be in a better position than when I did it from the start in HH.

So yeah, there's no doubt that going HC early on essentially enables god-mode for at least the first few months (and you can snowball into whatever strategy from there, presumably). Not great game balance, there.

[_shal_]

2 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

you get XP a lot faster in the early game in GH than in HH, for one thing

Erm, that's due to the December 11 patch, not for any particular difference between the two games.

[DvDivXXX]

33 minutes ago, _shal_ said:

the December 11 patch

Good to know, thanks.

In that case, then my test is even closer to starting a new account on HH than I thought, I suppose.

Edited January 4, 2020 by DvDivXXX

[Karyia]

20 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

Here is GH's Starting rarity set. Looks familiar? Yop, it's exactly the same as in HH, with the same imbalance in favor of HC over the other classes:

 

I would suppose they just changed the pics 😅🙄

[DvDivXXX]

5 hours ago, Karyia said:

I would suppose they just changed the pics 😅🙄

Yeah. They changed pics, names and replaced any female character with a male one, basically (and a few minor things like the UI color scheme or the hero's face). Other things looked different to me, but it seems to have more to do with my memory than actual changes, like the XP rework that I had forgotten about until shal pointed it out. ^^