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Awakenings are here


FinderKeeper
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3 minutes ago, Max669 said:

Translation : "Hey guys, we talked to some players, and pretended to listen to them but the truth is : we don't give a fuck. We know that one more week won't turn this giant pile of horse shit into gold, so we're pushing it live anyway. Deal with it. And we know we have important things to do like improving the load times and user experience, but shitty ideas gotta be implemented first, that's the rule."

I mean, nobody wants this patch to be delayed. I'm pretty sure most people want it CANCELLED. And yeah, money was spent coding it, well that sucks but if a feature is bad, it's bad. Delete that dev branch and forget it ever existed. Forcing it in production anyway is a VERY bad move, as SoggyShorts said above.

To be honest, the probability for me to quit the game when this "feature" arrives is very high. I could deal with all the bad decisions and bad patches that happened this year, but this one's too big and too horrid. No big deal for Kinkoid, though : I'm not a whale. But I probably won't be the only one leaving.

That's too bad, because there were pretty good changes recently, especially the new battle system along with the weekly bonuses that force you to change your team regularly instead of using always the same 3 girls. That was a great improvement, even though the latest "elemental" thing is way too complicated. But the fact that they chose to implement that stupid "gem" feature rather than give us a decent user interface to set our teams up shows that Kinkoid's priorities are in all the wrong places.

 

 

Why would they listen when people threaten to quit every time a change happens they don't like but they continue to play the game so kinkoid knows people are not going to quit and if people did quit it would help out with harem load time because less people would be playing so would be less server lag.

If they just removed the blessing system it would be a lot easier to make teams and this change would not be as bad because you would not need to deal with it when changing your girls if blessings were removed.

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2 hours ago, SoggyShorts said:

We often complain that the devs don't seem to play their own game sufficiently to understand its dynamics and the changes that the ...patches inflict on them.  On us.  Frankly, I doubt that the devs of any grinding game actually grind their own game because grinding is inherently a time-intensive activity.  Instead, they rely on focus groups, Beta testers, bug bounties, etc to get their game running as intended.

Professional game companies have QA departments that of course play their game. If it's a grinding game they must grind.

 

21 minutes ago, natstar said:

Why would they listen when people threaten to quit every time a change happens they don't like but they continue to play the game so kinkoid knows people are not going to quit and if people did quit it would help out with harem load time because less people would be playing so would be less server lag.

Well, I know I've never said I'd quit the game until now. And I'll quit. I'll just come to follow the story.

Also, harem load time doesn't depend so much on server time, the problem is your browser executing all of that horrible javascript code. That's why it depends a lot on the computer you have.

Edited by Kenrae
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Now. Rosso said: "There is no simple solution to this".

Really?

If your intention were to impose thresholds to the girls levels, it would have been more than enough to add one page for awakenings (toh, there is just one main menu slot still free) and simply impose the threshold for all girls of the specific element. Should I have to bet, it is your decision to impose a treshold tree separated for every single girl that generated most of the discontent in this thread. Without that decision, IMHO you would have been spared 80% of the bad posts, including the quitting declaration made by a number of players (the highest I have seen up to now in a similar situation).

I am not able to remember who it was, but I remember that once someone said "The chances to find a solution to an error are proportional to the will of the people to admit that an error has been made".

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1 hour ago, natstar said:

Why would they listen when people threaten to quit every time a change happens they don't like but they continue to play the game so kinkoid knows people are not going to quit and if people did quit it would help out with harem load time because less people would be playing so would be less server lag.

If they just removed the blessing system it would be a lot easier to make teams and this change would not be as bad because you would not need to deal with it when changing your girls if blessings were removed.

Complaints about past nerfs have happened in the past, however usually people don't say they want to quit that was a rarity. This patch however is a different story. The normal way that we used to play the game won't be any more after this patch.

This isn't just less resources or less free stuff like majority of nerfs in the past this is a game breaking system overhaul that just makes the overall game allot less fun to play.

Edited by Mighty wander
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Mod hat on: @SoggyShorts I largely agree with you on most of this discussion, and your posts are mostly good reads. Finder's warnings were justified, though, but please understand that the issue is only for one negative thing you tend to do: mocking Rosso and/or Kinkoid in a borderline personal and rather mean way. You tend to this in passing, and it's probably half meant as jokes, but it sends out an unnecessarily bad vibe that actually undermines most of the points you make. Your posts wouldn't miss a beat and would actually be stronger overall if you refrain from doing this. And on top of that, as moderators (but not just), we can't tolerate personal attacks. You've already started making the right move by editing some of your own posts, and that's great. Please don't think too hard about how we evaluate what's okay, borderline, or not okay. It always depends on the context and the perceived intent, typically more so than on specific phrasing, for us.

For instance, @Max669's latest post is a bit borderline in the first paragraph, but it doesn't get personal, and although he uses swear words (perhaps a bit more than average for this forum, compared to Discord), he doesn't insult or attack anyone. I'm fine with someone insulting a feature, especially when the vast majority of us feel the same way about it. And I'm fine with someone criticizing a person's actions, statements, or opinions. But I'm not fine with someone insulting that person. And Max's post goes on to elaborate on fair and valid points, making the intro's visibly upset tone only a starting point to convey an honest, strong and rather constructive feedback.

Your posts with excessive language (still talking to Soggy) are different in that it almost feels like you write perfectly reasonable and valid points on topic first, and then you apply a type of "Replace all" filter to add quick mean comments to every mention of Rosso and team. So it comes across as personal attacks. I hope that makes sense. Thanks for being agreeable on this. Cheers.

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40 minutes ago, Mighty wander said:

This patch however is a different story. The normal way that we used to play the game won't be any more after this patch.

Hey. I was going to put it in a similar way.

I was trying to look at this and along the way try to avoid saying "I've seen it coming" (I just did...) and epithets like "unbalanced", "even less fair", "sluggish", "gamebreaking", "lacking foresight", etc. (Umhm)

This wednesday/thursday it will become a different game. Every game system that relies on collection of girls will need to be approached in a new way. It's not that it's gamebreaking on it own - like servers will stop working. (well scratch that! we know something is bound to break! They will! xD) If we imagine an entirely new playerbase without existing players, the game will look playable to them.

It's just that it may stop being recognizable to us. And it's huge.

I fully agree that even casual majority will be pissed, and sizeable part of them might leave. Probably will so. And from Rosso's announcement we know that it will take them time to make adjustments. 

So, in the coming week or two I think I will try to play this as if no changes were made yet. I'm going to try to ease myself into it by waiting for their adjustments. Maybe push girls to lvl500. (I already upgraded my mythics, 5*, and 50 starter/commons to 451. Yeah, I know, priviledged veteran. Sorry). I'll accumulate gems, get a feel of them on a couple of girls. We'll see.

Incoming shitstorm is on the horizon. :/

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On 11/13/2021 at 4:11 AM, Kenrae said:

Ok, it seems the gems don't level up the girls and they only increase their cap. So that sentence is false.

I guess I should be happy, I'll have more free time after leaving this game.

My sentiments exactly. I gave up a bit before you and I can tell you not giving a flying f and/or a single euro to this game gave me some nice time away from the grind. I only did x15 fights in the league just in case I'd change my mind later and to keep going to the level cap, but I see that's wasted as well. 

Thanks for this update and the money steal from the shop KK. Makes me feel I made the right choice. 

To who would care, it's been fun chatting with you here about a then fun game. Good luck to you all whatever you choose to do. 

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Back to just me talking.  

3 hours ago, SoggyShorts said:

My contention is that spending money on a bad idea is bad.  But spending money on a bad idea, rolling with it anyway, spending MORE money on it to fix it, and losing a great deal of goodwill, belief in one's professionalism and thus willingness to support your game is FAR worse.

2 hours ago, Max669 said:

I mean, nobody wants this patch to be delayed. I'm pretty sure most people want it CANCELLED. And yeah, money was spent coding it, well that sucks but if a feature is bad, it's bad. Delete that dev branch and forget it ever existed. Forcing it in production anyway is a VERY bad move, as SoggyShorts said above.

Yop. You both nailed this part imho. Sunk cost fallacy is quite likely to be at play at least to an extent, here. And that could be avoided with better communication with us ahead of big things, giving up a little surprise factor for a lot more synergy and trust between devs and players. Making sure we're all at least roughly on the same page before investing lots of resources into something players don't want, or postponing other things for years that players desperately want.

Let's just imagine for a second there was a more direct, two-way communication channel open between the devs and at least a panel of dedicated, knowledgeable community members. Six months ago, when Rosso (and/or whichever dev had this idea) tests the waters with the player group, back when it was (I'm guessing) just a rough idea they're contemplating whether or not is worth exploring. The player group gives pretty much the same feedback we did here. Devs acknowledge the concerns raised, and either outright scratch the idea, or rethink it so that it makes sense for players too, right from the early stages of development proper. Everybody saves time, gets less stressed, the game improves consistently and little to no time and resources go to waste for either side. Everybody happy? Just a thought (candid, I know ^^).

Anyways, Rosso spending a good amount of time this weekend actually having private chats with a select few high-profile community members is a very healthy move, especially if actual improvements (from our perspective) come from it. Who knows, it might even be just about the first step towards the type of ideal devs/community dynamic I was imagining above...

As for yours truly, thanks for the praise and vote of confidence, Soggy, much appreciated, but I wouldn't have the time or energy to invest in such a project these days. RL is keeping me very busy, and I spend so much time on this game and forum already. ^^ I hope that at least some of my ideas get through to Rosso and the team one way or another, though. I'd be very pleased if I knew they actually follow my long open letters on the forum (but also very surprised, honestly). But even though/if they don't, I know plenty of people do who are in contact with them, including most of the selection of players Rosso had long talks with. A couple of them are notoriously more gentle and optimistic than I am ^^, but I trust their feedback was very solid. And I hope this kind of thing happens more often going forward. Perhaps even before a game-changing feature is already on the test server, eventually.

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I had some time to reflect on my tone while running errands this evening and realized that @FinderKeeper is quite right.  And as you pointed out, @DvDivXXX, I erode what might otherwise be a well-reasoned post with that tone.  Noted, correction made, and my apologies.

@DvDivXXXwhat you describe above would indeed be fabulous.  Yes, there are going to be tensions between the interests of developers of a for-profit game and the interests of the game's constituents.  Not that we expect to be handed everything, far from it, but some semblance of enfranchisement would be really helpful and I believe healthy for the game.  This isn't a Blizzard or EA game, and I'm glad of that.  This team doesn't have the deep pockets of those companies, so they're doing things in a less formal way.  That's actually pretty cool until we get ...well, what we've been getting for the last six months: some good, a lot of "WTF?"

Perhaps my idea of presenting problems as fact checks deserves the jaundice that it got.  I'm not on Discord and have no idea how wild and wooly things get.  I was proposing a mode of communication that doesn't shut people down.  Maybe it's too late for all that.  Then again, if Rosso spent that much time listening to some of the elder statesmen, maybe not.  It would be of tremendous benefit to Kinkoid if they essentially gain a QA department of unpaid volunteers... IF that QA department is able to influence decisions to the extent that a rollout is workable for the majority of the player base.  There are a lot of smart and reasonable people on this forum, and the perspective they bring to a problem often changes my own.  Why not the Developers', too?

And if it is able to exert that influence, then the game's constituency gains enfranchisement.  We NEED that.  The tone of this thread has been much sharper than I've seen at any time during my nearly year and a half on this game.  People are leaving.  They've had enough.  This isn't outrage.  As someone very cogently put it upthread, outrage is proof of investment.  Folks are beyond angry; they're done.  I'm very close myself.

The virtuous cycle you describe has to start somewhere, and in all likelihood enough of the pieces are already in place.  It could be quite ad hoc: people wade in with their perspectives, driven by facts.  One of the greatest examples I saw of this recently was by one of the number crunchers on the Patch Notes thread who graphed orb drops over time and demonstrated with data that the orb drops in PoP were nerfed.  Facts, devoid of ranting.  Hell, invite @GeorgeMTOto murder board what gets put in front of the developers.  George is gruff and it can be a challenge at times to convince him that there's a problem, but he has corrected my thinking a number of times and I KNOW that he sees things a fair bit more holistically than many of us.  Maybe it's just my turn to be overly optimistic, but I believe that a moderate voice presenting the fact-driven perspectives of the full constituency of player levels could be impactful and perhaps prevent an exodus.

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Dear HH community, I'm a new mod in the recently created GH part of the forum. We are a small community in both discord and here compared to you but we exist and I would like to thank you warmly for all your intelligent debate and arguements. You are an inspiration.

I come here to say that the GH community supports what has been said here and, in the great lines, thinks the same.

We don't have Q&A cessions and we sadly don't see often some official members of the Kinkoid team coming to our discord to talk to us. We have some players playing both games + the test server and it's thanks to one of them that we have been able be kept up to date about what's coming and what have been said about the awakening update and in game new mechanics. I'm displeased with how it has been done. I wish we could have the warning earlier like we had for the removal of the dating tokens, than last friday (on the blogpost I wasn't following >_>) because players need to prepare for what's coming

Thanks to your feedbacks and with what has been said in the GH discord, I managed to write a post to warn people in both the forum and in discord and give them the advice to train their harem to the max threshold they can get so they can have at least some time to collect gemstone to unlock the next xp cap their harem will encounter (or at least lvl 300 because books are so precious) before the update goes live this coming Wednesday or Thursday after the leagues reset.

 

I haven't encountered a single player that is happy with this update. Player from my club, from GH discord, we're all upset about this update. We feel we don't need it very much and that there are a lot of things that have been reported in the feedback or the game ideas sections about improvements that would need more attention. But we aren't the one who decides in the end. We, as players, may have not the executive decisions, but have the most important role: our feedback. Don't loose hope about giving it! It's because that we care about the game that it is important. A player that becomes suddently quiet is a player that has left the game. I worry that it'll happen a lot more by the end of the week but for the players who are still here, caring about the game, debating and argueing I would like to say again that thank you and you are not alone. ❤️

 

Zam

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7 hours ago, SoggyShorts said:

The primary dev takes our frustration as personal attack, we still don't feel heard, full-stop, the shit show must go on.

Just for reference, Rosso isn't a dev. He's one of the founders of the company, and has interactions with game development giving suggestions ect, but he's not one of the day to day developers. In my 4.5 years of playing the game, I've seen at least 8 community managers, 4 coders, a couple of Hentai Clicker devs, but zero Hentai Heroes devs. They've never interacted with us directly.

3 hours ago, Observer_X said:

it would have been more than enough to add one page for awakenings (toh, there is just one main menu slot still free) and simply impose the threshold for all girls of the specific element.

Unfortunately, that suggestion isn't very good, for a very obvious reason: The amount of gems you need is finite. Kinkoid don't want us to farm a certain amount of this currency, and then suddenly not need any of it at all. For all the flaws that exist in things like Champion Tickets, we don't actually reach a point where we cannot use them anymore. If we cannot convince them to delay a feature like this for a single week in order to make it not garbage, there's no way they can be convinced to make the currency have a definite end point.

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If this goes live i don't see them removing it because you can bet they will have in game bundles for gems so they would have to refund the players that buy the bundles if they were to remove it and i don't see them doing that.

they should have just sold in game bundles for dating tokens back when they were in the game if they wanted money they would have sold a lot of them.

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41 minutes ago, GeorgeMTO said:

Just for reference, Rosso isn't a dev. He's one of the founders of the company, and has interactions with game development giving suggestions ect, but he's not one of the day to day developers.

Roger, thanks.  Would it be reasonable and accurate to say that Rosso is the principal idea person?  In the example of the 90% market haircut, would it be reasonable to say that he put modification of the ymen economy on the implementation roadmap, and that someone else made the code change?  Or to stay OT, that the Awakenings implementation is an element that he devised at some level or approved?

I'm not attempting to point fingers or to build a Socratic argument, merely to understand the flow of information because I'm still on the idea of finding a way to help fix things.  If the above is even reasonably accurate or highly plausible, then the feed-forward comes (as it did for this feature) from a relatively brief stay on the Test environment, and in a meta sense, from Discord chats with the founder, when he lays out his vision for the game's future and responds to questions.  Post implementation, the feedback (or QA) comes from this forum, to the Community Manager, right? 

The Community Manager is generally a busy person since they have a number of business development and "face of the company" roles.  As such, I would think that their time is quite valuable.  Gaining their attention in a manner that resonates sufficiently for them to agree that an issue warrants reflection back into the company is pretty important.  Are we doing that effectively?  Can we improve on that?    

 

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13 minutes ago, SoggyShorts said:

Would it be reasonable and accurate to say that Rosso is the principal idea person? In the example of the 90% market haircut, would it be reasonable to say that he put modification of the ymen economy on the implementation roadmap, and that someone else made the code change? Or to stay OT, that the Awakenings implementation is an element that he devised at some level or approved?

Honestly, unsure. The development inside Kinkoid is a bit of a black box. Rosso does come up with ideas, but how much he is a part of the process, ie the fine tuning of values, deciding where they can be obtained ect, I'm uncertain of. Awakenings is definitely something he's approved of (especially if he's saying that Dating Tokens were a mistake in the middle of trying to sell us on this feature), and I believe there was stuff saying he was involved in the initial idea, but I don't wish to reread the convo right now.

41 minutes ago, SoggyShorts said:

The Community Manager is generally a busy person since they have a number of business development and "face of the company" roles. As such, I would think that their time is quite valuable. Gaining their attention in a manner that resonates sufficiently for them to agree that an issue warrants reflection back into the company is pretty important. Are we doing that effectively? Can we improve on that?

There are numerous issues with the process. @Noaccis the current community manager and I do feel he does a very good job of passing along concerns. There are issues getting him to understand exactly what our concern is at times, then exacerbated when he has to try and explain it to the devs (again, no direct contact, which I accept even if am frustrated by). I do believe it's used effectively. The problem is when we provide feedback that they aren't willing to hear (ie, this feature is very bad, please take the time to rework it. "No, it's coming this week"). It'd take a better community manager than I've ever met in any company to make that workable.

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7 hours ago, Max669 said:

Translation : "Hey guys, we talked to some players, and pretended to listen to them but the truth is : we don't give a fuck. We know that one more week won't turn this giant pile of horse shit into gold, so we're pushing it live anyway. Deal with it.

Hahaha this one gave me a good chuckle.

So people are still really mad for obvious reasons, (I'm one of them) and like we expected the patch is going live anyway... Way to go guys, surely this won't make a bunch of people stop supporting the game.

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1 hour ago, GeorgeMTO said:

The problem is when we provide feedback that they aren't willing to hear (ie, this feature is very bad, please take the time to rework it. "No, it's coming this week"). It'd take a better community manager than I've ever met in any company to make that workable.

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

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8 hours ago, natstar said:

...and if people did quit it would help out with harem load time because less people would be playing so would be less server lag.

Apparently, you do not understand the game client at all.
These are not pages that take a long time to load. This is a poorly optimized (or rather, not optimized at all) script takes a long time to process them.
Even if you are alone in the game, everything will slow down ... ;)

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I'm personally going to feel a bit sad to leave a game I've been on for roughly 5 years now... I do not know of any others that have been in the game as long or longer than myself personally. Never having to spend a single dollar, but did put in the time and saved resources to get where I'm at.

I'll probably stick around to see this Gem feature in action, but knowing myself well enough; if it hampers my usual collecting and enjoyment. I will be sadden to leave but it'll be for the better.

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1 minute ago, Yuyureka said:

Does anyone knows for sure if the fact that Orbs will now also drops gems will have an impact on the girls drop rate for Epic and Mythic Orbs ?

No data has been provided on checking for a new drop rate anywhere I've seen. It doesn't help that the test server is currently on an on build though, which doesn't match the page 1 graphic.

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I started playing this game 6 months ago, and so far have enjoyed the game through all its changes, even if I didn't love all of them. I could grind the 5* legendary girls and even got the last 2 mythic girls by focusing my spending solely around collecting the best girls for pvp. I either spent no or very little real money in the process (I'm okay paying a few dollars for a season pass every other month to get some missing resources when needed).

This change makes it sound like collecting new mythic, and even legendary, girls is just a waste of time now even at my (relatively) low level of 290 (a great level to be at with the new gem caps I know). I'll never be able to get the gems to upgrade them to a competitive level if I want to maintain the ones I got to level without gems.

A fundamental part of the game that I found enjoyable was knowing that even though people can spend money to be better than me faster (and they have every right to do so, the devs need to eat too), I could at least collect the best girls AND USE THEM. As of Wednesday/Thursday it sounds like for the vast majority of us it will be a detriment to collect a level 50 mythic/legend girl that just messes up your champion teams while you spend months, or even years for mythics it sounds like, focusing on your grandfathered girls that were at your level when the gems came.

I echo the sentiment about the gems being strictly to raise a girls level above your own (I actually got a little excited when I thought that was how it would work), not the only way to level them at all.

If this is actually how it's going to be where there's no point collecting the best girls because you can't level them without real money, I guess my wonderful 6 month ride in this game is coming to an unexpected and sad early end.

Edit:

They made enough changes to the patch that address my comments above (max lvl 250 before gems and big reduction in legendary/mythic gem costs) that I am now actually cautiously optimistic for the patch given my current level (I bought the 300k exp bundle to get to lvl 301 😅). My hope is this gives newer active players the opportunity to overcome higher level inactive players that are blocking up our seasons/leagues as we level up.

All the active lvl 400+ players I completely sympathize with your frustration and don't have a good answer for what could be changed that helps old and new players alike.

Edited by CyrilFiggis
Patch update
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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.

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