Too many XP-item rewards, too few Affection-items - needs balancing

[Gotaku]

With all the changes in the past months there has been a significant increase in item rewards in all the various contests and things. Evaluating after 2 months, it appears they were nearly all XP-item gifts and very few Affection-items. I'm flooded with a mountain of XP, but can hardly upgrade any of the girls. Seems a bit unbalanced.

[lepidocter]

To me, the thing is perfectly fine.

Once you max out affection, you don't need to invest on gifts for that girl. XP instead is now a never ending cost.

I've stopped in the month of October to max out the affection of every girl. At that stage, I didn't had any more reason to spend affection items, so they accumulated.

Yesterday I dropped 3 Legendary 3, an Epic 3, a Common 5, a Common 3 (Season, Events, Path of Valor). It's an unusual dense amount of girls at once.

In 5 minutes, all of them maxed out again.  And affection items are accumulating again.

Levelling them up instead is way harder with time. Not only you have more girls, but the cost (mandatory) is higher and higher. I have to promote 15 girls from Level 400 to 450. That's a big investment of books.

To me, the balance is perfectly fine.

[Liliat]

I could agree on "too few affection items", but certainly not on "too many XP items". XP (both girls XP and player XP) is the bottleneck for the foreseeable future.

More affection wouldn't change the way we play the game; it would however make it easier to unlock scenes/poses. I still find it weird to have a game with almost 1000 girls where we can only afford to focus on a few dozens, and "have to" ignore everyone else (Of course it's not a requirement; we can also choose to ignore Mythic and L5 girls instead; but then it means no PvP, which in turns means much less Kobans).

[Attirm]

Everyone's situation is different, and in my position it's exactly the opposite. I'm flooded with affection items, but am starved for books. I'm currently sitting on 400k in stockpiled affection items, and that's only going to keep growing. So long as I don't get a new mythic, I will probably never spend my way through this backlog and it will only continue to grow. So from my perspective, gifts have already reached the saturation point where I don't really have a use for any more of them. 

Books, however? Books are possibly an even bigger bottleneck than gems are. I've done hundreds of shop refreshes since the awakening system was announced and there's no end in sight. I needed to get 60 girls up to level 550, which requires an insane amount of experience, and now I'm starting to work on getting girls up to level 600 which costs even more experience. So I'm starving for books and could use as many as possible.

[Kaitana]

There is less money and more experience in gains, that's right (less affection it's not striking, however, maybe it's only your luck). But I disagree about too much experience. If you can't give affection to your girls, try to fight more champions and buy more gifts. We never could maximise affection with only free gifts.

[Xemnas]

I'm in the middle. I agree that exp is a always needed resource, specially after the stones patch, in fact i still need a lot of it (even if probably with my current stock i could get many at 550, not sure tho), so is never too much. But i also agree that we need a way to get more affection items, from my perspective we are getting way too focused on the pvp. I mean the priority should be to "know better" our girls, is very sad when i find myself thinking: "i like a lot this one, but i can't waste my gifts on her because i need them for the 5 star legendary". 

And i would really love to unlock many scenes, currently i do not even know how many girls are waiting.... 200 for sure.

To recap: too much exp? I don't think. We always need it at the end. Do we need more affection items? I think yes, I'm probably not the only one with lots of girls waiting their turn.

[lasergun]

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.

[JustVisitingReborn]

3 hours ago, Liliat said:

I could agree on "too few affection items", but certainly not on "too many XP items".

I'd agree with this.

 

3 hours ago, Liliat said:

More affection wouldn't change the way we play the game; it would however make it easier to unlock scenes/poses.

But not this.

My situation is basically that I pick-up the Mythic girl every month. I can afford the GXP easily enough. I can afford the gems (assuming a distribution of 1 Mythic/gem every 8 months). But the Affection - it's a killer. I can afford to upgrade that Mythic girl and 1-2 5* Legendaries/month. Everything else is ignored. And as it's expected to get more than 2 5*s/month now, that means that even in straight PvP terms, there's just not enough Affection to play optimally.
 

[Gotaku]

I agree. Let's not loose sight that, apart from a group of pvp-players, most people do play for the art = affection. XP upgrades are in the end an artifical drain: you keep upgrading, because your neighbour keeps upgrading; and he's upgrading because he's receiving the same xp items as you. Meanwhile the thing that you were actually playing for, art/affection, gets shoved aside.

Edited December 10, 2021 by Gotaku

[Observer_X]

Although the girls level is not limited anymore by the player level, players needs experience anyway to level up and increase their base stats, which is still one of the steps to consider to build your total battle stats, along battle team girls level and affection, harem EGO bonus, club bonuses, element bonuses, etcetera. At lower levels progression is quick, but when one players reaches the "zone" around level 300 - 350, progression keep becoming progressively slower, with levels before level 500 requiring over 200k experience for each level. The main sources of experience are daily missions, seasons and leagues: the numbers in the first two increases along with player level, while the third source is variable in function of player prowess inside the leagues (and which level of league he is in, given that on average in higher leagues reside higher level players), meaning that the increase of base stats is functional (along the other factors) to allow the player to compete in higher leagues. Moreover, player level is relative to other rewards in the game, and higher level players get higher level Temporary Places of Power.

Regarding the "too many gifts" matter, allow me to remember to you guys that a legendary 5 star girl needs 85050 points to be brought to maximum affection, and a mythic girl even 437625 points. I would advice to consider those numbers while re-examining your inventory and then try to re-think a bit about the "too many gifts" statement.

[Liliat]

Il y a 12 heures, JustVisitingReborn a dit :

But not this.

My situation is basically that I pick-up the Mythic girl every month. I can afford the GXP easily enough. I can afford the gems (assuming a distribution of 1 Mythic/gem every 8 months). But the Affection - it's a killer. I can afford to upgrade that Mythic girl and 1-2 5* Legendaries/month. Everything else is ignored. And as it's expected to get more than 2 5*s/month now, that means that even in straight PvP terms, there's just not enough Affection to play optimally.

Sure; we clearly don't have enough affection to upgrade both the Mythic and L5 girls. We need more than 600k Affection per month for that, and we get approximately 360k from the Market (And next to 0 from other sources). All my Mythic girls stay at 5 stars at the moment for this reason. So, an Affection boost wouldn't hurt. We'd need +2400 Kobans per month to buy the difference (And if I had +2400 Kobans/month, Affection would still not be my first choice).

But I wouldn't consider this boost a game-changer, because Affection is essentially a one-time investment. At the moment, you can buy the missing affection with Kobans for a few Mythic girls, and then be done with it for the next couple of years. Of course, for us at mid-level, it's a bit more than that, because we also need to catch up; not just maintain our position. And we also have less Kobans to spare, so focusing on acquiring girls rather than affection makes more sense, most of the time. Some high-level players (with enough L5 girls) already mention they don't really care about "one more L5". If you only have to upgrade new Mythic girls, the deficit is a lot smaller: 780 Kobans/month.

My plan at the moment is to get more girls (and nevermind if I can't fully upgrade them), and once I'm happy with my team, focus on bringing the Mythics to 6*. Then I should be relatively stable in terms of affection (Small deficit).

So, sure, when I say "it wouldn't change the way we play the game", that's exaggerated. It would definitely make it more comfortable. But I don't think it's critical to stay competitive. However, it's a pity that more than 80% of my harem (and not just mine ) will not receive a single flower in the next couple of years. Especially now that, with Awakening, Girls XP is the limiting factor for PvP. Even if I had all my girls at 1/3/5/6 stars, I wouldn't be much stronger in PvP, because most of them would be stuck at lvl 250 or 350 anyway.

[natstar]

They could easily merge all the exp rewards into one reward for seasons/path of valor,ect and give the same amount that you would gain if you claimed more than one.

it would also need less clicking when claiming the exp rewards for contests both seasons and path of valor have more than one exp reward that they could just make the exp claimable on the last step of the last exp reward and give more rewards in the spots the exp rewards were taking up.
remove the avatars from seasons rewards or move them to the first claimable reward since they are worst thing to get from it.

the path of valor exp rewards should not need to be unlocked either so merging all the exp rewards together means the exp could be on the free path and more rewards could be added to the paid path in the reward slots the exp was taking up.

[DvDivXXX]

17 hours ago, Gotaku said:

I'm flooded with a mountain of XP, but can hardly upgrade any of the girls. Seems a bit unbalanced.

You're flooded with books, really? Because even with all the improvements and reward changes to give us more books, I'm still starving for them. I also don't have anywhere near enough gifts, but that was already the case, and there's a crucial difference between the two.

17 hours ago, Liliat said:

I could agree on "too few affection items", but certainly not on "too many XP items". XP (both girls XP and player XP) is the bottleneck for the foreseeable future.

Exactly this.

Gifts have an end (so far away we cannot detect it without a very large telescope, but still, it's finite). Once you've upgraded a girl to give her all her stars, you're done and she will never require (or even accept) gifts ever again.

Books, well technically they also have an end (damn universe metaphor, why did I have to pick it ^^), but it's so far away that it's not just we can't detect it, we can calculate that we won't reach it in our (in-game) lifetime. Once you've leveled up a girl with books, you're not done. It will be years before you're even close to done even with "just" the bare minimum of 100 girls you need to level up to 700 so that you can have a few girls actually reach the new astronomical ceiling of level 750.

They could and definitely should stop giving us green gifts, and should significantly reduce orange gifts, just like they did with books, for sure. It would also be more than welcome and frankly overdue to give us more affection items from more sources. But we also still need a lot more books than we're currently able to collect, and that won't change anytime soon. The two aren't mutually exclusive. In fact they're pretty much disconnected by now (typically most books go to girls already maxed out in stars, and most gifts go to girls who will stay at level 1 for a long long time).

[JustVisitingReborn]

1 hour ago, Liliat said:

But I wouldn't consider this boost a game-changer, because Affection is essentially a one-time investment. At the moment, you can buy the missing affection with Kobans for a few Mythic girls, and then be done with it for the next couple of years.

I think we've just got different view points on this.

While I agree that Aff is a one time investment, I don't agree it can be put off till later without have significant consequences for your play.

In the first instances you're leaving your most powerful PvP assets one grade short of actually being worth the Koban investment to get them. A Mythic girl just isn't that much better than a 5* Leg when only raised to 5* (combined stats 25 vs 25.5). So you're spending ~1.5k Koban (9k HH) and for all practical purposes only getting a 5* Leg. All of the value of a Mythic comes in that 6th * investment.

Secondly, that 6th * costs 225k Aff. If you are looking to do this via shop refreshes, assuming 5k Aff/refresh, you need 45 refreshes. That's an extra 315 Koban/Mythic! (1890 HH). Leaving your Mythics to upgrade later is leaving you a potentially huge expenditure to get these girls into play later on.

So you're missing out on the strongest upgrades for your team for the time being, having paid an amount to get a Mythic that could have got you ~3 5* Legendaries, and allowing a huge resource deficit to build-up before you'll ever be able to get the full benefit of these premium girls.

This is where our approaches are differing - I would let everything else go to ensure that the Mythic is upgraded each month. I have a strong enough stable of 5*s right now that it's unusual for me not to have at least 3 of the top 7 girls any given week, and you are right that once you've made the Aff investment you can forget about them. If I stopped upgrading the Mythics I would have more as I have to let some top 7 girls go unupgraded to ensure I have enough for the Mythic. But this is a choice between the long and the short term.

Take this week as an example. I have Sai, who is the 4th strongest girl on Nutaku this week, but was not upgraded. I looked at the rest of my options for the week:

While Sai would be a great addition to my team, I also have Beatrix, Sara Jay, Cunegonde, Shtupra, Any and Taria who are all fully upgraded (both aff and to my Awakening level). I have a very strong team either way. So this week I left Sai out. That's an extra 90k Affection I have this month to put towards upgrading Finalmecia. In the long run Finalmecia is likely to be in the top 7 far more often than Sai and when she is, is likely to provide me with a greater advantage than Sai would have. I've lost out this week to ensure that by the end of this month, I'll have an asset that will deliver greater value from this point on. And the more Mythics that are released, the more than the 5* Legendaries are devalued. 2-3 years from now it seems likely that the bulk of the top 7 each week will be Mythics.

But there's another aspect to this conversation. My overriding focus in the game is the competitive aspects of it (and the above discussion is focused on that) but I would also highlight that I'm not the norm here. A very large proportion of players are coming here for the art. Affection allows them to open up the scenes for their girls, delivering the end product that they are looking for. Mythics have upset the balance of the game in this respect. They are generally the best artwork and the girls that a lot of players want to see the scenes for, but require the vast bulk of your Aff to upgrade. This means that the if you want to see the aff scenes for the Mythics you basically have to give up seeing the aff scenes for any of the 3*s. So that's thousands of aff scenes that have historically been created, and scores more per month, that the bulk of players going for Mythics will never be able to access. And vice versa. If you go the opposite road and open up the 3* scenes, you're unlikely to be able to afford the Mythics and as such won't be able to really participate in the in the PvP aspects of the game, which the developers are increasingly prioritising.

So, to me, the deficit in Affection is absolutely impacting the way we, and everyone else, plays the game. It's creating a dynamic where you are forced to make a choice between the PvP aspects of the game and being able to view the scenes of the girls, which is the first reason that any player starts playing this game.

All that said, from a PvP perspective, being forced to make choices of how best to invest resources is part of the strategy aspect of the game and something I enjoy (it's also the difference that's made for this interesting exchange ). If it was possible to max out every girl then the game would become very boring imo. Every player would end up with exactly the same resources. Skill defunct. I would simply state that the Mythics have created a huge deficit in the Aff budget and that this is so significant now that it's likely detrimental to player uptake and retention.
 

Edited December 11, 2021 by JustVisitingReborn

[DvDivXXX]

20 minutes ago, JustVisitingReborn said:

This is where our approaches are differing - I would let everything else go to ensure that the Mythic is upgraded each month.

I think you might have missed @Liliat's crucial point, or at least mine on this: Finalmecia was my 7th and, for the foreseeable, my final (haha) MD girl. From here on out, my kobans and planning will go elsewhere (including into getting the best bang for my astronomical investments in my now complete Mythic team). If you're F2P, or even on a small budget, it's now definitely and mathematically impossible to complete every monthly and weekly events. MD is the most expensive ever, and also the one that pays off the most (way, way further down the line compared to when you have to invest blood, sweat, tears and/or real-money into it, however). It's also the first one to say bye-bye to ASAP in order to kinda keep up on the koban sink escalation insanity all over the place in the rest of the game.

Upgrading the girls you use for fights in general and definitely PvP in particular is A GIVEN. It's implied you MUST fully upgrade your battle team. That's not something you'll need to do anywhere as often or as much as leveling up your battle team, which requires 10 times the mass of the sun in books and gems.

[Liliat]

il y a 36 minutes, JustVisitingReborn a dit :

This is where our approaches are differing - I would let everything else go to ensure that the Mythic is upgraded each month. I have a strong enough stable of 5*s right now that it's unusual for me not to have at least 3 of the top 7 girls any given week, and you are right that once you've made the Aff investment you can forget about them. If I stopped upgrading the Mythics I would have more as I have to let some top 7 girls go unupgraded to ensure I have enough for the Mythic. But this is a choice between the long and the short term.

I think the main difference is that I don't have enough L5 yet to consistently align a decent PvP team. I often have to include C5, and sometimes even C3 (!!) girls to get the element boost, for example. And having more Kobans would not help me get more L5 girls, because I already grab all of them when they show up (Well, except for Mythic Pachinko. And except for Felicia today, which I really need, but I also know that more events are coming that will require kobans).

I came back in the game ~6 Months ago with 5 L5 girls in total (Which was enough before I stopped playing, since I only needed 3 L5 girls. And we didn't have too many L5 back then anyway). So I have a huge deficit of decent girls for PvP. I'm slowly catching up, but until I do, that's my main focus. Once I have at least 3 girls of each element, I'll focus on the 6th star. But at the moment, I'd rather fill the gap with an L5 girl (or M5), than spend extra kobans to get the 6th star and have to ignore the next L5.

Looking at the "Top 7" you posted, it's simple:  I don't have any of these girls, except for Sai (And the Common, of course). Fortunately, the HH blessings are significantly better for me this week (But next week will be terrible again, with only one blessed L5 girl in my team )

Edit: in terms of Mythics, I have 5 of them at the moment. I'll get 2 more for sure, and then I'll see. Maybe I'll get half of them, or maybe I'll stick to 7 until I reach lvl 701. We'll see. It will depend on the new events/features, too.

Edited December 11, 2021 by Liliat

[JustVisitingReborn]

2 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

Finalmecia was my 7th and, for the foreseeable, my final (haha) MD girl.

And this would be where we diverge.

I absolutely agree that if the game remains static, sustaining 7 Mythic girls plus levelling up all the ancillary girls you need to pass the Awakening barriers is straining the available resources potentially past breaking point. However, I don't think the game is going to remain static.

In terms of creating reason for players to spend real money, the best thing that KK ever did for themselves was the introduction of the Blessings. Prior to that, you got yourself a team of 3 Mythics of your class. Perhaps 5, if you really wanted to get anal (lol) about optimisation of your team. After that though there was no gain to picking-up more Mythics. Or indeed 5* Legendaries, or any other specific girl. After you had your optimal team, a 1* common was pretty much as useful to you as another Mythic.

Blessings changed all of that. After the Blessings came in, any girl could be a big asset on any given week. It created the incentive to spend money to catch them all via the FOMO.

I appreciate that the Awakening system has totally retarded that. It would be impossible to raise every Mythic to level 750 without spending a fortune. So it's preferable to target 7. The game his shifted back to the pre-Blessing format, just with 7 Mythics rather than 3.

And that's the point I would make - I don't think that the current structure will be allowed to persist as is. I'm not saying they're going to scrap Awakenings. I am saying that in my opinion it is likely that they are going to tweak this system to break the 'you only need 7 of the premium girls' structure. It is contrary to the economic model of the game to remove the incentive to obtain more than 7 Mythics. My guess would be that in the next 12 months there will be an update that will look to shift this dynamic back so that even 3 stars will be viable again under the right circumstances. This could be a buff of the Blessings. More Blessings. Maybe a steady increase of the XP that's available. Maybe something I haven't thought of. But there will be some change to the game that will make having as many of the Mythics (and to a lesser extent 5* Legendaries) both desirable and achievable.

For me it doesn't make too much difference right now - I'm only at 5 Mythics, so I've got at least a 2.5 months before I have to decide whether I go for an 8th. But if I were in your shoes, I think I'd still be looking to pick-up next month's Mythic......


@Liliat - that makes perfect sense. If you don't already have the bank of 5*s, your circumstance is very different to mine!
 

Edited December 11, 2021 by JustVisitingReborn

[JustVisitingReborn]

22 hours ago, Liliat said:

I often have to include C5, and sometimes even C3 (!!) girls to get the element boost, for example.

I've been thinking about this specifically - and I'm sure some of the players who are more experienced that me will pipe-up if they feel I'm wrong here - but I wouldn't worry too much about the element boosts. I certainly wouldn't drop far down the list from your strongest team to get them.

In all honesty I barely pay any attention to these at all. I realise when I step-up to D3 this is likely to be something I will want to put some thought into. But even then I think you need to have a LARGE harem before this really becomes a viable option (large harem = lots of available girls = not having to drop too far down the list to find an element boost). Even then, with the Awakening system now in play, you need to be careful about the girls you are Awakening to get that boost (Awakening 3* Legendaries is not a great plan).

I almost exclusively play a rainbow team. The exception is where my best team would naturally have an element boost, and in those situations will create two teams - one that has the element boost (for offense) and the other where I switch out a girl to break the element team and make a rainbow team (for defense). Making an element team is very restricted as you have to find another girl of that element (meaning you often end going way down the list). Breaking an element team is far easier, as you're looking for a girl from any of the other 7 elements that can sub in. You can generally achieve that within a few places of your 'best' team by the spreadsheet.

[DvDivXXX]

Yeah, unless it cannot be avoided, a rainbow team is what you should always let your opponents face. It's okay to go down in total power a fair bit to avoid having a team of a specific color, most of the time. Because if your opponents face you as a blue team (for instance) and it isn't too big of a drop for them to tweak their battle team so they become a yellow team, the good ones will, and you will have generously donated them +10% HP and +10% damage against you.

It's different when you're the attacker, as hinted above. But just to be very clear because I half-suspect @Liliat might not be clear on that: Elements bonuses should only be considered (at least 99% of the time) when you attack. As the defender, you definitely want to be Rainbow unless you really can't (and/or it would be such a bad deal for your opponents to get the bonus you're giving them that it isn't a concern).

Having said that, we're derailing the thread (even though to be fair it has run its course anyway). If you want more tips and tricks on PvP, Elements and such, go make a QA thread. Cheers.