[ 20-Jul-22 ] Golden Anniversary - Discussion

[EpicBacon]

3 minutes ago, JustVisitingReborn said:

Logically, each tier of purchase should have taken you up at least one girl. So the first girl free. 2nd with the first card. 3rd with the second card. Then the last would be pay walled.

*Below not directed at EpicB, just general comments*

Honestly, I don't like the paywall much at all, but this event really isn't the end of the world. Unless you're a player spending real money heavily it's unlikely you're able to max out all the L5s/Mythics you're already getting free. These L5s aren't substantively different to any other L5s. In fact, 3 out of the 4 of them fall on colours that are already heavily represented, meaning that it's less likely players will have the excess gems of these colours to upgrade extra L5s.

The whole balance of the event is waaaay off (what % of players are seriously going to spend enough $$$ to finish this event?) and it's demotivating to see rewards that you can't work hard, or prioritise your in game resources, to get. But it's not likely to substantively unbalance the PvP aspects of the game.

I have no problems with there beeing girls behind koban barriers. that is completely fine with me.
My problem with this event is that you have to make a decision on day 1 (if you want to get the full amount from the cards)
Having several cards, you don't know how much points you need, you don't know what card to get, and someone gets the biggest card thinking that will be enough,
then down the line they get shafted because they needed both of them.
Add in the 3.8x Value or 4000% value deal, limited supply, buy now, think later...
It just leaves a bad taste.

But as you said; yeah the girls here arent going to make you win a league or anything like that;
its just hugely overcosted girls in a weapping that might look okay on the surface until you do the math.

[ShannonX]

28 minutes ago, Liliat said:

But these codes have expired a couple of days ago

All 5 codes worked for me this morning on Nutaku and HH

[Slynia]

This "event" was enough to revive even me here on the forum...

I can't really say that I'm surprised anymore. 

18k for all 4 girls? Yeah that sounds as likely as having all the strongest girls in your battle team for every new blessing... wait... there are players like that tho.

They aren't really the best reference for KK not gonna lie (😂).

[ShannonX]

2 hours ago, F-L-K said:

wait what? the free card will also collect xp & rewards?

 

Event cards and packs will be working like the regular monthly cards but for the duration of the event only but with an added value to them. 

[bolitho76]

The most completed calculation of getting crystals I had seen so far. Problem here is that he had included BonusPath from PoV, Season, PoA and partially from PoG.

[Varaczek]

So, basically at the moment it's an event of 1 girl for free, 990 kobans (Nutaku) for another one and real $$$ for two more?
Nice try, Kinkoid.
I'm already not doing Legendary Days, guess I'm not going to do this one either, no big deal.

[bolitho76]

32 minutes ago, ShannonX said:

Event cards and packs will be working like the regular monthly cards but for the duration of the event only but with an added value to them. 

Not really:

If they would provide the same like the normal monthly card I should have more teams available:

 

Perhaps it will change with the first Koban related Card, but not with the first, free card.

[Kenrae]

23 minutes ago, bolitho76 said:

Perhaps it will change with the first Koban related Card, but not with the first, free card.

It doesn't.

[bolitho76]

Like expected from my side. 😎 But I hadn't know, so I had to express it safe.

 

[Peaches]

2 hours ago, DvDivXXX said:

Yeah, this looks like a joke in poor taste, right now. More likely plain wrong maths and balancing on Kinkoid's side. HOPEFULLY.

Because yeah, having just one 3-star girl (Penny) literally pay-walled (behind a mere €5 Season Pass) already created an uproar two years ago, and rightfully so. No MAJOR collectible stuff should be literally unavailable without spending real money, on principle.

Here, we're talking two 5-star (competitive) Legendary girls not even just pay-walled, but basically unobtainable except by whaling it out in the hundreds of € on top of spending almost 6k in kobans AND being a hardcore dedicated player throughout the "celebration"...

So... do the maths (again), but do it properly this time, PLEASE, Kinkoid. Please do. I can't even give a ballpark to fix this, but we should receive double or triple the points per action to make this even close to an acceptable, non-PayToWin event. Either that, and/or move both Lyka and Louise under the 8-10k milestone. The tail-end of the reward track should be non-essential bonuses, just as you're already doing with Season, PoV, PoG and so on. It should most 1000% definitely NOT include one, let alone TWO GIRLS. These are MAIN rewards, that should be obtainable by ANY dedicated long-time player through efforts and a reasonable koban investiment ONLY.

You do NOT sell power. You do NOT lock essential game content behind hundreds of real-money units. These are the basic rules for any Freemium game to avoid the slippery slope of predatory P2W practices. You reconsidered quickly after doing a much lighter version of this F2P faux-pas back in Season #1. Please reconsider just as fast and send us an even bigger sign that HH is still a proper Freemium that does not get predatory like that (not on purpose, eg by design).

By "freemium" do you mean "dead"? Because that's what's often happened to games where the devs chose to start squeezing.

[DvDivXXX]

1 hour ago, JustVisitingReborn said:

Honestly, I don't like the paywall much at all, but this event really isn't the end of the world. (...)
The whole balance of the event is waaaay off (what % of players are seriously going to spend enough $$$ to finish this event?) and it's demotivating to see rewards that you can't (...) get. But it's not likely to substantively unbalance the PvP aspects of the game.

Agree to strongly disagree. PvP is a key part of this game, but it's not the entirety of this game. I would want to collect these girls even if they had been decorative 3-stars. It's not just about PvP impact, you know. It's a collection game too.

Not that it's anywhere near as important as the previous point to me, but you're also technically wrong on the lack of PvP impact of half of these 5-star girls being denied to non-whales. Any of them could and likely will eventually get blessed or even double-blessed one of these weeks, and then it will have some impact.

[DvDivXXX]

Just now, Peaches said:

By "freemium" do you mean "dead"? Because that's what's often happened to games where the devs chose to start squeezing.

No. Freemium is just the correct global term for "F2P games with microtransactions or other ways to spend real money as well", as a basic business model; even though in practice most people just refer to such games as Free-to-Play by association. It's neutral, the term encompasses anything that matches this description, from the most generous F2Ps that are entirely doable with grind and dedication alone, to the most vile predatory Pay-to-Wins questionably even legal where you literally must spend hundreds in real-money every month or week to be even somewhat competitive. And anything in between.

The good, decent, recommendable Freemium games follow the two rules I've exposed:

• Do NOT sell power.
• Do NOT outright lock main game content behind real money paywalls.

In direct line with these healthy principles, what they typically sell for real money may include convenience, ways to fast-forward the grind, and/or exclusive and entirely skippable cosmetics. DOTA, LoL, HearthStone (and beyond that basically all online CCGs, except for exactly Artifact, not coincidentally the one that completely missed the mark and failed miserably) and many many more massively popular F2P friendly games out there are in this camp. And, with the exception of Penny in Season 1 (again "only" a 3-star girl for €5 back then) and which was eventually fully fixed... Hentai Heroes also matched very clearly and cleanly this monetization philosophy.

The bad, obscene, dangerous Freemium games do not follow the two rules I've exposed. As a result, they should be avoided, you should warn people about them and keep an eye on your friends and relatives with game addiction tendencies or known issues in particular, so they never ever try these games. I'll refrain from citing examples, even though there are quite a few infamous ones, so as to avoid any unnecessary side controversy or drama, here. But yeah, fuck these games.

Unfortunately, unless Kinkoid fixes this with a very big pull of the lever on this new event format's design real quick, this alone makes Hentai Heroes cross the frontier into that territory. And no one here wants that, including Kinkoid (whether some of the people currently in charge realize it now or not). That's the really big concern here. And that's also why, yes, if this turns out to be on purpose and doesn't get heavily reworked into something F2P friendly, it would absolutely be a valid reason to consider quitting this game.

[Peaches]

Someone's probably already mentioned this but sorry, im too lazy to read the thread to find out. The two cheaper cards will give 15 fists and 120 red pills, and a few lips. Together they cost about 1000 kobans

The "premium" card also gives 15 fists and 120 kobans. It costs 5000 kobans.

Again, that's the "PREMIUM" card. (who is it a premium for?)

The 'premium' card also has this tucked in the corner "value 5000%."

One more time, the 'premium'🤣😂🤣😂 card has this in the corner, 'value' 🤪😝😜 5000%💩💩💩💩💩💩.

[Boulie2]

il y a 4 minutes, DvDivXXX a dit :

The good, decent, recommendable Freemium games follow the two rules I've exposed:

• Do NOT sell power.
• Do NOT outright lock main game content behind real money paywalls.

You can take Warframe as a good exemple of a freemium that really live the dream

(Not contesting, simply adding to what you're saying)

[jelom]

44 minutes ago, DvDivXXX said:

this alone makes Hentai Heroes cross the frontier into that territory

... if we forget the handful of old patreon (real money here) exclusive girls, of course.

[JustVisitingReborn]

1 hour ago, DvDivXXX said:

Agree to strongly disagree. PvP is a key part of this game, but it's not the entirety of this game. I would want to collect these girls even if they had been decorative 3-stars. It's not just about PvP impact, you know. It's a collection game too.

Fair enough from that perspective. But I did explictly highlight that I was talking about PVP

 

 

1 hour ago, DvDivXXX said:

Not that it's anywhere near as important as the previous point to me, but you're also technically wrong on the lack of PvP impact of half of these 5-star girls being denied to non-whales. Any of them could and likely will eventually get blessed or even double-blessed one of these weeks, and then it will have some impact.

Yup. But can you upgrade all your L5*s just now? I certainly can't. I'm sitting with at least 14 right now that I'm not even close to considering starting. In fact, as I've just passed 700 and will be focused on upgrading the girls at 650 for the next while, that figure is likely to inflate over the next 3 months to (guessing) 30+. The point being that other than a few whales who upgrade everything there's always going to be L5*s that you can never get to upgrading because you just don't have the the gem/GXP resources. They will be useful when they catch a double blessing, but unuseable because you spent your resources elsewhere. A few more of them isn't great obviously as it provides more opportunities to buy your way in front for the whales, but I don't imagine that players are going to start complaining any time soon that they were already (i.e. before this event) receiving more L5*s than they could hope to upgrade to PVP useability. So that we can't grab all of them in this event doesn't seem to impact the PVP that substantively.

[Ryujinjakka]

PVP became a joke a long time ago. The whales have 6 star girls, hundreds of thousands of kobans to burn to get them AND to fight villains to upgrade them in 700+ levels which directly make them reach the top positions on Dicktator3, which givers them even more kobans and so on and so forth...

Kinkoid is killing itself and it seem it doesnt cares....

[Attirm]

4 hours ago, Liliat said:

(Or cry about an event that is 10 times worst than the "Holiday Special" PoA that was already awful 😭)

For how bad it was, the holiday PoA was at least possible for F2P players. The main issues were that the rewards were stingy for how much the event was asking, and that we have no cost-effective way to turn kobons into ymens so anyone who didn't have a large ymens stockpile was just hard walled by that requirement. However, if Santa Claudia was a must-have for you and you had the ymens banked up there was nothing stopping you from completing this event.

This event, however? It looks like even as an active player that Rabbi is just barely possible without spending kobons, and Hari requires picking up both of the kobon cards up front to even have a chance of getting. And just forget about getting either of the moms without spending on bundles.

[bolitho76]

18 minutes ago, Ryujinjakka said:

PVP became a joke a long time ago. The whales have 6 star girls, hundreds of thousands of kobans to burn to get them AND to fight villains to upgrade them in 700+ levels which directly make them reach the top positions on Dicktator3, which givers them even more kobans and so on and so forth...

Kinkoid is killing itself and it seem it doesnt cares....

The most players at lvl500 are Veterans, not only Whales. If you have a look on their starting time a lot of them had started in 2016/17/18 (Nov2018 was my start). I'm fully f2p, had some top4 and 2 wins in League now, but it had take time until this year to catch up with older Veterans.

Most players with hughe Koban stocks are theese Veterans which had won the D3 League in the last years and most of them are not whales, mostly little spender with a card and a Season pass. The Koban stocks came from League rewards, yes, but they had nerfed the top rewards massivly and that's ok.

D3 winners are not surely Whales because in D3 you need not only brutal strength, you need to play smart enough to get good results.

[DuDeLoK]

when gacha-gaame is very succesfull and well developed they give out huge rewards on aniversary events so community celebrate and like theyr game even more. "other unsuccessfull" game devs use aniversary events to milk players so devs can celebrate. making aniversary events like this says a lot about team behind game

[DvDivXXX]

2 hours ago, jelom said:

... if we forget the handful of old patreon (real money here) exclusive girls, of course.

In a way, but it's not quite the same thing. The old Patreon exclusives are closer in spirit to the special Book they've released last year, in my eyes. These are like commissions that you don't even get to see a sneak peek of if you're not in the inner Patreon circle (or weren't way back when they thought this was a good model), and actually don't have any impact on the game proper (and aren't even in the game unless you happen to be a Patreon who purchased them from there).

This new Seasonal Event format is designed as a full part of the main game proper. Everybody sees the pay-walled girls, the ludicrously high real-money costs and/or point requirements per reward track tier, and/or the ludicrously low point per action ratio of the event's design. It's presented as the new normal. The slightly too frequent "hey! you haven't checked the Bundles page in an hour or so, come on, you know you want to spend!" popups become obscene because of these insanely overpriced bundles presented as opportunities for the event. If left in its current form, this is a point of no return in terms of monetization and the Freemium design philosophy of the game. For the worst.

Big difference.

-------------

1 hour ago, bolitho76 said:

The most players at lvl500 are Veterans, not only Whales. If you have a look (...)

D3 winners are not surely Whales because in D3 you need not only brutal strength, you need to play smart enough to get good results.

Of course, and that's a reasonable and frankly generous answer to the off-topic rant/whine from a very casual and/or fairly new player who knows jackshit about PvP in this game. I would have simply addressed this by saying "no off-topic and no misinformation here, thanks". And maybe directed the user to the QA section. I'll do this if any further post misses the mark by this much. Thanks anyway. If/when they're looking to add another mod to the team, you're my #1 recommendation bar none.

[F-L-K]

ppl kept saying season gives 1 shard per loss but I didn't get any in my losses

[EpicBacon]

22 minutes ago, bolitho76 said:

The most players at lvl500 are Veterans, not only Whales. If you have a look on their starting time a lot of them had started in 2016/17/18 (Nov2018 was my start). I'm fully f2p, had some top4 and 2 wins in League now, but it had take time until this year to catch up with older Veterans.

Most players with hughe Koban stocks are theese Veterans which had won the D3 League in the last years and most of them are not whales, mostly little spender with a card and a Season pass. The Koban stocks came from League rewards, yes, but they had nerfed the top rewards massivly and that's ok.

D3 winners are not surely Whales because in D3 you need not only brutal strength, you need to play smart enough to get good results.

This is correct, I think the term "whale" is beeing used indiscriminatly on top players,
or players who tends to win leagues a lot.
Sure they might have spent some money up front, and by doing so got ahead of the curve, now using said position
combined with some smart decisions and luck, some of them continued to stay ahead of the curve.
Using that position they reach the top of the leagues, getting kobans, and using said kobans to consolidate, making sure you keep winning, eventually you start to get a surplus of resources and you keep that around incase something unexpected happens.

Are there whales? sure, but I think the number is smaller then we want to admit.
And hey, I guess it makes you feel better if you think you got defeated by a whale instead of a veteran

[Ryu_D_sama]

Originally when I saw this event I was excited, but as I learned more about it just became disappointing. A lot has been said about it but another thing that hasn’t been consider much from a F2P perspective and someone that’s been playing for just under a year is that new/lower level players may not even be able to even complete this event and as such can’t partake with the hopes of attaining even 1 girl much less the other 3—which is the point of this “game”.

Other than Villains battles and Daily Goals, the event requires you to win both Season and League battles, failing to do so mean you fall short on the necessary Crystal count total needed to unlock any girl.

But this then means if you’re a lower level player competing in Leagues there’s only so much you can win before you hit a wall. I recently decide to move to D2 for the extra Koban with the goal of maintaining the 16-30 bracket which I’ve been doing sitting around rank 16-18 currently. Now I have to make decision if I want to win more battles for Crystal points or maintain my rank to avoid moving to D3 where I won’t be able to efficiently compete, resulting in more loses and less Crystal points to unlock a girl. On top of that less Koban. And in my opinion this is a game flaw that extends to other events/contest.

So my options seem to be burn through all my resources for 1 or maybe 2 girls if I’m lucky or spend massive amounts of money.

For something being called an Anniversary event, typically something all players should be able to enjoy, it seems to only cater to the few older players with massive stockpiles or P2W players. It’s another event that further highlights the disparity between new/old players and F2P/P2W.

 

[DvDivXXX]

21 minutes ago, Ryu_D_sama said:

For something being called an Anniversary event, typically something all players should be able to enjoy, it seems to only cater to the few older players with massive stockpiles or P2W players.

Actually, it's even worse than that. Some F2P or small budget long-time veterans may have massive stockpiles of in-game resources, but that doesn't include real-life money. So no, it doesn't cater to them at all. At most, they can get half the MAIN rewards, for almost 6k in kobans.

As for P2W players, the bar seems to be set too high even for most of them. I mean €50 in real-life money (plus the same 6k kobans) isn't even close to letting them get all four MAIN rewards of the event. This seems punishing for everyone but the biggest real-money spenders, aka the whales, which normally don't need such incentives, and certainly don't represent a big enough part of the player base (or even the game's income, for that matter) to justify putting out a massive month-long super hyped "Anniversary" special event basically just for them...

The only sane explanation is they screwed up the maths something fierce. Fingers crossed we'll have a response by tomorrow.