Apologize for placing the Patch Notes up a bit later than usual. You can find them here.
Placing this topic here because I suspect there will probably be a little discussion to be had about one change in particular, along with providing a place for more general stuff about the changes today.
Whoa. Slot 25 is up to 350 now. At this point, I’m almost hoping I don’t get that Ragnarok… And really wish I’d hit 1200 in the Thor tourney this morning…
Then you must be as some low number of cover slots, cause I see cost of my next cover, 27th, increased by 100 HP
Hence, I don’t really appreciate the change
Overall, the cover slot pricing starts lower and ramps higher than it did before. Still maxes out at 40.
What we’re attempting to do is make the ramp for new players a little easier and push those that are playing for a bit to do one of two things (or both). One is to play in all the various events we’ve got running and have planned. Pulling 100 HP from an Event isn’t too difficult (and our numbers show that this happens for a large number of players) and a large portion of the prize pool at the end also offers Hero Points. This should give users that play enough HP to continue gaining new Cover Slots when needed and have a little left over to toss at Cover Packs or Ability Upgrades if they want. The other route of course, is to monetize which is definitely a plus for us as a business. We like to put food on our tables and also to fund further development of the game which has a decent cost attached to it. So we’ll be looking at the change in Hero Point spending habits across the board with the change and tweaking knobs if necessary to make sure that we don’t raise any pay-concrete-walls while still trying to provide a good reason to push open new Slots as players move forward.
Edit: We’ve also got a change in R42 that I can’t talk about quite yet that alters how the collection/cover slots work in general a bit, so that also has an effect on why we pushed in the change that we did.
As someone who generally dislikes f2p on principal, but has spent money on the game, I get it. I’ve had a great time with the game (was a major fan of the original PQ and think you have improved upon it in some ways, which none of the other variants have managed to do, IMO). I would venture to say most of the people here aren’t against you folks earning a living
Still, while it might have defeated the purpose somewhat, and I can understand why you didn’t, it might have been nice to give people a heads up that covers past the Xth slot were going up in price a bit. As players, it helps to trust that the economy is relatively stable before investing with real money. As I said before, it is a mild bummer to realize that the HP on hand is effectively worth less now.
The thing to remember about the Lightning Rounds is that they’re unbracketed, constantly shifting, and running between time zones. So even if someone with a max level team is dominating for a couple hours, they won’t keep it up for the entire time. The longest we’ve seen anyone continually place has been a few Tourneys in a row, then they settle down again. We’ve seen quite a few people that haven’t monetized at all top out on one Tourney or another simply due to deciding to push on a given time. It’s definitely possible. More than that, it’s not uncommon.
I have no doubt that any one individual doesn’t dominate every single lightning round. But taking a character who is expensive as hell to max out (Ragnarok), is already one of the top 2 or 3 hardest hitting characters in the game and then buffing them 200% for every lightning round that you run makes a very easy division between haves and have-nots. With enough people maxing him out, you don’t need one individual to dominate, there’s a relatively small pool of them who can do it. They’ll walk away with more 3-star covers and everyone else fights for the scraps. The rich get richer, etc. etc.