I just did the math and just made myself aware of what is required to play the game as a competitive Story player.
Playing Story competitively often means doing your final clears of Sub 1 immediately followed by your initial clears of Sub 2, and so on.
With most events/subs having 1 loaner node, 3 ‘easy’ nodes, 3 ‘hard’ nodes, and 4 Essential nodes (CL10 only has 3 Essential nodes but also the Murder/Challenge node, so same thing), that means you’re typically playing 41 matches for initial clears, and 33+ matches for final clears.
(33+ for final clears because competitive players who finish early will often grind the first few nodes again).
That’s 74+ matches played in a row, as fast as you can, every single day, just to be a competitive player.
And that’s JUST Story.
This doesn’t factor in the time you need to spend as a Versus/PvP player.
Where even if you’re using Line to coordinate Shield Hops with others to hit 1200+ points in as few as 30 or so matches, you’re still spending a lot of time on Line not playing the game in order to more efficiently play the game.
Now I realize we don’t have to be competitive players, but if you’re here reading this, you probably are.
Don’t misunderstand me.
I love collecting the characters, then finishing them, then adding Champion levels to make my favorite characters even stronger.
But this game is horribly grindy, and while it could be better (I proposed one suggestion here) the Devs are not doing anything to make it better and reduce the grind.
If anything, the removal of certain rewards with the introduction of CL10 just made the grind even worse.
I don’t want to quit playing playing the game. I’m a commander of a T100 Alliance filled with good people that I’ve become virtual friends with on Facebook, and I love chatting with the other players in the Line rooms, too.
But in the past year we’ve lost several of our top players. They did not leave us for another Alliance, they quit the game, and I can see the end coming for me, too.
I don’t know when I’ll have finally had enough, but I can see it coming, and I’ll be both happy and sad when it does. Happy, because I’ll get that time “back” and no longer be compelled to go “Well, it’s 10:30. Time to ignore everyone and go play this game for an hour…or more.”
I’d be very surprised if the Devs can’t see the end coming, too.
Unless of course they’re not tracking the number of players playing each CL, the number of inactive, high level accounts and whether or not that number is growing, etc. But I expect they are, or at least they are tracking the spending, and I expect that’s decreased because of the number of veterans leaving the game. Yes, veterans do spend money.
And I expect this why we’re now being flooded with offers. The game is hemorrhaging players, the company is hemorrhaging money, and the Devs are trying to bandage it but they’re going the wrong way about it because they don’t know how to fix it. I honestly don’t know how to fix it, either.
But then I don’t have to know how to fix it because it’s not my game, as Venom has repeatedly told us:
Fixing the grind may help. Maybe. Or maybe it is over?
Maybe it’s time for the fat lady to come out and sing one last Ave Maria.
It has been fun.
