Been writing more text for Adventure Mode. It's kinda funny, because the more text there is, the less likely anything specific will show up for anyone. Ha! Still, making progress. First customizable suits are getting wrapped up!
I am so far finding this game overly confusing and frustrating. The core battle mechanic design is interesting but Adventure Mode and the power card charge concept I find unappealing. There seems to be no help at all for this game except for the in combat help. The initial tutorial messasges are gone with no way to re-access. Nothing now explains outside-combat things. Adventure Mode seems totally linear. Yes, your location data may randomize your path, but your path is still linear in that their are no real choices. I certainly am not going to bother to change where I go IRL to affect my path. THe only choice I ever see is this the Safe/Risky vs Ignore choice at some points but there is never any data to inform a choice there so why ever choose Ignore? How does one heal? Some past posts imply you just wait IRL for time to heal so it is like an Energy mechanic. I have been at 12 core for over a day now with no change waiting to heal up before I begin a Fight. So I assume power cards you get during combat are a random draw of those you own so far? I assume ones with zero charges you will not draw. But the more cards you discover, the bigger your card pool and thus the more variance you get in games later. With no deck building, you are then forced to possibly get bad cards you wish you rather hand not discovered. I think there should at least be a way for you to "turn off" the chargeable cards. Maybe you would have a limited number of "turn off"s you can do scaling with the number of cards you own. I see no way in combat to see (a) if a card is an infinite or charged card and (b) how many charges it has. This would be critical to know so you don't waste a charge card on an easy fight. Also, when I do the recycle on a power card, I assume it does not consume a charge? Is there a max number of charges a card can get? From a fuel buy, is an uncommon card with 4 charges just as likely to get a new charge as an uncommon card with 0 charges? I just bought a Basic Fuel pack, and it said +1 charge on Confusion, but when I go into my Cards and look, Confusion still has 0 charges.
Thanks for sharing thoughts about the game. I've been on the fence with this game for over a week. Last week I spent way too much money on other games. However this week I still know I want to buy car thief when it comes out! You're coming to help me a bit. Theory this game looks interesting. While not a big deck builder gamer this seems to be right balance. I'm also a premium gamer and haven't tried many f2p games. This is $2.99 with IAPs...?
Couple of things: First this game is really really good, and the devs are constantly trying to fine tune it to be better. Second, this is NOT a deck builder, not even a little bit. You have a core set of cards that you can use infinitely, with another bunch of cards that have "charges" meaning once that card is used, it consumes a charge, run out of charges you wont see that card again until you get another charge. You have NO CONTROL WHATSOEVER over which cards go into you deck at any given time, and if you are, like me, running tons of multiplayer games at a time, you will most often be playing with the core cards. The IAP are COMPLETELY not necessary, and the devs have already stated that they will probably be removing them in the future, so just ignore them. The core of this game is actually a really really great battler to be able to play in a turn based system. It is a ton of fun, with lots of ways to see upsets, and clutch wins or loses. Honestly I can't recommend this game enough. I will be making another post soon about some things that I feel like need more fine tuning/changing.
Thanks for your comments. Like I said the game sounds great as I don't like deck builders as I've never really gotten into them but this seems to be a game that I could get into... I'm glad to hear the IAP may disappear since 50 gold seems odd to me as I don't underand what it even means. Seeing that and $2.99 did turn me off.
Hey, all - thanks for the thoughts. Lemme try to address them: 1.) imdaKine1 and Pirhotek - re: IAP - Yes, there's a 50 Gold for $2.99 pack. This is 100% unnecessary at this point. However, we have it in there because at some point in the future we'll almost certainly have some "premium" cosmetic customizations available for purchase. Why? Because the game's a "service" in that it costs $ to keep it running. If someone's playing the game for a few months, and they wanna throw in another few bucks to help support it, we want that to be a potential option. As a player, this is often an option *I* look for, and am usually happy to support for games I'm enjoying - particularly if there's something interesting I can get in return. So likely we'll have one custom "suit" available as an IAP. But you should not need to get anything to get 100% enjoyment out of the game. I realize that's confusing, but hopefully this clarifies our thoughts, at least. 2.) Pirhotek - totally understood, re: confusion. We were super focused on the tutorial stuff for the combat system, because the combat system was really difficult for people to understand at first. So we focused a TON on that. There's a little bit of explanatory text that shows up in Adventure Mode a bit, but yeah, we haven't done the best job of explaining it, in part because it's changed a lot over the last few months. It is essentially linear. We just revamped some of the reward drop rates so that hopefully there's at least a little more differentiation between what's happening, but it's not where it needs to be, yet. That is, the different kinds of events need to be *way more* different, but we likely won't be able to do that until we get "character stats" into the game, because there just aren't enough ways to push the characters in different directions yet. BUT, that said - we don't actually even want you to do different things to shape your character's evolution. In an ideal world, the game just takes your life into account - but you don't necessarily feel compelled to go out of your way to do things differently. I know that sounds a little weird, but for me, when I play games that ask me to like, go for a run, my answer is basically "nerp." So we wanted something that reflected your life, and evolved differently because of it, but was more focused on you seeing your life reflected in-game, rather than suddenly getting ripped because you're walking fifteen miles a day. 3.) Power Card draws & Charges - yeah, when you draw a Power Card, you get a card from one you have, and have a charge available for. I'll look into why the charge counts aren't updating correctly - I can only assume "bug". We'll see if we can get that sorted. The inventory page probably just isn't refreshing immediately. re: turning off cards - this is something we've been thinking about for a good long while. Basically, I get that tension between cards you want & cards you don't. What we're shooting for is a way to actually use charges for cards you don't want in Adventure Mode events. So you might need to sacrifice N charges of a blah card, which essentially pulls it out of your inventory. And no - there isn't currently a way to see how many charges a card has in the midst of combat. That's something we might be able to add fairly easily. No max charges on a card, and no weighting happens on charge draws based on how many you have. The charges are based entirely on "rarity", and are otherwise purely randomized among cards you already have. We wanted to really explicitly make a game with as little deck manipulation as possible. I get that this leaves a significant "strategic itch" unscratched if you're used to deckbuilding games - but part of the issue is that we're also introducing new cards over time, and we didn't want "rebuilding decks" and a metagame that people could optimize for. I know it may seem really weird, initially, but as much as I love Hearthstone, it lost me after a point when I needed to destroy & rebuild all my decks to remain even marginally competitive (and by "competitive", I mean that in the casual-est possible way). 4.) Machiknight - thanks so much for the kind words, we really appreciate it. And we're up for changing stuff - AI modifiers should already be visibly different. Thanks for all the input!
Next Phase analysis Hello there! I have played 119 multiplayer matches and am level 12, I play the single play as much as possible as well. This is just to give you some idea of the amount of experience I have. Let me first say: Multiplayer is AWESOME. I absolutely love it, it is a fantastic fun system. There are some issues though that really bugs me: Card charges. I cant stand this system. I have cool cards unlocked, but rarely get to see them or play them, and am almost always playing the SAME 10 or so cards. Makes it somewhat monotonous, and I could feel my interest wavering because of it. Why do I so rarely get to see or use the most cool/interesting cards? I never buy anything other than the 10k fuel to keep unlocking cards, so I am not even topping off cards very quickly even. My thought is this: get rid of card charges altogether. Just let your deck randomly draw from the cards you have unlocked, this would make multiplayer MUCH more exciting! The other reason I like this idea is the concept of the upgrades for your cards. This will add differentiation between players as what you choose to upgrade will show your play style. If this wont work then I recommend removing card charges from single player at least, so you still get to play with all your cool cards and it doesn't take away from your multiplayer experience. I find myself NOT using cards in multiplayer because I dont want to use the card charge. Some games I end up with 3 cool cards in my hand that I WONT use because I want to save them for tough fights. Another solution that could work really well, especially for those of us who love to tweak, add the ability to purchase card charges with fuel. Make it relatively inexpensive (100 per or something), and that could add a whole new dimension of tweaking and reason for grinding. Anyway I could go on, but I digress, card charges bug me and keep me from playing. Now on to single player: I understand the single player is kind of a "beta" until you get to the point where you want RPG stats etc. None of that bothers me. There is just one single issue that I have with single player: Resting. I just came off of 3 days without a rest and just tapping the "next" button, missing out on fights and raising my reward tier. Granted I have a weird schedule with 4 kids, one of whome does not sleep through the night well, and one of whom was just born 3 days ago, so I RARELY have a time where I am not using my phone for 5 hours. My recommendation is to just have you health slowly regenerate over time, and at an increased rate when your phone is not in use, or have a button that says "rest" that you can push and come back to after a given amount of time to have recovered HP. Maybe if you rest the full amount of time you get some bonus evade or something to show that you are "well rested". This has pretty much ruined my single player experience and it make me sad. Anyway, I am not trying to be wholly negative, I absolutely love this game and see HUGE potential for it! One other thing I would offer for you to consider: Offer the game for free with a "unlock all cards" for like 2.99 or something. This works particularly well if you go with the whole "purchase card charges with fuel" route. This also allows you to have cheap and fun micro-transactions (i know so many people hate those, but lets face it, games like this need to make money so they can keep being awesome) like .99$ add 10 charges etc. Stuff that doesnt HAVE to be purchased because EVERYTHING can be earned, but CAN be to make life easier and Wonderspark money. So there you have it, thats my thoughts on the game as it stands.
Machiknight - re: resting, that's great feedback, thanks. One of the things we wanted to do was to make "resting" triggered by something you do in the real world. We came up with some threshold values that we thought would work for most people, and it's something we can definitely adjust to make work for everyone. Health regenerating slowly through general inactivity is a possibility, for sure - we could also theoretically do a "short rest" where a few hours of inactivity restores chunks of health as well. re: charges - one of the difficulties with changing the charge system is that basically, the cards are balanced by rarity. So some rarer cards are significantly overpowered, and if you started seeing them a lot of the time, it'd break the game pretty badly. Now, that's not to say the charge system doesn't need tweaking - I think one problem is that if you're not seeing your rarer cards as often as you'd like, *that* is relatively easy to tweak. There's almost certainly a happy middle ground where you're earning charges through activity at a reasonable clip so you're not running out, but then we can also keep the really powerful rares still... "rare". So we'll look at the drop rates again. One thing I found (and it's something we need to fix) is that if I consistently buy only the 10K packs, I run out of "Uncommon" charges pretty frequently. The thought was there should be a reason to buy the lower-tier packs, but at the same time, what happens is that you want the 10K pack for the potential to unlock the card, so you forego the lower-tier packs, don't get enough Uncommon charges, then the game feels weird. We can *definitely* do something about that. Thanks!
The health thing in the Adventure Mode is definitely an issue. I finally figured out I just "had to die" and fight with just 3 core health left to move on and finally get to a rest stage (and get past Last Friday). The funny thing was after dying and with zero core health I had to fight again! I had 0 core health, 10 shield. I started the fight and then died after I made my first move with the opponent never doing anything. Frankly I am finding it never pays to shield in combat unless you have a power card that encourages it. I guess being able to use fuel to directly charge the cards you want would essentially be deck building. In that scheme the rare the card, the more fuel to charge though. I kind of see charges now as the equivalent of the mana/power resource system of most card games, but it happens outside of the game. Which is kind of odd. Does pvp matching take into account what "charge level" the two players are at as well as level?
No, right now PVP just finds the fastest available match. It's something we hope to get to at some point. re: fighting w/ 0 health - there's an odd bug we haven't been able to track down that causes that. If anyone finds any kind of consistency to it, that'd be awesome. It doesn't happen all the time (obviously), but there's clearly something up. We'll see what we can do to track it down. re: shielding - the two things would be 1.) if you have a card that works w/ shield, and 2.) if your opponent doesn't have good range cards at the current range, but you do, but they have a lot of evade. It's kind of strange, because the strategy for shield is fairly difficult to explain because it's so situational - but we didn't used to have it in the game, and it led to a lot of times when the strategy "felt bad" because you'd have to evade when you didn't want to, or attack with a really sub-standard attack. We may add more cards that make shield more beneficial, beyond just damage mitigation. Thanks!
Tell you what - let's try something weird. If you've been playing, let me know a card you'd like to see in-game? Best suggestion (where "best" is entirely at my discretion, since there are a bunch of not-necessarily obvious factors to consider, as well as some technical limitations) will go in the game!
We're working on the problems with logging in right now. Sorry for the inconvenience! re: secret card - that's a great idea, but unfortunately not possible at the moment. There are some things *I* can implement on my own, and some things I need engineering support for. So right now, we can't do anything with "if a secret card is played..." or "if an opponent has a secret card..." We'll get that, because a "Remove all secrets" card is a must-have - but we can't do it right now. Thanks!
I continue to read this thread as I've already overspent in the last two weeks and likely will get this one day. I read the suggestion of would it be better to be a f2p with IAP for cards or something? Not sure if this is under consideration. As I have a virtual job and am on the road across the US a lot I can see how this really could fit into a fun game since I'm in different places all the time and can share it with others I meet with etc... I'll continue to monitor. I like the one player aspect as well since I don't always like online games.
Thanks for all the quick reply's devs! More card ideas! Damage shield: secret card - if your shield is ever removed, do 1/2 the amount of damage that caused it to attacker. Dodge: evade and double the evade gained. Close Quarters: immediatly move to range 1, +2 damage Ive got more ideas, but I havent unlocked all the cards and dont know whats there yet haha
Still loving this game. I see the player count crept over 2k. I do see regular issues connecting with your server. If I get a push notification for a beacon drop, they always result in a hung loading screen for me and I have to force quit. Also, some players have start dates in 2016. Are they devs?
morpheus - some of the 2016 folks are, in fact, devs, but some are also folks who played Give Me Fuel (our previous release, which had the same basic combat system but was multiplayer-only) who transferred their accounts over. Sorry to hear about your problems - we're looking at a couple other users who are seeing similar errors, but it's been difficult to diagnose, since the problems aren't consistent. If you can drop us a line at [email protected] (include your serial number, which you can find on the Settings page), and we'll take a look & see what we can do. Thanks!
