Phew... based on the old probabilities of getting Tier 1-4 posted by TRB4 sometime back, one would need approximately 1250 surprises to find all 64 animals. This is based on the results from 10000 simulations.
I wonder though. Seems like several have reported getting them much sooner than the 1250 you project. As I mentioned earlier, I have been trawling purchased surprises every evening for the last week trying to get the last five tier 4 animals and was able to get the last this evening. I've averaged several tier 4 animals each night, even though I'm only claiming about 40-50 surprises/night. Tonight I purchased 18 surprises and received two tier 4 animals, including the last one I needed. I ended up needing under 500 rescues to get all of the animals. Before you say it...I do know how odds work, and that you could be right and several others and I could still find our animals much earlier than the mean # needed. Just trying to discuss real world observations as we speculate on probabilities. Guess it's a moot point though, if they're changing the odds to make things easier. Careful Chillingo...if you make it too easy to achieve everything, you risk having people check out once they've done everything before you can come back with the next update... Thankfully, the update is coming next week, cause I just ran out of things to do.
Yeah my average of 1250 surprises was based strictly on the old probabilities before the probabilities got a boost. Because I don't know how to get the new values. If someone posts them I could rerun the simulations. Anyway let's call the expected number of surprises with the new probabilities "X". It's likely that most of us started the game when the animal probabilities were the old values, and these got updated around the way. So the average number of surprises you need would be somewhere between X and 1250. The number of animals in the shelter is a count of the total number of animals from surprises. Under the old scheme, one had a 50-50 chance of getting an animal or something else (U or coins). So the number of surprises you've gone through is approximately double of the animals in the shelter. Obviously there's no way to know for sure unless one has been keeping a running count of surprises. You have 463 animals which corresponds to about 920-ish(? who knows?) surprises. This sounds about right.
Yep, your right. I was thinking about your statement incompletely, forgetting that a significant number of surprises award no animal. My bad.
To help you guys along, let me just explain the current animal probability system. When you complete a pack, there's a 50% chance that it will be "animal". If the dice rolls and "animal" is determined, another dice is rolled to determined which tier of animal it is. The current probabilities (unchanged since 1.0) for tier 4 animals are 5%. If the dice rolls and its determined that a tier 4 animal is awarded, a final dice is rolled to determine which exact animal it is. The chances across animals are equal, so the probability for a specific animal at this point is 1/x, where x is the total number of animals in the tier. The upcoming patch will definitely boost the tier 4 discovery rate, but we will be adding 12 new animals as well in a new tier. These animals will still have a much higher chance of discovery than the current tier 4.
Okay, the ads were okay when they were in the corner, but you can stop the floating around the title screen crap right now. Im already pissed off this weekend about Oregon Trail (was going to show it to my daughters this weekend, only to discover that an app i paid for is now full of freemium and ads that were not there when i bought it.).
Have they changed? We do not control how the bubbles work. If they've changed, it probably is something on our publisher's side. I'll take a look into this.
Instead of being bubbles on the lower right, they're now floating around the inital screen. You have to tap around them once to clear them, then tap go to your city.
I actually find this to be no problem...and it is kind of creative, from an advertising point of view. Given that the game can be played very easily without any charge, the ad component and premium offers seem extremely minimal me. Not refuting your opinion, or your right to express it, just offering one of my own.
that's nice to hear... i'm just wondering... the gold to play gene pools is 2.000.000, but the biggest reward is only 50.000... if we are completing the hearts manually at the beginning of the game, the rewards (5.000 or 50.000 is still good), but after unlocked the gene pools, that's just annoying lol... maybe u should change the gene pools surprise system, something like only animals or animals / utopium... just my two cents, nonetheless a great game !!
I can't wait for the update, so I have somewhere to spend my coins. I keep bumping into the ~$2.4B limit for coins. A man can only buy Instant Surprises so many times in one day.
Coin rewards scale with level in the patch. But I don't think we'll ever make the coin rewards from heart package > the cost for an accelerate. We see the it like this: If you spend active time "pumping" the hearts, you'll gain some coin or U or an animal. However, if you decide to accelerate, coin rewards become a 'dud' roll. We really want to focus on getting players to actively engage in the game.
Yeah Ivan, this is the challenge of keeping the game fresh, cause it really plays out kind of quickly, at least compared to a game like Tiny Tower, which many compare this to. That game is much more monotonous, in my opinion, but I understand why it keeps people engaged. There are so many floors to buy/build, and the new elevators are pretty expensive, etc. It takes months and months of regular playing to complete that game. Despite the update, I expect that for many of us, the game will soon again become one of harvesting utopium from the forests and "pumping hearts" and buying accelerated surprises with no clear purpose for doing so other than stockpiling for the next update. After a while, that will get old and many will understandably just move on to another game (or maybe go outside?) I think once you have all of the jobs and animals, etc. you are hard pressed to justify sticking with the game to do these things unless there is some really expensive goal or suite of goals still out there. This is why I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to make everything (like finding the rare animals) easier to achieve. This is also why I think the animal splicer and ability to build large habitats for new animals (or something big like that) is a good idea. It would direct the game toward bigger, costlier achievements. Habitats could be 9 squares or more, perhaps, which could be expensive. I say could, because the latest fix makes expansions too cheap, in my opinion. I can earn enough to expand in a day's worth of coin profits. I think it should take 2-3 times that amount. If, for example, you do develop an animal splicer, or similar, maybe it should cost something like 3000u, or perhaps less if you had other large, costly goals in mind. Believe me, I would like to have a reason to keep playing once I accomplish the new fun things provided by the next update. My worry is, given the amount of utopium and land I have available, it won't take long to complete everything, and a week later, I'll be right back where I am now. Anyway, your determination to improve the game is inspiring (thank you!) so I'll be watching and supporting this game as a player and cautious consumer.
There are new discoveries and the town needs their mayor. What does this notice mean? Side note : 200+/650+ land. You can say I'm ready for update. 4 animals to go. 300+ rescued.
I agree with this. At the same time, the more that new content is added the more that the learning curve is steeper for beginners. We need more people to play, to encourage more new content. I would almost want to see certain content unlocked when you reach milestones or levels.
For me, there is nothing wrong with how quickly this game played itself out, it was refreshing in a sea of games that go on and on without actually maintaining any level of ingenuity or fostering new attachment with new content. Tiny Tower is one of those games I'm sure I put well over 100 hours into over the time I kept up with it, but I could not care any less about TT at this point if I tried. I love Nimblebit, but they really let the niche community push them into beating a dead, dead horse with Tiny Tower. Floor 152 was *no* different than floor 2. You could spend a lot of time searching for Dream Jobbers, or you could put all 1/1/1s in the stores who hated their job for all the practical effect that it had. Eventually I just grew sick of it, never even managed to get all the floors because I would always burn out on the sheer volume and repetitiveness, go away, come back, and there'd be even more floors I hope to see them tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end with the future updates than push this game into perpetual grinding. The three weeks it took me to go from nothing to having all the jobs, all the buildings, everything arranged just so, everything at full employment, was a sheer joy for a lightweight builder like this. Since then, I open the game once or twice a day, tap my buildings, collect a heart surprise, go on my way. If an update comes that makes it compelling again, great, but I fail to understand how anyone has spent the amount of additional time it takes to find out, "hey! the game only lets me collect 2.5 billion coins at a time!". There's thousands of other games out there and books and movies and all manner of stuff. For me, this game is just in a holding pattern because it was so interesting and they are "promising" future content, but I also look forward to the day my city is literally done.
Yeah, I agree with a lot of this too. I only have a couple games I've ever really played on my iphone (TowerMadness), and generally only play app games during <5 minute breaks in the day, waiting for the light rail, etc. If this is a "now and then" kind of game with pulses of play time tied to updates, that's fine. Maybe you're saying you'd prefer for the achievements to all come relatively quickly, to enjoy them, finish them and then walk away until the next update, feeling you've "completed/won" that phase of the game? If so, that's cool. Still, seems like it could be a bit more, is all I'm saying, and many might want to stick with the game a little longer, without getting locked into the monotony of a game like Tiny Tower.
Not quite. I don't care how long it takes to get to the finish (or "finish") line, I was just commenting that this game had been paced such that there was only about a month of content even for a casual player like my wife. Generally, unless they're going to keep the content updates more compelling than the Valentine's update (glitches aside ), I hope there's a point LamdaMu can say, "That's it guys, no more content updates are coming. We've told our story, we've removed the cap on land expansions and there's some leader boards for those of you who want to go crazy, but other than some bug fixes and updates to keep this working with new hardware, we're out of here, enjoy!" I love the freemium builder genre, it's my milk & cookies next to meat like Block Fortress. However, I don't want to see the "more is never enough" posters push this game into a perpetual grind like so many builders. That's the genre's achilles heel: publishers and/or developers are far too stuck on this idea of keeping us playing infinitely without purpose to milk out just one more IAP purchase, but this design also leaves them super vulnerable to their biggest fans burning out entirely and casual players seeing the ladder to the heavens as far too high to even bother with. What I'm saying is that if you can keep telling a story, e.g. Happy Street, with your periodic content updates, I'm along for the ride so long as that story is compelling. If you can keep changing up game mechanics meaningfully, e.g. Clash of Clans, I'm along for the ride as long as the gameplay remains fun. But, if all a developer is doing is a series of n+1 updates where what's going on after six months with the game is virtually indistinguishable from what was going on six days after you started, then what's the point in dragging things out like that? Pixel People clearly started with a vision for a faster paced free builder that was trying to tell something of a story where you were the omnipotent overlord working for Utopia Corp to recreate a human outpost in space via cloning technology. People like me bought utopium not because we needed to, but because we wanted to say thanks. Let's keep it true to the developers' vision and not just a way to milk out another $1.99 Utopium tip every 8 weeks because there's another 20 jobs to unlock, w00t!
