It's wrong to pay $2000 for a video game (VIP rewards for Star Trek Timelines, for example). Yes, you don't *need* to spend that much on a single game, but when optimum game experiences are selling for $2000 you have a serious ethical problem with the basic design of optimal experiences. The argument that it's your money so you can spend it how you want is also fallacious, because how we spend our money as a society is an ethical issue as well. The fact that this kind of design goes without serious questioning from governmental and/or societal watchdogs lends credence to something being severely broken in the economic system we have allowed to propagate. And say what you want about Whales having every right to spend their money or give their money to whomever they want - I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to. I'm talking about optimum gaming experiences being designed for people like that - that's the issue.
Oh, cool, it's one of these threads again. You don't need to spend $2,000 on free to play games to have an "optimal experience." These games are designed with the fact that 95% of the people who play them will never spend a cent. Just because you can't live out your wildest Star Trek LARP fantasies for free doesn't mean the developer has somehow wronged you. It's not like the guys at Disruptor Beam are sitting around juggling a stack of solid gold coins like they're poker chips plotting the next way they're going to scam gamers out of their hard earned cash. In the App Store of 2016, there isn't a choice of whether or not a game of this scope is going to be paid or free to play. The choice for a studio like this is simply "Are we going to focus on mobile or not," knowing that free to play is literally the only way to support a studio. But, sure, let's rage the night away because why not.
Are you actually blaming posters for being the cause of TA's downfall? Look, if people are looking for tips and strategies and all they can find is Touch Arcade, that should tell you something about the market being skewed and perhaps discussions like this are exactly what's needed. More discussions like this are what's needed more. Why are tips and strategies so difficult to find? Why are games so superficial these days? Why do developers set the bar so high (for monetary expense)? And why are people in the business (you guys, for example) so afraid to hold developers accountable for their game design? It's been a long-held understanding that F2P mechanisms are a direct descendent of techniques used in casinos with slot machines and economic pricing of gambling, so why whenever this is mentioned in a thread, why aren't you inflamed with anger, instead of rushing to the defense of these developers?
I'm not a hater When I play ios games - its typically something I do for my own enjoyment. Something that might help pass the time, or give me something to look forward to after work has kept me busy for the last 4 hours straight and I finally have a minute. I am a pretty big star trek fan, and this game has really been a fun look at some of the characters that gave me lots of great memories! As far as game play goes - its got some variety, but its not very deep. And within a short period of time it does get a little grindy. But that's what I like! I love having a game on my phone that is going to require me to either grind with something as silly as tapping... or grind with something as silly as regularly checking in, and moving my little minions a few xp closer to the next goal. These types of games aren't for everyone. There are lots of games that aren't for me. Paying 60$ for a COD game, so I can get shot repeatedly by a 15 year old isn't fun for me. But I don't mind that its a very successful series and people love it. Just play what you want. Pay if you want and let the market decide. I would love to see some posts from people that are playing this game now. There is already a toucharcade fleet. I'm not sure what fleets do yet!
No one ever said that Disruptor Beam is sitting around with gold bars. The comment about poker chips is closer than you may realize (read through the F2P Design Dictionary, free on Amazon if you are curious), but equally as disingenuous as a response since it didn't actually respond to the original thesis: that when I log onto Timelines, every game experience is designed to encourage me to spend money instead of to spend time with the game. I'm not sure why you are so angry with the posters here -- obviously, they wanted a more in-depth Star Trek experience, because they love the franchise, and when they played this game it did not meet their expectations and they came here to express why in so many words. But you appear to be upset at the why -- how could they possibly be upset that a Star Trek game in the works for years, could fall into the freemium trap of sacrificing quality and gaming experience for timers and currency? It's a totally valid question, and doesn't deserve to get shut down like this.
You can tell a lot about your traffic using Google Analytics, the key factor you look for is bounce rate. What that is measuring is the percentage of people who visit your web site and don't do anything but hit the back button. As these continual repetitive arguments about free to play dominate nearly every thread, our bounce rate continues to rise when it comes to inbound forum traffic. Previously, when our forums were primarily used for discussing games, sharing strategies, and the like our bounce rate was very low and you could correlate that data through new user registration and participation. Now that the same old free to play rant has taken over most threads as more games transition to free to play, what's happening is the exact opposite. People who are excited for these games, are enjoying them, and searching for other people to discuss the game with find a forum thread on Google and just peace out. I can't blame them either. If I was a random person who stumbled across this thread on Google looking for people to join my clan or fleet or whatever you'd hear a sonic boom from my mouse button I'd hit back so fast. The only thing in this thread is the same old toxic negativity that infects most free to play game threads. I'm really not sure what to do about that, as no one is technically breaking any rules, but it sure would be nice if the people who just generally seem to dislike everything about the App Store of 2016 would go away so people who do like these kind of games aren't immediately effectively told to get out. Maybe that's a problem with our forum rules we should look into changing, as it's not doing anyone any favors.
I don't know what other way to say it. I don't give a shit about this game, I don't like games like this, I could care less about it in any way, shape or form. But I don't need to go on a crusade about it either, I simply ignore it and go play Wayward Souls' new update or one of the literally hundreds of other awesome games I have on my phone. Let me try it this way. Say you liked to frequent the biggest music blog on the internet. Justin Bieber just dropped a new album and it's all the rage. You don't like JB, so you go into the comments thread for his latest album and try to tell everyone how shitty the music is, and how it isn't REAL music, and back in your day people PLAYED their instruments, and how music now is just a bunch of overproduced crap, and how the music industry is going down the toilet because people keep buying this terrible music. How well do you think that would go down? Do you think you would convert even ONE of Justin Bieber's millions and millions of fans to decide to not listen to his music anymore? Do you think that begging record companies to stop releasing albums like that will get them to be like "Oh, you're right! The last album went triple platinum and people are constantly begging for more JB music, but LET'S NOT BECAUSE REASONS"? Now imagine you're someone who just downloaded Star Trek. "Oh cool, I like Star Trek, and it's from those people who made that Game of Thrones game I love! Awesome!" But you aren't sure how something works or what a certain item does, or you don't know the strategy for doing blah blah whatever. So you google it. And you read this thread. Literally go back through and read this thread, it's not very long, and tell me how anything posted so far is going to be useful to any human person on this planet. It's not that there's only one place on the internet to get this information, it's that we're the biggest iOS gaming site, we rank well with Google, we'll end up in front of the eyeballs of a lot of people who have never even heard of us before. I've seen so many times where people have happened across a thread by way of Google, asked a question, and were so jazzed about the friendly and helpful response of other members that they became frequenters of the site going forward. But this thread? They'll simply leave and go to one of the hundreds of other sites that'll have some sort of Star Trek guide up soon. I am not blaming TA's decline on the posters, I'm blaming it on the shitposters. There's a very clear difference. I've been hearing it for years in fact. So many developers who used to be active here no longer visit because of the vitriol of people hating literally anything to do with free to play in any form. What good do you think you're even doing? Don't you think that the other people who hate free to play games already know all the same arguments people are spouting in this thread? It's a gigantic circlejerk. Ah, but what's the point? You'll save the game industry I'm sure! Let me know how it ends up!
Because it's not my job to babysit the world. Just like there are problem gamblers, and alcoholics, and drug addicts. If someone is compulsively spending their rent money on a freemium game on their phone then that is a problem, but it's not mine to solve. The data that's out there suggests this isn't the case, that the people who have rent to pay and monetary responsibilities to worry about are the exact type of people who don't pay anything, or pay a few dollars here and there like they would on going to a movie or some other form of entertainment. Then you have these ultra wealthy people, the type that wouldn't sneeze at dropping 10k on eating out because they have so much money it doesn't even have meaning to them, and they see everyone playing Clash and want in on it too. So dropping loads of money into it is literally nothing to them and it jumpstarts them into the top tier of players or whatever. Of course they'll probably get destroyed because they fast tracked their way there, but that's besides the point. Who am I to tell that person that they're wasting their money? Should I also tell them that Chili's is a very reasonably priced eating establishment and dropping thousands at a high end restaurant is also a poor use of money? What about luxury cars? Should we start a crusade against Bentley or Aston Martin because their cars cost 200k and you could just go nab a Kia Soul for like 10k, so that must be unethical right?
Game could have been good, but it is SHIT. Marvel Contest of Champions-like IAP. Also, I hate games that ... their app icon. Star Trek Ti....
Okay, so despite what I wrote earlier I'm still giving the game a shot. I love Star Trek and would like to enjoy this game, but at least to this point my opinion hasn't improved. Currently, this is what the game looks like for me. I cannot progress because the stage I need to clear in chapter two requires an engineer to clear the final challenge (typically there are four or five). I have a passable engineer but, even with two sympathetic abilities, she's not capable enough to meet the stage's final requirement (you can fail earlier stages but not the final stage, and in this case only one path of what would typically be two is open to me). I've leveled her to 20 and unlocked/built whatever equipment I can for her, but it's likely she just won't be good enough to clear that stage. Still trying anyway, but more requires getting the proper lucky items from transmissions, which only two can be completed at once (unless you spend some $10 worth of premium currency to unlock the ability to do a third), are unlocked by using a currency from daily rewards, and take some three hours each to complete (consuming crew members who cannot be used for other activities during the wait). So basically I'm stuck in the story until I randomly roll a *good* engineer character. My characters have returned from the two transmission missions so I spent my 'stamina' to very slightly improve them. I decided to try improving my 3★ Odo, so I can level him from 10-20. Most of his items require gear from transmissions, so there's no rushing that. Just need to very slowly trudge away at them and get lucky. One of them, however, I can build. Odo's Bucket is assembled from two each of *three* other items. I pick one and fly over to the location where it randomly drops. Game crashes, relaunch. Spend all the stamina I've accumulated in those last three+ hours repeating the same stage using the same characters to eventually pick up *one* of those six needed items to upgrade one of four items needed to level Odo from 10-20, very slightly improving him. Well, at least it didn't take long? 'Stamina' is used up, time to do some more transmissions. I've got one more remaining for the Klingons, so I pick some characters and send them off. Chuckle, with a hint of sadness, that it would cost around $4 of real-world money to speed up this one transmission mission so it didn't take three hours to complete. I can do two, and some of my characters need items from Federation transmission missions, so I fly to Federation space to buy the right to do these transmissions (using a currency obtained from daily missions). Game crashes, relaunch. Buy the transmissions, pick one, pick crew and send them off. Since I need to send my best crew out to do these missions not much point in playing for the next four hours. But that's fine, since four hours from now I won't have capped my 'stamina' and I can repeat this process again. Not sure if that sounds fun to anyone? I have a feeling you may have been replying to the other person who used the $2,000 figure, but I tossed it out too, so I'll reply. I *was* being flippant when I tossed that figure out, but it sure looks to me that spending $100, $200, $300 wouldn't really dent this game's mechanics all that much. They'd just hop you forward a distance into the game where you got to wind up pounding your head against the same roadblocks with slightly higher numbers. And certainly it's not realistic to be spending money to speed the timers with how they're currently priced—at least not at an expense level I can imagine anyone honestly defending. My personal problem is that this game, unlike other F2P games like Terra Battle and, indeed, Puzzle & Dragons, does *not* appear to have been well designed from the perspective of playing for free or at little in-game cost. About the only useful thing you can do in the game with a small amount of real-world money is buy the subscription, which at least will give you a passable flow of 3★ characters with, perhaps, a shot at rarer characters, for the month it lasts—and the opportunity to see how much fun you'll have slowly upgrading and leveling them. It's not that the game contains F2P elements: it's that it contains just about every F2P element conceived of, they're very poorly balanced in terms of cost for those who want to spend modest amounts of money, and the grind concealed under the Star Trek skin hits, in my opinion, way too early in gameplay. As an aside, the game's not dropping premium currency during gameplay—the same currency used to access the 3★+ gatcha. All I see are a few means of getting rolls from the daily bonus over time. So there's another curious deviation, though one which would be resolved with in-game events or tweaks. A lot of this could be solved with rebalancing and maybe pulling down some of this Jenga tower of F2P puzzle pieces. The game could be salvaged, and heck, might appeal nicely to people who love Star Trek enough to ignore the cons. But I do believe it's reasonable for people to push back when a company pushes F2P monetization *this* far.
I know you'll probably just delete this comment, but I won't be posting any more comments on your forum. If you want to stifle honest discussion about this game's serious flaws then good riddance.
It's being stifled? Anyone can post in this thread and the discussion can go on without hampering peoples' ability to discuss the actual game itself. We do this all the time in any number of threads that go off the rails like that one did. If that minor thing causes you to not want to post here anymore, then you are far beyond any help I can give you.
You will not be missed. edit: Sadly, people who have these dramatic exits rarely stick to their guns.
Sorry to say this but you do have a rather bad attitude problem and a chip on your shoulder when it comes to defending freemium. I'm truly sorry (and I mean it) if your site is slowly going down the pan but blindly defending all the freemium trash isn't going to help matters.
I don't know where people come up with this stuff. It's not "blindly defending freemium". Trust me, nothing in this entire world would make our lives easier than if freemium didn't exist. If I could make it disappear this instant I would. But it's not going anywhere, and people who hammer on the same arguments (and don't know how to do it politely) are ruining game threads. I know this not just because forum traffic is dying, but because people say it straight to us. When they report posts or in PMs or even people directly to my face at conferences. You can hand wave it off as "blindly defending freemium" but what we are trying to do is create a healthy environment that's useful and topical. Saying "this game is shit" is not useful to anyone. And ever so conveniently that person doesn't even address any of the reasons brought up as to why that thread was going down the tube and was split off into two discussions. Might as well just stick your fingers in your ears and shout "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA"
People who don't like freemium are usually impatient Tho there are certainly aggressive freemium models- you are always able to play a large portion of the game without dropping a dime. I'll never understand why people dislike this- even if it's just one hour at a time. Better then paying an upfront cost- only to not like it. Best to have options of how much money you want to spend. Gamers seem to be more and more entitled to having free AAA games. Game development ain't easy and takes a lot of time / effort / money. That being said- and back on topic- this game does have an aggressive approach. I'm still early on and honestly hasn't affected me as I don't play any single game for extended times. Hopefully they'll hear the feedback and bring down the aggressive monetization. A decent game thus far but I haven't played much to offer more impressions.
Seems like a reasonable argument, to be honest. And even to the extent concerns/gripes/ranting by people such as myself are accurate or inaccurate, justified or not, they will either come to be unrepresentative of the game (as the game evolves to iron out problems) or simply representative of a minority in the community (and certainly not representative of the players who stick with the game), so not a productive start to the official thread from the perspective of doing good for TA and this community. I am greatly disappointed by games which lean this heavily into the direction of frustrating gameplay mechanics and monetization (while not being opposed to the business model in proper balance) and I do believe it is a worthwhile discussion to be had on some level (if anywhere here, perhaps better in a topic dedicated to the subject which surely exists and has been hashed out to death), but for my part I just want to say your perspective here is humbling, and I wish I would like to have read it sooner instead of initially skipping over it. For my part I would not feel bad if my 'contributions' were removed along these lines (regardless of how I feel about the subject).
On the subject of this game, I will say it's disappointing and has a very aggressive monetary scheme, that being said, it is par for the course, the App Store of 2016 is terrible for a real gamer. That being said this argument is actually an old one, if you've been gaming for a long time, you'll know the dedicated gamer absolutely hates developers dumbing down games and basing them on making money and manipulating people with "Skinner Box" tactics rather then providing a good experience and are vocal about this, while causal gamers just don't care and will pay. It was only a matter of time before that age old argument hit TA.
