Universal Triple Town (By Spry Fox)

I really like this game, and will keep coming back to it for my free moves. But unless they figure out some way to not make iap affect high scores, i'm not giving them a dime. That shit is disgusting to be honest.

 

Here's the thing, it's 29 items per game maximum, and those leader board game involved thousands of turns, and if you're routinely having games that go that long with that many mansions, chests, floating castles, etc., you know what you don't have a shortage of? Coins.

This whole "it's pay to win" is nonsense based upon those who can't get 1 million+ games routinely (I can't) and simultaneously have no understanding at all of what those higher mechanics play like (this, however, I can).

If you go look at the official forums for the game (the Facebook version) where players have been playing forever, the bigger fans complain they'd like some sort of IAP so they can reward the devs because they earn far more coins through playing than they could ever spend. If there are two players able to even care about their positioning on the leader board and they ignore the fake high scores, they don't have to worry about the coins because they'll have them.

 

I guess the problem is that, like you said, most players never get enough turns to get to that point of practice and understanding. The turn cap of 150 is a bit harsh for that, i think.

 

That I can't argue with, although it does a good job of getting you to pay if you want the freedom to play as you want.

I paid the $4, but I hope the devs think through their monetization schemes better in the future. Selling the coins at the prices they do next to $4 to unlock everything (or even the previous $7) is pointless. Nobody who thinks it through is going to opt to buy coins for the purpose of buying turns, so all it does is give the impression there's some way to buy your way to high scores even though it's not true.

If Spry Fox ever gets hold of a time machine, what they should do is go back in time and release the game with 2500 free turns, capped the free turns at 250, and only had a $2.99 unlock IAP for unlimited turns. That way everybody would see the coins as something you had to earn to buy the in-game aids and even though nothing would have actually changed, the perception among the masses would be that it was more fair.

 

As an outspoken critic of freemium krapware around here, I was pleasantly surprised with the option to unlock unlimited turns for $4, and have been having fun ever since.

However, I have recently hit another more insidious paywall...

Ninjas.

After you break 100,000 points, there is simply no way to keep up with the Ninjas without spending thousands of coins on Bots. This completely unbalances the late game and makes me, once again, suspicious of the developer.

I'd love to hear opposing viewpoints on this, however.

Enlighten me.

 

Look, I get it isn't literally pay to win as in if you, person A, pay money you are guaranteed to get a higher score than person B but I'm sorry, it skews any concept of fair play too much for my liking. I repeat, I think it's a brilliant game, I paid to unlock unlimited turns on my Android tablet and on my iPod, but I firmly believe high scores can only have any real significance if every single player on the table is effectively working under the exact same conditions for every single time they play any given game, and that's simply not the case here. To all intents and purposes I am not bothered - it doesn't make any difference to the way I play, I simply ignore the store and keep going - like I said, I've seen my scores slowly improve from 50, to 60, to 70 and up to 130,000 (so far) consistently with practice and careful thought and I'm happy with that.

Still, I don't care whether or not people are happy with the system: I think it's wrong, end of story. Not write-endless-internet-rants-about-how-terrible-it-is wrong (okay, maybe just one little rant), not crimes-against-humanity-wrong, just a great game that's a 9 on my scale instead of a 10. It's the same nonsense as Electronic Arts' new Tetris - the point of a match-3 is to plan as best you can against random chance. End of story. I don't believe the addition of the store adds anything truly meaningful in the long term, and I think the developers should have left it out. I don't blame them for wanting to make money: that doesn't mean I have to applaud how they go about it.

Feel free to tell me how much of an idiot I am, obviously, and who am I to tell people what to do, etc., etc. Although given I'm just playing to amuse myself (doing a good job of it, too) and have no real interest in reading FAQs for ages to try and memorise different strategies I don't think there's much point me coming back in this particular thread. But I had to vent just once.

 

I don't know...

I get the argument that leaderboard integrity could be perverted by the ability to purchase items that can potentially boost your score. But, after sinking an embarrassing amount of time into this game, I feel that the store adds a strategic layer to the game simply because there is a hard limit on the pieces you can buy. Knowing when to buy and where to deploy a piece is pretty crucial and I think it's easy to do it the wrong way considering how large the playing grid is.

I agree with C.Hannum's post above -- if you're playing well, you should generally be seeing coins flowing in. I make pretty liberal use of the store in some games and I have yet to even consider buying gold.

I also agree that the ninjas are soul-crushingly annoying and your first instinct is to buy bots to nuke them to oblivion. But, again, I think a lot of that can be mitigated by having an effective end game strategy to maximize the amount of space you have open on the map.

Really, I don't begrudge anyone for finding the store to be distasteful. I just think it's another element of Triple Town that you have to really understand in order to do well in the game.

 

I'm afraid I agree with EightRooks.

The greedy implementation of coins substantially mars an otherwise exceptional (possibly classic) game.

The fact that purchasing coins is necessary beyond a certain point and that I can double my high score simply by throwing down some extra cash (which will, in turn, allow me to buy bots, houses, etc) breaks it.

 

My top score is about 405,000 points, and while the Ninjas hurt alot, I generally ultimately die because my field gets segmented and then I end up with a run of grass that fills up the board. I don't find the ninjas that big a deal, because if you have enough of them all at once, most of them turn into a single church when the board fills up.

I would never buy a bot to kill the ninjas because the game has a mechanism to kill them already. If I get a bot and I don't need to clear out a space, I will sometimes kill a ninja if they are in the area I am putting all the bears in.

IMO.

 

But your concept of how the coin earning and the item shop works is fundamentally flawed, so it skews it in your head, but not in real life.

Again, if two players are good enough to be involved in comparing their scores, both have more than enough coins without any IAP to buy any item they want, and both have access to exactly the same items, so how is it not fair?

It's like thinking there's something unfair about professional golf because good club sets cost thousands of dollars each while you're at the municipal course and only have your $250 Craigs list set. Surely, to your mind, there's something wrong with that because you'd be a better player if you had the $7,000 set of clubs. However, the same principle applies: by the time you're good enough to be competing with the big dogs, you've got sponsors and enough winnings to buy the $7,000 set easily.

I'm not trying to call you an idiot, I'm just trying to point out the very notion the IAP is actually affecting the leader boards or competition, such that it is, is misguided. It's even more misguided since there are no validated leader boards and the game is about playing yourself more than anyone else, but that's a different matter.

 

That is very encouraging. So you've hit 405,000 without purchasing any extra coins? If so, I feel quite a bit better about this game. Regarding the ninjas, though, every game I have every played has ended when the board filled up while there were some ninjas on it. They didn't die; they just stared at me with their smug little ninja faces.

 

It isn't necessary. I have never purchased any coins (except, the 5000 I got when I unlocked the moves) and my coin balance is currently around 25,000 coins and moving up.

While I agree that it would be better not to have the store as it is, its not really that big a deal to me. I don't feel I am competing with the people on the high score list, I am just trying to continually improve my score.

Suggestion for the developers:

How about this compromise? Add a second game mode. It is unlocked with a single extra payment. In this mode everything in the store is free, but you still have the same limits on the number you can buy. This mode has its own high score list. The developers get extra money from people who arn't going to buy coins, and the players get an even footing if they want it. I'm not sure this wouldn't cost them money that might be spent on the other mode, but it might be worth thinking about.

 

412,310 with no purchased coins. Its also nice because the in-game mechanism for getting coins is the same as the mechanism for getting points, so you don't have to change your strategy to go coin-farming.

Are you sure? I am pretty sure if the boards fills up, the ninjas turn to gravestones, and if you have three or more gravestones together, they turn into a church.

 

Honestly, there's no point in even looking at high score lists until the coins-for-turns and store-stock-refreshing exploits are fixed, which (I presume) will be in the next update. I'm playing it strictly to see what kinds of scores I can get and what strategies work the best, and having a blast.

As for the coins controversy, once you've bought unlimited turns it's really a non-issue, as there's no reason TO buy extra coins. In casual play, an 1800-coin chest is very easy to obtain early on, every three-cathedral or two-cathedral-and-crystal combination is 500 more, and you're getting several hundred more back at the end of the game. By ignoring the bots and crystals in the store and just buying the occasional tree or bush, I can score 200-300K consistently and still end up significantly coin-positive for the run, so that if I _do_ have an ubergame now and then where buying crystals and bots would be a huge boost I have plenty of coins to spare. I did that in a 680K game and could've gone higher if not for a long grass-and-ninjas run.

I'm still working on the best ways to clean out ninjas without buying bots, with varying success.

 

While I agree with you that the IAP isn't that big a deal, and that the leader boards are hacked anyhow, I think your argument here is flawed.

You argument is based on the notion that people don't care about their position on the leader board until they are close to the top. For most people, this is clearly not true.

People care about the leader boards/high scores to compare with their friends, to compare with people on the internet, to see their position on the leaderboard, to see how they are improving, to see if they are at the top.

Your argument is only relevant for the last two reasons. For all the others, not so much.

 

Ok, then. I stand corrected. Thanks for the detail-rich reply. Regarding the ninjas, I am positive that they didn't turn into gravestones. However, they were non-contiguous when that happened. Perhaps if they all landed next to each other when the board was full they would become a church and the game would keep going.

It sounds like I just need to practice.

 

Does anyone else keep getting crashes? I've tried deleting and reinstalling, rebooting, clearing memory, etc., but it always crashes after awhile. And now I am also having trouble restoring my unlimited turns IAP. It keeps telling me, "You've already purchased this In-App Purchase but it hasn't been downloaded", then it gives me a "Purchase failed / cannot connect to iTunes store" popup after that. Sometimes it crashes after I try accessing the IAP again.

Also, when I start up the game it sometimes asks me for my iTunes password. When I enter in my password for that, nothing happens.

Right now it's unplayable for me with all of these crashes and no turns.

 

I haven't had a single crash from this game.

Have you considered trying a backup->Restore to factory settings->Restore cycle? It takes a little while, but at least iOS doesn't rearrange your icons any more.

 

Looks like logging out of my Account in settings and then logging back in fixed the turn issue. I'll see if I get any more crashes now.