Dear Per Blue,
I don’t know that you’ll see this, but I felt it important to write you. I have been watching the death of a game that I loved because people are burning out left and right. It doesn’t hurt that sometimes, when those people do get burned out, they leave and it causes others to lose interest, too. Sometimes, life itself gets in the way. You can’t control that. But what you do have control over is the game itself.
I’m not a game designer, despite some daydreams of being one, but I do know what frustrates me personally. To that end, I wanted to offer some suggestions to you regarding the Disney Heroes Mobile game. I enjoy this game and have spent way more money than I ever should have on what is touted to be a “free” game. (My words, not yours.)
Let me offer some suggestions. Some are simple quality-of-life things. Some are pretty major. Some minor. Some are reasonable. Some probably not so much.
You know better than I do.
However, I am going to make all of the suggestions I can to help salvage the game and community before it leaves. And maybe. Just maybe… some of the old players may even consider coming back.
- Solo Deals. I hate solo deals. Every deal is a solo deal. I’ll be honest. Those few times where there were two concurrent deals and I could purchase the $10 one and get the $5 one with it… that was awesome. It was like a game in-and-of-itself. Wait for two deals to come up together and then pounce. Now, with solo deals, I have less incentive to spend money. I can’t afford to spend $50 every other day, despite you offering me those opportunities consistently. I can’t even afford $5 every day; that would be $150/month!!! We are not made of money. This is one of the biggest gripes I hear from people. “In order to compete or win, you have to spend spend spend.” Well, most of us have spent out.
- Where are my diamond chest deals? I don’t see those much anymore. I upgraded my chests all the way. You never added any more levels as you added levels to the game. But you added red/blue/yellow chests. You added class (damage/control/etc.) chests. You added 10× chests (do we really need those since you added the ×10 and ×100 options?). You added more chests that didn’t fit with those diamond chests. I’m guessing you believe the diamond chest upgrade was a bad idea and couldn’t go back on it, so you put out other incentives instead. That…. Well, that sucks. You know how many chests I opened trying to get Dr. Facilier? I still haven’t. It shouldn’t be this hard.
- Badge Buster Deals… While we’re on the topics of money, where are the badge buster deals? Those things were awesome. Almost everyone in my guild agreed those were insta-buys. Then the number of badges got decreased and they just weren’t as great. I used to get so many guild coins when one of those deals dropped. I miss them. Sorry, but I’m just not interested in buying a deal for 20,000 memory tokens. Yeah, I like those things, but I’m not spending money for them.
- Invasion rewards used to be awesome. We would stock up on some much needed stamina pots and gather some gold and so forth. The rewards seemed almost too good to be true. So, naturally, they were. You took them away. You nerfed them. HARD. That hurt. That really hurt.
- City Watch is ridiculously hard most of the time. Even normal is just as hard as it was 25 levels ago. Why? Well, I had never realized it, but a friend pointed out that the teams in City Watch are teams re-used from other players in the game. I would guess Surge has similar rules because why do I have to fight 5 teams with Beast and Randall in them? I only get to use them once unless I hire them as a mercenary! There needs to be some balancing done here. No, I don’t want a cake walk but I don’t want to fight the same lineup over and over again. SUGGESTION: The wards make a hard thing almost impossible. Most of us don’t have maxed out toons but CW’s structure seems to imply we should. For the epic CW, can we have a way of sending a toon or 3 or even a full team of 5 to deal with destroying the ward? Those toons would then be on a side mission to stop the wards, thus nullifying the effect on that round of CW. The penalty for us would be, naturally, that we don’t have access to those toons. They’re busy elsewhere.
- Guild Influence is full so often now and that ! marker is annoying. We need more guild perks. Let us spend it on increasing our storage if nothing else. I have a fairly radical idea…. What if we could use to spend for prizes/buffs for our guild? We could unlock the ability to do this and maybe if we deposit, say, 1M of influence over the week, everyone gets an extra City Watch raid ticket (Normal, of course), or 5 stamina pots or something. I realize this has the potential to cause other guilds to not buy perks, but perhaps another spendable (reputation, let’s call it for a lark) could be accrued alongside influence for purposes like these. And if guilds are full of influence with nothing to spend it on but name changes? Convert it to reputation. I could see it being like a shop that champions could buy from for the whole guild whenever possible. I don’t have an easy answer, but that extra influence needs to go somewhere. I need gold.
- Gold is arguably the hardest resource in this game to gain. It is needed to craft badges, to level up skills, to buy things from market and more that I can’t even think of at the moment. We need more guild. Earning 567 gold per mission just ain’t cutting it when some badges are over a million in gold to craft.
- Friendship disks seem like they would be more strategic if there was a third one, don’t you think?
- The User Interface needs some adjustments in some places. When I’m picking Missions, for instance, sometimes I’m picking the bottom mission and when I go to click it, I hit that back button instead and it kicks me out. Could these be moved over or something?
- Heroes that have been around since the beginning are showing their age. This saddens me greatly because some of these heroes are the most incredible ones you have (pun intended). We need some more refreshes or something. I’ve spent a lot of resources to power up some of these heroes and now, they get pushed aside by the new flavor of the week. This is getting old. Fast. I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve spent a lot of money with you. Reward me and my toon for having been through so much with you. I feel like the cable customer that’s paying three times more than a new customer for the same service sometimes.
- You like to add new items to the game that make people want to buy them or collect them to use. Double drops, stamina resets, stamina potions, etc. These are great items that allow us to play the game like we want when we want. Some days y’all activate double drops, I’m not able to play as much. Being able to control that on my own is powerful. Likewise, when you reduce market prices, I might not trigger a black market or mega mart opening. Why not have special “keys” that allow us to force those markets to open for an hour? Just like they normally do except it’s not random! Sometimes my game doesn’t even notify me I opened said market.
- Surge is crazy difficulty. It needs some balancing. I love the gold earning (see above about gold) but I spend it hiring mercenaries almost as fast as I can make it!
- Unavailable heroes in Surge (and other modes like City Watch) are annoying to sort through. Could we have a menu option to “hide unavailable heroes”? That scroll of death is real.
- Kim Possible - what’s the sitch?