PerBlue, let's talk

Hi PB! This is not going to be a standard “this sucks, fix it” post.

Background: My wife and I both play this game and are in the number 2 guild on server 1. We both have over 700 days played, and happily spent as we’ve needed to do to keep relevant, so long as the game has been fun. We’ve watched new and unique features coming out, and have been delighted at how fresh things felt.

We’ve noticed a trend. After about level 165, the scaling of resources to gain has diminished. It’s not uncommon to see individual items need nearly 12,000 stamina to craft. A five dollar stam deal would have been enough to bring about 4 or 5 heroes to gear cap; now it’s about 1.5 to 2. That’s including the newer 10% bonus stam. Daily, I buy stamina with gems til the point where it goes to 200 gems for a gain. Using this plus daily stam regeneration, I can reasonably spend around 2800 stamina if I’m on top of it and log in to spend before its capped. That rate equates to crafting a piece of 12,000 stam expenditure gear every ~5 days. Which once you count up the other five pieces of gear, means it can take weeks to gear up -one- hero.

This wouldn’t be terrible, if the output of heroes and gear caps didnt raise up nearly monthly. However, certain heroes themselves are so astronomically more useful and required, that not working on them puts you behind an incredibly challenging curve to regain relevancy. Worse, the calculation of resource expenditure for niche heroes who lose that relevancy, (looking at you, Gizmo), is not recompensed and effectively, shorts us the monetary investment.

I wont get into the eyebrow raising deals that pop up, (Fortify the Network contest? Hey guys, here’s a deal for the stuff you need to spend to do this contest!), nor the package deals for heroes that are woefully overpowered and necessary to compete. The deals seem a bit too perfectly timed with events in the game. A demand is forcibly created and a supply is provided.

The game has moved from fun to play, into a chore that yields continuously less bang for the buck. Invasion once used to be a fun and challenging event that has turned into a monotonous timesink, requiring now far more time and effort to gain lesser results. An entire city watch can be stymied by one person whom no combination of heroes can produce a win with acceptable losses. War remains well; people will complain about matchmaking, but that’s a player issue. Sometimes there is -not- a better option for the matchmaking system to pit guilds against eachother with. Arena and Colliseum are the same, and I prefer the current model opposed to the previous; it allows more flexibility and potential to tinker with teams and really learn how they work against others in real time and real life situations.

To conclude, there is a scaling issue within the game that has a propensity to worsen with each patch. A heavy majority of the playerbase can not sustainably maintain a money, time and resource expenditure. I have witnessed enough dear friends throw in the towel because the game had shown signs and slowly evolved into a never ending spiral that is impossible to break. By the time I am able to catch 15 heroes up to standard, a level and gear cap increase pops up, and at least one of those heroes will not be in the next 15 due to obviously apparent irrelevancy.

Solutions: Decrease stamina requirements to badge people up by at least 2/3rds. Doubling the amount of time between cap increases produces similar results. Increase resource gains of mod power and invasion rewards. The advent of raiding in surge, city watch and invasion are fantastic gains in terms of the time resource. The biggest joy of the game is developing a hero quickly enough to augment a team that opens new doors; getting them almost there only to have to drop them in favor of another unannounced release to focus on is antithema to the process. Natural progression of games of this cut inevitably gravitate towards being more “grindy”, but it IS mitigatable if detailed analysis of the expenditure to gain ratio is maintained to be more static across patches. A happy player base will spend more evenly, and reduce the gap between uber’s and casuals. Creating the environment that minimizes the difference will both maintain and eventually increase the active player base, without impacting any bottom lines. I’d be willing to bet that it would likely increase; if casual players are able to attain a goal more realistically, they’re more inclined to spend that 5 dollars and be happy they did it, instead of grumbling that they’ve barely gained a toe hold, much less a foot hold for their stage of game. The game scales well at the lower and mid tiers; but anything after around level 165 and the gearing / gold requirements starts to scale exponentially instead of uniformly prior.

Please don’t let the game devolve from a fun, tactical strategy platform into a game where you are rated upon how much time you have to play and how much you are willing to spend. That is a recipe for a game that loses its player base and death spirals and everyone loses. You can gage this trend by looking at server merger requirements to increase population centers, and how many average players have heroes sitting at cap and are actively used. When you see server merges being announced, that on particular raises the hairs on the back of my neck and my spidey senses start tingling, and I feel that at this pace, required merging will become a clear symbol that things are taking a sharp left turn. Guild mergers are often the herald to server mergers, and I’ve been seeing a rash of those lately.

TL; DR: Fix the scaling of resources to gain expenditure before the player base gets so overwhelmed that they find a new game to play.

I encourage thoughtful feedback, so let’s keep it clean. No need for insults or complaints about problems without providing some potential solutions, please! Mindless complaining is easy to ignore, insightful and coherent posts are taken more seriously by those being addressed! :smiley:

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I completely agree with all of your points. I do hope Perblue will pay attention to this and be receptive to having an open and honest conversation…

This game all brought us here for a reason so clearly they have done a lot of “right”, but this exponential rise in stamina and gold costs and the far to fast cap raises and badge levels is just getting frustrating… and releasing OP characters every month that as has already been pointed out are basically essential to level to maintain any degree of competitiveness only compounds these issues.

I think in terms of solutions they really don’t need to be that complicated… decrease the gold cost of new badges and drastically decrease the stamina costs. More and useful badge bits from trials could also help, and make higher amount xp drinks… I think if perblue listens to the community about slowing down cap raises they will actually see an increase in spending.

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Yeah, they released so many OP heroes in invasion to cover the gizmoducks nerf. I am still vip7 and i dont think i can reach R11 with the current stamina, golds, and xp bottles requirements. I have played this game since 2 years ago and i really hope you (Perblue) make some solutions by hearing our opinions. Thanks.

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Per Blue reagiert nicht…

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And what about red skills? I’ve never been able to max out a red skill. Maxing out a toon’s red skill seems impossible. I’m proud to say that i have not spent real money since the last 40 days :joy: This game i think will soon come to a complete halt…:face_with_monocle:

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Them slowing down the cap raise and slightly increasing the redskillchips per run would help that …or scale it for ypur current level cap since the newer servers would be able to max all red skill almost immediately with a few runs

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As for resources comment on being diminished after 165, that’s a fair comment but that’s not the problem.

The problem and I’ve said this in a few threads. Its the cost of the upgrading and leveling itself. Compare it to other games, we get a lot more gold, just upgrading in this game has become too expensive and PB really needs to fix that side of it and squish it to a degree its manageable to make the game competitive.

As for buying to keep relevant, I think buying the deals is not worth it, you gain a red rank on 3 characters if lucky but thats it.

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Another nice topic; another topic ignored by PB.

It’s very easy to solve major problems…

Cap rises - Reduce stamina required per fight in campaigns from 14/12/10/8 to 6 for all - badges will be cheaper and deals more worthy to buy
Red skills - Triple amount of skill chips; we gonna have +120 heroes with red skill, and max skill level is +70, not to mention how much gold is required
Invasion - Increase by 10x mod power rewards, double upgrade pieces and give all types of upgrades on invasion

But something will change No!
Less than 4 weeks to next cap rise :wave:

And during this time many players will leave, again.


And slowing down cap rises won’t change a thing, it will calm down deals scaling (which is very bad), plus daily stamina gain is too small no matter what to help players catch up.

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I had made a review something around these lines onto the iOS App Store a while back. It has since then been removed.

I sincerely hope they change. We’ll see. Not holding my breath.

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Sadly while accurate, the OP has pretty much perfectly described the business model of a ‘successful’ gacha game :stuck_out_tongue:

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This is easily the best post I’ve seen addressing the core problem of the ever-widening gap between exponentially-increasing costs and linearly-increasing (if that) income; thanks for your time in crafting it. @Polaris, can you make sure the devs and other relevant people see this?

It’s like you’ve accessed my purchase history. I used to make at least one $5 stamina purchase a month, along with occasional other deals, but once it reached the point where that purchase didn’t even let me level up the heroes I wanted to keep leveled up, much less work on anyone new, my interest in deals plummeted.

Agreed 100%; my biggest frustration with the game right now is seeing so many new, interesting heroes being introduced, and only being able to get maybe one a month up to a usable level. As badly as I’d love to see what Basil could do for my team, I’m not going to spend $20-$40 to find out.

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Wow, I did not expect to see such a turn out this quickly! Thank you all for contributing!

I use the level 165 as a soft cap. From that point forth, you start seeing the much more stymied growth of each character, in gearing requirements, gold per skill point, and overall splitting of resources such as mod power and exp items. It’s not a hard set line per character, more a general average.

There is definitely some consideration when it comes to the “how and what do I progress that makes an impact on my play style” that gets blurred between individualism and cookie cutter compositions. The timeline in which you have to switch gears and allocate those resources, and their poor scaling, is what frustrates me. Case in point, you never see a vanellope being used, but everyone has an insta kill Mulan. And now Pleakly, Jumba, and Basil are thrown in the mix, and the capacity to experiment and find that one “actually amazing” hero, (like Buzz), is thrown out the window in favor of maintaining situational relevancy such as in war and city watch. By the time you start to reach the surface, it’s time to rat race all over again.

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Thank you rockstar for this post. It is needed

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I use her and results are good, sometimes better than Mulan’s.

And Basil isn’t that good, he is mediocre comparing to anything new.

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Honestly, probably the worst part about all this is that a lot of these things are treated like problems inherent to the genre when those very problems are why games like this DIE!

Seriously, and am I the only one who hasn’t actually seen much of an increase in feedback from Polaris and the like other than for those live discussion things?

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@Polaris you seriously need to start paying attention.

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It is a bit disappointing that on a number of posts like these where players are asking for genuine discussions it seems there is no response from perblue…

I even made a post a little while ago about their supposed gold rewards increase… someone posted a screenshot from a response from PB and the increase from the guild check in is 1,000 gold… but no engagement from PB or response…

I know @Polaris is probably inundated by trying to keep up with these forums and also we are not directing blame or anything towards polaris but I really hope you would be able to pass this on the devs so we can have a proper discussion about this… we don’t want to see the game suffer any more than the devs we all play it because we like playing it so I think I can confidently say that we would all love to help make this game into something we can all love once again

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It’s the weekend, Polaris isn’t working today. :no_mouth:

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Players have been addressing these issues for months and months, telling PB the same things over and over again.
No response, nothing gets better. It seems that they simply do not care or intend to keep matters this way.

Maybe they want to make as many people as possible quit the game, so they have to make less refunds for players when they shut the game down.

Personally I’ve stopped spending. I feel PB does not deserve my money anymore and I struggle to understand why the same pattern goes on: people complain here over and over again, nothing significant changes for better but they still support PB’s poor decisions, greed and lack of respect for us players by giving them more money. Why would PB change anything if they get all they want already?

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People do forget that this is the same company that ran AB testing for arena rewards on the live game after beta had already finished and hoped nobody would notice :neutral_face::neutral_face::neutral_face::neutral_face:

I really think the expectations of morality are a bit too high :sweat_smile:

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