The Grind, Oh My

COMMUNITY DISCUSSION GENERAL DISCUSSIONS
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Like most of you I’m sure, I love this game.

But this grind. Damn, is it rough.

The game is centred around async play, yet you don’t get any exp until the game finishes, which can sometimes take days. That pads out the grind, but if you do lots of asyncs at once you’ll get all that sweet exp in one go right?

Not with an exp cap you won’t.

I’m not really sure why the cap exists other than to heavily incentivise spending money. And even then, the packs aren’t worth the money given the chances you’ll just get a duplicate on the scratch cards, and you have a deals section but there isn’t a single deal aside from the starter pack? Why is that? Deals are great! We all love a good deal.

If the community person sees this, I’m going to reiterate what some people have said already and a couple of my own stuff.

Please oh pretty please can you remove the exp cap so that we can actually be rewarded by playing your game consistently. Exp should also be given (doesn’t have to be much, maybe like 10-20xp) per turn in asyncs, because as it stands, arena is the much faster way to gain resources.

Coffee is also given at really low rates, even those weekly rewards which demand 40+ FINISHED games. There’s no way you can complete 40+ async games, no way. You can’t even buy a single coffee pack from that reward, maybe you can at the highest league but we shouldn’t really have to grind the entire game just to be able to get one coffee pack a week as a reward (that still also demands you continue to play constantly).

It’s really confusing how you have these games played rewards, but also the cap on exp, they clash pretty badly. You want us to play… But you don’t want us to play.

People have also spoken about removing the levels for phobies, and I can understand the idea behind it. Thankfully this game rewards clever play more than big stats, but if it comes down to two good players where one has higher level phobies, I bet the higher level one wins consistently. Rares and ultrares are already quite clearly better than most common and uncommons (clobster is clearly better than wooly bully, similar stats with a whole key less than bully, and clobster has an amazing movement skill) is there really a need for levels too?

Like others have said, purchases should lean more into unlocking new phobies, and cosmetics, not buffs. Maybe players can spend coffee on unlocking alternate versions of phobies if you want to keep sidegrades instead of clear upgrades, it could be cool. But ultimately spending money shouldn’t be the win button. Skins, effects, player icons, sidegrades, new phobies, stuff like this should be the focus for the store. I GUARANTEE, that people will be more willing to spend money, instead of give up on a game and spend nothing instead, since they cannot compete against top spenders.

This game has so much charm, the art direction is stellar, the voice acting for lippy is damn solid, the game is fun and rewards different styles of play and it clearly has mountainous amounts of potential. I really hope there’s a shift in direction away from gaining capital and encouraging players to just, play and have fun, yknow?

That’s what I have to say, I hope this game becomes a cult classic

13 Likes
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I reach the exp and tear cap almost everyday, I just need to spam async mode about 10 times per day especially on monday I spam alot.
just make sure you always have 20 match going on in async so your don’t have to worry about the 40 match requirement each week and reaching the cap every day

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One of the issues here is that many have already spent a lot of money, (e.g myself have spent ~1.2k already, and I’m a low spender compared to others) So you can’t really change core mechanics like the phobies level, etc.

Finishing 40+ games a week is not that hard either, I was keeping up 50 games at a time for quite a while to hit the seasonal rewards. On average I was completing 200 games a month. I’m actually finally toning it down now to roughly 25 games at once.

Yes I hit the caps often, I dont really care that I do, I play the game for the game itself, Its a game I enjoy. Of course I like the rewards, but I still enjoy it when I dont get any.

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It’s hard from the begging! Resources for.free to play are calculated!
I have a lot of coffees! But I don’t know if is better to get a 2000$ coffee pack… or 2,5 packs from.800$ coffees!

Had you tested it before?

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I personally went with buying one of each coffee pack since the first one you buy guarantee’s that you get a new phobie (300 pack is a new uncommon or better, 800 is a new rare or better, 2000 is a new ultra rare).
At that point (combined with season rewards) I had enough decent phobies that I’ve shifted over to spending my coffee on buying the ‘Daily Double’ thing instead since that seems to be decent value and also allows me to level up the phobies that I currently own rather than get new low level ones that I won’t be using for a long while (you will still get some new ones from tear packs though). Of course this is only a good thing to do if you actually complete the daily double.
If I didn’t go for daily doubles I would probably just save for the 2000’s again (even though it takes like super long) since a lot of the best high cost phobies are ultra rare’s (Beauty, Chuck, Smother Mother, Boss, Heavo 3.0 and Fire Ant all tend to be much better to summon as your late game than units like Fishtank, Motherload, Fleshcrawler, or Barzilla.
The only really good non-ultra rare high cost units for most players to get (in my opinion) are: Terrordactyle, Heavo 2.0 and Mr Tramples. And getting some of the lower cost ultra rare’s can be quite good too Alastor, Jeeves, Scritch, Brony and Sockassin are all units that you shouldn’t be unhappy with getting even though they’re not as flashy as the big combat units)

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Hear that, OP? Just play 40+ games a week then the grind isn’t so bad.

Seriously though, i agree that the grind is a bit much and should be toned down. I’ve been playing quite a lot for 4 months now (roughly 20 games per week) and bought a couple packs too, steam clocks me at 800 hours spent (make that 600 hours actually spent with the game 'cause it’s often in the background, make those 600 hours 300 if you don’t count “thinking” as “playing”). That is quite a significant time investment and about half of what the game apparently considers hardcore. My collection and phobie levels at this stage are pretty mediocre: i own 55/120 phobies at an average level of ~9-10. Progression gets slower and slower every level.

So yes, please speed up the progression, but also please don’t tie it to playing even more games (by f.e. removing the daily xp cap). It would be much better imo to hand out better rewards. If you do that with the quest system you could even kill 2 birds with one stone.

Everybody knows what a pain in the ass these quests sometimes are, if you’re unlucky you can spend days not being able to complete even one, but if you got like 5x the current xp for completing them it would at least feel rewarding in the end and not like a drop in the bucket. Add another reroll per day while you’re at it just to give us a somewhat timely escape route out of a bad batch.

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Maybe they can change it so that to get the Season Golden pack, we need 140 games (instead of 168) and Yellow Cup Weekly rewards to 35 (instead of 42 ) games a week. That could ease out the grind.

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I dont understand why this is such a grind? it’s only a few hours a day to maintain enough async games to pass that threshold. I play a lot of games (see my steam account link on my profile here) and most games you dont get anywhere without a good 2-3+ hours a day.

Max rewards arent meant for casual players, they are meant for hardcore players to get rewards when they play a ton.