Keys. The staple of pain for most new players (that I’ve introduced this game to).
When I introduce this game to my friends, they often find it fun for the first few hours,
then drops out of it entirely, and I think this is the #1 issue.
(There are more, but this is the more obvious one)
Anyways, here’s the first problem I’d like to bring out:
Investing keys in alot of important items nets you with so little keys,
you’d often be better off not spending them at all.
A small example: Extra Lives.
An extra life is very important in missions,
(IA even recommends you get more lives once you’ve run out of it)
but as of right now it hurts your key gain, alot.
1 life = 5 keys. Which means when you die, you lose 5 keys each time.
The main problem here is that when you’ve lost a life, your firepower gets nerfed severely, meaning you’d have more chance of dying again the more you play, which means an even lower chance of winning, more keys lost, and frustration keeps on rising, to the point where the player would simply leave, and never to be seen again.
Also: If you want to get back to where you were, you’d need to spend more keys, which lowers your key gain even more, and it goes on and on in that one step forward, two steps back fashion, until you run out of keys entirely.
And when you have no keys to spend on anything, it basically means no fun.
I tend to think of this kind of experience as this:
You’re trying to accomplish something, but every mistake you make sends you back a long way, and the road to get back to where you were keeps going harder and harder, such is the case of this game. Most people find that kind of experience frustrating, and even rage-inducing for some.
It’s already harder to do it again than it is to do something new, which is clearly evident in games such as Getting Over It or Geometry Dash. Most people would just be incredibly frustrated, they’d never get to see everything about the game.
Which is even worse if the game you’re trying to start is an online game - less players means less funds to pay for servers - which means the game servers’ quality starts to decline, which keeps going until the game dies entirely due to out of funding.
Now, you might be thinking:
Why don’t I not spend them on lives? Good answer!
If you make a mistake, you immediately die.
Which basically turns this game into Geometry Dash, but far far more tiresome, with no catchy music for repeats, and you may not even get any keys when you died, despite having finished many missions before.
(New players only have access to CI levels, so I’m limiting the equation there)
If you’ve seen the problem here, congratulations!
Now, know that Extra Lives are one of the cheapest items in the Store, and think:
What would it be like when you use them for the more expensive items?
It’s supposed to be fun for the new players,
that way they’d play the game longer, we’d get more people to hang out with,
and IA gets more money to expand the game and make it better for everyone.
As of right now, I see this as a problem, a huge one,
so big that, if not fixed, the game may die due to out of funding.
Solution? I actually have no solutions,
I just want to bring up this problem and we might be able to find something out together.
PS:
I know about retail stores and Shady Dealers,
and mission types that gives you keys at the end of the level,
but new players might not even get to see them before they uninstall this game,
simply because they’re frustrated, so I’m leaving them out of the equation entirely.
PPS:
I kinda want to know how many people have been removed from the galaxy in each update.
I saw so many green dots in the previous update where I was visiting, but when the new one came out, all the dots in the area I was visiting vanished. Like, over 100 of them I think.
PPPS:
Also, Insights are useless - part 2 coming soon. [Link to Part 1 if you haven’t seen it]