Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24.22.148.97-20150812232540/@comment-5937825-20150915153301

I had just recently came back after a long hiatus. A friend of mine left a long time ago and since then, my playtime has diminished. I first grew interested in the game because of the art and the (actually fun at the time) fighting system. Over time, the combat grew old. I felt I couldn't keep up with people spending hundreds of dollars on the game - the F2P model works. I lost interest a little while after my friend left. I've bounced around to a few other "gacha" games but none really felt as fun or flashy as VC did to me. It's the shiniest turd of the bunch. It's still a f2p game and the #1 goal for every game is to turn a profit. With that in mind, I understand this game will never get any better for the budget player. Power creep is advancing faster than I can.

Any suggestions I may have as a struggling player who loves the game will surely fall on deaf ears - if any ears at all! This game certainly had potential to provide long term enjoyment over long term progression, but they sped everything up to increase the feeling of "buy now or forever be behind" which, in turn, increased jewel sales. The #1 goal for every game is to turn a profit.

I used to think this game could be described as "Play for 5 minutes or play for 2 hours". Meaning you could hop on when you had 5 minutes to spare while waiting for something, or you could sit down and play hardcore for hours. Now, I see that you'd have to clock in up to 4 hours a day just to stay on top of things. For me, my interest started to decline on the first alliance battle.

Alliances were fun, casual, and most of all, ACTIVE. It was a no-pressure system to break you out of anonymity and talk to people who also enjoyed VC. 100% of that changed with alliance battles. It turned a casual setting into a competitive atmosphere. Instead of bragging about SRs, we would remind people to participate in alliance battles and to do your part to provide for the alliance. One alliance I was in would boot you out if you didnt perform. After the second iteration, the battles boiled down to who had more AOE cards. I still have my team of 5 HSRs all with 15% to deal 250% damage to all enemies.

The game was simpler two years ago. Getting an SR didn't make my day, it made my whole week. Now, I get angry when I don't get 2 SRs a day. Alliances were fun, like a little group of friends. Now they're a ghost town filled with angry competitors. Back then, I had several Archwitch notifications per hour asking me to help kill one. I haven't gotten one in the past week. Back then, Archwitches appeared in regular campaign (back when it was still called that). Now I haven't touched it because why should I? It gives no substantial reward.

I'm upset. I would have rathered pay $5 upfront, or even $2/month to play the game in its entirety without jewels, without the illusion of competitiveness brought on by the developers to squeeze more money out of you. Hell, I'd say this game is worth $20 (or $4/month) if that happened. I hate F2P games. I hate game companies. The way I see it, the game could have gone two ways: One would be to expand the game's depth. Instead of 4 elements that compete against eachother (Light >< Dark, Passion >< Cool), make a pentagon with effectiveness in a circle (Light > Dark > Passion > Cool > ? > Light). Replace "Soldiers" with "Health" and branch out your skills instead of just mindless attack skills (Taunt, Counter, etc.). OR!!! They could have gone the more profitable route - Power creep the Archwitches so you need ridiculous teams,  power creep the teams so you need to increase the Archwitches, forget the city building aspect of the game, drum up ways to have players fall behind. It's obvious the path they took, and don't fool yourself, the #1 goal for every game is to turn a profit.

TL:DR: Long time player, came back from hiatus, same old shit, fuck the F2P model for turning a game with immense enjoyability into an immense disappointment.