Changes to the game lately and how I feel about them

[Grellmax]

The recent changes to the game have quite an impact on the game as a whole. I've had the opportunity to play at the top end of this game for a good while now, so I thought I'd give a few feelings on recent developments and how I feel about them.

Negatives:

-The addition of LUX% boosted cards made this game go from 'pay for advantage' to 'pay to win'. I'm really not happy about this, and feel it far too heavily benefits paying players, as the LUX% gains are incredibly large!

-The raid boss count limited missions are pretty harsh. I live in a very similar time zone to Japan, and even so, the demands are really rough. I can only imagine how it must be for those in other time zones.

-The raid boss graphics have been hit and miss lately. The Wonderland boss was incredibly well done both in graphic and animation. The Halloween one on the other hand...

-Very high reliance on paid event bonuses such as Yen Sid and FGM. I understand they need to make money, but the bonuses from these are so huge it hurts!

-Yen Sid SR+. So far these have been strictly pay to get. I can think of only one occasion in which one was possible without paying for the big advantages. I am yet to get one of these cards.

-Card skills. Nice idea, but the fact they're limited to Raise ticket cards is really annoying. A smallish chance on gold ticket draws would be nice. Let's hope Olympus when it's released soon plays a part in us all getting these skill

Positives:

-The Mog medal system is extremely good! I am VERY happy with this. No longer are top players fighting for the useful cards in the limited rankings. No longer are the rewards simply Raise Tickets that end up with R cards for a hard week of work. No longer are the lower players stuck feeling as if they can never rise! You can save up Mog Medals and buy something more attractive the next round of limited stock, so no effort is wasted. Great system!

-More Limited Missions. Really happy to see this. I'm on Vulpes, and we've been sucking lately as a whole. Placing last means no good limited missions. Lately they're adding all kinds of missions with events that keep you playing for more than just the raid boss attacks. Been good to have something to do again

-High Purity. This is great. Can't wait to get a High Purity SR+. As it stands though, SR are king. This is great for lower players to catch up with the easier time finding duplicates and buying R+ Yen Sids.

-Reappearance of older limited cards. Really useful now that limit cutting is necessary for everything. Having a limited SR+ is no longer useful, as level 1-2 SR+s are useless compared to SR limit cut cards, so this is good to see.

My feelings on these things might be different from you all. Please feel free to comment and let me know how you are finding the developments lately

 

[JayRoxz29]

I Like the moogle coins a lot (^_^). It gives me the time to save for bigger stuff and whats left over for the others stuff I need to boost my ranking for even more coins.

 

[gnurtanio]

High Lux gain, make some player easily get 10 Million LUX every week, including me ..

at the first time i'm quite not agreed with moogle medal, but now my mind slightly change because Limited Mission Every week that give us a lot of moogle medal, include this Raid boss Hunting ( I'm reaaally hate a mission like this actually, cutting my sleep time. But the prize is HUGE 650 Coins)..

and yes.. with moogle shop, we can easily get SR or SR+ card without praying to god, hope for SR or SR+ appear in Raise draw or Kupo Nut, its 100% can be obtain by spending moogle coins..

But still, i like the old Lux reward system that give us SR+ assist for 3 Million Lux than Moogle Coins.. we Still can get Boosted Card from Raise Ticket and Kupo Nut from Old Lux Reward.. and now, those two items can only be obtained by limited Event.. i hope in the future they can sell those two items in moogle shop..

 

[ShardofTruth]

I never had luck with raise tickets myself, the last one was (once again) a simple R card, so I also like the change to the Mog Medal system. Maybe SE will introduce Ripe Kup Nuts and Raise Tickets in the shop for 80 medals or so, I think this would be a fair price.

I think the card skills a pretty underwhelming at the moment, as there are only four of them, so I don't really care. They seem only be useful against high level event enemies anyway, I keep my FGM cards for these now though.

I also like the new limited missions but I think the Raid Boss levels have to be adequate to the team level as the first 10 to 12 raid bosses are defeated in mere seconds after they appear, even if some high level players use only N or no cards at all during this time.

The high purity system was definitely the best idea SE had in ages, I'm glad I saved all those R+ cards.

 

[Blackdrazon]

-The addition of LUX% boosted cards made this game go from 'pay for advantage' to 'pay to win'. I'm really not happy about this, and feel it far too heavily benefits paying players, as the LUX% gains are incredibly large!

I agree this is "pay to win" (don't forget the fact that you can Fairy Godmother those boosted Assist cards now too. As soon as she's available somewhere where you can pay for her, that'll be a problem too), but so long as they don't stonewall the single player experience, I'll personally be okay. If there's ever a final boss in this game that requires FGM'd High Purity SR cards, there will be blood.

-The raid boss graphics have been hit and miss lately. The Wonderland boss was incredibly well done both in graphic and animation. The Halloween one on the other hand...

I really like the Trident Anchor, myself, maybe one of my favourite bits in the entire game so far. But the Hocus Pocus looked like they thought up having a Halloween boss part-way through October, told their artist to slap a cosplay on the Behemoth and threw it out the door after an hour of drafting. That "drafting" bit wasn't all hyperbole: imho, it was not even properly shaded.

-Card skills. Nice idea, but the fact they're limited to Raise ticket cards is really annoying. A smallish chance on gold ticket draws would be nice. Let's hope Olympus when it's released soon plays a part in us all getting these skill

Yeah, a smallish chance on gold would nail this, I think.

 

[Sign]

My only comment about paying to win is that, at the end of the day, this is meant to make them money. The game is already free, and nothing that's available for purchase is actually necessary to advance; they're just bonuses we have the opportunity to acquire if we really want them.

Is it unfair to those who can't or are unable to pay? Sure, these things typically are, and god knows how long it actually took for those who can't pay to actually feel rewarded for their efforts, but the staff need to get paid in order to produce more content so it seems like a fair trade.

 

[Grellmax]

My only comment about paying to win is that, at the end of the day, this is meant to make them money. The game is already free, and nothing that's available for purchase is actually necessary to advance; they're just bonuses we have the opportunity to acquire if we really want them.

Is it unfair to those who can't or are unable to pay? Sure, these things typically are, and god knows how long it actually took for those who can't pay to actually feel rewarded for their efforts, but the staff need to get paid in order to produce more content so it seems like a fair trade.

I agree with them needing to have incentives for purchases, but the current boost from spending is quite literally ~+100%. I think there's a line devs need to take not to cross in free to play-pay to win games. Paying should give a clear advantage, but not so much as to make free or casual spending players lose interest. Honestly the main thing keeping me going at this point is the mog medal system, because before that, of the 4 top teams (120 people) only 10 could get useful items without spending money, any prize beneath 10th was useless. So because of that competition, to place top 10 started meaning buying a ton of ethers.

 

[CutiePique]

I 100% agree about the Mog medal system. <3 "No longer are the lower players stuck feeling as if they can never rise! You can save up Mog Medals and buy something more attractive the next round of limited stock, so no effort is wasted." <- That, absolutely.

Don't know if it's a new feature or just for the Trident Anchors, but the new "boss leveling system" has been something I've wanted and thought necessary since, like, the second week of the game's existence. (Referring to the boss gaining multiple levels dependent on how quickly it was beaten.) <3

 

[DefiantHeart]

As everyone pretty much says, the mog trade was a great idea to the system. Got alot of SR cards as a result. I would definitely pay to get the cards if this was in English so I could trust the system more, and so I can understand the stories better. Hoping English version gets released December...

 

[ShardofTruth]

Okay with the premium option this game has really gone Pay2Win now. That being said I certainly would pay money for KHX but not for the chance of acquiring a good virtual card, that's just not worth it.

 

[Grellmax]

Yeah bit rough. The premium draw cards are boosted too. I don't really mind however. I spent my time at the top. I'm just glad I can continue to grow without spending.

 

[JR199913]

Okay with the premium option this game has really gone Pay2Win now. That being said I certainly would pay money for KHX but not for the chance of acquiring a good virtual card, that's just not worth it.

Yeah bit rough. The premium draw cards are boosted too. I don't really mind however. I spent my time at the top. I'm just glad I can continue to grow without spending.

So when you guys say premium draw... you guys mean that new page at the draw menu right???

 

[Grellmax]

So when you guys say premium draw... you guys mean that new page at the draw menu right???

Yeah that's right, the silvery page.

 

[JR199913]

Yeah that's right, the silvery page.

*Sigh*, i hope they will give some missions for that one.

 

[Athel]

You hit every point that I've been feeling lately. The Power Creep of this game has been getting pretty ridiculous lately, what with High Purity and Lux-Boosting Cards -- but at least there are now systems like the Mog Medals so that lower-level players can have a chance to catch up now.

(This was really just an excuse to share that Power Creep video since I feel like it's really relevant to the current state of the game.)

 

[ShardofTruth]

I would argue that KHX has not seen power creep, at least not at this point, I would also argue that High Purity, the Yen Sid and the Fairy Godmother cards even reduced it by makeing your old cards useful again.
It's true that with these things you can build a powerful deck much faster than when the game was released but the content and the "difficulty" is still more or less the same. This will change when SE introduces a higher card rarity.

 

[Grellmax]

I would argue that KHX has not seen power creep, at least not at this point, I would also argue that High Purity, the Yen Sid and the Fairy Godmother cards even reduced it by makeing your old cards useful again.
It's true that with these things you can build a powerful deck much faster than when the game was released but the content and the "difficulty" is still more or less the same. This will change when SE introduces a higher card rarity.

I see what you're saying, and I don't entirely disagree, however my reasoning for this belief is as follows: I can fill my deck with HP limited (events ie SDG, Cloud) SR cards, or (as I am currently) HP SR's and SR+'s 1 cut from HP. This is roughly about as good as decks get as a baseline. In the past, I've been able to consistently finish top 50, more often than not top 10. This has changed since the introduction of regular boosted assist cards and 11 Raise draw bonuses. The difference in top players decks went from being around 10-20k disparity from boosted cards to as much as 100k now. The disparity in LUX% gained from assist cards has gone from ~100% bonus advantage to now here some players are up as much as 500% on others. With this, players with similar decks are achieving 100's of millions of LUX per week on the boosted card bonuses alone.

The ability for non or rare paying players to compete with this level of power is all but history. The base level of power on the cards has stayed fairly consistent, and the early SR+ Riku LUX ranking reward card still remains the highest attack stat on a non-boosted card as far as I know. It's the fact that you MUST have a fully boosted deck every week now to compete that to me shows the power has shifted.

2c

 

[ShardofTruth]

The ability for non or rare paying players to compete with this level of power is all but history. The base level of power on the cards has stayed fairly consistent, and the early SR+ Riku LUX ranking reward card still remains the highest attack stat on a non-boosted card as far as I know. It's the fact that you MUST have a fully boosted deck every week now to compete that to me shows the power has shifted.

2c

I completely agree with that, you can't compete with the highest ranking players anymore when you don't pay as much of them, spending more time or having more luck just won't cut it anymore. But you can still compete for the prizes which are limited to 10 million LUX, no high ranking player will get more than you just because he can reach 100 million LUX. I'm not completely sure about the balance of the so called "super senior missions" (defeating a raid boss LV100 and higher). Were you able to do them or do you think these are limited to paying groups only?

I agree that this will become a problem if SE re-evaluates the current prizes according to the top playerbase or when the Olympus Coliseum PVP is introduced, but at the moment I see nothing wrong with it besides that people still seem to pay so much money just to have a higher number.

 

[gnurtanio]

I completely agree with that, you can't compete with the highest ranking players anymore when you don't pay as much of them, spending more time or having more luck just won't cut it anymore. But you can still compete for the prizes which are limited to 10 million LUX, no high ranking player will get more than you just because he can reach 100 million LUX. I'm not completely sure about the balance of the so called "super senior missions" (defeating a raid boss LV100 and higher). Were you able to do them or do you think these are limited to paying groups only?

I agree that this will become a problem if SE re-evaluates the current prizes according to the top playerbase or when the Olympus Coliseum PVP is introduced, but at the moment I see nothing wrong with it besides that people still seem to pay so much money just to have a higher number.

Hmm as long as they get money it doesn't matter for SE ( I Think).. This game is already not balance.. Skill, Premium Draw And Fairy God Mother Make it worse, i have 1 Person in my team which all his card (including Assist) are boosted card from Fairy God Mother, he has 210K ATK and 100K HP, How can we defeat a people like this in PVP??... Well yes they not get anything from LUX prize when they reach 10 Million... BUT they still need compete in LUX ranking board.. Only Premium Player can manage to Top 100 Ranking.. you can get a huge amount of coin if you manage into top 100 Ranking (which is just history for me)..

About Super Senior Mission... You need some Premium Player in your team to Complete this mission (Paying Player) AND of course you need to reach High Team Number.. i dont know what is the minimum, but my team number is 5 and last night i fought with Grellmax's Team (Vulpes Number 1) and we manage to face LV 150+ Dark Side.. when you reach a certain number, your team can fight with Number 1, and when you fight this team you will realise they will kill the raid boss for your team, all you need is just one hit to Raid boss and voila!!! Mission Clear!!, oh and prepare for getting Bronze ticket and 3 Ether at the end of the day..

 

[Grellmax]

oh and prepare for getting Bronze ticket and 3 Ether at the end of the day..

LOL we feel this way when we face Snake 1 and Unicorn 1.
What is your in-game name gnurtanio? I keep looking for you in enemy teams but I can't find you!

The only mission I can think of that my team was unable to complete was the Key Art 'mission'. Sadly we get matched against teams massively underneath us (I recall one of them being rank 64) while Snake 1 and Unicorn I believe were paired up. Luck of the draw sadly. Oddly, I don't recall matching against anything ranked worse than 6th since that event.

Finishing with 100 coins for individual and 200 for team rank each week is more than enough so far when accompanied by mission medal rewards for me to buy out at least one set (4 per) of SR+ cards. This time around I've bought all the Rikus, and I'm one off of the Kairi+Namines. I expect at some point SR+ Yen Sid cards will be available for 1000 medals each (prob only 2 though). I eagerly await that day . SR+ Yen Sid cards are about the only thing I can say are almost exclusively available to paying players, as every event with them is impossible mathematically without paying (or saving up ethers for months).