Here's a new one: The second Daily Mission to get the Vampire Sonic skin is... To buy 10 eggs from dispensers. You can't buy eggs if you don't have enough trail/pet slots. If you want to keep everything you've rightfully earned (or let's be honest, even bought) then you have to buy slots until you have more than what you already have in terms of trails and pets. And you don't even know if any of the other missions will be a roadblock either. Here's the best part: the reward for the second day... Is 5 pet slots. (Bonus: they made a Velvet Chao, made it a reward for the Fake Metal event, made it possible to buy the rewards, and so buying the Chao, and then later cut its stats after being evolved in half, meaning they fucked with potential purchases)
Hot off the heels of the Sonic Prime collaboration bleeding into very sketchy unlicensed Roblox games that misuse SEGA's own brands, one of the previous employees of Gamefam has spoke out about their experience.
Ya I’ve noticed some of this stuff on my YouTube, very weird and very unfortunate. If what this guy says is true just end this predatory mess already.
Sonic Speed Simulator is excellent because of the talented folks who made it. They deserve to be treated with respect. I selfishly want the speed simulator team to work on future sonic projects (not run by gamesfam) but the important thing is that working conditions improve.
I’m not denying the talent behind the project, and I agree, I hope they find better future gigs. But fuck gamesfam for making this a grindy nightmare
Gamefam just posted an "apology" for the whole scandal going on and... it's really not a good look on them LOL They addressed nothing, boiling down to just "C'mon guys, we didn't do this, you can trust us, really! You know that this isn't us!" The replies being turned off screams even more that they didn't even intend on this being a good apology anyways
The game's been completely reworked. If you played the old version, you'll still get to keep stuff you had before now, but now your levels and the level of every pet and trail will be reset to 0. You'll be given the new Red Star Rings as compensation for your previous progress. All the missions and worlds from previous updates have been removed. On top of that, Green Hill Zone is widened out and more neatly decorated, with Lost Valley and Hill Top Zone having new layouts entirely. All 3 now have story missions that will unlock the characters that give them. There's no longer reward chests for playtime. Races and Obbys have been removed. Time Trials seem to have made Obbys obsolete and are half of mission progression. Evolving Pets and Trails is no longer free and can only be done at a specific area. Similarly, they're leveled up by spending rings (or Red Star Rings every 5 levels) at the start of Green Hill Zone. You can also only evolve either of them once 5 of them have separately been leveled up to max. Enchantments are gone and I'm not sure how many of the effects have been carried over. A new stat will deal additional damage to the newly added boss (or something). There's no limit to how many levels you can get with rebirths, but doing so now awards skill points that will award ONE of each effect a rebirth it previously gave (+.25 experience bonus or bonus rings). Mounts are basically unchanged however the hoverboards and Tornado variants seem useless at the moment (but I'm not sure new players have access to either yet.) Daily missions are gone but they have been since Shinobi Amy. I've saved the best thing for last. They've removed roulette wheels, so you can no longer buy wheel spins to get random items (gamble) with Robux (real money). Overall, the game feels more like a game and less like a bootleg Sonic asset flip that happened to get Sonic Adventure controls right, but I think it still has some ways to go before it's the best it can be. more time will probably give me more perspective. I'd basically stagnated progress under the old system. If I had to say anything more, they really need to quadruple the base pet/trail inventory amount for everyone, give extra slots for more things, or just remove the limit entirely, because you're now given 5 duplicate Pets and Trails left and right and it's just not worth it to pay money when you're freely given these things or can buy them to fill those slots anyways. Not sure how the behind the scenes development conditions really were or how they've changed so feel free not to play the game if you think they might be bad but if you're up to it and were turned off by the original game loop/model I'd say you should give it a shot. Edit: Fuck this game. I just got to a mission that requires you to buy 25 eggs from vending machines. I can't progress because you can't buy eggs if your inventory is full, and mine is 124 over my limit of 80. Even if I deleted things I don't care for, I would still probably have to buy extra slots.
Man, I cannot begin to express how dissapointed I am with this game, its creators, and honestly SEGA for letting it happen this way. I know that SEGA probably doesn't give a shit about children making uneducated purchases, considering they've put out their own games that definitely allow for that, but let's start there. I previously said that they removed the roulette wheels, well, surprise, guess what replaced the chests you used to get for playing the game for extended periods of time? AN EVEN MORE BASIC ROULETTE WHEEL! Before they did it as a replacement for that, they added a similar wheel next to the boss battle arena, that one requires you to beat the boss to spin and doesn't offer the option to pay money for a spin. The new one, however, does. And both have the worst limitation you could possibly add to a feature like this: Just like the dispensers, you can't get Chao or Trails from the roulettes if your inventory is "full". The problem isn't just that you can pay for these spins you'll most likely never get a return on. It's that the "compensation" for not getting anything when you would have gotten something is... 5,000 rings. That's it. The amount you're more than likely to get collecting a single ring with even the most basic of upgraded Chao, and that's all they can give you in roulettes with WAY MORE rings as seperate prizes. I want you to understand, this means that a dumb little idiot child playing the Sonic game on Roblox is totally able to dump all the Robux they have (Which make no mistake is equivalent to real cash amounts) into these spins and get NOTHING worthwhile out of it, and even MORE nothing if their inventory happens to be full. It's worse than child gambling: It's child gambling with no payout. Onto Gamefam. Still no word on if anything's changed on the point of their work ethic, but it probably hasn't. I know there are people there just doing their job and doing their best in spite of the predatory scams of microtransactions, but they deserve so much better than their work being in this game of all games. They already pretty much forced out the people who made this thing notable at all, so it's really difficult to think they actually care about the series or their players. As for SEGA: There's so many things wrong with this thing, stuff that I would pull the license for immediately, the child gambling, the staff mistreatment, the bootleg FNF collaboration, and the general pressure there is against Roblox as a whole. But none of those have seemed to phase them. I tuned into their last Sonic livestream for a minute and was so frustrated the minute I saw them even talking about this thing officially. Maybe it was as a commitment to Wildbrain and not Gamefam, since it was about the new Prime world (that you can't access if you're not able to complete the missions I previously described) but it just really bothers me regardless. This thing's been around for a year and I've experienced it almost every week since and I just.... I'm done. I can't do it anymore. As someone who's playing for free, it feels like I've paid them so much. Too much.
I was watching the recent dev video for the revived Sonic Onset Adventure (which is made by the folks who did the original sonic speed simulator) and I was horrified to learn that some of the devs who were mistreated by gamesfam were hired STRAIGHT OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL. Let me be clear: I’m not saying that young programers shouldn’t be given a chance. They should. If folks have the talent then they shouldn’t HAVE to spend money on a college degree. What I’m saying is that gamefam’s already crummy behavior is even worse given the fact that they hired high school grads who (I’m assuming) probably don’t have prior industry experience. I would have hoped that corporations are run better than restaurants and stores that prey upon young workers… who am I kidding? We’re talking about the games industry of course it’s just as bad. Numerous developers of Sonic Xtreme nearly died. During the development of Sonic Heroes, Iizuka hardly ate or slept. Things need to change in the game industry. But I don’t want to deflect from Gamefams issues, they are especially bad. I wish the original Speed Simulator team the best of luck on Onset Adventures and their future careers. I had no idea that Speed Simulator and Onset are based on literal SA1 code. These guys are theoretically creating the Adventure-era equivalent of the Retro Engine. It’s really impressive stuff
Well, that sucks. I mean, generally speaking, don't spend more money on something than you think it's worth. In the case of SSS, I think it's only really necessary in the beginning, when you want speed things up a bit tbh. But even then, you quickly realize that it doesn't make much of a difference once you've committed yourself to the grind. Which can be tiresome, yes, but that's just how this game rolls. Have fun interacting with other players and running around to good music (even though the characters lack their signature abilities), but don't get greedy. Buying rings is a total waste in this game. Being able to play as Amy or Rouge, on the other hand, is pretty cool. Spent about 15 bucks and feel OK about it.
I haven't spent a single dime on the game. I never will. but I'm at a point where there's no way to grind (because they killed the grind with the update) and there's no way to complete all the current missions (for the reason of keeping all my stuff + having no way to deal with the collection) so there's just nothing to do in between updates, on top of now I guess being barred from any further worlds (like New Yoke City.) My biggest issues are such easy fixes, just make it another grind, let me unlock more inventory slots, let me level up my Chao or Trails without Red Star Rings, but no, they make money off the game being broken, so it'll stay broken, here's another sale of every skin you'll never be able to unlock without paying again. (Red Star Rings have no reason to be the ONLY way to level up and fuse/evolve Chao and Trails. You can't even buy them.)
It's been a while since I've last played it (the Shadow update), but yeah, this sounds bad. Leveling up pets and trails is essential in this game.
Shadow came after the whole reset. The chao and trail level ups and fusion (formally evolution) have been like this since then. You only need rings to level up Chao initially, but then it starts asking for increasing amounts of Red Star Rings every 5 levels. The only way to earn those is through quests, or 1 every 5 minutes through the auto-run feature (that you have to babysit to avoid Roblox kicking you for being idle). That's all you get until you can complete another event quest, and those spend so, so easily, because you need to repeat those payments 5 times to get the ability to fuse the Chao.
Not to defend the bullshittery, but all I did was to run around collecting rings (Emerald Hill Time Trial 3) and orbs (Lost Valley). I got to level 211 by this strategy. It was tedious, but it worked. I've unlocked Tails and Knuckles, then beat Dr. Eggman and did the Shadow quest. Boom, game done. Didn't rebirth, only maxed out a few sets of Chaos and Trails. This was the core experience for me. For a Roblox game, that's OK. You can really just ignore the silly stuff. That's not what Sonic is about, anyway.
The problem is that the game is what the game is, so if you just like to run around in the sandbox and ignore the skins and whatever else, that's great, but the game is built to be a grind, so the grind being broken means the game is broken, and if you want that grind, then... what are you supposed to do in this situation. Anyways, just saw a comment on the latest update, where they swapped out the rewards for the gambling wheel, replacing Riders Shadow with Frontiers Sonic and SA2 knuckles (whatever they called that) or 5-minute Magnet + Ring + EXP multipliers if you already have them. Commenter said that they used to have every skin but since this is apparently the replacement for daily missions these wheel spins now have an expiration date attached and now the commenter does not have every skin and will likely have to buy it whenever they feel like putting it on sale (if they plan on doing that.) Also they added another quest to New Yoke City but I still can't access it so I don't give a fuck.
