I'm pretty disappointed with how they've done things too. I still can't believe DiabloHead left! (It's StuBlad btw). The entire game overall had promise but they've taken a wrong turn somewhere and now there's nothing really keeping people coming back for more.
Yeah they pissed off a large chunk of the userbase with balance changes, and they even removed some things that I felt were interesting (like enemy versions of playable characters using regular attacks if their color was matched during an enemy cascade). At least they're giving some franchises some fresh love, like Streets of Rage and Golden Axe.
Sorry for the guild leave, we held out for like half a year? it was really fun. The biggest problem with this game is how the rich get richer but the average player gets fed bredcrumbs, you just can't catch up or compete. Any time they seem to add a better way to earn gold (boss battles) they 'balance' it by removing something else like the daily stages with no sign of that coming back if at all. A big issue is how they give out characters, because they are card based and you need X amount to rank them up you'll never get a new unit to blue star status unless you over spend, there is a huge reason why arena is nothing but free to play units as new characters just can't compete at their power levels. The other daily gacha I play is dokkan battle and while that doesn;t have pvp its a game where they learned to reward the player now and again, compared to it's launch 3+ years ago it's a really good game with both challenge and reward.
Whoops. Well rip the assets I guess but other than that? Eh I don't care there are 1 million other mobile games just like this one.
I played this game on and off. At its core, it's so generic that it could be (and indeed is) one of dozens of mobile games just like it. And it's simple fun, I'm not gonna lie. But the fun is mitigated in a huge way by the fact that it's got aggressive monetisation. Even if you were to pay for premium currency for this game, you would usually only be buying a chance to unlock something that you wanted. The odds were hugely against you though. 65 guaranteed legendary shards? That's still only a 1/16 chance of you getting the one you want, and a 15/16 chance of getting something that's worthless to you. And the game would sometimes give you the option to pay something like £30 for 65 shards of top-tier Legendary characters. 65 shards would unlock them at a basic level, but to be viable you would actually need hundreds of shards. So I could pay £30 to unlock Espio, but I would need to pay that same £30 many times for Espio to actually be worth using. The game became an endless grind-fest quickly and the arena (pseudo PvP mode) was an unbalanced, unfair piece of crap that was virtually impossible to progress or benefit from as F2P. The problem with F2P is that the so-called "microtransactions" are always hideously overpriced and the idiots who buy them (yes, I'm calling anyone spending money on them here and in other games idiots) ruin it for everyone else. I wish this game was something like £5 to £10 upfront and then there was no option for microtransactions at all, and the game would be balanced in such a way that it wouldn't be an unfun grind-fest. It shouldn't be available for free (or would essentially just be a demo if it was). Unfortunately, Nintendo tried this with Super Mario Run and the game was a commercial failure. People couldn't get their heads around paying a "staggering" £8 for a full game on their phone when they'd much rather just pay £2 a hundred times for loot boxes and premium currency. That's why all of Nintendo's other mobile games, like Mario Kart Tour, Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem, have been so much more successful. It's a damn shame. The writing was on the wall a couple of weeks ago when events in the game suddenly became way more lucrative and SEGA sold Demiurge back to its original owners. And the community on Reddit seemed to think that the game wasn't performing too well for a number of months because of changes in its content delivery and microtransactions. I don't know if their reasoning was correct, but the conclusion certainly was in the end. It's just a shame that the mobile gaming industry is what it is. I hate it and basically refuse to play any console/PC game that employs microtransactions too. I do not want to support that industry at all. Full-fledged DLC? Bring it on. Microtransactions, premium currency, loot boxes and paying for content that already exists? Fuck off. Not particularly sorry to see this game go. I'm not happy about it either though. It doesn't mean anything to me. I'll be happy when and if the current state of the industry changes for the better.
I'm actually quite bummed about this. I've been playing the game near daily for the last year, yeah it's a grind but... When you do unlock a character and build a team, there really is something magical about that. Though Sega REALLY missed a trick with this one, check these out. https://twitter.com/DaveLuty/status/1250793770494365696 Danny Russell who was pretty much the only guy at Sega who promoted the game (Well it was his job), came up with a pin badge set which he sent to media and various 'influencers'. I was lucky enough to get a pin set about a year after the game launched and the smaller booster set... Anyway... I always thought "Why are these not on the Sega Store?" they're so well made and Sega clearly have approved the designs for the characters. Just imagine it, either you can buy the pins from the Sega shop as normal, but say you unlock a character set in the game (so all the Sonic, Chaotix Yakuza, Golden Axe) characters, you then get a discount code to buy the pins from the shop. You not only get the digital characters, but also a 'physical team'. They had this free to play property which... yeah it was a grind, but it was full of characters and they just did nothing with it outside of the mobile app.
Crap, you can't even install it anymore if you didn't have it already. It asks for an update and redirects to its now-nonexistant store page. Same with the Mega Drive Mini Tower, it seems to be a stupid thing currently going on at SEGA where they're releasing exclusive merchandise for influencers-only, in order to "buy" their support (but of course you can't really say they're buying anything without money, can you? Wink wink).
In the game itself, the new event is basically a way for you to get anything you want, and they've enabled the Hero Passes for everyone so you get rewards daily and faster energy recharge.
Maybe if somebody starts looking into what the server responses are, it would be possible to make it work at a later date? Assuming that anybody really cares.
Amy Rose is my playable Character I start with since the beginning of the game and She's really cool. Hope She's playable at the start from another iOS game. I Hope SEGA and Demiurge keep this up. Also, I'm almost finished with Cream getting blue 5 Stars.
oh shit they added a story finale, looks like I got a reason to play again (at least until the servers die)
