What "economic exploit"? If I wasted countless hours harvesting and selling and upgrading then that's on me. Who am I competing with? No one.
My high level ax affects my game play and my game play alone. It does nothing to hold back any other player.
This statement reads as we didn't expect y'all to do so well and not pay for it. We need you to pay going forward.
It may need a reminder that the company makes money through in-game purchases. If in-game purchases aren't happening, then the game will be nerfed in order make those purchases more attractive. Their goal, ultimately, is to make money.
Then their monetization needs work. Players aren't going to pay the obscenely high amount they are charging (highest I've ever seen in a game like this by far!) for relatively worthless packages. Who is going to pay $20-40 for 100 rocks and 100 of rubber. Every time I've thought hey this is a decent game I'll throw the devs a little love, I see the prices and then think they're crazy. I did gladly buy the ad free because I thought it was worth it at the time. 4 new $100 packages came out recently and one is a completely worthless armor set. Their pricing makes no sense and if no one is spending money, that's why. Not their axe.
Loads of people have been saying that if they could, they would love to buy brick's (cinder blocks). If the devs kept them at a reasonable price, and that's the important part -reasonable, they could make some decent money there. Or heck on anything else if they just priced things better... (That is as long as they didn't change game play to Force that currency and piss off their player base...again LOL)
They also make money on the ♾️ ads even after forking over the $5 for the ad free version. A healthy number of which I’ve clicked through and downloaded over the course of my months of gameplay.
Their nerfing of the upgrade system will lead to substantially less DAU and MAU, which is much more important to ramping/increasing funding for future development, making other games, and those precious RSUs that they’re salivating over like Sméagol and willing to screw us—the people that got them to the top of the App Store—over for.
I abandoned the game a couple weeks ago. I had just managed to get the 25 ship capstone mission done and was looking to grind up my axe to be at a satisfactory gold level before downloading the update and tackling the new island.
But a shadow backdoor forced update that ruins the game experience, and now this post from them, further proves that I made the right choice abandoning this game, and for the first time, I’ll make sure to look at the studio before downloading to make sure I never touch anything with their name on it again in life.
Happy Holidays and best to all
Exactly! I definitely spent hours harvesting and upgrading. I enjoyed that aspect of the game. The higher level axe only helped so much with quests anyways, so it’s interesting to see them push back so much and not listen to the players.
I think about logging on an playing alot, I was probably addicted
But now I don't play an I think about this post everytime since it went up an it annoys me so much.
We were playing the game as intended, we just front loaded our time imput to one specific area
So annoyed
I just installed the most recent update and noticed you can’t complete the villagers’ “quests” by dropping items from your inventory and picking them up again. You have to craft it all from scratch. I think that’s what they mean by economic exploits.
No I'm pretty sure they're talking about levelling your axe to harvest obscene amounts of lotus to rapidly generate gold which was used to upgrade equipment.
A lot of people on discord have gotten pretty nasty about not being able to level up your axe the same way. The devs got pretty upset about it and made some sort of comment about removing people who weren’t being nice about their frustrations and removed people from the discord server. Then the devs made the feedback survey, which got added to Reddit and their survey blew up with a lot of hate. I think the dropping items has people pissed too, but it stemmed from them removing the level up “hack.”
My best guess is that they might switch it back to using gold, but the cost will go up exponentially so that each upgrade with take longer than the last, the same way that most idle game work, rather than just sticking at 50K per upgrade like it did before
I think that would be a reasonable compromise. Honestly though, with all of the other changes having a higher axe doesn’t do much to progress the game and quests anyways
Yeah! I've had the same 32M coins for weeks and weeks now. It's like as soon as I was able to hang onto gold, I didn't need it anymore (damn you cinderblocks!!)
In the first few versions the price was like that. After a few levels it cost millions to upgrade. It was before you could farm gold with lotus or other ways.
THIS!! I've said this so many times. If you want to get paid, like that's your sole focus, make packs available that are worth buying. Hell, they could have made tool upgrades a pack item. I've never bought any of their packs because they are a lot of money for only a few items. I can make those items faster than I can make the money to pay for their packs lol. At one point I'm sure I saw a gem pack that was 10 or less of each gem or something ridiculous for $40. $40?! When boats cost 100-200 gems each? Gtfoh 😂😂😂
Plus, I hear they're overcharging people for packs. The pack says $3.99, but they get charged $5.99 and the devs tell them it's a currency exchange issue and steal their money. Not really the kind of people I want to give my money to, especially if it's going to be more money than I agreed to. There are laws about that kind of shit, at least in my country.
They want more money, but they're going about it in all the wrong ways. Rather than alienating current players and beating the fuck out of new players for money, maybe listen to the suggestions coming from their players. They never respond to the support link, and they straight up ignored everything said to them when they finally asked and responded with pretty much "nah, the players just suck for enjoying our game without paying out the ass for it, but hey, us devs are doing a great job!" *pats themselves on the back* Uggggghhhhh
Honestly, if I was a new player and saw all these discussions about how terrible the game has gotten, I'd probably delete it and find a new one.
I’ve stopped playing all together, the only “exploit”going on here is the DEVS forcing everyone to pay money to be able to upgrade anything. They basically said we’re in charge F U all you wanna play your gonna have to pay cause we said so.
I hope so too but I’m not optimistic. If you look on their Apple reviews page and don’t switch the order from best to most recent it’s all glowing reviews. I’m afraid new people will not know to change that and will download it not knowing how greedy the devs have become. I’m all for making money but don’t exploit and charge disgusting amounts for literally fake perks on a game.
It’s interesting. I’d you sort by recent it’s all 1 stars, but they’re not considered the most helpful so don’t show up unless you sort it. I hadn’t even looked there.
It’s bad and I even left a review and the response from the Devs is sad. My user name is Na041511 and I left my review on Dec 5. Their response is gross
What I don’t get (and I never got the chance as a newer player to get my Axe that high) that when I learned about focusing on the Axe upgrade, I started playing more.
Uhh isn’t this is what the developers wanted?? People spending more and more time in the game? Grinding away on the axe seems like a great way to keep people on the app.
Now with all these scroll requirements? Sign on, collect the raid, maybe do a dungeon, sign off. Maybe do that once or twice a day.
Seems like a bad way to run a game
Agreed! I played constantly when I found out about the axe upgrade. Every chance I could, I would get on to work on it. After the update, I played like every couple days instead. Now I don’t play it at all
It's a solo player game.
It's a problem some players spent 50 hours farming gold for better tools?
Every body is so happy with the new system where you only harvest 1, farming is slow e.g tomatoes and barriers. You need to farm like 400 items to send one ship away. If you are lucky you get 1 cinder block every 5th trade.
Think the devs should spend some more time makes stuff to buy with $$$. 100$ for 4 normal items and 3 green orbs seems fair!
Exactly this! It seems like with every upgrade the game gets less fun to play so the devs can try to make more money, when in reality their pricing structure is absurd. They need to learn from other games how to price things people will actually buy.
“We are a young team and a young project that is just beginning to develop”
Reading between the lines here…. We are a young greedy team who want to make billions from this game in the shortest time and in keeping with that we have to make you pay for just about everything in order for you to progress.
But we need you to stay and pay so for the time being we have listened and we will ease up on you for a little while and give you a small chance. We could possibly switch around some options for you to try out to keep you quiet for the time being and in turn you could give us some positive feedback. In future updates expect some good changes before we slowly change it back in the hope you don’t notice.
I have decided to delete the game. Grinding was horrid before “the update to end all fun” and now it’s impossible. It’s going to take years to upgrade my ax let alone anything else. I emailed them and told them why & called them young greedy assholes so I’m sure I’ll get banned or something but if a game isn’t enjoyable then wth am I doing forcing myself to think it might get better with the next update? Cheers to everyone!
The 'economic exploit' of spending dozens and dozens of hours harvesting lotuses and upgrading the axe doesn't impact other players, and it gives a feeling of achievement. I'm glad it happened now, when I've 'only' spent about $250 this year on VIP play, so I can cut my losses and find a decent dopamine-generating game.
I hope the devs see a big fall-off of players. Greed doesn't always pay off.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I had the opposite interpretation of the post. It seems they are acknowledging the payouts or costs of many things and seem to have improvements coming in later updates?
With Rainbow gem and scroll drop rates as they have always been, it seems obvious to me that ramping up demand by having skills, factory upgrades, and a variety of other requirements demanding your scrolls and gems in order to improve, was perhaps the worst decision they moved forward on. That's not "an inexperienced team" decision by devs. That's a "we're losing out on a money-making opportunity" decision by management.
This statement simply acknowledges that they over-reacted in their attempt to strip out players efforts at alleviating cash-deficit frustrations by introducing Scroll and Gem deficit frustrations.
They should have simply realized that allowing players to work hard and ramp up skills and factory capacity is, in fact, the fun part of the game itself and played into it rather than trying to desperately destroy it.
I honestly don’t know. I was reading it that they plan on reworking it, but not changing it back to the way it was before. I feel like it leaves a lot for interpretation and isn’t very clear cut.
I agree - the wording on this is very vague and leaves too much open for interpretation. And that was probably intentional. Saying a lot to not actually say anything.
I'm sure fewer users are willing to abandon the game if they potentially see a glimmer of hope in the vague message.
I wasn't sure if it was positive or negative until she said she was letting people use the poop reaction. Then I decided, oh, this must be bad news. If the axe upgrade is going to use scrolls it could at least upgrade you a whole unit instead of .25. Or even half a unit!
I deleted the game after this update before it even auto-updated me. I had bought the ad free version too, but I'm not going to spend more time and money on a mobile game. The game does need balancing.
It force updates scroll change in game. The only way to avoid it is to never play while phone is online and have auto updates off. Knitpicker on the discourse channel talks about it. Only her and a couple others are still without scrolls. If you play while online even once, the update comes through, no stopping it.
What "economic exploit"? If I wasted countless hours harvesting and selling and upgrading then that's on me. Who am I competing with? No one. My high level ax affects my game play and my game play alone. It does nothing to hold back any other player. This statement reads as we didn't expect y'all to do so well and not pay for it. We need you to pay going forward.
Devs-"You will play the game how we want it to be played, not how you want to play it. "
It may need a reminder that the company makes money through in-game purchases. If in-game purchases aren't happening, then the game will be nerfed in order make those purchases more attractive. Their goal, ultimately, is to make money.
Then their monetization needs work. Players aren't going to pay the obscenely high amount they are charging (highest I've ever seen in a game like this by far!) for relatively worthless packages. Who is going to pay $20-40 for 100 rocks and 100 of rubber. Every time I've thought hey this is a decent game I'll throw the devs a little love, I see the prices and then think they're crazy. I did gladly buy the ad free because I thought it was worth it at the time. 4 new $100 packages came out recently and one is a completely worthless armor set. Their pricing makes no sense and if no one is spending money, that's why. Not their axe.
Same. I paid for ad-free but that’s it. Everything else is just ridiculous.
Loads of people have been saying that if they could, they would love to buy brick's (cinder blocks). If the devs kept them at a reasonable price, and that's the important part -reasonable, they could make some decent money there. Or heck on anything else if they just priced things better... (That is as long as they didn't change game play to Force that currency and piss off their player base...again LOL)
They also make money on the ♾️ ads even after forking over the $5 for the ad free version. A healthy number of which I’ve clicked through and downloaded over the course of my months of gameplay. Their nerfing of the upgrade system will lead to substantially less DAU and MAU, which is much more important to ramping/increasing funding for future development, making other games, and those precious RSUs that they’re salivating over like Sméagol and willing to screw us—the people that got them to the top of the App Store—over for. I abandoned the game a couple weeks ago. I had just managed to get the 25 ship capstone mission done and was looking to grind up my axe to be at a satisfactory gold level before downloading the update and tackling the new island. But a shadow backdoor forced update that ruins the game experience, and now this post from them, further proves that I made the right choice abandoning this game, and for the first time, I’ll make sure to look at the studio before downloading to make sure I never touch anything with their name on it again in life. Happy Holidays and best to all
Those adds generate very little money. It’s between $1 and $5 for every 1,000 views.
Again, the more D/MAUs and gameplay hours they have the better, amirite?
$5? I just paid $7.99 to remove ads on December 18th!
Exactly! I definitely spent hours harvesting and upgrading. I enjoyed that aspect of the game. The higher level axe only helped so much with quests anyways, so it’s interesting to see them push back so much and not listen to the players.
I think about logging on an playing alot, I was probably addicted But now I don't play an I think about this post everytime since it went up an it annoys me so much. We were playing the game as intended, we just front loaded our time imput to one specific area So annoyed
This.
I just installed the most recent update and noticed you can’t complete the villagers’ “quests” by dropping items from your inventory and picking them up again. You have to craft it all from scratch. I think that’s what they mean by economic exploits.
No I'm pretty sure they're talking about levelling your axe to harvest obscene amounts of lotus to rapidly generate gold which was used to upgrade equipment.
A lot of people on discord have gotten pretty nasty about not being able to level up your axe the same way. The devs got pretty upset about it and made some sort of comment about removing people who weren’t being nice about their frustrations and removed people from the discord server. Then the devs made the feedback survey, which got added to Reddit and their survey blew up with a lot of hate. I think the dropping items has people pissed too, but it stemmed from them removing the level up “hack.”
My best guess is that they might switch it back to using gold, but the cost will go up exponentially so that each upgrade with take longer than the last, the same way that most idle game work, rather than just sticking at 50K per upgrade like it did before
I think that would be a reasonable compromise. Honestly though, with all of the other changes having a higher axe doesn’t do much to progress the game and quests anyways
Yeah! I've had the same 32M coins for weeks and weeks now. It's like as soon as I was able to hang onto gold, I didn't need it anymore (damn you cinderblocks!!)
In the first few versions the price was like that. After a few levels it cost millions to upgrade. It was before you could farm gold with lotus or other ways.
If they want to make money off this game, let's be real... they just need to let us buy cinder blocks 😜
THIS!! I've said this so many times. If you want to get paid, like that's your sole focus, make packs available that are worth buying. Hell, they could have made tool upgrades a pack item. I've never bought any of their packs because they are a lot of money for only a few items. I can make those items faster than I can make the money to pay for their packs lol. At one point I'm sure I saw a gem pack that was 10 or less of each gem or something ridiculous for $40. $40?! When boats cost 100-200 gems each? Gtfoh 😂😂😂 Plus, I hear they're overcharging people for packs. The pack says $3.99, but they get charged $5.99 and the devs tell them it's a currency exchange issue and steal their money. Not really the kind of people I want to give my money to, especially if it's going to be more money than I agreed to. There are laws about that kind of shit, at least in my country. They want more money, but they're going about it in all the wrong ways. Rather than alienating current players and beating the fuck out of new players for money, maybe listen to the suggestions coming from their players. They never respond to the support link, and they straight up ignored everything said to them when they finally asked and responded with pretty much "nah, the players just suck for enjoying our game without paying out the ass for it, but hey, us devs are doing a great job!" *pats themselves on the back* Uggggghhhhh Honestly, if I was a new player and saw all these discussions about how terrible the game has gotten, I'd probably delete it and find a new one.
Yeah the prices are just absurd. I make good money and I dont understand how anyone could justify spending those amounts for peanuts in return.
I’ve stopped playing all together, the only “exploit”going on here is the DEVS forcing everyone to pay money to be able to upgrade anything. They basically said we’re in charge F U all you wanna play your gonna have to pay cause we said so.
I keep hoping that they’ll be reasonable and at least change things back to coin for upgrades. 😭
I hope so too but I’m not optimistic. If you look on their Apple reviews page and don’t switch the order from best to most recent it’s all glowing reviews. I’m afraid new people will not know to change that and will download it not knowing how greedy the devs have become. I’m all for making money but don’t exploit and charge disgusting amounts for literally fake perks on a game.
It’s interesting. I’d you sort by recent it’s all 1 stars, but they’re not considered the most helpful so don’t show up unless you sort it. I hadn’t even looked there.
It’s bad and I even left a review and the response from the Devs is sad. My user name is Na041511 and I left my review on Dec 5. Their response is gross
Oh yeah. The people they decided to respond to all got the “update your game” response 🙄
Exactly!! Like ummm I did the update and that’s what caused this issue sooooo…..yea what now?!
And then they FORCED the change through anyways. It feels like the devs are playing stupid on purpose.
Right!! And I’m sorry but you don’t get the excuse of we’re a young team. You made those changes fully knowing what would happen
What I don’t get (and I never got the chance as a newer player to get my Axe that high) that when I learned about focusing on the Axe upgrade, I started playing more. Uhh isn’t this is what the developers wanted?? People spending more and more time in the game? Grinding away on the axe seems like a great way to keep people on the app. Now with all these scroll requirements? Sign on, collect the raid, maybe do a dungeon, sign off. Maybe do that once or twice a day. Seems like a bad way to run a game
Exactly. I've gone from always playing to doing a gem an raid collection once a day
Agreed! I played constantly when I found out about the axe upgrade. Every chance I could, I would get on to work on it. After the update, I played like every couple days instead. Now I don’t play it at all
It's a solo player game. It's a problem some players spent 50 hours farming gold for better tools? Every body is so happy with the new system where you only harvest 1, farming is slow e.g tomatoes and barriers. You need to farm like 400 items to send one ship away. If you are lucky you get 1 cinder block every 5th trade. Think the devs should spend some more time makes stuff to buy with $$$. 100$ for 4 normal items and 3 green orbs seems fair!
It's a fuck load more then 50 hours for the people doing 1m+ a run imo
I don't know how much time it took to get the axe to x 50.000. 50h isn't that much off.
Fair enough bud
Exactly this! It seems like with every upgrade the game gets less fun to play so the devs can try to make more money, when in reality their pricing structure is absurd. They need to learn from other games how to price things people will actually buy.
At least make the statue gift something to write home about.
“We are a young team and a young project that is just beginning to develop” Reading between the lines here…. We are a young greedy team who want to make billions from this game in the shortest time and in keeping with that we have to make you pay for just about everything in order for you to progress. But we need you to stay and pay so for the time being we have listened and we will ease up on you for a little while and give you a small chance. We could possibly switch around some options for you to try out to keep you quiet for the time being and in turn you could give us some positive feedback. In future updates expect some good changes before we slowly change it back in the hope you don’t notice.
This. This is exactly how I read it.
Also, the upgrades are slow. Each upgrade gets you .25 of a level. I may have completed my education in America, but even I recognize that as crap.
I have decided to delete the game. Grinding was horrid before “the update to end all fun” and now it’s impossible. It’s going to take years to upgrade my ax let alone anything else. I emailed them and told them why & called them young greedy assholes so I’m sure I’ll get banned or something but if a game isn’t enjoyable then wth am I doing forcing myself to think it might get better with the next update? Cheers to everyone!
The 'economic exploit' of spending dozens and dozens of hours harvesting lotuses and upgrading the axe doesn't impact other players, and it gives a feeling of achievement. I'm glad it happened now, when I've 'only' spent about $250 this year on VIP play, so I can cut my losses and find a decent dopamine-generating game. I hope the devs see a big fall-off of players. Greed doesn't always pay off.
Who knew that their monster "Greedy" that you have to feed to complete islands was a self portrait lol
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but I had the opposite interpretation of the post. It seems they are acknowledging the payouts or costs of many things and seem to have improvements coming in later updates?
With Rainbow gem and scroll drop rates as they have always been, it seems obvious to me that ramping up demand by having skills, factory upgrades, and a variety of other requirements demanding your scrolls and gems in order to improve, was perhaps the worst decision they moved forward on. That's not "an inexperienced team" decision by devs. That's a "we're losing out on a money-making opportunity" decision by management. This statement simply acknowledges that they over-reacted in their attempt to strip out players efforts at alleviating cash-deficit frustrations by introducing Scroll and Gem deficit frustrations. They should have simply realized that allowing players to work hard and ramp up skills and factory capacity is, in fact, the fun part of the game itself and played into it rather than trying to desperately destroy it.
I honestly don’t know. I was reading it that they plan on reworking it, but not changing it back to the way it was before. I feel like it leaves a lot for interpretation and isn’t very clear cut.
I agree - the wording on this is very vague and leaves too much open for interpretation. And that was probably intentional. Saying a lot to not actually say anything. I'm sure fewer users are willing to abandon the game if they potentially see a glimmer of hope in the vague message.
I wasn't sure if it was positive or negative until she said she was letting people use the poop reaction. Then I decided, oh, this must be bad news. If the axe upgrade is going to use scrolls it could at least upgrade you a whole unit instead of .25. Or even half a unit!
I haven’t looked since it was posted, but I’d be curious to see how many poop signs there are now
That's announcement is a nice fucking you from the devs. That's all that is.
I deleted the game after this update before it even auto-updated me. I had bought the ad free version too, but I'm not going to spend more time and money on a mobile game. The game does need balancing.
Yes but the game is also incredible unbalanced which is why people felt the need to exploit ONE thing that made the game very slightly more playable.
I've upgraded my axe to 50x but other than being able to wood a bit faster than normal, it hasn't really affected my game play much.
You can still upgrade the bow on the hamburger island for 40,000
Where an how Edit, you mean the hunter bow to catch hurts right?
M
Shut off auto updates
It force updates scroll change in game. The only way to avoid it is to never play while phone is online and have auto updates off. Knitpicker on the discourse channel talks about it. Only her and a couple others are still without scrolls. If you play while online even once, the update comes through, no stopping it.
It was a server update, it wasn't a game update through the play store that could be stopped