Thread: Re-balance Feedbacks

Originally Posted by Doctorwhoa

Kind of bittersweet since its so hard now to gain affection.

Well, at least we will be able to keep the girls after they fix the affection, so it's a sweet thing in the long run... Just need them to investigate the issue, which I don't even know how they could have missed it... I can only assume none of the devs were ever responsible for balancing a game, because they kinda dropped the ball on a few points (and affection not even being the worst offender... *cough* stats *cough*).

Originally Posted by soviras

Well, at least we will be able to keep the girls after they fix the affection, so it's a sweet thing in the long run... Just need them to investigate the issue, which I don't even know how they could have missed it... I can only assume none of the devs were ever responsible for balancing a game, because they kinda dropped the ball on a few points (and affection not even being the worst offender... *cough* stats *cough*).

Welp. At least people who still have girls to farm can use the higher drop chance. I have all trolls story girls already farmed, so I need to wait for new world/story part or event, but seeing how I most times got both troll event drop-able girls in at most 10 days out of 14, and how slow they release stuff, they will probably fix drop chances before I will be able to use them ;]

Also not sure what you mean by stats being the main offender. Part maybe lost 115+M of cash on upgrading them before update. But I feel like that hurts mostly cause upgrading affection is so fucking retardly expensive any money that we lost cause of the update itself seems like a big loss, while if affection stayed cheap - it wouldn't be as "middle fingery" as it is.

If this game has more than one dev - then they are shit at their job, or do this as a hobby like 1h a week.

Originally Posted by Eversor86

Welp. At least people who still have girls to farm can use the higher drop chance. I have all trolls story girls already farmed, so I need to wait for new world/story part or event, but seeing how I most times got both troll event drop-able girls in at most 10 days out of 14, and how slow they release stuff, they will probably fix drop chances before I will be able to use them ;]

Also not sure what you mean by stats being the main offender. Part maybe lost 115+M of cash on upgrading them before update. But I feel like that hurts mostly cause upgrading affection is so fucking retardly expensive any money that we lost cause of the update itself seems like a big loss, while if affection stayed cheap - it wouldn't be as "middle fingery" as it is.

If this game has more than one dev - then they are shit at their job, or do this as a hobby like 1h a week.

Honestly, I lost as much as possible on the stat upgrade price change, but I don't really care that much even with the higher affection cost. What I meant with it was that the stat balance is broken, because you are always going to be extremely overpowered as long as you have reasonable amounts of your main stat even the way it was before the update, and with the new update, the limit is much higher and completely breaks the game. When you suddenly take 0 damage and oneshot the strongest boss in the game while being lower level than him, that should indicate the balance went way off the scale.

And from what I know, there is 1 writer (Porco Rosso), 1 artist (Solgeku) and 1 developer (Roman), 1 designer (Miike) and 1 PR person (Jessie) on the team... Which isn't really enough to do things at a faster pace, as they end up being stuck waiting for each other. As long as the writer hasn't written a scene, the artist can't draw it. If the writer wants to make something, the designer and developer need to have made it possible. If the designer needs to make a new element for the interface, the artist needs to have done the art it gets placed near, etc. A lot of possible work time is probably lost on inefficient processes due to dependencies, which bigger companies tend to have less often due to the more organized structure and there being an annoying boss to tell them what to do when. The same companies that they apparently left because they didn't like the way things were done there... They probably aren't as well organized as they should be as a result of that, but they will get things out eventually.

Question is, if they will get things out before game is dead.

5 people is not enough to do things at a fast pace? I hope that was sarcasm or something ;]. If there really is well 4 - cause I don't count the PR guy as a dev team - guys running this game - then they, like I said, do it as a hobby 1h a week, or work full time on it doing less work than half a person could do.

Seriously, amount of images and text/story we get is far, far to low even to be excused by "them waiting for each other". Only way if that could explain the slowness, is if they send stuff between each other via snail mail, or I don't know one of them lived on mars and they needed to wait for the slow communication between the planets.

In any sane team they would all talk with each other and do stuff at the same time, instead of waiting for each other to finish stuff beforehand. There would be basically some kind of sketches made for the artist of what writer wants in scenes and while writer types shit he has in his mind, artist can paint them. Developer should have made the game engine in such a way you could basically simply add new images and texts and be done with it - more work at start, far less work later. So he could work on other stuff like I don't know fucking balance? XD And frankly there were IIRC a bit of places where art was like different from text story. Not sure if lazy artist who wanted to do less main images and left the changes to miniatures of faces talking, or they just suck at communication.

What I see instead is a team of some dudes maybe even friends, that had an idea to make a sex browser gacha based game. Each one of them has other jobs and stuff, so they just work in turns waiting for each other. And they just slapped together a game, that frankly from day one since I started playing it - always made me wonder how the fuck its even still UP, in my opinion it should have died ages ago. To expensive to lame premium content, fucked up PvP, just story is funny, but released so slow its just sad. So a guy who wants to be a writer, a guy who likes drawing, some guy who knows how to code html5, some designer who I have no clue whats his job is, and a PR guy. And I am nearly sure non of them have ever worked in game developing business before.

As long as I sound as an asshole. I really do hope they will start using their brains, do a proper update, and make a fun game out of it. Cause waiting for story thats so slow, just makes me want to go look for story somewhere else. And tedious game-play doesn't keep me in, it slowly pushes me out. I was happy when I finished upgrading stats, all I had to do was do dailies, and spent my fighting energy. Now there is all the busy-work back, and its worse than before.

Originally Posted by Eversor86

Question is, if they will get things out before game is dead.

5 people is not enough to do things at a fast pace? I hope that was sarcasm or something ;]. If there really is well 4 - cause I don't count the PR guy as a dev team - guys running this game - then they, like I said, do it as a hobby 1h a week, or work full time on it doing less work than half a person could do.

The amount of people doesn't really say a lot. For speed they would need proper management to direct them, which is what caused them to leave the place they worked at before to begin with. They are essentially running around without a head, not having a clue as to how to organize themselves... And let's not forget that while there are 4 people working on the game, they don't all have the same skills, and certain skills are needed more often. They are lacking some important skills entirely, like the ability to balance a game (which is entirely different from being able to program a game, unfortunately) or managing a team. There can be a dozen people working on something, but without the required skills to do it properly it's nothing more than trial and error. There have been indie games with small teams, but those have been hit or miss depending on the skills they had. Sometimes their only source of proper feedback on certain aspects is from the players, which could easily result in broken balance or flawed mechanics until patching happens (case in point, Binding of Isaac, the dev never learned how balance works despite popularity and a massive increase in team size for the remake).

Back to this games team, Kinkoid. There is only one person who knows how to program game mechanics (but he doesn't know how to balance them), there is only one person who knows how interfaces work (who doesn't know how to include options because that's the programmers field), there is only one person who can draw and there is only one person who can write (at a level that's barely above fanfiction, though that may be due to the translation quality)... None of them know anything about the others fields, so if one gets stuck on something they all get stuck once their existing workload runs out. A lot of this game depends on the artist in the end, and only one of them can do that job. However, every other member significantly increases the artists workload. Imagine if the writer decided to change a scene, then suddenly the artists work for the previous version of the scene would be partially invalidated. The designer and developer have nothing to do unless they think of a new feature to add or improve, and once they do it would require resources from the artist again (and that seems to happen often). Without proper management, it's impossible to control these situations, and as such it results in significant delays because the artist is getting overworked.

It wouldn't be an understatement to say that for every hour of non-artist work, you need to do 1,5 hours of artist work when a game is almost fully based on its art (like this one, where there isn't a single part that doesn't have any art in it), which creates a significant bottleneck on their teams performance, and the monthly events add even more work for the artist. They would do best to get a second artist and spread the workload a bit more, but that creates other complications without someone with management skills. You actually get a lot of similar issue with fan projects involving a team of 3-10 people, which is why it doesn't surprise me. For a game like this, I would try to have at least 3 artists (one with focus on story, one with focus on girls and one with focus on backgrounds and events), 1 programmer, 1 tester (mainly dedicated to testing new content and balancing), 2 writers (each acts as the editor for the other), 1 designer and 1 manager to steer people in the right direction. That is what would be required to keep up the work at a steady pace while also ensuring quality. For this game's size and scope it's quite understaffed as it is now (especially because there is only 1 person who can make the art), and that results in a low production rate.

Currently, the artists backlog for existing content is about: 2 scenes for ~80 girls, updated versions of some tutorial scenes in world 2 and 3, updated art for older girls. Work for upcoming stuff is mainly based around the events, which is going to be 6 girls with 5 scenes each per month. Assuming they want to get good quality art out rather than rushed stuff, and that's a lot of hours to work on the art for that... That doesn't even include upcoming story, event backgrounds, event versions of the bosses, new features or even the background and world map changes for the next area. A single fully colored image of reasonable quality can easily take a day or more to make, which is also why many artists (who do it for a living rather than a hobby) have a rather high per image commission fee, and amount of time that assumes the image isn't scrapped or rejected for whatever reason (low quality, broken anatomy, changed script, etc). A single story scene has dozens of images. This is why they need more artists to keep the pace up.

And the reason they can use a parody version of a character is simple, the trademarked characters are generally rather specific and a high degree of likeliness is required before it's an issue. They can do it as long as there are some changes to the basic design, so it isn't a match anymore, and at worst it counts as a parody rather than infringement. This is also why Hasbro fails to shut down certain types of non-family friendly MLP fanart, despite really wanting to... Even Disney failed on numerous occasions despite really trying, and most other companies don't even bother trying anymore unless it's a very close match, and even then it's often just not worth it for them because there aren't any real damages from it.

I have no clue about the dev team background and stuff so I can only believe in your word.

Thou I would maybe poke here and there about few things you said.

This game uses a lot of art, but a lot of it is well lets say static. World backgrounds, world pages BGs, main screen BGs are single images used for long time after they are made. You could argue the same about trolls sprites, but those get new versions for events, thou then again making those shouldn't take more than few hours at best assuming they do have head on their necks and know what they want.

The bulk of artist work is then mostly in story and new girls affection avatars/scenes. But I will never believe that you need day or more for a single picture of this quality. People draw in less than day stuff that this game didn't event stand next to. I mean its not bad, but its not like some uber quality that requires god knows how much work (thou I know talking about doing art when you yourself can't paint a decent stick figure is kinda hypocritical). Especially if you factor in most story scenes could be (and probably are) done like VN games do it - separate background and character sprites - just instead of display engine of the VN showing those to you the artist just joins layers in photoshop or what ever making end images uploaded to game server.

So it probably boils down to them being like you described head-less chicken running around, where every single one of them only knows their stuff and have no proper management steering them proper way. So you probably are right that they would need to get 1-2 more artists (I think 2 total is enough - one would work on story, one on everything else), someone who can freaking balance the game (thou is it really that hard with a battle/fighting system thats so damn simple?). And lastly but most importantly someone to manage the team (I would start with this person).

You know, I start to think that their biggest fuck-up is just this update, or rather deciding to overhaul the game so damn much. Especially if you lack a guy who knows how to balance stuff and/or management skills in the team.

I think the worst part of the update was deciding to change level cap to 400. Cause this makes balancing hard, especially if you give so much "stats" progress per level. If you make hardest boss beatable at like leave 200, you won't be able to even win with him at level 30-40. And if you make him beatable at 30-40, then for anyone beyond 50 it will seems a fucking joke.

I believe best option for this game would be to actually semi adapt a lot of things from Diablo 3. Take seasonal leader-boards for PvP. Would fix the problem of new players having no chance in PvP without really the need to change anything else other than just adding a reset once per x months option, and maybe adding some rewards (which would be copy-paste more or less of what happens in contests).

Take paragons - levels after you hit cap. Basically just let people after hitting level cap - continue leveling. For each "ding" on "over-cap-levels" just give players some gift, like kobans which we get now from dailies. Leveling those special levels would be far slower, and thus the additional free kobans wouldn't fuck up the market so much as this dailies ones will - thus no need to fuck up affection system as much ;].

And for sake of simpler balancing, just make it so that each world you release is treated like new expansion pack - has different level cap. Like you are in world 2 (the first one after introduction world) make it cap at like level 20, then make 10 more for each next world. Then you have a "static" number of levels, per world added, around which you can easily work with upgrades, exp progression, items, etc, so that you wont overkill to much even if you hit the cap by doing PvP/dailies/whatever other source of exp there is part story quests. And if people hit the cap for that world? Just use the "paragon special levels" with kobans/etc. rewards.

Just make sure you make rewards on each world/level cap different, so people wont try to abuse your bonus levels by not progressing the story. But that could be achieved by setting exp/level progression in such a way that you would ding over-cap levels at similar pace on each world/level cap. Making it more profitable to reach highest world/level cap available in game.

A small side idea, would be to make it so that you can level those 10 levels on each world on just story quests alone, so that when next world hit everyone will start at the same level. Alternatively make it so that quests exp reward can be scaled up/down depending on your level, to slow down "overachievers" who over-leveled, and speed up the "slow-progressers". Thou the first solution would be far simpler I suppose, and seem less "assholly". People doing just story, would level as fast in over-all way of game progression, and more active players would just get freebies from over-cap levels.

Simple solution, that makes balancing the game far, far easier, especially for team with management/balancing capabilities issues. Cause it basically reduces balancing scope to each world as a separate "system", you have idea of what are people stats at previous world, and you just go from there - set up what you want players to end up after finishing that new world you want to add, and balance stuff around those two "values". And each new world would be simply copy-paste with different low/high numbers ;]. With PvP "fixed" by seasonal resets and small rewards, and "bonus-over-cap-levels" - you also fixed already two of main issues people had - wasted exp at cap, broken PvP.

And PvP could actually use that separate level/worlds system as a divider of all players. AKA like contests take a random bunch of 50 people for each one of them, PvP should have brackets based on worlds level-caps. So like 21 to 30, 31 to 40, etc. Which actually would further help new players do PvP, cause then with their far lower level and probably stats/items, they actually would have a chance against similar to them lower level players. Worst enemies would be then people that hit cap on their bracket, and farmed better items than them.

You know, what makes me wonder now is, WTF happened at beta of this update? Did they got so unlucky that only morons beta tested? That such big flaws were deemed ready to release?

I think I should probably write that stuff about my ideas of level-caps/stuff as a second feed-back mail to their PR guy, I believe that most people including me wouldn't have anything against like a secondary big Update if it fixed all problems with the game, even if it would mean like losing some levels/stuff (assuming they would release the 3.0 update after some people already hit level 80+ as there are only 8 world now and with my idea level cap would have been 80 now - thou then they could just convert levels over 80 into bonus-levels and give the kobans rewards or something)

Anyway its 11AM and I should have gone to bed ages ago so I will end this wall of text and go to sleep XD (You would think that with this much to say/argue, I was already a part of the game dev team or something lol).

umm, its been a while, I hit level 41 after the new quest opened- my energy did NOT refill. I don't know about stam, it was full when I leveled. Didn't the energy refill, and the stam stay the same previously?

IIRC, quest energy was refilled each level up before, now it refills at levels 1 to 9 and then from 20 up on each 10th level (so 20,30,40 etc).
Fighting energy never refilled if my memory serves me right.

So far only problem that I have is rising affection ... it need lot of items and they are expensive as hell ... and if it is hard for me on lvl 47 it must be worst for those who are just starting (even if you consider that they should have it cheeper if they dont have that many girls). Drop chance of girls isnt that bad (I droped 3 girls after that patch and now I only need 2 more to have them all) and I realy like how they are giving us 25 kobans for finishing all quest every day (today I even got legendary gear for 58s long quest)

So I assume that this info that's now on the wiki is accurate for the current game?

Required Affection to reach 1 Star = [Haremette Number] x 15
Required Affection to reach 2 Stars = [Haremette Number] x 65
Required Affection to reach 3 Stars = [Haremette Number] x 215
Required Affection to reach 4 Stars = [Haremette Number] x 915
Required Affection to reach 5 Stars = [Haremette Number] x 2,665

And it looks like these are grand totals to get there from nothing. These are not the values to get there from the previous star. Anyway, I just wanted to look that over and get a better perspective of the scaling, specifically using 1 rare lingerie (worth 100 affection) as the measuring stick and assuming no other affection items are used. A rundown after throwing some numbers around in a spreadsheet.....

Girl 6: * = 1 item, ** = 4 items, *** = 13 items, **** = 55 items, ***** = 160 items
Girl 13: * = 2 items, ** = 9 items, *** = 28 items, **** = 119 items, ***** = 347 items
Girl 20: * = 3 items, ** = 13 items, *** = 43 items, **** = 183 items, ***** = 555 items
Girl 26: * = 4 items, ** = 17 items, *** = 56 items, **** = 238 items, ***** = 693 items
Girl 33: * = 5 items, ** = 22 items, *** = 71 items, **** = 302 items, ***** = 880 items
Girl 40: * = 6 items, ** = 26 items, *** = 86 items, **** = 366 items, ***** = 1066 items
Girl 46: * = 7 items, ** = 30 items, *** = 99 items, **** = 421 items, ***** = 1226 items
Girl 52: * = 8 items, ** = 34 items, *** = 112 items, **** = 476 items, ***** = 1386 items
Girl 60: * = 9 items, ** = 39 items, *** = 129 items, **** = 549 items, ***** = 1599 items

Those measurements might not be so bad if the reference was a smaller affection item, like the common chocolates (25 affection) for example. 1600 common chocolates would be equal to 400 rare lingerie, which is still a lot of items but it's not as far out there. But for those numbers if they're rare lingerie things got pretty excessive starting somewhere in the 3 star range there (like by girl 25 or so).

Anyway, a brief summary of everything I came up with by throwing a spreadsheet together:
* Each next group of 6-7 girls sees it require 1 more item than the previous group to reach 1 star.
* Each next 1-2 girls see it require 1 more item than the previous 1-2 girls to reach 2 stars.
* Each next girl requires about 2-3 more items than the previous girl to reach 3 stars.
* It will be about 9-10 more items than the previous girl for 4 stars.
* And it will be about about 26-27 more items than the previous girl for 5 stars.

Thinking about the way things grouped up there... I'd actually kind of think that they should have picked multipliers that would produce a pattern more along the lines of:
* Each next group of 6-7 girls sees it require 1 more item than the previous group to reach 1 star.
* Each next group of 4-5 girls sees it require 1 more item than the previous group to reach 2 stars.
* Each next group of 2-3 girls sees it require 1 more item than the previous group to reach 3 stars.
* Each next girl sees it require 2-3 more items than the previous girl to reach 4 stars.
* Each next girl sees it require 4-5 more items than the previous girl to reach 5 stars.

Side note looking at their multipliers (15, 65, 215, 915, and 2665):
* 2nd value is x4.33 larger than 1st value
* 3rd value is x3.31 larger than 2nd value
* 4th value is x4.26 larger than 3rd value
* 5th value is x2.91 larger than 4th value

Why are the steps so uneven? It kind of seems like they should have picked values that would either climb at a flat rate (each one x3.5 larger than the previous one, for example) or that would climb at an increasing rate (x2.5, x3, x3.5, and x4, for example).

Of course any tweaks to these values will have a huge impact on how the entire affection system feels at different levels. I don't know where the best balance would be found.

Edit: Actually, about the values being a multiple of the girl's placement in the list, that right there is not a great implementation because it would be really nice if we could someday get some options to sort our list however we want and that's not likely to happen while order influences affection leveling costs. (They wouldn't want us bumping someone to early in the list to get a discount.)