well then they really need to scale not only prices but money drop from girls too ... its getting stupid
Getting, it's gotten, and really sucked a lot of fun from the game - an yet the devs pulling a Nero
It doesn't even make sense to upgrade them past 4 stars. You will never recoup the money and they aren't going to be used for battles.
When I got 4 star upgrades without need for any affection on Ankyo and Battler, and then on Battler also didn't need affection points and could insta upgrade her to 5 stars (or rather I can upgrade her, I just don't have spare 5 milions of cash seeing how I am slowly upgrading to 3 starts other new girls). I gone to discord and asked if they changed something, like did they remove affection cost need for 4/5 stars or something.
What I got in response is that they changed something with latest patches that makes girls remember how much affection points pre-2.0 you gave girls, which is around 15k, so each girl that was on 3 stars and need less than 15k total now to get to 5th star will have her 4/5 stars insta unlocked, if girl needs more than 15k she will require those 15k less.
Seeing as affection point cost 417, this 15k thingy makes upgrading girls to 5 stars around 6.25m cash cheaper, thou total cost go up into tens or hundreds of millions quite fast, at which point this "bonus" doesn't help much.
As a side note. Technically if they will release 4/5 stars slow enough, most players should be able to collect affection and cash to upgrade them 4/5 stars girls to those 4/5 as a side thing to upgrading newly acquired girls to 3 stars. Of course this doesn't work for new players or people who whaled and got a lot of girls fast.
Our only hope is that we will level fast enough and that with leveling up cash we gain from selling freely acquired items will become significantly huge portion of our income to offset 4/5 ridiculous costs. Or that supposedly to be released before end of the year PvP update will have high enough number of changes with maybe how much affection item drops/cash drops we get.
But then you need to ask what type of game has it become when players hope that they dont add new girls or new scenes too fast ... I could get used to that affection and all but if more girls will get 5 stars (which is great and I am happy about it) we will not be able to afford that (funny is that if you invest lot of time in the game and try to collect everything then you have it much worst by getting more girls and almost no extra income)
The only issue I see is that we don't get a lot of freely acquired items. Yes, you get some from missions, but not really enough to even begin to offset the costs of even 2/3 stars as your Harem grows, let alone a 4 or 5 star increase. Pachinko is not even an option now, since they started the scaling Pachinko prices and decreased the sell prices of items. It's showing even more that the ones who have been playing the longest/spending real money on the game are being penalized. I just got Stephanie (girl number 48) from a 10x Epic Pachinko roll and upgraded her to 3 stars which cost 10,320 affection (4,303,440 cash) + 864,000 cash to upgrade. Her income after all that is 1270/hr, so it will only take me (roughly) 4068 hours to recoup the cash I put into her. They really need to scale the amount of money that each girl pays out if they insist on keeping the scaling the cost to upgrade each girl
They probably overshot with the changes, but it's not a feels bad way to empty out everyone's cash and items, as opposed to straight up deleting them and starting over.
What else are you gonna spend cash on if not the girls and stats. The number of girls I need to get from 2* to 3* has been whittled down to 5, once they are done and the new girls are both 5*, cash is gonna build up again. The game doesn't really have a true gold sink except for the pachinko, where you can put cash in for maybe an upgrade.
If you only care about girl upgrades, sure. But don't forget upgrading your stats in the shop. It currently costs about 1 mil per level for me just to upgrade my main stat. I can probably even do 3 stats at the same time if I only did those, but girl upgrades are getting in the way.
The only issue with stats is that, at least till a PvP/battle mechanics revamp - stats are useless. There is no point in upgrading them if you have a decent gear or upgraded till like 10k+ per upgrade costs. I stopped upgrading when next upgrade cost passed 12k mark, and I still have over twice the ego/stats of bots I see all the time in PvP.