Mikonoda
10-10-12, 11:33 AM
tl;dr: Great idea for a game, horrible execution turns it into a blatant money grab.
I played Bakery Story for months and loved it before I finally reached the highest level and got bored. When I heard about Dragon Story I was excited. Initially it seemed to be everything I hoped for in a game.
After less than three days of playing, I'm so disillusioned I'm close to giving up. From what I hear Bakery Story has changed to have some of the same problems. It should have been such an awesome game, and I just wanted to lay out why I'm disappointed so others can be warned, and hopefully Team Lava will improve the issues.
1. Gold
Biggest reason I will be leaving, hands down. You can only gift a few people each day with gold? I've seen people saying three around the forum, but so far in my experience it's only two. Plus, there's no indication of the limit anywhere in the game. I just kept getting a message saying I had 'already gifted that person today' when I most definitely hadn't. I had to search through the forums here to discover that what I thought was a bug was in fact a game-imposed limit.
I've also seen mentioned on multiple FAQs that you're supposed to start with 40 gold, but it looks like they've cut it down to 20 recently, or on certain platforms. The FAQs - including the in-game one - all talk about gifting like having more friends is the best way to get more gold.
I know that technically you don't need gold. It's possible to breed all dragons without it, and you can just wait out the long times the hard way. But let's face it, they've set the game up so that gold is extremely desirable to have. I understand that they don't want people just friending a hundred players and getting piles of gold each day. But it would be more reasonable to limit the amount of incoming gold you can ACCEPT to, say, five each day. Instead people who are smart enough to have chosen island names starting with 'a' will be getting all kinds of gold, likewise people who have IRL friends playing will be able to count on getting sent at least a few each day, and the rest of us just have to cross our fingers and pray.
2. Debris cost
The cost of clearing the debris in the initial area was quite reasonable. And I get why the cost should increase with each new area you clear, since presumably you have more dragons and are producing more silver than the last time you cleared out. But an increase by a factor of TEN? I'm level ten and crammed into my initial area, scrambling to save enough to upgrade my farm and put out a magic area and dragon, etc. I don't have 50,000 silver available to clear a single tree! Is it going to go up again when I expand a second time?
From what I've seen on this forum, this increase in cost may be a new addition to the game. Again, intended to make gold ever more desirable since you can use it to buy silver.
3. Time lengths
Breeding and hatching times depend on the type of dragons involved. Breeding my basic green and yellow takes ten hours, and then another ten hours to hatch the egg. You can only have one breeding ground and one nest, at least at this stage of the game. That seems excessive. I'm setting up my nest and breeding first thing each morning and last thing each night, and spending the rest of the day doing pretty much nothing. Presumably when I get into the fancier types of dragons it will take even longer! I could of course speed it up with gold... you see where I'm going with this.
4. Loading issues
This one I'll acknowledge is probably due to the fact that I've only got a Galaxy S, and after just two years on the market it's helplessly outdated. Load times are painfully long, I often have to hit buttons multiple times to get them to register that I've hit them - and I can see the potential there to accidentally spend gold all over the place, as I've seen others complaining here on the forum. I know from the reviews on googleplay that lots of people are unable to play the game at all for constant freezing and forcequitting.
5. Playing with dragons
Hopefully this is an issue that will improve as more players get past the first twenty levels or so, but right now it's almost impossible to find any of my neighbours who have open pens to play with. Most people don't even have six pens, let alone six available ones. I clear out mine as soon as the game notifies me that they've been visited, and I still get people leaving 'you're full' messages on my wall. Getting up to four social rating was painful, I could only play with one or two dragons for every three or four islands I visited!
In Bakery Story the equivalent was tipping, and it depended on the number of open tables. The difference is that tables weren't all that expensive - it was the food-making machines that were expensive, and decorations. So even a fairly low-level person could put out enough tables to be able to collect tips from multiple friends between visits. In Dragon Story the pens are expensive, the dragons are expensive, and space to put them is ruinously expensive with the cost of clearing debris in a new area. You can't even play with an empty pen, for obvious reasons, so cramming pens in doesn't help much.
Also - and this was a problem I had in Bakery Story as well - I can't actually see that my dragons have been played with unless I fully exit the game and re-enter. I'll get the notification on my News, but no sparkles and no extra silver. Though if I empty the pens of the tiny amount of silver and THEN go out and back in, it acts as if I've cleared them, but I still didn't get the bonus.
Overall:
What should have been a really fun and diverting game instead comes across as a massive cash grab. Everything is set up to make you want gold really badly, and also set up so that it's INCREDIBLY difficult to get gold except by buying it. Of course the developers want to make money on their game. But by making it SO obvious that they're after the money, they've made me not want to spend any at all. I have a policy that if I'm still enjoying a game after a week of playing, I'll donate or buy gold or however they have it set up, regardless of whether I actually need to or not, because I do want to support the developers of the good games.
Not even three days in and I'm ready to rage quit Dragon Story.
I played Bakery Story for months and loved it before I finally reached the highest level and got bored. When I heard about Dragon Story I was excited. Initially it seemed to be everything I hoped for in a game.
After less than three days of playing, I'm so disillusioned I'm close to giving up. From what I hear Bakery Story has changed to have some of the same problems. It should have been such an awesome game, and I just wanted to lay out why I'm disappointed so others can be warned, and hopefully Team Lava will improve the issues.
1. Gold
Biggest reason I will be leaving, hands down. You can only gift a few people each day with gold? I've seen people saying three around the forum, but so far in my experience it's only two. Plus, there's no indication of the limit anywhere in the game. I just kept getting a message saying I had 'already gifted that person today' when I most definitely hadn't. I had to search through the forums here to discover that what I thought was a bug was in fact a game-imposed limit.
I've also seen mentioned on multiple FAQs that you're supposed to start with 40 gold, but it looks like they've cut it down to 20 recently, or on certain platforms. The FAQs - including the in-game one - all talk about gifting like having more friends is the best way to get more gold.
I know that technically you don't need gold. It's possible to breed all dragons without it, and you can just wait out the long times the hard way. But let's face it, they've set the game up so that gold is extremely desirable to have. I understand that they don't want people just friending a hundred players and getting piles of gold each day. But it would be more reasonable to limit the amount of incoming gold you can ACCEPT to, say, five each day. Instead people who are smart enough to have chosen island names starting with 'a' will be getting all kinds of gold, likewise people who have IRL friends playing will be able to count on getting sent at least a few each day, and the rest of us just have to cross our fingers and pray.
2. Debris cost
The cost of clearing the debris in the initial area was quite reasonable. And I get why the cost should increase with each new area you clear, since presumably you have more dragons and are producing more silver than the last time you cleared out. But an increase by a factor of TEN? I'm level ten and crammed into my initial area, scrambling to save enough to upgrade my farm and put out a magic area and dragon, etc. I don't have 50,000 silver available to clear a single tree! Is it going to go up again when I expand a second time?
From what I've seen on this forum, this increase in cost may be a new addition to the game. Again, intended to make gold ever more desirable since you can use it to buy silver.
3. Time lengths
Breeding and hatching times depend on the type of dragons involved. Breeding my basic green and yellow takes ten hours, and then another ten hours to hatch the egg. You can only have one breeding ground and one nest, at least at this stage of the game. That seems excessive. I'm setting up my nest and breeding first thing each morning and last thing each night, and spending the rest of the day doing pretty much nothing. Presumably when I get into the fancier types of dragons it will take even longer! I could of course speed it up with gold... you see where I'm going with this.
4. Loading issues
This one I'll acknowledge is probably due to the fact that I've only got a Galaxy S, and after just two years on the market it's helplessly outdated. Load times are painfully long, I often have to hit buttons multiple times to get them to register that I've hit them - and I can see the potential there to accidentally spend gold all over the place, as I've seen others complaining here on the forum. I know from the reviews on googleplay that lots of people are unable to play the game at all for constant freezing and forcequitting.
5. Playing with dragons
Hopefully this is an issue that will improve as more players get past the first twenty levels or so, but right now it's almost impossible to find any of my neighbours who have open pens to play with. Most people don't even have six pens, let alone six available ones. I clear out mine as soon as the game notifies me that they've been visited, and I still get people leaving 'you're full' messages on my wall. Getting up to four social rating was painful, I could only play with one or two dragons for every three or four islands I visited!
In Bakery Story the equivalent was tipping, and it depended on the number of open tables. The difference is that tables weren't all that expensive - it was the food-making machines that were expensive, and decorations. So even a fairly low-level person could put out enough tables to be able to collect tips from multiple friends between visits. In Dragon Story the pens are expensive, the dragons are expensive, and space to put them is ruinously expensive with the cost of clearing debris in a new area. You can't even play with an empty pen, for obvious reasons, so cramming pens in doesn't help much.
Also - and this was a problem I had in Bakery Story as well - I can't actually see that my dragons have been played with unless I fully exit the game and re-enter. I'll get the notification on my News, but no sparkles and no extra silver. Though if I empty the pens of the tiny amount of silver and THEN go out and back in, it acts as if I've cleared them, but I still didn't get the bonus.
Overall:
What should have been a really fun and diverting game instead comes across as a massive cash grab. Everything is set up to make you want gold really badly, and also set up so that it's INCREDIBLY difficult to get gold except by buying it. Of course the developers want to make money on their game. But by making it SO obvious that they're after the money, they've made me not want to spend any at all. I have a policy that if I'm still enjoying a game after a week of playing, I'll donate or buy gold or however they have it set up, regardless of whether I actually need to or not, because I do want to support the developers of the good games.
Not even three days in and I'm ready to rage quit Dragon Story.