State of the Game: December 2013

The Good
1. Counter Offers
This was a nice and unexpected update. The ability to make counter offers on the exchange has helped move things along on the stagnating exchange. While it can sometimes get spammy and tedious having to turn down offers of Fug Bugs for your Lethals, overall its a welcome enhancement.

2. Competition
With the inclusion of the new Phoenix and Alleycat teams, the competition for the top has become tougher than it has in a long time. In fact, this last raid event saw almost 40m points from the top player. Contrast this from 11m I got when I double-lethal ranked a few months ago for Hanzo, and you can see how much harder it is to place top 10. It should be noted that this has nothing to do with Dakota, and everything to do with players jumping ship from other games like Blood Brothers and GI Joe coming here due to the vibrancy of our forum community.

The Bad
1. Single Action Lethals
The latest announcement from Dakota classifies double-action lethals as 'unbalanced' and will see them slowly go extinct. This makes Lethals nothing more than expensive Epics, as recent mercs like F-9 and Restrained Colossus are arguably on par or better than a lot of single action Lethal mercs. Even Canis is better at his defensive counter role than the recent Totemic Warrior lethal. This move accelerates the downfall of any incentive for existing players to be very competative in events, meaning less sales for Dakota and less players interested in playing. I'm not sure what they were thinking, but it's NOT a good thing for the game, neither short term nor long term.

2. Typos / bad English
These have been happening more and more recently. It bespeaks of laziness and lack of attention to detail. On top of that, bad English is a dead give-away that they have outsourced the game to non-native English speakers, probably in India somewhere. I don't even need to list examples of these. Just pay attention to announcements and merc bios / skills and you will find plenty. I should probably also include the fact that sometimes they still have BB character pictures in game as well here. Lazy lazy lazy.

3. Unfixed Mercs
Lilith, Shellstinger, Colossus... all have been confirmed bugged and reported to Dakota. They haven't bothered to fix any of them. It's been months. I doubt they will ever get fixed. Obviously they don't care about the state of the game or their players.

4. Genebound resources
I understand that they implemented this change to stop resource farming on bot accounts. But it hurts the market as a whole. It goes much deeper than simply bringing down the price of mercs. No longer cna new players spend their hard-earned PS/AC on a new merc on the exchange. Now they actually have to buy tradable resources to be able to upgrade their team (because, lets be honest, they can't SELL their low-end mercs for resources on the exchange, and 99% of free players aren't going to buy MOBA COIN). Dakota needed to implement a different fix for this problem (such as IP logging, or gifting tracking to locate 'nexus' accounts where botters send their res). This just cuts the knees out from bringing in and retaining new players.

5. Lethal ranking reward drop
Most of us old hands believe the Top 25 cut-off for lethal rewards was a perfect balance of risk vs reward. It kept the competition at the top stiff and gave newer players a chance of getting a single lethal if they tried hard enough. The current competitive environment is way too top-heavy for the current reward structure thanks to numerous teams like FFF, Pirates, and Phoenix. Only giving a v2 Lethal to the top 6 is both stingy and ridiculously out of touch with the state of things. Less and less players bother to drop resources to compete if they aren't in one of the aforementioned teams because they have no chance of placing, leading to a hit in sales.

6. Biggest Pet Peeve
I really loathe how they use the word BIONIC for so many mercs. I mean, we have Bionic Blade BladeDancers, Bionic Bulls, Bionic Birdkeepers, Bionic Evangelists, Bionic Bashers, Bionic Smashers, and now the new Bionic Krampus. Really? Did we REALLY need another bionic bumbling idiot?


Final Thoughts
The overwhelming number of negative things happening recently has me extremely worried about the future of the game. While the recent Counter Offers update has been a huge plus to those of us that like playing the market, it's merely a drop in the bucket needed to keep this game exciting and fresh. I foresee a slow, painful death as players don't bother competing for weak lethals, especially since only top 6 get a v2 anyway. Old players with high-end double action lethals will continue to dominate, making new players get frustrated and quit since they cant even BUY their way to the top by getting shitty new single action lethals. Then the old players will get bored and quit because they can't get anything better. They should have kept Marcus and Atomic Hermit on and listened to their fan base.

+1

Pretty much hit everything there legend.  I like this game and the folks I play with/against but, the recent changes seems to be bass ackwards.  If you really want to balance out the game don't nerf current mercs or neuter event rewards come up with new pact mercs that will allow for free/casual players to have a chance at getting something better than what is currently available.  There are zero pact mercs worth anything in this game.  By adding something/anything that is better than what is currently there you can appease those that are complaining and keep your $ spenders happy.  I really hope they sort this out or this may be another game ppl jump ship from and find something new with a company that cares what direction there game goes.

Really like the effort you've put in making this thread, should post in the Suggestion Topic as well. ( Maybe if Dakota ( can ) read(s) this, they might change something )

+1

It is quite obvious that several months ago Dakota decided its strategic vision was to make as much money as possible from this game with doing as little work possible.  Every move they have made is to maximize short term gain at the sacrifice of long term sustainability.  They are just phoning it in-so enjoy the ride as it will end.

Besides, I see no issues with quality control.

Dakota finally replied to my report of Totemic Warrior's kill proc being broken by calling me stupid. I am frustrated beyond words at this point. I will be taking a break from FF and will only return when some real fixes happen. Hopefully I can return one day but that completely relies on Dakota, so I will most likely not be seeing anyone in FF again. Best of luck to anyone who decides to continue to let Dakota bend them over. Personally I can't take it anymore. I'm too "butt-hurt" from all the crap Dakota has put us through.

I'd love to see the e-mail you sent and what reply you got, if it's not too much of an effort.
Btw, join the inactive-club.

Grtz
Fresh

Excellent Legend. I dont see anything bionic about the ork krampus

Damn, I just realized I should be charging good money for a comprehensive game review and solution proposal report like that.... and Dakota got me riled up enough to do it for them for free. Well played, Dakota. Well played.

I'm with you one that one Legend ^^

Anyway, well stated, and I also appreciate the first response, I agree that Dakota has a lot of totally useless content. I would love to see them retire 50% of the old pact mercs and throw a dozen or so mercs that actually register on the power curve into silver pacts. Then even out the power curve by giving a slight edge to lethals over epics in terms of tangible benefits like statistically higher stats (the last lethals have had absolute crap stats) and most importantly higher speed, which should give a significantly higher win rate without giving them imbalanced skills that wreck the game (since agility doesn't effect raid, their holy grail cash cow event)

I'm roughly satisfied with the game at the moment, I believe it's headed in somewhat a better direction than a couple of months ago. They're trying stuff with the balance, it's not good yet, but I don't think ridiculously overpowered L are a good idea but last few lethal were quite underpowered let them toy a bit imo.
My main grief is bugged merc. Seriously, how long would it take for them to fix stuff like colossus, lilith ? 15 minutes ?

Don't forget Bulletstinger etc.
And if it's too hard for them to fix, they'll simply change the skill like they did with Niobe, haha.
What annoys me the most is the proc manipulation during events, when I run campaign I get 1 / 2 procs every round ( which is pretty fair, considering my skills have 30% / 35% proc chance ). When I compete in PvP or something the amounts of procs all the sudden, on an unknown way, change to 0 procs in 3 rounds. Dakota, you can keep denying that you're manipulating anything, the entire community knows that you are and the best thing to do would be to say that you have more proc chance with savages than lying about it.

I'm not a programmer, but my best friend is, and he has told me on numerous occasions that hunting bugs is one of the most time consuming parts of his job. Especially when he is trying to debug code someone else wrote. Again, I could be wrong.

It's painfully ironic that we all laughed at this thread once: https://fatalfrontier.forumotion.com/t477-official-ff-forum-announcement-and-other-news

I miss gameview.

Ya hit it straight on the head legend. What I don't understand is what the hell are they thinking. 1 less spots for lethal, it was already hard enough for someone not in a top team to get one then they make it impossible. 2 now there making the lethals less attractive to "balance" the game. Are they not in this to make money? 3 bugs sure it may take a while to find and fix and ppl will make mistakes from time to time but the amount that has come out recently pretty much says they just don't give a crap anymore. I've said it before, give us a reason to want to play. Make us want to spend money on your game. All I've seen is the exact opposite lately.

Exactly dohnson, why should I waste my time (and money) to compete for inferior mercs. I thought the idea was to keep coming out with stronger, better mercs to make the older top tier players continue to throw money at them and drop thier older mercs to the newer players to help them compete, circle of life. Now I can sit on my team and only pick up older mercs.

Hehe..thats commitment from dakota buddy....Free Games Forever..lol

DaedHead8 wrote:

It's painfully ironic that we all laughed at this thread once: https://fatalfrontier.forumotion.com/t477-official-ff-forum-announcement-and-other-news

I miss gameview.

Never seen this before, gave me a good laugh, hahaha.
Especially this:

• Max PVP titles can only be obtained by being top player within a PVP group everyday. Max title bonus increased to x5. All other players are demoted to a maximum of x1.10. 
  
  

Speaking of bugged mercs. I have been using my Overlord the entire event and have still yet to see the burn DoT proc. I thought I did one time but then realized I had forgotten to swap my Prawn to the back row.

Overlord Zealot has a 30% proc chance, and on top of that a 30% chance to burn targets so it's possible that you haven't seen it yet.

I just don't see how in all the time leveling/building a PE Overload and using him all event, I have not seen at least one single burn proc. Maybe I am just that unlucky. Can anyone confirm they have witnessed the burn proc, and that there was not another merc in the squad that poisons or burns?

I would like to inform the FF community that Dakota has gone out of their way to address my concerns about Totemic Warrior and that it was handled in a much more courteous and professional manner this time.

So moba, are you still with us or taking a break?

My frustration with FF was actually with Dakota's support staff and in fairness to them I was getting a little hostile after not getting an real responses from their customer service for some time. However after a little ruffling of feathers I did get a proper response and the courtesy I expect from any service provider. That being said I will stick around to play the game I love so much a while longer. For future reference I would like share that FF customer service does not response to hostile emails as quickly as they do to polite reports/requests.

So are they going to fix it?

Apparently they have already adjusted the proc to work as they described it in my Totemic Warrior thread.

A good history lesson: https://fatalfrontier.forumotion.com/t98-dear-developers-thoughts-on-ff-design

Scroll down to Marcus' reply. Of particular enjoyment is this quote:

"I don't think the Rares/Epics should change - many people spend a lot of time, money, and energy getting something like a perfectly evolved Ultra-Mutant v2. Changing that would cause an uproar in the community... but, changing the art wouldn't."

I think it is also funny that Lanseal suggested a skill be renamed to Supressing Fire. lol

legendslayer wrote:

The Good

2. Typos / bad English
These have been happening more and more recently. It bespeaks of laziness and lack of attention to detail. On top of that, bad English is a dead give-away that they have outsourced the game to non-native English speakers, probably in India somewhere. I don't even need to list examples of these. Just pay attention to announcements and merc bios / skills and you will find plenty. I should probably also include the fact that sometimes they still have BB character pictures in game as well here. Lazy lazy lazy.

The game isn't outsourced to India. While typos are irritating, they are not reflective of the way a country speaks or uses that language. The game is still produced and designed in the US.

BTW, I am an Indian, and English is my third language.
5+ years of living in the North-America, I am being honest, when I say that my grammar and vocabulary is better than most of my colleagues and fellow students/teachers that I interact with or interacted with.

OH REALLY?????

CXB5000 wrote:

What people (fans of FF) don't know is that Dakota and Gameview are and were the same company... owned by the same guy and operated by his outsourced teams.

I feel sorry for the people paying and hoping to get a good merc because trying to get a lethal via the roulette is truly a ripoff / con.

^^ Even I knew that haha

Arthainius wrote:

OH REALLY?????

CXB5000 wrote:

What people (fans of FF) don't know is that Dakota and Gameview are and were the same company... owned by the same guy and operated by his outsourced teams.

I feel sorry for the people paying and hoping to get a good merc because trying to get a lethal via the roulette is truly a ripoff / con.

Dude, again, it is designed and developed in the US. Its engineering team was and is still at an off-shore location ( even before the game was launched). Very little of that has changed.

I quit this game again for the second time a few days ago, and I don't see myself coming back. I see my old April Fools post got dug up. Good times.

KainHighwind wrote:

I think it is also funny that Lanseal suggested a skill be renamed to Supressing Fire. lol

That was back in the early days when the developers responded to players. Now they just ignore us and piss us off with the all the tact of a corporate lawyer.

Haha, good thing you found that post Art. Atomic, we all know they're thieves, there's no need to hide that !  

I guess the important thing to distinguish is that they are no more thieves than any other mobile game maker. Have you checked out some of the other games? It makes the return on money spent in FF look like a bargain. The fact of the matter is that we have another 5 years before governments even figure out that micro transaction games are in sore need of regulation and some of these companies that are downright usurious get a slap on the wrists (or the pocketbook).

Until then if you want to play these games, you need to come into it with realistic expectations. The devs aren't your friends, they are guys dangling a golden carrot in front of you and charging you a fortune for the opportunity to reach out and touch it.

^^^^^^ but make no mistake international regulation eventually will end this madness. Its like feeding off people with gambling addictions with no consequence.

Lanseal, the funny part to me was that apparently they are still "selectively" listening because they used that skill name recently with F9.

If anyone here has any legal background info PM me. I think we have enough ideas that have been posted on forum that have manifested itself into the game that we need to take legal action. The ideas weren't copyrighted but i bet this forum's forum admins have this website copyrighted therefor any ideas we come up with that are directly used in game we should be compensated for...... Like i said just PM me and lets see if there's not a international class action suit we could get going.

They can claim all they want that our forum isn't affiliated with them but we have screenshots of facebook about 8 months ago with them linking us as official forum.

I say we take it to the man

AtomicHermit wrote:

Arthainius wrote:

OH REALLY?????

CXB5000 wrote:

What people (fans of FF) don't know is that Dakota and Gameview are and were the same company... owned by the same guy and operated by his outsourced teams.

I feel sorry for the people paying and hoping to get a good merc because trying to get a lethal via the roulette is truly a ripoff / con.

Dude, again, it is designed and developed in the US. Its engineering team was and is still at an off-shore location ( even before the game was launched). Very little of that has changed.

That is what I said in a drunken state and I'm stickin' to that. Happy Holidays!

DaedHead8 wrote:

It's painfully ironic that we all laughed at this thread once: https://fatalfrontier.forumotion.com/t477-official-ff-forum-announcement-and-other-news

I miss gameview.

Me too, I miss the beer in the fridge and the good pay rate.

^ Hehe.
Found another job already ?

CXB5000 wrote:

AtomicHermit wrote:

Arthainius wrote:

OH REALLY?????

CXB5000 wrote:

What people (fans of FF) don't know is that Dakota and Gameview are and were the same company... owned by the same guy and operated by his outsourced teams.

I feel sorry for the people paying and hoping to get a good merc because trying to get a lethal via the roulette is truly a ripoff / con.

Dude, again, it is designed and developed in the US. Its engineering team was and is still at an off-shore location ( even before the game was launched). Very little of that has changed.

That is what I said in a drunken state and I'm stickin' to that. Happy Holidays!

My gf says im painfully honest when im drunk....... sometimes we say what we want to when were drunk lol....

Might want to change the color back to green, Arthainius. Red blends into the background and yellow sticks out too much.

was just playing around with stuff while i figure most wouldn't be on lol

Maintenance window ... drop all users and reboot ... hehehe

I changed the theme to the old school one but it has like uncommons on it.... we need cxb to do a bad ass rendering for us for the main picture

Yeah I was just randomly on. I reread my April's Fool joke. I laughed at and admire how much effort I put into it.

Arthainius wrote:

I changed the theme to the old school one but it has like uncommons on it.... we need cxb to do a bad ass rendering for us for the main picture

If you are good at something, never do it for free. -Joker   

^ Hahaha.

mamoncrief wrote:

I guess the important thing to distinguish is that they are no more thieves than any other mobile game maker. Have you checked out some of the other games? It makes the return on money spent in FF look like a bargain. The fact of the matter is that we have another 5 years before governments even figure out that micro transaction games are in sore need of regulation and some of these companies that are downright usurious get a slap on the wrists (or the pocketbook).

Until then if you want to play these games, you need to come into it with realistic expectations. The devs aren't your friends, they are guys dangling a golden carrot in front of you and charging you a fortune for the opportunity to reach out and touch it.

Mamo- Already happened.  Japan has put in regulations for  virtual card games that you pay for pulls for cards.  They consider it gambling which falls under some 1977 law.  

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2012/05/16/digital/japans-social-gaming-industry-hindered-by-governments-anti-gambling-move/#.UsBWF_RDtKs