• wgbirne@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    3234, which according to the game 7% of players reached.

    I was on level 2k5 years ago when there were only 3k levels. Now there are 15k…

    • Albin Jose@suppo.fiOP
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      1 year ago

      Wow awesome ! Will it become so much harder as the level goes on ? And probabily how much years will take to finish all levels ?

      • wgbirne@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        No, I don’t think that the levels become harder. They also gift so many free boosters to the players that it is way easier than 10 years ago when I first played the game.

        I also feel like that after failing a level too often, that the game is cheating for you so that you don’t lose interest.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          The game is “cheating” all the time. All the successful games with thousands of repetitive levels, go whale fishing and have engagement promoting strategies.

          The general strategy is:

          • Introduce core mechanics “organically” over the first few levels, then keep a periodic “loading screen tip” reminder
          • Add a harder level every several easier ones
          • Introduce “boosters” with a few free ones
          • Dis-associate booster cost from real money cost by having an “in-game currency” (not actual currency) with some non-intuitive conversion ratios
          • Add a second kind of free-ish in-game currency to keep players used to making in-game purchases
          • If a player runs out of boosters, give them some free ones after a while
          • Improve user engagement with regular reminders and periodic offers
          • Promote FOMO with limited-time offers
          • Add mechanics with obvious MiniMax-ing strategies, that are however impossible for a person with a normal life to MiniMax, while offering a way to use in-game currencies to correct for that
          • Keep adding cosmetic changes
          • Introduce slightly new mechanics once in a while every a lot of levels, combine mechanics together if you’ve run out of ideas
          • For each level, have a predefined setup that makes it extremely easy to solve, along with normal generators that make them hard to solve
          • Use the easy setups to showcase new mechanics and boosters
          • Use the hard setups to make people want to spend boosters, and buy them, and use real money to purchase in-game currency to do that
          • Ideally, have a level generator with tunable difficulty that can be adapted for every user
          • Offer whales big spenders exclusive VIP levels, that require a lot of spending to win
          • Add one or more “leaderboards” for big spenders to showcase how much they spend good they are
          • Remove real world time clues for big spenders, don’t let them realize for how many hours they’ve been throwing their money away
          • If a big spender drops their spending or engagement level, shower them with offers, assign a personal manager, offer invitations to real world events… whatever it takes (up to a certain % of their expected monthly spending)
          • Periodically expand the game with hundreds and thousands of “new” levels… which follow the same rules

          Bonus points if you add “seasons” and a “season pass”.

          Extra bonus if you place and cross-promote a number of games with the same strategy but different cosmetic themes.

          Casino mode: have thousands of “games” all in one, with different cosmetics, complex winning modes, and very simple mechanics (press button to spin, press button to auto-spin 1000 times, etc)… but in most jurisdictions you need to calculate and disclose the exact odds of winning in each mode for every level generator.