Little too pay to win

[FettyAWP]

With most money purchases such as pet token, crystal slots, improved ina, etc.
It has made the game a little easier and convenient.

However, with the improved crystal (25%), I feel like the game has definitely shifted to a little pay to win. I have already bought 4 pet tokens and would not like to purchase more for the time being, but this is so much improvement to the game play I'm a little concerned how far i'll be put back in comparison to people who get it and thus get higher cp...

Would it be asking for too much if we can get improved crystal upgrade with GP or take off the 25% limit on regular upgrades? thank you

[Ryu82]

Hm I don't think the effect of that extra 25% is that big.
Sure you will get a few more cp each run and can upgrade them higher faster. But the boost from crystal power is linear, so the more you have, the smaller is the effect of new crystal power.

What do you mean with the 25% limit on regular upgrades?

I'm not sure if I change anything on this, but I plan to add a challenge sooner or later which increases the effectiveness of the crystal factory. Like if you do 25 of the new challenge, the initial percentage is 25% higher and the crystals give a bigger boost, ubs give more energy or stuff like that.
I'm not sure when I will add that, but that would also improve the f2p effects compared to that extra 25% quite a bit.

[Zorlond]

Not sure the 25% crystal upgrade would mean much, anyways. I'd only imagine it'd be useful for Ultimate and God crystals, seeing as how they have lower upgrade rates anyways. For the four regular crystals, it's pretty much only one crystal lost per upgrade if you do them all at once (with an extra one lost at about lvl 4 or 5, and probably another later on, only been up to 9 so far).

Since Ultimates start at 62%, it's pretty much 'lose half each time', with the paid upgrade moving them closer to the regular crystals. Those Ultimate crystals are really powerful, though. Haven't had the chance to test the God crystals, yet.

I am, however, concerned about the extra crystal slot upgrades. Being stuck to two crystals is pretty serious, especially compared to the potential for having six at once. It'd basically triple the potential strength of crystals, being able to equip all of them vs just two.

If you're wary about making these upgrades easy to get (and to be fair, everybody's got bills to pay), maybe consider making them purchasable only with Baal power? We already can't hoard that like God power, so opportunities to use it would be limited.

[Ryu82]

There are people wo can reach P.Baal V50 within an hour, so that would give them the slots basically for free.

Even the additional slots are not as much extra gain as you might think. You would also need to focus and upgrade more modules with more slots you have. So the grade you can get for each crystal is lower. With 2 slots, you can just focus on the ones you need the most and ignore the others. So with more slots you don't automatically gain much more crystal power.

Then the crystal slots are also optainable with lucky draws. So even a free player can get all 4 extra slots with a bit luck and enough playtime.

[CmdrQuartz]

Also pay to win, to me at least, would imply you NEED to pay in order to really play the game. That there's a brick wall that all free players would hit that they'd NEED to pay to get past, or else suffer incredibly slow progress.

The only thing I'd say, considering there is a maximum effect, is that Improved Crystal Upgrade should instead be a GP upgrade that you buy 1% at a time. Since if there's a challenge that's going to raise it 25% and upgrading each module can increase it up to another 25% that means you'd only see 5% of that bought upgrade's effect on the final God Power crystal. It would mean you could reach 95% faster on those last 2 crystals, but ultimately makes that $13 worth less and less the more you pursue crystals, when something I'd spend money on should be providing me with more or equal value as time goes on. Like the equip slot, the value is always there because it's always an extra crystal, always more crystal power on a rebirth.

[FettyAWP]

Im talking about limit as in once you hit level 25 on crystal level factories the % of success doesn't increase.

[Ryu82]

Where did you read that there is a limit level 25 on crystal modules? It doesn't have a limit and you could theoretically upgrade even the god module until you always have 95% upgrade chance. It would just take months to do that which is not effective to go on that long on a single rebirth.

[FettyAWP]

if you hover over "level" on crystal factory it says it's capped at 25% increase.

[FettyAWP]

Also, could you make it so that even if I set the level of the factory, let's say ultimate crystal, to level 20 and make crystals at that level but I unlocked it to level 30 that I would get level 30 increase % benefits and not have to change from 20 to 30 then upgrade and go back down to 20 to continue creating?

[Ryu82]

Ah you are right, I totally forgot that. Well currently it is only the description and I forgot to add the cap. Maybe I will keep it as it is then if people already complain about that.

[FettyAWP]

The cap is definitely there. When I change my mystic module to level 35 from 25 there's no increase in % success.

and also I really appreciate you listening to every player's concerns and suggestions :)

[FettyAWP]

Or since pet stone is scarce and rare,
we could perhaps put up crystal slots/improved/fridge/etc purchasable through it too?
Since we already have pet token for 300000, I don't think this would be a bad addition.

[Ryu82]

Okay you are right, then I just forgot that I added that cap. I will think about what to do with it and maybe I will remove or at least increase it for the next update then.

As for the pet stones, well I will also think about that. For a similar price of 300k, It might not be a bad idea to add this.

[FettyAWP]

Thank you ryu,
I have gotten lucky on lucky draws and spent money on pet tokens so I have pretty much unlocked every pet that needs a pet token so there really wasn't an incentive for me to get pet stones. With the addition I'll enjoy the campaigns a lot more. Thank you for everything!

[CmdrQuartz]

Well, using your current logic 300k petstones is equal to $15 so 20k petstones would be $1. So if you think that's fair value you could make a full store out of it.

[Slimurgical (Stormy)]

Last I checked though, you can't actually buy anything with real money that can make the crystal factory stronger, I don't think.

Plus, if you had a thousand dollars, sure it'd be pay to win, but... yeah, not really tbh.

This idle game just generally takes a long time ot get truly far into it. With my playtime (granted all of it spent with the game window constantly open for most of it) I'm only at Baal Lv. 7 at most. Not the longest idle game though. Adventure Capitalist took me far longer, about a couple of years to beat.