@burbman
Not sure about your definition of “heavy grinding”, but you must be spending every waking moment auto-grinding something to take 30 classes up ten levels of mastery in just ten weeks… Where are you grinding, and how many hours a day (and days a week)? At the rate I go, auto-grinding the Pool with just two birds about 45 hours a week, there is no way I’d even be close to doing that in just 70 days.
As for the upgrades and why I complain — you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head as to why: the only “upgrades” we are getting are samey events and raises to caps. Those aren’t upgrades, in my view (and if you find them to be a reason to stay, that’s subjective). They add nothing to game play. If you’ve had to resort to starting other teams, isn’t that proof positive that the game is offering nothing new to veterans? That a true version 2.0 would be welcome?
In fact, that is EXACTLY what Rovio did when they made the so-called upgrade to Go! — they essentially made everyone start over. No new tracks, no new REAL content, just dismantled everyone’s wealth and assembled karts and said, “Yay! A new game!” I’d love to know how many players they lost at that time.
At this point I am not sure Rovio knows what a true game enhancement looks like. In all of their games, their idea of value-added updates have been confined to the following for the past year (or more):
— Churning out an ungodly amount of new levels really quickly, even though the levels are pretty much the same except for small mechanics tweaks every once in a while. This forces people (especially veteran completionists) to pony up cash for extra lives and power-ups just to keep up with updates (see Angry Birds 2 for this).
— Totally resetting everyone and calling it an update (see Angry Birds Go! for this).
— Adding some sort of multi-player aspect that is usually just a grind or filled with cheaters, or impossible to do well at without spending power-ups (see the Epic Arena, Bad Piggies Cake Race, Seasons challenges, and the Angry Birds Master League as examples).
— Adding online log-ins and backups, either to Rovio servers or Facebook. This is actually welcome, except backups don’t work worth a damn. I lost a ton of progress by “syncing” to Facebook on Seasons and Bad Piggies. Never again. So, even something potentially useful ends up sucking.
— Adding “events”. This is not really any better than churning out new, samey levels when the events are re-hashes that require no real strategy or effort other than mindless checking in and grinding away.
— Adding personalized things to buy, like new gadgets or skins, etc. This is not really all that fun. It’s a gimmick. (see various games’ sticker/scrap books and Bad Piggies scrap machine for examples — I have all the latest Bad Piggies gadgets!).
I will admit I want to see what happens in Epic after all Elite classes are out. But I’m not holding my breath that it will be anything all that interesting.
At this point you might ask, “What CAN they do — aren’t the above facets the way games get upgraded these days?” I don’t have an answer to that. But I know there used to exist NO Angry Birds, then there was. There used to exist NO Epic, then there was. Rovio CAN develop imaginative content that would make us all go, “Holy Wowzers, didn’t see that coming, and this is fun!” They’ve done it before.
I just can’t remember the last time it happened.
Thanks,
sutekh137
