Rovio must be desperate for cash to risk alienating long time players in exchange for short term gains. They made their big money on the freemium model, converting casual “play if it’s free” gamers into “I’ll pay whatever it takes” die hars. They are calculating that losing the cheap players, the ones who never pay, has no downside. Now they have doubled down, calculating that they can afford to lose the Daily Gem Letter buyers. The only reason to buy the Gem Letter is to get th bonus feathers. But a thousand feathers don’t matter much when you get to where you need thirty or fifty thousand to level up a bird. By making the KPP a required DQ, they hope to pry some of the gems out of your hands. All it does is make me want to uninstall the game. It goes against the sense of fair play. Some people seem to argue that the game is supposed to be hard so it’s a challenge. Hard is one thing, changing the ground rules is something else. Yeah, if you’ve got 800 FP and all the money in the world to pay for gems, you need a challenge. If you have other things to do with your time than play DC over and over, then it’s not a question of being entertained by a “challenge”. It takes too much time. Rovio obviously wants to push the players to convert more of them to paying customers who will blindly accept any challenge no matter what it costs in time or money. They came up with the Arena for this reason – players weren’t paying to complete map levels faster, so it’s a place for the more competitive ones to go for rewards at a higher cost to play. Must not be enough people doing it, because now they are trying to make the basic game more expensive to play. The only way they will stop is if the strategy fails. Rovio uses an A/B strategy to test. Some players get the harder games, the weaker birds, the KPP as DQ, the survivor pigs, the nerfed birds, the Arena opponents with 100 more FP, the impossible physics like floating blocks of wood. Then they calculate the results to see which group earned them more money. If they make an extra ten grand on paying players vs lose two grand by alienating casual players, what do you think they will do? They will continue to “optimize your game experience “ until the numbers show declining revenue from the cheating levels and start backing off on the difficulty. I’m obviously in the “see what they will stand for” test group and I’ve had it. The game just isn’t fun to play under these conditions. When skill doesn’t matter, when planning doesn’t matter, when all that matters is buying gems – it’s not fun. The fun isn’t in winning no matter what. The fun is in solving the puzzles and when the puzzle isn’t solvable – because it’s not a puzzle, it’s a revenue source – there is no fun. I said I wouldn’t do the Gem Letter any more, then they backed off on making me do KPP, and now it’s three times getting it as DC. I’m done with the letter. I encourage everyone to do the same. Boycott the Gem Letter until Rovio promises to play fair. That’s nine bucks a month they are getting, which is over a hundred dollars per player per year. So much for a “free” game!
