Thread:TexasSweetie/@comment-28129975-20160512162035/@comment-26893147-20160512201623

Hi Texas Sweetie,

I've read your post and while I feel a bit lost over the first part of the log (I obviously missed something somewhere) but I do get what you mean from the paragraph that starts at "Dragon Story / Team Lava / Storm 8 is a business" and I would like to write my comment on the issue.

First, I've been playing DS for a year. I think I joined the game sometime around May-June 2015, not sure. In that year I quickly learned the dynamics and the aspects of both DS and S8. All those in game purchases, the gold rewards, the in game tweaks, etc. And what I got is a very calculated business plan behind the scenes. As you said, this is a business, and they have to earn to make it worth their while. But in my opinion they are crossing some invisible line into too much greediness, that I'm sure is much more obvious to those that play longer than I am.

I don't think that the goal of 2,850 is a typo. I think this is a genuine attempt to see how far they can push the players. Remember Dragon Tales #8 where you had to raise Beast Dragon to level 15? How many players managed this particular task? The previous tales required us to raise dragons up to level 13 at most. Than they jumped to 15. Perhaps they realized that too many players could not complete it or perhaps they got a lot of complaints from players. Because from the next DT till now it seems they settled on Level 14.

The same goes for other aspects of the game. They try to push as far as they can to see the breaking point.

All these tweaks are meant to see, business-wise, where people would spend more gold, hence more money.

This is why we also get now less bonuses: in 2015 a bonus for new installation was 30g and now only 14g, and only 7g to reach X level in the newly installed game instead of 15g.

S8 only reason for existence is to earn money. I get it, I respect it, but I don't have to like it or even participate.

'''Seems to me that game developers are fine tuning the game to be a lot more addicting. There was this study done about how Candy Crush exploits weaknesses in the human brain to make us keep playing:'''

theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/apr/01/candy-crush-saga-app-brain

I think S8 learned the lesson as well and they are doing their best to exploit the same weaknesses.

I've been contemplating for a while about leaving the game. The game becomes too demanding and too addicting - you are always pushed to complete more goals, to earn more gold. To complete this, to have that, and so on. Bottom line - I spend waaaaaaaaaaaay too much time on the game - preparing food for nest DT, Preparing for battle, and now the newest mechanism of torture - Leaderboard.

And a final point: as a matter of principle, I have never spent any money on the game. In fact, I have never even connected and means of payment to any of my Cell phone, nor will I ever do that. As far as I'm concerned game developers can earn their money in other ways. among them commercials. I will not waste money on something this stupid as a few point in a game or a few extra dragons. Seems so stupid.

Very sorry for the looooooooong dissertation. I have a tendency to carry on ;)