So I've got a pretty unpopular opinion - so far I've been having a lot of fun with the Dungeon Keeper mobile game, and I haven't paid a cent into it. Most of the criticisms I've seen seem completely unfair.
The game doesn't *prevent* anyone from giving it a bad rating. It's *asking* people to give it 5 stars. If someone says "no" to that, they have every freedom to go to the actual store (where they'd have to go to rate any other app) and rate it one star. It's definitely a behavior that skews the ratings, but so is showing a message that says "if you like us please rate us." After all, this way, users that aren't tech-savvy enough to go to the store to rate it but want to rate it badly don't understand the power they have, and users that have that degree of tech-savviness who want to rate it *highly* have an easy way to do so...so that's skewing the ratings a bit more, but I don't think I'd call it dishonest. If you hit "no, I don't think you deserve 5 stars," their response isn't "well fuck off," it's, "tell us why." Now...we ARE talking about EA, so I'm not exactly filled with trust that they'd respond to that feedback well, but it's encouraging to me that they're asking for it.
"Digging one square takes 6 hours." I only started playing this in response to seeing all of the criticism of it, so there might have been balancing patches since most of that criticism was formed...but it takes 3 seconds to dig out most squares. I have two imps, and when I sit down just to dig, the two of them are completing their 3 second timers just a little bit after I'm ready to click on a third dirt square. There are two other types of squares - one that takes 4 hours to dig through, and one that takes 24. The game is perfectly playable without digging through those. Yeah, I have to dig through a bunch to get to some extra resources, but so far I think I'm about 1/3 of the way through the game and I have loads of space left in the area I can clear out quickly. By the way, there are *zero* squares that can't be mined out, I think - and the PC games had several of those. Is a 24 hour dig time really worse than a square you can't dig through at all? Now, I am starting to encounter some pretty hefty building construction times - 6 hours or so. I just don't *do* those tasks unless I'm about to go to work or go to bed. Oh, by the way - divide any "duration" by two if you're actually playing, because you can double your imps' work rate consistently. It has to be refreshed every half hour but it costs you nothing to do so.
Jim has also griped that there is nothing to do during these egregiously long wait times. I didn't run into any moments where I had NOTHING to do until I was a couple of hours into the game (and was facing a 15 minute wait time). Between rearranging my dungeon, buying minions, attacking other dungeons, and buying quickly-built traps, I had plenty to do. I had to keep one imp free to rearrange my dungeon if I wanted to dig, or to buy traps, but that's just resource management. I have downtime in Starcraft too, if I'm managing my resources badly. Much less of it when I make a mistake I suppose, but I can cancel any task in DK and unless I'm canceling building a room (or maybe a trap also? I haven't tried that yet.) it don't cost me any money to do so.
Now...the pace of Dungeon Keeper has *just happened* to fit perfectly into my life in the last week. I've had 10-15 minutes at a time to game, followed by long stretches of time where I'm at work, or hanging out with the girlfriend, or doing something else. (Mostly being at work.
) If I tried to sit down with it and just play, play, play for a four-hour stretch, I couldn't do that. But that's not what this game is trying to be.
It's funny that people keep listing Warframe as an example of a F2P game that feels better, because I played two or three missions in Warframe and got bored and quit. I could see all of this delicious content, and it was all behind paywalls - and meanwhile I wasn't having fun with what struck me as the very repetitive gameplay and uninteresting abilities available to me. I played it the first or second month that it was released on Steam, though, so maybe it's changed by then - and maybe I'm just not the target audience.
I had a very similar experience with LoL, too. All of these neat characters, and I only get to play a few of them, and none of the free ones (at the time) really grabbed me. I did wind up shelling out some cash for a character during the four or five matches I played. Wound up not liking that character either, and I said, "well eff this, I'm not going to spend money to find things I don't like" and stopped. I think that the UI gave me a lot of issue, though - I hate Diablo II and III too, because the pont-and-click interface just doesn't do it for me for an action game where I only control one character.
The game doesn't *prevent* anyone from giving it a bad rating. It's *asking* people to give it 5 stars. If someone says "no" to that, they have every freedom to go to the actual store (where they'd have to go to rate any other app) and rate it one star. It's definitely a behavior that skews the ratings, but so is showing a message that says "if you like us please rate us." After all, this way, users that aren't tech-savvy enough to go to the store to rate it but want to rate it badly don't understand the power they have, and users that have that degree of tech-savviness who want to rate it *highly* have an easy way to do so...so that's skewing the ratings a bit more, but I don't think I'd call it dishonest. If you hit "no, I don't think you deserve 5 stars," their response isn't "well fuck off," it's, "tell us why." Now...we ARE talking about EA, so I'm not exactly filled with trust that they'd respond to that feedback well, but it's encouraging to me that they're asking for it.
"Digging one square takes 6 hours." I only started playing this in response to seeing all of the criticism of it, so there might have been balancing patches since most of that criticism was formed...but it takes 3 seconds to dig out most squares. I have two imps, and when I sit down just to dig, the two of them are completing their 3 second timers just a little bit after I'm ready to click on a third dirt square. There are two other types of squares - one that takes 4 hours to dig through, and one that takes 24. The game is perfectly playable without digging through those. Yeah, I have to dig through a bunch to get to some extra resources, but so far I think I'm about 1/3 of the way through the game and I have loads of space left in the area I can clear out quickly. By the way, there are *zero* squares that can't be mined out, I think - and the PC games had several of those. Is a 24 hour dig time really worse than a square you can't dig through at all? Now, I am starting to encounter some pretty hefty building construction times - 6 hours or so. I just don't *do* those tasks unless I'm about to go to work or go to bed. Oh, by the way - divide any "duration" by two if you're actually playing, because you can double your imps' work rate consistently. It has to be refreshed every half hour but it costs you nothing to do so.
Jim has also griped that there is nothing to do during these egregiously long wait times. I didn't run into any moments where I had NOTHING to do until I was a couple of hours into the game (and was facing a 15 minute wait time). Between rearranging my dungeon, buying minions, attacking other dungeons, and buying quickly-built traps, I had plenty to do. I had to keep one imp free to rearrange my dungeon if I wanted to dig, or to buy traps, but that's just resource management. I have downtime in Starcraft too, if I'm managing my resources badly. Much less of it when I make a mistake I suppose, but I can cancel any task in DK and unless I'm canceling building a room (or maybe a trap also? I haven't tried that yet.) it don't cost me any money to do so.
Now...the pace of Dungeon Keeper has *just happened* to fit perfectly into my life in the last week. I've had 10-15 minutes at a time to game, followed by long stretches of time where I'm at work, or hanging out with the girlfriend, or doing something else. (Mostly being at work.
) If I tried to sit down with it and just play, play, play for a four-hour stretch, I couldn't do that. But that's not what this game is trying to be.It's funny that people keep listing Warframe as an example of a F2P game that feels better, because I played two or three missions in Warframe and got bored and quit. I could see all of this delicious content, and it was all behind paywalls - and meanwhile I wasn't having fun with what struck me as the very repetitive gameplay and uninteresting abilities available to me. I played it the first or second month that it was released on Steam, though, so maybe it's changed by then - and maybe I'm just not the target audience.
I had a very similar experience with LoL, too. All of these neat characters, and I only get to play a few of them, and none of the free ones (at the time) really grabbed me. I did wind up shelling out some cash for a character during the four or five matches I played. Wound up not liking that character either, and I said, "well eff this, I'm not going to spend money to find things I don't like" and stopped. I think that the UI gave me a lot of issue, though - I hate Diablo II and III too, because the pont-and-click interface just doesn't do it for me for an action game where I only control one character.
