by MrMoon » Wed Jul 13, 2016 2:35 am
Hi Playmage,
Option A and B both will result in people avoiding the mines if the coins mined don't make up for the energy potions invested. With just over 100 energy a player gets about 300000 coins on the difficult level, resulting in being able to purchase 2 potions when these are in the shop. Reducing the coins rewarded with 50% or doubling the price neither makes the difficult or hell stage rewarding enough. And once you have to use revives to complete these stages players should not play the mines any longer.
As for option C, if players can only buy one potion at the time, albeit more often, there is also no need to mine very much. Where do we spend those million coins then on? Better cards, special cards?
When playing the special levels, these cost me on average 100 potions, both revive and energy. That's around 12.5 million in coins, which takes around 10 hours to mine. If I would buy this amount of potions, it would cost me around $100. Is Galahad worth this amount in real cash knowing it's statistics? With guild wars it's for me about the same, I spend between 100 to 150 revives to reach the 50000 mark and get the special card. Another $100 - $150, which I, and probably many others, can't afford.
Probably there is somewhere a good balance to be found between players spending money for special cards or highly rewarding levels and a free to play area, but I doubt it will be with the suggested changes. New players would need to bring serious cash to get some fun out of the game and more experienced players might start avoiding the game.
There might be other options, like trading cards between guild members where playmage gets as "man-in-the-middle" gems, which can increase with the more desirable cards. Or a kind of market for all players, where we can sell or trade our high-end cards while you get gems for each sale. But whatever your choice, economics should be factored in, and the proposed changes are bad economics, in my opinion that is.