For those that are adverse to freemium gaming and the various F2P shenanigans that many apps employ: Puzzle & Dragons is arguably the most generous F2P game I've ever played, giving out expensive premium currency daily. As a result, you can get atleast a month of playtime without hitting a paywall.
While the board mechanics mentioned in the linked article are fun and interesting, there is little variation in gameplay style from level-to-level, and as a result, PAD is grindy as hell and is the reason I've stopped playing. A modern freemium mechanic other apps use to combat player dropoff for this reason is Auto play, which lets the game play itself (or simulate a runthrough of a round) for the same rewards. There's been a lot of debate in the gaming community on whether this is good design, but Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, a F2P game which implements both styles of Autoplay, has been doing very well on the Top Grossing charts.
The fact that autoplay makes for better retention of gamblers is not a long term asset; Autoplaying means it is straight up games of chance, and casino gambling is usually regulated differently from games of skill.
I tried installing Puzzle and Dragons once on my Nexus 4, and it was crashing at startup. The game uses native ARM code in a .so that couldn't be loaded because of (IIRC) missing symbols. I had a pretty standard Android install, nothing special about it, so really, I don't know how it ever worked on Android at all for other people.
Fascinating article. I got a little bit into the gme a couple years ago - just enough to get a taste of the crazy depth availble (and dedicated grind required to get far) before realizing that it was probably not a game I wanted a lose a couple of years of my life to. I had no idea about board maximizing websites though.
Being I was corrected by an GungHo employee I'd just like to point out the name is "Puzzle & Dragons" Puzzle is singular, Dragons is plural.
I also attended a talk in Tokyo by the designer of Puzzle & Dragons who pointed out he considered it an action game. It was specifically designed to require you to move fast. Since you can manipulate the entire board in a single move but you have a limited amount of time to do it the faster and more accurately you can move a piece the better you do at the game making it an action skill based game, not a typical pick 3 game.
Yes I realize that partly what the article is about.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] threadWhile the board mechanics mentioned in the linked article are fun and interesting, there is little variation in gameplay style from level-to-level, and as a result, PAD is grindy as hell and is the reason I've stopped playing. A modern freemium mechanic other apps use to combat player dropoff for this reason is Auto play, which lets the game play itself (or simulate a runthrough of a round) for the same rewards. There's been a lot of debate in the gaming community on whether this is good design, but Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, a F2P game which implements both styles of Autoplay, has been doing very well on the Top Grossing charts.
Acording to a recent estimate, something like 0.19 % (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11354546), and given the type of f2p under discussion, "the autoplayers", that fraction should be compared to something like the the rate of gambling disorders in the US population (around 1% for adults, 6-9% for youngsters http://www.ncrg.org/sites/default/files/oec/pdfs/ncrg_fact_s...)
I also attended a talk in Tokyo by the designer of Puzzle & Dragons who pointed out he considered it an action game. It was specifically designed to require you to move fast. Since you can manipulate the entire board in a single move but you have a limited amount of time to do it the faster and more accurately you can move a piece the better you do at the game making it an action skill based game, not a typical pick 3 game.
Yes I realize that partly what the article is about.