Thoughts on the past month's changes (Part 3 of 3 - Gorgon Wakes & Tokens)

The third and final installment of my Monday morning rant.

In the interest of keeping any discussion directly on-topic, I’m going to post my thoughts in a few separate posts, organized by topic; this one will be with respect to Gorgon Wakes and the newfound abundance of ‘tokens’.

Part 1 of 3 - Alliance Wars
Part 2 of 3 - Hero Balance; feat. Flatline
Part 3 of 3 - Gorgon Wakes & Tokens <~~ You Are Here

Part 3 of 3 - Gorgon Wakes & Tokens

Gorgon Wakes Changes

At long last, Gorgon Wakes has been transformed into the co-op raid we’ve always dreamed of! Or has it? The answer is “kinda”.

Overall, the changes are awesome. The difficulty is much more in-line with what makes sense for the respective team levels; the enemies are more varied and interesting; the first wave has actual purpose now instead of time-wasting bullet-fodder.

The rewards also are dramatically improved. The multitude of worthless batteries is now diluted by the occasional boost of gold, stamina, bucks, frags, and skill points. This is great! I want to emphasize that I really love the changes to both the raid itself and to the rewards. The raid is now rewarding without being overly generous, and I think it’s at a healthy point in terms of balance.

There is one thing however, that still needs to be addressed before the raid is where it needs to be. It needs to be changed to 1 run per day. We have THREE Gorgon raids to do daily to keep up with the baseline for daily progress. I can’t help but wonder what the point of this is. It serves no discernible purpose other than to waste time every day.

Daily grindy repetitive crap is what you put into solo game modes; not co-ops. Trading co-op raids is a pain enough already. But with three Gorgon resets per day, we need to find someone and do six runs just to keep up. I’m going to repeat this just to make it crystal clear:

A co-op raid is the absolute worst format for a 3/day game type.

There is literally no benefit to making us find someone and both babysit our phones for 5-10 minutes every day just to hit two “play again” buttons 5 times. Please make the agony stop.

Tokens, Tokens, and More Tokens

Seriously, why all the tokens?? Hero crates have tokens now, gorgon raids have tokens now, gold and silver crates have tokens now… Hell, let’s add a new gilded crate, just so that we can make more tokens!

Is this the new trend for mobile game business models? Tokenize everything to desensitize players to spending premium currency? It’s so over the top. I don’t have any problems with it directly, but it’s exhausting keeping up with them all.

My real assumption here is that tokens exist to facilitate the normalization of purchases that normally require premium currency (gold in this case). If you are granted Hero Crate tokens as a reward for a game mode, then you can open a few for free to get you hooked on the feeling. It seems to me like a dark and muddy system designed to maximize the psychological triggers of the “loot box” reward structure.

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I couldn’t agree with this more. Why Gorgon Wakes has not been lowered to one, or even two per day is beyond me. The raid has changed very little in the nearly 2 years the game has been released. I don’t know a single person who enjoys running the same raid 6 times a day.

Before most people would just skip it since the rewards were useless for most. Now the crates can drop useful items, but it’s still tedious doing 6 GW raids per day.

Personally, I would rather see 1 GW raid per person, per day. To compensate give us more tokens and grenades per run. Maybe give 75-100 tokens per raid and remove the grenades from the crates? That way you open less per day, but have a much higher chance of getting something useful. It would be roughly the same net gain in the end, but wouldn’t give us a ton of useless grenades or make us go through 6 mind numbingly boring Gorgon Wake raids.

Also, the difficulty could still stand to be upped. GW is still pretty easy.

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