Update Notice: AS Premaya, User Survey, and the Catch-Up Campaign begins!

Boringnameman, 9 months ago

Regarding the collabs in the survey, I want most of them! Also added Like A Dragon in the Other section. Kiryu would be an absolute unit, and Ichiban would have a blast with our party of unemployed do-gooders.

OpenStars, 9 months ago

It sounds like there is not much to this catch-up campaign actually, for veterans. I've already upgraded most of my grastas and I even say that as a completionist so I have...A LOT (unfortunately that menu UI is so sucky I don't even want to count how many - it would be nice if we could sort/filter them better especially non-attack ones I will say that!). The bearings people say is not a big deal. I will be glad to have 1 more Pain Staff grasta but that is about it. Overall the free 10-pull from the survey seems the biggest reward. Which helps me plan ahead b/c now I know that I can wait to start Main Story Part 3 for later this year when the second act for it comes out - probably there will be like 1k CS + a guaranteed 5-star for starting & finishing part 3 act 1 during that time. That is one of the more annoying things about this game - having to plan your advancement in order to coincide with the rewards, which 99% of the time are not offered retroactively to people who went ahead leisurely whenever they felt like - but fortunately it is not that bad!:-)

And yes, it is nice to know that there are a few things that Kbin can do better than Reddit, even as it struggles to catch up in so many other ways!:-)

Zingarinha, 9 months ago

Honestly, the newer players need the help more than veterans, since the slope for players getting into the game is rather steep, which makes it off-putting for many before they even get to the good stuff. However, they have also referred to this round of freebies as the "first supply drop", which indicates there's more to come.

Regarding rewards not being offered retroactively, I can't think of any cases in which someone wouldn't have qualified for campaign rewards by having completed content too quickly. There have definitely been ones that would require quite a bit of work to get to an appropriate reward point if you were just past one of the points. Otherwise, the ones that come to mind are either reissues of campaigns that were offered previously, in which only people completing the requirement for the first time would be eligible, or new campaigns that reward new completion as well as previous completion. Of course, I could be forgetting something entirely here!

OpenStars, 9 months ago

I was thinking of it from the standpoint that newer players do not really care or are even aware about the prior disconnect between the Global vs. Japan servers, and even now many global players seem not aware that we get ads whereas the Japan server does not (& thus the daily CS from them, which btw is said to not planned to change after this merging of release timelines). So yes, newer players need more, yet also are more unaffected by the transition.

As you say, what REALLY needs to be done is to lessen the hella long mandatory grinding in this game - especially for pain grastas - and yet one of each type does not really do all that much to change that? Now, THREE of each would do more...:-) (or even like 2 sword + 2 katana, to support the Four Tales + CC collab chars) - but actually, not even really then, b/c the real Power Creep in this game as far as equipment is concerned comes from Ores, not merely Grastas.

So permanent changes are going to do better to change that than a one-off or even second reward drop. Except Frags & Crystals were not really the major bottleneck to begin with? These days I mean, with Kid & especially Cradle of Time. I dunno, it seems like they want to offer something and this is it, but offering to allow us a chance to gamble on a daily basis with the Cradle of Time does not seem like much of a step up to reduce the grind - it just shifts it over from AD running and hoping for rewards there to... pressing buttons and hoping for rewards there instead, in a process that is far LESS fun.:-(

Maybe I am just being cranky but I do not like the direction I see the game heading in. I quite my previous game - a multiplayer tournament-based tower defense game - for this exact reason: they turned it from one requiring skill to one requiring either money or daily gambling where you have to log in every 6 hours and spin a wheel, that's it no skill whatsoever, for multiple years to be able to compete head-to-head against whales, who could also spin the wheel too. AE is nowhere near that bad, and it is single-player, and I might even welcome seeing "sales events" where players could choose to spend to get items such as grastas to lessen the grind, if that would help with their income and if it were not mandatory to be able to handle the content. On the other hand, I suppose that might creation tension in the future where doing such might BECOME closer to mandatory to be able to handle the newer content:-(.

OpenStars, 9 months ago

Regarding awards, yeah I was one of those who fell through the enormous cracks for one of them, which I think was even a guaranteed 5-star, but also tbh it probably involved at least a partial choice on my part. Maybe it was when Main Story Part 3 came out and like someone could play through one of the earlier easy prerequisites such as one IDA School Part 1, 2, or 3, or Azure Rebel or some such, or they would have to rush through sth like 30 chapters at the end of Main Story Part 2, leaving behind much content in their wake to have to go back and complete.

I recall I did such a rush for the ending of the first Mythos: I did not know that to access the latter half of that you had to finish Main Story Part 1.5, so after finishing the Mythos chapters 1-5 I then went through all of both acts to that main story part, which also required Two Knights to have been finished (fortunately I had done that or I never would have made it!), and then finished Mythos chapters 6-10. Except lacking grastas and also the Garulea gear at the time and also the singular Meta character I had at the time was AS Tsubame with her random hits - plus I was still working on the Four Tales char ADs iirc and also CC did not exist yet - with just the Persona Five Royale chars and some unfinished Four Tales ones, I did not find that end boss very approachable at all:-P.

And in return for all of that, I only got an extra 10 CS per chapter iirc, so 50 CS total. The experience was not fun - turning it into a headlong sprint just absolutely ruined the enjoyment for me:-(. Later, I went back and did 100 enemy kill achievements for each of the areas, which was a LOT of fun:-). Also, I had breezed through Ogres Spike with AS Tsubame and legit felt cheated out of the experience - who are these enemies, what are they all about? What attacks do they have? Do any inflict statuses? Can they heal? AS Tsubame's preemptive attack simply wiped every last one of them off the face of existence so that all they were was pictures until I press one button and then they get taken off the screen - it killed any sense of "immersion" or "gameplay" or "fun", it basically removed the "game" and the "play" parts of the experience, turning it into being forced to take a leisurely stroll through that area just to get to whatever was on the other side. And don't even get me started on Mimi! I even refused to use Tsubame on her and Violet alone one-shotted her! (well, with help from NS Myunfa's earth zone + crit dmg buff, which tbf is an enormous boost:-) Worst of all was the end boss Zennon Ogre: I didn't get to see any of his animations at all, he just flat-out died almost as soon as he appeared, and then I couldn't even take time to think about that since I had to zoom ahead to finish the last 5 chapters of the first Mythos in time before the event expired:-(.

Later, I went back and beat him (his shadow form) with the now-finished Four Tales cast and it was SO MUCH MORE FUN!!! He still died in sth like ~5 turns and on my first try, but he got to use his animations where he grew into this enormous giant, all large & powerful & menacing - I really enjoyed that battle and it sticks in my memory now even, especially the dichotomy between her brain rot approach (no slight against her: she made alarmed monster hunting without grastas possible for me; it is just that she was "tuned" for a later part of the game) vs. the synergy of a slash team where everyone worked together for the good of all - and the power of friendship prevailed:-).

So since playing slowly & thoroughly enjoying one part of the game was FUN and rushing content just to meet some arbitrary deadline was NOT, I probably decided to give up on even that guaranteed 5-star reward, to be able to actually ENJOY the game. I would have rushed 10 chapters or even 20, but 30 was too much. I really wish this game offered better "balance" in things like that.