Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26093926-20150909014645/@comment-26289928-20150909092920

I felt like this event was a major step-up in comparison to the previous one, both in gameplay and profit-wise.

This time we were guaranteed that we could have a chance at obtaining a new sword and/or swords that were not obtained previously, instead of relying on blind hope that we would get something good after completing 100 floors which turned out to be a huge dissapointment (hint hint smol completion banner). In a way nitro+ was being extremely generous with this event, even going so far to provide copious amounts of exp in non-exp infested maps to train your bb swords. (they doing great in trying to win back their playerbase)

But.

Since Nitro+ is a company, and they gotta make $$$, they must find a way to keep players playing for as long as they can. Here's why the rarity-5 yari (conspiring with Nihongou) is secretly Hakata: by getting player's swords to repeatedly get stabbed and repaired under long hours, plus the impatience and incentive to get Nihongou under a time limit (be it a week or four), it forces players to consume resources, mainly help tokens (though I could see people running out of steel). When players run out of resources, well, they have to buy them using real money. Tsuru's official artist and Nihongou's official artist both wasted 300+ help tokens before finally getting Nihongou, and I bet some players out there wasted much more.

"Well," you say, "This isn't fresh news. That R5 yari has existed since the dawn of the planet of World 6." What I am trying to establish here is that Nitro+ has finally gotten around to maximizing the utility (and profit) of the R5 yari. The incentive of clearing W6 or clearing 100 floors was much lower than clearing E4 repeatedly, since the event was a) time based and b) had a clear goal and prize(s) at the end. This is visible improvement in terms of marketing and gameplay, thought not the most innovative one.

Now I am going to address the issue of the extremely low drop rate (after 450+ runs, I shit you not, I still did not get Nihongou. But I got Akashi. Which means that I still have to deal with the bullshit of W6 that is mainly 6-4. I thought my life was over. I am digressing. Sorry.). To keep players glued to their computer screen for a longer time, devs made the drop rate disgustingly low. Like, 0.8-1% low. This works, however, after a while, it just doesn't. People who play other games with similar gameplay (cough cough kantai collection) will proabably say, "well, it works for KC, I sat in front of my comp for a month without eating or sleeping to get my ship waifu." The problem is, KC has much more characters to run with, providing the game in events with evened out drop rates, no matter how low that chance gets, you (seem to) still have more of a chance to obtain a rare ship, because there's just that many rare shits you can get. Unlike this event, where you can only get a maximum of 2 rare (I say this as drop rates are extremely low and guaranteed) swords per map, interest dies out rather quickly in comparison. (cue in the comments on the event page screaming for Nihongou) That being said, it would be much in nitro+'s benifit (and the playerbase's sanity) to increase the drop rate to about 3-4%. Albeit still on the low side, it would seem much more attainable and therefore keep people going.

That being said, nitro+ still has a lot of issues to sort out in game, be it copyright issues or simply game development. The current event (seriously, recycling an old event right down to the backgrounds just to show that Hakata can shit out koban (anticlimactic)) does not show the game's potential to grow or innovate new features. Right now the fandom is the only thing keeping the game alive, not the other way around, and that should be and is an alarm bell to any game dev.

Anyways. That's a story for another discussion. Sorry for being so long winded, and congrats and thanks to those who read to the end.