Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26093926-20150909014645/@comment-26385541-20150910052945

First of all, thanks for opening a discussion on this! I think a lot of people have been wanting to talk about it, and I'm glad to see other people's opinions being shared.

I think the War Training Expansion was definitely better than the Underground Treasure Chest, with its 100 levels of doom, but still a huge grind, which is pretty boring with the same old background and BGM (honestly, I spend most of my in-game time reading comics or watching shows in another window). I would be interested to see whether Nitro+ could implement some sort of measure where the rare sword drop rate increased the more runs a player did (say, to reward players who ran a map 100+ times to no avail). I feel like that would make grinding more worthwhile.

That being said, I (by some freak accident of chance) obtained Mikazuki, Nagasone and two Nihongous. My saniwa level increased by ten. I unlocked all but 2 shinken hissatsu (awakened states) of the swords in my inventory. I max-leveled my Iwatooshi and Hotarumaru. It was great for me, but probably not for newcomers. This was definitely an event for more seasoned players.

Even so, I definitely felt like I was racing the clock during the last week grinding for Akashi, and since I started the event with probably 20 help tokens, that was probably where I felt the pinch the most by the event's end. After spamming help-token-reward missions and dailies, I can say I really wish there were more dailies and shorter missions that offered help tokens as a reward. You can get up to what--5 per day? I pushed literally all of the swords in my inventory (that weren't away on a 12 hour mission) below half health just to grind for Akashi in the last week. By the end, they were all so damaged I couldn't even make it to the boss node. And they -still- haven't recovered. I was irritated that they would have the gall to start another event immediately after the War Training Expansion without giving us time to recoup our losses.

And yes, higher drop rates would be optimal, especially for those with school and full-time jobs and lives outside of the game who don't have endless hours to burn grinding the same map 100 times (I got through E3 98 times--the most of any map I ran, with my token shortage problems, and all for nothing.) Low drop rates make you feel great when you get the drop after a long grind, but the fact that another player could get that drop on their first run seems to be really frustrating to a lot of people. Maybe that's the 'thrill of RNG,' I don't know. It kind of feels like there's something lacking though when your efforts aren't rewarded.

I suppose we could look at it as a learning experience... it wasn't a bad event, but it did have a lot of shortcomings, and this game still has a long way to go in terms of giving us a cohesive story and in terms of making the gameplay more interesting. It's at times like these that I feel the "freemium" aspect of the game most strongly (when I'm being wrung for tokens and steel especially). I think the draw of having a new sword is a huge player motivator, for better or worse,  but I still wish the game itself weren't so capitalistic.

Sorry I wrote a novel, but thanks for reading if you did. ^v^