On the Mystery of the Mystery Box

My question is "Why?". The subject is the Mystery Box.

For the past several months these boxes, which randomly select prizes and MAY contain the hero you actually wanted, have been released into the game, culminating in their most recent appearance: Rocket Racoon's Mystery Box. These boxes defy all logic. Here's why.

The idea, I presume, is to make more money by forcing people to buy gold so that they can buy a ton of mystery boxes in the hope of getting the promised prize. But wasn't that what the dreaded prize wheel did as well? And, in one of the best improvements the game has ever released, the Prize Wheel was dealt away with.

Here's the thing. I would like the game to make money. I want it to keep going. However, random chance is frustrating and degrading to the players. If you want them to spend real life money, why not just make these heroes Agent-Only?

The only argument for this is that it's more "fun" to randomly get a hero that you were tentatively hoping to get. Do you know what's more fun? Gameplay! Remember those arcade games that don't have a purpose, since they're a bad way of getting fractals? How about your score in the games reflects the chance of getting a hero? That's assigning rewards to gameplay, essentially Developer 101. I don't play "Rooftop Run" unless it's part of a challenge NOW, but I'd play it the whole gameplay session if it meant I'd get a hero!

In other, better news, Drax is confirmed. Yes! Thank you. I actually see the line of reasoning for once - Drax looked like another boring strong guy character before I saw the movie. However, I still don't see the logic behind the incongruous enigma that is the Mystery Box.

-- SHSOFan.

No Ads

I deliver regular content about a game a lot of people play and that seems to have bumped up my pageviews quite a bit since I started. So far, I have delivered this content for free and it takes a lot of time to make. Does that mean that it's time to make a profit from my readers? Does that mean that I'm suddenly going to "monetize" my blog and add ads? Well I'm happy to tell you that I will not be doing any such thing. Despite this blog being the most viewed out of all of my blogs, I am not going try to make money off of it. The reason is that I love this game. You love this game. All you're doing is reading stuff about the game that you love by a guy who wrote it who also loves it! The What-Ifs I make I create because they are fun to create, not because they bump up my pageviews or give me more money from ads on this blog. When you put ads next to your content, it not only slows down loading time, but it's unfair to the person who wanted to see your content. It's like the ad is saying, "You love the content right next to me, and because you're here you'll look at me!"

That kind of thing seems wrong to me, so you can rest assured that this blog will never, ever become monetized.

So that's your mostly text post for today! Check back in a few days for the first JLA What-If Week 4 teaser! Don't forget to click on every ad on this blog so that I'll make tons of money!

-- SHSOFan.

Quicksilver Released!

Quicksilver has been released!

But, there are a few caveats. For starters, he's Agents-Only! Now that would be absolutely fine, IF he was silver. But he isn't! Instead he's 900 gold! Now, what?! Agents-Only character should not be gold. The reason they are Agents-Only is because only Agents, who have already paid money to get extra benefits, can purchase them. But instead of rewarding these paying customers with a nice silver hero, it seems like their trying to get you to shell over even more money for gold packs! And these are people who are already paying!

I'm fine with Quicksilver being Agents-Only, because he's well liked by fans who would pay the membership fee to play as him. But making them either save up a whopping 900 gold coins, (last time it was 170 gold a day if you got on the wheel and managed to collect it, which means it would take six days or a little less then a week to get 900, BUT, I don't know whether members get less now because of the limited gold rewards on the wheel and daily rewards). This is not the time to be forcing players to buy more gold. This is the time to be releasing silver heroes, putting some effort into the loading screens, lowering all the 900 gold heroes to 600, (which is still a lot of your a non-member), bringing back more tickets and releasing gold codes. Remember: REWARD the players, and while that may seem a bit self-serving, it's a well known developer's rule. They are the people who are playing your game, and if you're mean and limit everything, then you'll lose customers. I see it all the time on the Facebook page, where people decide not to play the game anymore because of the limited rewards.

I believe they can pick up again and go back to fifteen tickets per Adamantium medals won, 20, 10 and 5 gold slots, and all silver heroes in the Agents-Only section of the store.

You can do it!

-- SHSOFan.

More Heroes Are Leaving The Store

Looks like people haven't been buying Scarlet Witch, Avengers Thor, Avengers Captain America, Rogue, Punisher, Astonishing Cyclopes, Avengers Hulk, or Hope Summers enough, so SHSO's deleting them from the store.

But, before they disappear, they are having a "going away" sale, with 20% off all the departing heroes.

You know from my reviews of them that Avengers Captain America, Hope Summers, Rogue and Avengers Thor are all good heroes. Cap was a runner-up on my Top Ten List of Best Heroes, and only because I didn't have room for him. So was Punisher.

The first question I have is: WHY?

There's a great line-up of heroes in the store. Why is SHSO getting rid of these perfectly good heroes? Bad sales don't mean people hate them. It just means you've buried them in your confusing store layout.  This is the equivalent of swatting every fly you find, instead of keeping them from getting inside your home in the first place. If they'd just change their store layout so that it was easier to navigate their great selection, and stop coming out with Spiderman/Thor/Iron Man/Hulk/Wolverine repaints every two months, then the stores wouldn't be crowded, and there'd be no reason to get rid of these characters.

These deletions, which are becoming annoyingly regular, feel very gimmicky, almost like they're testing how much they can hold back rewards before customers start disappearing as fast as the heroes.

It's bad enough we have limited gold rewards for no good reason, now instead of one new hero every week they're gonna delete eight? My advice to them is: reward your players. If every time a SHSO player talks about the game to a friend he rants about limited rewards and the deletion of heroes instead of how fun, exciting and fresh the game is, then you're going to wind up losing potential customers, not to mention the frustrated players.

While I don't think two goodbye sales counts as game-quitting material, I am not in favor of their continuation.

On the bright side: well, the store IS less crowded. And there are three new awesome potions in the store!

-- SHSOFan.