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Okay I just decided to cache out my tokens and stop playing this week’s horrible event where you lost points for shooting stuff. I bought one gold crate and I got… 250 pig!!! They’ve actually nerfed gold crates too now. To hell with these clowns.

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So they raise the cost to get stuff with tokens and then take away points for shooting stuff in a game about shooting stuff. Awesome. It’s like this game is a subtle psychological experiment where they make a great core game and then attempt to see how crappy they can make the ongoing experience while keeping players. Then they sit back and twirl their mustaches watching their customers squirm.

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I took the first week off and came back yesterday to give it a shot. What a slog. Looks like they’ve nerfed EMPs into oblivion. Simply upgrading bots requires resources that are scant. Acquiring spark and crystals is nearly impossible now – most of that moved into the way overpriced war pass.

I’ve always been happy to drop $5 here and there for a game I like and get some value out of. I like supporting good devs. R/E makes this hard. I’ve always felt insulted by their pricing and practices – like you can feel their disdain for their customers. So I don’t spend in ABT and certainly won’t be paying $20 for a pass that seems to exist just to make their game tolerable at this point.

If the pass were $5 I would buy it and considered it a step in the right direction. If it was $10 I might even give it a shot. In fact I would be willing to bet they would make more money at $10 than at $20 because they’d get more than twice the takers. They might even make more at $5. That number seems to be working well for Supercell, which makes gobs of money.

Can you imagine the gall to charge $20 for a season pass and still have ads in your game! Unreal!!

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I don’t see how this levels the playing field with the hackers/cheaters. Unless they had their gems confiscated, they will just re-upgrade all of their stuff instantly and retain their ill-gotten overpower levels.

If anything this is a huge setback to longtime honest players and an even greater obstacle to newer players, now that spark and crystals are so much harder to come by.

I am not the guy to scream “greed” at devs. I know they are in the business and deserve to make good money for good games, but in this case it has always felt like R/E has a certain contempt for their customers. Their business model is broken, ad heavy, and geared towards whales ($30 character unlocks, etc. ), but those things clearly aren’t cutting it for them here.

I don’t know what the right answer is for them but this ain’t it. There are devs whom I’m happy to give money to here and there because it feels like the value is there, but $30 to unlock a character feels like contempt on their part. You can get a masterpiece like Red Dead Redemption 2 for $30 and never watch a damn ad. For $5 I might have paid for a bunch of characters over the years but for R/E prices I have never paid. I’m done and in a way thankful that this will free up some time for better things.

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My challenge runs were ending at 10pm MST since the recent changes. It’s a little before 8pm here now. Just looked and now it says challenge ends at 3pm tomorrow. WTF? Did I miss a day or is this a very long day? Anyone else getting this?

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Was having the same issue but seems to be working now.

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Based on the number of people pissing away gems for these challenge runs, Rovio has no impetus to fix Devastator or the run at the moment. But I’d be surprised if this thing is sustainable at this level of participation.

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This was my first week pushing for the higher leagues, as I only recently unlocked and leveled up Devastator. Spent probably 400+ gems and way too much time getting to the gold league and wound up in 6th place. All that for one legendary crate (an upgrade to a low-level character I hate) and 9 epic crates of meh.

The whole thing felt like a slog and a waste of gems. I can’t imagine how bad this was before they sped Devastator up. Fool me once… won’t be repeating the experience.

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Is it possible to get to the higher league levels without spending a bunch of gems or do I just suck at this?

It’s so slow and numbingly repetitive – breeze through first area, squeak through second area, die from 2 hits in third area. This whole challenge thing seems like a big contrivance to get you to throw away gems.

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@papakarlo – What is fast weapon recharge?

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Yeah it was there at midnight but didn’t make it until the morning for me.

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Interesting. They are still there as of now (a few hours after token exchange began). I got pretty much everything I want from the tokens I earned, so I will risk it and report back after the new event starts.

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Add me to the list of those with a broken token exchange. Finished today in 1st place and got to the exchange to find 4 tokens and last week’s items?

Luckily I spent a lot of tokens early this week – got something like 24,000 total because of a freak visit to Shockwave’s Spire.

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Update messed up the game for my iPhone XS max. It’s severely letterboxed, sides, top and bottom, like they pushed the version for a tiny phone to my big phone.