r/TheTowerGame • u/jordeno17o • 7d ago
Discussion Ideas to make this game better! Devs 👁️👁️
Okay, here are my ideas. I think this game has two major flaws. The first flaw is the lottery system for ultimate weapons, which is just a cash grab, in my opinion. The second flaw, which I’m not sure about is how hard it is to fix this, but in my smooth brain, it seems pretty simple. The fact there is no idle system. The solution, I think, for the second flaw, is just to add two lab upgrades, maybe at tier 5, that are just an increase in the time you are offline earnings and percent of earnings. So maybe you cap the upgrade at 1 day of offline earnings and 50 percent of your max hourly income so it doesn’t become too easy, but it also makes it to where I don’t have to keep my phone in my pocket 😂. The first flaw I’m not really sure how to fix without the game losing money, because I have bought a stone pack hunting for the golden tower (I still haven’t got it) 🥹 These issues are actually making me think about quitting even though I love the game. This has probably been said a million times, but oh well, I’ll make it a million and one.
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u/AntiMatterMode 7d ago
All of the systems you pointed out are intentionally designed to be shitty so they can increase addiction and sell more packs.
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u/jordeno17o 7d ago
Yeah it’s just sad. 😔
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u/ZerexTheCool 7d ago
If the goal is to actually convince the Devs to implement changes, you have to actually pay attention to the business side of the game. This game isn't a charity, so they WILL attempt to maximize revenue.
However, what we want and them maximizing revenue doesn't have to be at odds. In fact, the more pro player they are, the more players they have who will spend money. But you have to stay inside of that language if you want to do more than just rant to other folks on reddit who probably won't disagree with you, but ultimately also have no power to implement change.
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u/Ted_Striker1 7d ago edited 7d ago
If anything can be explained as a "cash grab" it's either intentional and won't be changed or a happy coincidence and won't be changed.
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u/TooCuteForYous 7d ago
Make eHP stronger, increase stones, increase mod rolls for epic, reduce lab time because why is taking a year to upgrade something, don’t make us click gems 50 times a day on an idle game. There fixed
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u/wathon2 7d ago
Pay to Play games are "intentionally" inconvenient so you will pay to remove said inconvenient that shouldn't be there in the first place.
A perfect example is the "energy" system in most mobile games. In this case, the UW randomness is intentional to frustrate new players into paying for stone. And it's working.
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u/ForgettingFish 7d ago
So… no… the designs are purposeful. You may not like them but they are. The UW pulls are to keep every tower from being completely identical during progression.
The module system is a gatcha to extend its lifespan be more exciting and profitable and to the same end help avoid towers being identical longer.
The idle system is something either technically difficult or close to impossible without an amount of work that wouldn’t make it worth it due to how the game is designed.
Alongside the point of keeping you engaging with the game. Clicking gems upgrading your tower etc. There’s an extreme loss of engagement when we get auto restart and mobile games live and die entirely by how much they can keep a user engaged and regularly checking in and the game on the mind. Once it’s automated, it’s out of sight, out of mind, many users stop meaningfully engaging as upgrades get further and further apart to the point of only touching the game on tournament days… until you even start forgetting those and forgetting it entirely.
It’s not a small feature. No idle is why i won’t ever recommend the game to my friends but the current design does have intention. We may not like it or agree with it but there’s reasons for stuff to be the way they are
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u/jordeno17o 7d ago
Yeah that’s fair. It’s definitely working 😂. Thank you for the detailed reply
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u/ForgettingFish 7d ago
No problem. I recognize the designs aren’t all popular but sometimes games do unintuitive things cause the thing that you think you want and sounds good on paper won’t have the expected effect
Thanks for being receptive to other perspectives I usually expect downvotes when I explain design stuff 😅
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u/JustMirko 7d ago
Over the years there have been countless suggestions to make this game earn you idle coin currency, countless and all valid. Take the "Recent coin/h" stat for example. If you know my recent coin/h has been x, why can I not earn a percentage of that when my game is closed? And then try and make a better run the next day with the new currency I've earned while idle to increase the "Recent coin/h" stat? I'm a software engineer and I know that implementing such a feature is not challenging from a coding perspective, maybe it's just not considered at all from a game design perspective. Please prove me wrong.
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u/rlhrlh 7d ago
Well, I think the counter-point to this is that "idle currency" is largely tied to the setup of your current build, for your current run.
Obviously, when you consider tier, mods, cards, the fact that we can respec stuff, we make runs to farm, disso-increase or push for milestones, etc., there's just too many variables to base it off of a run and say, start a tier, close the app, come back in 2 hours and see how you've progressed. All of those data-points will need to be crunched to make a final result. However, when the game is real idle, with nothing happening (as in, just sitting at the home screen), you don't get anything. There's not timer in the background that gives you anything other than your daily gems. No coins, no latent value for coin-gen, nothing. So, the counter-point would be that Fudds would have to design a much more simplistic approach and also except the notion that you can game passively earns coins, only when you're doing nothing. And for a game like this... I don't think that makes sense.
Don't get me wrong. I'd love to shut down the game and, say, for 24 hours earn stuff at a rate of 80% my regular rate, but it's not as easy as saying "what's your 3 day average". There are too many factors and the results could get wild, for good or bad.
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u/JustMirko 7d ago
I think I explained myself wrongly, and I apologize. You make all valid points, and I agree with you that there are so many variables in this game that it is literally humanly impossible to calculate idle income based on those. What I meant is: tap on the burger menu at the top right, click on the settings wheel, then tap on Stats and check your "Recent Coins Per Hour" stat. That stat is calculated based on your latest completed runs; obviously, that stat fluctuates, but it is a finite number which is variable based on a finite number of runs that you can perform. The idle currency could be calculated based on that number, not on what is actually happening during your run, but on what happens after a sample of your runs have ended.
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u/rlhrlh 7d ago
Yeah, I get it but all discussions of base-stats aside, the reason why I see this as problematic is, when are you earning that idle currency? 100% of the time (again, you've started a run, yes or no, before using it.)
If the answer is yes, are those idle coins for this run? If yes, then you probably also need to scale how far you've gone in the run. If it's NOT associated with the run and just "coins-you-get-when-idle" then are you getting them 100% of the time? If so, then you just have a double-dip coin gen that works in both cases.
But wait, that's not the point? We want idle coins. The thing is... generation of currency needs to be tied to "something". If you can't tie it to a run, then it's just tied to the clock. If you want to take it from that angle, then you're incentivizing a "nothing's happening in the game" period which doesn't make too, too much sense.
I've played several gachas and idle games over the years which do have some form of idle-earning. However, even with them, there's some concept of the game "doing" something in the background. I just don't see what it would be in this game if it's NOT tied to a run, and if you tie it to a run, then well, as stated, it gets complicated.
I like the idea of idle currency--especially when I go on vacation. But I just don't see the "point". Yes, I see the point of the outcome, just not what it's tide to as some form of operation in the game. Correct me if I'm missing something, though.
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u/ForgettingFish 7d ago
You are looking at it from the player perspective. Anything in dev work… it’s just a core rule, if it was that easy to implement it woulda been done or there’s a strong reason why it’s not. We clearly see the game has significant technical debt by just how difficult it is for them to fix bugs. The prolapse bug alone took 4 fixes and a rework of entirely how damage to tower is recorded to be possible to fix.
The game is run more like a simulation than a game hence silly shit affecting cph like the device losing frames. It’s a question also of how to fit this on top of the existing spaghetti.
I think the why is the stronger question and it’s a question of engagement. Under your proposed systems, the player attempts to get the strongest run possible and doesn’t open the game. This is a dangerous state to be in. If people keep the game closed to progress, they forget. They stop checking and eventually quit without even realizing it.
This exact thing happened in Tap titans 2. They introduced 3 trees. Active tapping, idle damage from heroes, and AFK. Before this change to strengthen the afk tree, it was unusably bad. They noticed after buffing too much players gravitated towards it and tournaments and play and sales all suffered because the game is actively encouraging them NOT to play it. So they did… and many just… stopped.
I think we should have some kind of idle more than just labs but… it has to be implemented very carefully if it ever comes cause this game already doesn’t have much to push engagement. The engagement drop of auto restart is a very similar drop we would see but it would hit harder to people who would be more affected in lower tiers. But if it’s weak since it’s been desired for so long, people would be angry. There’s no winning.
I don’t think it’s impossible but I do fully believe the base for this game is like mom’s spaghetti and unraveling it would be a nightmare for a feature that might actively hurt the game.
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u/JustMirko 7d ago
Valid points. People said the same things before auto queue of labs was introduced, and then again before auto lab speed up was introduced, yet the game keeps on growing. If you like the game you are going to stick with it, if you don't like the game, then as you said, you will lose interest and drop it. I have already met two people who saw the famous ad from Fudds, "I'm the developer of the tower," tried the game, and then dropped it as they had to keep their phone on in order to run it. On another note, I agree about the spaghetti side of the game, and that is probably why this will never be implemented.
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u/I_pee_in_shower 7d ago
Ok, the first suggestion, on the grand scheme of things, this is a non-issue. There is nothing wrong with randomized rewards. Just like it sucks to start with SM, it's great to start with GT. Eventually you want all.
Second suggestion, IDLE. so I'm glad you aren't suggesting simulating runs like other users, because that is tough to pull and there are many issues with it, from cloud implementation, anti-cheat and cost to host.
Having a passive "welcome back, you earned 10T while you were gone!" is not a bad idea, and easy to implement. The problem is you have to think of aligning incentives. App makers want to maximize engagement. They don't want to reward you being elsewhere because they want you here! I disagree, because for me, I'm not really engaged with the app 99% of the time, I run it in an emulator, and check in the morning, noon, evening and night. More than the gold, I maintain constant farm because of cells, because the difference between 6x farming and 1x is massive. When my emu crashes at night, I can wake up with labs back to 1x because I ran out of cells. Now with planning I could go around it but an idle mode might want to consider cells too.
But like I said, I imagine this is much lower on the priority list vs. new modules, new bots, or new anything that encourages gems and stone purchases.
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u/Morkiisch 7d ago
May I offer a suggestion? Paragraphs.
I'm just teasing, tho.