Topic

Some thoughts on daily limits

Here is a link to pictures from my 1,000,000 imagination day

To quote the Community Guidelines, “In Glitch, the journey matters far more than the destination. This game is not about just winning, leveling up, or amassing the most currants.” Touche. So let me assert in advance that the point of this post isn't to brag about a “high score.” It is to illuminate my concern is that a game mechanic is out of balance, specifically the lack of any limit on the use of upgrade cards.

There are three important types of limits on using resources that I can identify. First, there are daily limits on the frequency of use. Familiar examples include harvesting trees, caressing emblems and squeezing chickens. Most of these are limits are on a particular item but some apply to the whole class, i.e. I can harvest each spice tree twice a day but I can only revere one Spriggan icon per day no matter how many I have. Second, a barnacle can be scraped more than once a day but only after it has regrown. That has the same effect as a cool down period or waiting for herbs to grow. Third, there are daily limits on the yield from a particular activity. There is a cap, for instance, on the amount of energy I can gain from meditating and the amount of imagination produced by shrine donations.

On a normal game day, when I'm just enjoying the pigs and trees, I barely notice these limits. After milking a particular butterfly twice, I happily move along to the next one. At some point, however, I began to want more imagination than I was getting from bumbling around Ur. The cost of brain capacity increases was going up fast and I still had to learn Mining IV and Teleportation V. The thought of incurring large penalties on skills that take days to learn motivated me to pay for a bigger brain.

After trying a few other strategies, I noticed that there are no daily limits on using upgrade cards. I had been using them sporadically but only the ones I bought with imagination from the daily shuffle. Suddenly I realized that I could buy an upgrade card for $400 or less at auction and get about 1,500 imagination in less than one minute. At that time I was level 35 with a quoin multiplier of 23.85.

Buying cards at auction gave me so much more imagination than anything else I could do in the game. I quickly maxed out my brain but I kept going with the cards out of curiosity. At one point I bought every upgrade card available at auction (except reshuffles and get-out-of-hells) at up to $1,000 each, but the supply was quickly replaced at affordable prices.

So after milking these cards for a while I wanted to see how far I could push them. Pretty far! I'm sure other glitchen must have earned 1,000,000+ imagination in a single game day, but probably few in under 2 hours (real time) and even fewer by using less than 1,000 energy. It took me from 1:27am to 11:57am in glitch time, which is about an hour and 45 minutes. And I didn't really use any energy at all. I started the game at 2,400 and logged out at 2,381.

My preliminary work showed that I got the most imagination per minute from Sky Plunge, so I bought several hundred tickets (thank you Glitch Remote and the glitchen who made large quantities of tickets available for sale in their towers). By this point I was level 47 with a multiplier of 82.6. I wanted 1,000,000 imagination net of the cost of using the tickets, and I calculated that would take 253 Plunges. To be safe I brought 320 with me and teleported to the lowest spline environment I know of – Axis Denyde. It actually took me just 249 tickets to reach my goal. I had forgotten to factor in the Qurazy quoin increases from leveling up during the session (which I did twice). I did ticket #250 for good measure and then logged off. So the results you see on my screen capture are purely from tickets. My imagination cost for using each ticket was 1,652 each, so the net increase in my expendable imagination was 1,417,390 – (1,652 * 250) = 1,004,390. Almost immediately I spent it all on increasing my quoin multiplier to 100.

All that to say that, in my view, there should be some kind of limit on the use of these cards. I'm not trying to shut down a loophole that I exploited so that others will not benefit from it. I would be happy to go back to give up all the levels and upgrades I've acquired if it will make Glitch a better game. It's just that the imagination yield from cards is so disproportionate to everything else that it calls out for some kind of a limit. Unless the intent is to leave a back door open for rapid advancement.  Certainly the double limitation on meditation (cool down + maximum energy yield) seems absurd when compared to the raw power of unlimited upgrade cards. 

In my view the best limit that could be applied is a cool down period, similar to teleporting or meditation.  I'm not sure how long it would have to be, but even a minute or two could limit shenanigans like mine. A daily maximum on card use could work too. I hope such a limit would apply to the whole class of upgrade cards, though. That way glitchen could do 10 of their favourite card rather than 1 of each (or 50 instead of 5 of each or whatever).

I hope this post will spark some interest from the community and the developers. I wonder if it might affect the card economy. I have some detailed analysis of the yield from each type of card that I will post eventually, but I wanted to get his discussion going first. In my gameplay, I'm looking forward to taking a complete break from the cards and going back to just bumbling around.

Posted 3 months ago by Hamster Baby Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • As someone who benefited from these cards in the way you describe (gaining millions of iMG and leveling from 59 to 60 in two real-life days, not to mention the thousands of currants I gained) I reluctantly agree that something should be done. Sky Plunge absolutely breaks the game ;)

    Although an after-card cooldown is my favourite of your suggestions, I think all that may be needed is to increase the rarity of the cards a little... or a lot. I'm willing to bet that most or all of the cards you purchased were from high-level players who had literally purchased every other card in the deck (save the Energy upgrades). In my own experience (being one of those aforementioned players), I was netting up to 15 "ticket" cards on a reshuffle, although on average about 6 or 7 per. It might be a run of bad luck, but I've noticed recently that I only average 3 or 4, so their occurrence might have been changed.

    Anyway, with increased rarity, the prices will increase and hopefully will fall in line with their benefits. It wouldn't hurt for higher level players to have a few more cards to pad out their deck, too ;).

    The cards are enjoyable and rewarding (even to me, STILL!), and if anything, making them harder to come by will increase the player's excitement when one appears. Caps and wait-times have the potential to cause frustration.

    Thanks for the post!
    Posted 3 months ago by Bradamus Prime Subscriber! | Permalink
  • nice test!
    Posted 3 months ago by phelps.mike Subscriber! | Permalink
  • -1 to a cool-down, since I tend to save my upgrade cards and do them all at the same time.

    250 in a row sounds like a boring grind to me (a couple of hours of watching loading screens). What's the loophole you're worried about?
    Posted 3 months ago by Janitch Subscriber! | Permalink
  • +1

    I think the idea is that it seems like a disproportionately profitable grind to the rest of the game (and if there are other ways to get this much IMG this fast, I would love a quick point in that direction).

    I personally feel kind of trapped by Sky Plunge, like if I want to level - or even have the IMG to buy the upgrade cards I don't want and will never use to get out of my rotation - there's nothing else I can really do right now that comes anywhere close to special events tickets.  Right now most of what I do in the game is Sky Plunge to try to get my quoin multiplier up, with the goal of eventually having enough IMG available from quoins at least to do other things.

    I've been seeing a lot of updates and forum posts lately that imply boredom from players with excess IMG.  Most of those discussions revolve around introducing something new to do with it, but I think it's kinda obvious that that problem - if it is a problem - is connected to this one.

    Humbabella just posted about something that also would not be possible if upgrade cards were more rare: mathemaglitch.blogspot.ca/2...
    Posted 3 months ago by Persephone Pear Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Janitch - Yes, 250 in a row is a bit of a boring grind.  I just did it one time to illustrate the my point that upgrade cards yield an excessive amount of imagination compared to other gameplay.   Maybe "loophole" was the wrong word to use.

    I spent about 1.5 hours playing for fun today (a mix of gardening, mining, wandering, doing quests, etc.) and earned almost 47,000 imagination.  In my Sky Plunge endeavour, I earned that amount in under 5 minutes - about 18 times as fast.  So a glitch who incorporates even a modest amount of upgrade tickets into their play is going to earn imagination far quicker than one who doesn't.

    The main reason that I see to play this game is to have fun and be social with other players.  That being said, I think most people also want to play efficiently.  I think that's why, for example, so many players seem to have more herb gardens than crop gardens.  Herb gardening isn't really different from crop gardening at the level of "am I having fun doing it" but herb gardens to seem to be more efficient at producing currants.  Also, selling items to the tool vendor isn't inherently more fun than selling to any other vendor, but I see a lot more gitchen on Cebarkul than anywhere else in Ur.  So I think that having one activity in the game be far more efficient than another is something to be remedied.

    Upgrade cards are cheap and plentiful to buy at auction and in towers.  I think that situation is likely to continue.  As Persephone mentions, higher level players may not have much use for additional imagination and, I conclude, be prone to sell their tickets.  Since these players may have maximum energy, quoin multiplier and brain, their daily shuffle is probably going to yield a lot of tickets.  Perhaps a lag time isn't the best fix.  The simplest remedy might be to just increase the imagination entry cost.  I'm agnostic on that issue, but I'm pretty sure the game would be more balance if some kind of limit were introduced.
    Posted 3 months ago by Hamster Baby Subscriber! | Permalink
  • If your complaint is that grinding iMG cards is boring and you'd like people to stop grinding boring activities, nerfing iMG cards will have the opposite effect. As a person who hit 60 before iMG cards were introduced, I can tell you that the activities we used to grind levels before that were much, much more mundane. Those who haven't yet hit 60 (and me, should TS uncap levels) will just revert to those more mundane activities. People grind iMG cards because they want to; take those away and they'll just (resentfully) switch to the second-best method.
    Posted 3 months ago by Jus​tin Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for the link, Persephone!

    +1 Justin, I think that's a point well worth noting! People who want to grind, will. At least the cards are a more interesting way to do so.
    Posted 3 months ago by Bradamus Prime Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Despite the fact that I previously argued that the cards should not count toward our quoin total for the day, this thread makes a good argument for why they should.
    Posted 3 months ago by Pascale Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The simplest way to handle this is to make them so they can't be auctioned.  I think they're supposed to be an occasional bonus.
    Posted 99 days ago by Lucille Ball Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yeah, I'm kind of uneasy with the unlimited/uncapped nature of the minigames too.  I don't begrudge people their grinds, but making one single kind of grinding this profitable distorts the entire iMG market.  If I can be honest, I'm a little resentful that I can play Glitch energetically for several hours, gathering resources, making meals, crafting furniture, gardening, and so on -- spending literally every minute of those hours clicking happily -- and yet make less iMG than I would have made in three runs of Radial Heights.  I like Radial Heights well enough, but I'm not sure it should be THAT much more rewarding than anything else I can spend my time doing in this game.
    Posted 99 days ago by Pale Queen Subscriber! | Permalink
  • We have updated the daily quoin limits so they no longer will limit your collecting when using a Ticket to Paradise. If you have hit your daily quoin limit outside of paradise, you will not be able to use the ticket and if you reach your limit while in Paradise your limit will not kick in until you leave.

    Enjoy.
    Posted 93 days ago by Bosen Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I would much prefer a cooldown mechanism for ticket use.
    Posted 93 days ago by Pascale Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Sorry Pascale — you already voted above and we went with what you said … thanks for that!!!! :\
    Posted 93 days ago by stoot barfield Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Hey, I'm in beta! ;-)
    Posted 93 days ago by Pascale Subscriber! | Permalink