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.