A Newbie's POV -- Too Much Grind

[dislekcia]

The primary cause of grind is tied to the way the game works: You're not actually grinding the game to give you gold in the early game, you're grinding your understanding of the systems until you level up as a player and learn a new skill. DD is a series of new skills that you need to learn in order to progress. (Later on you might need victories to afford something, but the whole point is that those victories require skills learned - which is why we're trying to make the exercise of skilled play pay off the most)

We're trying to make the realisations that lead to learning new player skills easier to reach, but at the same time it's not rewarding to the player if we just explain everything up front. So we're working on ways to make things make more intuitive sense - stuff like bonus experience having special animations, to show you how much "extra" you got if you're not paying hawkish attention to your exp bar. Giving piety gain and loss animations a "scale" so you know what the relative importance of specific actions to a god are, that sort of thing.

The goal here is to provide an entertaining experience for players, part of that entertainment is tied to the joy of becoming better at a hard game. There's still a lot of informational display stuff we need to fix that will make things easier to figure out... that's the hope at least.

[Abraxas]

As an aside, playing through a new profile recently, I've really felt like if you already have these skills you're supposed to learn along the way, then there's definitely a lot of grinding involved to progress at all. (Read: if I want to upgrade all of my buildings, the most efficient way to do so is just pick a few dungeons I can clear pretty quickly and repeat them over and over again, with no incentive to try the harder dungeons)

If not as the main form of progress, it would at least be nice to have an alternative of challenge-based progress rather than grind-based (as in farming for gold)

[fall_ark]

[gjaustin]

[fall_ark]

[gjaustin]

I was trying to avoid duplicates, as well as Faithless and Miser since shops and gods may not even be unlocked yet.

[The Avatar]

I think just completing the bronze should half the cost of the upgrade.

[dislekcia]

What would be the difference to giving players gold rewards for completing challenges?

[The Avatar]

Gold could be used for anything.

Fine, if you don't like that idea, at least lower the upgrades to 750 and 1500.

[fall_ark]