Monday, January 26, 2015
February Post
Many of you have complained that the game get's boring after a while, and yet some of you have been playing for years. For those of you who complain it is boring, what could the game designers do to make the game more engaging? What problems do you see with the game that allow engagement to wane? For those of you who have been playing a while, then what is it that drives you to continue playing, especially when it takes days to make some of the upgrades?
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Clash of clans is a multiplayer freemuim game that came to iOS devices on August 2012. It immediately gained popularity among the mobile platform gamers which praised the game's competitive experience. Within the end of the year, I started playing the game to see what all the commotion was about. Immediately, I was hooked on the game, finding myself unable to put it down. Fear rattled my mind as I always wondered how my village was holding up. The comical graphics and gameplay brought me joy, as it was a fresh new game. With friends I started a clan which grew everyday. Soon we were full at 50 people and were constantly switching out for better members. I remember the chat always being active and the second I sent out a troop request, it would be filled with the best troops. The game itself was great, but the community made it even better. Jorge Jao (The ex-top player) was always breaking new boundaries in the game that created even more hype among players. It provided hours of entertainment with updates only making it last even longer.
ReplyDeleteWith progression, many players saw the greatest downside of Clash of Clans; it was a freemium game. I knew that it was intended to be a freemium game, but thought that it would be different in some way. The game was great for the first few months, but it was eventual clear that it was meant to pressure players into buying gems through micro- transactions. Soon, I was losing more resources than I earned thanks to the matchmaking system. At TH 7, I was getting picked on by high TH8's, it was one flaw of Coc. Regardless of these problems, I continued to play, but friends didn't do the same. The global went from being friendly to hostile. It used to be people recruiting and helping others out, but it soon turned into 8 year olds swearing and spamming on the chat. Most of the top players retired or just didn't play anymore. Unnecessary "balancing" was made to the game. For example, hog riders were greatly nerfed and big bombs were buffed to multiply the damage done to hog riders. The barbarian king's attack was greatly nerfed and was not necessary. Extra AOE defenses were added which made archers and barbarians almost impossible to use. More defenses were being added than troops, so getting 100% on a higher level base was very rare. Creating a clan from scratch was even harder because higher level clans bribed new players (I am guilty of bribing players too). Getting on the leaderboards is impossible without dropping $500 on this game every week. The top players cheated and exploited glitches in the game to stay at the top. In the end, what I am trying to say is that Clash of clans was a great game at one point, but now it is just a remnant of its former glory.
Supercell has a long way to go if they want to fix the game. First of all, they need to buff some troops to have a balance when attacking. A level 8 air defense will take out a dragon with a few hits, so they need a buff. The same goes for Valkyrie's, healers, and goblins. A stricter swear filter should be added as well as separate chat's for clan business, and other social activities. Penalties for exploiting need to be added to avoid circumstances where top players stay in the same spot for too long. More troop upgrades need to be added to compensate for large amounts of defense buildings.
I find that the biggest flaw in the game Clash of Clans is that you only have two builders. Once you claim all of you resources such as the elixirs and gold coins, you can upgrade two items in your village and that's about it. (Of course you can also attack other villages, but you can't do that forever either.) Depending on the upgrade you're making, your builders can be busy for around three or four days. While you are waiting for your items to upgrade, it's very easy for players to become unengaged in the game.
ReplyDeleteAn improvement that could be made to the game is to give each player than 2 builders from the beginning of the game. That way, players will be able to do more things to their village and remain engaged in the game longer. The designers may also want to make the upgrades to take a shorter amount of time to upgrade to keep players engaged.
I have been playing Clash of Clans for about eight months, but for the last two the game has been getting exceedingly boring. The main reason for this is that everything is too expensive. Just four months ago, I could spend a few minutes here and there raiding, then buy the next level of mortar. Now, however, the cheapest gold upgrade costs 2,500,000, the cheapest elixir upgrade is 3,000,000 and the cheapest dark elixir upgrade is 35,000. If I let my six level twelve collectors try to get me that gold, it would take 120 hours. That is assuming I didn't lose any gold at all from raiding, a near-impossibility.
ReplyDeleteMy boredom, however, stems from the fact that I have a very high level account. Most people have a far lower level town hall, but they still say it gets boring. What I did/do to counteract this is switch up my strategy. For a few weeks I would exclusively go for loot, then after a while I would push my trophy count. Sometimes I would join a clan that frequently participated in wars, sometimes I would join a more relaxed clan. By changing my goal like this I was able to keep the game exciting until I reached town hall level nine. Town hall nine was the point where I started to LOSE resources even after good raids. The only use of raiding was to get more trophies, but this quickly became boring.
In summary, the best way to keep the game entertaining is to switch up your strategy and never, ever upgrade to town hall nine.
{NOTE: My post is so long that I can't send it all at once, so I'm breaking it into bite-sized chunks and replying to my own comment with the rest.}
ReplyDeleteIn the world of Clash of Clans, there are essentially two camps. There are the high level players, who love every minute of leveling and raiding, and there are the lower level players, who feel the game can get boring sometimes. Both of these camps are playing the same game, so how could they be seeing it from such different perspectives? I decided to put in the time to find out the answer, and in the process of doing so, I discovered a very dark secret of game’s design. It is USING YOUR OWN MIND AGAINST YOU. Trust me, this isn’t some sort of Jedi mind trick. It’s very real, and it is making Supercell millions a day. Let me explain.
Essentially, Clash of Clans uses dopamine to hook its players. When a significant goal is achieved in your life (say, you get a 7 minute time on the mile, you bite into some delicious chocolate, or you finally upgrade all your walls to the next level in CoC) your brain rewards you with a surge of dopamine to your dopamine receptors. The first time you trigger dopamine, it feels great. But the more you do it, the more your body tries to tell you “hey, that’s enough” by cutting off dopamine receptors, thus making you need to do the addictive thing more and more to try to get the same rush as before. This is known as desensitization.
Clash of Clans attempts to do this by making level progression in the beginning very fast, very rewarding, and very, very easy. Next thing you know, you’re Town Hall 3, and have cleared out almost 8 Goblin forts! It felt great to be able to conquer all your foes like that! And you got new defences and troops every few minutes! But now, you’re being matched against higher level players, and everything costs more to upgrade and takes a little more time. Every time you defeat an enemy, it’s not as fantastic a feeling as it once was. But you just need 40,000 more coins and you can get these awesome air troops! And if you raid more people, you can upgrade your army camps a bit more! And if you can cough up a little cash, Supercell can hook you up with that sweet, sweet dopamine a little quicker. Do you see where this is going?
When the game gets harder, the bursts of dopamine become more sporadic, but more rewarding. There is a big gap in the player base because some of the lower level players are trapped between dopamine bursts, unable to reach the next level because they’re raided so often that they don’t have the funds to upgrade or continue. Right now, they’re just outside the threshold where the game could addict them. They are so close to falling into the trap. And even though Supercell have instituted mechanics into their game designed to cut you off when you’re most invested ( wait 30 minutes for the cannon to finish upgrading) causing the next time you jump in to be more rewarding ( returning to see a shiny, more powerful cannon), it doesn’t work on everybody. At least for me, there are two words stopping Supercell from conquering my mind: CONFIRMATION BIAS.
DeleteMy problem is that whenever I open up the app, I am greeted by a gasping lady telling me I was raided 4 times, and I lost almost all my gold and elixir. Confirmation bias tells me to ignore that one time my defences won, but to put the losses out of proportion. The fact that the lady is always gasping and terrified, no matter if I won or lost the raids, certainly doesn’t help either. My brain tells me “You lost. They took all your money and it will take FOREVER to gather all that elixir again. You are never going to get enough to upgrade again.” This is certainly not what Supercell wants.
Now, I could go on and on about this topic, because I find it really interesting (and kinda twisted) but I’ll wrap it up. Hopefully, this has taught you something about the mobile games industry. They lure in huge crowds with the promise of a free game, hook you with behavioral game design targeted at your brain’s biology, and suck the money out of your pockets or the time out of your day with the empty promise of unlocking a rush of dopamine like the one you had so long ago. Remember, just because it’s a game doesn’t mean it can’t be dangerous.
So the moral of the story is: both camps have their reasons for their opinions. And neither one is wrong. But if i were you, I would at least be aware of what is really going on before you charge into your next raid.
Should I cite my sources? I have a list of them somewhere...
DeleteClash of Clans starts as a game that is very interactive and enjoyable, leaving players with always something to do to improve or purchase. Over time, this becomes untrue, since less and less activities are available as you level up in the game. Players that are consistently leading the player board in levels and trophy amounts seem to only be staying at the top of the game because of the difficulty to defeat high level players and the difficulty to create an insanely advanced village.
ReplyDeleteThe main advice I could give the game designers of Clash of Clans would be to make the items available to purchase less expensive. I realize that this is one of the main ways Supercell makes money, since Clash of Clans is a free download, but many players don't enjoy having to save up a large amount of money to only pay for one item. For players that are willing to spend their own dollars on virtual resources, the cost is still very high. The reason the cost is such a huge problem is that it causes players to delay their game. For example, each village is equipped with only two builders, with a third costing five hundred gems, which are hard to come by. If a player has enough resources to use both of them at the same time, it is possible they will not come back to the game until the twelve to twenty-four hour upgrade is completed. If these builders were less expensive, players would definitely be more likely to use a third one, and therefore have a better village. A higher level village could encourage players to be on the game more often.
One way the game designers are keeping me playing their game so often is the fact that other players are continually attacking my village, and there is no way to stop them unless I use money. Although the upgrades are long, I always try to find another improvement I can make to my village.
I think that the game can get more boring later on. An improvement could be that it would have different worlds where you would have to reach an amount of trophies to get to that world. There would be more challenges like maybe an enemy in each world that you have to defeat before you can rise up to the next one. This might be similar to many other games, but I think that this way more people would play it for longer so that they could see what the next world would be.
ReplyDeleteAlso, they could make some resources easier to purchase since not everyone wants to spend a lot of time saving up for one item and then starting at zero again. Of course this is how Supercell is making their money, but I think that the game could be more engaging if you didn't have to always wait so long until something upgraded, or you finally have enough money to buy something. All in all, I think this game is pretty good and it could definitely entertain you for a month or two.
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