Friday, September 17, 2021

Legendary Game of Heroes & the Need for a Stable Platform

For the last couple of years, I've played Empires & Puzzles a lot on my phone, but there were times when there wasn't much to do in that game.  Because it's an RPG-type game there are times when you don't really have quests or objectives and stuff and yet there might not be much other stuff to do in real life either. 

So eventually I downloaded a similar game that had been advertised in Empires & Puzzles called Legendary Game of Heroes.  It has a similar sort of RPG setup and matching colored tiles to launch attacks but whereas in E&P you build a town to train your people and make items to help your teams, Legendary Game of Heroes is set up more in a Magic the Gathering style with just cards of characters and items.

I never really liked LGoH as much so it was just the game I'd play when I was bored with the other one.  There were some fun things to do like the "bounty hunt" where you use special bounty hunter characters to kill bad guys for points and prizes.  Like most things in that game it got repetitive but at least it was fairly easy once you could build up your teams and you got decent rewards if you made it all the way.  Completing the 20 basic levels got you 10 million gold pieces, which is really helpful in the beginning when you need gold to level up people and items.

Besides the rules I never really understood fully, there was something else holding LGoH back:  the platform was never stable.  There were always problems with it crashing or freezing up.  It was really annoying with things like the bounty hunt where you only have a limited number of keys because then you'd lose a key and not be able to get another one for 4 hours.

I put up with the issues for over a year but then last month in 12 hours it crashed 4 times!  I lost 3 bounty hunt keys!  One crash in that amount of time is tolerable, maybe two, but 4?  That was it.  I quit the guild I was in and deleted the game from my phone.

I mean really, I played that stupid game over a year and the people who made it never really seemed to do anything to make it run better.  They were too focused on pumping out one "event" after another to get people to pay money for gems and stuff to take the time to actually make the game's platform stable.

Before anyone says anything, I don't have problems like that with E&P very often.  And other people in my guilds over the last year or so complained about crashing issues too, so it was a widespread problem and I'm sure it was known by the company too.  They just didn't give a shit.  Why should they?  There's no money in making the program stable; it won't get people to spend money to buy shit.  Most players will just put up with it because they have time and money invested, so why worry about it?  Just tell them it's their fault and keep pumping out events that mostly get boring after 2 days, long before they expire.

The obvious parallel to writing is that your story needs a stable platform.  If your grammar and formatting and all that basic stuff aren't up to snuff, then it doesn't matter how good the rest of your story is; it'll be too annoying to read for anyone to bother with.  Unlike a video game, it's unlikely readers will have invested enough to plow through a lot of bad grammar and poor formatting.

So really, don't neglect the basics.  You need a stable foundation to build your story on.

1 comment:

Cindy said...

I don't have much patience for games that don't run well or interrupt too much with ads. It's also been a long time since I've paid for any sort of power up in a game. Instead, I just keep trying over and over again. Anyway, my Dad is a big fan of Hellboy. :)

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