DaveBaum

I think the devs have done a wonderful job with this game. But some of the pricing decisions and special offers mystify me. Rise of the Runelords bundle is the best PACG value, but it is very expensive for an iOS/Android game. I suspect a price tag of $25 means many people won't even consider it. Instead they will either grind gold to play for free or find some other game to play at a fraction of the price. Either way, no money for Obsidian. Then there was the special deal on gold that was only offered to people that hadn't bought anything in a long time. Not a great way to thank your most loyal customers. Now we have some purchasable vanity items (dice) and new content (alts). But the pricing is outrageous. The fact that the alt is always bundled with the base character makes anyone that already purchased the base character feel like they are paying twice. And $60 as the "bargain" price for all 11 alts is absurd. That's full price for a AAA console game. If the alts were priced reasonably then I would purchase them. At $2 per alt I might buy my 2 or 3 favorites, but not all of them. A bundle of all 11 for $10 would be an instant purchase. The dice prices are even worse. Making the game look nicer with cool dice is worth $5 to me, tops. I'd buy a few marbled or luminous dice at $1 each. But not $20 for those bundles. In short, if obsidian priced things reasonably I would have gladly spent another $10 or $15 on this game. But at the current prices I can't see spending any money at all.

The entire point of Local Heroes is that you get to try to close locations whenever you acquire and ally. But Distractions causes the character to end their turn immediately, losing the chance to close the location. Presumably the only way to win would be to empty all of the locations and then close them. This doesn't make the scenario a little more challenging - it makes it nearly impossible. I understand that Legendary is supposed to be difficult and randomness is part of the game, but this just feels broken.

The blessings deck definitely exerts more pressure when you play with more characters. But at the same time you have more cards available to play (with 6 characters there's almost always a useful blessing somewhere). Discarding is less costly because you have more decks to work with. You have more tools at your disposal, and possible synergy between characters. Overall I'm surprised by how well it all holds together. For me, 3 or 4 characters is the sweet spot - but that is probably just due to my party composition, builds, and strategy. I'm sure other players find 1 character or 6 characters to be ideal. I completely agree about movement restriction being the most interesting part of legendary.

Spreading out is my default choice. As long as each character is reasonably strong solo and has a decent chance of closing the location (perhaps with a blessing from another character), then covering as many locations as possible is a big help when you run into the villain. It also minimizes any of the "every character at the location" penalties. One big exception is characters that have strong synergy. For example I really like Valeros and Lem together, and I'm willing to leave one less location covered in exchange for the bonuses they provide to one another. However, if I feel like I'm way behind on turns then once two locations are closed I'll split them up anyway. Another exception is when I think I can burn through the first two locations very fast (i.e. Academy, an ally-heavy location, a boon-heavy location with Seelah, etc). In those cases I tend to group up on the first two locations and spread out after they get closed. I'm not certain this is the best strategy, but it seems to work well enough. Sometimes my desire to avoid a specific location (either because it will be hard to close or has a nasty side effect) leads me to double up in mid game. For example with a 4 person party I might start on 4 locations, then once 2 are closed I start doubling up - ignoring that 6th location until the very end. This always feels risky and very dependent on how much of the decks you need to go through before finding the henchmen/villain.

I think this is a problem with FTP in general. The conventional wisdom is that most players play for free or spend very little cash, but the game makes money off the very small number of "whales" that spend a ton of money on the game. The big "success" stories in FTP tend to be games that have tuned their game to lure in and milk those whales for as much as possible. The exact opposite of rewarding your best customers. Pathfinder Adventures doesn't seem to fit that mold. It feels like the FTP model was bolted on late in the development cycle and the team is still struggling with exactly how to monetize the game. Personally I'm thrilled that I could just buy all of the real content outright with the Runelords bundle, but at the same time I'm worried that this excellent game may fail simply because it wasn't priced in an effective way (i.e. perhaps it is too easy to play for free and there isn't enough incentive to buy anything). With respect to the Buried Treasure deal - I get why it is structured that way. The "regulars" are already spending money, and they want to tempt those people who aren't spending money to buy something. But I agree that as a customer it feels wrong and there are probably better ways they could have rolled this out. Still, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.... this feels more like a fumble than evil machinations.

I'm not sure about the "new party" thing. I created a new party and added two brand new characters to it. The game showed that I had not completed Brigandoom with the party (Poison Pill was still locked), but it would let me choose between Normal/Heroic/Legendary for Brigandoom. The game indicated that the scenario has already been completed at Normal and Heroic and there was no completion gold for beating the level on Normal. Perhaps if I deleted the old party I would be able to earn gold from Normal level, but I didn't want to test that out. AFAICT "completion" is tracked three ways: 1) Per character, records which scenarios each character has completed, regardless of Normal/Heroic/Legendary. The first time each character completes a scenario it gets the appropriate character bonus (card, feat, whatever). You can view this under the character's completion tab. 2) Per party, recording which scenarios were completed, with separate marks for Normal/Heroic/Legendary. This is what you see when selecting a scenario, and can be very different from what a given character has completed. You can't select a scenario until the preceding one has been completed (a new party can only select Brigandoom). I believe this also lets you take a brand new character and dive into a much more advanced scenario as long as at some point the "party" completed the preceding scenarios... even if you have long since removed those older characters from the party. 3) Per account. This records at least normal/heroic completion per scenario and appears to determine whether or not you get additional gold for completing the scenario. It also determines whether you can select the higher difficulty levels: once a party beats a scenario on Normal, the Heroic level of that scenario is unlocked for all parties. Note that the other party still needs to have completed the preceding scenarios, but they can jump straight to higher difficulty if another party has paved the way. For example, if one party has completely cleared Perils of the Lost Coast on Normal and Heroic, a brand new party can play Brigandoom on Legendary as its first game. But it cannot attempt Poison Pill until it first beats Brigandoom (at any difficulty level).

I find myself playing the app differently than tabletop as well. I think it's because of several factors: * Games are quicker - no setup/cleanup time, and even individual turns are faster. With tabletop, after dealing out the location decks and doing all of that shuffling I really want to make the game count which means I am basically always trying to win and progress forward. With the app, sometimes if I don't feel I'm closing off locations fast enough I'll give up on beating the scenario and instead focus on gaining cards. I'll opt not to close the Academy and keep exploring it just for the chance of picking up a cool spell. Then after the blessings deck runs dry I'll retry the scenario since the games are so quick. * There's a lot to keep track of in tabletop, and running more than 2 or 3 characters becomes tedious. With the app, a party of 4 is a breeze and even running 6 characters is fine. * You can keep a lot more character decks. With tabletop, you really only can keep 4-6 characters built which lends itself to creating a party and playing through scenarios one by one. With the app, it is much easier to swap characters around just to try a different combination. So I wind up playing a lot differently in the app. Repeating the scenarios multiple times means you see a lot more cards which then leads to more deck building decisions. With tabletop I felt that aside from setting up the starting deck the deck building aspects were somewhat muted. Sure you'd slowly acquire cards and increase the strength of your deck, but difficult or interesting choices were relatively rare. However I don't want to knock tabletop. For me, playing with actual cards and rolling dice is more fun. I haven't tried "pass and play", but I can't imagine it being even remotely as good as sitting around a table covered with decks of cards.

Daily Quests could be a really cool part of the game, but it just misses the mark in a few ways. I agree that a random encounter quest turns it into a very slow and tedious lottery. I skipped that particular quest. Only having a single quest slot and the quest expiring every 24 hours also forces a very specific schedule (other games do stuff like 3 quest slots, quests never expire, can get at most 1 new quest per day). Lastly, the rewards seem low compared to just playing the game. In Magic Duels, a good quest is worth 8 games against the AI on hardest level. In Pathfinder a legendary story scenario with 4 characters is worth 250 gold, which is more than any quest I can recall. It's a shame, because a good quest structure that encourages you to play outside your comfort zone can really enhance the game.

I assume the gold recovered from salvaged cards is minimal, thus the primary benefit of salvaging is to thin out undesirable cards and thus increase your chance of encountering the more valuable cards. Are there some general guidelines on when it is good or bad to salvage cards? Let's say I have one copy of "Shortbow +1" in my vault, and one character in my Story mode party already has that card in their deck. Under what circumstances might I encounter that card? A. Story mode when that character is included in the scenario. B. Story mode when that character isn't included in the current scenario. C. Story mode with a new party. D. Quest mode. I guess I'm struggling with how the vault compares to the box in the physical game. Mentally I keep thinking that each party has its own "box" with a complete copy of my vault, and quest mode also has its own box. But maybe this isn't correct since you a party can have many more characters than you'd actually be able to construct with a physical set. In the above example, what happens if I salvage my single copy of "Shortbow +1"? Does it immediately disappear from the character's deck? Or maybe the game doesn't allow you to salvage "in use" cards? Do multiple copies of a card increase the chance of encountering that card? If that's the case then there could be a definite advantage to keeping many copies of very desirable cards, even if you only ever wanted one per deck/party/whatever. If a treasure card is nearly at parity with a non-treasure card, should it be salvaged in order to increase your chances of running into the "good" treasure cards? Do the current contents of the vault influence what may appear in future treasure chests? For MtG Duels, there is a hard limit on copies of each card (based on rarity), and thus once you find 2 copies of a particular Rare, you are guaranteed that future booster packs will not contain that card. One consequence of this is that you can be certain that X booster packs will yield a complete set (and you cannot purchase booster X+1). I'm probably thinking about this too much. It just seems like the Vault is potentially another level of deck building and I'd like to better understand the rules.

If you discard an ally for an extra explore, don't take the explore and then hit the >> button the game asks you if you want to skip your explore or go back. Going back let's you cancel the ally by moving it back to your hand, but it has already counted as being played for the challenge. This can be repeated 25 times to complete the challenge in a single turn.

On the store's main screen there is a button that says "Daily Gold" along with a countdown until the gold is available (7pm CDT I believe). Right after I collect the gold the timer appears to be correct, but if I put down the iPad and come back a few hours later the time hasn't decreased as much as it should have, for example displaying 20 hours when gold will really reset in 10. It will even still tell me I have a few hours to wait after the gold time should have reset. On the main screen the game indicates that I am "Logged in to GameCenter" with a little green dot under the wifi icon. If I completely quit the app and restart then the time is correct (or it becomes the button to collect the gold if the gold is now available). Also, if the time is incorrect and I purchase a treasure chest from the store the time then is adjusted to the correct time. Lastly, if I turn off the network, the game will warn be about losing the network connection. If I then re-enable the network and wait for the game to restablish its connection the daily gold time will then update to the correct time. The daily challenges appear to reset at the same time as daily gold, and the challenge timer always appears correct - updating to the correct time even when the daily gold timer is incorrect. iPad Air 2, iOS 9.3.5, PFID# 9D31AF5AADFCAA0C

If you buy a 5000Gold back (sufficient for 10 Chests) -this is pretty much equivalent to what you're asking for (at current drop rates); you'll even score some treasure cards. OTOH, at this point it looks like the devs will pretty much be lynched if they get on such requests, instead of delivering AD4... Is it equivalent? I really have no idea about the current drop rate because I have opened 4 chests and received 0 dice. I read somewhere that dice would show up about half the time. If that's really true, then I've just been unlucky. Or maybe the drop rate is considerably lower. I'd hate to buy 5000 gold, open 10 chests, and wind up with only one set of dice. OTOH, if there was a way to spend the same amount of money and be guaranteed to wind up with 4 more sets of dice, I'd spend the money in an instant. Perhaps this is a short-lived problem and that after another couple weeks of playing the game I'll accumulate enough dice. But I the general point remains. The Runelords bundle was perfectly aimed at customers who want to pay up front for a known chunk of content. As the devs add extras to the game they can probably make more money from that market segment by providing predictable ways of purchasing those extras. For example, if they invented some new locations/villains/whatever that would be available in quest mode then I'd be very likely to purchase that outright. But I wouldn't want to sink money into random treasure chests that may or may not have that new quest content. I also agree with the comments above about AD4 being more important. Heck, that's probably part of the reason that treasure chests rub me the wrong way... half the cards are useless at the moment.

I really like that when one character assists another the dice skins reflect each character. In order to make this really work, though, I'd like each character to have its own dice skin. Unfortunately you only start with two dice colors and I usually use a party of 4. I realize that you need to balance the gold and treasure stuff as a way to get the FTP portion of your customer base to spend some money. Randomness of the treasure chests is probably a big part of this. However, I purchased the Runelords pack because I prefer to pay up front for the whole game rather than grind or constantly purchase gold. I really appreciated that PACG gave me this option (and it is why I spent $30 instead of $0 on the game). It would be great if there was something similar for dice. Even if you want to keep all of the legendary dice as treasure-chest-only, a pack of 1 set each of 4 different common dice would be perfect. The FTP crowd can still grind or buy gold for the treasure chests and get rewarded with the cooler dice skins, but those of us that just want to pay up front and play the game could assign a unique dice skin to each character in the party. Dave