Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-26338036-20150602072622/@comment-144.24.20.231-20150602135424

Halving the rewards is not a tweak. 5-10% change: that's a tweak. 50% is basically changing the progress model.

If the model is that broken for them I'm sure they could just abandon this game and release a RR4 (until they announced the June update I had actually been wondering if that was what was happening with the drop off in car sales and the "free gold" section being a bit depleted).

I'd be interested in the stats of their user base - is there a lot of churn (people play for 1-3 months, get as far as they can and the quit) or is it mostly people who have been around for a while? The wiki is probably a bad place to judge from but they do seem to get a lot of new players reasonably regularly (but equally there are a lot of "old-timers").

If the main part of the model is new people then change... who outside the hardcore will know? If the main part of the model is people who have been around for a while... why give the user base a reason to leave?

I did love the wording they've used in the release notes:

"Rebalanced rewards given per track"

Halving is not "rebalancing" - I've not seen any evidence yet that there's any kind of "per track" difference either - just "half".

"Crew costs are now based on the series group level"

Nice and innocuous. But it actually reduces the incentive to buy gold to spend on agents - because you might as well just spend it directly on the R$ or Gold, rather than spend 5 gold on a manager to get an extra $80000  (and "worry" about winning assuming you haven't killed the bots) - I'd imagine it's probably pretty similar in price to just buy that $80K direct.

They appear to be hoping that previous investment of time will keep the old guard around, and the new lot will simply have to hang around longer to get as far (whereas I would have thought that people would be more likely to quit earlier now when they have to churn Mt Panaroma for longer).


 * shrug* it's giving me an incentive to quit - the question is, will my departure be made up for by enough new users who will be more profitable to them under the new model?