Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31087078-20170209031355/@comment-28829111-20170211224352

Nothing wrong with any of that. If the business model works for them and they become profitable high five their Marketing Director. If customers get too disheartened (like what happened with the unannounced changes to the collection sets occured when the Treasury Update arrived) they leave. Worse, they bad mouth the game to their friends. The marketing adage "a satisfied customer will tell x number of their friends about their experience, whereas the dissatisfied customer will tell "insert much higher number". The reality in today's social media world is that an unhappy customer will tell thousands of their closest strangers.

People have varying degrees of tolerance toward in-app purchases, in general. My grown children are of that group that believe in-app charges are wrong. period. I believe that it is a way for the company to recoup and grow their computer science programming R&D budget. I benefit from their game - some satisfaction level on a scale of one to ten much the way a movie (I pay money to see in a theater) entertains. Sometimes the now $10 ticket is worth it...sometimes not. If one buys rubies, tools, energy, etc....they are hoping to get a certain value from the purchase. We all have our monthly spending budgets ranging probably from 0$ - $100 (the person on this end of the scale is not my friend, tee hee). If we are satisfied that the rubies were worth it....maybe we got a long awaited non-giftable CI  OR if the energy purchase was satisfying and gave us an extra hour to play...then we go away not feeling icky. But if our expectations were higher and we got a bunch of bike parts in our TBs for our rubies...we feel betrayed and shafted. Minki, I think what is happening for you in the HL and AC is that you are trying to play in good faith and are feeling shafted. I'm going to step out on a limb and say that the overemphasis Mytona has placed on the SS (since it is the only talisman that works effectively) and the cost of getting that one precious coin are problematic. There is only the one winding key set, correct? and it is elusive. Others struggle to get the diagrams. Also, the calculated time limits put on the HL and the AC are a huge factor. Some can barely finish but most need a flying time or two. Minki is caught in the spend or miss out mid-level player hell.

Minki, have you a detective hat so that you can win some extra Flying Time? I believe some rooms award that more than others but would need to check and refer to players who know this better than myself. Do you have friends who could gift you the sets to make one? That would be my next step. Build up Flying Time so you can "skate" past the HL and AC when Quests do this. Personally, I did not have this experience and I do not know why. Maybe it was that I just happened to have the SS running when I hit Quests in those rooms. Maybe it was because I did NOT own those pieces at all before getting to that piece in the Quest. I've seen other threads where players gift away the problematic Quest pieces and then have them sent back once they show up in the Quest icon. I try to be somewhat conscious not to send newer players any sets that will mess up their Quests - sticking to CI collections from certain rooms they already have open on their maps as well as only the first few in the scroll window as the fourth sets take awhile to come up in the quests.