
Fun with solving puzzles (and dragons): Thoughts after 500 days of PAD - Cixelyn
http://cory.li/puzzle-and-dragons/
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minimaxir
For those that are adverse to freemium gaming and the various F2P shenanigans
that many apps employ: Puzzle & Dragons is arguably the most generous F2P game
I've ever played, giving out expensive premium currency _daily_. As a result,
you can get atleast a month of playtime without hitting a paywall.

While the board mechanics mentioned in the linked article are fun and
interesting, there is little variation in gameplay style from level-to-level,
and as a result, PAD is _grindy as hell_ and is the reason I've stopped
playing. A modern freemium mechanic other apps use to combat player dropoff
for this reason is Auto play, which lets the game play itself (or simulate a
runthrough of a round) for the same rewards. There's been a lot of debate in
the gaming community on whether this is good design, but Star Wars: Galaxy of
Heroes, a F2P game which implements _both_ styles of Autoplay, has been doing
_very_ well on the Top Grossing charts.

~~~
jawbone3
The fact that autoplay makes for better retention of gamblers is not a long
term asset; Autoplaying means it is straight up games of chance, and casino
gambling is usually regulated differently from games of skill.

Acording to a recent estimate, something like 0.19 %
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11354546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11354546)),
and given the type of f2p under discussion, "the autoplayers", that fraction
should be compared to something like the the rate of gambling disorders in the
US population (around 1% for adults, 6-9% for youngsters
[http://www.ncrg.org/sites/default/files/oec/pdfs/ncrg_fact_s...](http://www.ncrg.org/sites/default/files/oec/pdfs/ncrg_fact_sheet_gambling_disorders.pdf))

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greggman
Being I was corrected by an GungHo employee I'd just like to point out the
name is "Puzzle & Dragons" Puzzle is singular, Dragons is plural.

I also attended a talk in Tokyo by the designer of Puzzle & Dragons who
pointed out he considered it an action game. It was specifically designed to
require you to move fast. Since you can manipulate the entire board in a
single move but you have a limited amount of time to do it the faster and more
accurately you can move a piece the better you do at the game making it an
action skill based game, not a typical pick 3 game.

Yes I realize that partly what the article is about.

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alanfalcon
Fascinating article. I got a little bit into the gme a couple years ago - just
enough to get a taste of the crazy depth availble (and dedicated grind
required to get far) before realizing that it was probably not a game I wanted
a lose a couple of years of my life to. I had no idea about board maximizing
websites though.

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glandium
I tried installing Puzzle and Dragons once on my Nexus 4, and it was crashing
at startup. The game uses native ARM code in a .so that couldn't be loaded
because of (IIRC) missing symbols. I had a pretty standard Android install,
nothing special about it, so really, I don't know how it ever worked on
Android at all for other people.

