Board Thread:Disney Magic Kingdoms Discussion/@comment-32526072-20190518142003

I've decided to join the ranks and head out on an escape pod while I still can. I've played this game every day for the last 3 years. I've had fun, and it's a mild way to release some OCD steam, but it doesn't do that anymore.

A game should be fun. It shouldn't cause stress, and it shouldn't make people set alarms throughout the night just to keep up. It's a Disney park-building game, for cripes sake!

I believe if you're getting a lot of traction from a "free" game, it's perfectly fine to spend money every once in a while to support it and also give you a leg up. But with the furious pace of all these events, I'm not "occasionally" spending money. I'm spending $30-$50 a month. That is utter and complete bs.

It's not just the frequency of the events (which, for any newbies, used to be one every few months in order to give players time to catch their breaths and focus on the permanent storylines). It's how impossible they've become to finish. I don't have to go into specifics. There have already been plenty of comments about how frustrating the Cri-Kee tower challenge and Moana event were. There's also the absurd leaps Disney has made lately with their balancing of tokens. And, as the cherry on top, their drop rates have become atrocious. Check out the DMK forum on Reddit. It's riddled with comments from people who couldn't get a single comfy fabric from the Moana event and were told after contacting the devs that, yes, the drop rates were "very low". It's also recently become a popular theory that the closer you get to earning the last token to achieve something, the deliberately lower the drop rate becomes in order to use your impatience to get you to buy gems. This hasn't been confirmed anywhere, but a lot of people have noticed it.

My *ah-ha* moment came today. I've spent the last five days trying to earn a rare token (I have 13 of 15, incidentally). I've essentially done this task 15 times and have had ZERO drops. For a token that's not even epic or legendary! I simply can't do it anymore.

Look, I know what's going on here. To be fair, it's tough to evolve a game like this when you have new players coming in all the time. And then there are all those comments on Facebook from players who say they finished an event ridiculously early and they're now bored. Well, yes, that's what happens when you spend an ungodly amount of money/gems. Many of those people will say they didn't. Some of them got lucky with their drops, others are outright lying. It's obvious Disney is pandering to these paid players by increasing difficulty. And how can I argue with that? It's making them money. But either you're a paid game, or you're not. If you're focused on releasing monthly challenges that are physically impossible to finish without spending money, then you're not free. Stop marketing yourself as though you are.

These guys aren't complete corporate greedy monsters. They respond to collective complaints and make tweaks. But something needs to fundamentally change if players like me are going to come back. I'll still check in to get my daily gems, but I am done giving another penny to this game. I'm sure they get enough new players who pay that they won't miss me or the others who have also jumped ship, and that's sad, but it's the way these things work.

I realize this post is very long. Thanks for letting me vent. 