I’ve played and finished the original puzzle quest multiple times on multiple platforms. I loved puzzle quest 2. I even loved and finished Gallatrix.
This is not puzzle quest. This is some sad mobile cash grab. No open world. Timers. Loot crates. Aren’t you making enough money from Gems of War? You had to go and ruin the Puzzle Quest name?
I’m so disappointed.
This is why I’ve not yet posted a Shop Talk update for 0.37. Almost every element of the Shop update frustrates me from the pseudo-discounts to the merry go round of pricing by currency to the RNG of highly valued items.
Game is still set up in a way where getting a full set of maxed mythics takes upwards of 10 years if done F2P and around 5 years if spending $250 or so per year.
That isn’t even counting the other 4 colored sets, meta shifts, pets, nor any other future resource sinks.
I’m also in a holding pattern as well, waiting to see the direction the game is going moving forward. From Salty’s final stream, the impression I received was that there is a significant amount of unreleased content yet to be released and that the devs were at least keeping the door possibly open to not worldwide launching before the end of the year to more fully flesh out and balance the game more before jumping to 1.0.
That said, if there was a Shop Talk thread for 0.37, I’d say that currently I am very deeply suspicious that in exchange for the guaranteed Sunday random purchasable Glyph and follower crystal for Gems, the tradeoff was that the chances of one of these items appearing in the Daily Deal shop for Gems instead of Crowns on any given shop refresh was significantly decreased.
On one hand, this isn’t necessarily so bad given that Gem income is so poor that Glyph purchases with for Gems are not sustainable in the long-term. On the other hand, the balance of sales offers are significantly skewed toward Crowns, that at times it feels like the game is actively punishing players for accumulating Gems in the late-game by offering very few meaningful Gem-based offers in the Shop to spend them on.
IMO, I think the devs are trying to recapture the magic of the $50 USD Nysha medal offers with the VIP Mythic Bundle offers. The problem here is that for the average player, only 3 Nysha medals are ever needed in GoW (medalling troops being ignored). Here in PQ3, 16 Glyphs are needed to max a single thing in the game. It makes “noping” right out of these major purchases easy to do because there are too many rare resources (at exorbitant prices) needed to make even the slightest headway into any upgrades at Legendary, let alone Mythic. Something needs to significantly change in this respect. While a player might buy an expensive package a couple of times when needed, they will surely not buy that package dozens and dozens of times over again for a single character, at least not for 99.9% of the game’s eventual population.
I’m right there with you. “Value” is always a matter of perspective. They are obviously fishing for a bunch of whales. They have priced things waaaaaay beyond my interest. Especially since, as you mentioned, so many glyphs are needed for Legendary items and a ton more for Mythic. I really dislike the complete dependence on random luck and not having any drop rates posted for anything. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’d much rather have something tangible that still takes a long time to accomplish, like getting a “Soul Fragment” after killing each monster and being able to trade in 1000 fragments for a random glyph, or 2000 for a specific glyph… or whatever the numbers may be. At least I could see where I’m at and be working toward something.
The game is actually cool. You have a lot of options. It is fun to play. And the things that are different than in PQ2 are not worse, they are different. For instance, I am a big fan that the opponent does not make any moves. There was nothing more frustrating than massive chains triggered by luck from an opponent in PQ2.
The money aspect… Is difficult. I would like to spend money into it, but it is the same for me. Everything available is too expensive in my point of view. I am not going to pay 20€ to upgrade a single item to legendary level. So instead I am playing another class. I think a lot of people have the same oppinion.
BUT: the developers have to make a decision. Make a little bit of money with a lot of players or make a lot of money with few of us. And the reality is mobile games give more money with option 2. I do not like it too, but most of the games have this approach.
I absolutly agree and therefore I do not invest money into games using such money-making-strategies. But from a business point of view I can understand. If this type of game is making more profit why choose otherwise? I don’t like it, but I can understand it. The best way to stand up against this thing is to never invest money into such a game. And, actually, you did it, didn’t you? 
The difference being a highly active GoW player could farm a Nysha medal in a week
A highly active PQ3 player gets to salvage some gear…
I think that’s something that the devs consider at this point to be a significant mistake on their end. They didn’t think that active end-gamers would be able to farm them anywhere near that easily and they see 4x speed as the primary enabler of that result. It’s an outcome that the devs do not want to occur again in PQ3. Can’t sell those bundles if farming the desired content of those bundles for free is easy to obtain.
On the few PQ3 streams that Salty hosted, the concept of animation speed was frequently brought up and then somewhat definitively shot down on the stream with the Joe the Animator. The slowing down of farming compared to GoW is intentional IMO. There might be an outside chance of some animation frames being shaved here and there as optimizations, but I have strong doubts that PQ3’s animations will ever get any faster than maybe the GoW equivalent of 1.5x speed of PQ3’s current animation speed.
I’m going to quote myself here because I am in full Phillip J. Fry squinty-eye mode over this. There was some kind of shop tweak at the beginning of this week has caused a lot of previously very rare offers to suddenly become much more common for me. For most of this week, in the base Daily Deal roll + 1 reroll, I have seen Glyphs offered in the majority of my Daily Deal boards. Got another one today, for my FIFTH Glyph offer this week. Only one of which was offered for Gems.
Today though, Lyranica had this as her Daily Deal offer,
Two Glyphs for Crowns on the same Daily Deal board.
She had one yesterday, for a total of 3 this week (she doesn’t reroll the board), all for Crowns.
Between the two of us, that’s 1 in 8 Glyphs that were offered for Gems this week.
I have to wonder at this point if the Daily Deal boards are now being biased on Gear Scores, as both of us have Gear Scores over 2000 (I’m over 2500 personally), or by perhaps Level/Citadel Level (we are at +/- Citadel 100) now.
Regardless, between both of our accounts, these offers are being presented to us at rates that are far too common to be co-incidental. Anyone else seeing a boost in rates of rare offers for Crowns on their Daily Deal boards?
I hope you’re wrong about that. If things don’t change in the next update or have some kind of promise to address the speed issue, I’m done. I’ve been finding myself slowly creeping towards being done with the game for the last several weeks now… so the statement above is assuming I even make it to the next update.
I’ve seen 1 glyph offer in the last month and it was for crowns. I’m no where near your gear level though. I’m sitting at about 1850 right now. I’ve also wondered if gear level impacts shop offers, follower drops, and chest drops. One of the issues with not being transparent about how anything in the game happens is it can cause players to come up with all kinds of crazy theories that may appear true based on RNG of small sets but in reality may be completely false. But, those theories are still more to work with than anything the game is offering in regards to game mechanics.
