Other Everything is becoming a drag - large Feedback post

[il Duderoni]

I've been playing for about a month, maybe a month and a half now? At first I found it an exciting time seeing how this all plays out, but as time goes on and I'm almost literally doing the same thing day in day out I feel like I'm just going through the motions with this game. Allow me to elaborate on the aspects of this game that having been putting me off, especially as someone starting out.

At first there was exploration of all the aspects, with the Rift being the last feature I unlocked which arguably I found the least rewarding since the AI seems high on cocaine in that mode only and I got my rear beat more often than not.

Once that was past and all the new exciting things were unlocked, all I had left to look forward to was

1. The slow crawl through Story Mode
2. The endless cycle of Prize Fights
3. The stubborn and unfortunate pattern of Daily Events

I'll address these (and quite a few more) issues I'm having point per point in one or several replies because for some reason the forum system thinks my very, very long post is spam or contains profanities (even though I've run it through a profanity checker a few times).

 

[il Duderoni]

Story Mode.
For starters, I don't know about you, but when I play the story mode of a game I generally don't expect down the line to have to break the flow of the story myself so I can go get some levels in the other modes. It also feels very odd how the Hard mode of the earlier chapters are actually easier than the Normal nodes in the final story chapter.
Oh you were following this narrative? Too bad, let's go cram that Fishbone Gang storyline back in your head! Have fun forgetting what the Egrets were up to until you go back and revisit beaten nodes just to catch back up again!

This is not how you do a proper Story Mode in a game. I'm only bothering to complain about it because it seems SGM is actually putting in effort to be better than the common trash one usually finds for Smartphones.

My suggestion would be to re-level the pathway to the bosses more consistently and evenly, with the Normal Story Mode being the primary climb through levels. You can do whatever shenanigans you want forward from Hard, at that point you're in it for the grind and not the story.
However, any nodes that are off the beaten path from the boss can be challenges, of course. It's a neat idea to have treasures locked away behind that. That is something I did appreciate, and of course doing a 100% is very satisfying in of itself.

What I'm saying is that the initial Story Mode experience should be far more streamlined.


Prize Fights.
It seems these are meant to be your main source of leveling, which I've come to understand is running a system that's satisfactory for end-game players. However, let me tell you what my cycle through these is as a beginner player.

Bronze, Silver, Gold, the cycle remains the same though repeats sooner the higher the difficulty. I keep building up a streak until I have three match-ups that all equally will kick my best teams' behind. At the beginning, I just tried anyway and found myself beaten anyway. Boom, a measly two digit exp reward and back to the streak you go.

Oh would you like to spend premium currency to restore your streak? If Theonite wasn't as moderately easy to obtain I'd make a much larger point about this. You can have a Microtransactions business model and not appear completely greedy, you know? Ever hear of Warframe? Anyway, that's beside the point...

Back on topic, the example situation now is that I'm matched up against three teams where I correctly expect all three of them to beat me senselessly. Either it's because my A-Team is tired or, (more likely nowadays) my best team just can't hold a candle to em. What ends up happening is one of two things:

• I back out and decide to call it a day, hoping that in my absence a few people will try and beat MY Defense team and give em some extra points. Inevitably, if the Prize Event hasn't timed out yet from it's 3-day period, the next will happen:
• I match up against the strongest available team using my 3 weakest characters and throw the fight, leaving for a minute to use the bathroom while the opponent's team wrecks my low-low characters. Sometimes that'll result in a three digit exp reward for low level characters that could use it.

The end result is the same. My streak is gone and I can start over against teams that are leveled easier. By the way, using Theonite to restore the streak only to find the matchups beating you anyway is VERY dissatisfying! Refunding that spent Theonite and subsequently removing the streak re-instate (or if you really want some goodwill, give us the option between the refund or another shot with some more Theonite) would seem like a very consumer-friendly move.

Additionally, why isn't there a button to allow us to reset the streak ourselves? I'd ask for the auto-matchup to be a little more forgiving in what teams it picks, but if I can just reset my streak without having to waste the energy of three characters (not to mention the one whole minute...) it would keep me encouraged to keep going. Because at the end of the day we're all in it to grind out points so we can get the rewards or at least meet the point minimum for the end reward.

Daily Events.
Honestly, the Daily Events don't NEED to be more streamlined in their run to the boss. *I* would appreciate it, but I can see why that's not necessary. Daily Event layouts seem well planned already for the most part but what I care less for is how stuck they are to a schedule.

I love Cerebella, I love playing with her and if I could I would only play with Cerebellas in my team all day every day. Her Daily Event however falls on a Friday, and wouldn't it just be so that Fridays oftentimes leave me more occupied than other days. Meaning I have to rush through the Event if I want some of those rewards or not at all.

I'd like this to change in some way or another. My first thought would be to allow events to go on for maybe 12 hours longer. Or maybe some fancy mechanic where we can reserve one Event per week that we can hold on to for a few more days.

 

[il Duderoni]

The Bad Advice.
Use characters that you're not using to level up your main character.

Worst. Advice. Ever. Because of that advice I early on sacrificed 3 Understudies to a Headstrong for a mere pittance of exp. Result, weeks later I am wasting an ungodly amount of Exp on my Maxed Headstrong because I use her as a carry in Bronze situations, and I can't evolve her because I could've used those Understudies for that instead! What a bad piece of advice that was and how hard it has bitten me in the behind.

The Wikia itself had to list this stuff as beginner advice, but I wasn't even aware the Wiki existed! How often do you seriously believe some Mobile Game has a whole Wikia dedicated to it? That site is a treasure trove of good info but it is not a reasonable expectation for someone to believe it has one, not to mention well maintained too.

That example does perfectly lead into the next problem, which is...


Leveling.
Good god, leveling has become such a drag for me. Either I don't have enough spares to Evolve a favorite character, or the leveling of the character in question is taking such a long time because of the energy expense and the fact you have to pick your characters as a counter to the opponent's team leaves it out of action more often than not.

It becomes even more frustrating when you hear Veterans speak of their favorite ways of levelling. Either you bring two weak characters and have a high level carry them through the fight (not viable for Early play, of course) or they speak of an old trick where you'd replay an Expert 2x Cerebella Story mode fight, a trick that has now been nerfed by reducing Exp gain for replaying Story mode fights. Great encouragement for people to just ignore a whole aspect of the game once they're done with it too. Does nobody care about story anymore?

I've got a range of ideas for this. Some straightforward, some not so much.

a.) More Exp per fight. Pretty straightforward, I'd say. From 50% to even 100% Extra Exp in modes designed to be for Exp farming like Prize Fight seems like a good idea. It certainly should be, as the Energy cost to it is far more demanding than non-Prize Fight stuff.

b.) Allow us to reset a Chapter's completion status once it's fully beaten. I want to ask it for every Difficulty seperately, but seeing how I'm hitting this drag right around the time I've almost beaten the Fishbone Gang one I guess it would be fair if it only is given as an option once Expert is 100%. Just gotta get that Painwheel/No Bronze Trio done, which won't be any time soon unless by some miracle a Silver Painwheel finally drops for me.

c.) Allow Maxed characters to split their Exp reward among the remaining teammates. I don't see why it would be unbalanced to have your "carries" power level other characters, which they are doing already anyway but just less efficiently. It's bothersome and fixing this would allow me to play with my favorite characters more often, which I'm now doing less because my Headstrong can't Evolve yet because of my earlier mentioned issue.

d.) Allow already-sacrificed characters to count for the Evolve requirement. If I've earlier sacrificed several Understudies to my Headstrong, then my Headstrong should not require even more Cerebellas to Evolve. It would make a very inadvisable feature be somewhat less inadvisable.

e.) Why don't we let Today's Missions give extra Exp when progress is made on them/completed? The Theonite is nice, but additional exp certainly seems welcome too.

Coins.
I wish I could spend Theonite on Relics, but instead I'm spending it on Coins whenever I think the Cabinet of Curiosities has a good deal for me (usually I'm wrong...) or when I need to level up a move or purchase Skills for my characters. The cheapest purchase on the skilltree so far has been for 1 sp and 2000 coins. Commonly you'll spend at least 10k (often more) when you really want to dedicate to a character. Silver/Gold raise exponentially as well.

In perspective, completing a Daily Event reportedly nets you 30k and the Daily and 4-hourly relics net you 500-2000. The Medici Prize Fight that seems whimsical in when it chooses to arrive isn't that great either because the opponent scaling just gets crazier even faster and you basically have to hustle through it repeatedly and very dissatisfyingly (the method of which I've described a bit further above) all for what might end up a few hundred thousand, IF you set your mind to it as someone in the Early game. A nice amount, until you start spending it and realize that, oh yeah, everything is expensive and unfair for beginners.

a.) Scale the monetary rewards for beginners a little bit better, please.

b.) Reduce the cost of skills and/or items in the curiosities shop. This would cause less of a coin devaluation than a.) and give Veterans a leg up with their stockpiled coins. Reward them a little too, eh?

c.) Alternatively, maybe create a token that players can earn in some way that allows you to reduce/remove the coin cost of a Skill upgrade. Maybe even SP? I haven't often had a shortage of SP yet, but I'm sure it'll be soon...


To latch on to that last suggestion, I can see where this in a simple form could be bothersome. Instead of using these tokens to upgrade characters quickly, they'll save em for the more expensive nodes of the skilltree. In response I could suggest tiered tokens, where Tier 1 is usable for the first two circles of the skilltree, and Tier 2 for the second half. Coincidentally it'll be possible to say in a simple sentence that Tier 2 Tokens are only usable for skills that are unlocked by Keys.

 

[il Duderoni]

Auto-fights.
I know, I know... Pros shouldn't be using auto-fight (AF) anyway. Look, let me tell you, Auto-fight is the reason I'm actually enjoying a fighting game in a long time. I'm not good at these sorts of games, so having an AI take care of the basics for me such as going in, juggling, etc. is priceless to me. There's some issues with it, though. Issues that have been reported before, have been acknowledge and have yet to be fixed.

Look, I get it, blocking and using Specials/BB's is basically the only real agency we have left in a fight if we use AF. But I'm not amazing at these sorts of games and sometimes I miss my timing. Having the AI help with my timing for Blocking would be great.

Squigly's AI is really obsessed with charging her skill, to the point that she'll leave herself open or ruin opportunities for a win. I basically had my Dead Heat lose against an Understudy because her dash backwards for charging forced the Battle Opera to move, allowing the Understudy to survive what would've been fatal. As a result, the Understudy went and beat me in such a short span of time in what I believe must be the first time an AI actually learned about desperate self-preservation.

We're talking a 5% health Understudy beating 3 other 10% health characters. All because the Dead Heat decided charging a dragon was more important that standing still. I even think I was holding block too, but as reported Squigly loves to ignore inputs (even a desperate spam for Skills/BB's!) in favor of the charging.

a.) Fix Squigly!

b.) Maybe tiers to the kind of Auto-Fight we like? Maybe a newbie mode that includes block and a Pro-mode that only handles stuff like juggling or a combo that's already on-going.

 

[il Duderoni]

Business Model.
90 for a pack of 8 relics per character. You throw that at me, I expect at least one of every character guaranteed. Price like this, you're basically paying for a full-priced game and some DLC imo.

I'm happy this business model doesn't push any P2W or even P2Play practices as some F2P's sneak up on you. Hats off to you for that.

Buying these characters doesn't guarantee you a win, just a skip forward in what I consider now a bit of a bore. 80 should guarantee me a nice selection of awesome characters and plenty of space for them, but they're are basically loot boxes which means I could buy this and RNG could do me nasty, leaving me standing there like a tool.

My suggestion is simple. Work on those prices or what they give in exchange. Microtransactions has the work Micro in it, and nothing about these prices represent that word
I understand this game has to make money, but right now the game will not receive one big payment from me while it could have had multiple smaller ones for sure.


End note.
I'm not a stranger to abandoning mobile games that don't treat me right. The common mobile game is out there to either spam ads onto you or trick you with microtransactions that will annoy you greatly.
I want to believe Skullgirls Mobile is different. You've given the Energy System a whole new spin that is truly brilliant.

That is why all these missed notes, all these small bothersome details have piled up to become a larger problem that makes playing this game further that much more bothersome for me. I'm sure that at some point a lot of these complains will slowly melt away as I transition away from Beginner and creep closer towards Veteran, but that barrier is looking and feeling very large to overcome and unless something changes, I could find myself just forgetting about this game eventually.
And that'd be quite sad, because I do believe this game is a great effort towards making mobile games appear less as a scam and evolving the mobile platform into a truly worthy gaming platform. So how about it?

 

[Ryouhi]

Story Mode.

i'm not sure if with "leveling up in other modes" you are refering to Prize Fights for example or if you just mean having to go do other story modes. I personally don't see a problem with the former, as it let's you break up the monotony of one mode and mix it up a little.

If you are refering to the latter, i can definitely see where you are coming from. I don't remeber having any issues with it myself, but frankly, it's been over a year since i played the story mode proper.

Maybe having the difficulty setting be more consistent betweens different stories instead of the current system would be nice. For example letting a player play through "Easy mode" of the stories from start to finish with a consistent level requirement instead of having difficulty feel more random if you compare difficulties betwen different stories.

Judging from dev's responses in the past i wouldn't hold my breath for too many Story mode changes at the current time, as it is hard to invest into for them. Players will realistically only play through once and then leave it at that, so it's a lot of dev time for little player engagement.

Still! Would be a great change for the future!

---

Prize Fights.

Yeah, as an early- to midgame player keeping those streaks can be hard. But devs have said in the past that you *are* supposed to lose your streak at some point. Whether you agree with the design choice or not is up to you.
I personally would love to see the number of streaks required to get to the max multiplier would be lowered to perhaps 10 fights instead of 15, making it less painful if you have to rebuild it.

I personally don't think the theonite for reseting your streak is an issue. The game is free and needs to entice people to spend money on it, but this probably mostly for whales or people that are just really close to a milestone etc.
I believe it may be a good idea to make this cheaper though, because at high streaks this gets ridiculously expensiv e making it a non-option to me. Or maybe giving players one free reset a day?

While i do spend money on the game myself, i never use theonite for rebuilding streaks, so it's a non-issue for me personally.

As long as these thing aren't pay to win i think they're fair - this is more like pay to progress more quickly - which is a system similar to that of warframe.

---

Daily Events.

Hm good points. This is certainly disadvantageous to people with certain schedules. I always hoped The amount of nodes per map could be reduced a bit so you can get through them more quickly?

The Bad Advice.

Another good point. On the discord we tell every newbie to never ever sacrifice - ididn't even realize this was an in-game tip.
Yeah, definitely a noob trap

Leveling.

Like you mention yourself - leveling becomes more efficient once you have a few fighters that are already a higher level than others you want to level. Personally i don't think i felt like leveling was slow when i started playing, but i also lack a new player' perspective with how the game currently plays nowadays.
Giving max level fighters a way to share their excess XP is something i always hoped for as well

Giving more incentives for the Daily missions is also a great idea imo

Auto-fights.

Hm not to judge, but i believe once you reach a certain skill level with the game, auto fight is more of a hinderance than it is of help.
It's certainly useable in lower level, but maybe this is why you have trouble beating enemies at higher streaks?
I am extremely bad at fighting games, but the mobile version in my opinion is ridiculously easy to control and pretty intuitive.
Tap until you see the last attack of your standard attack combo, then swipe upwards and keep tapping.
This "combo" alone is the bread butter for most casual play and basically let me play thorugh all the game's content.
After that, just find special moves and Blockbusters that combo after finishing your air combo.

Auto mode has it's uses, but it has no strategy or logic to it. It just executes random attacks at random times and as such is not reliable.

So again, not judging you for using auto mode, but maybe you should try to get this basic combo down without the auto mode and you may have btter luck at higher streaks

Business Model.

Fair points.
I personally play f2p 90% of the time and only buy some theonite for 20 bucks whenever a new character comes out just to show the devs some love.
While the prices are really high (from what i hear they're standard prices for Gacha games tho?), you also get a lot of theonite for free just by playing - enough to get enough to buy relics regularly.
Personally i never felt like i had to spend money on this game just to progress or compete and never felt like there's too long of a time without getting some relic pulls in.

End note.

Thank you for taking the time to write such a large detailed post about your feelings on the game. Do remember this game is developed by a relatively small indie team of people - but this also means they tend to look at every feedback post and have shown in the past to listen to the community
So hopefully we may some of your wishes realized at some point

 

[il Duderoni]

What I meant by levelling simply put is that at some point in Story mode you reach a moment where the line-ups you have to go up against are too strong for you if you've only been doing Story Mode up until that point. The Tooltips even say that when you reach this point you should be looking into Prize Fights. Having to do this (and I had to postpone Story Mode for a long period, not to mention) broke the flow of storytelling quite severely.

Investing in Story Mode, even if it's only going to be seen once, is still important. For many newcomers it's going to be the first impression they'll get, so it's important the devs get that right.


I'm okay with losing the streak, I just groan how I can tell when all of my three matchups will beat me. I've done a lot of studying into the various forms of all the fighters so when I'm confronted with three opponent teams all with (what I call) 'cheese' to them, I'm ready to give up and throw a fight so I can reset my streak and get some easier matchups again to continue farming those points. If I could instead press a convenient button to restart and spare the wasted energy/time I'd be much happier to keep trucking on that way.


When it comes to levelling, one major example that springs to mind is when I was trying to max out a character using a well leveled Eliza and two rookies I brought for levelling/longshot bonus. I think I got about 1200xp I think, which in the past felt like a wealth of Exp. It resulted in the Exp blip barely moving for my Eliza. It was very disheartening.


Right now it sometimes feels like my inputs are being read incorrectly, which could be my slightly damaged screen or me swiping in a very shoddy way. I've blocked when I wanted to grab, I've dashed and combo'd when I wanted to dash and grab. Not to mention that the constant tapping can get a little strenuous for my fingers. What I'd like even better is controller support for the game. I have a few Ipega controllers that I like and I think it should be doable to use the two thumbsticks to simulate swipe movements and maybe the shoulder buttons for taps. D-pad to activate character specific skills such as Ms. Fortune's head or activating the Wrestlemania-thingamajig, and such. I imagine it's workable and would probably reduce stress/input-frustrations considerably for me. There's an App out there that let's you simulate touch movements when using a controller but I feel that's going to make for a larger problem down the line.


I'd love to just deck down 60 to 80 on this game and basically have all of the greatest characters ready to use/level. Maybe a more reliable way to earn bronze characters too, while we're at it? I forgot to specifically point this out, but I'd like a reliable way to obtain bronze characters. If I could easily get my hands on three Cerebella's, then my earlier mentioned problem would've been a non-issue. Maybe a currency issue, but it'd have a solution nonetheless.


I hope SGM keeps growing and polishing its experience. I might even go so far as to install it on Bluestacks and play it while I'm at the computer, if that's allowed. Does anyone know if it is? I don't want my account banned over a silly thing that I don't even really insist on.
Or, y'know, having a PC build developed eventually would be neat too but I know that's asking a lot.

 

[educavalcantee]

Can I share some begginer's advice?

A thing that you can do (helped me a lot in the early game!) is to save your theonite. Don't spend it in anything. When you reach 1k, buy the 10+1 pack of premiere relics. You'll have a guaranteed silver fighter, 10+1 chances of pulling another gold or silver fighters, and the best part: You will be likely pulling a lot of bronze Cerebellas . Keep doing this, and you'll see your collection growing bigger. My best gold fighters came from 10+1 pulls of premiere relics. (Well, RNG blessed me.)

Another thing: don't evolve your bronze and silver moves past level 3. It's is necessary only to unlock the skill ability. Soon you'll be playing the expert daily events, and the game will reach another level for you, when you start to get gold moves.

 

[Inked]

Or, y'know, having a PC build developed eventually would be neat too but I know that's asking a lot.

SGM probably won’t come to PC as this version of the game is actually a spin-off the original and the original Skullgirls is based on PC/console. it’d be redundant in a way tbh. also personally i wouldnt see it as appropriate either just because it’s Skullgirls Mobile. laptops are mobile too i guess, but you get my point lol

 

[il Duderoni]

Can I share some begginer's advice?

A thing that you can do (helped me a lot in the early game!) is to save your theonite. Don't spend it in anything. When you reach 1k, buy the 10+1 pack of premiere relics. You'll have a guaranteed silver fighter, 10+1 chances of pulling another gold or silver fighters, and the best part: You will be likely pulling a lot of bronze Cerebellas . Keep doing this, and you'll see your collection growing bigger. My best gold fighters came from 10+1 pulls of premiere relics. (Well, RNG blessed me.)

Another thing: don't evolve your bronze and silver moves past level 3. It's is necessary only to unlock the skill ability. Soon you'll be playing the expert daily events, and the game will reach another level for you, when you start to get gold moves.

My odds haven't been great in the past with Premieres so I'm pretty hesitant. I've had 1k Theonite before but I ended up blowing some of it on Coins because I foolishly wanted to buy a silver from the shop that I later found out didn't rank so well amongst the community. Again, the sort of newbie trap stuff that I'm not very happy about.

SGM probably won’t come to PC as this version of the game is actually a spin-off the original and the original Skullgirls is based on PC/console. it’d be redundant in a way tbh. also personally i wouldnt see it as appropriate either just because it’s Skullgirls Mobile. laptops are mobile too i guess, but you get my point lol

I own and played that one. It was okay but definitely a more classical fighter game, which I so happen to be quite bad at. (I'm only better at Tekken because they're more forgiving for spamminess)
It also doesn't have an RPG element which I'm a far bigger fan of. I see why it won't come to PC but man would I love it if it was.

 

[VictuTheNewb]

Leveling.
Good god, leveling has become such a drag for me

Oh good lord, why am I still trying? Since I started playing this game I am always unable to level up my characters because they're either too weak to put up behind my strongest characters and risk losing a win streak or I just don't have where to level them up. "Team a and team b have no energy left? Too bad, story mode does not give you anything". It has come to the point where I can only upgrade 1 level a week(I know high level characters should take a longer time, but seeing your xp bar not moving upon receiving 5 0 0 0 xp is frustating. I heard that level 59 diamonds can take up to a month to level up.