I know that there must be hundreds of topics about boosts and why they are not the best feature for the game, but I’d like to sum up my vision of the problem. And I have an idea how to save JWA from this disease.
Boosts kill core gameplay
At least gameplay of hunting dinos and collecting DNA. Since you’ve leveled up all your team to 30 there’s no more need for the base gameplay. That leads to the point that a player doesn’t need a VIP account anymore, a player doesn’t want to buy scents, a player doesn’t need coins. That leads to the point that the company loses revenue from the game. So many features and resources go useless, but getting your team full of 30 dinos doesn’t mean the end of the game.
Boosts kill progression
It’s mostly connected to the previous point, but the point is that in most games late-game requires a very high activity to progress. Take any MMORPG. The higher level you are the more you have to grind to progress. And that makes sense, that gives a player sense of progression, that’s the base thing for any game. Progression. What do we have here with the boosts? All you have to do is to get a daily battle incubator, do 3 boost strikes per week and spin some green SD. It takes about 30 minutes per day. All extra time a top-player wants to play goes worthless. New dinos don’t make much sense and here we go to the next point.
You’re stuck with only dinos in your team
Before boosts were implemented, all you had to do is to level up a new dino to 30 and you could use it in your team. But now it’s much complicated to replace a dino from your team. You lose half of the used boosts and that makes the replacement worthless. You can do it only while some events are active as I read the forum, but that’s not the way it should be.
New and returning players can never become top-players
I left this game about 1,5 years ago and my team full of 30s is still legible. But I’m not a top-player anymore (as I used to be) and I will never be it again cause I can’t do anything to beat the ones who collected boosts all this time. And I can’t collect more boosts than they, I’m strictly limited in getting ones. The only opportunity is to buy boosts for HC, but a pack of 100 of every type costs 6000 HC. 50$ per week to catch an extra week of boosts? That’s insane.
What to do in this situation?
Of course, Ludia can’t just remove all the boosts and say “Let’s play without it as we did before”. Many players bought boosts for real money and they can’t be just erased.
The main point I suggest that the higher progression should be based on DNA collecting. Increase the max level of a dino to 50. Let it require more and more DNA to level up a creature. If you want to add variability for the dinos, let a player choose a parameter that they want to improve a little bit more with a level up (sinse 30 or 20 lvl). For example, when I level up Magna to 31 level, she gets attack and health increased by leveling up and I get to choose what to improve extra: health, attack, speed. It’s like boosts, but this will be DNA based boost. If I want to grind, ride my bike for hours to get more Irritators to level up Magna faster, that’s my choice and my opportunity to progress.
All collected extra points spent on the dino should be resettable. For coins or HC, but I should be able to reinvest points in a creature without losing the points I collected. For some currency of course.
And what to do with collected boosts?
Let it be transformed into any non-hybrid DNA. Reset all boosts, count them and let them be any DNA a player needs. For example, 1 boost (any type) is 2000 common DNA, 200 rare DNA or 50 epic DNA. Or calculate any other rate, it’s only an example.
Players who collected tons of boosts will be able to go further with next max level of dinos, everyone get a chance to catch them and nobody loses a progression in this game.