It finally happened. Over the past week or so, I’ve been logging in to Ancient Summoner more and more rarely. I think I’m finally getting free of this drug, and it could not have been sooner.
It’s just more of the same, on a less frequent basis.
That one sentence really is the best way to describe my recent time with the game. It takes longer to level up. It takes longer to clear a map node in the campaign. It takes longer to upgrade a building at your bases. Everything just takes longer, making paying for progress more and more enticing, except it’s not enticing at all for me, meaning I’m just less and less interested in Ancient Summoner.
How far did I get?
I’m level 37 and I’m at region 8 of the campaign map. This should tell you almost nothing and it tells me nothing either. As far as I can tell, I’ve unlocked all of the available activities, except for some of the sea port expeditions, which unlock as you upgrade the sea port building.
I get 4000, maybe 6000 crystals per day.
It now takes close to a week to gather enough resources to upgrade the main city hall building, and a couple of days to get the crystal for the secondary buildings. All of this is only the case if I focus on crystal gathering expeditions. The downside of that is that I usually lack the silver to buy card packs or gather guild contribution points.
The card collection aspect was keeping me occupied, but even that is getting less interesting.
Basically everything either takes too long, or would be too expensive if I was the type that buys stuff in F2P games. I’m not, though, so for me, it’s just way to expensive and way too big of a time investment.
There’s some depth, but only some.
There is room for tactics in the card battles, but the whole system is set up to fail and resort to money. Higher levels mean you get to put more cards in your deck, but it also means the players that do pay get more time and opportunities to get ahead. Time, money and levels also give you higher hero stats, including health and card bonuses, meaning there’s very little chance to catch up with anyone.
Here’s where my hero’s at. Getting upgrades is now harder, so that part died to.
A different system, one where there’s a fixed limit on the amount and level of cards in your deck would have put everyone on a more even ground and make the game part of Ancient Summoner far more interesting. As it is, Ancient Summoner is a pure skinner box and that kind of approach always fails eventually. It’s just a matter of how long it takes for certain people.
I’m mostly done.
For me, it’s failing right now. I’ve logged in today, after two days of not logging in at all. I got a card, some points and some gold due to ranking 199th on the season 1 arena ladder. I got a legendary level card, so I might play around with that for a short time, but for the most part, I’m not interested in playing anymore and I’m not interested in any of the unlocks either.
It now takes four victories to clear a single map node. Boring.
You can assume I’m done with the game at this point, because I certainly won’t be writing about it anymore. I might occasionally log in a few more times, but I foresee myself completely free of this skinner box within a week or two.
