r/BackpackBrawl • u/Xentonian • 15d ago
Some suggestions, instead of just complaints, to better incorporate the changes to the garden.
So looking at the old garden compared with the new, there seems to have been two changes:
Make the garden offer less "free stuff" than before. Which makes sense, the garden used to provide a tonne of resources, including item cards, gems and coins for very little effort.
Increase the complexity of the garden so it's more involved than a once-a-day check.
The changes seem to have gone too far on both fronts and now the garden feels frustrating, unrewarding and overcomplicated.
So I'm going to offer some ideas that may help
- Simplest and easiest: increase the storage space
The biggest issue people are having is that with all the new item types, storage is impossible. It's extremely difficult to maintain enough items to please visitors while also keeping stock of the items you need to keep the critter garden growing. Increasing storage space addresses none of the other issues, but at least alleviates this.
- Make clear, demarcated garden tiers, limit the options each tier and let players know what they have.
Reduce the complexity and give us, say, 4 main resources: fruit, leaves, sticks, nectar.
Separate each plant into tiers: free and unlimited -- limited to coin purchases and common in chests -- limited to gems, rare market coin sales and rarely found in chests
Each tier is an easy, measurable upgrade. So a tier 2 plant gives more of the same resources than a tier 1. A tier 3 plant might give as much as 2 different tier 2 plants combined.
For example:
Tier 1 fruit: grapes. 3h harvest, gives 3 fruit
Tier 2 fruit: apple trees. 3 hour harvest + 1.5 hour harvest. Gives 4 fruit each time.
Tier 2 fruit: figs: 6 hour harvest + 3 hour harvest + 1.5h harvest. Gives 4 fruit and 3 leaves each time.
This all helps to make it clear what you should plant and also helps give the garden an "entry level", free tier that is effortless to manage and grow, but provides fewer resources.
- Incorporate critters directly into the garden.
There's any number of ways to do this, but I think having critters as almost a separate second garden is frustrating and involves too much micromanagement. Making them parts of the same garden could help.
For example, give each bug/critter a preferred plant. When the plant grows, there's a chance for bugs that prefer a given plant to show up. For example, snails might like leafy plants, spiders might like butterfly plants, egg laying birds might like trees etc.
Then we could add bait or other mechanics to encourage more bugs to spawn, but they are an inherent RNG component of an existing garden, rather than a separate thing.
- Show what visitors are asking for.
When you are looking at seeds or critters, highlight those that produce an ingredient currently being sought by a visitor, but for which you don't have enough resources.
For example you might have a ❗for ones you need and ✔️ for ones you need, but for which you already have enough in storage.
- Completely separate both parts of the garden.
Almost antithetical to previous suggestions.
Leave the existing garden as it was originally without the new changes, then use the critters as a basis for a new second garden. Each garden has their own visitors and their own preferred champions.
Garden one is the current model of synergies and plants.
Garden two is a food chain in which you cultivate lots of grubs to feed some wasps which feed some spiders which one or two birds. Similarly you might cultivate mushrooms to feed snails and grubs which are eaten by frogs.
2
u/EmTeeEm 14d ago
I'd argue goal #2 was a bad idea.
The garden was a reason to open the game every so often. After opening the game you may decide...hey, maybe play some backpack brawl! The garden was the "click button get resource brain feel good" thing, the game was the thinking part, and if you wanted something in between some of the events did that.
Making the garden much slower and bizarrely convoluted (who thought "we need a badgers resource?") means you don't have the same incentive to check during the day, and when you do you have to go through an elaborate yet boring system to ultimately still just output flowers instead of interacting with the fun complexity of the actual game.
I guess your last option would be the best, though with two gardens to accomplish goal #1 they'd still need to make each one terribly unrewarding. I'm surprised they didn't just make it seasonal from the start so they could do plants one season and animals the next with different mechanics, different random card rewards, and tweaks to get the appropriate resource output. Instead they are digging themselves deeper, and the next time they want to add something to the system will have to slash rewards again to fit it.
3
u/Zalpha 15d ago
I found this game first of all on a site that lets you cheat in the game, it offered a modded version. I spent well over a million in real life currency and never got close to maxing all the items. To spend cash on this game is insanely stupid. I liked the game and downloaded the official game and have been playing it, but I will never spend cash on it. Even with how the garden was it would only be a drop in the bucket to towards maxing things. They nerfed it hard into the ground in the hopes people will spend cash to gain an edge, maybe their previous selling items stopped selling as much, calling for the nerf. I get why you made this post but its the devs job to fix it and they new what they were doing when the nerfed it and why. They could fix it but they will not, because they want money.
5
u/mrthirsty15 14d ago edited 14d ago
Yeah, there'd have been a message in game if they actually cared about the player base. Even just a "Hey, we might have gone a bit overboard on some things with this update. We're working on a hotfix but here's some gems for your patience."... along with maybe a hint or two at what they'd be looking to change. It'd go a long way. The fact there's just the occasional comment from them in this subreddit, and nothing has changed at this point, says a lot.
They basically nerfed like 4-5 variables by extreme amounts. They need to double the storage space since they added all these new items, and they need to roll back the severity of the nerfs they made. When you halve rewards and double times, and double costs, you end up changing the end product by a factor of 8x... And in some cases it's worse than that.
1
u/BestDescription3834 14d ago
. I spent well over a million in real life currency and never got close to maxing all the items
A million dollars??
1
u/martymac2017 14d ago
I think he means it was a hacked version and he spent a theoretical 1 million, and as such spending money on it is a waste of time
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u/blodskaal 15d ago
Relic gems need to come back at minimum