Whoops. I meant to come up with something before September ended but forgot. The silly thing is that I always have a lot to write about! However, they always end up as snippets on Twitter.
I probably mentioned it before, but one of the biggest deterrents in writing a blog post is that I feel the need to think up a theme or two and then write a few paragraphs based on that/those. Composing a blog post takes up a good part of the day too.
With Twitter, on the other hand, I can just toss up anything at the spur of the moment without worry that it has to be some sort of short prose. I like that sort of freedom.
Anyway, let’s talk about the pesky event lucky bag draw from Com2uS’ free-to-play mobile game, Tiny Farm, and how using it can get expensive.
Tiny Farm
Whoever is thinking up the events is getting more and more obnoxious. During the first few years of the game, simply breeding and completing simple tasks were enough to obtain event-only animals. Now most of them come from the lucky draw bag — one of Tiny Farm’s gacha systems — which put players at the mercy of random number generation and pure luck. Success rates are quite abysmal, but that’s typical for a lot of freemium mobile games, isn’t it?
Here’s what Com2uS cooked up for the current Mid-Autumn Festival event in regards to the lucky bag:
I was lucky and received both upon my first multi-bag draw. (Players have the option to draw one bag or 10 bags at once.) Such luck is doesn’t happen often though; I usually need to do a few more multi-bag draws before I even get one animal. 
Sometimes it may take until the final few hours of an event before it happens due to the amount of time needed to collect enough tokens or coins to do them.
Event lucky bags always require their own special currency that can solely be gained from from providing love to animals a fixed number of times (usually 30 times), and harvesting from specific production buildings that are only available during the period of the event. (Occasionally, the tokens/coins may be rewards from missions and quests too.)
In most cases, one of the buildings will come from completing a timed quest. Its default production time is 12 hours, I believe. Production time can be decreased, however. By spending the premium currency known as Bells, the first building upgrade will drop the time to 8 hours. The second upgrade will max out the time to 6 hours.
There is typically a second building that can only be purchased with Bells. For the current event, the premium building comes with a production time of 9 hours. Two additional upgrades follow; the first will reduce it to 6 hours, and the final one brings the time down to 3 hours.
All upgrades for the free building as well as the second building and its upgrades do not come cheap and cost a few hundred Bells all together. You’re probably looking at at least $30 US for EACH EVENT. And events vary between weekly and biweekly. There are some cases where they may run for 3 weeks too such as this Mid-Autumn Festival event. Regardless of length though, there’s no denying that Tiny Farm is a heavy investment.
As mentioned earlier, giving love to animals is part of the requirement in getting tokens as well. Hearts are necessary for this and they recharge at a rate of 1 per 10 minutes meaning you get 6 Hearts per hour. For 30 Hearts, that’s a waiting time of 5 hours. Naturally, players may instantly refill their Heart gauge with Bells. :3
All in all, that’s a lot of money for folks that want as many chances at the gacha as possible. And lord knows there are a handful that are willing to fork over the money just for that. The rest of us that can’t or aren’t willing to factor Tiny Farm into their monthly budgets can only pray that the few lucky bag draws they do will get them the event animals.
Yes, I’m fully aware there are multiple ways that we can get Bells other than buying them, but there’s never enough time to save up those “free” Bells for every building upgrade or to buy each premium production building, is there?
I’m honestly a bit frustrated with the way events are designed nowadays, yet nothing pisses me off more than the idiotic Santa’s Sock. But that will be a rant for another day. XD
koukoupuffs 