A Haypi Review: Significant Flaws in an otherwise very......

A Haypi Review
Significant Flaws in an otherwise very addictive game

Let me start by giving you a little background on myself as so to justify my review. I am an almost thirty, stay at home mother who was raised a gamer. I started playing Atari as soon as I could pick up the controller and have been playing any and all types of games ever since. Now that I have a family I try and balance my gaming world with my real world. I am willing to spend some money on a game however; I will not spend uncontrollably like a younger player might. With online games like Haypi, if the game can manage to squeeze any money out of me I try and balance that with what I would pay in a store for a computer game or board game. I am also willing to spend a little more if the game continues to keep my interest after several months. I understand that “free” games like Haypi need to pay their employees as well as keep the game bug free and awesome, so I am more than willing to give my fair share to that cause.

Let me start by sharing the great aspects of Haypi. Haypi is very addictive from the start with key enjoyable elements like building up your city, your army, and your resources. There is something very satisfactory about building up your own civilization. Another key element is the element of war with the aspects of competition, revenge, camaraderie, and alliances. All factors that make the game very addictive and fun. The last and probably most important is the Chat. Being able to instigate wars with your enemies at the same time as helping with your alliance really builds a sense of friendship, competition, and loyalty, not only to your alliance but to the game itself. If I wouldn’t be letting down my entire alliance by quitting the game, I probably would have left the game already.

This leads to, in my opinion, the very significant flaws of the game. These are all fixable if the developers are willing to listen to the voice of the gamers. The very first discouraging aspect of the game is the extremely long time it takes to really build up your city enough to be able to build an army big enough to enjoy any other aspect of the game. For example, to take a level 1 fort you need to have at least 200 siege engines. But to make 200 siege engines you need a significant amount of resources that you just don’t have until you really build up your city which takes you to about general title level 6. This is even with using all of the free coins given to speed the process. This could easily be fixed by lowering the first couple level fort troop numbers so that a newer player could take a fort and start gaining some money. If you have the patience to outlast this mind-numbing time things begin to get interesting.

The second discouraging aspect of the game is the very difficult and slow building of money. Money is a key aspect of the game with building technologies and buying leveling up items like nuggets and gems, not to mention much more expensive items like the scepters. The way to get money is very limited. As a newer player you have to rely on the marketplace to sell resources to make profit and if the market prices are down in your server you’re out of luck. And once the prices go so low in the server they never recover and you are just out of luck. It is very painful and this doesn’t even consider the menial rewards to taking forts. It takes you so long to even be able to take a level 1 fort and once you do the only reward you get is 20 monies an hour per fort level. It is very disappointing after the tremendously long time it takes to build up enough siege engines just to take a fort. Again both of these problems are easily remedied by setting higher limits in the market and giving better hourly rewards for occupying forts.

The third discouraging aspect of the game is the imbalance for the need for coins later on in the game. I agree and understand the entire coin purchasing aspect of the game. The developers do a relatively good job at balancing when and where coins should be needed. It is an ingenuous balance when players are continually debating on buying coins for the more privileged aspects of the game. Where I believe it gets out of balance is at the point when your resource buildings are maxed to 15 and you need 10 coins to level up one resource in one building. In addition to those 10 coins you need a mass amount of resources to upgrade. These higher costing upgrades are not substantial enough to warrant using coins on the upgrade. I believe the upgrade rewards need to be quite considerable to tempt someone to spend coins, let alone 10 coins! This makes the entire game hard because of the imbalance in high upgrade costs to low resource output. The last coin imbalance I believe is in the coin prices for nuggets, gems, scepters, etc… however if the money imbalance aspects of the game were fixed as previously mentioned I don’t believe I would have a problem with the coin price for leveling type items. If making money was just a little easier or there were lower price caps on market items, I wouldn’t be complaining about the cost in coins for leveling type items. Fundamentally, make it attainable for an individual to save or make money within the game to purchase leveling items rather than forcing them to purchase coins in order to do so.

The last major and most discouraging aspect of the game is the imbalance between the need for thousands of siege engines and the inability to keep enough crops in your cities to feed them. Even when your warehouse is maxed with crops and your resource buildings at max production rates (lvl 15), if you have any significant sized army of siege engines (3000+) you’re running out of crops within 12 hours! Even if your planting technology is high you still have a significant imbalance in crop production and consumption. This forces a player with larger armies to spend an inordinate amount of time feeding troops instead of warring against other players. Again, this can easily be remedied by increasing crop outputs in each upgrade, increasing the percentage rates in technology upgrades, increasing warehouse holding levels, and/or having higher oasis levels. It is my opinion that all resources buildings need better increases with upgrades to be comparable with the oasis outputs. A level 9 oasis only needs 600 siege engines at the most to occupy and the output is great, however, compare that with the dauntingly low outputs of your resource buildings and the imbalance becomes clear! You spend a lot more time and energy upgrading your resource buildings which becomes insignificant when compared to higher level oasis’s which are very easy to occupy. Very Discouraging!

In the end, this is a great start to a great game however it needs some tweaking to keep players interested and active. Like I said, I’m willing to spend money on a game and have already spent over $30 on Haypi. Unfortunately there are too many imbalances in the game itself to keep players interested for the long run. War games are inherently discouraging without having to be challenged by the imbalance of the game itself. I’m not sure how much longer I will want to play the game with the continuous setbacks I keep encountering; even though I’m trying to stay active and loyal to my alliance. I hope this review is helpful and taken seriously as I really do enjoy the key concept of the game and hope the best for its future.

Rednessa
Server 4
Renegades Alliance

You already posted this in General Discussion. Post it in only one section.

LOL, wasn't sure which area was best and it took me long enough to write it I wanted to make sure it was seen.

ok 1 and 2 is just somthing that takes time and effort to get
3rd coins are not really needed as a level 15 reasorce buildings are still enough to keep u going and the only thing coins do is make somthing happen faster, u can get everything someone with coins can expet it may take longer.
and number 4 some accpects of it have been suggested before but all together i like #4