IdleOn

UPDATE 3 (follower patch): Installed the game to see if things have changed. Next day, the new patch drops with 350 dollars of p2w to get some of the most broken benefits in the game with a new currency that costs real money and no way to grind in game.

He did not fix the 2.1B integer limit that I complained about over a year ago, rather he capped it at 1.05 bil which is laughable since I could easily hit 1B over a year ago before the W5 power creep.

Capping the number go up dopamine in an incremental game is a sin.

Additionally, I encountered a neat bug where random parts of the screen were opening a link to his twitch channel.

So yea, my review has not changed. Lava still being lava. I noticed he deleted a criticism thread of the new patch on Reddit already. Classic.

UPDATE 2: The developer has now banned me from the reddit for making a single post criticizing him. https://imgur.com/a/MVzXQWy and here is proof and my username https://imgur.com/qHJ8nf0

UPDATE: Shortly after this review I have been banned from the discord for criticizing the latest patch (v.156) and how it hurts F2P players and did not achieve what he promised.


Note: Here's the image linked in the reddit post. https://imgur.com/EqMq9TS
This is also what I reference below in the review.

I love this game and will probably always love it, but it feels like I am Johnny Depp dealing with Amber Heard when playing it sometimes.
I can not recommend this game to new players as the developer constantly makes the experience worse for new players and endgame. I will change my review if the situation gets better.

The Good

[*]Game has good systems to progress with.

[*]Being able to control multiple characters without actively grinding them all is cool.

[*]Resource management and hoarding billions of items makes you feel rich and powerful.

[*]Interesting and quirky monsters.

[*]Artwork looks great if you enjoy pixel art.

[*]Always a goal to strive for.

[*]A lot of different systems to min-max.

[*]Choices you make can heavily impact how well or fast you progress.

[*]Smooth leveling process

[*]Most systems have no caps. Endless character levels.

[*]Loot explosions from collecting your "afk gains."

[*]Decent jokes through the quests.

[*]Community is nice and helpful for the most part.

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The Bad

[*]Every world increases the amount of gems you must spend to stay competitive. The latest world gave as much as 20x the character power for spending money on gems.

[*]In-game currency acquisition is consistently getting nerfed. An example would be the KIng Doot mini-boss. The boss has gone from 72 gems possible to 19 gems to now 9 gems per kill. That is a massive nerf.

[*]The dev keeps adding more and more gem shop purchases each patch despite nerfing the rates of obtaining the currency.

[*]The dev has laid out the current patches to be QOL and Bug-fix focused, but ignores the most crippling bugs that plague the game.

[*]A lot of his "QOL" ends up being nerfs with a pretty paint coat.

[*]in Patch v.156 his dungeon "QOL" was some party find features such as invite others and find group. These features essentially broke trying to find a party and now no one can find a group when it was already difficult before. The dev just keeps on trucking and talks about making adding more to dungeon 1 when his other dungeons and party features are broken.

[*]Endgame players are constantly getting nerfed in damage and progression.

[*]Endgame players that discover an oversight and use it are threatened with bans because of the developers mistakes.

[*]Old bugs are not being fixed like mobile overflow (when your materials or money hit 2.1B you just lose them on mobile).

[*]The game white screens if you are performing actions that require a lot of input (people in the community have a solution for this, but the dev refuses to listen).

[*]The community has a lot of smart and talented programmers that have solutions for a lot of the games problems but the developer will not take the help and frustrating problems just continue to exist.

[*]A lot of the issues stem from the developer's ego and his refusal to listen to the people that are playing his game.

[*]His responses to criticism can be emotionally charged at times.
Last month he went on a banning rampage in the discord over people that had negative criticism towards the game (as noted by the other top review).

[*]The latest patch was hyped up as nightmare versions of the games bosses, but turned out to be a flop because you make more in-game currency by doing the easiest bosses. The developers response to negative criticism was, "ok then dont farm nightmares dude" and "if youd like i can remove all gems and make that mroe clear."

[*]Normal bosses drop 1 gem each, which is a great way to farm up gems for F2P players. However the new nightmare bosses take up 30,40, and 50 keys respectively but still only give 1 gem each. This means F2P players have to give up 29,39, and 49 gems per nightmare try for a 1/1000 drop rate of a cosmetic item. (Gems are the in game store currency).


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The Ugly

[*]Players and mods are banned on the discord for petty reasons.

[*]The dev reprimanded staff he personally hired for fixing situations he caused and in his lack of transparency with his own team decides to punish his long time staff with an immediate ban without hesitation.

[*]Any form of negative criticism is deemed toxic by the dev and makes you worthy of banning.

[*]Dev has a history of censoring people whenever he can. He will take down YouTube vids because he feels they take away from his own channel, he will make you change your name if you are an Idleon content creator the name is related to his game, and he will ban you if you mention certain people that he doesn't like.

[*]I was banned without warning after being a member with over 10,000 posts over a year without a reason listed. I assume I was deemed as "toxic."

[*]The dev banned several active and long time users over an April fool's joke spoil. Only one has been unbanned.

[*]The dev criticized my feedback in Discord by saying, "so do the last 1.5 years of your enjoyment mean nothing to you?" As if the game can't degrade or my feelings change over that time frame.

[*]The dev adds things to the game because he wants to, not because the game needs it. He will spend an entire day streaming him drawing frogs for the first dungeon, when the dungeons have bugs and the party system is broken. His stream on 5/8/2022 had him explicitly say he does things because he wants to.

[*]You must join the discord to be competitive. You will not be able to "exploit" his oversights without the help of the community that does the code digging. Many of his oversights are bugs that go on for months and give massive advantage to those that are adamant about staying ahead. You must be part of the discord to even know what is an exploit and what is deemed ok by the dev.

[*]The developer's communication is poor. He has no community manager and doesn't address the communities concern. His version of addressing concern is by adding things no one asked for and saying people wanted it.
He has put out two game polls since the latest world release based on what the community wants, and nothing in those polls have been addressed in 2 months.
The only thing that was addressed were an issue with players auto clicking a new feature. His solution was to just hard cap clicks and screw those that didn't exploit early.

[*]Cheaters are free to roam the game and can even unban themselves.

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I suggest to those that get invested into their games to proceed with caution if you still want to try this game.

Game is getting more and more p2w, dev added a HUGE p2w update with a new currency, only way to get this new currency is by spending real money

For months and through numerous requests by the developer after every update, I have considered how I was ultimately going to post my review for this game. For the first 9 months of playing this game, it was one of the best games I have played, and certainly the best idle game. The progression system is outstanding, the different areas in this game to progress in are many, and it feels like you are still making progress towards something or other no matter what you are doing. I was ultimately planning on this being a positive review.

Unfortunately after the most recent update, I can no longer recommend this game, and it's not just for the content in the update, but primarily because of how the developer has handled the situation since the update has been released. While the update itself was a travesty (adding a very obvious pay to win system introducing some incredibly powerful pet follower bonuses, the average person will need to spend hundreds of dollars (or wait on average several years) for a good chance at getting incredibly game altering bonuses), I was confident that the developer would quickly identify the criticisms laid out by the community and address them with a plan on how to fix the new system. Instead, he's banned numerous people making complaints, deleted criticism from posts made on the subreddit which he moderates, and hasn't issued a single statement since the update was released, which at this point has been more than 10 days ago. That silence speaks louder than words.

The developer and his mod team ban people and delete criticisms constantly. I say this as an outsider who has never been punished in any way. I can no longer stay silent on their behalf. The dev, unfortunately, has what appears to be a long history of making bad decisions when it comes to punishing people in his game, on discord, and on the subreddit. It's shameful, and ultimately the people they end up banning or punishing (just look at how he handled those who used the sailing exploit) are usually the game's biggest supporters and i'm sure many people who have spent money on the game.

The developer constantly touts "solo dev" as if that were a positive. From what I have seen, that also means he's never held accountable to anyone but himself. When he comes up with a terrible pay to win system, there's nobody in his corner to tell him it's a bad idea and to rethink the system. When he issues bans to numerous members of the community, there's nobody there to review the legitimacy of the ban, or to tell him that kneejerk bans are harmful to the game and community.

I think what's more pressing than fixing the most recent update is fixing the authoritarian system of control that's been the norm in this community. Lava should take some of the money he earned from this update and hire a community manager who should be the one handling all bans, and review all retroactive bans. They need a panel of three members of the community (NOT selected by Lava) for this to review them - I am guessing the VAST majority of bans and mutes on discord, reddit, and in game are complete and utter nonsense that no panel of three would uphold. If I am wrong, great, prove it by having a panel go through them all and release a statement on the number of bans and mutes they reversed.

If the developer continues his heavy handedness, there will be nothing but sycophants left to sing his praises, which ultimately hurts the game and the community rather than being able to accept hard truths and work to improve the game based on those truths.

I think there's still a chance for this game to be saved. I'm willing to change this to a positive review, in the end, if instead of a knee jerk reaction that I'm expecting from all the negative reviews he instead reacts with a thoughtful response that both fixes the issues with the update, in game, but also fixes some of the grave concerns I've raised about the heavy handed moderation resulting in numerous unjust bans.

I don't know why the developer has been silent for so long. I am going to guess that, when he ultimately makes a statement, it's going to be something about spending all his efforts on fixing the issues that iOS has had resulting in the update being rejected there. That's ultimately not a good excuse for being silent so long. Most of us want the game to succeed, and with such a backlash, there should have been a statement made the very day of the update, let alone by now 10 days later. I had been holding off on this review to give the dev a chance to make this statement, but it's been too long at this point, and with no promised changes, again, I cannot recommend this game as-is.