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.

It's a good idle game, lots to do, good music, good visuals. So why a negative review?

The developer decided in today's update to increase the required level to unlock your next characters. For example, I have account level 550 and my 9th character was going to unlock at level 600, and that was just raised to 1100. It will be a long time before I get 1100, but 600 was just around the corner, so that's pretty brutal to be missing out due to not having started playing a month earlier and I'd already be 600+ with 9 characters.

It's a bad update for new players that will increase the gap between new and old players. I think the real reason this was done is to slow player progress further (if it takes longer to unlock characters you'll be farming with less characters for longer slowing progress) and it will make bundle purchases look more appealing since the bundles will speed up progress even faster when progress is slowed down overall.

And would you look at that? Another new $20 pack, which would be considered one of the most OP P2W bundles yet, was dropped today's update. So the math adds up.

I get you're going to keep adding new P2W bundles you want to make money, but can you at least change back the level requirement for new characters? If not I'll highly recommend new people to avoid this game, updates are not new player friendly and heavily P2W / pay2catchup

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