Idle Pins

Former Kongregate player here, played this nonstop for months back when it released on kong a few years ago. I do not recommend anyone to touch this dumpster fire of a game. There's no offline progress + the progression is built around you buying at least some of the premium shop items with real money. The developer is known for being a hothead that argues with and insults players. Back in the kong days he was in the chat daily berating players and throwing tantrums when anyone dared to suggest a change or criticize the game. You can still see this behavior when you look through the discussions page, he refuses to acknowledge that the game might not be perfect and gets pissed off when people want changes. As the game goes, you have to keep it up and running 24/7 to make any progress. Once you get to the point where you're grinding for the 0.x% chance items just to power up a tiny bit, you'll be sitting at the same stage for literally weeks if you don't have the premium boosts.

Former Kongregate player here, played this nonstop for months back when it released on kong a few years ago. I do not recommend anyone to touch this dumpster fire of a game. There's no offline progress + the progression is built around you buying at least some of the premium shop items with real money. The developer is known for being a hothead that argues with and insults players. Back in the kong days he was in the chat daily berating players and throwing tantrums when anyone dared to suggest a change or criticize the game. You can still see this behavior when you look through the discussions page, he refuses to acknowledge that the game might not be perfect and gets pissed off when people want changes. As the game goes, you have to keep it up and running 24/7 to make any progress. Once you get to the point where you're grinding for the 0.x% chance items just to power up a tiny bit, you'll be sitting at the same stage for literally weeks if you don't have the premium boosts.

TL;DR: Terribly grindy, P2W, stuck in the past. [Response to Dev's 1st response (numbered points) below: https://i.imgur.com/5PajXPZ.png ] [Response to Dev's 2nd response (text below numbered points): You really don't seem to understand what I've written if this continues to be your line. I enjoy grindy games, I've played grindy games, games like NGU Idle and a number of others. None of them fail to respect time investment like Idle Pins, for as marginal progression as Idle Pins runs on. Stop trying to make this sound like detractors want an entirely different game, or an entirely different pacing, that simply isn't true. And there's time walls and then there's time walls: I urge anyone reading this to ask themselves: in any idle progression game you've ever played, has there ever been an upgrade that takes a month to get, yields ~0.02% benefits AND you're excited to get? No? Because that's the bulk and pace of progress on offer here. You keep bringing up "paywall" so for the THIRD time now: I never said the game had a paywall. Please stop using this red herring fallacy as an defence. To reiterate, I said the game had P2W elements and this is an objective fact: when you have best-in-slot options that can ONLY be obtained for cash and the equivalent F2P options don't match up: That's textbook P2W. Yes yes, this is the game you wanted to make, I've already acknowledged that. Still, you sure are super-defensive over it, one would think someone THIS sure of himself wouldn't care about what people offering feedback not in alignment with his vision would say. You made the game you want to play, you won't change it for the world, cool cool. Please stop misrepresenting what negative feedback is, though, there are plenty of people who would be happy for Idle Pins to remain a slow, grindy game AND ALSO not waste time and electricity like it does now. I'll note that this is the second time the Dev's response fails to respond to substantive points in both the review and my first reply. Reader, make of this whatever you want.] Remember when browser idle games didn't have offline gains, or failed to have meaningful offline gains? Remember when progress meant leaving your computer open for days and nights? Idle Pins' dev doesn't just remember, he's stubbornly stuck in that era, and you don't need to bother suggesting any change what so ever from that model, because he doesn't care. What's fascinating about Idle Pins' terrible design is how every bad thing you could say about the game intersects with everything else: Making progress requires you to grind out (tens/hundreds of) thousands of sub-1% drops while online. You check to see how you can speed up the process, and immediately hit the P2W wall. For a few bucks, you can get otherwise unique boosts to drop rate and other core stats. For the cost of a AA game (20ish bucks) you can buy the best farming formation (formations are the deciding factor on what pins you can use at any given time) in the game that sits comfortably ahead of the farming formations you can "earn" after hundreds of hours playing (and after 500 hours of this game being on, of fiddling and looking up guides and streams, I STILL hadn't gotten the F2P basic farming formation, lol). For the price of a AAA game on launch (!!!) you can buy the best combat/flexible formation in the game, which again blows any equivalent formation obtainable through gameplay out of the way. These items I listed above can ONLY be bought for cash and are absolutely better than equivalents gained through grinding and in some cases. As extra icing on the cake, one of the few ways you can jump a little ahead is with seasonal events (Christmas, Halloween, Valentines, that sort of thing) where rare pins are dripped out a lil bit. Unsurprisingly, these events are absurdly grindy, require online play and have ADDITIONAL monetisation tacked on to either skip grind or gain other temporary (read: FOMO'd) rewards. So lets circle back assuming you bounce off the store page wall. What then? Well, the game's "premium" currency (and I put it in quotations because honestly the best stuff's bought with cash), Derium, can likewise get you a lot of good rewards, including scaling ones. Unlike the main store, however, this can be "earned" through daily logins which mitigates the impact of having it also offered for cash. And, to be fair, a lot of Derium upgrades are reasonably priced, putting them within reach of F2P players. Others, however, are laughably expensive - when I stopped playing, the coveted +Drop Rate upgrade for Derium was going to take me a month of daily log ins, all for a measly 20% additive bonus, which is to say to give an example, taking a 0.1% droprate to 0.12%. Amazing stuff, really motivating. OK so Derium gets you SOME stuff but then it also becomes a grind seemingly designed to get you to fork over money. What about the 100% F2P progress? Well, again, hope you like leaving your computer open with the game running for weeks and weeks on end, because otherwise you will make no meaningful progress at all. You'll do a week or two of this, peek into the reset currency tab and realise that all that time barely got you one or two small upgrades. The game barely has any meaningful offline gains at all, grudgingly added in after the Steam release's negative feedback, but you lack the most important offline gain possible: item drops. You need SO MANY of these dumb items that fuse with each other and then give points on resetting that the ONLY way to progress is online, game open, for weeks on end. It's funny because if the game was doing something shady you could AT LEAST say well, THAT'S the angle, but as far as I can tell it isn't. If the game was nabbing processing cycles to mine crypto or fold proteins you could at least grin and say to yourself "I can respect the hustle". It's not doing that, it's just wasting countless hours of electricity for nothing. A hidden crypto miner would be a more honourable use of that time and energy, no joke. The frustrating part of this is that the game looks great visually, there's neat ideas on display too, but the dev is stubbornly convinced that letting people make real offline progress would be a betrayal of his vision or whatever. And, to be perfectly honest, I don't know if offline gains for item drops would really fix the core issue: that you need absurd amounts of these things to make very small, very incremental gains. There is no other idle game out there that I've played that's this hostile, this adverse, to player progress.It's honestly an achievement in of itself, which I have to say I'm impressed with. All I can say is, I supported the game early on. I bought a few of those cheaper stat pins and one of the cheaper formations (a mistake, the only formations worth buying are the farming one or the super expensive one, but lol @ spending 50$) and I honestly regret it. Check Steam Achievement clear rates if you wanna groan, the game has TERRIBLE retention rates. What a shame.