itch.io

Really happy to be writing my second round of feedback so soon, it's really impressive how fast you got this out!

So, first, love the direction you're going with the events, the GPU Firesale is really fun and I found it extra useful near the beginning of runs where the extra profits from rent on the GPUs can be very substantial. The removal of the negative random events I mentioned previously has massively improved the game feel, the lack of random slowdowns makes progression smoother and more engaging.

The reworks to R&D are excellent, I like the new additions and the increase in numbers on the existing options is also very enjoyable. The addition of infinitely repeatable options is working towards the game having a lot more staying power. I especially liked the built-in cooling upgrade, the effect it has on repeat runs is felt immediately, with less clicking, lower cooling costs, and the ability to buy way more hardware with those savings, this upgrade is the type of thing that really adds up to make repeat runs feel really good.

The expansion of reputation levels is also super welcome, persistent scaling and serving larger and larger contracts for larger and larger clients is totally the core of what the player fantasy is with this theme, and I think the further you go with reputation and contracts the better. I think that the expansion to the length of a run with this has improved my opinion of the hardware selection, now that the player is able to scale further, rent/unit and the versatility of a rack to serve different enterprise clients becomes way more important, so I found myself spending a lot more time browsing hardware and designing racks for specific purposes, and the ability to duplicate those optimal racks was just the icing on top.

Now, the new addition, Crypto. I love the concept of this, and it fits very neatly into the existing systems, and adds some opportunity cost for your racks, since we now have so many different roles they can serve to generate income. Passively generating crypto and then using it to crash the price, buy low and then wait, and buy tons and dump is very fun. But it is WAY too strong as is. Prices seem to be able to be manipulated to go up basically infinitely when enough cash is available, minimum prices are veeeeery low, so when you manage to gather enough to dump you end up with gigantic positions in a coin, and then the market recovers rather quickly, then you can buy repeatedly in small increments to raise the price by literally millions of times, and finally dump for massive profits. I think that this loop should stay, but I think crypto will need some tuning to not make it break the progression of the other systems.

My suggested changes to the crypto would be this, firstly, the most impactful change I think you could make is to tighten the band on prices massively. Consider the maximum profit % a player is able to achieve with the price spread, because players will always find a way to manipulate the prices to their minimum and maximum values if allowed. Tokens like Doge and Shitcoin have incredibly low minimum prices, and so their maximum prices should be at most something like 10x higher.

Secondly, the market is actually not volatile at all, I would characterize it's behavior as HIGHLY stable, it has very strong mean reversion, and the band on those mean values is very small, trends do not hold for very long, and so buying and selling is almost always just a few seconds away if you're waiting for something. I think also, it's a bit of a problem that all of the coins act this way, the interesting thing about markets is that different assets can have different dynamics. A good example of this would be having one coin be very volatile, with frequent swings between it's highest/lowest values, so that you can trade it very actively, as opposed to a coin with very low volatility that would provide a stable source of income when mined and the ability to make modest profits on large sums of coins whenever you need liquidity.  One more interesting dynamic that comes to mind is coins that stay very near their minimum values, always ready to buy and very easy to mine, but very occasionally shoots way up in value for a sale window.

The final change I will recommend in this very long comment (I'm so sorry) is much slower mean reversion that happens in larger increments. I think this would be fun in a lot of different ways, firstly, for mining it would open up windows of opportunity for profit that slam shut suddenly, forcing you to monitor and engage with the market conditions based on your play style. This change would also prevent players who just massively profited off of large sales at high prices from entering back into their positions for a while. It would also be interesting for a kind of hybrid trading and mining strategy where you mine and buy at the same time to amass a large position and shoot the price up to max, and then continue mining through the high prices.