I know I've made way too many posts by now (and I still have some more up my sleeve) but I want to ask:
MrDrNose, why did you make the Store?
(Newbies, please read this if you want to know what to refrain from doing for the best experience. I think.)
The things that you sell in it mean that no real effort has to be put in the game. You just have to wander around, farming DCoins with your transtemporal relayering powers and your biological ability, by getting achievements and literally wandering around. All you have to do is wait.
Want to beat the game? Get 40 DCoins and buy Map3. You'll instantly have access to the WIP level, History.
Want to hire the Watcher to gather the school's secrets for you? Farm DCoins. Watcher doesn't care. You won't even have to die (unless restarting necessitates/counts as dying).
Want to spend much less time obtaining the school's secrets? Go to the Store and ask for a hint for much less DCoins. The chances are, they'll tell you exactly where and how to obtain it for you to just do what they told you to do, which would take considerably less time than farming DCoins. Or, better yet, buy a cheap untitled map with ALL of the secrets you need in them.
Want to get all of the achievements you can think of? Buy some items for your loot box. If you buy enough items and hints, you will be told exactly what you should do to do anything, and, with just a bit of practice, blitz the game.
Want to do this without even wandering around, farming DCoins? Perhaps you might be able to farm a specific number of coins, search for that number in the game files, and then replace all instances of that number with 1000000000000. You'll break the game either by succeeding and prevailing or by corrupting the save data as the game knows it.
With the Store, no matter how unskilled you are, you'll always slowly-but-surely progress. Every DCoin you snag is a step towards having victory handed right over to you. Honestly, I think it's less pain, less gain. Once you play the game like this, it will lose it's intrinsic value and become rather worthless in a sense, because everything you do will become much less of an accomplishment. It's like playing an idle game (though I believe the real strategy in idle games are in speedrunning it, since it basically works the same way: the more you wait, the closer you get to victory, but if you spend your money more wisely, you'll get closer faster). Without the Store, you are forced to progress on your own, which may result in the repeated loss of your progress multiple times, but you'll slowly learn and have a chance to really accomplish something of your own volition without just knowing exactly to simply spend a bit of time and then succeeding, as though it were all done automatically.
If you're going to have such a store, I recommend the following things:
- Secret items are not for sale.
- Maps that are a part of the main game itself are not for sale.
- Outright tips and hints are not for sale. I still stand by my ideals that experimentation and finding and reading the cryptic pieces of paper is the best way. If you need information about how characters behave, hide them somewhere other than right over the counter.
- Information about things cannot be sold until you have already dealt with them.
- You can only buy helpful items for your loot box once you beat a level, and you can only use them in that mode and lower. (So if you beat the Math Level normally in Regular mode, you can only use items in the Lil Puss, Boi and Regular modes.)
- When starting with loot box items, you cannot play the game and get achievements for other endings than the ones you've already done.
- Maps with potentially spoiling content cannot be unlocked until you've beat associated levels and found associated secrets.
- General random things such as the "NUTS" graphics are okay. Although, to add a sense of reward, you should have a certain amount of achievements rather than DCoins before you can unlock miscellaneous privileges. Because, you know...
- If it's feasible, have a better way to collect DCoins than just strolling around and picking them up. I know you can get them for entering secret areas and achievements, but otherwise there needs to be a bit more of a challenge than merely surviving and waiting in order to obtain them LOL.
Before then, anyone playing the game should limit theirselves to these rules in order to create a greater sense of fulfilment and accomplishment. I can already tell that MrDrNose doesn't give much regard for his deep secrets, considering that some of them are all over Discord and YouTube and Twitter, and as a result have leaked into the main game by some. I'm looking at you, onion face. If you don't play the game honestly before using the overly convenient Store, you probably can't be bothered with it much and as a result, aren't really dedicated to it in the right way and may not be a true fan. Either that, or you want to know everything about it, for judgment or general information collecting, which is quite understandable but, come on, you get my point LOL.
I just hope you all take these things to heart, because, well, I did. It struck me as suspicious the moment I first looked at it (probably in MUG's streams before I even got around to downloading the game).
I have a few other general questions and random things to say but they can wait for now.
