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Flashback Friday: I've played Clash of Clans more than any other game, but now it's time to log off

What I learned from the process of spending $70+

Flashback Friday: I've played Clash of Clans more than any other game, but now it's time to log off

Back in September 2013, after a year of playing Clash of Clans, Jon Jordan decided to move on.

So with Supercell's fourth game Clash Royale now out, we thought it would be a good opportunity to revist the article as part of Flashback Friday.

 

As with everything in life, there are beginnings and there are endings.

Some can be excited and unexpected, while others are best when planned and measured.

That's what I'm thinking a year on from when I first started playing Supercell's Clash of Clans.

At the time, I didn't know much about the game, and certainly during the Canada-only beta in August 2012, no one expected it to have the commercial and cultural impact it's since generated as one of the most played and profitable games in history.

Equally, on a personal level, I've never spent so long playing a game, or indeed, spent so much money in a game.

Slippery slope

So let's get the money bit out of the way.

As with many players, my first purchase in Clash of Clans was the 3,000 gems required to buy an additional builder: a hard gate designed into the game during the early stages (around one month in for me) when you have a relative large amount of resources but are restricted by your lack of builders in terms of how quickly you can spend them.

In total, though, I've spent over $70, buying currency to speed up buildings and buy defences that provided significant new features.

Yet, as must be the case with such resource-based games, there’s only ever a brief plateau of satisfaction before another new unit or building update makes itself known to our envious brain.

This is most clearly seen in the update cycle surrounding your town hall, which is the core building that controls the levelling up process for your key resources - notably gold and elixir mining.

It's the most expensive building to level up, but once you've completed this, all that's happened is you've opened another layer of increasingly expensive upgrades, which quickly overwhelm the higher capacity resource production you've also unlocked.

Infrastructure costs

Of course, the city-building aspect of Clash of Clans is not the game itself.

It's merely the foundation on which you build your armies, either to play the single-player (effectively the practice) mode, or attack other players for resources and ranking; an element most fully experienced in the game's Clans mode.

To be honest, though, this was something I never found very exciting; preferring instead to act as a supplier of troops for the other players in my clan.

My base - not too good, not too bad

Not that I got much praise for it. The most 'exciting' thing that happened in terms of my clan-play in Clash of Clans was when some (no doubt) snotty-nosed imp kicked me out of the clan for not playing enough.

The very cheek of it!

Calculated swansong

So, even though I joined another clan, from that point on, my enthusiasm for the game was waning.

After a year of fairly regular play (at least once every couple of days), I was at the stage when any upgrade took days to complete.

Also, it was now almost impossible to organically collect enough resources to upgrade a building as, in the meantime, someone would attack my base and steal most of them; hence the only upgrade option available being to buy gems.

So, being of the analytic persuasion, I worked out how much it would 'cost' to upgrade everything in my base to its next level.

In in-game currency terms, the answers was 103.7 million gold, 45.65 million elixir and 10,000 dark elixir.

In hard currency terms that's 49,225 gems, which converts to $351.57; despite my relatively advanced in-game level, for me that was a surprisingly large number.

Learnings

Yet, time and money has not been wasted.

Any journalist worth their salt should not be expensing back their in-app purchases.

As a journalist, it's become clear to me that in order to have an informed opinion on free-to-play games, you have to spend time and money actually playing them.

Indeed, one of my most important conclusions from p(l)aying Clash of Clans is that any journalist worth their salt should not be expensing back their in-app purchases (or receiving free currency from the developer) as it totally destroys your perception of the value of virtual goods - the key aspect of the F2P business model.

It's also important to play some of these games for long periods of time to see how your motivations to play and pay rise and fall over the months. And, of course, to experience how developers update their games with new content and time-dependent offers to keep their long term audience interested.

So, in that context, will I be deleting Clash of Clans from my iPad?

Not quite. It's going into a new folder called 'Games I Used to Play'. I might dip back into it every so often, but my attention is demanded elsewhere.

The folder marked 'To Play' is now filled to bursting. 


Upgrade breakdown

Walls: 215, of which 89 need 200,000 gold each to upgrade to level 7, while 126 need 500,000 gold each to upgrade to level 8
Cannon: 5, of which 3 need 800,000 gold each to upgrade to level 9, while 2 need 1.6 million gold each to upgrade to level 10
Archer Tower: 5, of which 2 need 720,000 gold each to upgrade to level 8, and 3 need 1.5 million each to upgrade to level 9
Town Hall: 3 million gold required for upgrade to level 9
Army Camp: 4, which need 2.25 million elixir each to upgrade to level 7
Wizard Tower: 2, which need 1.5 million gold each to upgrade to level 8
Mortar: 3, of which 2 need 800,000 gold to upgrade to level 5, while 1 needs 1.6 million gold to upgrade to level 6
Air Defense: 2, which need 1.08 million gold each to upgrade to level 5
Barracks: 4, of which 3 need 1.5 million elixir each to upgrade to level 9, while 1 needs 2 million elixir to upgrade to level 10
Dark Barracks: 2, which need 1.25 million elixir each to upgrade to level 2
Dark Elixir Drill: 1, which needs 1.5 milion elixir to upgrade to level 1
Dark Elixir Storage: 1, which needs 1.8 million elixir to upgrade to level 3
Spell Factory: 1, which need 1.6 million elixir to upgrade to level 4
Laboratory: 1, which need 2.5 million elixir to upgrade to level 7, plus 20.25 million elixir and 10,000 dark elixir required to upgrade units to their next level

plus 6 Elixir Collectors, 6 Elixir Storage units, 6 Gold Mines: and 3 Gold Storage units which currently don't require upgrading.

Contributing Editor

A Pocket Gamer co-founder, Jon is Contributing Editor at PG.biz which means he acts like a slightly confused uncle who's forgotten where he's left his glasses. As well as letters and cameras, he likes imaginary numbers and legumes.