The auto mode

In the latest update for Crash Fever, we have a new addition – a small little button at the left part in battle scenes – the auto mode toggle.

If you are not that into mobile games, then you might not be too familiar with it. In short, it is something that allows you to let an AI to play the game instead of you. It’s very common on most China games and is one of the things we use to determine if the game is good or not. Usually, we say that games with too little player interaction is bad, and most games that fall under this category has one thing in common – the auto mode.

I played at least hundreds of mobile games, I guess. I mean, if you count everything I ever downloaded, from the tiniest snake variants to the largest works like Cytus and Implosion, it should make a hundred. Not all of them has that auto mode, but most failed examples do.

You may wonder why, but as I said, player interaction is a huge aspect of the game. Plus, the player will need to have some satisfaction when playing a particular game. Press a button then see your troops kill enemies monotonously doesn’t sound fun and there is literally no skill requirement of the game. Skills is also a thing – no matter how braindead the game looks you still need the player to think a little from time to time, and reward them for doing so. When the game is just “auto mode and watch things go” the only thing that separates players from one and another is the pay-to-win aspect – the whales are better, and the rest just sit behind. That’s absolutely not fun and it is responsible for the deaths of countless mobile games. Not even kidding, go play MapleStory for iOS or Android (developed by Playpark) and you will know what I mean. Also just saying, Playpark is quite a terrible developer. In most of the cases, a game that has an auto mode does not require much player skill, since well, simple AIs can already handle them. You can already tell how the fun gets killed from this aspect.

But let’s take on another aspect – if the game somehow requires the player to do repeated actions (most games that include the farming aspect does), then auto mode can be quite a good addition. I mean, you really don’t want to sit there and do something repeatedly for two hours straight. It’s boring, especially if the farming stage does not pose any threat or have any interesting variables to keep your brain awake. Plus, we are always busy, and busy people don’t really have the time to sit down and burn time on games. Well, I am busy most of the times. Don’t ask how I manage to squeeze out time for games, that’s a secret. But whatever, you can now see that in some cases the auto mode should be there. It boils down the good old question – is it implemented correctly?

I took on Crash Fever’s auto mode for a spin, and let it farm awakening materials while I am writing this. When I take a look at how the AI plays the game – gosh – it’s horrible. You can easily tell that this little thing cannot handle any stage above a certain difficulty and you can only use it for farming materials or extremely low difficulty stages. Remember that Crash Fever is a puzzle game, although it does not look like one. Plus, it is disabled in the best part of the game – multiplayer battles. The name stated that, it’s multiplayer, so you are kinda expected to play with others instead of asking an AI to play on your behalf – that makes sense. It also gives the incentive for players to play by hand instead of abusing the AI and make the game boring, since multiplayer yields extremely good rewards and bonus drops compared to solo farming. I think it is done correctly and solves the issue most busy players are facing. Besides that, farming materials are indeed extremely boring. The enemy can’t kill you, you have to slowly grind the enemies to death (sometimes, I mean, my team does not have that firepower to nuke things yet), and it takes some notable time for every run. To be honest, I’m glad that it’s here.

On the other hand, Tower of Saviors is also quite a grindy game. You farm for materials, do simple stages over and over again because of guild missions, and do biweekly stages or ultimate stages dozens of times to get sufficient copies of the card for whatever purpose you need it for. But people are pretty fine with it lacking an auto mode, mainly because we have a separate system for that. We have certain teams designed to roll over these easy difficulties with extremely minimal effort (like paying attention for 0.5 secs every 10 secs), and in some way you can get them for free. They are pretty much used for material farming or extremely low difficulty stages. For harder difficulties, we don’t need the game to autopilot on itself because of the game’s variable nature – you cannot expect what will happen next round and you will need to be awake enough to farm anything which is considerably hard to get. Even if you lack the time to do so, most of the times you will still have an alternate route to achieve what you need with less farming. I think it’s the game design that helps the game to survive for a good 5 years and probably more to come.

If you play mobile games too, do share your experiences and opinions on the auto battle features!

See you next time,

--Lilacse