Board Thread:Plants vs. Zombies 2/@comment-26169720-20170114184444/@comment-24024415-20170122160636

The Determined Mine wrote:

Legofan9o5 wrote:

The Determined Mine wrote:

Legofan9o5 wrote:

The Determined Mine wrote:

LittleRedFlame wrote: Everyone is calling it trolling while im here calling it "Running out of ideas" and "Poor game balance" ... nah, I feel like for a long time Pop wasn't trying, and this is the first time Pop actually does a good pinata party. "Good Quality". Now THAT is subjective.

The Pinata Party in my eyes is certainly anything but "good", I would describe it as "malicious". It just does not work in a fun, goofy playstyle shift, or a "Starting off weak and triumphing over your strong adversaries". Moreso, it gives off: "You like playing PvZ2? Well screw you." with the terrible plant and zombie choices that makes it difficult to play blind and in a single go as Pinatas are intended to be played.

Give Popcap this: their recycling of old Pinatas may be bad, but at least they function as small challenges by themselves, where every plant had its own role to play. This was a massive difficulty spike with no excuse.

Btw, we've seen Popcap troll users with the April Fool's Gargantuar. That's funny and works because the typical audience would over-react to such a hefty threat, which was just an easy enemy all along. As that example is to trolling in its most joking and innocent stages, this Pinata is "Trolling" at its most cynical, disgusting and toxic. The thing is that - you don't play blind in some levels. At all. That's the entire gimmick of Pinata Parties: you cannot predict what plants, waves and zombie combos are coming. Sure you partially can if they repeat, but the average player is assumed to not have played them before, at least not recently enough to remember their composition in detail.

And yes, some levels are traditional Locked and Loaded, showing the plant side, but the zombie waves are still a mystery. Pinatas are blind, the elements of the level cannot be predicted unless you have a second-hand report from another profile or user. But even then, that other user would have to go in blind. So that part of your arguement is wholy debunkable. ..."Some levels you don't play blind" - fail, and learn from it, and it won't be playing blind anymore.

Your point actually makes it that all pinata should be able to one try every time - which is technically impossible.

Once again, that does not remove the initial "blindness" of Pinatas, since repeating would certainly give more insight the second time, but still surprise on the first.

What I'm trying to get at as a whole is: This Pinata was not well put together on a structural level, making new players with basic PvZ2 intuition fail because of poor and harsh level design. And that's an element I've failed to mention directly: intuition in Pinata parties.

Game intuition is why most experienced players can play Pinatas much easier than newer players, because they can play with high amounts of improvization. That is what balances out the blindness of Pinatas and justifies some of the more difficult entries, that the player can recover and use their limited resources to win by playing by ear to maximize their tower's effectivness. Yes, every Pinata should be able to be passed, given that the player shows compitent intuition during the level.

This Pinata didn't even have that basic input in it, as it literally required game intuition only possible after a loss or using Power ups, which is just shoddy game design.