After carefully examining the records we keep of every game played on Mycena Cave (we’re over *2/3 of a million* games since we started counting on March 20th!) we’ve come up with some interesting trends.

We see that it takes the average Echolocation player about 20% longer to win the same amount of nuggets as it takes the average Cave In player. As a result, we’ve decided to **increase the winnings from Echolocation by 20%**: each “X” left on the board once you complete the frame is now worth 3 nuggets, up from 2.5.

This change is effective immediately :)

-screams with so much joy and happiness and stuff, flails around-
ECHOOOOOOOOBOOOST!!!!!!!!

so today I maxed out for the first time in months :D lovin this update.

I thought mushroom meals was going to stay a no profit game since people were cheating at it? but I know that there were tweaks for it in the works anyway since the difficulties are wonky…

Love the new payouts. :D

Maybe if people didn’t need to cheat at mushroom meals it could work? Like, no overly challenging levels that take an hour to solve and perhaps a small limit (3 or so?) on how many times a day it can be played? (So even if people cheated they wouldn’t really have any advantage.) And no numbers, that would make it harder to cheat, as users would need to assign each mushroom a number in order to cheat (they still could do that, but solving the puzzle would take less time than assigning the numbers to mushrooms and typing them all into a solver).
I like this kind of games and would love to get nuggies for it. ; v;

I hate numbers ‘n junk but I REALLY love Sudoku puzzles. :c I hate that people cheat using solvers, as it totally ruins the fun and payout for everyone else doing it. @___@ It makes me sad-

I am not sure as to a solution, but I hope we could come up with something so that we could get a proper payout on it. :/

PyroLuna; The issue with Mushroom Meals is indeed that people can use solvers (and sometimes do..) and it is hard for us (me, anyway) to identify them unless they’re satisfying a couple very obvious signals. In Cave In & Echolocation it’s much harder to cheat, so they don’t run the same risk. Therefore we can’t really do much about the payout for MM :( There are a lot of alternatives I’ve come up with to at least make it worthwhile to play (and add easier levels for those that didn’t do sudoku puzzles for 6 years straight in secondary instead of paying attention in class -cough-whatme?noI’magoodstudent-cough- 8D), but our priorities have been elsewhere, I’m afraid!

Back O/T, though, I hope echolocation fans will be able to enjoy echolocation a bit more with the higher payout :D

this helps me not at all lol echolocation baffles me the one time i got them all in the right spots…i still earned 0 nuggets i’m still hoping for other types of games (i really love the game where you draw lines to trap things in boxes >.> but unfortunately i think it’s a flash game ;/)

but woooo for updates!

I’m super happy about this upgrade in payouts- however I think the discrepancy is being caused by the fact that Cave In has a partial-payout system? It’s almost impossible to not get paid when you play a game of Cave In if you’re trying.
Meanwhile..it happens very regularly with Echolocation. Paying for the partial wins there would probably would’ve solved it just as well as this upgrade. =\

I agree with Sapphy. I think part of the issue is while playing cave in, which I don’t do often, there’s partial payment. Whereas with Echolocation, I bat 50/50 on getting paid or not. And yeah, I get about a minimum of 50 nuggets per game, but that averages out to 25 nuggets per game, since I don’t complete so many of the boards.

Would it be possible to, say, divide the total amount of winnings you could get with the number of hints you used by four, and then award a fourth of it per wasp found?

Changing the system to partial-payout would fundamentally alter the strategy that was intended for the game when it was designed. While we do see it as a viable alternative to perhaps be considered at some point in the future to try out, it would currently take too much coding time and effort to be a priority :) I fully understand it is frustrating to go through a frame and for a quirky reason have one or two off (I hardly play the game for this reason, but then, I love Cave In! so I’m fine either way) and not get anything for it, but it is exactly the type of game to include that mechanic — it’s hard, and requires thought, and having to be completely certain of wasp locations means potentially receiving a lower pay-out. Much like you can’t give up 75% of the way through dismantling a bomb & saying ‘I give up, I want my check now please!’.

Cave In! was not designed with that mechanic, and the payout is tuned to that. If Cave In! only awarded nuggets for a fully cleared frame, that payout would need to be much higher, and that would mean a lot less opportunity for people to ever get nuggets. There’s a design reason for the games being the way they are.

That said, changing the payout system would not (if done correctly) alter the speed of the cap, and you are right about that — the only things it would alter are the type of game mechanic, and the type of enjoyment gained from it.