Sarah C.
I have been a player for a few years…
I have been a player for a few years now and have paid close attention to the game mechanics. Here are some of my observations: It’s a fun game at first, but the heavy competition quickly overtakes the more relaxing elements, and often strips away real creativity for the sake of making a calculated win. If you’re a type-A personality this will be just your speed, but other types might find it stressful. If you’re a frequent player the Season Pass is definitely worth the money, more so than the Premium Membership. Season Pass allows you to participate fully in all designs and unlock all the season rewards which include coins, tokens, and unique themed designs. The main focus of the Premium Membership is maintaining your designer status so you don’t move down a rung after the 14 days. There are a few other perks it provides—including automatically enabling Season Pass—but they’re pretty negligible for how pricey it is. Premium is great for preserving your designer status if you’re only going to hop on the game a few times a month. But since you CAN move up in status without Premium by playing consistently and strategically, it is ironically worth LESS the more often you play. Now we get to the more serious criticisms, and the reason I have given the game only two stars. As I said earlier, the competition is the driving element in the game. Your ability to make top three consistently determines your advancement in designer status, coin earnings, bonus rewards, and a lot more. In fact, if you’re not ranking at least top two you are losing coins with each design you submit, and you have to wait for the little bonuses the game provides in order to work back up again, or make a purchase. Of course this is completely fair. I have no problems with the game developers making things difficult in order to increase competition and drive potential in-game purchases. However, I and many other players have noticed some concerning trends that indicate more than just healthy competition and understandable bids for cash. Lots of players report an inexplicable downturn in wins after receiving a large coin purse or other reward. The same designs that would have ranked at least top five before are suddenly placing 7th or lower. This drains resources very quickly and players find they’re right back where they started with little or nothing to show for it. This can be extremely frustrating for players who put in a lot of effort to get ahead and now feel like they’re being punished for it. In addition, the game seems to show bias in wins towards new or infrequent players, supposedly to draw them in on a more permanent basis, at the expense of loyal veterans. The game developers are adamant that there is no manipulation happening, but experienced players have observed these trends for a while now with very little in the way of explanation. Unfortunately, in game developer circles it has become accepted practice to rig supposedly merit based games to try and force good players into a purchase. It’s not apparent to me that the developers of Redecor are above this unethical practice, whatever they may say on paper.



