Countdown timer should simply stay the way it is now, but it should not jump to 5 seconds. If everyone finishes the wave, you will be waiting 30 seconds, give or take. This is not a problem, those who would have you think it is are simply impatient and shouldn't be playing these kinds of games.
I'm not talking about dragging this game out for an extra hour, I'm talking about dragging it out by a few extra minutes. Is that REALLY a big deal? I think it isn't.
As for resell getting the boot, that's a good decision. Interest upgrades simply subtract from the available vespene that you could spend on other elements. Returning 2% to all difficulties is a good decision.
It is what you want it to be. It's a troll post for people who are ignorant, but it's not if you're willing to entertain my suggestions... which you seem to be willing, therefore it's not for you.
There's a simple way to solve that problem. The essence upgrade shouldn't disappear, it should let you continue to upgrade your essence cap however many times you want to. I do not see a problem with this. However, I would much rather there *not* be a cap at all. To me this seems pointless. If you have the money to buy really expensive pure towers, then you should be able to do it. Right now you're being double penalized, once for the expensive towers, and a second time for having to use your valuable vespene on an essence upgrade... and hell while we're at it, you get penalized a third time because you can only build at max 4 pure essence towers. It's ridiculously restrictive and for no good reason.
Also, 8 pure towers does not seem unreasonable to me. If you have the money to do it, then by all means knock yourself out. The lack of minerals will put a dampener on the amount of pure towers you can afford. That's a cap by itself.
None of these are good. My opinion is they are all bad because they do not have the most obvious option--A normal mode. Normal mode should make it so that when everyone finishes their wave, the countdown timer will continue to countdown until it reaches zero. Then the next wave will start simultaneously for everyone. All 60 waves should begin at the same time, every time. This gives you time to spend your vespene on an essence and kill the unit without having to worry about a flood of units rolling in. Then, as an added bonus, the fruit wave acts like any other wave and the units eventually end. Why?
Why would I want the fruit wave to behave like this? Because the fruit wave (as it stands right now) is like this -- "who has the most points? He does. He wins"... You are all trying to play a casual game for 59 waves and then suddenly, EVERYONE IS AGAINST EACH OTHER ON WAVE 60. This is f*cking retarded! That is what Race / Competitive modes are for, you are *competing* against each other.
Normal should *not* be a competition against other players, it should be a personal competition against the custom game.
If you design something a certain way and somebody finds a way to exploit it, does that make it valid? I would hope not. The game is being played in an unintended manner (at least I hope it is)... and therefore changing the game to prevent exploitation is in order. My opinion is exploitation is an invalid way to play the game and efforts should be made to end exploitation.
My difficulties stem from the countdown timer skipping to 5 seconds when everyone completes the wave. There are 1 of 2 ways this problem can be solved. 1. Fix the countdown timer, prevent it from skipping to 5 seconds. or 2. Prevent interest farming altogether. I prefer both. So while I may find it difficult, that does not mean that the problem is limited to just me, it means I'm a typical gamer who sees interest farming as unnecessary and because of this, am unwilling to improve at it. So read into that however you want, it seems at this point you're willing to ignore literal interpretation.
Just because I mentioned one way resell upgrades are bad doesn't mean I'm a complete dunce. It means, I didn't bother to type out every way a resell upgrade might be useful. You are saying that rather than spending your vespene on element upgrades so that you can get better towers, you would occasionally prefer to spend a vespene on a resell upgrade so that you can save yourself from leaking on a critical wave... or so that you can sell light towers and build nature towers against earth units. That seems like a legitimate thing to do, except given the current countdown timer problem, you only have 5 seconds to do that after you complete your wave. You have 5 seconds to sell your light towers and build nature towers.
You are more than welcome to frantically do stupid crap like that, but I would much rather only sell my towers when I accidentally misplace a tower. To me, that's the proper use of tower selling, to fix a misplaced tower.
Here's the thing, I recognize the resell upgrade is not being *entirely* useless, but what happens if the creator removes interest in a new version of the map? The resell upgrades become 90% useless and retain about a 10% usefulness. Then, if the creator makes it so that all towers refund 100%.... that remaining 10% usefulness transforms to uselessness. It's 100% useless.
So, while you would like to frantically sell your towers and change them into something to have a slightly better chance for the upcoming wave, most people would much rather build a variety of elemental towers and not abuse tower selling. And no, that doesn't make us bad at the game, that makes us sensible.
I do not know who he is.
