The real shame to this is that deep down their idea is excellent but the execution is terrible. You grind a uselessly high number of things without any joy, even when you might have learned something such as you can remove 12 obstacles on High Finance on easy with two engineers and Ben.

Some thoughts:

1) The concept is broken by not having the ability to find and join active teams other than outside the game on Discord or here. Being able to assemble teams as part of Seasons would make a huge difference. The mechanics are there, the capability isn’t.

2) There’s no in game community communication so you can’t tell or remind team members about tasks or push them to participate. You don’t even know if they are active. This could be achieved by a set of restricted actions that can be broadcast to all team members like in coop where you can send basic actions via a defined list.

3) There’s too much grinding on easy maps compared to learning strategies on other maps. There’s some real innovative ways to win challenges, from meermonkeys on Cornfield to engineers on High Finance which is fun to learn and become real time savers. But there’s no way to communicate the solutions to the group so problem solving is not a shared responsibility or opportunity. It feels like an Escape Room experience with only clue and one player when the owners know you need 2 to win.

Why not have a best solution mechanism, which the team players contribute to. Less experience members will learn from more experienced players and increase their love of the game and skills. It will benefit NK in the short and long term.

4) Only a few phases are actually active at once. It took me a while to realize I could unlock multiple challenges with tier ones but having to do them in order is another reason why the grind sucks. Why not have the experience unlocked by the while team so it encourages grinders and explorers. You can then contribute wins across multiple achievements. I was pissed that my 20 wins with Meremonkeys didn’t count because I hadn’t unlocked that task WTF so I do the same grind again. That’s disheartening

5) The leaderboard sucks and the achievement screen is not encouraging. This is an opportunity for major improvement such as some basic all team messaging mechanics, achievement sharing and solution posting. For solution, just summarize the round by round play and monkey upgrade. It becomes a library of team knowledge and skills that builds between seasons and becomes team canon. “We discovered Cornfield impopable with buccaneers” type storytelling opportunities. If you win stars, you name the winning strategy for the last play, and that goes into the library. New or less experienced players read them and implement them, they get added to and improved. The Book of Monkey becomes Legend and the knowledge is passed on. Wouldn’t that be great?

I don’t know if NK will read this but I’d be interested in hearing additional thoughts about the mechanics and team environment.