User blog comment:Pgrobban/The rise and fall of Cookie Run/@comment-24956068-20151002102429/@comment-25968376-20151002125959

>''Beginners can only grind up to (around) 6,000 coins per play, and remember that Special Episode 1 requires keys instead of lives, so they can only play 3 times an hour, which probably can only give you 18,000 coins. Not much, especially upgrading those S-grade cookies still requires grinding.''

That is true, but 18,000 coins/hour is a huge improvement from the first few seasons, and also remember that the first episode now has plenty of coins as well. It took me maybe a week to unlock my first A-grade Cookie back then, now it's certainly doable in a few hours.

>''All in all, if you want to play Cookie Run seriously, you NEED someone else that also start playing with and compete with you (I suggest more than 2 friends). Adding other people's LINE ID can only discourage you from playing because of their gigantic high scores. Take myself for example. I don't recommend beginners adding my LINE ID or they will feel stomped :P''

The important thing here is that those friends need to be people you know in real life. I don't get much excitement about beating strangers. I wouldn't be discouraged about high scores from long-term players, but I would need someone to tell me how I can get from say, 1-5 million points to 100-200. The gap between low-level cookies and OP ones is simply too huge now. I don't remember this being an issue in the earlier seasons, at least not those of us who didn't add random strangers from online forum threads.