User blog comment:Pgrobban/The rise and fall of Cookie Run/@comment-24956068-20151002102429/@comment-25968376-20151002175604

I do get your point, and I don't have a good solution for this. I don't mind if you have C/B/A/S rank cookies with the same passive effect at different levels - this segregation already occurs with treasures. Having it set up like this, you could potentially make a custom combi that's all about XP or coins or whatever, and terrible for long runs. Just like abilities work in RPGs, if that makes sense.

But I got the feeling that CR wasn't such a big cash cow for "IAP-nomics" compared to some games I played. In games like Real Racing 3, you'd have to pay the equivalent of 150 dollars to unlock one of the fastest cars, and that's just one out of 20-30 or so in the same price range. It was impossible to get a 100% completion of the game, sometimes even within a series, just because you had to shell out that much of the premium currency. Luckily CR hasn't gone that far yet.

However, the lastest release with package deals has made it clear that this is the way that the game is heading towards. Soon it's no longer enough that we pay for stuff with hard-earned Crystals, but they're forcing players to pay with real money to earn exclusive stuff.

One more thing. If we look at runs in the past, we barely used treasures that revive or lift from holes because they were rare to get by. Now we're expected to do achievements where we crash 60 times into obstacles, revive or fall into holes 20 times and so on. This feels very... anti-climatic for me.