Store Items and Commentary on Pricing

Here is the point I had been trying to make:
Some items are buyable with coins (points); others with sand dollars. As described in other topics: it takes an insanely long amount of time to earn ONE sand dollar. One sand dollar is equivalent to 35,000 points!!

So: First of all, anything you pay for with sand dollars is REALLY hard to get. I would expect the items priced with sand dollars to be most important to the game -- but not all of them are. The most glaring example of this is the "life-preserver", designed to extend a round. It is like an "extra life" within the round. Now, USUALLY you don't have much from extending a round, since by the time you are "out", the game is moving too fast to react to dangers; or the enemies have ganged up on you. The few times I did extend a round, the extension lasted for a few seconds only. Yet this item costs 15 sand dollars!! If you pay for sand dollars with real money, that is real money spent for a few seconds of game play!! (cheapest price is about 50 US dollars for 10000 sand dollars, or about two cents per sand dollar -- so you just blew thirty cents for a few seconds of game play!!) And if you earn the sand dollars yourself, it takes, oh, at least a couple of hours of game play to earn ONE sand dollar; nearly a day of game-play to earn fifteen -- for ONE life preserver. (What is even stupider is that using a life-preserver is actually a mission worth two stars/two sevenths of a sand dollar/10000 coins. The game requires the player to spend FIFTEEN sand dollars in the cycle of re-earning 2/7 of a sand dollar!!)

Some other items within the game rightly cost sand dollars rather than coins, such as pets that you can add to any given round (one per round for Android; two per round for iOS). The pets then "belong" to you; and you can use them to earn sand dollars more quickly. The downside to the pets is that there are 56 of them; and only 19 that do anything special; and of these, some pets perform essentially the same task (Butterbean, Matteo and Saffron; Sophie and Evey, sort of) -- so you end up paying 560 sand dollars (by the above calculation, about 37 days of game-play, if you play for several hours per day -- sitting around and doing nothing but flicking your finger around on the screen) -- you pay 560 sand dollars for the set of special skills. Since pets come in "pet boxes", you do not know what you are buying until you have bought it -- so there is no way to buy just the ones with special skills without buying all the rest on the way.

This would not be so bad; except that just about everything else you can buy with sand dollars: a permanent coin-multiplier; a permanent speed-blast extender; or swim-stars (characters) that are immune to certain enemies -- costs 200-400 sand dollars -- meaning, a month of play to purchase any one of them.

This in turn would also not be so bad; if any of this progress at all actually belonged to the player! Instead, it belongs ONLY to the device that is played on. There is no way to transfer it when switching devices. There is no way to protect it in case the device needs to be repaired. This is in any case NOT YOUR PROGRESS TO KEEP. (To put this once again into proportion: an average person playing an average amount of time per week and choosing to earn all sand dollars rather than buying them with money would probably need a new device, or at least a repair on an existing device, before ever earning all the things having to do with sand dollars. Somebody buying stuff with real money would need to calculate an additional 50 dollars or so for every device purchased.

I would expect the items priced with sand dollars to be most important to the game -- but not all of them are. The most glaring example of this is the "life-preserver", designed to extend a round. It is like an "extra life" within the round. Now, USUALLY you don't have much from extending a round, since by the time you are "out", the game is moving too fast to react to dangers; or the enemies have ganged up on you.