I have been REALLY enjoying Episode. Maybe it’s the quarantine, maybe I just love the concept of these choose your own adventure stories! BUT, as I read more of them I see each one is not created equally.
Love on Fire is still the funnest one I’ve read so far. I got used to gem usage and got hooked into paying $ because making those choices and seeing different outcomes was super fun! So I didn’t mind spending a little money on it. I enjoyed it and spent more than I will share lol. It was fun.
Now I’ve been reading more…and have made some observations. Girl in a Boy Band being the breaking point making me write this. It’s currently free (like no tickets spent on chapters)and you get an extra gem for reading 5 chapters. Awesome! I thought “Maybe I’ll be hooked by chapter 5 and want to finish the story!” BUT when a story like Girl in a Boy Band make simple conversation answers cost 29 gems (!!! Not 15, not 20) I stop reading and start just clicking through to get to the next chapter. And that’s what I’m now doing, unfortunately. I now see this story as a prop to get my money. I no longer feel like it was written for fun. Had to share so that hopefully other writers, and I too hope to start writing them, will keep this in mind.
Moral of the story: If the story is fun and the gems are used at the right time, I will end up spending my real money on the fun interactive story. When they make it hard to have a normal conversation without gems, I click click click to earn my free gem after 5 chapters and ditch the story.
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Ooo please recommend some! So far Love on Fire, Rule Breaker, and Love Life are my favorite. I just thought love on fire was so fun because it was like being on Bachelor in Paradise hahah. A guilty summer pleasure. When not 2020 lol
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I can recommend some really good community stories if you want!
Or do you want me to recommend episode official stories?
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many fo those featured stories are comunity stories republish with gems in them. go find the orginal with out gems.
or just keep away from featured there is a lot of amazing comunity stories there is much better.
I could recomand a lot but they are mostly only fantasy, dont know if you are in to that
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Ok, see I didn’t even know there was a difference! I thought all stories were written by the community using episode’s platform, characters, etc. I have totally been trying to piece together why the gem amounts and use are so different per story. It’s all making a little more sense now. So in the app on my phone, how do I know the difference between community stories or Episode stories?
Oh, thank you for telling me that. I will totally take some recommendations! I do like fantasy. I’m not sure how dark stories here get, but irl I love reading horror and mystery.
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I will Pm you some fantasy stories
also the horror ones properly arent that dark this is a 13-year-old app. also honestly most are just kidnaping stories. there are a few good ones. but not many
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i agree with you 100%
episode is a business, of course they’re going to want to make money. but the way they write their stories with the most ridiculous gem choices doesn’t make readers want to spend on the app. their recent stories are so obviously just money grabs, with subpar directing and laughable plots. i wouldn’t mind the gem choices so much if the stories were actually decent.
additionally, the gem costs in choices are inflating while the amount of gems a reader receives through a reading streak remains the same. 15 gems was already a little steep before, and now some choices cost 30 gems! i, personally, am not willing to pay for gems for choices that ultimately don’t affect the plot.
EDIT: i also just wanted to add that i normally only read community stories. the only reason i occasionally read an episode official story is to look at the new/unreleased assets (outfits and hairstyles)
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I totally agree. I feel like episode tries too hard to make money, and that’s the reason they’re losing a lot of customers. If they give us gem choices that actually make the story more interesting and not just a sentence to say in a conversation, people will actually read the featured Stories.
And I think that cause no one reads the featured stories anymore, they’re forcing new people to read them. It’s honestly just dumb.
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Ya! They need to balance out what you’re getting for those gems and very good point that if gem choice costs have gone up we should earn more than 1 freaking gem per chapter. Like really?? If someone doesn’t want to spend real money they’d have to read dozens and dozens and possibly one more dozen full stories to make 1 single fun choice in 1 story lol. I do love the idea of these story choices, don’t get me wrong, but I just want it to be less obviously a ploy for money. Give me a crazy fun story with fun outfits, hair, different endings, etc, I’ll get hooked! Put minimal effort into a story and want money so that the main character doesn’t basically piss everyone off, no thank you lol
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I’m new to the app but it does seem that way… It’s such a fun idea that I hope they do it right and grow into an even bigger app/community instead of asking for more and more money and letting ppl leave frustrated. They just gotta chill on the gems a little. Or, ya, not make them just options to end a sentence. C’moooon.
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i have mixed feelings on gem choices. from a business standpoint its brilliant. like you earn money in exchange for nothing (assuming there isn’t a contract with an author regarding gems) so part of me respects it despite the fact that im the one getting duped. but also I think they’re totally doing it wrong. we know it, they know it. i mean every time you log into the app it practically begs you to read one of their official stories for FREE. and people still won’t do it. so here’s my take:
first of all, 30 is a big number. if they raised the cost of gems but lowered the number needed to make purchases, they’d be much more likely to get readers to purchase choices. second, they aren’t offering a product that seems worthwhile to most people. if gem choices affected the plot line (im not recommending this, im just saying its a smart business move) or gave readers something in return for it they’d get a lot more purchases. it could be something as trivial as changing the color of the background or a little star next to your name, people would do it. honestly I think the best move they could do would be to allow readers to keep outfits purchased but only for a limited time so they have to come back and keep reading.
idk, this was a lot longer than I thought it would be. 
I’ve recently started playing rule breaker and it was really fun for a while until like simple choice started costing 20-29 gems. It really discourages you from playing since the game doesn’t have many efficient ways of earning gems. Just recently I got a simple choice that cost 39 freaking gems🙄 and I’m just like… how do they expect me to get those gems without buying them. I feel like I’m not the only who feels this way and it happens in other stories as well. They should really look into this issue if they want players to fully enjoy the experience.
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and get ban for a 100 years no way.
they have permantly ban people from the app who use those hacks
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The sad part is now not only do official Episode stories charge readers insane amounts of gems but recently Episode started making community authors charge gems too. It was about a week ago when I started noticing that I had to spend gems to be able to support authors, to boot points in stories that use point systems, to wear certain outfits and even to read the FAQ (when before they were all free). I honestly thought it was a glitch until an author I follow on IG let her followers know that Episode is now MAKING them add gem choices to their stories (they don’t have to but Episode is pretty much backing them up into a corner- a community written story will only stay relevant and in the public eye if there’s gem choices if not Episode will purposely make their story hard to find and going by how many gems readers spend is how high ranked their story will be) but no matter what (meaning it’s not in the authors control) readers now have to spend gems to support authors, to boost points (i’m not 100% sure on the boosting points part because i’ve seen stories that always charge for boosting points but I read a story today where there’s a point system for the love interests and for personality of the MC and at the end of every chapter it was random- like at the end of one chapter you had to spend gems to boost the love interests points but got personality points boost for free then the next chapter it’d be reversed- so i’m assuming that authors have some say so when it comes to point system boosting), to read FAQ (not many authors have a FAQ section but in the past week since this started every author that does have it charges gems to see it) and finally having to spend gems for clothing options (i’ve only seem this in one story so far- the author gave readers a regular closet which was free but then had a “premium” closest that cost gems to unlock).
Prices
FAQ- 18 gems
Support author- 15 gems (EACH TIME!)
Boost points- between 15 and 18 gems
“Premium” clothing- 18 gems
On average I only earn about 20 gems give or take for free every month by completing the daily tasks and in the Episode store it costs $1.99 for 22 gems (keep in mind gems are on sale right now the sale is you get 10% more gems… so once the sale ends you’ll get much less gems for your $2). Literally everytime you support an author, boost points, see the FAQ page and buy “premium” clothing it’ll cost you $2… so do the math on how much it’d cost just to support the author every chapter. If you support an author every chapter in a 30 chapter story (which is the average) it’d cost you $60.00- THAT’S INSANE! 
I don’t know about anyone else but i’m dirt poor I lost my job because of the coronavirus and as much as I love supporting authors I just can’t do it anymore because I can’t afford it.
There’s no doubt in my mind why Episode did this… for MONEY! They probably know that their stories ain’t sh*t because no one wants to spend a fortune on gems just to do basic things in their lame stories and because of that me and probably millions of other readers went flocking to community written stories and stayed with them because they were free and we could actually enjoy them without having to spend a fortune… so what do they do? FORCE community authors to charge insane amounts of gems too- since we earn only 20+ gems for free a month they know that that ain’t even remotely enough to pay for everything so it’ll force us into buying gems and giving them money. And worst case scenario if other readers are like me and can’t afford to buy gems or just don’t wanna spend that much money on them (cause they are expensive asf) then we can’t support authors, since their stories aren’t getting gems their stories will become obsolete and eventually all the trouble of writting stories won’t be worth it to them and they’ll leave making it to where the only stories that are left are the official Episode written ones. I could be wrong but that’s what I think they did
The really fcked up and sad part about this entire thing is that Episode decides to do this when the ENTIRE WORLD is in the middle of a PANDEMIC where millions of people are sick, are dying/have died, jobless and hurting for money. That’s when they decide to fck authors and readers by squeezing them for everything they got. That’s low even for a greedy asf company like Episode. “Ooooo there’s a global pandemic? There’s millions of people who are sick and dying? There’s millions of people who have lost their jobs and are hurting for money? There’s millions of people who are on lockdown and are stuck at home? Yeah this sounds like a perfect time to f everyone and try to get money from them!” Heartless pieces of sh*t 
I’m gonna try to enjoy the community written stories while I can and I suggest you do the same because I have a feeling things are gonna get worse and if it does i’m leaving the app for good. By the way to any community authors reading this i’m sorry this happened to you and trust me if I could still support you I would.
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Just wanted to say that community authors can choose where to add gems and how much gems are (5, 8, 12, etc). So if an author is asking for 15 per episode or for the FAQ, it’s a choice.
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