So, I am going to do something that I promised to myself that I will avoid at all costs, namely I am going to complain and rant about latest greatest disasters around Combinators. I am truly sorry about that already beforehand.
My intention initially was to conclude second part of Combinator guidelines and how to cost efficiently perform upgrades, that analysis has had now significant setback.
Namely I lost one very expensive Combinator to reprocessing, one that I had invested a lot of Perfect Points and time. Its stated that Combinator Card is a special type of card but it is clear that it is not any of that. All of the problems rise already with duplicate handling, which worked fine without that abstract concept which I don't understand how it got any approval to be released at all, considering the fact that OOTP data model has been one of the cornerstones of the games stamp of quality.
Every card visibly has already CC level assigned, so it is truly unclear why there has to be some special abstract construct that consistently brakes the gaming experience in new and not in so nice ways.
Because of reasons I had to change the order of locking cards, which resulted new collected Combinator being a standard duplicate. If you check in Combinator upgrade screen and you don't have a duplicate "Combinator" and use Show Only Duplicates then all Combinators are removed from that list, yeah, that does not happen when it is treated in previously mentioned scenario. And then you want to use your regular card to do the upgrades, to fill in the missing points and the rest is history -
HELP, Combinator ended up being food.
Admittedly there is also separate checkbox to force removing from display all Combinators, but when part of the mechanic works mostly in a certain manner you expect it work always in that manner, not to have curveballs waiting to bite at the worst moment.
I still think that crafting for upgrades is a great way forward, just not the way it is currently. There are better ways doing it, that can scale with the game for future changes and even more game mechanics that can be introduced based on that.
Combinator card type as such should be dropped and replaced by Crafting/Upgrade, all cards have anyway already assigned Levels, and every card in everyone's collection is already a unique resource.
Instead of having a Combinator odds you can have Upgrade level odds up to being able to pull a Level 5 upgraded card, much more elegant way of designing upgraded Cards and that would be one awesome screen grab if someone pulls fully upgraded card, regardless of tier.
Handling of duplicates would be also way easier to implement, by just selecting card with the highest CCLvl as primary Locked card.
And starting an upgrade should not be cheap either, it should require effort from anyone who wants to go down that road to improve odds or to make an extra PP income stream.
My loss in this specific case is that about two thirds of my carefully collected PP balance is now wiped out with one incident, that my dear friends is not fun. Clearly I don't have the resources to recover to previous state of things, you cant plan getting lucky with card pulls that help in growing that balance.
That is one of the problems, but the more erring question is that can overhaul of Combinator concept be postponed to OOTP 26? I can only see more fundamental issues coming up in OOTP 25 which no one can predict, but there will be those and they are waiting for the "right" moment to appear, when the damage can be maximized.
You don't need a special type of a card to make a card upgradeable, all you need to know that a cards starting Level is 0 or greater, that is just good practice in data modeling.
And that button to convert Combinator to Standard card, I bet the only thing it does is to update cards CCLvl attribute to value "-1" and nothing else. Which inherently means that all the core components for fixing combinators are already in place. If there is more to it, then something has gone horribly wrong in design already very long time ago.
Checking out and thanks for all the fish.