I’ve been vocal about my enjoyment of “Digimon UP” but I will admit that I wasn’t a fan of certain aspects of the game. One of the biggest was how I could never burn through my seemingly never-ending deluge of holo tickets, the game’s experience and gear currency. That all changed today with the introduction of the Super Hologram Device, and I’m grateful.

The way the original Hologram Device worked was that, as you did stuff in the game or left it on the idle screen, up to 25 of your holo tickets would be deducted every three seconds or so, giving your current Digimon some experience, and you a random piece of gear and some bits, the currency used to upgrade the device to higher levels. The amount of tickets deducted was based on your current Hologram Device level.

For me, a day one player who has been above average in my playtime for the game, I was still only using 10 tickets per three seconds. This is fine when you only have 4-5,000 tickets. You can reasonably plow through your reserves in about 20-30 minutes if you kept the game running.

What the devs didn’t account for were constant game disruptions in the game’s first month, causing them to give out a high number of tickets as compensation, resulting in players having upwards of 500,000 tickets to tick through 10 at a time, and that’s about an average total. This morning, I woke up with over 640,000 tickets. Not ideal.

A sidenote for the folks who might not know what’s going on here. This Karn EX video linked below will catch you up on the issues plaguing “Digimon UP” in its first month:

Back to the story at hand. If you’re doing your math properly, you’ll discover that players would need to leave their phone on “Digimon UP” for almost two days straight just to get through their reserves. All this, for an idle game, a genre known for requiring very little input to receive materials.

Fortunately, the developers of the game heard the collective player cries, and overhauled this part of the game. In their initial statement announcing the Super Hologram Device, among other changes, the dev team said,

“We made this decision to improve the player experience as quickly as possible. Ideally, we should have anticipated this situation during the initial design phase, and we acknowledge that this issue was caused by our own lack of foresight and we thus intend to review our processes moving forward.”

They also mentioned that with the change, players would be able to swap between the two machines at will and acquire holo tickets in numerous ways, rather than just idle rewards and daily dungeons. The change isn’t about separating players from their tickets, but rather helping them get through the daunting number of tickets they’d accumulated.

And boy, did it help. In just a few hours, I’ve gone from over 600,000 tickets to under 100,000. I’ve also leveled up my final Digimon to Mega, and now all my Megas are level 99. I’m effectively done with one portion of the game and can focus solely on running dungeons and gearing up.

Two added bonuses I didn’t see mentioned is that the Super Hologram Device changes your odds for gear you pull, making it easier to pull high rarity gear, and gives you far more bits than the original, making it easier to level up your Hologram Device and get even higher rarities. You can compare the rarity changes below:

There are still some issues that need to be remedied, but this is a great start. Now, let’s figure out how to fix summoning 35 tickets at a time for Trainer Cards and Support Digimon, the painstakingly slow build of D-1 currency to purchase the right side of Crests, and the fact that an idle game needs its players to leave the game running. But again, it’s a great start.