List of what's wrong with Spymaster...

Hi All -

I posted the list that follows as part of a thread to another comment I made, but figuring most people will probably never read it, I'm posting it again as a way to illicit other intelligent feedback for the creators of the game. The catalyst for this list was that I felt that there were so many insane design flaws with the game that I just couldn't continue playing but didn't want to be that guy who complains with nothing constructive to add. Please note that I wrote this BEFORE the elite class concept was created. I don't want to even start on how absurd that one is, only to say that it is indicative of every other element of this game: COULD be cool if there was a true plan behind it and rewarded those who had dedicated so much time to reaching that level, but totally not thought out enough and therefore implemented way too soon.

Feel free to add additional feedback to this list as it will only serve to benefit future players if the creators take any of this into consideration.

1) Raging disparity between people's attack/defense sums. I have no idea how someone could have 350k+ sums because even with huge spy rings, there's no way to accumulate enough money to buy enough stuff to get that high (unless I guess you just do tasks 24 hours a day for months - and even then, I doubt it.)
2) The odds of wounding an opponent in most cases (at medium level) is between 40 and 60%. Which basically means if you attack all the time, odds are you'll get nowhere fast because you basically win as much as you lose. To the extent that attacking people is the foundation of the game, there needs to generally be some forward progress for doing so.
3) I've beaten people where it says I only had a 2% chance of winning and was rewarded less than $1k. And lost to people where I had an 80%+ chance of winning and lost $500k. Makes no sense.
4) I understand the desire to increase the viral nature of the game by rewarding people with large spy rings, but this is actually a mistaken thought in my opinion. If I spend 90% more time playing than someone else, I should be exponentially better than them. If they have a spy ring 100x bigger than mine, I could play forever and still probably never surpass them. This makes for a very frustrating user experience. Rewards need to be based on play and/or strategic decisions made in a game - not on the sheer number of people someone knows. Fixing this entails simply creating an algorithm that averages out the size of people's spy rings and weights more heavily on in game achievements. If you want to reward people with bigger spy rings, it should be incremental, not exponential.
5) There seem to be a lot of cool concepts in here - but they don't tie together in any meaningful way nor do I think there's consistency in how they work. For instance, Safe Houses - very cool concept - but to what end? At one point I owned every single safe house at the same time (except the one in Italy). Theoretically, these should have kicked off a lot of cash - but they didn't. I then sold all but one and seemed to earn almost the same amount of cash as I had been earning when I owned them all.
6) Swiss Bank - again, cool idea, but why put money in there? I'm better off spending my money on buying black market items which increase my attack/defense sums therefore protecting me from assassinations. It's not like I even earn interest on the money I put in the bank - on the contrary, I'm disincentivized (not sure that's a word) to do so because there's a 20% transaction fee.
7) I get the sense that the game was created by some creative people sitting around a room coming up with cool ideas. Unfortunately, it therefore plays like a series of disjointed concepts strewn together. Where's the overarching story line? What am I trying to achieve? How do in-game features all tie together towards some greater end/purpose? A strong UI person or two on this would probably add a lot of value.
8) If you're going to take advantage of technology that allows you to have groups of people connected to each other, why not allow people to actually create teams and go on assassinations together? Or where the actions of one member of a team/spy ring directly impact others? It would at least cause people to consider their actions and would allow for groups of people to "fight" each other.
9) Wire Transfers? Short of situations like mine where I want to leave the game and will just give away all my money, what's the game incentive to ever transfer someone else money?
10) with assassinations and tasks requiring so much energy, and energy refreshing painfully slowly, I basically can't come and "play" for more than a minute or two at a time because if I do a couple big tasks, or a few assassinations, I'm out of energy. I know you'd counter that it keeps people coming back and is easy for people to come play for a minute, but it precludes people who actually want to sit and play for 15-30 minutes at a shot from doing so.