So just a quick note about the perennial question: "Why fix issue A before issue B?"
TL;DR: Not everyone on the team can fix every problem! Sometimes we have spare resources and make a minor fix before we have the resources required for a major fix!
For anyone who like an essay read on:
We have a BIG priority list of things to do & fix here. In a perfect world, we’d be able to work through that priority list starting with the most impactful issues, and working our way down to the least impactful issues. But remember:
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Everybody has their own perspective on what that priority list is, based on their own experiences. So no 2 players or even devs are going to necessarily agree on priority anyway!
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Usually the biggest, nastiest issues require key people to solve them. Because those people are so busy, sometimes other team-members are solving smaller issues while the bigger ones are stuck in the queue waiting for attention from the correct people.
To be more specific, in this case,though, why fix single troops defenses before fixing armor issues/guild issues/other stuff? The answer is straight from point 2 above…
We fixed the single troop defense because it was a very simple fix that I could make/test over the weekend - pretty much everything else listed above is a complex fix that requires our tech lead + QA/Production teams to work on.
That aside, as I mentioned, let me speak to why this came onto our radar and seemed to be worth the time to fix…
We noticed a marked increase in single troop usage last week, and that was having three effects (in no particular order):
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Players were able to farm single troop defenses (not in what I would call the spirit of the game) to climb the rankings extremely fast. This generates a lot of work for our support team as they receive complaints from other players… now 100 support tickets = 5-8 hours of work, and if I can save my support team all those hours of work with 30 minutes of MY OWN time… that’s something I should do.
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Fast single-troop games flood the game economy with a lot more gold, which is converted to in-game goods. Obviously that can have a negative impact on the economy, and we need to protect against that, because creating an economy is one of the key things that allows us to keep the lights on and the servers running!
So we need to take potential threats to the economic health of the game very seriously. -
As I mentioned, the usage of single-troop defenses was growing rapidly. Despite the fact that I KNOW some people were enjoying easy wins, and having fun trying to kill Elspeth before she cast (I KNOW - I tried that too!), there is a whole Game Health issue here where the game is being played in a degenerate form.
That’s not something we want, because I think the longevity of the game takes a hit… Gems has been steadily growing for almost 3 years as a game you play in a certain way - ruining that for a quick gold-grab with faster games is not a path we’re willing to risk going down.