is there a local glue factory? 
More importantly:
Is it an African donkey or a European donkey?
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I would say, then the developers have failed to learn from the past. People who had spent extra cards on disenchanting complained loudly when they later realized what it had cost them. I have faith that the devs will keep that in mind in future expansion.
To summarize @Mr.Strange 's stance, which I agree with:
- It is okay to add new high-value currency, so all players start at equal (zero) footing;
- It is okay to continue to reward high-value currency (glory hoarding with new rewards weekly);
- It is not okay to turn old low-value currency into high-value currency (extra cards pre-1.0.8).
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This is exactly the crux of the thing. Well said. That was a mis-step, and we should do better.
I can say this was the one thing that console players had a huge advantage over the PC players. Knowing what changes were coming let players use as many iron and magic keys as possible and then save all the troops (especially since commons were much easier to get that way). This way when the changes eventually came, you had many players that had at least a third if not more of their troops ready to come up to mythic day 1.
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My answer was an immediate no to this question. What if we kept the situation but changed the animal? Say a cat or a dog?
Console indirectly benefits in many ways from PC pioneering.
- Foresight into how practically useful troops are, so you know whether or not you should invest heavily in them
- A more âmanagedâ troop release schedule, taking into consideration the role various troops have in the meta
- Balancing passes that allowed the console to completely avoid the 1.0.8 trueshot/skullspam meta, for example
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Agreed, folks should not be spending 100% playing GoW. Thatâs almost a different question and solution though. One might argue that your pvp leader board and rewards for achievement specifically incentivize more time than anyone else in game. Thus, those in the top pay zones for awards, are doing near just the opposite of what you say you want, right? I digress. Really a different topic.
Donkey on a rope is interesting philosophically, but also scratches a different itch. We all bring our own baggage and experience to such questions before we answer them. Itâs also not a parrellel to the GoW question IMO.
Your point is still well received. Many folks will take and collect or horde anything they can have access too. You want to avoid feeding that psychological behavior. However, in GoW, you accumulate our of necessity as the gameâs progression requires an ever increasing / growing amount of resources. Those requirements continue each week with more and more troops.
So, ironically, we are talking about a âcollect em allâ kind of game. Each week we have additional items to collect and it all needs leveled and traited with yet more items we must collect, some of which are a real pain. We have more and more kingdoms, and you benefit by getting each one to lv 10⌠and you benefit even more if you can get them all to 5 star⌠all of which requires more items to be accumulated. Never mind how much âtimeâ all that takes, there is a benefit to doing it all, to collecting it all all too. Both in economy and effectiveness of your teams.
In GoW, how you spend your time contributes to resource gains and progression. All of the resources, thus far, have a value to be exchanged for something in game. The more you have, the better off you are, as new content drops⌠cards included, have become a resource - until you get to the point where you have 4 mythics of a given card.
At that point, I think folks only continue to hold them if they have them⌠not necessarily seek more of them⌠perhaps because theyâve been burned in the past. Perhaps not.
The cards only then become the only currency in this game which expires. That is, when you have 4 of the mythic. So by conditioning and habit in game alone even if you were not caught in the Ascention update issue, one wonders if a player can develop a Pavlovâs Dog kind of conditioning to resource gains as a result of playing this game. RhetoricalâŚ
If you aim to reduce that 'accumulate, collect them all, put in more time, etc effects, it will be interesting to see how changes in the future play out. As it stands, it seems the game almost encourages the polar opposite of what you say the devâs desires and aim should be.
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Weâre still waiting on Mercy.
Well, when she finally shows, it really will be aâŚmercy.
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Indeed, well summarized and I agree. Should they stick to that design philosophy, then once you have 4 of a given troop at Mythic collecting that specific card any longer would seem unnecessary. Itâs the single currency that has a finite usefulness in a game where all other currency / resources have infinite uses.
Interesting economy phenomenon they have.
Iâm sure. Not disagreeing with your other points, but I think knowing about the Ascension was the biggest so far.
As for Managed Troop release⌠eh⌠while I can understand some of the troop selections thus far⌠not sure itâs been necessarily âbetterâ. (That said, I finally pulled Mercy for the first time on PC which means sheâs bound to show up on console now real soon since she no longer eludes me overall.)
Extra cards still have use. They can be disenchanted to souls, which are also of finite use, but can at least be used to level up new troops as they show (so itâs a moving ceiling). But since they have that one (low-value) use, the dev team would be foolish to give them another, higher-value use in the future.
My expectation is that, if there come levels beyond 20 (itâs hard to get much more superlative than âmythic,â though), theyâll use new currency to ascend.
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As a mobile player the Disenchant system is incrediblely onorous and irl painful to both body and soul. If the devs want us to go back to having no spare copies bring back auto features with a check box for âdo not Disenchant this troopâ for mythics or personal play styles.
In this case the donkey on the rope is Disenchant, yes itâs a great feature however you arenât going to pay me the hours it takes to use. You arenât going to pay for my Tylenol for the use induced joint swelling in my fingers. At the end of the day I cannot really use the donkey. I just stare or ignore it and rarely ever bother play with it.
Developers cannot blame us for not utilizing a feature when the feature is as repetitive and poorly implemented as the current Disenchant system. It is a step backwards even from 1.0.5
âŚyou can tell I am on mobile by the dumb autocorrect to capital Ds.
True Shot + Skulls would be nice actually. Since we never got that, Goblins are still 50-60% of what we see. Goblins and mismatched 4 Legendary teams dominate the Console version
Youâre not necessarily supposed to keep up. Itâs not supposed to be trivial to do so. The opportunity to acquire resources is higher than the rate at which they are required, so you can do so if you invest the time. However, thatâs most likely to allow newer players the opportunity to catch up, not so that you can always effortlessly keep up. Unless youâre dedicated, you shouldnât have everything. If it only took an hourâs worth of work to fully ascend, level, and trait a troop, there wouldnât be much point in having those systems at all, and they might as well give you the troop maxed out from the start.
And those hard decisions are what makes games interesting. If you donât have to make decisions, then youâre not really playing, just pushing buttons for stimuli. New players have to make those decisions, and itâs in the best interests of the game and the developers to ensure that players continue to have to make those kinds of decisions in order to keep them engaged. Thatâs why they keep releasing new content: to keep the game interesting, to give you new things to think about, new decisions to make.
While the ascension change is one example of low-value resources increasing in value, the resource under discussion for the guild update is guild tokens. Currently, thereâs no reason to keep them, and guilds should spend them immediately for the â admittedly marginal â benefits they currently provide. However, some guilds were hoarding them, in anticipation of them becoming more valuable in the future, hoping to gain an advantage over other guilds that didnât think to do the same. Thatâs not behavior the dev team wants to encourage, because it gives people an advantage not for spending their resources wisely, but for speculating on future developments, or on leaked information. As @Sirrian said in another thread:
Life isnât fair, but people generally expect the activities they create and choose to engage in to make an attempt to be fair. Having started playing the game earlier, accumulating certain resources earlier, shouldnât give you an insurmountable advantage, where you can effortlessly keep up with new developments while a new player struggles to catch up. When traits and traitstones were introduced, older players had an advantage in collecting them because they had good teams already, but they still started with just as many traitstones as everyone else: none. A newer player can catch up or surpass an older player if they play more. Speculation is rewarded in the real world, but even in the stock market, making decisions based on insider information is considered âcheatingâ, and penalized.
The game doesnât fundamentally revolve around collecting things. It doesnât end when you have everything, and it doesnât begin at that point either. It seems like people get too caught up in that cycle â when they donât have everything, they feel like they canât really play, and have to grind until theyâve maxed everything out. But once they finally do have everything, they no longer have a reason to play, and go complaining that the game has become stale, and they need new content to chase after. Rewards and progression arenât the only reason to play. Games should fundamentally be fun, without needing a carrot to chase after. If it isnât fun, but instead just addicting, preying on flaws in the playerâs psyche, then itâs not much of a game, and not healthy for the players or the industry.
In short, players shouldnât be penalized for making rational decisions based on currently available information, or rewarded for speculating on unknown future events, because it drives behavior that is unhealthy, and the outcome will be perceived as unfair.
You both get an A+. Oh, and another Nobel Prize for Literature. 
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Great point! Guild tokens are an excellent example.
With respect to âkeeping upâ with new content, it is useful to break players into cohorts, or groups of players with different motivations.
Some players want to maintain one or two strong teams that fit the current meta. There is no reason for them to accumulate resources that arenât part of those teams, so the time required for them to meet that goal is fairly small.
Some players want to experiment with new teams a lot, and be on the bleeding edge for new synergies. These folk get every new card right away, but donât generally obsess with leveling or ascending troops past the point where strategies can be validated.
Some players want all cards maxed - this requires a huge and ongoing time investment.
So players can self regulate their level of effort.
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you sir, win the internet today.
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