Lowering gold gained is a tricky one, but also strikes me as the best solution. I think the difficulty is that you don’t want to hit it unilaterally or else early-gamers will really suffer. The main problem lies with the hardcore, end-game grinders. I think lowering the max would’ve made sense. I’m sure players wouldn’t have loved that either though. Whether the gold per match is lower or the tasks are less rewarding or the tasks costs more, it’s all the same effect in the end.
I can say that before unity came to PC, our guild rarely completed all tasks, we usually maxed out 3-4 colors. Since unity, we have been completing all of them. People are definitely playing more - I have a set amount of time each day where I can play, with 4x speed I get a lot more done in that time.
2 Likes
However, speeding past animations does make the game end faster than playing that same game with animations at normal speed no matter how you cut it.
Thinking that 4x means actually playing overall 4xfaster is a gross fallacy, and the devs cannot possibly believe it.
Infight animations are cut off, but all the introductory and ending animations and the time to connect to the servers are still the same, not to mention when you explore you have to reenter the kingdom every effing time ecc and that can take longer than the actual fight.
But we are being treated as if a) we had required to play 4x faster, b) we are actually all playing 4X faster all the time and c) we all should gain less for that.
This is, let’s be diplomatic here, disingenuous. Also mildly insulting.
4 Likes
I completely agree on that point.
In my own case, I have 4x speed on. My games are going faster, but nowhere near 4 times faster.
1 Like
Decision making time is also a factor. Four times speed with the same teams I was using in Adobe netted me a less than 25% increase in the amount of matches per hour I played - a net benefit, but not by much. My net gain is closer to 40-50% more gold/hr when using “Unity” teams (ie spam spells, fewer decisions made) after accounting for a deficit caused by increased losses and about 60-70% faster explore (mostly because of the increase trait animation speed). Gold gain potential has gone up, for sure. Since 4x speed is optional and will imbalance the earning power of different people different, I believe that the assertion that overall earning power has gone up on average 25% might be pretty close to true. You might not be earning 25% more, your guild might not even be, but some people are earning a little more, some a lot more, and some about the same. In theory, you would need to deflate gold’s overall value by about 20% to compensate.
However, none of that changes the fact that reducing the amount of static rewards given and equate a 20% loss, even considering an average 25% gain in gold overall, can be equated. Your time within the game for any given task gets you less the more of it you put in. If you had already put in four hours into the game this week, you’d have likely finished PvP tier 1, and maybe even the entire event. Your fifth hour has you farming PvP continually - way less rewards per hour. Gulid tasks have diminishing return. At the beginning of the week, everyone kicking in four hours of PvP worth of gold would give you one value, and kicking in five hours worth of gold would get you a value that did not equate to “25% more”. Legendary tasks have less value as less people are donating to them in any given period. If everybody in your guild matches you on donations long term, they cost 33k each because 30 people are sharing the burden. If you are consistently top donator, they cost 1 mil each because only you are shouldering the task. It is irrelevant how many people get the rewards because the rewards are non transferrable. Even when you get the rewards, getting more of them does not relevant stuff. There is a soft cap for each collection tier, and a point where more “stuff” is completely useless period. Your 1000 gem keys might get you a legendary you need, some traitstones, ultra rares and epics you might need to ascend, etc. My 1000 gem keys gets me maybe a mythic, maybe a legendary to ascend. If I had 25% more gem keys, I’d only have slightly less chance at missing the mythic, it still wouldn’t give me enough extra to throw them away at non-exclusive mythics to try and get one I missed previously.
Pre-crafting, I would need 16 times as either gems or gem keys to try and get an old mythic not in a kingdom, increasing each month. With crafting in, there is now an effective “price cap” on mythics and so this last tier (not realistically even being achievable in the first place), is only slightly greater than the previous one and therefore the upper limit on gains had to be pulled back a bit. The problem is the “correction” may have shifted people to a lower collection tier while they put in the same amount of “effort” as they did before, even playing at 4x speed, which also no reasonable amount of effort will be able to overcome. Every other patch where collection tiers were shifted resulted in a net loss that was claimed as a net gain, but was able to be overcome with effort. Avg playtime per week required to maintain collection has raised from about 30 mins to 1 hour farming over 2-3 hours of play time per week to 3 or more hours farming over 5 hours now with an increasing percentage of it dedicated to using efficient farming teams rather than just being able to play at a casual pace and enjoy myself. Continued increases like this are untenable.
In the end, I’m sure they are completely aware of all this, because this is exactly how the system was designed to work, and softcaps are highly preferable to hardcaps anyways. The percentage claims are the thing that irritates me the most, as they are not an accurate representation of exactly how the economy changed. The whole “everyone loses 20% rewards because on average everyone will gain 25% gold you can buy rewards with” is written as to give the impression that this is a zero-sum net gain once you have put that “extra 25% gold in”, which will never be the case. There is no place on the new Guild Tasks reward table that you could simply put in 25% more gold and come out with a comparable reward as pre-patch. If they wanted to make up for a 25% gold gain and nothing else, simply increasing tasks costs by 25% would have been sufficient. Shifting around rewards for a smoother progression in diminishing returns would have resulted in lower levels still at a net loss, but the entire table would be balanced to “20% less rewards per gold given” compared to where it was before (until they added crafting materials at bad conversion rates, anyways).
4 Likes
Well then didn’t cut the rewards by 75%. They acknowledged that 4x speed in practices means something like 25% faster so they lowered the rewards by 20%.
The higher up a guild is the amount of goald is decreased, because it is easier for you to win, not the best explanation but my wife can do the same fig t and get 1k more gold than me lol