I hate how people throw around P2W indiscriminately. What exactly are you winning by paying? Quests?
A good looping team is and always will be unbeatable. The game has enough skill involved that it simply can’t be P2W.
I think you mean something like “too expensive to collect all the things without paying moving forward, unless you started the game months/years ago.”
I’m in the Guild that keeps getting 2nd place. We have NO deals with other Guilds, its just filled very high level players that don’t want to grind Trophies, ever.
The last few weeks we just need a few more points 15k & 20k respectively for 1st. But we allow for real life/Vacations/missed days for personal reasons. So unless they implement the 27 rule like Guild Chests 1st place is probably safe. Plus, the developers thought it would be a good idea to give 1st the easiest schedule possible.
Even those of us who started years ago will be feeling the squeeze of the new economy.
That said, you’re completely correct that the game is not, by any means, pay to win. Unless “winning” is defined as “having all the cards as soon as they come out”, exactly as you said.
Sure you can be anal retentive and argue about semantics but you know very well that it’s a mental shorthand for “game where you’re progress is severly handicapped if you do not play over 40 hours a week or pay hundreds upon hundreds of dollars”. Of course progress has multiple meanings too.
At the end of the day seems like publishers want to squeeze the last bit of money before running GoW into the ground.
I know this isn’t a popular opinion, but by that “revised” definition of P2W, I’m totally fine with it. I really don’t think it’s reasonable to expect to be able to collect all the cards in the game without paying. It’s sort of silly to think you could in a F2P game. Try playing something like Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes or Marvel Contest of Champions. You have to play around the fact that you’re constrained and can’t have everything. That’s how these games work.
They were too generous in the past and now they’re clamping down, it’s clear why, and I don’t think it’s that shocking. I also understand why people are pissed; it’s been one way for years and they’d grown accustomed to it. It wasn’t one of those games. I’d argue it’s still much closer to its old self than those games, but every inch closer is painful.
i hate how people throw around unbeatable indiscriminately. can you share the looping team that is always will be unbeatable? because so far, every team bound to lose at some point in the game.
Or maybe Gems of War isn’t doing that well financially and they dev team is trying to save it from being killed by the publisher? Does that make you change your opinion? It’s at least clear it’s not a big hit. It’s nowhere in the top grossing charts on Mobile…
If the option is this tighter economy or no more Gems, I’d definitely opt for the former. As I said a couple of days ago, it’s still much deeper and more generous than any other puzzle quest game out there and than most every F2P game out there.
All about perspective…
As they added new legendaries while keeping the event key payouts equal, they gradually diminished peoples’ resources. Likewise, mythic drop rates were low enough that most people couldn’t acquire enough gems over the course of a month to reliably pull the new releases. And the direct replacement of select guild tasks with crafting materials sure looked like another attempt to slow the inflow of resources. Even with the shards/diamonds in guild tasks, it takes more than a month to build up enough to craft a mythic.
The game seemed headed, if slowly, in the direction of depleting players’ stocks so that nobody could reasonably acquire everything without paying. That’s why the further decimation of the guild tasks has been so confusing to me. I know I was already picking and choosing mythic cards to ensure I would have enough gems to target the ones I really wanted.
There are no gems in LT, that has been confirmed by devs (and observation).
Gems have doubled in importance and reduced by 60-75% in availability. [Depends on your guild.]
What could be the–clearly unintended–side-effect of reducing gem supply and increasing gem demand in a microtransaction-funded game? Could it possibly be that people will feel they need to buy gems using real world money?
This was no accident or oversight.
The developers in GoW are responsive (if slow, but that’s okay, they are still better than most games) but this is not the sort of thing they will reverse, it’s obviously a business decision, not a coding one.
Sure, they can walk it back a little…add gems to the LT’s which are only available to top tier players anyway. But overall they will still end up with gems being 2x as important and 1/2 as available.
If you don’t have the key troops, you’re in a disadvantage. With this drastic reduction of rewards, you have to fork out cash to buy gems so you have a chance to get those important troops.
Sure, you can just ignore the competitive side about the game. Then it’s clearly not PW2. But if you’re in it for GW - you’re screwed if you haven’t played a lot before to get awesome troops and great amounts of resources.
There is no single troop you need to win and there are lots of viable teams. If you can’t win without the best legendaries then it’s a failure of either skill or imagination.
Yeah, sorry but it doesn’t.
I have nothing against the devs/publishers but I do not care for their well-being. If the only way to keep the game afloat is to hurt the player so much that he well pay the money begging to stop let the game die.
I have hundreds games both on Steam and PSN that I have paid for, games that do ask me to throw money at them just so I can waste time. I think considering the circumstances I’d rather play those.
Oh yes, GoW is more magnanimous and I prefer a thief who takes only my wallet to a thief that takes everything leaving me in shorts but at the end of the day I’d prefer to not be robbed at all (that’s an exaggeration).
Fine, if it’s raw capitalism you want then by that same token, they have no obligation to you. They have to look out for their business interests. You are entitled to nothing and can place no demands on them. Who gives a shit if you spent money or are a VIP 5+? That’s just a transaction.
You can’t demand a refund from Wal-Mart b/c a few months from now they raise the price on what you bought previously. In fact, you wouldn’t even think to pitch a fit b/c they raised the price on something.
It has to go both ways…
I assume you haven’t played in the two highest brackets?
You have 90 days to get a refund at Wal-Mart, and they’re rather loose on their refunds. I’ve heard stories from Walmart employees of some of what they’ve taken back for refunds including a rotisserie chicken that’s been eaten except for 2 leg pieces because the customer didn’t like it.
Try another example
Funny, but what benefit to them to have players quit, particularly if $$ is the goal? Oh, unless you mean they are running some sort of scam with their backers like The Producers? 
Sure they don’t. But raising prices/decreasing the amount same price buys is rarely a way to make your customer hapy. They will rather move elsewhere. And most companies care about their customers or at least try to look like they do because they want to empty their wallets and if the customers are not happy someone else will.
Nice strawman, I didn’t say I want a refund. But if you are not getting angry by companies who instead of increasing the price reduce the amount the same price gets you then you may be sure that there are many people who are. And they stop buying.
At the end of the day games are not essential. So even tho you might still buy milk or bread with an increased price you don’t have to put up with it in games.
6 months later? I don’t think so…
I think it’s pretty clear actually:
End gamers literally complain that there’s nothing to spend their money on b/c the generosity of the gems via guild stuff devalues gems to the point where people don’t see good value in buying gems bundles. Many people post regularly saying “I don’t know what to spend on b/c nothing seems worth it”. That’s a direct result of the gems inflation in the economy. No two ways about it.
To the extent end gamers therefore aren’t continuing to spend, changes like this do heaps of good for all new players coming into the game. They don’t know the “old way” so they have no basis to complain, and they see that the game is still much more generous than other games out there. The economy is tighter, so the gems bundles suddenly look like a much better value prop. And stuff like the PtG or Growth Pack looks friggin amazing!
Put differently, tightening the economy and upsetting their end-gamers may actually be the best business decision they can make. All speculation of course, but I think it’s a pretty logical supposition.
Your idea of “a few months” is 6 months? You do know that “a few months” doesn’t represent 6 months, right? Is there any other goal posts you want to move to conveniently fit your argument?