Excellent summary by @Lyrian here:
I caught pieces of the stream, and went back to check relevant parts of it myself. Heres my opinions on the stuff that was previewed.
Login Screen
Looks good. Less clicking to get through is a huge bonus. All for it.
Adventure Board
This is probably the change that disappointed me the most. You better believe we will be checking the claims about it giving “about the same” rewards when it goes live, but thats not even what I want to focus on here.
I’m talking specifically about the loss of daily tasks. Don’t really care about snotstone events (except for the obvious associated rewards). Those weren’t really interesting to begin with, nor did they ever reward anything that was actually fun.
Click here for Rant
For me, a huge part of my daily interaction with Gems of War is finding an efficient way to get through these daily tasks. Do I try to do as many as possible and have a weak team that has to do content that won’t be profitable? Do I use a slower not PvP viable team or two faster PvP viable ones?
Should I set up my daily task run in whatever event is going on? Over half my saved teams are formed with some sort of daily task in mind to be viable or fast for a given piece of content, and many can be tweaked to cover another task or 2 while losing a bit of efficacy or speed. I even have some farm delves set up with teams that appear frequently on the task list. On alts, I have to make adjustments for not having a certain troop and it matters a lot more in many cases where a troop would otherwise be “bad”.
This is honestly where most of my “fun” in Gems of War has come from for a good while now. Part of the reason I have four accounts is all the different ways I am forced to approach these tasks, and so I generally have more than I would care to do in any given time stretch, because even the big guild events have started to blend together despite the huge disparites in collections and stats, the “best” still tends to be the “best”. Sure, theres a lot of garbage tasks in here, which are either insta-repick or just skip for the day as they have higher opportunity costs than potential rewards for near 100% of the playerbase, but that doesn’t seem to have been completely addressed with this new tasks system, judging by what was previewed and the fact that it is stated that which tasks appear are random.
We are taking all this interesting stuff that rewards team building, maybe trotting out that mythic I wouldn’t have otherwise because it covers more colors and thats what my task needed, and approaching stuff from different angles to get this done, and replacing it with, basically, a bunch of mini-pet rescues. Flat, on rails, walls of stats that doesn’t reward experimentation, with nothing to really optimize so long as whatever PvP team you have already built can take it out, and it looks like thats how it will be set up. It is just more daily content that you can just approach the same exact way nearly every time, and while there is a random pool, I’m sure it won’t be long before we’ve hit the bottom of the depths of said pool. I see this getting very old very quickly.
It feels like my interaction with these daily tasks is me desperately grasping at some kind of variety that is in any way rewarded by the game and therefore appeals to my desire to be efficient and this new system slaps it away with a “no, you WILL do it this way”. Yes, I know I can still force variety by using any team I want, but that is not the same thing as being actively rewarded, however small, for it. This didn’t need additional structure. Disappointment is the only way I can describe this.
Team Management
Cool. Wish they hadn’t moved where the sort by button is (I always have this on Base Rarity as my saved filter) but I can deal with it. Suggested teams is nice, if it actually suggests some semi-competent combinations.
Troop Roles
No idea why the system was restricted to a single role. This screams being able to use roles as tags, applying an arbitrary amount to a troop, especially since they are condensed to a small symbol displayed next to the troop type. Most good troops cover more than one role, and their assigment seems arbitrary.
One thought that kept repeating through my head was that if they actually went through every single troop in the game and manually tagged them to set this feature up, it would have been an egregious waste of development time. For once, I actually hope they were auto-generated.
Boost Ratios
We’ve been wanting this for a while. I’d say the implementation here is a bit lacking, but any “better” solution I can think of increases the complexity by quite a bit, this is ok I guess.
Epic Battles
More ways for lower level players to put their sigils to use. Yay.
Also more ways for less experienced players to mismanage their sigils instead of learning how to properly teambuild. Quick math shows that, because of valravens, if you use 2x sigils the entire time, you’ll end up with about a third of the number of plays you would otherwise. If you use 3x sigils, you’ll be cut to under a fifth of your normal plays. I have a feeling this is going to lead to more mismanagement and waste than actually allowing any walls to be broken.
Can’t be used with the delve event, only with events where 1 sigil = 1 battle, which is probably the only place I’d actually want to use it. Even on my intentionally low stat account, I’ve never really reached a point where I say “I sure wish I had a bunch more stats so I could clear the next battle”, so I’m ambivalent otherwise. Might make a few battles slightly faster if I’m just trying to burn sigils at the end of the week or something.
Drop Rates Shown In-Game
Appears to be missing an entire decimal place of resolution, in some cases, drastically altering the reported drop rate from prior data (event keys 0.11% displayed rather than 0.104% for mythics and Glory Keys 0.01% displayed drop rate for mythics instead of 0.014% are the worst examples).
This screen doesn’t note that event keys have an increased chance to drop the glory pack troop. This doesn’t skew rarity chance, but drops within that rarity is skewed to the glory pack troop, so I guess the rates are still technically correct in those cases, but its still omitted information.
Unsure if it actually uses live data or not to get the drop rates. Doesn’t display whether or not a troop is actually in chests. These are the two of the biggest reasons people wanted drop rates shown, to insulate themselves against drop table mistakes and be able to check if something is in chests when it should be.
Without these, this is not a good replacement for the “old, inaccurate” chest data mined by Taransworld (and kept in a neatly formatted way, with historical data).
Flash Offer Calendar
Cool, I guess. Lets see whats on them first, and whether or not they are resource traps.
Bug Fixes
Always nice to see some of those.
Other
The worst outlying issues the games have that have been controversial several patch cycles have not been addressed in any way (no level 500 delve faction team solutions, no old weapons reappearing, no PvP point solutions or even matchmaking fixes). While I understand this is decided ahead of time, I think the development cycle needs a way to make “course corrections” as they notice a smaller issue become larger and larger and larger (as with old weapons, as this has really been an “issue” for almost as long as the game has existed, but only became a “problem” in the last 18 months or so, and never needed to get that far since soulforge already exists).
As always, final judgement reserved for after the patch lands, but so far it is pretty hard to get past my disappointment at losing daily tasks, one of the few variety incentives the game actually has (and also likely an economy nerf but shhhh).
I Must say what’s the point of the stream then
Shame of Zorn is latest proof with so many others
