4.4 Update Preview Discussion

The question that remains is when was the last time we had something not disappointing. I know for fact that they not listening to their player base :mask: Shame of Zorn is latest proof with so many others

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Yes, I kind of agree with you. I am not unreasonable, but they showed their true colors now.

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Well, I tried to not talk about this yet, but it seems to be a big focus of concern. Too be expected, I suppose.

They used very non-commital language along the lines of “over time, its roughly the same amount of gems, but it can be more” which isn’t a lot of information. But the term “gem value” was not used here, it was clearly “gems”.

I’m reserving judgement for the economy angle of this until I see exactly what it offers. The 15 gem cost to skip a tutorial task that gives significantly less than that in rewards is a bit concerning, as is the fact that the previewed “legendary” adventure battle giving about as many chaos shards as a single delve farming run (and much less other rewards, while likely taking about as much time). But yeah, if gem tasks are rare enough that we see them at most every other day we are going to have to give like 100 gems each to even come close to just the raw gems handed out by the system it is replacing, not counting to mention the other collection-building resources (gem keys, event keys).

While the lower rarity tasks were very clearly stated clearly aimed at lower level players, I heard no indication that these tasks will favor more difficult/higher rarity stuff for here levels, but apparently they do refresh every day if you don’t complete them, so you can at least ignore the low value ones. The top (tutorial) task slot stays over days and will be replaced with a “kill task” for “veteran” players, which did not have its rewards or its requirements previewed. Depending on how heavily they followed the structure of the old tutorial tasks, this will be at around level 200, and everyone past level 200 will have the same pool, only now the lower levels will have fewer stuff they can complete and the higher levels might have a higher incidence of stuff they don’t care about.

Worth pointing out here that 6k gold for 3 battles, provided this reward doesn’t scale with armor and personal bonuses, even relatively easy ones would only be “good” during roughly the first 50 levels or so, and have a higher opportunity cost than generic PvP battles by about level 200, or about the first month of casual play. The souls one looked like at least an average amount of souls for the amount of effort put forth (as opposed to the blanket far far below average amount of souls for every single task reward that gave souls in the current system, except “level a troop”), but would likely still lose to dedicated farming with Pharos, unless, again, they scaled with personal bonuses. Chaos shards I feel like they severely lowballed, but this is also a “new” way to obtain them. Id say they need to dial that in, but we all know that won’t happen.

Really the thing that irritates me most about any potential economy nerf is how they try to hide them or intentionally misrepresent how things are going forward… even when they are nerfs by proxy (like the whole Tower of Doom gives more gem rewards fiasco). I hope this time they have done their due diligence and these claims can be backed up with hard data, but I’ve been around long enough to know that it probably wont, and thats just how they operate, people will be visibly upset for a while and then the issue will die out. It still stings for me. Every. Single. Time. And every single time brings back how I felt every single other time they did it, and there are a lot of them to reflect on.

Even though now, I should be beyond caring about it:

image

But we still don’t know how bad any potential nerfs here are.

What we do know is that daily tasks are going bye-bye, and that is something I can say will significantly negatively impact how I interact with the game, regardless of the rewards associated with the new system. All the different overlaps you can have to try to build a viable team and different content you could use to complete these tasks having my dynamically interacting with the game is being replaced by something that checks for a pulse and exchanges x of my time for y prize. Thanks, I hate it.

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If any one haven’t figured this one out.
It’s a battle against the End Gamers that have everything and the Devs. The publisher or what ever. They dont give a rats ars about the new players. They made a big mistake in the past. Where there was a paradise for gems. Easy too collect. And the future new players are suffering for it now. Just too gems sink the endgamers.
I say stope your war against the endgamers.
Cos u never gonna gem sink them. And if the day comes that they u do. There wont be no new players anymore. Start and make it easy for the new players. and Forget about the endgamers existence

So when’s the 4.4.5 update preview? I think we’re already done with this update.

These posts were copied over from the streaming thread to avoid filling that up with non-stream discussion.

I read Salty’s comment here as support of what Lyrian wrote above: while the average amount of gems awarded may be similar, the variance will go up (that’s the only way you can have larger max payouts while keeping the expectation the same). And, thus, the low end of the rewards will have to be either lower or more frequent.

Which brings us back to the point mentioned during the beta. I, at least, don’t care for this kind of rewards system. The fact that the devs continue to pursue rewards structured like this—after the original Dungeons, and Treasure Gnomes, and Orbs, and…—says that someone does. Whether that someone is players (which would put me in a minority here), the devs, or publishers (who are preying on player psychology), I cannot say.

I guess I don’t like the implications of the update starting with “these changes are controversial”.

What’s the point of beta testers if, as we’ve seen now:

  • They don’t get to test the bulk of new features.
  • Their feedback is not valued.

Is it just to say you made a token effort and get some feel-good points?

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I do have something to say in regards to the Delve issue, and that is that it isn’t as high a priority as other fixes we would like to bring to the game. Right now, what I am pushing for the most (as well as a lot of our team) is the re-introduction of old weapons.

To say that we ignore the community is wrong. Yes, we may not get to things as quickly as you’d like, but we very frequently address your concerns. Dawnbringer in Arena? Fixed. Hero class cost? Fixed. And, not only fixed, but we brought a whole new feature that players to attach hero classes to teams, as we knew that would be the next request. It took time, but it was a well thought out and implemented fix that we are very proud of.

On the other side, when it comes to Quality of Life changes, we also listen. Players with limited eyesight having problems? We got in contact and made changes to the board transparency and worked closely with them to ensure they could have the best experience possible. Troop filters? Done. Drop rates? Added. (We didn’t need to add these, but we thought it was time and did so, even though we know it’ll cause an influx of work for our support as many people don’t understand how percentages and statistics work.)

People think the AI is cheating? We ran rigorous tests and shared the results with you! (And many of you still didn’t believe us. :stuck_out_tongue: )

We can’t always meet all of the community demands, and nor should we. Some would harm the game, and others are too complicated or require a excessive amount of developer time to implement. We do what we can, when we can. We do our best to make the game the best it can be for the players, the publisher, and ourselves. Not everyone will be happy with the direction of the game, and this is a reality of live service games that need to evolve over time to stay fresh for older players and attract newer players.

I understand many of the concerns listed in this thread, but I do believe it is false to say that we do not listen to our playerbase, when we have shown consistently that we do. A lot of the changes and features in this update are ones that we have been planning for over a year, and are very excited to bring to the game. There is a point in the game where it is overwhelming for newer players, or lower level players feel that they can’t contribute to their guilds. We wanted to clean up tasks to better educate players, keep everything in one place for ease, let guilds and players in global chat help each other with team builds, have a way for players to explore new team options (brought to you by the new suggest a team feature) and make it easier for players to know how much damage their troops will do. (I’m personally so happy that there is a boost ratio calculator in game now!)

Developer schedules are tight, well in advance and subject to change. We do what we can to bring you fixes and quality of life changes where possible, though I understand your frustration over the timeline of us doing so. That being said, many developers don’t address community concerns OR bring changes to their games, so I’m very proud of the work we do here, and I constantly advocate for the important issues aired by our community with the team and our publisher.

SNEAKY QUICK EDIT TO ADD ONE MORE THING (AS IF THIS WASN’T LONG ENOUGH ALREADY AMIRITE?
I collate feedback from all of our social channels, which includes our reviews across every platform, our various social media accounts, Reddit and Discord.

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Ugh you know what I know you saw this, Salty, but I liked my last paragraph I edited in best and in it I kind of said I’d said my piece.

I get it and the rest of it isn’t healthy and we’re both editing the heck out of posts so I’m gonna call this post a mistake.

(Salty’s replied to it but for the benefit of others: I related my GoW experience to a weird Christmas where mom forgot to put my presents under the tree.

The presents were my analogy to “everyone else gets more PvP points than me and features they want, that makes me jealous and bitter.”)

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I still don’t think there’s any justification for how the PVP scores are at the moment. None whatsoever.

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Interesting analogy. We can add to that though…

You have access to troops and weapons that newer players don’t, by virtue of playing longer. You have higher stats, better troops and an easier time completing your collection.

You might not get a present, but you have a lot more than a newer player coming to the table, and now you’re upset that you don’t get more, even though you have years worth of presents from prior Christmas’s while this is their first.

Yes, human nature will likely make this feel like a let down, but it is what it is.

We have things in the work for later game players, and are looking into PVP, etc. We don’t have an ETA on this, but it is something that we would like to change for the better of our entire playerbase, especially veteran players.

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That’s all very well and I’d love to see that kind of improvement, if successful. But for the time being, the non-veteran players are supposed to be gradually reaching the point where they are matched against the veterans (emphasis on gradually). They’re not supposed to be having such a bad time that the veterans need this kind of handicap.

And if they’re not, which I suspect is actually the case, then we shouldn’t be handicapped.

Just band-aid the thing. Everyone gets 50.

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@Shimrra, you may not agree with this, but the justification is that we want to evaluate all of our options and make the best re-work possible if we choose to do so. On top of that, we have a rigorous schedule, deadlines to meet, and expectations on the future of the game from the publisher. We cannot drop everything we have in the works to meet one demand that only affects one section of our playerbase, especially when we have so many targets to meet, and so many players demanding VERY different features and fixes. (All of which are convinced that theirs is the most important, and if we fail to listen to them will result in the end of Gems of War. Which has never proven to be true, TOUCH WOOD.) Live service games work at a rapid pace, and even though we are also subject to this pace, we try our absolute hardest to act on the needs of the community and include changes and quality of life adjustments whenever we can. (See my above post where I list a few of these.)

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Well that certainly doesn’t explain why the score discrepancy was looked at a while back and then changed from bad to worse. That was when the band-aid should have been applied, instead of salt in the wound.

I mean, it obviously isn’t fair how it is now. Every time someone on the staff talks about it, it isn’t actually explained: why in blazes is it this way? What’s the justification? No smoke about how it isn’t up to the players or how there are too many demands on dev time. Tweaking the numbers to be worse was either a wrong call made too quickly, or a wrong call made after lengthy consideration and the comments on getting the best possible rework are also smoke.

And if its the publishers again, tell them having the non-vets have to actually compete fairly might get them to spend more cash trying to catch up!


Of course, I keep saying ‘non-vets’ and ‘vets’ like this is an ‘us or them’ thing, when in actuality the PVP score differs wildly between people who are within 10% of each other’s level, so it might not actually be whether or not they’re veterans. That’s just a word put in my mouth really.

Which is another problem. All these invisible levers being pulled. I’ve lost track of how many people have asked for the system to be explained. There’s not really any point in throwing shade at lower level players unless we know for sure that its the factor. Some of us are just running out of patience with the situation.

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This is essentially what I was going to comment on.

It’s a long shot, and I did have thoughts on other parts of the thread, but… can we take this:

as an acknowledgement that the way team Power scores are calculated was changed in 4.3? :stuck_out_tongue::man_shrugging:

I’m going to quote myself to re-iterate, since it still seems relevant and (I think) echoes what Shimrra was saying:

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If the “one section” that got screwed over and was complaining all over the forums was new or mid-level players the problem would already be fixed for sure.

I have read the comments about stating that veteran players have better stats and new players should be rewarded and veterans have all the goodies, but it’s not new players that are getting the rewards. I can play an alt in another guild and get 70 PVP points per game and that alt has 85% of what I have… It’s everybody else getting better rewards except those dedicated players that have done the right rhing (actively promoted by the devs/game) join a good guild, earned their stats and mythics, spent their gems and money, been logging in most days and completing new events and old alike that are getting duped more. We are all getting duped with all the gem changes, just those are getting duped more.

There’s no way you can spin that a level 1300 player can get 30% less PVP points per battle than another level 1300 player on the argument it’s ‘because you have all the presents’.

Moreover, fighting level 1300+ players with meta team as a new player will result in more losses than wins maybe until deep into the game, so new players do not go down that route, they go to explore to trait troops and re-enter PVP when more competitive.

I mean I’m a gaming veteran from the late 1970s and I can’t remember encountering a game where highest level/veteran/maxxed/end gamers (note the different titles over the years) who earned achievements were summarily punished against their similar peers like this.

I did the LB a couple of weeks back. Not in the sense I went for it, never have, i just played enough PVP for top 100 etc.

I am not end game, I don’t have everything, I’m close but no cigar, and was over L 1400 at the time and players at L 1500 were getting more than 20% more PVP points per battle due to their guilds doing no LT probably. Some on LB are getting over 30 (possibly 39) points per battle more, so when doing 1,000 battles, that is massive.

It should not be masqueraded as veterans have everything to justify the logic. The system is broken, it’s not as simple as that, and a simple fix of equalising PVP points is all it needs.

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I believe the issue is rather talking with your player base, listening is a one-way channel that eventually makes players wonder if anybody is around at all. Especially if there is no reaction from the supposedly listening party for well over several months.

Take ingots. Utterly broken system on release, only low quality drops from PvP, many high quality ingots required for the revamped kingdom power system. Questions regarding how players could possibly cope? Silence. A few words regarding the planned delve system would have prevented a lot of bad feelings.

Take weapon upgrades. Utterly broken system on release, most weapons turn into random board manipulators, which is not the way a large part of the player base wants to play. Unfortunately, we are forced to permanently wreck our weapons if we want to upgrade kingdom power. Got a minor surprise fix after several months, making a few of the mythic weapons less horrendous, fully viable solution still pending. Questions whether this is still being worked on? Silence.

Take PvP. Utterly broken system for high level players, we get punished for progressing in the game by having to fight more battles for less rewards. And to top it off, we get entirely unannounced ninja changes that make the situation significantly worse. Question regarding those ninja changes? Silence, silence, silence.

Now, this might sound a little surprising, it takes very dedicated players to wait around for well over a year to see whether feedback given was actually feedback received. It’s truly amazing how many dedicated players this game has, and it really pains me to see each day how much silence they receive in exchange for their dedication. I’d propose to try a little less listening and a little more communication, except that this proposal was done multiple times in the past and was met with silence.

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This is very good news, and I hope we can see it implemented soon. But at the same time, it’s disappointing to see that there’s such a disconnect between endgamer reality (e.g. a veteran player can get double the rewards in pvp matches just by being guildless) and the perception on your part (veterans have more troops/stuff, so they get a bit less but it’s okay).

Not meaning to sound ungrateful, I appreciate the effort put into improving the game… But we’d take more kindly to waiting for fixes if we felt our complaints are acknowledged as fair, instead of dismissed as veteran tantrums.

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That’s it, it’s not this new and old player logic that is randomly used to brush it off. Moreover it’s not even 10%, it can be players higher level than you getting more PVP points.

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