I have a roughly five page post I just offloaded to google docs because some of the points I was leading toward have already been stated here much more concisely.
I’ll touch on part of it.
It isn’t just that we aren’t getting any indication if our feedback is even being heard or not for a long long time, its also instances of requested changes being twisted in such a way that doesn’t satisfy the intent behind the original request.
The weapon upgrade thing is a good example. People requested that weapons don’t have upgrades that negatively impact weapons. They universally changed all exploding upgrades, because most of them negatively impacted the weapons they were on. This, in turn, negatively impacted a few weapons. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of upgrades that continue to universally negatively impact the weapon’s main function (spawning different colors on spawning weapons, destroying colors that they can spawn on spawning weapons, doomed weapons that create a single gem, etc), and a ton that potentially negatively impact the weapons, particularly in certain situations. Now, because of the ongoing silence, we pretty have to assume “we are done addressing weapons upgrades”, when they didn’t actually even fully address weapon upgrades.
The multi-buy on glory packs is another good example. The original request, made multiple times, was actually to have a multi-buy pack for spoils of war specifically, with the arrows on everything in the shop being an iteration of that request. The change that allowed this to happen limited spoils of war to 10 buys per week.
The one that particularly irked me and set off my rant was the whole “we are showing drop rates now in game” thing as an example of listening to community feedback. For one, the display screen lacks enough decimal resolution to accurately reflect Mythic drop rates (in one instance, it is off by a pretty big margin). For another, the whole reason this was requested again, and again and again and again was because of the repeated mistakes that get made with drop tables, either having them reverting to old rates(yes, this happened), suddenly changing without warning to some arbitrary number never seen before (yes, this also happened for a couple weeks one time), having the drop rate for a certain rarity be zero (yes, this also happened), or having a troop missing from a drop table when it should be there(happened multiple times). We want a way to know, for sure that the thing we are attempting to pull is in the chest that we are opening and at the correct rate with data fed directly from the server in real time. It is basically impossible for any single player to distinguish the lack of a specific drop with “bad luck” without this kind of data. That is why we wanted it, not just because we are curious about what the drop rates happened to be.
As for the other hot issues:
PvP payout calcs are broken near the top of the score curve. We know it. The devs should know it. Its been this way forever, several patches made it worse for a while, and this patch made it worse in a way that is going to stick. They should know why, its been stated over and over again. I have nearly a page covering this alone (again), but I’ve stated it so many times I’m starting to sound like a broken record. It all just boils down to the fact that small (and even very large, at this point due to power creep) stat descrepences don’t make very little difference in how difficult (or time consuming) a given PvP battle is, but a very small score differential can lead to drastically different payouts. And, since @Saltypatra brought it up, having a lower team score has nothing to do with your ability to field a number of teams that can tear through PvP every bit as effectively (or very close to it, certainly not anywhere near “twice as long”) as I can at endgame with every troop in my collection - I should know, I do it all the time with four accounts in various stages of development with the others missing a variety of troops (but having cherry picked out the really good ones when I developed my account, because all you need is a few good ones). Also, it begs repeating, matchmaking is broken, and this would be less of an issue if it wasn’t (but only less of one, not not an issue). It gets really frustrating when we get even a hint of “need to investigate” on this one, as if they still don’t realize what the problem is. It might take some time to test all the factors, it might take some time to implement a long solution, it might not even be a priority, but I’m tired of it being treated like it isn’t an issue and it didn’t get a lot worse in 4.3, and that they don’t know exactly why.
Old Weapons coming back has been requested so many times since the very early days of the game that I’ve lost count. Prior to about 17 months ago (when raid/invasion events started), most these were shinies to collect and little more. A few good weapons trickled in, most of them being entirely useless for the content shops on which they appeared, but they were later buffed and a few were quite good in other content. About a year ago, the 3.5 patch hit with a big enough hero class buff to make them viable on teams and brought the weapons back into the spotlight as necessary for progress by adding progress gates. We also started getting “manglikes” during this same time period, some of which would continue to be useful in a variety of high level content to the point of being a strongly dominant option, and other extremely high value weapons sprinkled in later. Thus within this time period, weapons now both heavily affected gameplay and potentially capped progress. So this “request” to have old weapons be available once again has existed for almost as long as the game (partially fulfilled at one point with the cash shop), but has been an issue with the game for approximately 12-17 months, and is approaching the level of a “problem”. That is just… way too long to leave something like that hanging at the current state of “working on a solution in the future”. Long locked in development cycles can mean weeks or even months without movement on key issues, but it should never approach years. And yet, it seems like this one is. At this point, while I think everyone’s optimal solution in mind is soulforge, and soulforge is probably preferable, if the solution happens to be soulforge after this long a wait plus another 3-6 months at least, I think we will collectively lose our minds.
High level delve faction runs being absurd always seemed intentional to me, as if they weren’t expected to be beaten until some future feature down the road was implemented to prevent rapid consumption of said content. A bunch of people did it anyways by essentially repeatedly slamming their heads against RNG walls (or now, buying a bunch of potions and sigils with slightly less head-slamming). I actually hope they take their time on this one and implement something that makes the runs actually fun instead of “moar stats for your team, so its better now” angle that nearly everyone is proposing. At least they stated they have a plan here for a while (or was it that they plan to have a plan?)
Well, thats enough from me about stuff that definitely isn’t in the update. So, uh, how bout them adventure boards?
(Kinda almost feel like making an ongoing game issues thread to consolidate some of the commonly brought up stuff that is spread all across the forums. It still feels like they aren’t getting heard, or at least not understood, even when there is someone there actively replying to them)
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