I’ll have to give that a try next time I’m on XBox. I find it difficult to determine when I am clicking on the Hero, the medals, or the current events. (before 4.8 and after)
I do find the smaller Icons annoying, although perhaps I will get used to them. When the UI change first happened, I took an 8 month break. Upon return, the UI didn’t appear as ugly as I had remembered. The medals may still appear ugly to me in 8 months, but after a while, my memory won’t allow me to remember how pretty the old ones were.
100%. Now that they don’t overlap the white/cyan border of the medal slot, these lines become visually confusing and make it harder for me to quickly distinguish the lines of the actual Medals. I’d much prefer if they still broke the border a little bit.
Definitely not fully sold on the new designs (Nysha looks, imo and for want of a better word, ‘gimpy’, or cartoonish maybe).
I am somewhat opposed to this whole weekend thing regarding events that are being phased out. It seems to me that it’s another blatant attack on our resources (gems) and our time. In the past I’ve noticed that on bounty week, some of the more selfish players will commit far more gems to bounty than the guild event that is running alongside it so adding a new event mode which sometimes is a solo pursuit will exacerbate this issue. Many guild players won’t have the wealth of resources to participate in the added content so it’s gonna create a situation where the GM may have to prioritise and hope his guildies stick to the plan (some most certainly wont). Obviously players will be gullible enough to follow the new shiny distraction (medals) whether it’s of guild benefit or not. I really don’t think solo rewards should be included at all in the new events and maybe it would be better just to end invasion etc rather than shift it to a weekend slot. We don’t have the time for all this content either. Recent updates are aimed at stalling progress and draining our resources. They are also intended to increase our time commitment despite the fact that it’s already far too excessive. I just don’t get the ethos behind this. It’s about time that the healthy gameplay stance of Sirrian was taken into account. Doing stuff like this proves such sentiments to be meaningless and fake.
Edit
This also will send pet rescues even further into obscurity unless there are plans to include them in the new events. There is little incentive to grind like an idiot when your kingdoms are frozen.
Pets need a feature to be more available. There are now 63 pets in the pool for pet rescues. And it is now a punishment for those who actually have been keeping up with them as there are maybe 7 or so that are not maxed. A 1 in 9 chance when you’re actually playing is terrible odds. Not to mention that’s for ONE rescue, which statistically speaking, won’t give you enough pets to get to the next level or finish.
Even if you decide to spend some gems, you have to hit the right pet first.
After one hour from the last Pet Gnome appearing on top of that. So even if your guild manages to trigger a pet rescue, after it ends everyone plays PVP until another Gnome is killed, which may take a bit. Time factors a lot since everyone have more things to do during their days…
To the best of my knowledge, there are no plans that I am aware of for pet rescues to be a part of the World Event System. Pet rescues aren’t historically part of any event that requires sigils.
The game is moving to a point where it is not going to be feasible to grind to completion any longer, no matter how “endgame” a player’s account is. If a player wants “perfection” or “completion”, then soon (if not already) that is going to be impossible without spending very substantial (if not near-insane) quantities of gems and real money to do so when players are out of gems. Of course, as a F2P game, all of these collection objectionives are technically obtainable for free given enough time, effort, and luck. Good luck with that, though, to any who seriously try to do so. That and what this week’s Powerball numbers are.
Anyone lately talk about how many gems it would take to buy out a Hero(ine) class to clear the Power 18-20 walls? Better have a bottle of ultra-strength Pepto-Bismol ready and then multiply that result by 34 kingdoms (and then take a couple more shots once you realize the size and scope of the number).
Once upon a time, a Minishroom showed up as a pet rescue in my guild. I was close to maxing it out, and decided to “let it ride” for one more pet rescue.
November, December, January, February, March.
Today is the five-month anniversary of the last time Minishroom has been spotted by my guild. I’ve never even been “blessed” with the opportunity to buy the pet outright since then. Nevermind the dozens of certain other pets that seem to spawn the vast majority of the time… Grrr…
I needed 3 copies to max it out forever. … it came up I got 1 and bought the others with gems… then it popped twice in the following week. RNG is a harsh mistress.
@Saltypatra, why the Medals’ art were downgraded in quality in this update?
As new medals (Medal of Seasons) are being introduced with the new game-mode the team used these rushed designs until a new proper set of artworks can be created?
Some copyright dispute over the old/better designs?
Also, why create the Medal of Seasons and sort of reduce the value of Medal or Aranea and others?
Can we hope for a change to Medal of Anu so it can provide extra mana without any problem with traits boosting starting mana by a %? Maybe Medal of Anu could give 2~3 mana to all troops at the start of the battle and be coded to trigger properly so having multiple badges/medals would award all the expected mana.
If not, maybe Medal of Anu should become something else and we could maybe have Medals that give 2~3 mana at the start of the battle for specific colors:
Medal of the Sun: All Yellow troops gain 2 mana at the start of the battle.
Medal of the Moon: All Purple troops gain 2 mana at the start of the battle.
If you ever look at this thread (Cool screenshot topic - #2730 by Crow) and go to the beginning, you’ll see what Gems of War looked like in 2016. The game has graphically come a long way! The artists have done a really good job. Even the medals that came out were fantastic. And then they updated them in 4.8.
I’ve played the game back then. (Only recently I took a break of a few months from the forums and the game, but my guild was cool with me still being part and getting the rewards.)
A lot changed, some good and bad things regarding art style choices, I thought they would stop adding crude and bad arts after Frost Archer and Arctic Fox, but Beastly Claw and Glaive of many goats were still approved… And now this sudden change in the medals…
Honestly, these medals added in 4.8 are so crude I could make them with MsPaint except for the gradients… I can’t see why they would change them…
Medals were changed to be consistent with the art style direction change that the game made quite awhile ago.
In that art style, which IMO appears to be loosely based on data presentation principles created by a professor named Edward Tufte, any level of detail or graphics that is not critical to present information to the user is to be avoided (the devs appear to have decided to add back in some basic detail to identify medals with specific Kyrstaran gods).
Broadly speaking, this type of design for presenting information is considered to be a best practice in most modern professional workplaces. This design type also has the benefit of requiring fewer computing resources to run, which assists the game to run on lower-end devices. Unfortunately, this type of design methodology is pretty much the antithesis of traditional fantasy design interfaces, with their colorful flairs, motifs, and complex UI/UXs.
^ This includes all the newfangled ugly-as-badwords websites that don’t make the slightest amount of sense to look at. The forum hasn’t gone that far … yet.
