@Fourdottwoone has largely encapsulated my thoughts and frustrations regarding the kingdom level expansion as presented, many thanks to them for the detailed response to Salty’s post. To add a bit more:
While I appreciate Salty’s example of a mountain whose height and steepness will be adjusted as necessary, the analogy rings a bit hollow when it feels like what’s being presented to us is more of a sheer vertical wall, virtually impossible to climb.
So far all that’s been mentioned regarding books’ obtainability is that they will be included as campaign rewards. At 10 weeks per campaign with a week off in between there’s time in a year for just shy of 5 campaigns. Temporarily setting aside the important how of dispersal (Free, Elite, Elite+) let’s just envision that each campaign yields 6 books of a given color. Even if every campaign gave the same color, a totally impractical idea, it would take an entire year to accrue enough books via that method to max 1 kingdom, out of 34! If each campaign rotates its books’ color, just think of how long it might take, similar to how Tower of Doom’s forge scrolls are few and far between. If we want to go way out there, let’s even envision that each campaign doles out 6x of more than one color. Upgrading would still be heavily limited by jewels and especially legendary deeds, the latter of which people have rightfully been clamoring for more of for ages now.
I realize that I’m just tossing out hypotheticals, and have no better idea than anyone else here what the balance or proportion will be. But that’s why it’s so frustrating to see Salty basically say “we don’t discuss specifics anymore” and “it’s impossible to gauge what’s reasonable for any given player”. She cited ‘too many variables’ such as how many resources a player already has, how long they’ve been playing, and what are they focusing on with their resources. But that reframes the discussion to be a matter of player agency, whereas the inherent tension regarding deeds has always been that they are largely a time-gated resource dictated by the devs.
And to me, the inherent risk of taking a “we’ll adjust accordingly as things play out and we listen to feedback” is that too often in this game it seems like that’s an admirable sentiment but not one followed up on with great success. For example, Tower of Doom is now 10 weeks apart for any given color. It takes multiple full-clear runs to gather enough scrolls to max even one weapon, and there’s more doomed weapons than ever. The devs said that they would look into providing other ways to obtain forge scrolls and that tower weekends may occur, but like, why not have that plan more nailed down when you implement the change to begin with? And then why not announce that so people can manage their expectations better or even better yet, provide feedback? When something slips into the nebulous “TBD Pile” the results have not historically been encouraging, as was the case today with Salty delivering the unfortunate news to @Razzagor that a much-asked for adjustment from literally years ago is still nowhere on the horizon.
I don’t enjoy leaving negative feedback. I’m certainly not wont to complain endlessly about things large and small in forums. This is actually my first post here and I felt compelled to register and make it because the rollout of the last couple patches has been so baffling to me that I couldn’t not express feedback about it. 5.0 was the most empty major patch of any product I’ve ever partaken in, but that concern and others such as the impact of the Elite Pass/+ were largely covered in all the discussion here a month ago. Credit where credit’s due, 5.1 has appreciable bug and qol fixes, and the gnome/vault rework is very sensible; a hearty thank you for those.
Going forward I would just sincerely like to ask Salty to reconsider her stance on talking about specifics or heck, even vague intentional notions where changes to systems are concerned. If the aversion to that is due to people acting like jerks and engaging in bad-faith or ad-hominem attacks, why not wield that banhammer more vigorously so that the rest of us can continue on with earnest, if sometimes critical, feedback.
