I can confirm that the shrine is as expected but the value of the shrine is different depending on the account level you have. For example on our baby alt account it offered 20,000 gold and a minor orb of chaos for $1.99. The more upgraded alt was offered 100,000 and 2 major orbs for $9.99. This may be random and could also be different each day.
There was also an arena update that should make some players happy. You can now select the troops in reverse order, so the Epic troop is selected first. The other nice update is that you can reroll at the end of the selections if you aren’t happy with the team setup. I haven’t noticed anything else updated yet and as for the Warband I’m not sure what that will be.
My two cents which will probably be lost in the forum couch is that this update has a nice arena update, but probably won’t move the needle for most players with anything else. It’s not a total cash grab but does bring gems more in line with other games of the gacha genre. Things like the campaign, ads, daily offers, and this new shrine update are all copy and paste features from other games. Gems is just a little late to the party.
The biggest outstanding questions I have going forward.
-
Warbands and how do they work? Could be another offer situation like the shrine but with troops, which is where it seems to be leaning.
-
Direction going forward after this update
2020 has been the year of catch up for gems in my opinion. Playing some other games of this genre already It was surprising gems got away with being as F2P as they were for soo long. A few theories on this are that the dev team has changed and thus the direction of the game has changed. The publisher is trying to milk gems for everything it’s worth. According to the financial statement from Digital Bros, Gems is doing very well and making them money so my guess is they will want to keep going down that path until the money stops coming in. Of course the pandemic could be to blame for some of the updates not being as massively game changing, but since there is no gems roadmap from the development team, we will never know for sure if this was updates as planned, or things got pushed.
As a F2P this update doesn’t affect me one bit. Sure there are more offers but they aren’t in your face and unlike most other games they don’t do a half dozen pop up offers every time i log in. Pvp/explore are still unlimited play and unless that changes, I can’t see a F2P not being ok with these cash grab updates. They still have not paywalled anything even though some of the campaign troops/weapons are now time walled a bit. A great example of this is I already crafted enraged kurandara but still don’t have regular kurandara lol. Thankfully none of those mythics are meta changing so It’s only my FOMO that get’s a hit and not my actual account health.
TL;DR Update doesn’t seem horrible. Little cash grabby, but brings it more in line with other games. Not intrusive but won’t make the players who have been looking for a big content update happy. Arena got some nice updates. Still not sure where Warband comes into play.
