So, the first day of Gnome-a-Palooza… I had a working day and managed to do only ~25 Gnome-a-Paloozas (there are plenty of more dedicated farmers). These Gnome-a-Paloozas gave me:
484 Vault keys (and just for comparison, my all-time best for the entire gnome weekend was ~30 Vault keys).
60 Epic Vault keys,
2.27M Souls,
350k Glory,
2000 Gems,
7M Gold,
9300 Chaos Shards,
… and I have enough verses to craft 56 Gnome-a-Paloozas more.
Gnome-a-Palooza is ridiculously broken. Looping potential and rewards are just far above any reasonable level.
I like it and the Devs know what they are doing so relax folks. I think it’s entertaining to see folks come here with full pockets wanting it stopped before others have even had a chance to enjoy it because they work perhaps.
It makes me nervous. There are two possible scenarios.
This insanely OP feature was intended to be insanely OP. But why? Does it mean the game is coming to a close and they’re trying one last hurrah (I hope not and there isn’t much evidence to back this idea, but it would certainly make sense)? Does it mean that, since the Underworld is nearly finished, they’ve purposefully decided to let loose the flood waters due to the current bottleneck being deeds/books? That seems a little more likely - it allows new players to catch up and makes the community feel nice. It also could hint at a new resource coming into play (3rd world map, maybe?). But it also risks hurting their profits quite significantly if players feel they don’t need to buy these items with real cash, and I just can’t see them doing that knowingly.
This insanely OP feature was NOT meant to be this insanely OP. This, too, presents cause for concern. This is not a bug, GAP is a feature. It works as advertised. For that reason, and due to the amount of potential work and lashback, I just can’t see a wipe being an option. I don’t think they can rightfully cause players to lose the items they’ve earned now. The economy has already completely crumbled to pieces. Every resource in the game besides the current deed bottleneck is now easily infinitely obtainable. If they nerf the chances of Mana Surge Gnome spawns, it’s too late. Players will have hundreds of VKs and endless resources. If they do nerf rates and you’re unlucky enough to have not used GAP beforehand, you will NEVER be able to catch up to players who spent a day grinding thousands of Gnomes.
TLDR: I don’t think GAP is a bad thing, and I LOVE playing it. I’m just worried about the motivations behind this feature, and what the future holds for GoW. If you knowingly shatter an economy, you surely have a reason for it. But what?
I think we all share that worried mind while enjoying gap. I just don’t see this as an accident. It must have been the only thing they were really concentrating, because other things were bugged. Maybe they want people to catch up the endgamers, because underworld is almost ready while some of us are only starting to do pure runs. I believe all of this is intentional and someone will soon say, working as intended, they remove the band from gap and we can all walk towards the unknown new feature called the sky world
I think the line will be working as intended even if this was unintentional. The cat and half of other feline species in the world are out of the bag now. Cant really turn this around.
Dont know which im affraid more : the devs who cant count or the future.
The devs must have underestimated how fast verses would drop. I think this is also shown by the fact that they are trying to sell these for real money.
It still is a time thing. Some folks with jobs and other stuff going on do not have the time to play gems for 12 hours a day so this really does not affect the game as much as you think. The folks with everything still have everything but just more of it. They will still sell campaign to most folks and other stuff to folks with less playing time be my guess. Most folks living on game this weekend we’re likely just buying campaign anyway and will do the same next campaign
They likely will have a boss per kingdom so going to take lots of resources to craft all those boss troops be my guess. Or you can pony up several grand.
Don’t they tell us that a lot of stuff is thoroughly tested and “working as intended” right up to the point where it isn’t and gets changed?
…
My opinion is that being able to run a permanent or semi-permanent Gnome-a-Palooza is destructive to the game environment. It will widen the gulf between the new(est) and old(est) players because one group will be able to generate such and the other will not. It could also introduce a level of hyper-inflation into the game as certain resources become much more plentiful than they are now.
When we first got the ability to speed up the animation speed to 4x, it didn’t take an immense amount of time before the ability to farm gold (among other things) at much higher rates led to a decrease in gold awarded per battle. Constant GAP could lead to the same thing on steroids given that it’ll be possible to farm numerous other resources in quantity as well.
I wouldn’t touch it for this weekend; I’d consider “constant GAP” to be part-apology and part-compensation for the skull damage bug. (Playing high-level delves trying for faction team wins at 1.5x speed to pre-empt this was a bizarre and unpleasant experience.) But I believe that things have to be pulled back a little bit with the patch allegedly due next week to bring some balance back. Either removing the new gnomes from spawning during GAP “because they’re performing and therefore can’t crash battles” or removing the ability for Verses to drop during that time.
Otherwise I fear that the developers will have to nerf battle rewards even more than they already have to bring things back into balance. Or do something else silly like raise the prices of everything in game, from statue tasks to event buy-ins and everything in between.
At the top-end, who are the users that are currently reaping the lion’s share of the rewards, and how much do all of these resources truly matter?
Ingots? Probably don’t need.
Jewels? Probably don’t need.
Souls? Probably have millions stockpiled, despite medalling troops.
Keys? Probably only really pulling for monthly Legendary and Mythic troops now and obtain them with relative ease.
Chaos shards? Perhaps. But I don’t believe anyone is farming gnomes specifically for these. A decent pick-up on the side for sure, but unlikely a motivating factor.
A fair argument could be made regarding farming orbs from Cedric for future Red/Boss-tier troops or for obtaining Tarot cards. This may be intended behavior as a new Nysha-like chase, just like Rojo said.
Also from Rojo,
Outside of the top couple percent of players in the game, how many platyers are actually looping GAP? Unless you’re running meta speed clearing teams, looping GAP is not realistic. I’d wager that the current situation does not affect early, mid, and mid-late gamers at all and it’s a normal day in GoW for them.
All that said, I do believe the community could use a “working as designed” (or not) message from Salty on the situation. I’m sure there’s more than a few of us that are wondering about rollback potential if GAP is truly not working as intended and I hope is addressed before the weekend.
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