6.5 Update: Dragon's Path

Official News
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For those worried about how long dragonite takes to get without an absurd amount of gems, keep in mind that this is normal both in GoW and other mobile games. A great example is imperial deeds and books of deeds, which, while still rare, are much, much easier to get than upon release, thus making the community’s guess of kingdoms taking a crazy amount of years to completely irrelevant.

Resources are scarce when they are first introduced. That’s intentional and is meant to create FOMO. In time, dragonite will very likely be easier to obtain, whether by daily adventure boards, events, campaign passes, daily offers, etc.

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103

True.
But deeds introduced 3 years ago, and i have 0 lvl20 kingdom. Not a good omen, haha.

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104

I honestly think they may have painted themselves into a corner with this one. If you offer a direct cash to Dragonite shop option without any kind of purchase limit, you will undoubtedly have a statistical minority that will whale their way to a full suite of troops. See: Diablo Immortal.

That said, GoW isn’t in the same league as Diablo Immortal and there’s not decades of (former) good will behind the brand to survive the shock to the player base once the mechanics were worked out.

If you leave everything status quo, you’re devaluing future purchasable troops.

There’s been research done ad nauseum about who the paying customers are in f2p games. This patch was designed exclusively for late game players with any other/earlier benefits either a nice coincidence or an afterthought. It just seems like there was little to no thought paid to how all these (deliberately obscure because f2p is f2p after all) systems work in tandem with each other.

You have to imagine that 505/IP2 have all kinds of data on their customer base. This swing and miss is encroaching on Hanlon’s razor territory. I don’t say that to be snarky-- even if it’s just sunken cost, I have a vested interest in seeing this game succeed as my nearing 1600 levels should attest.

It should be a testament to the core gameplay loop here that, despite all the missteps, the core player base keeps coming back. Disincentivizing that same player base with a model that devalues your own shop (and the engine that fuels upkeep/development along with it) just makes no sense.

C’est la vie.

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105

Yeah… that’s not a good example. We’re years in and nowhere near close to any progress.

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106

True, sort of anyway

But it still doesn’t change the fact that they TOTALLY based Dragonite gathering on luck or spending gems.
I am still so pissed off by this concept: be unlucky and find just 1 trap, which means getting zero Dragonite, while doing the same effort as a lucky one, who doesn’t find any traps, but they are getting 80+ Dragonite- just because of LUCK.

I am keeping my gems - I can live with not getting the new troops/weapons as long as these are the conditions.

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107

Oh my goodness, that sounds like my personal hell. Go away, Luther!

Just to play devil’s apricot, I like the idea of having something to work towards (that even the whales and tryhards with tens of thousands of gems saved up will have to work towards for about a year) and I love the fact that (until the point where people are able to start crafting their Diamantinas) everyone will have a different set of coloured gem dragons available, so we’ll see a bit more variety in team compositions.

Really appreciate the pace that new content is coming out too, thank you GoW staffers!

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108

I can’t be the only one, who keeps thinking of this, when seeing the stairs in the new dungeon, right?

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html

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109

Has anyone actually thought of the free to play audience or even just the general audience that can’t afford 300 gems a day and how long it would take them?

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110

It’s clear to me what the strategy is.

Add in monetization as much as possible.

Follow that with an assault on gem collections.

They never really have been able to master the gem collecting issue - until now (at least those that cough up most days/every day)

Combine the two, so gem collections are lower than now, and make more monetization tie in again, after.

There has been an assault on gem collections. The whole idea is to stop players making net gains on gems, it’s very subtle how it’s been done, to mix and match the gem supplies and monetization.

Could you imagine the uproar if kingdom tributes were nerfed?

All this is to me is ’ do I spend 300 gems today or not’. That’s most average person’s daily tributes. Yes some can do 19 a day and get 450, but this is just an indirect change to the tribute system at every level.

Yes, you can choose not to spend the gems, is the temptation enough to make you spend them every day (endgamers)?

Add in loads of pets, flood the pool with several at a time here and there, that collectors will try and get to Mythic and spend 2,500 gems a pop, all adds to an assault on gems at the same time as extra monetization (previously). I mean we recently had 3 paid passes running at the same time.

Can they really keep 3 going all the time without a player backlash over paying more?

Do they care? No - clear to me, assault on gem stocks, back to more monetization.

The other thing I see, is probably better mythic troops than the recent junk we have had, but they will arrive eventually.

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111

I agrree with you about the upcoming variaty those dragons will offer in the future. Same with the slow progress even tryhards will make.

What I disagree with is the current pace of new stuff being released. Even that they have fixed some stuff, there is still plenty of things that should paid attention to before opening another (possible) tomb of bugs.

Hopefully this dungeon rework was just already on the schedule and they now focus more on the still remaining bugs like guild war score and ranking system, lance knight, “daily offering bug” and whatever bothers the community for ages…

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112

I’m mostly F2P. (bought a couple of campaign passes last year, might do so again if the rate of content carries on) too, and the Diamantina troop just isn’t aimed for us. Just pretend it doesn’t exist for the next year, and keep spamming the dungeon mode for small amounts of dragonite. We’ll be able to get a couple of the coloured gem dragons by the time the whales are crafting the big one. By the time we reach that point, there’ll be a new currency (or seven) to worry about, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they then add additional ways to get dragonite like they’re currently doing with cursed runes.

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113

Totally agree that the gem sink was 100% by design in response to things like GaP and they would love to make more money because of course they will as they’re a business.

But the monetization strategy is completely off and they’re now incentivizing behaviors they clearly didn’t mean. A monetization strategy, even if I’m being completely cynical, would mean the player will always be faced with the chance to spend just a little bit more to get what they want. Hence the campaign pass, the kingdom pass, etc etc. but those players that would pay now have less incentive to do so as the reward for doing so (namely a complete collection) is not possible due to a contradicting system.

So even by the “greed” metric, this design just doesn’t work. And that’s (still) ignoring the philosophical question over paying vs. f2p.

Would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the design process of this content.

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114

You are correct with your posting, but someone must have a plan.

I think they want to get the gemconomy down, find a way to nerf tribute indirectly, then bash on with more paid content.

I do find it a little odd, but maybe there will come a wall of daily offers for the new dungeon content?

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The million dollar question (no pun intended) is how do you flip that switch into more paid content?

I sincerely think an unlimited cash → dragonite conversion would create backlash that the core player base wouldn’t be able to absorb. But the nature of dragonite → egg RNG leaves them in a spot where limiting the spend on dragonite devalues campaign offers due to the time commitment.

I want to agree that someone must have a plan-- I’m just completely stumped by what that plan is.

Either way, as a data guy with a background that dabbled a bit in psychology of buying trends, etc., I will say I find this all fascinating.

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116

Absolutely this. I think they’re wildly overestimating how many players would be willing to put up with gem expenses outpacing gem income. That would certainly be crossing the line for me.

But then again, they already had to sell the company once. -36% revenue this year and the message is still not getting heard.

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117

So you’re ok with the fact that Gems of War went from a game where almost everyone can participate at even grounds to… this?

To me, this is actually kind of scary.

They’re making active attempts to price Free to Plays out of the game so players will need to buy things to keep up.

After that, they’ll raise prices in an attempt to make more money and people will have to pay to keep up, otherwise FOMO.

Has anyone actually thought about how much money it would cost if someone had to buy the gems? There are people out there at actually do buy gems to participate in events as is. Does it make sense economically? no, but it won’t stop people from doing it.

I don’t even like Dragonite as a reason to cover tributes. Actual tribute gains are capped based on how many kingdoms we have. Raising Kingdom Power Levels only increases the consistency, but these are still similar results to what we were getting a year or two ago.

Meanwhile, there are more and more gem sinks to spend on. I don’t know about anyone else, but this isn’t making me want to spend more gems. This makes me want to ignore other events that I once was doing. If that’s the desired effect, great.

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118

Fair enough! I’m lightyears away from being strongly affected by the irrelevant kingdom offers, but I appreciate that it’s a huge annoyance as that’s the main way you’re going to progress in the game at a high level. I hope that the limited fixes to kingdom offers mentioned in this patch make a difference for you!

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the “additional way” for cursed runes is already there for dragonite: gems!

by the time those new currencies are introduced you’ll still have to buy everything with gems (or real money ofc, which at this rate will soon mean the same, as no one can keep up)

It’s insane how every “new content” means just “new offers”. gems are still the premium currency and they’re making sure everything is gated behind it, and calling it content. GoW used to be one of few exceptions when it comes to mobile games only for whales. it’s not anymore. and since the content itself is way better in other spending games, this just hurts the playerbase while making it even worse for whoever still joins it.

Imagine a new player planning on how to keep a good prog pace in this game. will end up with something around 25-30k gems a week by the end of this years updates lol

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120

Hasn’t that always been the case? Are you suggesting that someone with Daddy’s credit card who opens thousands of gem chests, gets all the mythics and stat bonuses from levelling their kingdoms was on an equal footing with their F2P opponent?

Yes, I’m OK with it. GoW is a freemium game, and I’m happy enough with the content I can get my hands on without spending any money. If they want to make a Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon that whales get to play with long before I do, that doesn’t diminish my experience one bit.

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121

I don’t remember, how long it took me to get Zul Goth, after it was introduced. Two years maybe?
I consider this one to be more or less the same case. And I simply refuse to care about it.

Having stuff, that is temporarily pay-locked, like campaign troops, is much more frustrating to me. As long as those exist, it will never be possible for players to get 100% of the monsters without spending money.

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