I don’t disagree with you.
I disagree with the devs since so much focus being spent on end gamers instead of midgamers or new players.
For end gamers these goals are like visiting a place that’s one state over.
But for new players these goals look like going from here to Mars. Yeah it’s possible, but the odds are 99% of us will never see it up close.
This is a dilemma the devs have mentioned before. The forums are mostly end game players, or at least people who are strongly attached to the game. If an update rolls around without any meat for endgame players, the forums fill with angst that they’re being forgotten. Of course, as you pointed out, endgamers are far outnumbered by casual players, who may never come close to things like Zuul’Goth or Books of Deeds.
How do you divide your limited development time and budget between a small but vocal minority, and the much larger group? I don’t have answers, but let’s hope that someone in Melbourne does.
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And said endgamers have very loudly and publicly sworn off even spending $10 on campaigns as a matter of principle. So as a game publisher, I don’t know why I would be servicing this lot.
Hmmm, maybe:
“After pressing the developers to deliver a ridiculous cashgrab with insipid flavor and playing experience I’m surprised not everyone fell for that and I’m outraged. How dare they!?”
I thought I had two years ago. I had just made the Yao Guai meta, and I felt I unlocked Easy-Mode. The game was almost too easy. Now, I…
I’m so burnt I don’t even feel like putting thoughts to paper. GW this week, ToD the next. I’ll see how the Horde does and decide what to do from there, but right now, I don’t see myself finishing a single Book of Deeds.
I beat the first Mass Effect Game multiple times with multiple accounts. By ME3, it was down to two times total. Gems is starting to feel like ME:Andromeda. I gave up halfway thru that one.
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In the release patch notes devs went into a little detail about books and endgame content. They wanted to make them a far away situation.
The problem by catering to the extreme, the effect on all is more extreme.
So people with 50,000,000 souls as the most extreme of that currency, set the minimum benchmark for progression devs have said is intended to be almost impossible and definitely so in the short term.
For most of everyone else, that means millions of souls have to be farmed.
To stop the most extreme of soul collectors, medal costs and the scarcity of them were determined, so that those with extreme soul hoards just couldn’t use them to get loads of elite troops.
And that’s the problem in a nutshell.
So slightly off the subject of books, but it’s part of the issue.
I think it is high time the availability of soul based troops and soul caps were improved, that medal drop rates are enhanced slightly and 3 tokens should alway drop at explore 12.
Furthermore the soul rate at explore 12 could have a modifier attached to it, that slightly increases souls gained from explore 12. After all due to their limitations, soul based troops struggle at the max level - they are outdated.
I made a thread about that and asked about better soul based troops for the current game and a boost to the necromancy trait, and allow increased soul based caps, maybe for Necromancer hero.
A similar scenario applies with books, deeds and imperial deeds. I remember when deeds were introduced and the player base calculated how soon we could have all 15 power kingdoms.
We were told our calculations were way off and we’d have them much sooner, yet here we are with less than 45% of kingdoms possible at power 15.
So, yep we can hope books become more available, like ingots did, but deeds have only had 1 a week added to epic tasks and not everyone can access even them as they are stacked at tier 11.
Let’s hope deeds and imperial deeds become a little more available now we need 50 deeds per book.
A sprinkling of them somewhere (and not just for cash) would be beneficial.
Writs could drop from explore 9-12 for example. A low amount.
Writ/Deed Gnome etc.
Or we get xx amount of writs daily, like ingots for each completed campaign. 2 for 1, 3 for 2 and so on. Yep we need lots but it’s a start…
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You’re all worried about getting the books… But even if we get 1 Imperial Deed a day it would take 3 years to get enough to upgrade all kingdoms to 20. Considering we get only about one a week if we’re lucky… It will take around 21 years.
You should have plenty of Books by then
Basically this. I think everyone is focusing on the wrong thing. Yeah, they have every opportunity to make the books readily available, but it doesn’t matter how available the books are if Imperial rate doesn’t also increase. And the whole reason for introducing a book resource was so they could have another milestone/tier that they could put a bunch of resources in without accelerating the pace to hit level 15 kingdoms by introducing more deeds. But introducing more Imperial Deeds would increase the pace to hit level 15 kingdoms up until the point where regular color deeds are the bottleneck. Which then begs the question… why else would books exist at all as a new resource that directly converts from an old one, if there is intended to be a new acquisition method that inflates the amount of deeds to be obtained in a way that already accelerates the level 15 pace, when they could have just made the upgrade costs more deeds and give more deeds?
The most they could offer and have the existence of books make sense is a drip feed of Imperial Deeds from some source that is both time and effort gated, to move it forward just enough so that colored deeds can still bottleneck level 15s but Books will bottleneck higher levels. Which is a very delicate balance considering writs from epic tasks that don’t go to Imperials can go to making ten colored deeds. Offering more of any deed but Imperial deed makes Imperial deed remain the permanent bottleneck no matter how many other types are introduced.
Maybe they set it up so color deeds are intended to be the bottleneck for levels before 15 and we have had fewer Imperials than expected? Wouldn’t count that out completely. Regardless, I’m in agreement that your primary method for leveling past 15 is not going to be intended to be turning normal deeds into books, this is intended to be a long term sink on normal deeds to extend the time before they are “useless”.
Also, I really wish the “but look what they did with Ingots” example would stop being brought up every time some scarce, time gated resource is introduced and people complain about it. It is highly likely that we only get so many of these because there was a last minute change to the reward structure of delves. They talked about this in one of the dev Q&As when asked about rewards being buffed for taking on higher level delves and it was said that the way rewards were the way they were was because their initial implementation of progressing levels into a constantly of bigger rewards made delves take way too long before you could start making any headway and that the reward structure was got was the best of a few ideas they had for correcting this. The reward structure of delves is basically broken in this regard and has been from the start, and I pointed that out in my initial posts about delves, and it seems that we can’t get any more rewards for higher level delves because we are already being offered all the rewards they can. Reading between the lines, it would seem that the rewards you can get for a single run at 2.0 modifier is already the maximum amount they wanted to give out in any situation and had likely only given this many rewards for higher level, possibly even level 500, full clear in the initial iteration. Meaning that while some people might still have maxed gold ingots by this point, it would be much less common of an occurrence if they had another maybe month or so to work out the reward structure that Sirrian actually wanted.
The more apt comparison would be “look what epic tasks did for other deed acquisition”. By tripling your guild’s gold consumption, you get probably a bit more than double the amount of effective deeds per week on average, maybe about 20-30% more imperials, converting some of the time gate into a massive and coordinated effort gate that also ties into the games “social” aspect to keep people “obligated” to play and drives their metrics. And thats the version we eventually got after a lot of community feedback.
Or maybe “look at what daily deals did for pet acquisition”. Which is… a very very tiny acceleration spread over a long time period while actively sinking gems, only more if you actively focus getting other things out of daily deals by further sinking gems, where still really the only way a low activity player would ever max a pet is just to buy out the shop on a rescue (which is a comparable amount of gems anyways).
Or “look what World Events did for medal acquisition”. Wherein they drip feed (with attached gem sink) medals of a lower rarity than are really desirable and allow more to be obtained with a coordinated effort gate.
These are the kind of things we can expect for them to do to address scarcity nowadays. If it is a time gate currently, expect a very large effort gate. If it is an effort gate, expect new a time gate to trickle feed what you want or not at all as an “incentive” to try a new thing, or a gem sink comparable (or maybe greater) than what already exists. If it is a new mode, expect a new resource to be used instead. We should not ever expect a mode where you can get a bunch of rewards, including highly desirable (at the time) rares, at an exponentially higher rate than what was offered before before while still giving decent rewards for items that already exist for a given period of time expenditure, even limited if it is limited entry, ever again.
And, I might add, that addressing scarcity by giving sudden access to a bunch of the thing, as was done with delves, while having a finite cap to use them, was not good design in the first place, and that any of these methods above far more apt. Its just the scale I disagree with here… something that had a 20 year expectation starting point getting doubled is still 10 years, which is still beyond what should be considered “forever” for a game of this type, and “quadrupled” is still almost as long as the game as existed to this point. If you then have to spend an additional hour a day, or 6.25% of your waking existence working to turn a “forever” goal into “forever”, there isn’t really any tangible “goal” there. If they wanted to start at “a few years” and pare it down to in the 1 year range for hardcore players while ever introducing new progression mechanics every year or so, which is already what is being done, I think people would be a lot more amenable. Oh, and while always having an outlet for said resource so it doesn’t just pile up over time, even if it is just a small percentage of whatever the next thing is, or even one of the things before it. Also helps if, when you introduce a new resource, there is some semblance of how fast it is intended to come in rather than waiting 2 months after it lands to wait and see.
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Or these will be used as the carrot for the Elite+ Pa$$. Free gets almost none, regular pa$$ gets a little more than almost none, and the $25 pa$$ gets the lion’s share.
You can’t tell me the suits aren’t rubbing their hands together ala Mr. Burns from the Simpsons after how well the players ate up the first pa$$…
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I think one solution might be to make them droppable from treasure runs, since there is basically no reason to do those right now, unless it pops up in your list of tasks to do. The treasure game mode has been trash for a while, guaranteeing deeds or writs in those might be a good way to revitalize the game mode.
In the end all we have is hope and faith.
Right now, the only people who should worry about books are very high-end, VERY late-game players. (I feel like there used to be early/mid/late game and now we need categories for “late-game” but I digress.) As an earlier post pointed out, by the time you start being gated by them you should be running out of things to do with deeds, so even though it will take “a long time” that is completely consistent with other things in GoW.
Someone said “it’s a video game, you are supposed to be able to beat it”. I’d argue “it’s an F2P game, if you beat it the devs failed”. It’s how the game works: if there’s not something left for a player to do, there is zero motivation for that player to buy stuff. It’s based on hoping gamblers make irrational choices. I don’t think GoW manages player frustration well, but I feel it takes a lot of willful ignorance to believe this game is designed for more than the very upper % of players to “finish” it. They need that small minority to do it for the same reason a casino needs someone to win every now and then: gamblers get even less rational when they see someone else win.
Anyway, back to faith and hope:
I think it’s provable with Mithran’s math the current books take intolerably long to get. I’d be willing to bet only a very small number of people are even in the neighborhood of worrying about books yet. If I felt like this was a normal, healthy F2P I’d argue this indicates in the future, there will be a new endgame chase goal and we’ll start getting deeds faster. The idea there is well-tread in MMOs, which are sort of like the ancestors of F2P. As new content arrives and power creeps, they have to rebalance old content so new gamers can catch up to the “fun” part of the game (socialization). Stuff that used to take hundreds of hours due to being “endgame” starts taking dozens because it’s “just midgame”. Welcome to power creep.
I think it’s fair to say GoW has managed power creep poorly. It is worth saying I think traitstones are much easier than they used to be, but other newbie hurdles like souls and waiting for particular troops are still as bad as ever. The real gate in this game has always been the troop gacha, and soulforge isn’t a very streamlined solution. It took me about 6 months to get Pharos-Ra as a newbie. Outside of “being hardcore and starting on a particular week”, it will take any random newbie that long today. That sucks. Souls are no longer the “true” gate to power, yet the game still makes people wallow in the muck for half a year to farm them.
So normally I’d say “this is how F2P works, accept it or leave”. But at this point? Whatever. Make a lot of noise about things like this. Newbies who are sane will check the forums early in their life, and if they see people warning “this is shitty” they will leave. That means you did a public service and saved someone’s time and money. This is why I ultimately ended up avoiding FE: Fates: I took a peek at the subreddit and the top 3 posts were about the gacha odds and helplines for addicted gamblers.
So yeah, even though books are technically a 4th-tier-endgame goal, I think if we really examine the game we can point out this is a bad departure from convention. When I signed up, it felt realistic to say, “If I play for 2 years, I’ll be powerful, a little faster if I spend some money.” If I signed up today and analyzed all the gates, I think I’d argue “PS6 will release before I can catch up, I should spend my money on things that make me happy today.”
So please. Complain loud and hard. We need a power creep adjustment in GoW badly.
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