Originally published at: Bounty Weekend – Leaping Spider – Gems of War
New Bounty Troop: Leaping Spider Leaping Spider from Zhul’Kari, is this weekend’s Bounty Captain. Leaping Spider will be available in the Bounty Shop, and will appear in Gold, Glory and Guild chests in 3-4 weeks’ time.
Four new troops within one week.
Other things may have a larger short term impact, but this permanent unstoppable growth, this addiction for “more content” is what really kills the game and scares away new players.
How many troops, how many weapons, how many pets will be “enough”?
Ten thousand? More?
Can you imagine the situation of someone, who starts the game today and tries to catch up on this?
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You don’t invest into a game you’ve already finished, there are no way for CCG to have any kind of ‘end’
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This is not a collectible card game. Or at least, it wasn’t, when I started it.
I am very aware, that the constant flow of new troops is geared towards endgame players, and especially those who are known to be “generous”. Does not change the fact, that there is a critical point, where the amount of things and the horrendous rate to get them (without spending thousands of dollars or more) is enough to make new players quit right away.
And a game, that is down to… let’s say two hundred oldtimers, won’t be able to keep those around anymore either.
It doesn’t take THAT long to catch up. From my very own experience of starting an alt account in April’22, after a year and a half that account is nearly at level 1400 and has all of the key mythics, 74% classes completed, and 1274/1319 troops, and over half delves done at 500 pure. That’s a person who already went through all this and knows what they’re doing, and had the opportunity to quickly jump into a good guild to grow. So, a newbie who makes newbie mistakes will probably take about 2 years to get where I am now with my alt account; at this point, getting to all troops is a waiting game, so, another year, roughly, maybe a year and a half. All the troops I’m now missing are mythics, and with more and more mythics added to the game, and power levels being blocked by kingdom at level 18 - the “get to full collection” issue isn’t that pressing or important.
There are quite many nice methods of catching up in the game, if only a players knows about them and can spare enough free time to take advantage of them (GAPs, for example).
Two-and-a-half or three years still sounds daunting, but it took me about three years from zero to being “on top of everything”, and I started my main account four years ago. So this hasn’t really changed that much.
I know the “numbers” say the game is in decline but as someone who is in global on pc/mobile there are new and returning players left and right. Most dont seem to care that the game is moving to p2w even when they ask. Most players dont even seem to care if theyre guild is active. There are so many brand new/zombie guilds around its crazy.
Your perception seems a bit off from my perspective. Once you get Queen B/Rowanne you dont care about mythics for a while except in that you want one but dont know how or why, just that its a strong troop and any other troop just wont work as well to clear content like Beetrix/Rowanne
If the developers didn’t constantly and consistently release new content, a lot of the player base would drift away. And they’d do so in numbers that would make the current perceptions of a “player base decline” seem like nothing at all.
The vast majority of people have a short attention span. And they need “new lands to conquer” on a regular basis. And if they can’t find it in Gems of War, they’ll take their entertainment time (and entertainment dolalrs) elsewhere to do so.
There are a small number of games and the like that are so awesome that they can retain their player base and their replayability for huge periods of time without adding anything new to the experience. Gems of War isn’t one of those games and that’s not a sin.
But it might be a useful exercise to go through something like the Google Play store or something similar and see how many of the games that remain popular for any length of time do so without doing the same sorts of things that GoW is accused of, with all the new content releases and cascades of events.
I suspect that you’ll find that the “popular” games that don’t have any of that stuff have their brief supernova of time and then fade away. Whereas the ones that remain near the top of the charts do much more to provide “new” experiences for their players.
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