This is what happens when there are people who are willing to pay people for their work are playing along side those that feel that everything should be free. Different expectations, based on different realities.
This is why I hate the current FTP “freemium” model in general. In my perfect world there would be games you pay for and games that are “free” with just endless ad spam. lol
It is a unique mix, and I think you’ve identified something not mentioned yet in the wide variety of expectations that comes with the playerbase.
I spend a lot of time playing this game, so I feel it’s more than fair from my perspective to spend money on it, both to support the game I enjoy and fairly compensate the creators. It’s not a perfect experience for sure, but even with what I spend on the game it still works out to be about the cheapest form of entertainment I enjoy on a regular basis, and I’m going to err on the side of patience for the devs to make their fixes or add new features.
If my patience ever wears out or the content doesn’t keep my interest, I’ll move on feeling like it was a fair deal and I got my money’s worth for hundreds of hours of entertainment. Especially finding this game just prior to Covid lockdowns gave me something to take my mind off things, and provided me an opportunity to talk to new guildmates at a time when everyone was feeling more isolated than ever.
It would be nice to see games go back to a solid price where you buy it and it’s done. No microtransactions or ads. The whole concept of games as a service paid continually for access does feel pretty icky compared to how games used to be sold.
It is not a game, it is a business, the fact that you say you have “ploughed a hell of a lot of time and cash into” it shows the truth of this statement.
You have invested time and cash into something and what a business person should know is that if they are providing something that people are willing to invest that time and money, if they want people to keep investing, they need to ensure that the “product” is of a good standard.
Unfortunately GoW’s standards are dropping, the quality control is pretty abysmal, the testing is being fobbed off onto the customers and when the people who are putting in their time and money offer positive feedback and suggestions, but barely get listened to, that is alienating the core customer base.
Long term players (myself included!) are facing a “Sunk Cost” situation. We’ve put in the time and effort and money and we don’t want to give up on that, but neither do we want to keep on seeing something we enjoy going downhill due to bad decisions by the developers.
Let me give a parallel example: How many people watched the TV series Heroes? It started off utterly brilliant, orginal, inventive, intriguing and a whole lot more, but, then (to quote Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory TV show) “Heroes gradually lowered the quality season by season 'til we were grateful it ended.”
And that’s what’s happening with GoW, People are sticking with it, because they want it to go back to what they knew and loved, but it’s simply not happening. New things are being introduced which don’t improve the game, mistakes are being made and then “fixed” in a way that makes the situation worse and there’s a lack of will (or interest) from those at the top to rectify the situation.
GoW is still one of the top rated games of this type, but it’s not going to stay that way and the more people get pi$$ed off, the more they’ll look for other games and start recommending them to friends.
At that point, the Devs have a choice: Fix the problems that are causing people to leave or just try to cash in as much as possible before the revenue dries up along with the customers.
Unfortunately it seems that the second option is the one that’s been chosen…
I love Gems of War and I spend a lot of my time playing it. I am also a guildleader, so I also spend time trying to make the game understandable for others who doesn’t have the time to find out what is new, the bugs related etc.
I have invested a lot of time and money in this game and have good relations with people in my guild, some goes back a couple of years.
Because I love this game, it makes me sad to see so many bugs in almost every release: updates or faction release(it wasn’t always like this) - and they aren’t fixed fast unless it is hurting their economi. Fun to see how these bugs are fixed soooo fast while like this AI skull bug require a Client update.
In sales you learn that complaining costumers, are a good thing. That means that people care and want to revisit your shop, use your product, play your game.
Where people that doesn’t care or have had enough will find another store, product or game. And then you have lost that customer.
The haters, well that is too much. But being negative and being a hater are not the same.
It took them one day to fix the gnome-a-palooza bug where we were able to fight a bunch of the mana surge gnomes while a gnome-a-palooza was activated. That is because they were giving away so much free goodies that they want to sell us so the fix was fast. they were selling 4 of each verse and 1300 gems for 50 bucks CAD. It seems if the bug makes the game more difficult and angers players it is low priority but if they are giving away too many good rewards they have motivation.
I wish you all the best in your future endeavors and may you find joy and happiness wherever your wings may carry you!
Ah, the things we do for love.
But it does. It’s valuable feedback that other companies pay piles of money for, this community is engaged enough to provide it for free. One day, when they decide to understand and act on it again, they might rise back to the level of excellence they were widely lauded for five years ago.
It crashed the game, a lot. They “fixed” it. It still crashed the game, a lot. They “fixed” it again. It still didn’t work remotely as advertised, with very detailed community bug reports arbitrarily getting marked as “Not a Bug”, “Unable to reproduce” and “Reported”, often all three flavors for the very same issue. After a few more “fixes” we’ve finally reached a state that looks like what the design papers might originally had in mind. There are still some issues left, but I guess that’s just a few more dents on a car that got thoroughly totaled. Whenever people look at it now they only remember all those painful accidents and would rather avoid getting near it again.
Did it backfire? They had tons of feedback from beta testers, weeks ahead, that what happened would happen exactly as it did. They had tons of feedback, from the preview stream, that what happened would happen exactly as it did. They had tons of feedback, on the day they went live, that what happened would happen exactly as it did. At this point I can only assume it was intentional, they wanted to provoke exactly the negativity they received, for whatever reason. I’m willing to consider other reasonably likely explanations, so far nobody was able to offer one.
That’s a bit of an understatement, the game is unplayable for most players. If you happen to hang around on global a bit, the question that came up multiple times each day on the two channels I frequent translates to “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?”. Lower level players don’t stand a fighting chance in just about any game mode, most prominently the quest lines they are working on. There’s no explanation accessible from within the game what is causing this and how it could possibly be circumvented, for over a week now, even though the game has built-in mechanisms to provide this information. And for each player who actually takes the time to ask about this, there’s probably a hundred who just run as fast and far as possible.
There’s also a back story here, the Heart of Rage and its release woes, which left a lot of players sore. Maybe they should just publish the drop rates and possibly consider adjusting them based on the feedback they receive, or at least offer a reasonable explanation why Cedric has so many identical twins.
I totally don’t get it. From technical point of view it’s just a feedback loop, improving communication would make it go away. However, this has been suggested in the past, the response was that they can’t communicate properly because they would receive death threats when they do.
I wouldn’t really see it as toxic. It reflects the state of the game, which hasn’t exactly been healthy the past months. IP2 has every means to change that, and some parts wouldn’t even take much effort. Take Gnome-a-Palooza, if it had been rolled out configured like it is now, the forum would be full of praise.
I think the game is still enjoyable if you’re in a place where you can log on, play for a bit and feel like you’ve made progress.
I’d go so far as to recommend the game to a new player on the condition they definitely quit 2 years in and never spend any money on it.
The game has always had a low bar for the quality of its content and programming. But that was fine - many players were looking for an off-brand World of Warcraft game anyway and the game kept steadily improving.
Not anymore, not for the past two years. As you approach endgame content, ‘game’ and ‘fun’ are increasingly replaced by constant barrages of money nagging, design flaws, and outright programming errors.
Patch 5.6 is the first time I feel the game deserves to be labelled a genuine dumpster fire.
I don’t care for TH or arena.
Which game modes are left that aren’t plagued by bugs, have had the fun taken out of them for monetisation, or help me progress? Not many.
I’m happy for you if you’re still having fun. I have a feeling many people are not. The sentiment on our guild alliance’s (spans casual to hardcore) Discord is not much different from that on the forums.
When you’ve kaputt-designed your game to the point where people are begging to be allowed to spend money to play less of it, you know you’ve succeeded as a drug business but failed as a game developer.
While thread was nice and everything @Sherby74 . Not even this thread managed to stay positive.
LOL As of now, the only bad things are Lycanthropy and lack of Doom Skrolls to be obtained…and a few more problems. But, afterall, this IS a free-to-play game.
Ha ha - I know, right! This thread has now become everything I was talking about with everyone piling on to tell me about everything that’s wrong with the game I’ve played for years and still enjoy. Step away from the forum @Sherby74 it’s not good for you here! 
Like you, I avoid reading the forum normally because the amount of crying is high and unmotivated most of the time. People who complain about game assets like scrolls of doom, but who simply don’t know how to organize themselves with resources and prefer to blame the developers. Players who complain about arenas because they feel they are unbalanced, but are simply not good enough to play the mode and like any game if you are not good, you can lose. People who complain about the various troops in the game considering certain troops too strong and others too weak, but the reality is that as your opponent can use certain troops, you can too, with the advantage that over the opponent in a lot of put your brain. I read this topic simply because for a week within every day in the forum to document me on the progress of the resolution of the current bug. Honestly, they have shown very little professionalism in dealing with this problem and given a truly unprofessional motivation. On your phrase “it’s just a game” it is true, but I remind you that unlike other games where you can play a game today and if you are bored you can resume playing it after a year without being damaged and without losing resources, in this game if you want to always be up to date, you have to play with a certain consistency and then find yourself playing with heavy bugs like the current one increases your sense of frustration. In other games you can say “ok until they fix I stop playing” but if you do it here you get damaged. I preferred to purposely skip the “money spent in game” argument because while players use it as a motivation for having a perfect product, the reality is that in-game purchases are simply figured as donations and not investments.
haha, thanks for making me laugh with your comment. A much needed laugh.
Op is just trolling, check his post with the forum troll that got banned about laughing about people complaining. Why do people moan about complaints? I could add so much more about justifying complaints but enjoying 90F and living life…
/ignore - don’t waste your breathe
/end thread
Thanks
No, I’m not going to stop the negativity. I was going to, but then I got this, and everything dark in me flared back up.
Better go make a new thread. A fun experiment to see if we manage one thread that stays positive lol
time for a joke so people get up the positivity again @Sherby74 . You post the next joke, so we keep this thread as positive as possible. Cheers!
And right here. This sums up everything I mean about this toxic environment. My other main thread was to say I was enjoying Lyncanthropy. Which I did. And this gets twisted by bitterness to claim I’m a troll, this place is unreal. Stick to your toxicity, you seem to enjoy it. I’ll carry on hunting for the positive.
Thanks, that is for sure haha!
