I am aware of this, but still, such a feature should also exist in the game.
You should be able to preview weapon upgrades on a weapon that you don’t own yet.
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What about Slay Bells and Fire and Ice weapons? I didn’t see them on the list above?
I’m OK with the paywall-thing while I know it’s not for everybody. So it’s OK for me, personally.
Sadly Meta-Weapons like Rope Dart and Earths Fury are craftable only.
Yes, I say “sadly” because in opposite of many previous speakers I think that Soulforge locks out newer players because they don’t have the ressources to craft the weapons. Endgamers on the other side - which most probably have enough ressources - already have the weapons or can now easily complete their collection.
So the system to get the important weapons is not beginner-friendly at all.
Will the weapons be available on Switch, too? I don’t read a word of it, which - following the “logic” of news in this forum - normally means: “No.”…
Didn’t they say these would be available for flash offers?
I don’t know what they’ve said - that’s why I ask.
And I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. Do we have “flash offers” on Switch? What are “flash offers”?
Yes, and that’s the entire problem. This is a pretty phenomenal way for you folks to miss the point.
The whole point of this exercise is that weapons, generically, should be craftable. The fact that weapons were available for Glory once and then vanished isn’t a explanation, it’s just restating the problem to begin with.
This positively reeks of a retroactive decision to justify the awful RNG-selected day 1 weapon for this feature and/or the immediate highlighting of a disastrous flaw in the feature. I mean, I’m sure it isn’t…but it doesn’t matter, because it sure seems like it is, and perception is reality.
We’ve gone from “we can’t just put weapons into the soulforge, we need a better solution”, to “we’ve come up with a solution: weapons are now in the soulforge!” (which is eye-roll-worthy to begin with especially considering how long this has been festering), to “weapons are kinda in the soulforge, except for this huge swath of weapons that won’t ever be in the soulforge, and also the free weapon that was put into the soulforge was totally on purpose and also you’re not actually supposed to craft it but it’s there anyway because reasons”. This is…not making y’all look good.
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Flash offers are a relatively new feature. They’re sales that last 24-72 hours and offer some items for a more reasonable price than they’d normally be. Usually it’s “something plus some gems” at a rate that would be better than the shop for the gems alone. Sometimes it’s questionable, like when it was a minor orb plus gems for $9.99. But other times it’s so cheap it’s harmless, like a Vault Key plus 100 gems for $1.99. I’ve always felt once something’s cheaper than $3 it’s hard to complain about the value.
The current release schedule for Switch patches is, “Due to platform differences we can’t tell you when we plan to update Switch”, so don’t hold your breath.
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Also I’m on board with @Amadan’s post but judging from how quickly the angry players started thanking the devs for this I’ve got better uses of my time than an essay.
The most positive thing I can say about the solution is “some time over the next year it should cover the weapons that mattered.” Probably the closest to negative I want to delve into is “this post by Salty would’ve been far more effective if made 24 hours before the changes.” Overall I think players are happier to take new features that are mostly positive and have a few quirks if the devs stand up and explain those quirks before release, instead of quietly throwing the feature to the wolves and leaving players to speculate if it’s broken for 24 hours.
It’s also probably a good idea to lead with a nice foot, like “we’ve broken the pattern and made Rope Dart available, in the future the weapons will follow the kingdom schedule” instead of an ugly foot like, “Yes, this weapon is technically free, but it’s complicated and LATER it won’t be free so it makes sense.”
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“Players are able to see whenever we set legendary/mythic drop chances for chests significantly lower than advertised? That leaves us only with one choice, disable the data channel that allows them to prove we are doing it!”.
You’d think the proper course of action for War & Peace would have been to manually remove it from the Soulforge. Possibly posting something like “Oops, yeah, it’s a quest reward, thanks for pointing that out, we’ve adjusted the weapon pool for this week”. Unfortunately, making mistakes seems to be something that can’t possibly ever happen at IP2, the universe always presents us with an alternate reality, no matter how improbable.
I hoped the weapon-offers in the shop could be some server-sided thing that does not need a client patch - like the weekly card for example.
Weapon offers probably are server-side. I’m no dev but I’m pretty confident that part’s right.
Flash offers are not. They have special UI and didn’t exist until probably two updates past where Switch was locked down.
The flash offers are a little more tempting because it sounds like they’ll specifically target high-value weapons you don’t own. So you can either wait, “However many months until Rope Dart’s kingdom” or you might wake up to find out you can buy Rope Dart today for a special price. In the end nobody likes the money transactions but “pay money to get something that takes time to get for free” is the business.
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Yeah, me too 
.
@Saltypatra Two questions!
Q1. Can we assume the Urskayan Crown weapon will receive the same treatment as War and Peace, being obtained from quests in Urskaya?
Q2. Did anything change between the Dev Q&A with Sirrian and Nimhain and now?
** Long context section **
They seemed to think weapons like the
would be appearing in the Soulforge, and made a special note of it as the only Ultra-Rare, which would have the same crafting cost as any Epic weapons that might appear. Sirrian also said he had just been working on it on Sunday (a few days earlier).
Transcript (25:26):
"Sirrian: They [event weapons] cost a little bit more, than the current weapons in there cost - 25% more or so. We’re talking in the region of 400, 500 diamonds on the old Event Weapons in there - for Legendaries; I think the Epic ones are cheaper if we have any Epics - I believe there is one Ultra-Rare Event weapon, too.
Nimhain: One, the Celestial Staff - which we did for Whitehelm a very, very long time ago, when-
S: It’ll cost the same as an Epic.
N: Yeah."
This seems to contradict:
Adding other bits and pieces to the story:
Dev Q&A (in response to the prepared talking point, “What’s going on with old Event Weapons?”) (22:28):
"S: We had trouble finding a good solution -
N: Which was fair for everyone involved.
S: Yes. And- as you know, some of these old Event Weapons were promised exclusively- at the time, we said, you know ‘Get these this week only for Glory’, and- do we wanna put them back in for Glory? That would… be… nice, but, it wasn’t really- I still don’t feel we can do that because we said it was this week only for Glory, in those- I like to keep our word on that, so, much as… a lot of people wanted them back in for Glory, couldn’t add them for Glory. We don’t want to only add them for dollars, either. We want you to be able to get them for free [Nim echoing], because I don’t like locking any of the actual game content away for free[?]; that’s something we try never to do - lock content behind paywalls - apart from Deathknight Armor, it’s just a series of bonuses, you know, we have to have one thing. Gotta give us one (cheeky grin). Uh, but- the actual game, content, we don’t like locking away behind paywalls."
[…]
So I think we have come up with a plan, now, and it’s rolling out - this week! So you’ll be able to get old event weapons as of next week- as of next Monday, that will start."
After watching or reading that, I don’t think this is an unreasonable response:
Despite some of the occasions where Sirrian didn’t remember particular game details, I feel fairly confident (and of course, I could be wrong - but that’s why I’m asking this) that Sirrian knows the game well enough to be able to distinguish between Raid, Invasion and ToD weapons, which we currently buy for Gems, as always, and the older Event weapons listed above, which were offered for Glory.
So - just re-iterating the question - did something change between the Q&A stream, or any of these communiqués, and now?
And if something did change, please feel free to just let us know, even if along these lines(!):
E.g. Divine Protector (I like being up-front about these things… 
).
Given this list of weapons offered for 4.99 won’t be available to craft in the interest of fairness to those who had to pay, or because it wouldn’t be appropriate, Divine Protector should realistically be unavailable for crafting in a Whitehelm event week; or the players who bought it should be compensated, or have reason to be upset.
Salty did say she didn’t like to talk in absolutes; at the same time, though, if the reason for paywalling the listed weapons is an appeal to the value of fairness, we kind of already are (talking in absolutes) .
I don’t think only being offered once, compared to multiple times for weapons on the list, sufficiently differentiates it (Divine Protector).
Anecdotally, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, as it was (unintentionally? ) hinted within about an hour of reset that weapons might not always be available from quests in the future.
On the whole, then, I’m fairly sure they really did just want to roll this out ASAP and probably thought it wouldn’t be that big a deal. I think that would have been way more likely to be true if what Slyp mentioned happened - i.e. if it was mentioned/addressed beforehand, or immediately acknowledged.
Tbh, this (unfortunately) kind of resonates with me:
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I was rather thinking about future offers, like ,say, Rope Dart, Earth’s Fury and a few other popular ones getting added to the shop as special offer on Thanksgiving week. And then permanently removed from the Soulforge rotation, because “they were purchasable, now you won’t be able to craft them”.
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My bad! 
It’s funny that I only stayed with this game because some user suggested to me that I should get it for $5 - Divine Protector. That was the only weapon that was not meant to be put in the Store, yet it was, and it’s precisely the reason why I stayed with this game for another extra year. I was planning to leave it behind that week. You could say that this decision was coming from the Gods or so-called Prophets, and because of it, I have nearly 3000 hours invested in Gems of War, not to mention my suggestions posts, and especially bug reports on the Forum, which essentially made this game a bit better and less buggy. @Kafka or @Cyrup should know.
Remember, if you contribute to the game, the game contains your DNA! It’s a mutant game now! 
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So what this means is that out of 31 missing weapons only four will be available for crafting someday and the remaining 27 are hidden behind a hard paywall? (not counting some weapon bundles that I did buy because things just fell the right way that day)
I actually spoke on how passionate we are about our Gems of War being free to play during my PQ stream today. Aside from some very specific examples, such as VIP keys and the Deathknight armour, you can access everything in game that a paying player can!](4.4 Update Preview Discussion - #50 by Saltypatra)
Perhaps, it’s time to admit that the quote above was, maybe, just a (blatant) lie? One might say that it’s possible to get by without paying a dime if you play since the very beginning - the first day the game was released - but anybody who just happened to start later MUST pay actual money for things those early gamers could obtained with in-game resources.
I would be more inclined to spend some more cash if I was offered a choice instead of strongarming, you know.
Is this plain stup…sorry, smartness or just being malicious?
Yep, news like this extinguish all the positive emotion created by the knowledge that those unfortunate newer players would at last be able to get the good raid/invasion weapons. Why is it that quite of then one hand offers us flowers while the other, simultaneously, tries to do some unspecified number between one and three in our souls?
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I’ll say it again, here.
I am glad, but please, make sure to add another label/tag to the game - P2W in combination with F2P. 
Why?
It’s quite obvious that if this current system will stay in place, you will be foced to invest money if you’ll want to proceed further, because of Kingdom Stars - weapon-related collection requirements.
While the game is still F2P, however, it limits the ability to gain or craft weapon by just playing the game (in-game time spent only) to obtain certain rewards.
Deathknight’s Armor is not an issue here, don’t get me wrong! That’s the progression boost only.
However, paying around €5 for myself, just because I missed some weapon, it’s a bit too far and it’s not friendly and competitive in the eyes of other players. They have very valid points and arguments.
The best solution would be: Make those weapons craftable, and at the same time, make them available for money. So, you have a choice: you can either craft them, or decide to invest some money to get them. That way no one will get discriminated and the majority of people will be satisfied.
I should also mention that crafted Event weapons cost 50% more instead of the promised 20 or 25% in the Stream.
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249 here…but still missing 4 class weapons 
and working on it
Well, now… this is a mess.
From my understanding there were 3 ways to get a weapon. There were weapons offered for glory, weapons offered for gems, or weapons offered in the forge.
If you missed out on the glory weapons, you could pay cash when it showed up in the shop, or you could do without.
If you missed out on gem weapons (Factions excluded), you couldn’t get it in the shop.
Forge weapons never changed, and were always available.
The answer should have been to make those gem weapons available for cash in the shop.
After all, if the glory weapons were only available for money after the glory sale ended, why are gem weapons any different?
Ohhh, I forgot… The new meta teams are running on gem weapons! Also, no one played with their heroes back a year or so ago, so folks who paid money for glory weapons back in the day weren’t paying to win, just to complete their collections! New players can’t compete! (Hmmm, that one seems strange as new players don’t have the great troops all traited up, or the classes, or the ingots, or the knowledge, but I digress.)
My point is, no one complained about paying for missing glory weapons. Now everyone is complaining about paying for missing gem weapons. As for it being P2W, there are over 200 weapons and 600 troops, plus a crap load of classes. Surely there are other combos out there.
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