Community Council

  1. The amount of buggy content has gotten larger and more frequent.

  2. Quality control is at an all time low. similar to point 1, but can exist separately.

  3. The introduction of new currencies is excessive and now we’re 7+ years into it. It wouldn’t be a problem except that list is still growing and old currency is nearly irrelevant. We’re talking minutes of our lives to scroll through all of the numbers of currencies, non-exaggeration.

  4. No content is ever future-proofed for pain issues.

Issues such as the soul forge troops getting harder and harder to target, pet pool getting out of hand, deeds/book of deeds blocking content, scrolls for doom weapons etc,

  1. The focus on monetization over the health of the game has been very apparent the last few years to the detriment of the game.

While they have the right to make money, players have the right to be annoyed by the amount of features designed to make people part with their money.
Monetization is starting to actively interfere with the gameplay loop and/or hinder progress. I’m sure some people will say that people are just paying to get ahead, but that’s what let’s them continue to put out more monetization options unchecked.

Some people will say getting a few more tributes more stat points then others, unlocking troops ahead of time is trivial, and while it is, it still adds up over time. Case in point: Delve pure factions and even delve main runs got a lot easier when people got more stat points and it got way easier with potions. Small benefits stacked up. How many people remember day 1 All Seeing Eye/Hall of Guardians/Crypt Keepers. Those were some tough times.

Gems of War plays way differently when you’re way behind. You stop caring about getting everything, so buying anything stops mattering.

  1. All of the new “game modes” are largely the same.

If I were to give credit to Delves for being different, which is a low bar, Legends Reborn, Journey, World Events, Bounty and Tower of Dooms are largely the same experience. Contrast that with Arena and Treasure Hunt which are wildly different from the base game. Do I want to continue with the repetition? no, but I have to because resources.

  1. Global PvP has been stale for years and has never been adjusted.

Its not an Elementalist/Beetrix/Gobtruffle/Thief/Orbweaver/FireBomb/insert-meta team issue, its the fact repetitive/similar design defenses are fine and sandbagging is equally/if not more rewarding. There’s no reason to try to make a unique defense. Its easier to just set the things that the most amount of people are upset by to add to the problem. Even if those things aren’t actually a problem in a vacuum.

At least Explore freeze bug was fixed or that would have had its own category.

  1. Troop creativity is dwindling.

I don’t expect every rare/ultra-rare/epic troop to be special and unique, but look at those recent Mythics. Tauraeus? Ahries? Leo? Tihamata? Sparkinator? Astral Mother? Kalika? Should I keep going? But they’re only for kingdom power, some say. But no, they’re actively selling mythics in those monthly packs and whoever buys those things deserve not to get a throwaway troop.

There’s… more. But I’m going to end up being here all day.

Gems of War has playable modes that can be played for extended periods of time (I’m not using 24/7 or forever as it only exists as long as the game exists) and the servers are “usually” stable enough to play extended periods of time. For some people, that’s enough and that’s what they enjoy.

If you’ve played as long as some of the people have, you definitely notice a difference between the early days and now. I’ve lost a few too many guildmates over the years from different unfavorable changes.

But hey, everything is fine, until it affects you personally. That’s the story of life itself, isn’t it?

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There’s lots of really great points raised in this thread.

In summary what I can see as the main points are

  • people feel a meeting could be a poor use of time
  • certain voices would get heard more than others
  • no guarantees anything would change
  • the current lists of bugs get bigger with every update
  • things get reported to the team but we get a standard reply of ‘working on a fix’
  • some bugs never get fixed and get pushed down the list as ‘aware/known’
  • feedback doesn’t get listened to

Soooo, while I can’t find a perfect solution, I think a few ideas suggested could be quickly implemented and could have a positive impact.

Here’s my thinking, currently compiling a list of all current bugs.

Every Sunday regardless of how much beta testing I’ve done through the week, I run through the next week’s campaign and world event on beta anyway and I usually log a few bugs/ potential issues. I was thinking I could try to force any new additions to the above list, on beta where they get logged and the dev team respond, there’s a chance that more visibility of bugs could = a fix being implemented? It couldn’t hurt right, currently we look for bugs just with whatever is happening with the update.

I’m thinking that the idea of a weekly bug post could be a great idea too. The post Jeto made today about an update to this weekends bugs is HUGE. It’s a really great step in the right direction. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get that kind of thing more regular?

So in summary my ideas are

  • shelve the meeting idea for now
  • get a weekly bug list uploaded on a Sunday to the forum which anyone can add to
  • try to force more of the older/forgotten bugs on beta
  • keep updating the weekly bug list so old bugs aren’t forgotten about
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It would, but this is what they promised:

…and instead we get bug reports selectively recurrently ignored (e.g. [Reported] Ironhawk+submerge freezes game || [Reported] Submerged is kind of goofy, I guess ) & mods who take week-long afk dinners while the playerbase simmers in arguably avoidable (and partially mod-induced) frustration: the main issue & solution continues to be apparent as it has been over the years, but the playerbase has yet to focus its efforts in requesting the powers that be that somebody like Hawx (with Dedication beyond office hours and Knowledge/Understanding of the product and the customers) be hired as the liaison person between Forums and Devs.

Ref. Jeto’s ‘huge’ step in the right direction:
It’s been pretty standard SOP that when a mod triggers the forums through their actions/inactions, they go MIA for a while, and a big official ‘right direction’ post/promise is done, pending the next episode of forum triggering, that would be avoidable if mods had the required dedication/soft-skills.

The above should probably be taken into consideration to adjust the expectations/effort in this upcoming endeavour, to mitigate potential resulting frustrations.
:sweat_smile: :pray: :vulcan_salute:

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Good luck with this effort, let’s hope it produces positive results. :innocent:

I’m sure you’ve already considered this, but my suggestion with regard to keeping bugs visible is try your best to keep pinging them with the highest priority issues. It’s great to keep all the bugs visible, so they don’t fall off the radar, but we have to be somewhat realistic - the devs haven’t agreed (as far as I know) to resolve every bug, so making sure they keep focused on the highest priority issues will at least possibly be more fruitful that what we’re getting now. You might want to engage the community in prioritizing the bug list you come up with.

I agree this would be a significant improvement over the current situation, but it’s only part of the puzzle. If they don’t clean up the backend processes, such that they release less buggy content, etc. then it really won’t matter how well the community communicates with the devs. I strongly believe that a large part of why their CX team is having such a hard time keeping up with support issues is because the content is abysmally buggy, not just occassionally, but with every update that is released.

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Historically, when bugs are released players are understandably disappointed/upset: however, it is how the mods dismiss/ignore/patronise/threaten/etc that tends to trigger the playerbase…

Alternatively, when a company rep with the suitable soft-skills tackles the very same issue in an open and respectful way, the pitchforks tend to be put away:

Vs

:roll_eyes: :sweat_smile: :vulcan_salute:

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Absolutely, there does need to be a dedicated community manager. It will help considerably. However, even if we have such a manager, there’s only so much they can do before the community bulldozes over them. I don’t think having someone tell us in a nicer way that things will get better, but not delivering on that promise, is the solution. :innocent:

For me personally, and from what I gather from why Hawx started this thread, people want the bugs gone…

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I totally reject your theory that the bugs are so small we won’t care anyway or will live with it. That is a total dereliction of duty on the devs part. Your reply was rather snarky as well…I value all player input I this broke game and it seems like your just making excuses for ineptitude…please don’t speak for other players in this game about what bugs we will or won’t accept. For the kind of money they collect from the payers it’s total slack ass-edness. Carry on.

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Let’s keep it friendly :sweat_smile: and look for solutions that we can make happen

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I would add spell description to the list. The learning curve for new players is steep enough without having to decode what a spell does rather than trust what the text says it does.
EDIT
The order of spells/effects happening sometimes contradicts the description of them happening. These are simple and quick fixes.

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So like consistent wording for spells or fixing poorly worded spells

I am also working on a few other lists with feedback items, quality of life adjustments and translation issues too

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Genuinely not being snarky, but how would you even go about fixing the German translation for example? There’s several hundred(!) typos, grammatical errors, idiosyncrasies and mistranslations in there.

And missing parts of spell descriptions. Like Lucifria burning all enemies which is amazing in Arena - it not mentioned in German.

I’m still chuckling about the spell that targets “Feine” (delicate, fine) instead of Feinde (enemies).

And then they went about and translated references to song texts or other cultural references that we also know in English and not on German. Believe it or not but we listen to music that’s in English in English.

Someone clearly does the translations who has no clue about the game nor what’s a cultural reference that doesn’t make sense if it’s translated to German. :sweat_smile:

This has been changed a while ago.

And besides Hawx won’t have to do it all by herself and she told me that it seems to be more complicated to “undo” false translations.
“Somehow they are not allowed to accept community provided translations”

But that’s also not the point.
We gonna try to establish a list of imprtant things the devs should keep an eye on and have it all a little bit more gathered on one or two sheets.
Like a ToDo-list.
Not more or less.

If this works out and the major bugs start to vanish, we can add more minor things to the list. But for the moment I think translation failures are not the most wanted/important thing that need to done :wink:

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Oh nice.

I don’t play in German so I didn’t know they finally changed it (it was missing for quite some time).

Still an example for how bad some of these things are sometimes. :sweat_smile:

For another game on steam, two friends and myself made the complete translation into german of everything. All it takes is a complete excel file provided by the devs with a format like “stringID” “english strings” “translated strings”. This doesn’t have to be provided publicly. Then just use docs.google.com to edit online with multiple committed people at once. The excel sheet can also be used for small short comments/discussions among the translators, (we also used a seperate discord too), about wording etc. This will get rid of 99% of all errors. Errors that would still occur could still be reported and worked on quickly

All you need is - due to the massive amount:
a) a small number of passionate and precise players speaking english and german that want to do the translations and that are chosen or whatever you’d like to call it…
b) time to work on this
c) willing devs that provide such a file in the first place and also implement it afterwards

I’m pretty sure, a) and b) isn’t a big problem here.

3 Likes

Just saying that there might be some restrictions either from any company and/or the government.
I have no idea or proof if that could be a problem somehow.
Let’s see what the devs reply will be to this.

@Kafka

Just wanted to pop in and acknowledge this thread although I haven’t had time to read it all yet, I will bookmark it so I can go through it in the next week or 2.

Currently we’re sort of looking at this area again - communication and transparency.

We’re reviewing the beta program again, in more depth this time, maybe ideas around better communication or an idea of a “council” could be integrated some way into the beta program. I will read up on this thread over the next week or 2 to see if there’s anything we could integrate. We’ll also be looking at how other games do it well and what we can do to emulate that within our scope.

For now, I just got back to work today after having the flu all week and other team members have been out sick as well so next week will mostly be catch up work then we can get into it more.

The community is great at sharing how you feel and what the top issues and feedback are.

It’s the team’s job to try to reduce how often issues happen, there’s nothing you folks can do to help us with this, that’s on us.

Regarding translations, it’s an ethical problem and possibly a legal one here in Australia where volunteers can’t/shouldn’t be doing the job of paid employees and translation is a paid job. Otherwise, we’re completely grateful at how generous our community are with offering their time to translate the game for us - we’re just not in a position to take you up on it.

Click here for story time! Feel free to disregard unless you're a giant nerd like me

I always pull this story out whenever translation issues come up. The last company I worked at supported 42 languages/dialects. There was 1 Translator and 1-2 proof readers per language. All translations were from German or English, so we had a minimum of 80 people reading the English text PLUS the developers who wrote the text and there were STILL spelling mistakes and slip ups.

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that humans don’t read every letter of every word, we read in chunks, so your brain basically recognises the word based on the first couple of letters, the last letter or 2 and the shape of the word and basically it fills in the gaps for you unless you’re really sitting there analysing every letter - which you just won’t do over thousands of words because your brain gets fatigued by it and starts subconsciously working out short cuts like the aforementioned things.

Spell checkers are great but won’t pick up grammatical issues, or issues if the typo makes another real word - so there’s definitely tools and methods to try to ensure the text is as good as possible (some of my favourite are a simple spell checker, grammarly and yoast). However, based on this experience I’ve had I’m convinced that no matter what you do there will always be mistakes in any kind of text no matter what you do. We’ve had community members submit corrected text with mistakes in the corrections. It’s really not as easy as it seems. It doesn’t excuse the mistakes and my story might sound extreme but there it is haha

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Feel free to hire me for translations. german - english :wink: :sunglasses: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Edit: Or at least for corrections :stuck_out_tongue:

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Actually countless examples of “the players” asking before about certain stuff scheduled events even start - without answers. Possibly without “the team” even checking up on the matter. Only so that on set date the predicted fails… happen.
I don’t want to read to much into it, but that sentence or that part of “that’s on us” comes across like “pff whatever”, because “the team” has yet to actually deliver proof of “caring”, not just for a day or a week. No, consistently. And if some bugs already occur, then if someone goes to have dinner, it would be awesome if another person could actually take over and not have the topic ignored until someone eventually takes pity. Same if someone gets ill, or is “off” due to whatever reason.


Hm, translation is a paid job, but what about “voluntary” doing it as some already offered? What about beta testing which is also “voluntary” - just as example?
You could - in theory still “release” such a excel file with the language strings, f.e. to users of the beta program with “exclusive viewing and editing rights” to a small amount of users then and see what you’ll end up with. This could eventually be double, triple, countless times re-checked. It is basically nothing else than someone using their free time posting useful comments in such a forum. Or is it?

Otherwise just move to nzl, because I had no problems translating a whole game for a dev from nzl, without payment. The three people involved in translating into german simply got “acknowledged” in a small ingame page. We didn’t even ask for that. That was a voluntary doing by the dev, just a small appreciation.

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