Community Council

Community Content
21

I like the idea, but I fear this would turn from ‘Community Council’ to ‘Hawx Council plus two semi regulars and one random person dropping in for meetings’ within a couple of months.

I think a council could provide meaningful feedback with regards to gameplay, monetisation, balance, dev prioritisation, etc. But a non-representative council runs the risk of just losing sight of the problems of the community at large, compelling the devs to go back to square one (ignore the community entirely, try to make more money instead).

I think the number of bugs is owed in part to the ‘no programmer shall read the forums’ policy. Community staff aren’t programmers and they don’t look at or pick up on bug reports the way a programmer would. It’s not ideal to have community staff be your intermediaries ALL the time.

To be honest, I think you’re just setting yourself up for more unpaid work and the next level of piss-taking by IP2.

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22

The ‘dedicated’ part has documentedly been lacking here, as has once again been demonstrated over the past weekend.

Gotta wonder how much of the ‘communication’ issues between playerbase and devs would be solved if they hired e.g. Hawx to do all the simple mod things that would solve/mitigate so many avoidable issues, which now exist only due to lack of mod dedication (not to mention that they do not play their own game, as once again demonstrated by their inability/unwillingness to detect/duplicate that 10th battlecrasher issue right away)
:roll_eyes: :person_facepalming: :vulcan_salute:

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23

Yes, absolutely.

In the other game we had several community managers over time.

You know when everything started to get really good? When they had someone who was a good friend of one of the programmers/devs and also a player as a community manager.

He had both sides’ ears which was amazing. Player-dev-relationship got so much better.

When he left, his dev friend took over for a bit which brought more improvements.

Then they got a new, awesome community manager - and now they have two.

Their update preview videos are great, the patch notes are amazing - are there still bugs? Yes!

But we get compensated right away and no one is trying to blame player luck, rng or whatever for clear bugs/mistakes.

They messed up big time and had to disable guild wars - and over there, gw has really good rewards - but they acted swiftly, refunded anything spent during GW, and if they really love us, they’ll give us currency for the gw shop (which they did last time, enough to buy one of the most expensive items).

So why am I talking about a different game here?

Because I still have hope.

They had a time where they were kind of hostile towards the player base, ignoring glaring issues. But that’s the past.

If one company can do it, another could as well if they wanted to.

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24

I think that there is the KEY

If they really care about their game and want it to make it a great successful game where they can be proud on!
They can reach everything!

They dont have to do it alone, coz this community is the proof that so much people believe in this game and want to help make this game great and good working!
Never feel ashamed to ask for help and think you fail if there comes feedback that things not work as they must, should be.

Scripting, code everything behind the screen is not simple! But without a good communication is it very difficult to understand what the players keep busy.

I have learned if you really want something and believe in it and never give up the hope, you reach your goals and feels it so damn good what give you new energy to go for the next goal! :star_struck:

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25

I support the idea @Hawx and totally respect your commitment. A shortform list of issues directly pinged has got to be more palatable and manageable for eg @Kafka than trawling thru all the forum posts. I am extremely disappointed in recent developments and I think for many it’s last chance saloon. For years we have begged for things such as doom scrolls to be looked at and the “solution” judging by legends is about £65 per kingdom. Thats about £2.5k for 40 kingdoms and you will STILL be way short of maxing the weapons (curse breakers need scrolls also). To implement this at a time of global financial crisis is disgusting. Pricing within game has always been completely unrealistic and even the whales are checking their piggy banks. I just don’t know what to make of it all. The attempted exploitation of FOMO mindset yet again is sickening. I am and will remain VIP1 until pricing policy and game quality changes significantly. It really is time for the company to wake up; some of our players are already leaving or just not bothering to play. Too much.

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26

That’s a bug? I thought Lance Knight was some sort of inside joke.

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27

If you encounter someone with Lance Knight, check out his team after the fight. I assume nobody uses this guy :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

But back to topic:

I think it might be a good idea to gather the major issues in one thread every week and adress it directly to the devs. Maybe it will work out somehow.
And once some of the major bugs are fixed the minor bugs can be integrated as well imo

i don’t know if it would make sense to gather some issues and start a poll for those. The first 10 or so will be delivered and remain until they got fixed.

Just an idea…

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28

It’s an interesting idea, but right now we are sitting in living proof that the devs aren’t being relayed information or if they are they simply don’t care about it. Last kingdom this battlecrasher method was universally hated by everyone on the forums and in the game, yet not only did they do it the exact same way it had the exact same 9 battlecrasher issue that it had last time around. The middle men (or women) who relay them information couldn’t have possibly missed how unpopular this was last time around.

TLDR: The devs don’t care enough about the opinions and thoughts of players for anything like this to ever work. We can’t make change, the middle men and women can’t make change either. The developers who refuse to communicate and refuse to improve the game are the only ones who can make change. It’s simply not happening.

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29

It seems that when bugs/QA issues are acknowledged, the reply is generally something like: “This has been reported to the team and we are working on a fix”. But this appears to be merely political speak aimed to deflect further posts to a bug thread. It’s quite clear what the “team” are working on (additional cash based content) and consequently bugs increase rather than diminish. For me there are 2 standout issues which are inextricably linked: 1) insufficient testing and releasing bug riddled content regardless of beta feedback and 2) having zero support to address point 1) during weekends. I don’t care so much about monetisation because points 1 and 2 (and many other factors) make it easy for me not to invest. Those further up the food chain clearly don’t give a monkeys about overall quality. A recent post from @Kafka mentioned “noticeable improvements in server performance”, but now we have a constant yellow exclamation mark, and softlocks that block an achievement.

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30

  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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31

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.

Screenshot_20220803-115258_Discord
Screenshot_20220803-115258_Discord719×931 126 KB

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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32

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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33

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.

34

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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35

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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36

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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37

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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38

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

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39

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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40

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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