Council of Chiefs

Get used to it folks. This is going to be 3 out of every 4 weeks of the month soon.

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Reminder that you can actually craft in the the soulforge release week for “normal” price (generally 200 diamonds, 400/400 jewels, 10k souls, and celestial). Might as well crack into my diamond stash for a bit. Maybe spend the 500 gems on weeks where theres a purple weapon, since I need like all of those jewels for crafting deeds at this point.

My first impression of the event, rewards aside, is that the restrictions make the battles terribly paced. And thats with a kingdom that has a couple powerful weapon choices and a very clear idea of what you are supposed to do for a win condition (not that this is actually fun to play out for me, “fishing for skulls” is far far from my preferred method of gameplay).

I ran the numbers too, and this makes it unlikely to be it. The reward stages just don’t progress like this in any event. Every reward stage milestone in every other event gets further apart, and generally significantly so. It is unlikely any event would be designed with the last few reward stages that close and one being cheaper than the ones before it.

If there are something wrong with the reward milestones, its almost certainly that the battles aren’t paying out correctly. Looking at the leaderboard, I’m seeing an upwards of 20% variance in scores for similar battle counts in the 100+ range.

From the help site:

There have been multiple reports of a certain battle of higher level and rarity giving less skulls than the same battle of a given rarity or rarity and level. Thats not slightly differently, thats different ends of shop tier purchase worth of sigils variance. That is far from “averaging out” for most people, since the amount of battles for those on the leaderboard are more than the amount you’d get with every valraven, every free sigil, and a t4 purchase.

However, the help page also says this on the same page:

Which is just incorrect full stop. So who knows.

I mean, if it turns out the events are supposed to be paced like this, supposed to have even greater time requirements (or worse, considering we have access to actual scaling tools this week), and they are supposed to have this kind of gem cost/reward progression, then I suppose its easy decision regarding any kind of serious event participation in the future. It wouldn’t even call it a boycott. If the events are not fun, the time/reward cost is worse than what you could get in a free mode, and the gem/reward cost is hiked 600-800% above what the same rewards were plus a few tokens, non-participation is just making a smart, informed decision. A decision I think people would just arrive at independently with this info.

Like I brought up as an earlier concern, the event has no unique draw or collectible factor to short circuit this logic and incentivize good baseline spending, outside of the FOMO driven weapon (which, by the way, worst 500 gem weapon ever, hope some of them are sort of usable) which can be sort of sidestepped by using soulforge. As I’ve been saying since pretty much the start of these events, sinks only function if they offer a bigger incentive than other things you could spend the same resources on, or if you have enough to consistently cover the cost of the desirable things. That doesn’t happen with the gems resource, by design, they are never useless and always have the baseline key price (VIP or gem or event) as their lowest possible “worth”. So this is not going to be an effective sink in its current state. And I’m saying this knowing full well a ton of people bought in this week, because most did so without having the full info and to get their first medals of seasons, which plummet in value afterward. Don’t expect a repeat without some changes.

So how do we “fix” this?

  • Events should take a roughly t4- (t4 with some t3s) purchase from each guild member (perfect games). Previous events required around t3+ (t3 with some t4), but it looks like the baseline was intended to be upped a bit because the weapon is on a higher shop tier, so the average buy-in would be higher and there are slightly more rewards. But asking for a t6+ is patently ridiculous and not sustainable, and if the aim is to function as a gem sink, is likely to have the opposite result
  • Up medal of seasons to at least Legendary rarity, preferably mythic. This will drastically improve the “carrot” offered by collecting these medals, since they can be used to upgrade legendary and mythic troops. Full event participation saves 10+ hours in explore if they are mythic rarity.
  • Relax the team building restrictions a bit. I can’t imagine having fun playing an event with restrictions this tight week in week out, and this one is basically “raid but worse”. When the mode was pitched, it was stated to be possible to have multiple “or” restrictions for any given category. Please make future events use at least a couple different criteria for a single category restriction so theres at least some interesting team building opportunities and we have a higher chance of having teams that aren’t slow paced. Avoid using two-category “and” restriction, like is done with class events, because those are far too restrictive for interesting choices.

Those three things would likely put them roughly on par with the old events in terms of engagement. If you wanted to improve from there, you are likely going to need different unique reward incentives on the shop tier, reward tiers, or both. Medals that aren’t unique after the first week don’t count.

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Just popping to in to clarify a few points… I spoke about this on stream as well.

We are going to be tweaking, changing and re-working parts of the the Event until it is at a place we are happy with.

Scoring will change week to week, and will continue changing as we re-work the event as mentioned above. Like Guild Wars, we won’t be releasing a formula to get the max score, and it wouldn’t help you much as the scoring changes week in and out.

I am collating feedback for the devs, so please keep leaving your thoughts and opinions in this thread, or any other threads made in the feedback section. It will take a few rotations for World Event’s to hit their stride, so feel free to leave feedback on the next few so I can pass it on.

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Considering the current, already very high level of stress, everyone of us endures because of pandemics, I find their decision to raise the gems prices needed to complete the World Events up to 600-800% not just insane, but simply unethical.

It almost like a price gauging which we witness at this difficult time. Gow is supposed to relax us, and not add additional stress, especially during the worst world disaster in years.

Big thumbs down for devs. And if you continue this vulture-like mentality, it is you who will pay the price.

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Please bear in mind that any of our events were planned well in advance of the current pandemic, and it does not have a bearing on our earlier decisions.

I am speaking to the team at this time about things we can offer in game to help pass the time while people self isolate, but we aren’t sure what can be done yet.

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That was a ridiculous approach now and still is to this day. The main difference between Guild Wars and this atrocity is back then…GW was every week and basically the scoring system has stayed consistent.
Where as here… You’re going to change it constantly and it’s only monthly at least right now.
So the second we think we learned how to score. It’ll be invalid in a month.
Furthermore…it’s the complete opposite of what you said just a week ago.

So what I think you mean is. Y’all won’t know the scoring is supposed to work. So you’re going to pretend that you just won’t tell us. Brilliant. :clap::clap::clap:

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On this, can we expect a certain buy-in level assuming no ravens lost to at least be semi-consistent one which reward level can be reached? You say the scoring methodology will change from week to week, and thats fine, but there is no way to make an informed decision on when to buy in to an event or how much if one week you need t6 or 7 from every single guild member to reach the final reward stage and another you need t3 or 4. You also say you won’t release the formula, and thats fine, but we at least need criteria at what we are supposed to be doing. This one, if we use all information available, our directive is “fight battles, higher battles are worth more (probably)” with no indication of how you are supposed to arrive at higher battles, especially when you are offered 3 of the same battle at some point with no discernible pattern. We especially can’t make informed decisions when theres no way to calculate, or even estimate, approximately how costly it will be to reach a reward stage until someone has already done it, and this information is then useless for future weeks. The guild wars formula was in fact divulged while leaving some of the variables up - we know what we are supposed to do there (heres the formula: Guild Wars, Point-Scoring for Battles, and You!, its also posted on the help site under guild wars), and its possible to work toward all of these criteria at the same time. And yeah, the scoring doesn’t change every week, and some of these variables were discovered in the first week, so everyone has a pretty good idea of how to score well. No comparison at all.

If how you play the event can result in such huge score variances at a given level of buy in, as far as to cross the gap over several shop teirs totaling over 1000 gems, the help article stating that they will “average out” is basically just inaccurate and should be changed to reflect that it matters greatly how you play the event.

For now, unless we are told explicitly otherwise, because of the experience we had with this week, we just kind of have to operate on the assumption that all these events are intended to have a t6-7 buy in from every member to reach the final reward stage, which basically means “don’t buy in to chase reward stages, it isn’t worth it”.

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Please, wake up and check the news. Then adjust accordingly. Now, you are just making people angry. Desperate and frustrated people in desperate times will make desperate decisions which ultimately you, as a business, will regret and pay the price.

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By design. If the players can never get a handle on how scores are calculated, they can’t min-max their purchases. These events are going to be hitting the “impulse spending” nerves hard.

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It’s having the opposite effect on me.
I think I was right though.
The “skull points” are RNG based. Knowing that we will all find it disgusting. They aren’t going to tell us that.
And then a month from now it won’t be RNG based. To throw us off and then back to RNG based.
When really that makes the monthly event 100% RNG based. Way too much RNG considering the base is supposed to be a match 3 game.

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@Saltypatra
What was asked by many/all here, was to have a game mode with clear rules, clear progress, and clear objectives.

Ir should be stated BEFORE entering a battle, what rewards it will give allowing us to pick one because of a reason, not because we just have to pick one.

For the love of God, number of total matches played by guildmates, how is this not already there? You can only see top 100 and yourself.

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And me, but as far as we both know we’re the minority.

There is a lot of education dedicated to making games like this profitable. Torulf Jernström is one name that comes to mind pretty quickly. He has given a talk named “Let’s Go Whaling”.

Perhaps, adding a minimum decency to your business decisions, by not increasing people’s stress levels and not making them angry and frustrated during the world’s disaster when they worry about dying and survival, would be a good start.

It’s amazing to see the development team continue to step on rakes. There appears to be almost no record-keeping or generation of institutional knowledge. There’s just the same decisions made over and over again—I hesitate to call them mistakes, because that suggests the devs didn’t want to make that particular choice.

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And there’s consistent backlash to developers/publishers that take it too far.
This isn’t a kids game.
The companies that profit like drug dealers target the youth and prey upon them.
I have no issue with the game trying to make money. Just be real about it. Tell us what tier is designed to get the rewards. And how to earn them. To leave us in the dark is like asking me to spend money or gems on a mystery box. No thanks mister.

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We have received a lot of feedback in the past from players wanting the game to feel more dynamic. (Please note this isn’t from all players!) By changing the scoring week to week, this keeps things fresher and more interesting, in lieu of playing the same event week in and week out. This won’t be to everyone’s liking, but nothing we put in game ever is! There is no in-game event that players all agree upon, even Guild Wars. For example, during the 4.8 Update Preview stream, some players wanted us to remove Guild Wars altogether, while other players argued fiercely with them against the removal. (Don’t worry, we don’t plan to remove Guild Wars.) Regarding World Events, we will endeavour to let players know how to score, whether it is by collecting skulls, or maximising 4 matches, in the lore portion of the World Event overview. We meant that we would explain what would get you points in my quoted posts, not the way to min/max said points. I apologise for the confusion surrounding this, and will be more careful with how I phrase things in the future to avoid further misunderstandings.

I can’t say much more than what I have above, but we will be tweaking the new World Events week to week until we are happy with where they are at. We will also be reviewing the reward tiers and potentially tweaking them when we see how World Events perform. As always, I collate your feedback and relate it to the devs, and I have already parsed a lot from this thread. Thank you for taking the time to leave it. Feedback with succinct reasoning behind it is always the most useful, and is the feedback I quote to back up points I raise with our developers.

Thank you for your time.

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I’ve nothing against a game trying to cover its costs and make a little on top. If I play a F2P and end up enjoying it, I’ll always buy something because that’s how you show support for a game like that.

I would be very happy to just get this one piece of information, though.

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I don’t think you guys can continue to tell us these whaling tactics aren’t on porpoise.

Also it isn’t so much as min maxing our score but understand it.

If there are do many p2w people who hate GW for having limited fights and needing strategy, perhaps you should rip the band aid off and remove it so the players that like it can just quit now.

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And where exactly did you receive requests from players wanting 600-800% gem price increase for Events, while keeping the same rewards? Unless of course, your publisher plays GoW and it was his feedback.

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One last thing before I step back and keep collating feedback from afar…

As many of you have mentioned, the skull drops in this particular event have some variability. It’s not a simple 4 skulls per match proposition, sometimes you get a few extras thrown your way, but on average the further your progress the more things are worth. Please be aware that this is unique to this event, and future events will be different.

Thanks team.