Well, at least it’s not an Apocalypse Kingdom event, where we can put amazingly awesome Xathenos to work.
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So… every new event will include a new random factor, that nobody is aware of, that will not be explained at any point and that we are supposed to figure out to have more “fun”.
While also expected to optimize our strategy to it from the start.
I think, you are confusing this with an offline singleplayer puzzle game with a save/load feature in some way.
6 Likes
This is how I feel.
It isn’t harder math than anything else in the game to answer, “How many sigils will players have to spend?” If we believed Saltypatra or Kafka couldn’t do that math, we’d have to completely forget they did that math when Raids/Invasions released and discussed it with us publicly. It was a friendly occasion and everyone… well, let me correct it to “most people” were excited, because the cost/reward ratio seemed to be worth it even though we were now “losing” more gems.
This is bogus. Their bet is that you are too stupid, addicted, or indifferent to make good on any action. They’ve made this bet several times and won, so they’re going to keep making it. I know Salty and the gang aren’t stupid, so the only explanation for why they seem to continue to act as if they are is a GW Bush kind of “If I act like a good ole boy you’ll let me steal your wallet and stick a screwdriver in your eye, then you’ll blame a homeless man for making me do it.”
It’s not an outlier. It’s a pattern. If you stick around, get used to GoW being a game where only the people who spend money can reach the rewards. It hasn’t gotten better for two years. There’s other games to play. What I’ve found from playing them is many of them offer even more generous monetization and you can have a lot more fun in them.
For example, in one game I play, $2.99 a month gets you something like GoW might present as “a squire” who collects up to 8 hours of (slightly reduced) tribute for you. So while I’m at work, I keep getting income from that guy. And while I sleep. I know the economy is balanced so these rewards are trivial in the long run, but $2.99 is also trivial to me per month.
Imagine if GoW did subscription content like that instead of the current models that tend to require you spend more and more money per week to get the same thing. I feel like the devs have a successful casino, but I signed up for this game because it didn’t seem to actively promote whale behavior. If they’ve changed their mind, I’m moving on, and I suggest you follow.
In the end, I think while the quoted statement is humorous, it’s mixed up who is the one stepping on rakes. The players are Charlie Brown, and the devs are holding the football. Every time you tell them “or else” then keep playing, they win.
7 Likes
In the future, i wont give a single gem for this kind of crap event.
Expensive, unpredictable, chaotic, repetitive and boring.
Good idea on paper, but in reality just a trap for our gems and $.
4 Likes
Or more exactly, every time you keep paying.
While a game that runs dry of free and low investment players becomes unattractive to whales too eventually (and yes, we could force their hands this way, but the game foundation would be broken beyond repair until they understand), there’s no immediate benefit in someone who plays but does refuse to invest money.
I’ve come to the point to see this game as downright undeserving of my money since the justifications of the graphics “upgrade” a few years ago, and I am not shy to share this stance with my guild mates whenever I feel like it.
Numbers like concurrent players, matches played and gems spent are cute for marketing, but ultimately it comes down to Dollars, Euros, Pounds and so on. Unconvinced about the recent “improvements”? Make it your resolution for the rest of the year to not pay a single coin. Write it on a note and glue it to your screen. Don’t give into it when the next update brings in new shiny toys. Anything below 6 months can be shrugged off as a random fluctuation.
I know this has been said before, but WTF?
36 Likes
i’ll guarantee they’re tracking gem spending on these world events.
I just question if they’ll attribute a significant drop in tier purchases next time to this debacle.
Cost-reward ratio isn’t worth it. Explore is free, and similar rewards (more of them too.) Time-reward ratio also favors explore.
My plan going forward is to craft the weapons in soul forge, if they’re interesting enough to justify delaying mythic crafting. Otherwise, they can wait until my mythic collection changes that assessment.
1 Like
This.
The score system here is a terrible decision.
You’re actually asking your player “Trust us, the points you’re receiving are correct”
Aaaaand , given near and distant history, devs have absolutely NOT earned the trust needed to make such a statement
5 Likes
Exactly.
If we don’t buy their “offers”, THEN they will listen. It is a business - they are not doing any improvements on our behalf, as long as we only protest - yet continues to play or rather spend our money.
They already reduced the gems from flash offers, like the cheapest one was 100 gems for 16 dkr(Danish currency, something like 2,40 dollars(?), but I am sure you know the flash offer I refer to) . Then you could buy this offer 5 times. After New Year the offer is 50 gems for 17 dkr. No thank you - I for one have not bough any flash offers since.
1 Like
they clearly explain that they don’t explain
One more thing, I would like to point out.
It has been emphasized a couple of times now in this thread by the team, that the scoring system will not be explained, just like with Guild Wars.
In Guild Wars there is a number of points showing below the portrait of each opponement, that could be seen as the base for each win. There is an explicit point bonus for unique defense troops at the first fight of the day. There is a multiplier for troops of the fitting colour, that could at least be estimated after one or two comparing fights. There is a minor factor for remaining life/armor, that is more tricky to point at.
The random part of Guild Wars amounts to 10% of the scored points in a win at most.
Now let us see the new event in comparison. “Here is a yellow quest level 150. It might earn you four skulls. Or nine. Enjoy the surprise.”
“Everything is working as intended. Stronger enemies earn you more points except when they do not. It is meant this way.”
8 Likes
“Perfectly balanced” sculls gain
While having max level of fight so far at 410. With occasional 15 sculls from mythic fights, i’m still getting lvl 120 epic fights that give me 3 miserable sculls per victory, and it’s not a best part. Best part is: out of 6 free fights today ( 1 valraven) i got 1 mythic fight, 1 legendary fight (28 sculls from them combined) , and 4 epic fights (3 sculls for each epic).
3 Likes
Which gives us the only power we have. DON’T GIVE THEM A DIME! Refuse to spend any money on this game while this trend continues. That’s a whole month, people. And we have to have as many people as possible to do it. If the income trickles to zero maybe they’ll understand what a huge mistake they are making here.
9 Likes
The sad reality is that such a small percentage of players use these forums, or watch the streams, that even though this is the thing that HAS to happen in order to effect change, the likeliness of it happening is just not good.
Even if the top 100 guilds cascade the word out to their players, that’s only 3,000 players out of tens of thousands.
I agree with your concept and it is absolutely the only way to send a message to the publisher that this is not acceptable. Unfortunately, historically we can see that this just doesn’t wind up happening. The devs are always reporting that the playerbase is growing and that the game is doing well.
We are just seeing the next evolution of the game. Guilds who decide not to buy in (pun intended) to the deeper Gem sinks will just adapt the way guilds who couldn’t continue to afford LTs adapted.
1 Like
•Why I like this 
event:
It’s so completely terrible, in every way, guilds aren’t making this a requirement. Great job!
•Why I dislike this event:
What can I, a nobody, say what hasn’t been said. This event is awful. It’s a bad joke. You should feel embarrassed for putting out this crap product. I can came up with an event, as type this out, that would be better. ffs. You’re getting paid for this too. Wow. What a gig.
I invested more time posting this, then I will playing the event on mobile. Then again, I’m not event loading up the event on mobile, aside to cash out what others earned.
Unfortunately, I invested gems on console. Not happy about that. Now I feel like I need to play it. Sweet event guys.
This is a one day, middle of the week event, cash grab at best. Put your ego aside, admit it’s trash, rework it, make a one day. The whales, white knights, and marks will invest and play it.
Actually, it’s my fault.
It’s our fault.
We, the player base of Gems of War, expected better from you. What are we thinking?!
Pathetic & lazy effort all the way around.
F
5 Likes
emphasis mine
Exactly this.
We’re not asking you to do our homework for us so we can get high marks for no effort.
We’re asking for the expletive rubric. You know, so we can attempt to do our best on the assignment.
With no guidance as to what the model progression looks like: how best to choose rooms (does location of the fight matter? Can ignored rooms regress? Can rooms progress without having been chosen? These are all basic questions I have no answer for), what rewards should be expected from what (even if! the scoring was something vague or somewhat random like base rarity * level/10 +/- 1 or 2 ; people would still hate that formula, but at least knowing it helps a player know what to expect and therefore do), whether I need to scout every time to see if there’s a difference in boss talents (whether boss talents even change scores—and if so, by how much), etc…
These aren’t big asks. They’re basic—foundational to how games work.
I don’t mean to sound rude. I’m sorry if I’m coming across that way. I don’t like that nowadays I feel like all my contributions to the forum are negative—my feedback never felt to me to be consistently on a downward trend before, and I don’t like that it now seems to.
tl;dr: I’m playing the event now that I already bought the sigils, but will budget my free gems better in the future (at this point not even the retroactive-deathknight armor I’ve been holding out for could convince me to spend, I’m afraid). And PS—as @TheIdleOne suggests, random scoring =/= dynamic gameplay (neither does the same 4-5 battles shifting where they are located on the map, btdubbs—this is less dynamic than the Explore teambuilder, not more).
A bit of levity to end:
A joke from Mike Birbiglia
On our final day on the trip, we got into an argument about essentially nothing. She noticed there was a basketball court at our hotel, and she said, ‘We should play.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, but not, like, a game.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Well, ’cause I’d win.’ And she said, ‘No, I think I would win.’ I go, ‘No. I know that I’d win, and I know that what I’m supposed to say is that… “The guy says, ‘I’ll win,’ the girl says, ‘I’ll win,’ “and the guy lets her win, and then she likes him more. But I just don’t have that in me.’ And Jenny goes, ‘You don’t have to let me win. Let’s go out and play.’ And so we went out and played basketball, and I just kicked her ass. I mean, it was just like… It was just like… 10 to 1, you know, 11 to 1. I mean, I was having a good day, but still, I was just destroying her. And at one point, she literally said, “I’ve never met someone who’s so obsessed with the score.” And I said, “the score is what makes it a game!”
For those stuck at home, a lot of great stuff from this guy is on Netflix, and you can read the transcript of My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend here:
5 Likes
Forcing us all to spend this amount of gems to finish an event is not going to keep players playing this game. You depend on completionists to play this game and pay money for it, if we cannot complete the event then we might as well stop playing all together.
Just talking with my GM in discord and we are pretty much giving up on completing this event which will be the first non-completed event in a long long time. I expect that this is going to raise some problems with our guild mates as the expectation is that we can and do complete the events.
But, we cannot expect there to be no consequences from this, some of the hard core members of the guild will want to leave to join a guild that can complete the events while others (like me) will want to stick it out and hope that the Devs adjust the scoring of this event to allow us to complete it with a similar expenditure of gems as we have in the past. And others are just going to see this as the final writing on the wall that we have all seen over the last couple years, the degradation of this game into a pure money grab by i+1 and 505 games to attempt to suck as much money from us as possible and thus will delete the game and say farewell to GoW.
I hope that the Devs come to their senses and adjust the scoring right now instead of damaging the ecosystem of the game for good.
11 Likes
People I have been talking to have figured out how to adjust the scoring in 5 minutes:
A base # of skulls based on Rarity +
A random # of skulls based on level.
This rewards players who consistently go for the highest level/rarity.
You know, LIKE THEY TOLD US TO!
It would eliminate this 1 skull for a legendary battle 
I appreciate that this is a new event type that may require adjustment or tweaking in the future. However, considering that you are using this initial launch as a way to collate data and gauge later events, would it not be prudent to simply declare this week as your “test run” and reimburse gem tier purchases to the player base up to, say Tier IV or V? In this way, you can collate you data and the players won’t feel as “cheated” by the reward randomness and the seemingly impossible task of completing all the stages. There will still be a fair amount of gems used from those players who choose to purchase additional Tiers. A goodwill gesture would go a long way in reducing player frustration and facilitating a belief that you are not just trying to gem sink everyone into oblivion.
1 Like
The guild war scoring system for top guilds to feel safe.
New tasks, so that only the top guilds could fulfill the legendary ones.
Now a new event, so that only the top guilds can close all the awards.
Developers, who are you making a game for? For 300-400 players or for everyone? 
1 Like