It really depends on how they want to get paid. Would you find it crazy if people were unhappy about Guild Wars battle repeat sigils being available for $5 each?
Some parts of Gems of War are very competitive, like Guild Wars, players expect to be able to compete on equal grounds. With update 4.5 the devs have announced you will be able to purchase a significant advantage, for cash only, that will put you far ahead of any F2P player. Depending on how aggressively they follow that path I’d expect players to not just be unhappy, most haven’t realized yet how utterly huge the long-term benefit of extra deeds is.
Any new player coming in over the next 6 to 12 to 18 months, will be at a huge disadvantage, if what you are saying is true. And that has nothing to do with Flash Offers… I find it crazy that the people that support the game are demonized. The people that spend money on GOW are the people keeping new content, new patches, and new features flowing into the game. To make the game so everyone is equal, is to give end game players nothing to do, nothing to spend money on, and no real reason to keep playing. Besides, the deeds in a Flash Offer will be available for everyone to buy, not some, not a chosen few. If you, or anyone else, passes on an Offer, that’s a choice – and whatever choice one makes, hopefully it’s a good one.
This is a valid complaint, but you’re doing the same thing. People who pay money aren’t “demons who should be reviled”, but they also aren’t “angels who support the game exempt from criticism” either.
I think the problem is something I’ve said for a long time though: GoW doesn’t offer a lot that’s attractive to casual, long-time spenders because it overvalues almost all of its currencies. Flash offers have helped a little but do not change the perception. Flash offers have helped a little but not enough. More than half are “irrelevant trinkets for a relevant investment”.
What I mean here is I’ve played several other F2P and GoW is the first I’ve stuck with where spending $10/month didn’t represent something significant. In GoW it barely buys me a single tier further into an event than I already get for free. In Pokemon Shuffle that was 2 weeks of farming and paid for one entry into each weekly event for a month. In the ones I’m playing now it doesn’t translate to gameplay but cosmetic items that are really cute.
The most visible ways an F2P player sees to “support the game” involve either $50 purchases (which is where I feel the currency payout starts to get interesting) or potions. Potions are literally “buying stats so I can finish a mode”. That makes F2P players angry enough the “supporting the game” holier than thou garbage doesn’t counteract it.
Deeds are another version of that. To an extent it is buying stats to “support the game” this way. You’re never going to talk F2P players into the notion that “buying stats” is not something to be reviled. You don’t have to agree F2P players are right to think that way, but it’s how they generally think.
I will support the game if they make Tier IV of 2 events cost me $10/month. They will get a literal subscription out of me because I find that pricing fair. I’d even live with an economy where gems were given out less to support that model. I even assert there’s enough of me to make up for the people who might quit over that (they probably aren’t paying as much as $120/year anyway.)
But there we are. That kind of system asserts “people who pay at least this” are more valuable than people who don’t. Nobody likes hearing that. That’s one of the core bad things about F2P games: the players are always separated into classes.
Trust me, you don’t want to travel down that road. It leads to a place where you get a “24 Hour Super Power” flash offer each day that instantly wins you any fight against any other player not having bought that flash offer. Saying “it’s okay, everybody has the chance to pay each day, those who pass on the offer have made the choice to serve as punching bag for those supporting the game” just doesn’t work out, there’s only so much punishment players are willing to endure for others to have fun. Note that once the F2P players are gone new punching bags would have to be found to continue such a business model, which would be those players having bought the flash offer less often than their opponents.
Oh, also, unless you’re a dev, you can’t say you know this for certain.
A feature of the weapon flash offers is they are different for everyone, and only target the weapons you’re missing. We don’t know for certain if every player will get the same flash offer for deeds, or even if all players will get the same offer at the same time.
And part of why this conversation goes on is why it might eventually end up that route.
The devs are absent. I mean, it’s nighttime right now for them so that makes sense, but they aren’t going to visit this thread because, historically, they do not participate in these threads until torches and pitchforks are waving. They haven’t stopped waving for months, so that threshold is hard to see anymore.
But in this case they also have no power. Everything is the publisher. They can’t choose when they release, they can’t choose what features they will work on, they can’t choose what they will be selling or for how much. All of these are things that at some time or another have been claimed are out of the hands of the devs. Whether it’s true or just a convenient excuse, it’s led to something else.
The devs don’t make firm claims about what they will or won’t sell anymore. This is because they know the publisher’s whims might change, and knowledge isn’t even spread well among the dev team. Salty had to retract, “We won’t sell deeds for money” within 6 hours of posting it. That makes me think a meeting was held, information changed, and she had to rush to correct herself in light of the new information. Or, it means the team isn’t sharing their monetization plans with Salty. Or, it means she didn’t really know and spoke without knowing. None of those things are good for the players.
It all comes down to we cannot trust the devs because they are agents of their publisher. You can like the devs, and lament that it’s their boss pulling the strings. But that doesn’t change that the decisions they make can change directions and have changed far more towards monetization of the game than they used to.
I get that they need income to keep the game going. I’ve laid on the table for 2 years what it takes to get me to pay for a game. Few of those things have been done, and I don’t feel guilty that I’m not paying them to do the things I asked them not to do.
And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can’t find one good thing to say
And I hope if I found the strength to walk out
You would stay the Hell out of my way
I guess the core issue is finding a balance between “I won this competitive game because I played better than my opponent” and “I won this competitive game because I paid more money than my opponent”. Once money is the only deciding factor, why even play any longer? GoW was always really good at finding that balance, Deeds feel highly suited to tip everything hard towards money though. Depending on how they fine-tune availability, this could easily end up with a permanent 30 points mixed stat advantage for players willing to pay big.
This is the one thing I sort of hold on to right now.
Everyone’s flailing, but we’ve seen 0 flash offers and 0 deed offers. The beta testers have maybe some idea of how it’s going to work but the devs are free to change rates at any time and might’ve used higher or lower than planned rates for beta.
What we’re arguing right now needs to be more, “I’m worried this will happen” and less, “This is happening”. I’m cynical AF but as of right now nobody’s got a whaled level 15 kingdom. We might make it to next year with nobody having a whaled level 15 kingdom. It may turn out that other things over the year will develop that make “people have whaled level 15” irrelevant. We simply don’t know.
But it’s easy to get caught up in where it could go because as I pointed out in the last post: we can’t trust that the devs’ intentions are the publisher’s intentions, and the publisher doesn’t talk to us directly. If the publisher wants to tip the balance, the devs aren’t going to have much of a choice.
So all we can really do is preemptively scream and hope it’s heard. It’s sort of like prayer. Only noisier and meaner and scattered with more “You’re just an entitled snot who wants everything for free” etc.
I hope it stays dark forever
I hope the worst isn’t over
I hope you blink before I do
And I hope I never get sober
The biggest currency in GOW is Time invested, Tacet spends nothing and has everything. So, the people claiming any aspect of GOW is p2w, I suggest they go ask Tacet how someone that has played everyday for years without spending any money, has everything. Same will be true for the deed system, Tacet will have every kingdom to 15 without spending any money, go figure.
I suggest people Play and Have Fun, and stop worrying about flash offers… If they don’t want to spend anything, perfect, they get exactly what they deserve if they put in the time, which is everything everyone else has.
The devs won’t share more information, possibly because they are not in the information loop, possibly because information they shared in the past got invalidated within hours, on several occasions. We can either speculate or shut up. The former is providing feedback, the latter is agreeing wholeheartedly for all practical purposes.
And while working on getting every kingdom to 15 he’ll be encountering players with all kingdoms already at 20, for even more bonus stats. Which he’ll be sure to enjoy once the PvP rework introduces brackets that makes him compete against those players at a significant disadvantage, after investing all that time.
It’s a very significant step on the road towards an instant win button.
Have you done faction battles? Have you done pet battles? Bounty? Stat advantages? GW Paragon has stat advantages over soldiers… I’m really confused how stat advantages provide a win… Plenty of people win in GW, complete factions, win all pet battles, and do bounty, despite stat disadvantages, so I’m not sure how stat advantages leave free to play players as punching bags, since we all face stat disadvantages, sometimes very significant stat disadvantages, in every competitive game mode.
Tell that to Tacet, who will have every kingdom to 15 without spending a penny, however, he will play everyday, and do his daily Adventure Board, as he knows time is the biggest and most rewarding currency in GOW.
You place crazy amounts of value on stats. 5 armor and 5 life and 5 attack and 5 magic won’t stop a player from beating you. Neither will 10 armor, 10 life, 10 attack, and 10 magic… It’s something for end game players to work towards, like Zuul Goth, it’s suppose to take a long time. (TIME is the keyword), a long, long time. Which is the goal. They want end game players playing, and working towards goals, which is the point of the new kingdom levels.
You don’t seem to understand the core issue. Update 4.5 attempts to change the most rewarding currency from time to money. To get every kingdom to 15 takes very much over a year, even for a player playing 24 hours each day. Flash offers will reduce that time significantly, each time they are purchased. Kingdom level 20 is already in the pipeline, so that those players who purchase Deeds for cash will have something to spend them on. If Tacet continues without spending a penny he may one day start wondering why he’s so far behind, despite playing so much.
If they wanted end game players to work towards kingdom levels they wouldn’t offer them for sale in Flash offers.
Note that I love the idea of higher kingdom levels, it’s a new goal to work towards. I wouldn’t even mind that you can take (possibly significant) shortcuts towards that goal for cash if that didn’t bleed into competitive game modes so much. I do place crazy amounts of value on stats, there’s a very intricate balance between the damage troops can dish out and survive if you look closely enough. When you can regularly engineer situations in fights between players where troops can both deal and survive roughly the same amount of damage, it takes just a very minor shift in stats to make the battle go either way.
Personal wish list, either remove all Deed related bonuses from player vs player modes or make Deed offers available in an in-game currency. Heck, just put two price tags on any Flash offer, pay either in cash or in something like five times the gems that cash would buy you in the shop.
