You should all be ashamed of yourselves. This is one of the worst forums for information I think I’ve ever been a part of. I read the posts and its post after post of people begging you to give them a reason not to quit your game. This game is full of issues and bugs right now, and it’s full of unhappy players. The part that really irks me is that you don’t seem to care. We are not expecting a perfect game tomorrow, we all know it takes time. What I think everyone in this forum can agree on is we would like you to do a couple things…
Give a weekly update on work complete and work in progress.
Acknowledge the issues we are having and assure us they are being fixed.
Stop telling us that we are imagining the issues that we are clearly experiencing.
The bottom line is COMMUNICATE! I see several posts where one of you apologizes and says you will be better, but I never see the better part. You have a great game here and a playerbase that wants to stay and play if you would just give them a sliver of hope that you actually care.
And finally, if all you are going to do is give a cookie cutter answer that “you will do better” or “things are being looked at” then don’t bother. At that point you might as well just tell us to go find another game because you could give a sh*t less about us.
And 6 months ago this post would never have even been considered as the Devs were very active and communicated well both in game and in forums. Now, they are gone, obviously don’t care, don’t fix bugs, don’t ban cheaters, don’t update on progress of bug fixes.
Almost like a new game is coming out and they want this one to die.
For those like me who feel slighted, since they are letting the game become unplayable you can contact the company that facilitates the payments to whatever version you play and demand a refund. You may get some or all of your money back. Maybe enough of us doing this will get their attention?
I have to say i agree both with the op here and with @Clark about 6 months ago this wasnt an issue… But now it is and i think exactly what @Pantenkind said about communication is spot on. Well said brudda
Whilst I don’t care for the tone of this thread much, I do sympathise… We know though that the game just got too big and the likes of Sirrian and Nimhain just too busy to spend the time here that they used to. Shame, but probably inevitable…
Something to consider! Maybe they are doing their best and maybe their best sometimes is great and other times not very good like this week for instance! Guild Wars should have not happened this week at least on console! Very bad product this week!
One thing you need to also realise is that you posted this thread on a Sunday, a day in which not all of us are in the office as it isn’t standard office hours. Unfortunately, this means you are unlikely to get an official response until office hours resume on Monday. This isn’t always the case, as we do float around on weekends and evenings, but it is a good thing to consider.
I understand that there is frustration over less direct communication with the devs, but that was always going to be inevitable as Gems of War continued to grow as a game. Whenever I post on the forums I am relaying information from the rest of the team, which frees them up to continue working and fixing the issues we are all curretly experiencing.
The reality is, if we didn’t value our player base, there wouldn’t be any team presence on the forums at all. We do answer a huge amount of questions and acknowledge issues, which is the main purpose of our Known Issues threads which we keep updated. We are not always able to give an accurate timeline on when something will be fixed, as we don’t always know. Sometimes things are fixed much quicker than anticipated, and others take longer than we had planned for. This is the nature of game dev, and we do our best to keep you informed on what we are working on through these Known Issues threads. Everything that is listed there is either in the process of being investigated or fixed. Also, new issues do pop up that need to take precedence over others we were already looking into, which can further throw our fixing timeline out of whack.
@Pantenkind I’m sorry to hear that you are upset. We do our best to communicate with our playerbase as regularly as we can. The way in which we do this must evolve as we grow as a game, but there will always be a dev/team presence on these forums to hear your reports, feedback and thoughts.
Really? You change the title? I’m glad you’re more concerned about the devs image than actually talking to us. I realize you just wrote a long post that basically said nothing, but I want you guys to give us a little respect. Assume we are adults and tell us what’s in the pipeline. Acknowledge our issues and let us know they are being fixed. If the code is too hard then hire better help. It’s insulting that you changed the title instead of actually caring why this thread needs made in the first place.
I have always treated everyone on these forums as adults, as has every member of our team. The title was changed as it was inflammatory.
I endeavoured to answer your questions in my reply as to why things have changed and what we will be doing moving forward. We are all hard at work trying to improve the game and fix any issues concerning it. The best place to track these is in our Known Issues thread, as I stated above. This is where we acknowledge issues and let you know they are being fixed.
In the pipeline is launching 3.0.5 fully on mobile, fixing Guild Wars, fixing bugs, and after the game is running more smoothly we will be working on crafting. We have acknowledged this schedule many times in the past, but I am happy to re-iterate it as need be. As well as doing all this, we are always working on new troops for release, upcoming kingdoms, and adding more playable languages.
We have always treated our community with respect and will continue to do so.
I kind of wanted to blurt out a cranky response to this post, but I DO understand it comes from a vaguely good place that cares about the game, so it deserves a proper answer. I DO want to give you all an honest answer from a dev’s point of view too. And it really comes down to two things:
1. Exactly what @Saltypatra said… TIME! - much as I (and Nimhain) would love to continue work in the community, Gems of War has been growing so much in 2017, the team here has been growing too, and it’s my job to try and keep that all in line from a dev & direction & team pov. And Nimhain’s job to keep it all in line from a design & live-operations pov. At this stage of growth, it’s a massive undertaking… and leaves us no time to drop by here… but that’s where @Saltypatra comes in - she’s here to make sure we communicate with you guys. She reports to us constantly, and we make sure she’s passing information back down the pipeline to you!
Do we wish we could return to the old days where we personally would always have a little time to chat? Sure! But things need to get done, and it takes so. much. darned. time!
2. There is a darker side to this answer. Both Nimhain and myself stepped back from the forums when we realised that it was impacting our work, not only due to time, but due to the amount of abuse & harrassment we would encounter on a daily basis. In all honesty, you get accustomed to a certain amount mud being thrown your way in a public-facing role… as far as I’m concerned, @Saltypatra is a saint for taking some of this stuff in her stride and keeping on moving… I’m not kidding when I say that a week wouldn’t very often go by when someone doesn’t threaten me, and it’s not good, but you put up with it.
HOWEVER, during the Guild Wars preview, I received over 15 Death Threats in 3 weeks, I had my personal information published online, I had some pretty bad experiences on linked-in and social media, and discourse, and even my email… and some of the descriptions of what would be done to me and exactly WHEN they would be done, and where, were disturbing. I’m not easily disturbed, but a part of my mind started wondering “what if there is a crazy person out there?”
At this point, I realised that, yes, this level of abuse WAS affecting my work. I can’t have that happen really… I’ve got a lot of stuff to get done… so it was time to take a step back.
Now I KNOW most of you here are good folk, who are probably a little horrified about what I just shared, but as always, I wanted to be totally honest with you. All I can say is that, I AM actually really sorry I can’t hang out more… the mostly fine folk are not the problem and I really enjoyed discussing things with you! But… EVEN IF I had time, the emotional toll of trying to discuss things as a game dev in a game forum, while being subject to all kinds of abuse, just affects the quailty of your work. That’s a sad reality of the internet… we make an awesome thing for sharing thoughts and ideas, and a small number of crazy people can wreck it for us.
The solution? Well, I’m not going anywhere… neither is the rest of the team. We’re all still fixing bugs, adding features, improving stuff, occasionally breaking a few things too (it’s the nature of the business after all - we’re all far from perfect).
And finally, @Clark, I just wanted to address your points one-by-one… 6 months ago this post would never have even been considered as the Devs were very active and communicated well both in game and in forums. @Saltypatra is here helping folks out and writing dozens of posts every day! We’re pretty active!
Now, they are gone, obviously don’t care
I don’t think anyone seriously believes we don’t care… I know you’re saying that for effect. But honestly, if you saw the amount of effort & progress being made here in the studio, you wouldn’t ever question how much the team cares!
don’t fix bugs
Aww c’mon! We fixed DOZENS last week!
Although I grant you we’re pretty good at adding new ones some days.
In all seriousness though, bugs get added to our tracker and ranked on severity… just because a bug somebody sees doesn’t get fixed, doesn’t mean we’re not fixing OTHER bugs. Be aware though, that some need client updates, and others are waiting on the codebase being all over into Unity
don’t ban cheaters
I banned over a dozen this weekend myself!
We DO ban them… but we don’t really comment on that. We also like to see some real solid proof of cheating before we do it.
don’t update on progress of bug fixes
We have a known issues thread for that, as it can be a lot of work to track every single thread - many of which are repeats of others - but we also try to jump in and help when appropriate… it’s probably something we could be better at, so we’ll certainly take that feedback from you!
Anyway - just realised how much I’ve written… so pressing REPLY!
This is of course simply inexcusable. I hope the permanent banhammer was used on these people and that this was reported to the proper authorities (IIRC it’s not the first time that happened either (when we switched to the current guild task system I recall you saying something similar).
So when are you going to fix the gemspawner mess? 'cause the “fix” you introduced last week has made things significantly worse instead of better… Right now you’re pushing numerous people away from the game with the constant extra turns the AI gets from gemspwaning, whereas the human player hardly gets them anymore.
I can’t really comment on this, because I’m not looking for cheaters myself, but others have posted on the forums that they’ve been reporting cheaters to your team for months with nothing happening… Pinging @Aelthwyn and @Fractalier here…
I think we deployed out about 5 or 6 updates to that last week, each one incrementally improving it.
Stats-wise, it looks to me very close to how the old system was… but we’ll be making a few more tweaks tomorrow I believe.
That’s not really the how it works… it functions equally for both sides, I’m very certain.
I actually appreciate you taking time out and talking with us. This is incredibe and very rare as most devs in the numerous games I’ve played on mobile this is the most responsible and responsive dev team I’ve seen.
As someone who has seen the shadier side of business, death threats are usually common practice from competitions. Your best official response is to report it to the police, and avoid being goaded into heated responses.
That’s good to read. I must admit I barely played the last 3 days out of simple frustration with this “fix”. But this last week it certainly seemed that gemspawners favoured the AI. I realize there may be recall bias here, but before the “fix” if there was a difference between AI and human extra turns after gemspawning, it wasn’t noticable, whereas after the “fix” it was almost impossible to get an extra turn with gemspawners (Kraken not getting an extra turn when spawning 9 blue gems with 20, 17 and 16 blue gems already on the board (that happened in a single match in GW for me yesterday), while the AI’s Gar’nok looped a dozen extra turns)…
