Here’s a depressing thought. VIP 0, 50 gems is $4.99 at the lowest price point.
You have a great memory Lyya, as this is another reason that prevents us from making changes, outside of the ones I’ve already outlined. It’s not as simple as making one change, if it happened there would also be great demand for being able to have hero classes and weapons stick to teams, and that is another feature that would cost a significant amount of time and money to implement. Unfortunately, a feature such as this wouldn’t fit into our update schedule, and as you can see there is a roll on effect from any change that we make in game. There are a lot of facets that affect decisions at all levels of development, whether in house or not, that need to be taken in consideration.
On the topic of VirginiaAppleJack, she has left 505 and is pursuing a career with DC. There are no hard feelings over this change, and we all wish her the best of luck in the future! (I do miss her though, she was amazing and working alongside her was an absolute pleasure.)
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At this point, most of the player base would be happy with the one band-aid change and not forward thinking future solving issues.
similar case to the Dawnbringer/Runic Blade argument in the Arena
Best wishes to VirginiaAppleJack
For the record, my memory is fine too … I just didn’t think it was relevant because …
… because this is wrong again. We want the above regardless! Of course, weapons actually do that as of… jeez, I can’t remember, ages ago, soooo the time where neither classes nor weapons would stick is quite ancient.
So that’s not something that’s suddenly going to become an issue. Because one part is fixed already and the other part has been missing and desired for years.
The difference is that we can actually recognize the technical nightmare involved in getting classes to stick, contrasts very nicely next to the low-tier challenge of changing one or two numbers.
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@VirginiaApplejack is still listed as a “Gems of War Dev” on here.
Possibly her status cannot be removed from here on the forums because it is somewhere deep in forum legacy code and could cause issues/take too much time/effort to change? 
Maybe in the next forum update? 
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Give me two years and I will use my admin powers to remove her. No sooner, no later. (I’ll take care of it now.)
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While we’re on the subject.
If regulars lose their access after lack of posts. Why are the mods exempt from this rule? 
Can his title be changed to “Be a lurker, not a poster”?
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This has fallen a bit down the list, time to push it back to the top.
Her status hasn’t changed as there is probably a 50 gem cost attached to it
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Dear Devs,
Please lobby hard with the publishers to get them to allow you to remove the gem cost. It would be very fun to experiment with the different hero classes, but as it is, it really is not feasible. Think about all the work you did making different classes that we can’t enjoy because of this crazy fee!
Thanks.
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You know, in a sick kind of way, I’m wondering if the backlash over the 50 gem cost makes them (505) feel justified that it was the right decision, since they might think it means players will spend on it since they want it so much. Supply/demand, etc.
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They really just need to make class changes Separate…like guild wars you should lock in the class you want each day and not allowed to change once battle starts…….towers are separate so you have to change class then don’t like the change it costs 50 to change back. pvp and all other modes same thing.
Its not worked that way with me, far too many boneheaded decisions from the devs or publishers made me stop donating money to this game about 1.5 years ago. I say donating as I would still purchase items right now (the gem packs specifically) even though I do not need them at all. The obvious BS responses from the Dev crew on why they cannot make any change at all to this further cements my stance on not donating any further cash to this game.
I think eventually someone who can make the decision will pull their head from the sand and realize that massive player angst is not good for the cash flow and look for a way to reverse this decision while saving face, I just hope Salty gets to break the news and gather the accolades as she is taking the vast brunt of the backlash for this stupid stance.
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I agree with Fleg, Devs it’s kind of annoying for the gem cost to be 50 instead of free
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With regards to the code being hard to change, it is possible that part of the program is already compiled, and linked in as a resource / library when they build. It may be compiled using a different / older tool chain, and recompiling it may be tricky / error prone. So they have a binary which works, which can be linked in and run fine, but if they try to change anything, it could muck up the whole thing.
Possible, but extremely unlikely. That would be tantamount to freezing some portion of the game code forever, and a terrible practice if they knowingly architected that way. This portion of the code (the class change fee processing) was not added by the contracted console team and there is no reason to believe it was inherited.
It would also have to be server code written that way, as I said earlier, as client code is not responsible for this decision.
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Oh, absolutely, this would be a terrible practice. Just trying to wrap my head around why it could be dangerous / difficult for them to change it. It does seem much more likely that it has nothing to do with technical reasons.
I am… actually suspicious this may be the case, but having the server makes me skeptical.
Note Salty pointed out it’s code from the AIR days. It seems reasonable, based on my Xamarin experience, to assume there’s a way to make a library in C or some other language that can be consumed by the multiple incompatible platforms that were used at the time. (We’ve got a C++ library most of my company shares, since we need to guarantee we all use identical implementations and it’s highly optimized in that language anyway.)
So I can imagine writing a spec for the library and detailing that changeClass() should check the time, deduct 50 gems conditionally, and change the player class. If that “deduct 50 gems conditionally” was not parameterized, then it’s embedded in the code. If there is no one on the team familiar with how that build chain works, or if it’s very fragile, then it’s effectively impossible to change.
That still strikes me as oddly implausible. I haven’t sniffed class change API requests, but ultimately it is the SERVER that has to deduct the gems, right? So for my theory to work, the server would have to be calling into a strange, impossible-to-edit layer.
That strikes me as very easy to solve. SOMEWHERE in the code there is a button tap handler, right? This is pretty Mickey Mouse Dependency Injection theory. Find the part where the process you want to replace starts. Write a new thing with the same method calls. Put the new thing where the old thing was.
Every objection I can think of like, “Well changing class ALSO changes all of this…” has to happen server-side. It has to happen in response to some already-existing API call. I really don’t understand how a client-side C library change is supposed to hold up development on a server-side library change, unless vast chunks of the GoW server were outsourced and nobody knows how to update them.
Which would be… well, “risky” is a very polite word.
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