Still feels like an excuse and not a real answer. I mean they say there is no way of knowing what would be affected. Maybe i am wrong, but is there no way to test that on a beta server?
I know a get-around way!
Add a regular daily task, « switch character class » with a 50 Gems reward.
There. Fixed.
3 Likes
That only works if you believe the crap excuse.
2 Likes
Monumental, indeed! 
1 Like
Devs continue to respond saying the same thing about how tricky it is to get rid of the class change fee. What we all would really love is a specific response why they can’t reduce cost to 1 gem or to 1 hour timer. Both these things could be easily done. But they never mention it only getting rid of cost completely.
I think they did - did you read both of Salty’s responses here?
2 Likes
See @Lyrian’s posts, and mine, about how this is quite possibly a publisher restriction rather than a developer restriction. However, to keep peace with the people footing the financial bill of the game, Salty can’t come right out and say “those mean people are keeping us from doing nice things”. This leaves her with four options, none of which people want: repeat, lie, deflect, or say nothing.
This. I’m quite surprised at some of the responses in this thread that make it sound like people actually thought IP2 had control of the game. They’re contracted by 505. I’m sure they’re allowed to make suggestions but I’d be shocked if they were allowed to make any major decisions without 505 approval, and by major I mean “any decision that in any way affects how the player earns or spends resources”.
Bingo. If they were able to change the cooldown window from 72 hours to 24 hours without the code collapsing on top of itself, they certainly could make further changes. Given how passionate they are about the game, I wouldn’t be surprised if this comes up regularly in meetings between IP2 and 505, assuming 505 actually wants to hear player feedback.
Unfortunately, what it sounds like people want is a sense of closure, and it’s not going to happen. Neither Salty nor any other dev is going to come out and say “we can’t change this because the publisher won’t let us”. Throwing the publisher under the bus would likely cost a developer his or her job and possibly cost IP2 the contract for work on GoW.
The devs never had the keys. They don’t own the car, they’re just the mechanics. Any repairs or improvements need to be authorized by the car’s owner. It feels more likely that what happened is some kind of management shift at 505, or the playerbase started to grow fast enough where it caught the accountants’ attention.
I’m guessing they can’t say this plainly. (See above)
This is a strong possibility.
If anything is ever changed regarding the class change cooldown, I’d expect to see something like the timer removed completely and the gem cost made permanent, so you can no longer “wait it out” and just have to pony up the gems every single time.
4 Likes
The problem I have is the doublespeak. This is obviously a 505 mandate but salty says legacy code bla bla and follows the lie with a brag about transparency.
Maybe a stupid question, but are there any 505 reps on the forum? I think Salty is great, but if she can only speak for IP2, maybe another set of ears/eyes/voice would be helpful?
1 Like
VirginiaApplejack is a 505 rep, I believe.
Here’s the best analogy I can come up with for the non-technical. I actually no longer believe “it can’t be that complicated” and I’ve shifted to being upset that it’s known to be this way and left alone. It’s dramatically damaged my opinion as to whether they can continue to deliver features. Anyway, analogy:
Let’s pretend the devs are homeowners, and GoW is their home.
A long time ago, they needed to add a room to the house while they were busy doing some other major renovations. So they put an ad on Craigslist and hired an unlicensed contractor from a foreign country to do it for them because he offered an unbelievable price. The room was added on, it looked nice, everything’s cool.
Until it rained the first time. Then water started pouring out from under the baseboards. It turns out the cheap contractor didn’t seal the room up very well, and the rain is leaking inside of the wall. To solve this, the devs would have to redo most of the room and, for the safest fix, they’d need to tear all the drywall down, inspect all the wood, and potentially redo all the walls. But that was expensive, and they were trying to install a new hot tub. So instead, they covered all of the seams with silicone. Water stopped leaking through the baseboards. Maybe it’s still leaking in the wall. Whatever, you can’t see it, right?
A couple of weeks later, the smell hit. If you’ve ever lived in a mold house, you know what I mean. It permeates your clothes and follows you out. Guests who came inside the house visibly frowned the moment they took a breath.
Now the problem is even bigger: clearly the room needs to be inspected, but now once the drywall comes down it is guaranteed that the lumber needs to be replaced, all of the drywall replaced, and to make it worse an expensive mold mitigation team might need to be called in to handle it. This is required, in most jurisdictions if you find mold while you are working on a structure, it is illegal to proceed until an inspector has declared the mold is gone.
So the devs have purchased some scented candles and placed them about the house. The problem’s inside the wall, and you can’t see it, so obviously a good solution is to try and mask the smell. The hot tub’s been installed, and they’re really excited about the new bowling alley they’re putting in the garage. They reckon a few games of bowling will be so fun, the friends who have quit coming over “because your house makes me sick” will be tempted to revisit.
Meanwhile, the mold’s spreading. That tainted lumber’s connected to other walls of the house. The drywall’s touching others. Mold sends out spores. Given enough time, the smell will get stronger and other rooms of the house will be tainted. Alternatively, the mold might damage enough of the wood/drywall to cause visible structural damage. Then, any inspector who happens by for a different project might see it and declare that must be addressed before any future work can proceed. By that time, it might be cheaper to tear down entire rooms and not rebuild them than it would be to “fix” it.
But that is the path they’ve chosen. The candles smell nice, and fixing the moldy wall is not a bowling alley. The end.
3 Likes
While I agree that inheriting a code base can set a team back, and architectural flaws can undo a project if they are not addressed, I think this is not such a case. The decision to not charge gems is going to be as simple as setting a value to zero on the server (nothing to do with Unity or the client code). Even if by some miracle of terrible programming the system required a non-zero value, they could still change the charge to a single gem and the cooldown to a single minute and nobody would complain.
Salty is wrong, and this is definitely no technical hurdle, purely financial. I don’t blame her, though. She is relaying information from those who know, and it’s a game of telephone that the devs simply won’t correct at this point.
I am sad though that, having been caught in a mistruth, the team as a collective whole won’t stop hiding behind “code is hard” and just outright say they can’t make this change as it hits a KPI or other financial success metric, despite how very obviously flawed the situation is.
I have some hope that the dev team can find a long-term solution to the class mess that lets them walk away without egg on their face but still gives the players the flexibility they deserve.
24 Likes
I’m not an expert on Unity and I’ve heard horror stories of how something about how it is structured can lead to couplings that can clot the blood if one is inexperienced. Part of me wants to give it a whirl to learn exactly how that happens, the other part of me is like, “You already have enough hobby projects, jeez, finish your GoW tools instead.”
But the analogy still stands: it’s a smell in GoW from a player perspective, and every time the devs push back it smells worse. 50 gems isn’t as dear to me as it used to be, but for the vast majority of my GoW career it was an insultingly high cost.
1 Like
I think we are all adult enough to understand that GoW is not a charity, and that they need to make money from it to continue its existence and development. It would be refreshing just to hear that expressed or even used as the justification here.
2 Likes
As an addendum, I think the initial excuse for having a class switch fee was to discourage frequent switching of classes, as the team was worried that players would expect the class choice to “stick” to their defense teams otherwise. It made some sense at the time, though it falls into the category of “learn once, remember forever.” The devs haven’t made an argument to that end recently so it must no longer be top of mind.
3 Likes
Again, it can’t be a viable financial reason. There’s just no way, I don’t believe that.
For this to be even close to a good excuse from a business perspective, there would have to be a non-zero number of players who both spend money on gems on a regular basis and use gems on changing between classes on a regular basis.
That makes zero sense to me. Who is going to do that? Its going to cost how much? Say someone is silly enough to be doing that ten times a week. Playing three different classes a day or whatever. If they’re doing 10x a week then that’s 500 gems per week. Anyone with the play time to be doing that and spending the gems will be in a super-active guild, so that number won’t mean as much.
Have I missed something?
7 Likes
I have spent the 50 gems a couple of times the whole time I’ve played. That’s 150 gems, maybe 200. I know if it was set at 5 or 10, in would p.s. spent a lot more than that over the years
I think reduced cost and timer will be great, as an end game player with multiple heroes we have to be able to switch between a multiple times a day.
Yeah, I think this is what I’d want to hear from the dev/publisher group as a whole - “This is an important revenue stream for us” (lol) and/or “This is the model we’re going with. It’s successful (because ____________).”
2 Likes