no problem @Tacet, if this can help
Well I like where a lot of this discussion is headed.
I definitely think a 30 day login calendar is a great idea. It could easily take place in a single city every month, I imagine it looking like this:
Day 1-5 the same common troop from that city
Day 6-7 250 gold each
Day 8-12 repeat day 1-5
Day 13-14 10 gold keys each
Day 15-19 5 of the same rare from that city
Day 20-21 1000 gold each
Day 22-26 10 gems each
Day 27 2 gem keys
Day 28 2 event keys
Day 29 a single UR from that city
Day 30 an epic from that city.
The colander changes every 30 days, you snooze you lose. Missing a day though, just misses that day and doesn’t push the calendar out.
I also think VIP 1 should cost 1$ and give you “every troop obtained is level 5”.
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I don’t know about “every troop obtained to level 5” for VIP 1, but VIP 1 definitely needs free “try another player” for invasions.
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Personally, I don’t feel the gap.
I’m only level 175 or so, and I never need to check what I’m fighting against.
Gold income feels right for me, too.
I guess I’m just in that sweet spot for those two.
However, everyone else in my guild is suffering on challenges and kingdom levelling that this thread talks about, and PVP could even be worse for my friends.
I liked these ideas:
- 30 day login calendar. The rewards don’t have to be big. 20 gems on day 22 is too much. 5 gems would be awesome.
- Arena could scale based on your level. At level 1000 you could get diddly squat like we get now. At level (1000 - x) it could improve by a small amount, so that if you’re level 50 you’re getting some really sweet soul collection.
- story mode, challenges, etc costing 0 gold entry. Maybe not the challenges, which I have a few left, but def story mode. Give these new guys something extra.
- the newest city could maybe cost gold.
- make treasure hunt more rewarding. PLEASE.
- don’t touch tributes
- a slight dabble with key return. It would be nice to have, like, 1% chance to get a gem key when I earn a key in-game.
(So one key in 100 is gem key, maybe 5 keys in 100 are glory keys, 94 in 100 are gold keys)
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Agreed. Late-game when we’re drowning in Gold Keys from random drops and tributes it gets boring. It’s another thing that will not make any kind of difference to speak of.
Gold Keys are boring for everyone actually. I mean, before, it was ‘I got this thing in my game… and it could be three Legendaries!’
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i dont agree as much cause i get excited when i see a rock worm or a Valkyrie show up or really any of the trait stones. keys seem to always be pricey 1k for a key that could have been 3 legionaries seems nice but with the sacrificing mechanic it is more like omg i got a ultra-rare valk from a gold chest(which is possible) I think the reason it might be boring is that you have collected everything it can give but for me(still not lvl100 guys) it is exciting. i want the commons and the rares cause i know that they will scale in rarity and get better and stronger and create interesting teams with concepts that seem strange and might work. Teams that have no functionality before 108 now have the possibility in 108. you can make a giant team or a true-shot team or even a burner team. Something to implement to keep gold chests exciting is to create a crafting system with trait stones which might get complex.
This is a similar experience to what I’m having, even at lower levels on pc/mobile…not so frequent on xbox, but then again I’m a higher level…idk!
It’s the same problem many other games have: accumulation of low-tier trash. That provides nothing wanted and brings the increasing let-down feeling as you see dropping another gold key/minor-major Ts/standard token/** token/whatever.
Interesting that players keep suggesting the devs to provide a way to craft the trash into something worth-wile, but it keeps never happening. So said players soon get replaced with newbies that enjoy the trash yet until supply dries up.
Dude, you gotta give them time. This new patch has been out for so short a time that I’m sure that are still collecting play data. The dev team cares, stop trying to paint the picture that they don’t.This isn’t gamevil or mobage.
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More time? How much time whe have arena and related – pretty rtivial improvement reqs?
How much time the tres hunt is out and dead in the water for majority of players? How many changes THAT thing got since release?
The devs have a ton of time – just it is used to implement all the stuff that we didn’t ask and didn’t want; that does not make the game any better, especially more fun to play, just allows more spending and grinding and other activities not really fitting the original idea of a “game”.
Just had talk in the guild (top 10), about everyone thinks 1.08 was a letdown, our holes down the drain. I expect another mass exodus in early Jan.
Player retention is definitely not very high on the priority list.
(Sorry for the OT, if we want to continue this, let’s start a spin-off topic.)
I can’t speak for all mediums, but GoW on Steam has increased about 30% in the amount of players playing at any given time. It is nearing at all time highs near that of the launch month.
Also, much of what the devs added this patch people have been wanting. I have been wanting a system similar to traitstones ever since they eluded to it back in December of last year. Several of the effects they added were even ones people suggested. There reason for holding it back was “too P2W”. I feel like once they add some better methods of farming and crafting traitstones it will balance out.
I’m playing more, and enjoying the game less. It seems like so many fun teams that used to be OK to play, seem so far behind the power curve that their just not fun anymore.
So I’ve been trying to farm up some trait stones, and that is so slow it just makes the game a chore.
I’m hoping they will focus on balance over new content for the next few weeks.
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I also see a peak right after patches then it fizzles. Let’s look at the numbers at end January.
Raw numbers are tricky and especially prone to hide the delayed effects. I probably quoted the devs/reps of MPQ a few times after they removed the guaranteed *** from the cover packs. They said sales went UP so the players just LOVE the change and out to more gambling compared to just get the cover they wanted to get…
Yeah, sure.
@Tacet : See, that is the very thing I was referring to.
I’m stuck in the last century and still think game is about fun, not about grind or time-sink.
FYI Guys, Retention is up quite a bit higher since 1.0.8, in fact ALL of the KPIs for the game are up since 1.0.8., which is awesome news for the future of the game.
If we saw people leaving the game in large numbers, we’d be actively working to address that. Fortunately it’s not the case here (oh, also, just FYI it is the holidays… .we only have Nimhain and myself in the office working here on the game at the moment, so obviously things are going to be moving a little slowly right now!)
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Sounds like you’re happy to breach 5 cells on Titanic and think it’s enough to manage the problem later when the water is flowing over the top of the separators?
Not sure which thread I mentioned the very common fallacy to not count with the delayed effects. Even though we teach modeling and all the examples how that works out.
I suggest you read into in-game guild chat or just do keyword search on phrases like ‘stale’ and ‘boring’.
Certainly it may all go according to the master plan like was the case in MPQ, the game needed population of a different mind-set than those around at the start.
Another fast example: short-term it’s easy to up play time by simple changes like nerfing arena rewards to half. As a part of population that might used arena to obtain souls will double its effort. But it’s part of strip-mining and won’t last very long.
Time is a very important thing to offer to games like this which update pretty largely tri-monthly.
Tweaks are frequent, I’ve actually earned 4 new legendaries since 1.0.8, one from Gem chests and the other three from Glory. Not sure how many changes have occurred to chest, but I’m pretty happy with what I’m getting. (Trait stones have also been made to be earned more often.)
Updates are weekly, new weapons, troops, kingdoms, who knows what else? Even if you only login once a week, you’ll witness the game’s always progressing closer towards the majorities tastes. (Not counting patches right off the bat, those are much larger and difficult to gauge until the dust settles. That’s still happening with 1.0.8 presently.)
Bug fixes and troop/weapon adjust fairly often. If something appears to be wrong, the teams are here to make it right. But not everything is a simple hotfix, testing is always in order. (Don’t forget, the Orb was recently reduced in mana cost, so they’ll happily reverse extreme actions to a degree.)
I look forward to the end of every week, not because of some PvP bonus, but because of what each new week might have in store!
For those who are getting tired, I will recommend taking a sort-of break until something of interest comes up. Obviously accomplish your guilds requirements each week, but don’t concern yourself with overplay if it leaves you unsatisfied. Just be patient and you’ll see with time new features, troops, kingdoms, etc. will show up, and then give it a try again!
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@Pasa: Very happy to discuss this stuff with you. Game Design & Production Education is something I do a number of times a year at universities/colleges. Helping players understand what is happening and why is a really useful thing for everybody.
Essay incoming. TL;DR Sometimes you gotta break eggs to make an omelette.
So… I’ve got a little bit of experience working with game design (about 3 decades now), and while I freely admit there is plenty of stuff I don’t know or I get wrong, there is a PROCESS we follow which more often than not leads to good outcomes for everybody - core players, casual players, the dev team, & our publisher. This process or something very similar, is in place at many great dev studios, such as Riot Games, and Blizzard. But it scales down nicely to small teams like ours too.
The core of it goes like this: good design needs to be built on 3 PILLARS - player feedback, designer intuition/experience, and hard statistics/analytics. Each of those pillars is of equal value. As soon as you lean on one too hard, you get problems… and that’s kind of what you’re implying in your post, but it’s not the case here.
Lean on analytics too hard? You get the strip-mining you mentioned.
Lean on designer feedback too hard? You add features that lose your core audience, and don’t work with your business model.
Lean on player feedback too hard? You skew the game features to cater to the most vocal players,and you either go broke by giving too much away, or alter the difficulty to cater for a minority.
With these recent changes:
- Analytics tell us that our economy is not healthy (too much reward being given too freely, which messes with the patterns of play and core loops)
- The Design team on both player/publisher sides, who play the game constantly on live accounts, agree for a number of reasons,based on their experience both mechanically and emotionally with the game.
So, we KNEW going live with 1.0.8 that some players wouldn’t like changes, especially changes that reduced Gems from Tributes and Souls from Arena, but in this case a combination of analytics & design experience tell us that the best course of action is what we did. If the design team had not agreed, it would never have been changed. So far everything points to the fact that it was the correct decision. And of course we will tweak/adjust stuff to improve it as time goes on.
Our goal is to have Gems of War be very successful for many years. And we’re in a much better place than we were 12 months ago (we even just made a top 10 games of 2015 list on Kotaku Fahey's Top 10 Games Of 2015 
).
Now you may disagree with the above - that’s fine - but let me challenge a core-player belief as an example. I’ll quote from one of your posts:
How much time the tres hunt is out and dead in the water for majority of players? How many changes THAT thing got since release?
Now, it IS often mentioned by players on the forums that Treasure is a waste of time.
However, the reality is that Treasure Hunt is hugely popular amongst the vast majority of our player-base under level 100, which is over 90% of active players. Treasure Maps are purchased with Glory and consumed at a very high rate.
We gave away 100 packs which included a couple of Treasure Maps on the weekend. Most of those treasure maps were used within the hour. So, definitely NOT dead in the water for the majority of players.
Does that mean we WON’T improve the Treasure Hunt game? No! We have some improvements we’d like to make, sure. But players are already engaging with the game so well, that other things take priority.
The point of this? If you only see things from a core player’s perspective, then you’re only working with part of the picture. We love the feedback provided in this and other threads, we don’t even mind when it gets a bit passionate 
We read it ALL. And where our designers and/or our analytics agree, you will see change in the game. So keep on telling us what you like and don’t like. But understand that sometimes we will make decisions in the best long-term interests of the game that you might disagree with.
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Sounds like you’re happy to breach 5 cells on Titanic and think it’s
enough to manage the problem later when the water is flowing over the
top of the separators?
Not sure which thread I mentioned the very common fallacy to not
count with the delayed effects. Even though we teach modeling and all
the examples how that works out.
But sometimes it is just a small vocal minority that is not liking the changes. Someone with a complaint will always speak out, most who are happy do not say anything.
I like all the changes, the PvP battles are really interesting now, interesting to set up a good team to beat a hard combo of troops.I love that there is a reason to get souls, get gold, and cheer at every gold key because it means a possible traitstone. I was at a point where all gold went to Guild since buying keys was a waist and souls I had collected 90k since there was no reason to upgrade troops I would not use. Now I can’t get enough souls and can’t buy enough gold keys.
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Thanks for taking the time to do this. Good to see a reminder of the long term plan and a reminder to some of our vocal friends that the devs do (roughly) know what they are doing.
You know how I hate to quibble 
but one remark was too tempting:
Woo-hoo retention up for 11 days…
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