Discussion about pay-to-win frustrations

Gameplay Chat (PC/Mobile)
122

In my personal case the problem is more the lack of relevant changes. Relevant to make the game interesting to play on that is. We lost a plenty of guild members already, including leader. And look ahead to lose another bunch, including leader. And likely me too. They are not loud about it, just drop a note in chat ‘game boring, good luck’ and that is it.

Guess the population that likes the match3 aspect. Those who remain are probably who want a hoarding simulator. Where the recent changes are indeed pretty good, mass of new material, elevated costs again, one can grind more ti fill the tables.

For filling sake, nothing else. Just read Tacet’s new topic around kingdom power at 4 stars. Just for that one needs to ascend and level all troops. What sense does that have game-wise? You play just 4 things at once. Overall a few times 4. We have well over 70% cards that are not fitting in any team, are pure ballast. What is bad enough, but now brings extra incentive to throw a ton of resources at them?

Certainly the view is different from different positions, my experience is sour: I took my old defense team from defense on first days, as it made too many wins. Then started to play with it after evolving. Worm, worm, borer, worm. Wasn’t a big deal to push the worm to 20 and borer is okay lower. The traits were trickier but for just 2 units no much problem either. And it just keeps beating everything. With play style I wouldn’t even call play. no target, no nothing, just keep activating the top filled warm unless there are skulls. And it just wins. Cool strategy game?

Sure it will probably change as others ascend more troops, those I fight are medium-evolved yet. But 20 attack and 13 burrow is not a joke. And last few months were about such teams mostly, slimes, skels, you name it. THe additional stats from town and team bonuses killed all the abilities completely except for skull and endless loop generators. And you can’t allow to not play some of those because the opponent is also that fat on attack and life, if you’re not on top you’re sliced.

Those things were working pretty well around 1.03. It was the later changes that broke the balance. On resources namely 1.07 that made gold the only thing that counts. Now indeed the rest got revived, but I’m not in praise for undoing a major break. Especially as the main troublemaker elements are left there.

But if you just started recently so gold keys are interesting to open, all the power to you – just I must point out that you had that in the past, and not worse.

I would have welcomed traitstones if the related abilities were properly designed to start with and provide some balanced and diverse metagame, but they are not and most of them is nothing but nuisance. Serving just the collectionists.

Err, I’m confused. You also say there was no reason to dump souls into cards you don’t play. There is no more reason now. Play-wise. So why, to get more power points that in turn give you a drop of resources back? Even if it comes out as feasible, just a circle of hoarding. Not real progress.

By MY aims at least. YMMV.

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A lengthy example - in a different game! - of where this is failing miserably, is in Diablo 3. Unless they do some radical changes to their upcoming patch… Context: there isn’t enough stash/inventory space in that game. Not at all. Imagine if, in GoW, we were limited to keeping 100 troops (we’re now on 150+) and if we wanted another one we would need to destroy an existing one. That is basically how little inventory space we have in D3 right now. And people have complained on the forums, and made well-thought-out reasonable threads with hundreds of upvotes and enough pages of agreement that they had to be restarted for hitting the page limit.

The smart thing to do would be to listen to the player feedback and do something useful with it. Or at least compare it to their analytics that suggest everyone hasn’t got enough space for anything.

So after all year long of forum threads asking Blizzard to give some more space, what they said they’re doing is putting it in as a reward, in a system that not everyone uses (Seasonal gameplay - leveling a character from scratch for four months), and also making it really hard to reach (the rough equivalent of having a Mythic Legendary troop or two in GoW, with traits). And that will be repeated over subsequent seasons, so we can’t even get all the space we need immediately - it will take until the year after, 2017. Meanwhile, they’re giving us tons of new stuff that we can’t hold all of - say we got three Kingdoms next week, but still had that maximum capacity, which thankfully is a fiction I made up just now to compare to.

All this while one server already has the option of getting twice the space of everyone else through spending $20. Needless to say, it’s been capitalized on. And that isn’t really the right way either since it should have been for free.

TL;DR - Blizzard is (probably) implementing a QUALITY OF LIFE improvement, which should have been done 12-24 months ago, as a reward for something incredibly time-consuming that not everybody wants to go out of their way to do. Because they’re not paying enough attention to the community and completely botching the solution. Something like putting our troop filters in but only for people who hit lvl500 or 750.

And the Gems of War team are smarter and pay more attention and do things we actually like on a regular basis. So there.

… And I’ve just realized this has little or nothing to do with the main thread but I thought I’d say it anyway. Developers doing things that make sense vs doing things that make no sense - there, I made it relevant.

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124

I was probably too vague. My examples on excel-sheet-guy driven design are mostly from other games, with MPQ on top. GoW is much better in this department. No wonder I dropped MPQ long ago and still playing GoW (to some waning extent).

I did imply the same as you, that leaning on numbers, especially aggregated ones is dangerous.

You have people who actually play the game? That is really hard to believe as too many interface elements are in the category humans would not tolerate, only autotests. Including long and needless animations and extra clicks.

It looks exactly like so many other programs I see where developers just develop, do some minimal tests and move on. And learn about problems only from bugzilla.
180 clicks to ascend the worm – how that went unnoticed? Or the old ‘level troops to 15’ process for so long?

That is hard to swallow too. I recall when arena was introduced it had a set of rewards. Then a little ahead they were reworked, almost doubled. I’d think by the process you describe. The new table stayed on. I’d guess because it was found GOOD.

And now you say you discovered that when it was good, suddenly when you increased the demand for souls by a lot (the extra 5 levels are anything but cheap) the soul handout needed a halving back? This is just odd.

Sure the exploit related to difficulty change must have been fixed (another thing a regular player discovered quite immediately btw), but beyond that?

Well, I’m not really afraid about GoW with current way without real pvp, as you are fortunate to not needing players at all. O,O
I mean anyone beyond the paying customers. When I play, I combat the AI. And teams that are told to be coming from other player accounts — but could be just generated on the spot out of thin air. Emulating those teams would not be a big development step.

But if I was a developer I’d measure the success more in true retention of players, and their level of happiness. And a real challenge would be to part from the traditional freemium way well depicted in that South Park episode.

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Not to be snarky or anything, just pointing this out…This seems to be where the design gap comes in with regards to us on the forums and the rest of the player base.

I bet the active forum population is considerably less than a percent of active players, which would be another reason why implementation of things feels so odd.

We are simply not the target audience, which is totally fine because the target is what posts the bills and keeps the game alive. But it is something to keep in mind when we have these debates.

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126

my biggest complaint is i only feel the burn when i burn through all my maps and i want a trading system or even a gifting system so i can get maps as gifts from people who do not want them

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this is my vicious cycle of maps

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128

My feeling with this game after the 1.0.8 update is boring, there is no new game modes, just a pvp with the new skill system that make it more boring, the treasure map hunting and the arena are now a waste of time (cogratulations for that)… I am level 450 and you are quite forcing me to leave the game. All the new stuff is related to money, and advance now is sometimes slow, sometimes impossible, and if you feel you can’t advance the funny dies.
I am glad you have every time more players, ok, inside a few months you may have less. The statistics you have talked about just show the more efficent way in economic terms, but if a game is no funny anymore, or just boring, all this won’t be useful

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129

@Sirrian Can you expand a bit on how the economy is out of balance?

What I feel is I get ton’s of items that are of no use to me, and items that would be useful are far too rare. For instance, I gave up on trying to farm Arcane Plain Traitstones to improve a troop I wanted, because after 150+ (4 days) matches I had 1, and I need 8, for just one trait.

I do like the changed drop rate on keys from gem matches. I think I would have really liked the new rate when I was a new player. Getting a gold key ever 2 or so matches is nice.

The most fun I had this weekend was trying to find a way to be able to recreate the Agile Glitch, so it can be squashed. Now if you’re going to open a “Bug Bounty” mini game, just let me know. :wink:

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They made too many things that give you “free” stuff. maps for example can if you do it correctly yield unlimited amounts of gold, glory, souls, keys. this game is was and will probable be very grind heavy and we only have 3 game modes to play in and that is more than some triple a games released so far. We have arena that after 3 wins pays for itself. we have treasure hunt which after a couple red chests pays for itself and we got pvp which can pay for itself if you win once. In the future there will be more game modes but at the end of the day you are still playing a match3 card battling game. If you want excitement then try do some of the user created challenges such as “skulls only” were you cant use your troops’ spells or do “mage master” where you can only use teams that deal damage through spells but you can’t use skull matches. You must also run a troop that removes skulls for no benefit.

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I’ve only been playing GoW for 4 weeks now, and as of last night, think I’m now at lvl 103? So, am I now not part of the vast majority, or am I merely spending way too much time with this game! :stuck_out_tongue: … Just kidding, but I really enjoy this game and also really like playing Treasure Hunts too. Can’t keep enough maps really, and the wife hates that I seem to get more then she does. So when I get 6 or 7, I let her play a few. - Maybe this is due to still being new to the game, and maybe this will loose some appeal later. But I doubt it. I think it’s a good addition to the game. (If I had any complaints, it would be that it seems like the better I play a session, the less chance it seems I have at acquiring any keys? - I’ve had many times now with 3 safes and multiple chest, and didn’t get a single key. But have received keys (Mostly Irons) when I don’t get as far, or have mostly chest and no safes? Maybe this is how it’s designed? but if so, I wasn’t aware. Just thought it should award more for getting so much further.) I believe I have been awarded Magic Keys twice in all the Treasure Hunts I’ve done, and less then a dozen Irons. But still fun. :)grinning:

Have to mention I’m still on the older version of GoW, being on XB1, so can’t speak on any changes that may have taken place on the new version? Hopefully not too many. … I play because I really enjoy the game itself. I’m not looking to become a top tier player, and only have a Guild consisting of 3 right now. (My wife, son and myself.) So I don’t have a huge income of stuff coming in as I’ve seen others mention here. Though some things do seem to build slowly and looks like it will take quite a bit of time to achieve. But I don’t mind since I enjoy playing so much. … Presently I only have 7 Legendary troops, with 1 duplicate of Orion, making a total of 8. And all of these came from Iron keys, except 1 that came from a Magic Key. (Which I’ve only had about 6 of anyway) At the same time, my wife only has one Legendary, and she has opened as many, if not more chest than I have? Guess she has poor luck when it comes to the chest.

Thanks again for a great game! :smile:

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did you just turn this game into a family game? If so then nice and great choice. It beats a game about killing people hands down.

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Yeah, well they both saw me playing it, and I got tied of the wife wanting to play mine. So I just set up a profile for herself. :slight_smile: … So she plays mostly while I have to work, but we do share in the evenings. She’s just over lvl 90, while my son is still in the 40’s, since he has a few other games he plays. … I think we are just over a 1000 trophies. But yeah, we all enjoy playing.

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@Sirrian so it doesnt really matter core players get effed if the things are fine for base players? I don’t really give any… For treasure maps, they are pretty worthless at this point of the game when you need gold and trophies and the only think you grind is your level and trait piles which TH don’t award any. But if we would have to wait until that wave of casual players hit the point of needing the same critical things that we are needing now it would be pretty sad. Just to mention something again, disenchant threshold and a “disenchant extra copies from mythic troops” kind of feature. I know you said sometimes you take descisions we wont agree but removing that was a pretty bs-ish one.

Everything wrote with love. < 3 :v:

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Very interested in specifics as to what your KPI are.

Speaking on the game design I have a LOT of friends in the industry, I’ve been a hardcore player on more games than I can count and I’ve watched the rise and fall of more games than most have played. I can say I see a lot of signs of an imminent failure right now. I don’t think you’re factoring everything in. Short term gains in KPI that you haven’t provided transparency to don’t always mean it’s the best decision. I’m nearly vip 10 and I’ve played for about 2 months. I’m seeing a lot of odd things. First the arena was the best way to get souls but my “goal” of the game was to build up my troops so I could use them but my best farming course is to not use anything I put time into and rather play a random set of troops. The ability to gain resources is very hampered by the recent changes. It’s to the point that while I have an excellent collection of troops I can’t really level them in an effective manner despite spending hours. I compare to the console with it’sold model and I am able to progress at a relatively steady pace. With my long history of play and experience I’m able to spot the flaws before most people but that just means they’ll figure it out down the road. It seems your goal is to cater to new players as you keep pointing out that 90% of your players are sub 100. For a year old game that would concern me and my friends. It’s an indicator that you’re not retaining players long term. New blood is great but you want to generate a constant revenue stream because eventually new blood will dry up.

I’ve dropped 1500-2000 between console and app in a rather short time and despite having nearly vip 10 I’m realizing I still struggle to generate souls and without those I can’t do much. To make things worse even if i had the souls there’s no competition so I’m left to bare bones pvp. I don’t know your business model exactly but I’m the kind of player my friends want in games they design. They focus on converting new players to long time players while it seems your focus is on new players and more new players. But you said retention is up so I’m very curious to see your retention numbers and well your definition of retention.

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136

I remember when the devs put the troop level up from 10 to 15 and all hell broke loose on the forums. There wasn’t any Treasure Map then …or Arena…in fact there wasn’t much at all - but lots of talk and interaction on the (old) forum. This game has come so so far in 12 months and many of the things in 1.08 have been sparked by the players. I think it is a bit soon to be castigating the devs when not much can be achieved over the holiday downtime. I did my fair share of farming souls etc & started again now we need them for ascending but only because its fun to try for 1k souls in 20 mins. I found that if you play play play (I average 286 per wk) then things you ‘need’ naturally come. Even Sheggra eventually at lev 750 (l could have bought her for £39.99 but why on earth would I ? ) I’m sure the devs will sort any imbalances over the coming weeks just as they have always done. I recently spent a few quid on daily gems - not because I need them but because I wanted to give back a little to the devs making me a fun FREE game.

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137

what is pvp good for after you reach rank one? Also when the meta is set to one specific set of teams it makes pvp almost not worth playing. With maps you never know when a match will lead to a cascade and you never know just how far you can push one map to give you loot.

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Its good for gold earning. You get around 5 times more gold while fighting 8 battles in PVP than completing the arena.

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Well firstly, it’s the primary source of income of gold, glory, traitstones, and for me souls, keys and maps.

But more importantly, its the game. I mean, it’s the part of the game that brought me here to play the game, right?
The map, the kingdoms, that’s all fluff. Doing the match 3 part, that’s the fun part, no?

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140

Very similar to my thoughts. I see the MPQ story repeated, even if not that blatantly. But the basic approach is still similar, all effort is put to early game experience and bullying spend. Without any love to end game (or even middle).

Make people think that progress will put them in a funnier position while it does not at all. While veterans at least not get directly hosed, they move toward land of boredom. Except those only aiming to max out numbers just for maxing out sake.

Another strange thing is not using the most important feature of retention: guild. Again MPQ example, right when it faced sinking, it introduced guilds. That made people stay. Then guild competition that kept even more. And kept all kinds of activities.

GoW is not really competitive what is probably a plus, but guild activities still could be found.

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I’m not too sure I agree.

From 107 & 108

  • Trait System - for long-term players requesting passive abilities for troops
  • Ascension System - for long-term players requesting common cards become more relevant
  • Kingdom Power Levels - for long-term players requesting reasons to level more troops
  • New Kingdoms - for long-term players seeking more content to explore
  • Weekly Content Update - for long-term players enjoying collection mechanics
  • New Troop/Team Menu - for long-term players who said the old menus were getting difficult to navigate
    And next update? Heroes & PvP changes planned! For the long-term players again!

Just sayin’…

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