Do you like the new World Event (Festival of the Sun)? Poll

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21

I’m currently pretty meh.

It is a lot less bad than Council of Chiefs, but suffers from a lot of the same problems. This mode was previewed with all these cool ideas of be able to have all these different combinations of troop restrictions, and this is in the second time in a row its been “like raid, but weapons also restricted”. The battle selection screen is still mostly pointless… for this one, it was presented like it was RNG in the original post, but you actually get the same exact sequence of battles revealed no matter which fight you take (so if this is “random”, it was rolled once for everyone or progressed from the same exact seed). Because medal rewards for the shop (and event) are still only epic rarity, theres no strong incentive to interact with the shop.

The positive side to this particular event is that everyone that chases the highest scoring fight (which is both clearly delinted and is the same score for everyone) will always have the same score for an equal amount of battles, and you can easily estimate what your needed buy in is from the very start of the event. These are things that need to remain consistent between every future event - the ability to estimate your score and be in the ballpark so you can choose an appropriate buy in for an expected reward and only need higher if you mess up.

I’m playing (at least some of) my free sigils this week because I can, but I have a feeling they are going to look at the data and conclude this was a “failure” because it didn’t drive gem expenditure enough. I hope this is not conflated with this being an “easy” to complete event but rather what I’ve been repeating every single time this comes up, that the spending incentives are the lowest they’ve ever been - no lasting collection incentive (no troop, not even a weapon this time) on either the shop or the event rewards. This can be partially rectified by simply upping the rarity of Medal of Seasons, as has been repeated over and over and over again - Epic medals just aren’t worth the kind of gem expenditure needed to make the shops a good idea beyond basic event participation or collectible levels, Legendary is borderline but would likely see a lot more t4+ even on weeks where you don’t offer anything else, and Mythic would have at least some portion of endgamers going up to t6 in the shop every event regardless of what the event is. The lack of long term goals driven by the events really hurts the incentive size.

Every event dangles Zuul as the big long term prize because they all give orbs, but most orbs are useless after that fact (and nearly half of the ones you get are useless before then, because of the drop ratios), and, again, they all reward orbs. For other guild wide events:

  • Invasion gives gems and an orb rewards for personal participation up to a point, has a weapon to collect, and a troop to collect (for kingdom power milestone purposes, mostly, but is a long term goal) in the shop teirs
  • Raid has a weapon and troop to collect (for kingdom power milestone purposes, mostly, but its a long term goal) in the shop tiers
  • Tower of Doom has a unique weapon to collect from a tier all its own (one of them at least which is very, very good), and forge scrolls to upgrade those weapons as a personal play incentive and in the shop tiers
  • World Events have, so far, one of the worst weapons I’ve ever seen from any of these events priced at a tier where it was “cheaper” to soulforge it immediately, and NO weapon in the second (this one) one, and Epic rarity tokens in the shop, and some more epic rarity tokens as event rewards

From me, Invasion and Tower of Doom get a solid B+ for having lots of motivators spread throughout, raid a C, and World Events are a D minus. Not completely objective, but I think many people would agree on which events have the best extrinsic motivators to play (ie, which you are actively rewarded for playing both as an individual and guild contributor).

In terms of engagement, or intrinsic enjoyment for playing the mode, which is a lot more subjective, I would personally also rate World Events, this one included, at the bottom of the pile. The restrictions are a bit too restrictive for a lot of interesting choices to be made, and I’m saying that on events that have one or more really good scaling choices for the event. Its going to be really bad for events that don’t. Because of the troops involved this time around, Festival of The Sun was a lot better paced than Council of Chiefs, but still “raid but worse” in terms of team building options, with raid already being the worse of team building options before World Events.

I think I enjoy the battle type variance a bit more than on Raid even with more team restrictions, especially this time where I have two choices of empowered troop (or both) and also the ability to more fully use kingdom gimmicks instead of having a fully immune boss every battle, but that is counterbalanced by pinging back and forth between battles where I need a “real” team to battles where I just want to throw empowered into damage, plus having the battles being meted out by “fake RNG”, and the fact that both World Events so far have made heavy use of the same pool of troops that I am using, which I really really dislike, especially once their stats are above about 2.5 times my own.

tl;dr: While this is clearly the best World Event (of the two) so far and a vast improvement over Council of Chiefs, it is still worse in almost every way that matters compared to the other guild based events. Easy, calculable milestones is good, but every other event already did that. Required buy-in of t2/t3 for event completion on this specific World Event also good, but Invasion was already here, and this one needs stronger consistent shop incentives for both low buy in and high alike so that people want to buy in even if the event is on the easier side, look at what other guild event shops offer here by comparison to see why (epic rarity) medals are a stark step down from any of the others. Even with this set of relaxed requirements, event reward milestones are just ok as a motivator (functionally, not really any more enticing than any raid or invasion reward set would be, and probably less so than ToD) which could be improved dramatically by simply upping the rarity on medal of seasons without having to add any additional rewards.

13 Likes
22

This, very much so.

7 Likes
23

So I totally agree on all points, tbh, but I think I’d like to see if we as a community can come up with a way to reconcile these - what seem to me to be - conflicting complaints. I.e.:

  1. (Negative) For the maximum points- chasing player, there is no real RNG (and so feels fake/unnecessary)

    • The main benefit I see is that players who want easier battles or who unfortunately weren’t privy to the info on the forums and don’t know how best to use their sigils have options

      • The counter-counter-argument to this is that that’s why Epic Battles were introduced, right?

  2. (Positive) Not having RNG means scoring is fairer, a major complaint from CoC.

I’m tempted to say let’s just roll with this, even if it seems pointless, because I’m not sure I can come up with a better option.

I definitely agree with both of these points:

Perhaps just a single Fight option (i.e. no choice) like in Raid/Invasion, but with rotating enemies?

Maybe something like the Class Trial screen?

I can definitely say I was looking forward to more creativity in these regards, e.g. Orc Raids on Silverglade (fixing the ‘enemy uses the same troops as me’ issue), Mages and Warlocks from all over Krystara come together to help push back a flood of Daemons from Karakoth/the Underworld, etc. etc.

Your point about the combination of individual and guild extrinsic motivators was spot on, too, I thought.

2 Likes
24

Echoing this: in another thread I said I was debating buying Tier III in the shop — 150 gems for 3 epic tokens. I did end up pulling the trigger. But I’ll buy no further simply because while 50 gems to an epic token is reasonable value-ratio, the next tier nearly doubles the cost (this halving the value-ratio).

If what I was buying were legendary tokens, that Tier IV I’m not seeing worth buying at the moment would suddenly be a no-brainer. Maybe even the next tier or two—but then I’d be sitting at Tier 6 or 7 just as I am now, shaking my “not really worth it” head.

Make those last tiers (or all, just by changing MoS) mythic tokens, and most people who could would buy them, I’d bet, even though most mythics aren’t worth upgrading in the first place. I know I would — and I am pretty dang gem-stingy

That, and/or have something fresh and new in the shop, too. Some ideas—

  • a medal of summer that doesn’t disappear, but that is a unique Legendary/mythic medal (even if its effects were nerfed to 5-10%, and worked only for Bright Forest troops, people would still want to equip such a thing sometimes, and you could bet your bippy most wouldn’t use it to elite level a troop if they weren’t farmable in the general explore pool).
  • Or a weapon (maybe one that’s actually good?).
  • Or a troop (same “can it be good, please?” request).
  • Or even a Sacred Treasure or three — anything, really, that is really difficult to get elsewhere to the point where folks are literally blocked in their spending (can’t get more treasures without shards, no good way to farm those and also try to get renown day after day).
  • By the same token, toss some writs in there so people can craft Imperial Deeds. Plenty of people at this point cannot use their deeds as a gold sink simply because they lack Imperials—and a sink doesn’t work if a player isn’t able to throw gold down the pit
2 Likes
25

The medals make this a literal snoozefest. There is absolutely no challenge whatsoever.

26

Making it a 20% would be ideal in my opinion. It affects only spell damage, not life steal or healing like a Medal of Nysha would. Restricting each medal to affect their own kingdoms’ troops would need a little more incentive in the form of extra bonuses and also more medal slot tabs for players as well. And a better way to change between them like Shimrra suggested in his own topic: Medals to Team Selection ASAP Please

1 Like
27

I’m glad we were able to finish it with a decent/normal amount of time, energy, gems.

But mine is still so laggy, it is slower than 1x. Still was able to do my part for the guild, which feels so much better than buying all the tiers and ragequitting. The mode itself is meh. Glad i had db or whatever swiped it out.

28

The only visual bug I get on my Galaxy S9+ is the icons wiggle (for lack of a better term) when the map is open for 3-5 seconds.

29

Think its due to the game trying to space them out…

1 Like
30

The ideas aren’t necessarily at odds, because (1) is not about the kind of “RNG” on display here, but rather about making relevant choices. If we accept that (1) cannot be done without RNG that influences score, then yes, not having (2) is more “bad” than having (1) is, and having (1) is way more bad than not having (2). If we don’t adhere to the notion that you must use RNG to make there be some kind of relevant battle choice, the biggest complaint about not having (1) is that the selection mechanic doesn’t really add anything relevant to the system. Battle selection, but the battles given are a sequence pre-determined by RNG (as with this event) means the only relevant choice you have is to actually go for sub-optimal points, and yes, in this case, the gulf in points is so wide that going for a four point battle when you can put two or even three sigils down on a 14, 24, or 34 point battle doesn’t make much logical sense either.

FYI, when I referenced “fake” RNG in the context of Festival of the Sun specifically, I mean that the battle progression is literally the same for everyone regardless of what they pick. Think of shuffling a deck of cards and duplicating that order to everyone. The first five cards dealt to the table are the initial battles, some for everyone, and no matter which one is picked, we all draw from the same deck to get the one after… it isn’t five decks that lead to similar places that are roughly the same over x amount of draws, just one deck that was (if we believe the original event post) totally random in order. Thus, by the 50th completed battle, any given 2 players would have the same 45 battles in common, and for most of them, in the exact same order, and for many, at the exact same level for each encounter. For example, everyone that did a minimal buy-in will see Glitterclaw almost twice as much as tinseltail before they run out of sigils and see Glitterlclaw climb much faster than Tinseltail in levels out of the gate because there are more of these at the front of our communal “deck” order, no matter what selection they made, even though all battles are allegedly equal chance to appear.

To clarify, I am in no way advocating for us to do this “single deck” style but everyone have a different “deck” order for each individual, because that just causes a lot of the same problems that Council of Chiefs did. The mode works better when there is a knowable or predicable sequence within a certain number of battles and/or have a similar score potential within a certain number of battles that is the same for everyone (in this case, same sequence over all the battles), but having the battle choices basically not matter is just very much against what it seems like this style events is trying to be.

How I would do battle progression - there is a logical, predicable order of progression on battles wherein each group of (x) battles metes out the same score, or at least within a small percent of variance (and the variance of the score is not based on RNG, but a known factor of the sequence of battles picked). The relevant choice would then be which set of battles you run through before returning back to the original state. During the early event, you’d be able to scout all paths and decide which one has the least amount of possible obnoxious opponents, then run those paths when each encounter has leveled up. When the system was explained on a basic level originally, this is how I thought it would always work, for all world events - choose your path for slightly varying gameplay within the event (ie., when I pick this group of low rarity, say, orcs, I fight them into progressively higher rarity and highs scoring battles themed around similar troops, but I could have also chosen to fight a low rarity elves fight and progress through that until clearing the higher rarity “boss”, and having another selection) while keeping scores from person to person pretty much the same so long as they didn’t intentionally tackle stuff that would score less.

The Council of Chiefs variant of battle selection was worse and didn’t work because it just shotgunned seemingly entirely random battles no matter which one was selected before and occasionally changed battles you didn’t even touch and had a random component in the scoring, this one didn’t work because it is set up like it is supposed to be random, but the highest scoring battle sequence is not only the same name but the same exact battle for literally everyone. The Festival variant worked better than the Council variant by this metric, and is more or less “ok”, but why even have the selection at all if it is mostly ignored? In either one, for the purposes of informing future battles, it doesn’t seem to matter which one you picked, and of the offers immediately available, your choice was either obvious or meaningless. From a gameplay/engagement standpoint, this seems contrary to how it was intended to work. There just doesn’t seem to be a good reason to have this selections done this way other than (and this is something I see actively happening, by the way, looking at score variations before we even hit level 100 battles within my guild where I know these players can handle those fights) to confuse people that didn’t happen to thoroughly read the forum post on how the event was scored into just blindly picking battles. And that wouldn’t be a positive attribution to the event.

But yes, lets clarify, here and now, that it is much more important to have consistent calculable milestones than it is to have “fun choices” in which battle you want to select within the mode, for the simple fact that the extrinsic motivators are way more cut and dry than the intrinsic ones (“fun” is more subjective, and like it or not, a less fun mode with better extrinsic rewards is going to see more play, and thus sink more gems or potentially convert that into revenue, than one a few people just really like). But also that these ideas aren’t mutually exclusive - you don’t need to employ RNG to anything that would directly influence scoring to introduce variance and actually choice agency on your battles selection within the event.

TL;DR: Battles/scoring should never be RNG, reward milestones should be calculable or estimatable from the start of the event first and foremost, but battle choices should in some way be relevant to the events, which can be done without using RNG in a way that influences score outcomes.

1 Like
31

Okay, so 57% likes this time as compared to 8% last time. Quite a big change lol. Fewer voters though.

Hopefully the devs have noticed the upswing in votes and also read through comments in this thread :smile:

32

Im in a babies guild and we managed 10 of the rewards stages, and that even with 6 inactive players in the guild. :+1:

33

Well, just in case the devs ever do read this far, it is my wish that they don’t have an event medal buff armor. Unless, perhaps, the Kingdom is Adana or Forest of Thorns.

This one worked because of the Magic Buff more than anything. Mang and Trickster’s Shot are now off the table for a while.

34

This could be easily adjusted to matter if e.g. Cat Sith battles had all enemies at lvl/2, Epic battles followed the current format of one troop at lvl and three troops at lvl/2, and Legendary battles all enemies were at lvl.

That would allow those who struggle with a particular level to actually see a benefit in choosing battles with less rewards. ‘Strategy’, I believe it is called.
:thinking: :stuck_out_tongue: :vulcan_salute:

1 Like