I have been playing this game for almost 6 months now. I got some of my real life friends into it, which has really added to the experience. 4 of us play quite a lot, while the other 2 are newer to the game.
I like the fact that this game is adding new things frequently to keep it fresh. They’ve added quite a bit since I’ve started.
My criticism is that the new things don’t seem like they are worth the time. The Tower of Doom is a neat idea, but it is a lot of grinding and coordinating with the guild and the rewards are boring. It takes a guild of 30 people putting in many hours each and you get a few Orbs.
My friends are complaining about this, and I feel the same. There just aren’t good incentives to put in the time it takes to do well at these things. This game does a lot of things well, but sometimes it feels like a grind.
Yeah there are a bunch of threads about this already but I think “yes”.
The mid-game phase of GoW is extraordinarily long and it’s very hard to feel like you’re making progress. I think shortening it with some reward injections or even some events that are “not worth it” for endgamers but “very rewarding” for midgamers would be nice. The only realistic way to accomplish that, I think, is a level cap-based leaderboard. Let the endgamers fight each other for something shiny, let the midgamers fight for “more, lower-level prizes.”
I dunno. Either way I think the problem is “endgamers don’t need more rewards, but everyone else does, and endgamers disagree with the premise they don’t need more rewards.”
WHile this is true, (and i’m not a complete end-gamer so i suppose this thought doesnt apply to me? anyway) Not everybody in a guild is an “endgamer”. In a guild, players can be “new”, “mid”, “end” or anywhere inbetween those 3. Now endgamers wont benefit from loads of gems. New/mid players will. For example, the guid i’m in, rank 6 (100 gems). Would of been nicer if it was higher rewards, yes, but it was beneficial for those who werent “at end game” yet, and refunded some gems spend on tiers (mentioned a bit more further down).
Personally, it’s more of a “We were told this was a ‘gem creator’ event, but unless we buy 0 tiers, It’s just another gem sink”.
500 gems for rank 1, where people probably spent double that to get rank 1? Loss of 500 gems.
Myself, who went tier 4, got 100 gems, a loss of only 300 gems.
Net gems wise, i’m 200 gems ahead of rank 1, so was rank 1 “worth it”? perhaps not.
People like shinys. Dangle something shiny and tempting infront of you (better rewards) and people will try (spend) more to get to them.
I’ve been hard, hard against this particular argument. Here’s my stance.
When the devs say you will be gem-positive, I’m not sure they always mean “from just the rewards in this event”. Really there aren’t many events that pay you back more gems than you are “supposed” to put in. GW is the only one that comes to mind. Maybe I’m wrong. If I’m wrong, I don’t care, let me make the actual point.
The best thing I did for my game was start making reminders to collect Tribute. I haven’t pushed Kingdom Power ridiculously far but on average I expect 8-10 gems per tribute I collect. Over 8 hours in the day, that’s 64-80 gems daily, or 448-560 gems weekly. That’s Tier IV in some event and I haven’t even started looking at rewards.
Last week was a Tower of Doom week. I bought Tier VI. Yes, six. I also crafted Xathenos for fun. I started the week with 3,200 gems. It was the most gems I’ve ever had in the game.
I started this week with 3,500 gems. That’s a bigger number! I didn’t even do anything special! If I hadn’t bought Tier VI, I’d have even more gems and it wouldn’t really have had an impact on my event performance.
So when I see people complaining “I thought this was supposed to give us gems”, I think they aren’t looking at it across the board. It’s easy to think, “I would’ve collected tribute anyway”. But when the devs are asking, “How many gems can a player make in a week?” they aren’t focusing on one specific event. They are looking at every technique for gem generation and trying to maintain a specific rate. So it’s not right to look only at event rewards.
Further: don’t be so vague. I feel like this happens a lot:
Player: “I want better rewards.”
Dev: Huh, OK, what rewards would you like?
Player: “I don’t know! I just want better rewards.”
Dev: *Gently adjusts rewards.* There, I made an adjustment.
Player: “NOOOOOOO THIS ISN’T WHAT I WANTED AT ALL, THIS IS WORSE, PUT IT BACK!”
You want more, but how much more? Is it on the order of 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, or 1,000 gems? Some of those are ridiculous. Others are trivial. The ones in the middle are interesting, but have to be accounted for vs. leaderboard rewards. Also keep in mind: at some point, players have to spend resources or the game sinks because nobody pays.
I’m not against a boost, but keep in mind I made 300 gems after buying Tier VI. So add however many gems you think you deserved to what I made and ask yourself if it makes sense to expect that many gems of income weekly.
While true, there are multiple ways to get gems (and tributes are a good method), not everybody can collect tributes hourly, a bit trivial, but a valid point is a valid point. (valid point on both sides By the way, gems are semi-easy to get).
In terms of actual rewards, it just doesn’t make sense how Guild war has such high rewards Whereas ToD doesnt. ToD (seems to be) an event where a guild work together to get rewards, whereas Guild wars is just “Oh look, we’re the only guild in this bracket (AGAIN) that even does GW, But sure, there’s no dead guild here”.
GW seems biased to older guilds, who have gotten high. Yes, they benefit the guilds who “get good” and “stay good”, but what about the good guilds who could give people in bracket 5 a run for their money, but are currently stuck in rank 1500 cause GW doesn’t advance?
It just seems odd how an event where guild participation and communication is important gets worse rewards than GW (which i dislike because it’s biased to older guilds)
personally (boy i use this word a lot), I’d prefer 1 of 3 things.
A) the rewards for Gw isnt so high. No doubt some of the “we want better rewards” comes from Gw’s inflated rewards, so we want to balance it off that. (“backlash cause nerfing rewards”)
B) ToD and GW gem rewards switch completely (The gamemode that requires more communication, gets the better gem rewards)
C.I) ToD’s gem rewards becomes half of GW gem rewards. (increases, but not “massively”)
C.II)Tod’s rewards stay (relatively) the same, but GW’s rewards get nerfed so they become double that of ToD (Basically A and C.I Combined)
This is true for the majority of Gems of War Guilds. But at some point, competition happens in GW. The entire reason anyone bothers with the terrible lower ranks is they’d like to get to that competitive place. I’m in a bracket 3 guild. I assure you I pay a lot of cognitive costs when I play GW. I usually spend half an hour picking my team. If it’s a new team, I tend to spend 20-30 matches practicing the team. Then I have to see if, while I was doing that, somebody found a better idea and potentially repeat it. I probably spend at least an hour on those six matches. In that way, it’s the hardest event because I almost never know what it’s going to throw at me.
But this is indicative of a thing I try to fight: we are currently experiencing a very different game. Because GW has zero competition beneath some point, you feel like “it’s a lot of rewards for nothing”. This skews the work/reward tradeoff for every other event in your eyes. You aren’t wrong. But for a lot of the game, GW involves a lot of effort, so the work/reward tradeoff isn’t so skewed.
I think in a lot of threads, we tend to have people who have completely different game experiences like that arguing with each other, not realizing that they are both right within their own context.
But it’s a severe problem. You pointed out, “Not everybody can collect tribute frequently.” This is true. But if something auto-collectible like “event rewards” are increased, then both “people who don’t get tribute” and “people who do get tribute” get them. Put more simply: every bonus gem you propose for yourself also goes to me. And I’m not even a particularly motivated player among the competitive crew. My assumption is the devs already feel like I make too many gems. But I agree you don’t make enough. So how the heck do we set up a fair way to increase rewards such that a player like me doesn’t get more but a player like you does?
I think the solution has been clear for a long time: “The game will make more sense when/if GW is dropped as an event.”
Or at least improved so that the inflated rewards at the top are “easier to access”.
But hey, at least we’re able to have an argument that doesn’t just boil down to “You’re wrong” “No you’re wrong” “no u”.
I admit, never been near the top, so no clue if it’s inflated or not. (even though i still say it is, Cause bias exists everywhere). Would just be nice if the “lower” rewards got increased, but then that’s just “oh, you earned 50 gems instead of 25 by doing absolutely nothing… literally nothing, u didnt even need to pvp and u came first”…
I’m rather finding myself comparing it to Raid/Invasion, due to the event shop attached:
Reward tiers contain less than Raid/Invasion.
The weapon requires buying tier 4, for a higher cost than Raid/Invasion.
Fully unlocking the weapon can be done through the event shop only, for 2850 gems.
Buying the weapon is a one time only opportunity, by all we know it won’t ever be available again without paying money. If you forfeit owning and upgrading the weapon you can make some nice profit. Most long time players around here like to collect it all though, as the main incentive to play the game, and for those the pricing model is a very low blow.
I understand majority here are discussing the leaderboard rewards (and i too agree with many of the comments) but I’m also casting my eyes away to look at the match rewards you get.
While the recent increase in gold and souls and additions of trophies were a bonus for events, the rewards for these should scale with difficulty.
As you move up higher the levels, each match takes much more time, brain power and risk and the rewards are the same as a normal explore battle which can be completed in 10 seconds.
These resources are quicker and easy to farm in pvp (a 3 trophy match could provide x3 gold along with ingots and traitstones) so why not incentivize players for using sigils especially the ones who have gone to higher levels by paying gems to play?
People would be a lot happier if the leaderboard-quality rewards stretched a couple of orders of magnitude further. I’ll pay attention to where I place next time, but I’m willing to bet there are about 10x the people who play “with effort” than people who get rewarded for their effort.
I don’t think I’ll ever place in the top 100. I know what kind of effort that takes and I just can’t have fun playing a game that way. But I do think I devote a very above-average amount of time to this game and its community. It’s a shame that the only thing the game rewards as “above and beyond” is “spending a lot of gems” and “having a lot of free time”.
It means that when we talk incentives, I’m usually not interested. I’ve mentally committed to playing for “years”. That means no matter how many of a resource I need, I know I’ll probably get it eventually. What I care about is hanging out with cool people in my guild chat, and that those people are happy.
They aren’t. New modes ask us to spend more and more effort per unit time than the last. They aren’t getting “poorer”, but they also aren’t getting “richer”. It feels like Gems is getting harder, and the only people getting increased rewards each time are the people who have the time/resources to chase the leaderboard and reach it.
That is a small, fixed number of people. I know that, due to my life and how I play, I will NEVER be in the top 100 of any event. The people I see burning out are the people who could, but told themselves they’d quit if Gems became that much of a chore.
So the current structure, to me and many I know, says, “You can only get better rewards if you don’t have any fun.”
I have a feeling a lot of discussion about rewards involves people who would say the same thing, but have an even lower threshold for “what is not fun” than me.
Definitely. In fact, I’d go a step further and add that this game needs better rewards, period. What’s generally on offer (especially with regard to content requiring real money) is pejorative to the point of being insulting.
Oh i agree that IRL offers do need improving. Perhaps not the gems offers (no matter my opinion on them) But $35 to “fully max” a mythic u just got?
The mythic is worth that $35, not the souls or traitstones.
Does this mean 1 major wisdom and 1 major growth is worth $35?
i’d like to cash in all my majors for IRl money PLOX (sarcasm).
Proof positive that this ‘Mickey Mouse’ tier developer enjoys insulting the intelligence of players and has no qualms with regards wasting their time also.