Personally I was in favor of modifying Dawnbringer’s text as follows:
If being wielded in Arena, deal 99 damage to all allies. Otherwise, gain 30 trophies.
Functionally identical, but then the flavor text can be, “I got 99 problems and a trophy ain’t one.”
Other ideas I only just thought of today that could still be implemented:
Add a 9th battle to Arena that’s always a Dawnbringer team. Add a prize to it from the Gnome pool.
Dawnbringer can show up in battles 6-8 of Arena, and similarly drops a Gnome prize.
Since it’s so easy to beat Dawnbringer: a special Arena mode that’s only Dawnbringer. 255 matches, single-loss permanent elimination (you can never play Arena again after a single loss). Every match is zero rewards, the final reward for 255-0 is Zuul’goth.
I expect if they add that last mode, within 10 minutes the entire PvP meta will be all-Zuul’goth teams.
Seeing how this thread evolved further (now at 80 replies), I admit… I feel the same way. I never felt like quitting the forums before, despite not even playing the game (much) anymore, and that was because this always was to me such a friendly community. And the thing is… it was like that until I decided to mostly leave, which was at the end of Feburary. I didn’t interact as much with the community since then, just posting some bunnies here and there, so I now look at this and wonder why, in 45 days, this place changed from being one of the nicest places on the internet I knew to this toxic crappool of hate.
It’s not even just this topic. I noticed it when I checked the streaming-topic as well. There used to be a lot of joking with Salty about her streams there up to two months ago. These days it’s mainly people basically demanding spoilers of what’s next, when it will come… like they are entitled to learn anything before it comes…
Just like they seem to feel entitled to use a topic like this one here, where they should express being happy that something they wanted fixed (I am SURE I would find all their names in the Fix-Dawnbringer-Thread!) to demand that their personally Nr-1-issue with the game gets fixed next and, since they are such special snowflakes, being upset that this hasn’t happened yet.
Honestly, this thread really makes me want to quit the forums, too, because people I thought were really kind and nice suddenly seem to have turned into… someone not as nice (I don’t like calling people rude things, so let’s leave it at that). And I am just confused why this happened. Have 3.3.s updates brought so much bitterness? I mean, I basically quit over everything - from lore to raid to invasion - so I understand that people are upset. But… that shouldn’t change anyone from being a kind person into a spoild brat.
I honestly don’t get it?
But yeah, guess this thread has managed to do one thing: Who really is spoiled and feel entitled to things by being a regular here and who just cares a lot about the game. Because yes, there were also a few positive surprises about some people here.
Seems like a bit of an over-reaction… I actually went back and scanned the whole thread and didn’t find anything particularly toxic, crappy, or hateful. But YMMV.
I’m trying to articulate why I think this happens with most F2P games in a post, but just for you, bunnymancer, I will provide a quick summary:
“Normal” games like Super Mario Bros. 3 are fixed. By that I mean the way it released is the way it will always be. You’ll never wake up to find suddenly SMB3 has incorporated a new puzzle mode between stages. You pay your however much money knowing what it is and knowing it will never change.
F2P games like GoW are constantly in flux. They release in one state, but to stop players from getting too burned out/bored there is always the promise of new content. They add new levels. New items. New ways to play.
Over time, people get bitter because some version of the game is “how they wanted it to be”, and the game will inevitably divert from that path because there is no way to satisfy every player.
GoW has a lot of games with different playstyles within. There are a lot of players who have been playing for years, and they’ve seen a lot of changes. Inevitably, not all of those changes are their favorite. This is a recipe for an environment where any change at all is the worst thing ever, but also no change at all is the worst thing ever.
The nice, not-toxic players realize they aren’t having fun and quit. As time passes, the probability that what remains are the kind of people who will happily stand in a fire ant bed to complain about the bugs in your yard increases.
That makes a lot of sense, though it doesn’t really explain to me why things are the way they are right now. Like, the UI update was so horrible and so many people complained, but it was still so much more civil (as that was what brought me here to the forums, I would have never stayed if the community had been like that back then). I’m not sure if ‘civil’ is the right word, either - maybe I’m looking for something like ‘demanding’? I’m not sure.
The thing is, I feel like people have forgotten in the last two months that the devs are a small group of people. What I see are the following things:
People want spoilers for updates, ever faster updates and changes and bugfixes all the time.
If these things don’t come fast enough for their taste, they just keep asking over and over (formlerly in the Q&As, now in the stream thread, asking for previews)
People forget that the devs are a small team and are also humans who need rest and sleep and are also obligated to produce new content by their contracts with the publishers. So basically, people demand that a very small group fixes all the bugs, revamps major game content like PVP, pushes out new content in a speed that allows people to get previews of things basically whenever they please, answer support tickets faster… the list goes on. How the devs are to accomplish this all, no one says. The funny thing is that the people who demand the most things are also the ones complaining the most when new things then happen.
I checked by now and no, I won’t name names, but there are people here who now complained about the Dawnbringer fix who did post several times in the Dawnbringer thread about how bad this issues was.
And none of this was that bad when I joined even though the game existed several years already then (I joined September last year).
This might be the first time that my stubborn persistence alone has resulted in me being indirectly characterized as not-nice and toxic. But eh, if the shoe fits…
It’s always in flux, this is sort of in reference to that guy with the numbers too.
I think GoW devs have been very focused on new features, and doing that means letting bugs sort of pile up. People are mad about the bugs and madder that there are new things. I think a lot of people want to get GoW from right before the UI update and play that forever. Some people want it from right before the Raids/Invasions. Some people are fine with it all and just want some peace.
I do think it’s true, though, that every major update means we lose some players. It’s unavoidable and that’s not a commentary on whether I think the devs are doing well. If we lose more “nice” players than we take in, it gets hard to maintain a cordial environment. It can be a feedback cycle, too: as “nice” people post less and less, there’s less “nice” stuff to read and that encourages more people to withdraw.
There’s… not a well-known solution. Maintaining a community around a thing that stays positive for a long time is a very difficult feat. It’s very hard to convince nice people to stick around when everything else is not-so-nice. But if they don’t stick around, the nice people tend to all depart.
Edit
Also seriously some of the snark about how easy it’ll be makes me wish each player’s username incorporated their lifetime Arena record.
(I’ve actually been trying to make a rhyme about it but it only works if I can sing it. And it’s really big right now and I need to be doing other things besides editing images.)
This forum is not a contest to know who are the best friends of the devs or not.
DB issue happens 6 months ago and it was corrected with the easiest to implement fix, so that’s normal that some players are disappointed. For me, there was 2 mistakes:
waiting for 6 months to correct what devs considered as a not-so-important issue
choosing to give an huge advantage to the player in Arena: that means if you want to be competitive in the Trophy Leaderboard, you have to farm Arena. And does Arena should be the place where to farm trophies? Or should it be the draft mode of GoW?
