Events, their rewards, and a need to rethink them

So we’ve got another Bounty event coming up tomorrow. And I find myself wondering “what’s the point” of this, after dozens of Bounty events. Sure, we get a new troop to nudge kingdom progression along a notch, but what beyond that?

Because we have a number of event types where the rewards simply aren’t meaningful anymore. That offer nothing to the endgame player and perhaps not even anything to anybody beyond the early stages of game progression. The rewards simply don’t move the needle because they’re paltry and they duplicate stuff that can be more easily and profitably farmed in other game modes.

Vault keys? Wait for a gnome weekend that comes around just about as often and invest the time in that. Throw a Gnome-a-Palooza or three out there and you’ll farm dozens of Vault Keys, more than you’re likely to see through completely finishing every other event in the interim.

Chaos orbs? Also plentiful, both from those interim events and from spending those Vault Keys, but with little of value to use them upon once you’ve crafted the handful of things in the Soulforge.

Ingots? They can always be farmed through grinding PvP, among other things.

Traitstones? Souls? Even gold? Easily and more profitably farmed in other game modes.

Cosmetics? Titles and Emojis and the like? I’ll bet 99% of the player base couldn’t care less.

I’m an endgame player, probably about as far advanced as any 100% F2P player can be. So what resources would be helpful to me, and where do I get them?

Gems are always helpful, and they do appear in the reward tables for some events. Not in really huge quantities, but one can get a steady Gem income by logging in more and/or by doing Treasure Hunt. (Even if Treasure Hunt is a boring slog and inefficient for that purpose.) And a couple hundred every week from Guild Tasks.

Diamonds are still helpful to me – I have roughly a half-dozen Mythics yet to craft and a new one gets added to that pool every campaign or so – but they’re probably a diminishing return at my stage of things. And they’re also available from some reward tables, plus the Daily Dungeon, and a trickle from Guild Tasks.

Forge scrolls would be great, and they only come around once every 11 weeks and even then only in one color. The soulforge isn’t an answer here because Cursed Runes aren’t available in enough of a quantity to assist, but I’m also waiting on the alleged changes to Daily Deals to introduce some there. I have at least one kingdom where I’ll have to upgrade a Cursed Weapon to remove a kingdom stars block, so this is an issue.

Dragonite would be a popular suggestion, here, but I’m willing to leave that one alone on account of it still being a recently-added resource. I hope for more ways to get it in the future, but for now it can be let alone (in my opinion).

But the big one? Deeds. (Also: Writs to forge into Deeds.) Because deeds are becoming (or have already become) a significant impediment to kingdom power progression. And even if you see them semi-regularly, whether from rare appearances on the Adventure Board or offers through Daily Deals / Arena offers (and being a player with enough of a gem income to take advantage of them), the number of kingdoms requiring Kingdom Power Level 18 is starting to multiply pretty quickly, with Kingdom Power Level 20 requirements perhaps a year away from starting to emerge. And those require huge numbers of deeds without a way for a F2P player to reasonably and/or reliably come up with them. Or to catch up to the already necessary number.

It helps that we’re starting to see more Journey events, and that Books of Deeds are part of that reward table. It helps if you’re in an active guild that completes most/all of the Guild Tasks every week because a trickle of Deeds (and Writs) can be had that way. But players are falling behind in this area, and Writs/Deeds haven’t become particularly more plentiful the way other past “new” resources have.

So it’s time for Deeds and Writs to be added to Event Reward tables, both as a way to refresh them with relevant currency and to encourage more players to participate in those events to get them. Not necessarily in huge quantities, but enough to get players outside the top guilds (who likely finish all of the rewards in the first place) to get them and to have meaningful rewards in those tables as opposed to the easily-acquired-elsewhere dreck that’s there now.

Perhaps 10 colored deeds per week based on the Event/Kingdom, with them stationed at Gates 4 (1 deed), 6 (2 deeds), 8 (3 deeds), and 10 (4 deeds)? Plus an Imperial Deed at the 12th and final gate? And some similar mechanism for Bounty and Faction Assault (weekend) events to make those more meaningful to late-game players who otherwise have little reason to play those events for paltry rewards as compared to the time invested?

I already skipped much of last weekend’s Faction Assault Redux; I purchased three tiers from the Event Shop to get a copy of the troop – which I promtply orb’ed to mythic for the kingdom stars without thinking, because I have that many orbs lying unused in my inventory – but I felt little inclination to play the event. If I play the Bounty event at all this weekend, it’s probably to have an excuse to avoid my family and guests over Thanksgiving weekend; I’m seriously considering just buying enough shop tiers to get one copy of the new troop and orb’ing that to mythic as well.

The Redux Invasion and Redux Raidboss events at least offer a new weapon to justify purchasing tiers, and as guild events they’re generally pretty quick and easy for a large(r), active guild to complete. But I’m just not seeing it for Bounty. Or Faction Assault Redux. Or even Arena, where the rewards are crummy and require tremendous effort even to get that far.

Something needs to change here.

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Some numbers to show how much rewards have been stuck several years in the past:

Upgrading a kingdom from level 15 to level 20 requires 30 books and 29 imperial deeds. There are currently 36 kingdoms, requiring a total of more than 1000 books and 1000 imperial deeds.

The Arena event rewards 60 writs for spending some major effort, roughly every 6 weeks. Crafting a book requires 50 deeds (plus other resources), crafting a deed requires 100 writs (plus other resources). To earn a single book this way takes (5000 / 60 x 6) = 500 weeks = 10 years of very dedicated gameplay.

If each weekly event as well as each weekend event would reward two books and two imperial deeds, it would still take at least 5 years to finish upgrading current kingdoms. This doesn’t take into account that new kingdoms keep getting added, and that the next mother of all bottlenecks, “book of imperial deeds”, is already waiting in the game files.

TL;DR: Could we maybe get back to being able to progress by playing the game, not just exclusively by opening our wallets?

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I thought about making a post on this, but realized it would only be looked on by other frustrated users.

Rewards have not kept up with the games progression. Most of this is due to Gnoma, but I have felt for months now there is no point in doing 90% of the content. Diamonds, orbs, and all crafting materials from weekly and other events?..Worthless. Asking me to drop 300-600 gems into an event to get 2 vault keys and 2 small and 1 large orb? Why?

Spoilers show they are working on some orbs that will allow weapon and pet progression, and this one change alone would fix a HUGE amount of the issues with end game content…but I worry that they will not put those orbs into the normal drop pool.

First thing they should do is put more deeds and the like into events. Second, when they come out with a new resource they need to ALWAYS put some of it in all events. Giving 10 dragonite in a weekly guild event would go a long way.

All of these changes would be VERY easy to do, and take just moments of the development teams time…so that means nothing will happen…for MONTHS.

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That wouldn’t be a problem if the remaining 10% would offer some reason to invest time in. My troops are all traited, my classes are all at level 100, my delves are all at 2500 renown. What I should be working on next is farming medals, to prepare kingdom power level 28. It requires 15 golden troops, a long grind intended to keep players busy.

I’ve already been working on it for several months, quite a few of my kingdoms now qualify. At least they technically qualify, in reality it will never matter. Because I’d first have to get past kingdom power level 27, which requires upgrade level 18. No amount of playing helps against that particular obstacle, it’s a paywall that can currently only be scaled with roughly $100 for each kingdom, and it’s only the first of several even higher ones.

I guess I’ll eventually get enough books from campaigns to proceed with one kingdom of each color, in maybe two to three years from now. I’m beginning to wonder what I should be doing in the meanwhile, farming more medals to prepare kingdoms that will never benefit feels kind of pointless.

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I guess I’ll eventually get enough books from campaigns to proceed with one kingdom of each color, in maybe two to three years from now.

Of note here is that kingdoms aren’t the only area where the release schedule for new ones far outpaces the availability of resources needed to upgrade older ones.

99.994% of GoW players are completely unable to farm medals fast enough to keep up with mythic releases. This was true for 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. I guess I’ll just end 2023 with ~112 mythics needing upgrades, up from ~96 in 2022.

The 20%(?) buff earlier this year may not even have been enough to compensate for the accelerated pace at which troops are introduced by the new passes/kingdoms/delve extensions etc.

But yes, they’re not going to bother fixing their pacing issues.

I’ve been struggling with this since GAP came alive. It’s two sides of a coin for me. I like the fact I really don’t have to do all the events after a day at work, because there’s usually very little for me to gain (not an endgamer). On the other hand I would love to play them again if there was something in it for me. Now I do some of them just for the trophies and leveling classes, because I’m not a fan of explore grinding. Some of the funniest aspects of the game went past so fast, like traitstones. I found it a fun hunt and now I have plenty, can’t really say when that happened, all of a sudden the hunt was gone as did happen with many other resources. And now the unpopular opinion… Without GAP there would still be meaning for many of the event rewards, so did they go overboard with it. For me a lot of the hunt was lost real fast, I couldn’t care less what I get from chaos orb and that is sad, it used to be a thrilling moment.

The last few weeks were stressful. Not just for me, but I’ve heard it from many. Lots of burnout around.
In this situation, the last thing I would want is to put more events into a “Can’t miss” status.

Obviously, my text wall in the opening post tells you what I think about the first. But the second? I can understand why the developers might want to tightly limit how much of a brand new resource is available for a while. And in the specific case of dragonite, I’m okay with that being constrained for the time being because it’s still a new resource.

But deeds have been around for a while, and they’re the de facto roadblock for a ton of players at this point. Sure, there are probably a few players out there whose biggest stalling point is not having all the dragons, but we do see new troops for every kingdom on something of a quasi-regular basis. And we’ll continue to see so; you might not be able to get to “maximum available power” in certain places for lack of dragonite, but you’ll probably be able to make occasional progress if you can obtain a decent enough supply of the other stuff.

Right now?

I have twelve (12) separate kingdoms that have an open “level troops” or “trait troops” task, something that explicitly suggests I’m missing available troops. Several of them are mythics, including most of the Gem Dragons, three of them are Tarots (Tower, Strength, Ace of Wands), plus Xenith and the new troops that came with the Broken Spire re-work.

I have two (2) kingdoms that have an open “upgrade weapons” task. Darkstone is a lost cause until that kingdom sees a new weapon, because my one missing weapon there is paywalled at this point (Soultrap). Stormheim either requires me to secure a supply of blue forge scrolls, or merely to wait until the kingdom comes around again and I can Soulforge the most recent campaign weapon. If the promised Daily Deals update ever happened, I could probably get forge scrolls from there, but I’d also probably try to “game” the system by upgrading all my other non-fully-upgraded blue Doom weapons first.

I have seven (9) separate kingdoms that have an open “medal troops” task, two of which are the 28th star task to get 15 troops to gold (of which I already have 10 from previous task levels). But I’m much less worried about those because that’s something I can actively grind if and when I have the patience to do so. I actually try and do some Explore 12 every day for tokens, so even though I’m slowly falling further behind on those tasks, I’m making enough progress to not be particularly concerned about that.

I have two (2) kingdoms that have an open “level pets to 20” task that are a lost cause at this point because the only things I’m missing are cosmetic pets not leveled all the way up. (Ghulvania and Mist of Scales) I can hope for the increasingly rare Saturday Redux Pest events, or I can hope for new pests to be released for individual troops; I figure one or the other will happen eventually.

But I also have four (4) kingdoms currently sitting on “level 18” tasks without the resources to upgrade them and several more likely to get there in the near future. And this without any reasonable path beyond spending huge piles of money to get there, having already used up most of my Writs combined with my stash of Deeds to just get two kingdoms there.

I see potential pathways for everything else, especially if all this rumormongering about new Gnomes and new Orbs comes to pass. But I don’t see a pathway for Deeds. Especially when the 16 → 18 jump requires 10 Books of Deeds plus the required pile of Imperials.

And that’s what has me frustrated. More Dragonite would be nice; more plentiful Cursed Runes would also be nice. But not increasing the supply of Deeds is probably a showstopper for a lot of people at this moment.

I like this post a lot. Let’s see what happens. This is a company that can tell us how many gems were exploded in an entire year by every player on every platform. They know exactly what they are doing.

However I’m pretty sure they will be looking at their numbers at the moment and trying to figure why the metrics and income have started sliding. I hope they are.

To the point?

The only way the Devs will change awards is if people and guilds stop mindlessly completing them.

They are a crew that deliberately thwart progress - see clicks on E12. Unless more players leave and more guilds stop insisting on progressing world events weekly, then it will stay as is.

Ive suggested to my guild and alliance that it’s better to try and go verses and vault keys than world event. Hey we have minor traitstones weekly in world events and people have100,000 of them…

They just redo the same argument - cater for all. So make everything punitive for the entire player base based on 1 player with zillions of resources. If that player gets near completing something - maybe a few L20 kingdoms, that player thwarts the progress for the entire remaining player base.

Specifically a recent comment about Dragons and pointing out that a few had all 6 Dragons already. They used the argument that it’s supposed to take a long time and then proceeded to change the RNG on the dragons for the entire player base. Fair does, their choice but I fear they will regret those actions as a line in the sand moment.

Personally I’m at a point where I’ve invested heavily in the game, done everything, gone all in like so many on kingdom progression and all of a sudden the Devs indirectly reduce my tributes by 90% with New Dungeon. So 6+ years of progression is curtailed, and it’s so transparent.

I’m sure there’s more players like me that stopped doing dungeons and everything except ToD and Journey. I did it to try and keep enjoying playing the game.

I’ve not done Arena in 2022, Bounty I ignored all year and orb the troop, although last time I played a bit for a few gems. WE is optional, as GL I’ve done T2/3 but this is the last week I do a single battle.

The Dragons are a choice, either spend 300 gems daily or fail or 1/20 days gain some Dragonite. On my 5th Dragon at the moment and the last 3 have been duplicates of the same one.

I’ve therefore taken the decision of no more gems on Dragonite and last couple of days I haven’t even attempted the fail. I’d not done dungeons for months prior to the new version, and I only did one yesterday to see if it gave 11 diamonds.

The game mode could end up being the death knell of the game. I feel it will turn newer players away more than anything else.

I’ve moaned about stuff in the past, gave praise on the occasions it merited it, but the new dungeon is just a disaster and is affecting game morale more then I can ever remember.

It’s not new content. It’s thwarting net gem intakes on all players. End game of end game it’s still thwarting net gem gains by playing. Yes there are ways to get gems, cash gold keys or glory keys, but that’s thwarted by volume sinking being obtuse (ofc it is).

Each time anyone gets close to medalling 2/3rds plus of troop base, we get an influx of troops. Hello common troops, dragons, crap kingdom troops, new timegating on old kingdoms.

If the devs really were interested in making progression a tiny bit fairer, they would have altered the offer system at least a year ago. That they haven’t speaks for itself. I cannot remember last spending on an offer. I have an imperial deed offer today - I may not even bother.

In the meantime they masqueraded New Dungeons as new content, when really it’s a daily gem grab unless you vote with your feet not to do it.

I have 3500 cursed runes and I’ve 7, yes 7 Hoard Mimics. Wth, all pointless in the space of 3-5 patches.

Then there’s another point. If nobody says anything or makes posts that aren’t enthusiastic about everything, then the cash grab and barriers to progression will get worse for all. They still may but…

That’s not being toxic, it’s pointing out that it’s not all hearts and flowers. The forum gets too much stick in my opinion.

So sadly I hope they don’t change rewards, unless it’s knockout improvements.

For some the less game modes the better. We’ve been saturated with simultaneous, samey content recently and afterwards, I’ve actually thought what for? Unless it’s knock me out type stuff - I’ll wave and spend less time in the game. Which then leads to a wider point of why play. People only for me and B1 wars.

I’ll keep my gems and stand by.

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