What’s that you say? Delves take too long? Couldn’t agree more, please pass that along to the devs.
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We are all given the exact same amount of time.
The big disconnect is that your company seems to think that y’all are the only ones who don’t have enough time to play Gems of War.
Personally, I feel like the game should be more friendly to those gainfully employed that can afford to spend money on a video game. That don’t want to devout a whole weekend to be being beaten in the head by “gimmicky mechanics”.
Your Faction Troop designers feel they need to punish those who enjoy Factions and Delves. Most people don’t like to spend money and be given frustrations in return.
TL:DR… No one can blame @Saltypatra for not wanting to do 100% Faction Team builds during streams made to literally preview those Factions. The troops and synergy is quickly becoming the worst aspect of Gems of War. And these streams are meant to promote the game. Not show how badly designed the Faction troops are.
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The one benefit to poor faction teams is that they make farming delve runs at 500 possible. I use Mirrored Halls for mine. Lose a troop? Get out of order? Not a problem, because I know the final room is a joke. But yeah, faction vs faction was not funny.
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On the contrary, this is exactly what we want to hear
Now, pretend we were the ones saying it to you
You’re saying you don’t have time to practice and do up to 5 battles to stream
But we have time to do 250+ battles of increasing difficulty after spending 2000 gems to try
If you don’t do it with massive potion buffs, your chance to win is next to 0
I pulled it off with an hour to spare with lucky rng, but I know I’m the extreme minority
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We all know that a level 500 faction-team-only run is one of the hardest things in the game. Delves are designed that way - for endgamers who are looking for a challenge. Why argue for a streamed run of something that we all know takes immense concentration, time and also luck?
I think some faction troops could be better designed, but even that chaotic werewoods team was a nice strategic challenge - when to transform, keep torben at full mana, organize 13+ reds, remove useless birds …
For context: could not do it at two tries with 4 tier VII buys and hoard level 100, did it at first try with 5 buys and hoard level 150, no bonus - so yes it was one of the more expensive ones, but definitely doable with higher hoard levels + 50% kingdom bonus.
I like the delves the way they are. Contrary to stat buffs from epic tasks that only some guilds can achieve and only sigil based events you have the choice to advance your delves at your own pace or buy in at first weekend.
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I think a lot of you have missed the context of my post. I work at Gems of War. I already live and breathe it. I do not have the time in my working week, at Gems of War, to do what you want. Therfore, it has to come out of my personal time. I already work 38-42 hours weeks for Gems, and work weekends where necessary as well, meaning some weeks I work even more hours more for Gems of War. As such, when I get down time, I don’t always want to focus on my work further, when I have social comittments, skills I’m honing, cleaning to do, or a partner to spend time with.
Typically when people leave work, they want to be able to do something that isn’t work related to reset and unwind. I am the same. I do play Gems of War in my own time, but I also need space to be a human being with interests outside of this game, for the sake of my own wellbeing and mental health. The argument a lot of you put forward is that you have the same amount of time in a day as I do to play, this is technically true, but purposefully ignores everything I have outlined above. To be clear, I already spend 38-42 hours a week actively invested in this game, as it is my job. It isn’t playing in the same context, but I am active across a lot of our processes, interact with the community, write parts of the story, and play around with new troops or test upcoming content so I know how to show it off on stream. (This is typically updates.)
I don’t think any good will come of discussing this further, so I won’t be replying to comments or questions along these lines anymore.
In other news, I will be streaming again today, and it is a break stream. I won’t be previewing new content, as we have a lot coming up in the schedule.
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Sounds more like what everyone is saying has gone over your head
Forget it…
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I agree with this 100%, but I think the point is delves are too time consuming, too difficult, and generally bad design wise. If someone played the aminthrax faction, that big on release would have been caught. If the devs don’t want to play, why would they think it’s fun for us? To an extent, I’d say most play factions to keep up with the troops and stat creep.
I think delves throw too much rng and bad design on top of inflated stats. Mirror matches get harder and the troops have huge weaknesses and some rooms can add counters with no way to finish the high level delve.
The kingdom bonus is gauze around a knee scrape and potions are a tiny bandaid. Buy enough, and you cover it, but not very well.
With the rate of faction releases and new gold sinks, I think it can be agreed that there needs to be a change to the gold or treasure requirements for high level boards, or the mode won’t have much of a leg to stand on.
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Step 1: Create GoW account for streaming purposes.
Step 2: Use dev powers to make it hoard 100, all troops unlocked and maxed, upgrade kingdoms to max levels, and anything else endgamers may have access to today.
Step 3: Show on stream how fun and doable the faction run is.
Total personal time spent = 0
Plan B can of course be to ignore the above 3 steps that were the main request, and talk about how your personal time is not enough to be a hardcore GoW player. If following Plan B, a hardcore streamer substitution may be in order for the particular faction demonstration stream?
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Unfortunately it seems that I am your stream host and you are stuck with me. <3
Not only do our other team members have different jobs, but one of my many repsonsibilities is to protect them from the community. As such, not many appear on stream, which is often for the best. For the most part you are a wonderful community! However, a few bad apples ruin a good bunch, and it is not appropriate to expose those developers to potential abuse (which definitely does happen, on and off stream) when it is not within their role to be dealing with the community.
Tacet is a great example of a hard core streamer who regularly plays all parts of the game. I always encourage people to follow him because I think he creates amazing, unbiased content.
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So: that’s a ‘no’ to plan A?
For those not in the Know: Warlords 1, Warlords 2 GOLD, Warlords 3 Darklords Rising, Battlecry 1, 2, and 3 are all available on Gog.com.
Warlords 2, Warlords 3 RoH, and Warlords 4 are not available yet.
I doubt that Warlords 2 will ever be available again since Warlords 2 Gold is a very enhanced version of Warlords 2.
And Warlords 3 Darklords contains everything that Warlords 3 RoH had and more.
So, the only game missing from the Warlords series would be Warlords 4 which I understand was NOT a IP2 designed game at all.
I would just like to say, I love the streams as they are. I think having someone engaging with the players live, giving out bits of info while showing a bit of casual gameplay, is way more beneficial all around than watching someone spend an hour or two trying to beat a super challenging game mode while ignoring everyone because playing requires all their focus. Thank you for doing the streams, Salty! <3
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I think attempting to pawn this off on Tacet is rather inappropriate. While I agree, he does a lot of good things for your game and this community he is in no way affiliated in any sort of official capacity like you are. In other words, he has no say on the direction of the game. Like us, he is forced to just grin and bear what the devs produce for us to deal with.
I believe the point of this discussion has been focused on having someone that actually works at the studio attempt to play the game as it is. As close to an “end-gamer” perspective as possible. Salty, you make this sound like it’s an unreasonable request that would require you to change your life completely and become a recluse in order to fulfill. That’s crazy. As mentioned already, we aren’t asking you to dedicate thousands of hours to the game to meet this request. Use your dev tools to create an account that resembles an end game player and have a go at a level 500 delve using a pure faction team. It would make for an entertaining stream.
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And it looks like you are stuck with us as community. Sometimes life just isn’t fair. 
Getting back to level 500 Delve runs, players have been complaining forever that some of them are exceptionally poorly designed for pure faction teams. The usual response thrown in every once in a while is “yeah, we are aware, we’ll think of something”, with nothing really improving. Which essentially leaves us with two conclusions:
1.) The devs are a bunch of incompetent fail-hards that couldn’t be trusted to boil water.
2.) The devs still haven’t understood what we are complaining about.
We can’t really do anything if the first conclusion turns out to be true, except maybe hope that they’ll eventually hit the bullseye while repeatedly trying to shoot their own feet. So, second option. Frequently pointing out All Things Wrong in writing doesn’t seem to help at all, whatever the communication barrier is, sky high apparently doesn’t begin to describe it. Some say that seeing is believing, so getting you to actually experience some of the pain yourself might actually prove enlightening. I’d suggest the following:
1.) Play a level 500 Delve using a pure faction team, hoard level 100 (I’d recommend Dark Pits). If you can’t dev up an account to appropriate levels I’m sure someone from the community can borrow you one.
2.) Let your thoughts be heard as you tackle the Delve (e.g. “Failed again in the first room!”, “This legendary room is outright impossible to beat!”, “Enough, I’d rather try to gift everyone a Deathknight Armor than beat this Delve, it’s far more likely to happen!”).
3.) Make sure to acknowledge that potions would make this level 500 pure faction run easier, except that one would first have to battle all the way from level 20 to level 500 on a single Tuesday evening to make it happen. Have some colorful adjectives prepared to describe whoever designed this.
4.) Conclude by assuring you’ll do everything possible to get this design atrocity fixed. Demonstrate your personal commitment by promising to play a level 500 pure faction run each week until this goal is reached, even if it frequently leaves bite marks in your mouse pad.
If that doesn’t work out, please don’t attempt to boil water, Australia already has enough problems with fires.
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Snark aside, I agree with the general idea. It doesn’t have to be a live-streamed event (though the schadenfreude element might earn a higher than typical viewer count). But I can’t remember if a dev ever claimed to have played/beaten a level 500 delve with the faction team. If it really hasn’t ever happened, then nobody in-house appreciates just how high a hurdle is being set for players.
And note that even if you wanted to buy 2000+ gems of potions for a Tuesday faction event, you still need to find the hours and hours to do it. This has prevented me from spending those gems on many occasions.
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Second that. I just can’t find the time to play several hundred progressively harder battles on a single evening. So, when Salty claims she can’t find the time to even stream a single Delve run, that somehow feels like she’s complaining about rain while we are drowning in the ocean. Possible ways already proposed a bazillion times by the community to address this:
1.) Prior to the first Tuesday Delve battle, let players chose whether they want to start at level 20 or at the highest level they’ve reached with that Delve.
2.) Make Tuesday Delve run from Monday to Friday inclusive.
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What I would like to see is the Tuesday delve be able to be played with your potions and sigils until you finish your sigils. You would not be able to get Leaderboard rewards after the 24 hours but at least you could at least not be pressured to do delve 500 in 1 day. I am not sure how hard this change would be to implement but I bet more would play the Tuesday delve if they could finish it without having to rush on a work day.
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Ahhh the paradox of Faction Assaults.
Those with the time to do 2500 Renown in 24 hours either don’t work or take off work. Which probably means they have less money to spend on a video game.
While those who spend money on a video game don’t have the time to do a 2500 Renown in 24 hours. Due to them being at work. And lately even 72 hours isn’t enough time due to the poor design of recent Factions. Those who work all week usually don’t have 8-10 hours just to do Faction Assaults on the weekend.
Absolutely none of what I said is even considered for a second when designing 100% Faction teams.
My illuminati agents inform me that the devs aren’t happy about how many folks get the new Faction to 2500 Renown during the release weekend. And therefore continually try to make it more Difficult to accomplish.
And if my agents are wrong… Then tell us why that’s not true? When your design choices have made the theory more factual than conspiracy theory?
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The solution is simple. Instead of increasing the delve lv by 10 each time it should go up by 20. This would cut the time in half obviously. Shop tiers could give out half the sigils to compensate.
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