How do they mess up this bad EVERY TIME? Depths Below was one of the most boring, useless updates in years. Release a troop that literally costs over 3000 gems to get enough copies to make mythic, and you can’t even use it in the delve it’s meant for. Make players spend a 10k gold “entry fee” that gives them nothing of value (1 gnome that can run away and “4 extra gold on 4+ matches” trait).
Seriously, how do these game developers think up the worst ideas, consistently?
So true. I got minor traitstones from deep delve treasure room. So bad and very disappointing.
They need to re-do their rewards.
They need to test things out as beta release or something to evaluate the success of their addition to the game before releasing it officially.
Huge mis-opportunity to engage players and increase their happiness.
Failed to do the right thing IMO.
To be fair: potions in regular delves is a benefit to most players and has already let me progress in a couple of factions that I was stalled on.
The rest of it though, yeah, what a missed/botched opportunity: good ideas but terrible execution.
They do have beta testing; were the Deep Delve changes beta-tested? Was this another case where beta testers gave feedback that was ignored?
As has been mentioned before, Beta feedback is primarily for minor mistakes, such as spelling errors or maybe wording tweaks. I don’t know of a situation where a major update feature has been removed or tweaked due to beta feedback.
Then … what is the point of it? You have experienced players telling you “hey, this new feature doesn’t work / is unbalanced / is worthless” and … you just ignore it?
I feel like that’s the story of Gems of War for about 2 years or more now.
That doesn’t sound quite fair. Being able to buy daily delve sigils feels like a huge improvement for players trying to catch up. And while I was highly sceptical about that Auto Play Mode I have to admit I’m now a huge fan. We even got a few new pets to help us past task bottlenecks. That headliner though, Deep Delves? Calling it a wreck would actually qualify as praise.
From my experience, yes.
The beta testing as it seems to be run here is not to ask “should we be doing this? Is this a good thing to do?” but rather “does this work as we intended it to work?”
It’s held much too late in the development process for any feedback to be able to reverse course, everything’s already been implemented. They’re just doing one last run with players who have fresh eyes and fresh input. They’re read your feedback, but they won’t act on it unless it’s just really minor tweaks.
This was absolutely my experience as well. Community beta testers are brought in way too late for anything substantial to be changed. I’m more and more cynically taking it as free outsourced QC testing than giving the community any way to help steer the future of the game by giving valuable feedback. It’s neat to see what’s coming down the road, but the only types of changes that can be made are catching spelling errors or UI problems.
I’d be shocked if the beta testers yesterday didn’t catch the fact that the new troop wasn’t eligible to be used in the pure faction team. Either it was too late in development to stop with the devs already off for the weekend, or it was intentional.
Yesterday? The community already discussed Burning Ocularen not fitting into All-Seeing Eye restrictions about a month ago. I’d be surprised if the beta testers alerted Infinity Plus Two about this any later, provided they were allowed to give feedback about it.
I understand that its a known thing from Tarans, but what I’m saying is the beta testers wouldn’t have gotten their hands on the All-Seeing Eye event as it should go live until yesterday. The beta testing server is a 24 hour ahead headstart to catch things like Boss Rooms not progressing to the next level, issues with battle routing, etc before it is pushed live after reset.
That is when, in my experience, a beta tester hits the “oh shit we found a major issue” button right before weekend release. There is a small window of time between then and getting the devs to fix whatever is wrong. Catch them too late on a Friday and thats when we get the Our Bad email with 50 gems after weekly reset. Also, next time you see an event post where it says ”we are aware of xyz issue with the event" and you’ll see evidence of a problem a beta tester caught right before release where they didn’t have time to make a fix and just put the content out broken.
ONE DAY ahead of production? That’s not a beta test; that’s a release qualification, and a very rushed one at that.
If the sigils didn’t cost gems, then I would agree.
But if a player is trying to catch up on factions then they probably don’t have gems to spend on it.
Sounds like your favorite thing about the GoW update is the ability to not play GoW.
Kinda makes my point doesn’t it?
PS… The amount of clicks it takes to auto play, I can have a match finished by that time. 
Why not? This is a genuine question, maybe I am missing something. It’s my impression that potions available through hoard level now provides a path to 2500 that doesn’t “require” people to spend the boatload of gems on a weekend or a Tuesday anymore. So depending how people play, they might actually have more gems?
I guess it just depends how fast (or immediately) someone wants to “catch up.” For me I’ve always treated the delves like a marathon, not a sprint. I’ve got plenty parked on 2300 that I figured I would likely just never do the PF 500, now I’m interested again with the new features. And I would be willing to buy a few extra daily sigils for hard PF runs in the week of highest campaign stats , if I got motivated about it
Look up a term called “feature freeze” sometime.
v6.3 is delayed for the Switch version (which I have) so I can’t be a judge on quality yet, but I can definitely sympathize with some of the arguments made so far:
Deep Delves? I can see the criticism that if this doesn’t have a significant rewards boost compared to 2 normal Delves (at comparable level) the guaranteed Gnome encounter doesn’t feel like enough incentive to engage with the mode.
More Delve Tokens + Delve potions? This is an ABSOLUTE improvement for farming (normal) Delves, whether to grind Faction Renown points or just the raw rewards. And yeah, the news said these potions STACK with event potions which means saving you at least 30 Gems per event.
And if you don’t actually benefit from either of them, congratulations! Please do not proxy-complain for those who will.
New Delve troops? Okay, so Burning Ocularen not having any Faction colors is absolutely weird, but without further confirmation I can only assume it had to be deliberate (or at least impossible to miss) by the design team – “why” is a separate question, one which I would love to see an official response to but am not holding breath for.
The funny thing is, that was my first thought about the Auto Play Mode as well. 
Tried it out once, it’s aggravating to watch, mostly due to the AI doing stupid in slow motion. The way it kept looping mana feeders when all the heavy hitters were ready to go to town made me want to murder a piece of hardware. That’s when I realized you shouldn’t use Auto Play when you are able to play GoW yourself, you should use it when you are unable to play GoW yourself. Like when doing guild management stuff, answering questions on Discord or reading the forum. Replying to your post got me all the way to a boss battle, when the game would previously just have been idling in the background. Works for me. 
This was my thought too. What battle would I trust the AI to play for me that wouldn’t be done in a few moves anyway? I didn’t come up with much.
Hey, look on the bright side though, at least they didn’t add an achievement for winning a battle on auto-play…
That seems like it’d still need regular intervention to advance it to the next battle; turn Auto Play on; confirm that you want to turn it on.
If I don’t have time or attention to play, I also don’t have time and attention to babysit Auto Play; particularly as it’s not good at winning battles anyway.
I have a gold farming tram that I use on my other device. So far it has not lost at explore 12.
I use it either while playing another game or doing stuff like cooking.
Yeah, I don’t get to have it play that many battles but even 10 is better than 0.