Ghulvania Power level

[Starlite]

This bug does not appear in the Known Issues list, so I consider it to be an unknown and unreported bug – until it does.

Platform, device version and operating system:
All

Screenshot or image:

What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
When the game decides to include a Personalised Daily Offer for Gems, I expect it to offer me something useful. In the screenshots, I’ve been offered a troop I do not need, while there are low-rarity troops that I do need.

How often does this happen? When did it begin happening?
The underlying issue has existed for well over a year – since the rather dubious “feature” was first introduced. This particular variant – where the kingdom in question actually could use a personalised offer, but a completely different (and useless) troop is offered – is new, as of whenever Goblin Bomber and similar troops were added. I’ve been sitting on these screenshots for a month or three because of the historical futility of reporting bugs that players consider critical, but support people and developers don’t understand.

Steps to make it happen again
Play the game. Obvious.

Steps Demanded of the Developers by the Players

1. Immediately add to the Known Issues List.

2. Figure out why the wrong troop was offered, and fix it (this could well be related to the indexing error that frequently afflicts the battle loading screen – which is also missing from the Known Issues List).

3. Reassign (or deassign) the Personalised Daily Offers associated with each Kingdom Power task, so they are actually useful – or at least, not useless (ie: if no useful offer is available, revert to the random offer list). This is so f’ing easy!!!

4. Rewrite your bug report handling processes so that they properly incorporate the priorities of experienced (or just knowledgable) players. Your arrogance regarding players’ knowledge of the game is unacceptable: we play the game; you do not – no matter how much you think you do, you have no clue about the reality of playing this game.

If you think I’m wrong about any of this, I’d love to hear your justification.

We care about this game, or we wouldn’t be so disappointed in Infinity Plus Two and 505 Games.

[ANGI]

sorry to tell, but the offer with boar rider comes from the open medal task, not from the open upgrade troops task.
be prepared to see sometimes a goblin bomber offer and sometimes what you mentioned here, until you have 10 silver troops.
but i agree, these offers are broken in general!

[Wow]

Yes it is the medal task giving you that. After that you’ll be fine here

. But you are right. It is a bug.

[awryan]

To be clear. I wasn’t asking if IP2 does contract work for other companies. But how much of Gems of War was/is contracted out to other studios?

At the very least, I thought you (or Salty) had gone on record saying the mobile ads were contacted out?

[Jeto]

@Starlite I had merged your new thread, into this existing thread where we have been sharing what information we have in regards to these Kingdom/Daily offers. So no update or response is missed across any new threads.
As with your responses @Wow & @ANGI

[Kafka]

@awryan

But how much of Gems of War was/is contracted out to other studios?

OH I see, sorry!

Ah yeah, it’s common for an advertising company to serve in app ads, which is what we’ve done also (we’re not a marketing company so let them handle that )

Otherwise, some of the game art is done externally, although we do have our own art team as well, it takes a few people to push out new content every week.

None of the programming is contracted out, that’s all done internally. We have expanded our team, and are literally right now still growing but we are still a small team, the entire company is still less than 30 people and obviously, some of those people are like myself, working on CX or other areas not necessarily directly related to the development of the game - ie like the actual coding and design. It takes a suprising amount of work to develop a game like Gems of War (or I guess, not surprising, depending on your background haha).

Basically, although the company is small and probably last time someone asked me, we had like 20 staff. I’ve lost count at this point and I can’t do a head count as we’re still not back in the office we have a larger team on Gems of War than we did before PQ3 development or covid started.

Which is great because we can address more things, but at the same time… it’s still a stretch, especially right now as when I mention the Guild mail issue, which is a small issue on the surface, it’s a large one on the back end.

Which honestly is entirely normal for games that start inching towards being a decade old. Before starting at IP2 one of the games I worked for had to be rewritten from scratch because the code was so outdated, while said game was still in live service development.

THANKFULLY, we’re not in that position at GoW, a stitch in time saves 9 and all of that but this Guild mail issue is one of those stitches in time which will eventually save us from that sort of drastic measure. One of the costs of that is, we have no time for anything else while that and the next update are addressed.

We’ve also been upgrading and improving server performance (if you notice some hiccups I’m afraid it’s all been part of the process sorry! The outcome will be worth it though).

Hopefully this gives some insight into where some of that Dev time is going and what else we have going on behind the scenes

I do like sharing this information and we have started a monthly community update blog on PQ3, I will let 505 experiment with that blog and then take lessons learnt there to see if that’s something that would be good for Gems of War as well (seems like it would be a win for our communication).

[Fourdottwoone]

@Kafka

Which is great because we can address more things, but at the same time… it’s still a stretch, especially right now as when I mention the Guild mail issue, which is a small issue on the surface, it’s a large one on the back end.

Okay, I’ll bite. What *is* that Guild Mail issue you keep mentioning? If this is about synchronizing guild task completion to ensure the reward mail pulls the correct data, any chance this will also fix Guild Wars total scores going out of sync?

@Kafka

I do like sharing this information and we have started a monthly community update blog on PQ3, I will let 505 experiment with that blog and then take lessons learnt there to see if that’s something that would be good for Gems of War as well (seems like it would be a win for our communication).

Maybe you could just keep talking here while 505 experiments? We do like getting information shared, even if it’s bad news, it helps to manage expectations. You might enjoy it more once you get better at dodging the bullets.

I still believe you don’t entirely understand the core issue regarding the daily offers. Picking a pretty common situation, in two weeks Leonis Empire will receive a new troop. I’ve got more than enough resources to fully upgrade and trait that troop, it wouldn’t just make it stronger, it would also unlock higher kingdom tribute amounts and add a notch to my completionist bragging rights. Apparently improving that troop is the most logical thing to do, possibly even one of the main goals in the game. And yet, if I really were to do that I’d suddenly never play Arena again, which I have been doing on a daily base for a long time. Are you able to explain why?

[dank-o]

Thanks for that post. Clear insightful informative posts like that do help to quell some of the feelings some people have (while unfortunately, some can’t be helped).
We (I hope) do know that game development is a complicated matter, and weird issues & bugs can sometimes rear their ugly heads.
But getting open communication about it does always make people feel like something is being done about it, or that it is being addressed, or at the very least, that it is acknowledged & known.
Interesting to hear that you are still not back in the office, so I assume the development is still mostly done via remote work & team video/chat, which I can easily understand can complicate things a bit. Covid did indeed affect everyone & how things are handled when it comes to the personal social aspect.

You mention the guild mail issue (and I recall you hinted at it before), can you elaborate for the curious ones of us, how it affects the game? I’m simply curious what the issue is and how it touches on us, can help to know what we’re facing (in case there is something flying over our head

At the same time, it reminds me that one of the things that bothers me with the game is the lack being able to send a personal message to other players, even if it’s only limited to guildies. On one hand, it makes things more complicated when a player can’t send a message to the guild leader to let them know if they have some IRL commitments that will take them away from the game for a while (and the only solution for that is to use discord, which sadly not everyone uses). On other hand, it also makes it hard for us to check on or try to help (discreetly) someone else in the guild, especially if they have been in the guild for a long time.
As example in my guild, we have a player who we guess/assume is russian, or someone from a russian speaking country due to having a name in cyrillic, who has been with the guild for nearly 3 years now (joined us randomly one day), but she (we are assuming based on the name) has never ever spoken in the guild. Only shared teams once in a while. We do have some people who can write/chat in russian, so it would be helpful to be able to communicate with her? just to say hi & check if things are ok, but since she? never talks in the guild chat, we can’t even know if she? reads the guild chat in the first place.
And for caring (older) people like us who just want to make sure everybody is ok, it feels frustrating to not be able to do anything.
(older here = irl age. myself I’m 50 years old, there have been older than that in the guild, and many are in the 30s or 40s)

But again, thanks for the post, have a good day.

[Djimbalimbl]

This post and the replies by @Fourdottwoone and @dank-o show perfectly, that dev priorities and the communities most desired improvements are completely out of touch. Devs are working on some kind of issue with the “Guild Mail system”, that almost nobody (or absolutely nobody?) in the community knows and at least I never was confronted with an issue with guild mail, that was blocking or annoying me or whatever else. However, working on this and the upcoming update is blocking all (!) dev capacities and the issue of the daily offer system, that is annoying all long-time players since many months, even since years, is left completely untouched. I am pretty convinced, that no one in the dev team and none of the support people in the forum is able to answer the question, Fourdottwoone rose in the last post (the thing about not playing Arena after upgrading the oncoming Leonis Empire troop…). Either at least one person in the dev team should start to play the game MUCH, MUCH more, so that she/he achieves a “high-end” account, that is facing all these endgamer problems or the team should finally start to pay MUCH, MUCH more attention to the feedback and suggestions by experienced players. I think, the latter option would be the easier way, but obviously it helps only, if the feedback is REALLY taken into account and not only discussed in a few minutes and the status of the bug reports is simply set to “not a bug”.

Having that said, the daily/Arena offer system in its current state is bugged and I don´t understand, how one could even argue about this. Two things have to be changed, and not at some unknown date far in the future, they have to be changed as soon as possible:

1. If a task can´t be fulfilled (fully upgrade 14 weapons, but only 13 weapons are available is the perfect example), this task must never trigger a daily offer.

2. For some tasks it has to be corrected, what offer they trigger. It can happen, that an open task is theoretically achievable. For example, I messed up in Zaejin and Maugrim Woods, stopped upgrading troops too late and now I am stuck on the “Upgrade Kingdom to level 18” task. I play the game since about 2.5 years and I simply don´t have enough deeds, I could accept this, I am just not playing long enough to have all those deeds. However, this now triggers several “kingdom helper” offers, and this very famous offer contains 1 event key and a bit of gold. This obviously will never help me to get closer to the upgrade to kingdom level 18. The triggered offer should be deeds (and we can discuss, if only green deeds should be triggered or just any type of deed and I have “bad luck”, if the color is wrong), but nothing else. Then it is my decision, if I want to spend this huge amount of gems on all the green deeds (and I need a lot, I am missing 11 green books in total…) or if I am “too poor” for that. But the stupid event key doesn´t give me any options, it is just stupid and annoying.

[Worm]

It seems like this is being looked at as needing a complete overhaul and maybe it does but several quick fixes could be made by making sure each offer proposed to solve a specific task actually is logical for that task and if it’s not or too often misses the target, just remove it while we wait for an overhaul.

I’d much rather have a general offer I might not really need right now than something that would make no logical sense whatsoever to buy like today’s sweet deal for 10 Ultra-Rare ingots (when I already have 7997) to help me upgrade Stormheim’s Doomed Wand.

[Wow]

By the way, Ghulvania, Maugrim woods, and Zaejin are all life Kingdoms. The next 2 coming are: Leonis → armor. Darkstone → magic. My purple books goes to Darkstone! Sorry, if you are so excited to use them in Ghulvania. Thinking to go beyond PL26 with magic and attack kingdoms only.

Darkstone has 14 weapons too.

[Dust_Angel]

To give some perspective in numbers…
I think it was March 9 when upgrade kingdom X to 18 situation landed and started seriously generating 100% useless and unhelpful kingdom helper offers.

During this time I’ve received 22 of them in daily deals middle slot (so - roughly one third of the time) and 20 of them in Arena (so - roughly one ninth of the time, as there are three helper-eligible Arena offers per day instead of just one helper-eligible daily deal).

[Wow]

Honestly, I am not sure what to say. Yesterday, I got an event key again, but today I got these offers again. I can’t spend 500 gems daily. For me, it is alternating deeds sometimes Imperial, event key, and writs.

[Kafka]

@dank-o

You mention the guild mail issue (and I recall you hinted at it before), can you elaborate for the curious ones of us, how it affects the game? I’m simply curious what the issue is and how it touches on us, can help to know what we’re facing (in case there is something flying over our head

I’m calling it the Guild mail issue as an over simplification

Basically we’re working on fixes/improvements to the way the game server/database handles large numbers of requests as we’re having issues with players not receiving all their Guild Task mail. The root of this issue is also linked to things like any issues with Guild Wars scoring and while I don’t believe we’ve seen it for the other live event scoring, it will prevent any issues occuring in the other live events in future.

Basically, what we’ve been calling the ‘Guild mail issue’ is a huge look into the way large amounts of requests hitting the database at the same time are handled so a bunch of issues players have been reporting can be improved/fixed and future proof everything else that could be affected as well. It’s mostly related to Guild stuff as Guilds hit the same part of the database at the same time most often because you’re all well coordinated Gem matching machines.

This is also just one part of some improvements we’ve been working on regarding the servers/database as well.

These are critical tasks to running a healthy online game.

[NerdieBirdie]

Thank you for the explanation!

[canadademon]

@Kafka

because you’re all well coordinated Gem matching machines.

Sorry, we’re just programmed that way.

@NerdieBirdie

Thank you for the explanation!

Seconded. Always appreciate the details!

[dank-o]

@Kafka

you’re all well coordinated Gem matching machines.

lol, that made me giggle

Thanks for the explanation, this makes a lot of sense. All of us WCGMMs who hit the servers early every week/day/friday know the feels of wake up lags (reset time is 7am on my side).

[Kafka]

We need a better acronym than WCGMMs

[Fourdottwoone]

@Kafka

We need a better acronym than WCGMMs

Well-ARranged GEm Matching MAchine = WARGEMMA

[awryan]

@Kafka may I ask why my post that pointed out these offers have been bugged for years was deleted by someone on your staff?

It didn’t violate any community guidelines unless we have grown to a sensitivity level that calling a bug stupid is now crossing the line?

As busy as the devs are, your players are 10 times busier. So spending 2-5 minutes to make a post should be appreciated and not just wiped away like it means nothing. I know are time and money is no longer appreciated. But I didn’t think even our feedback is now taken like a drop of water into the ocean.

Incase you haven’t noticed recently. There’s not a lot of players left that bother with giving feedback due to experiences like this.

P.S. Actually flagged posts are hidden first if flagged by the community. Of which this post never was. So then those players who like to flag any thing can’t be blamed for this.