Give us a chance to get Older Weapons

This is a frustrating aspect of dev communication and I’m especially disappointed that they keep citing, “We are going to work on transparency” but never keep that promise.

Up to the day of the announcement that the class change fee was going to be removed, the devs maintained their position that they didn’t want to and would not change it. There was a huge thread about it just like this. They could have said, “We get it, we’re investigating it, please sit tight and we’ll tell you when we know a timeline for fixing it.” That would’ve made a lot of people very excited and caused the thread to lose steam for a while. Instead, they waited until they had a solution to say anything.

(I sort of get why they worked that way so I don’t want to criticize it too hard but the point is next.)

So as far as I know, they’re actually working on a solution to class weapons right now. But they don’t tell us a word about what is in a version until it’s finished and committed, and they never, ever talk about more than about 2 weeks ahead.

That makes players anxious, because it means the time between “we deliver feedback” and “feedback is implemented” is as long as possible. Players are happiest when that gap is minimized. It is certainly true that many, many players aren’t satisfied with statements like, “This is a priority but we don’t have a fix or timeline.” Those players are giant babies and will be unhappy with everything. It’s not worth upsetting every other player because of them.

That said, “We’re investigating and don’t have a timeline” only works for so long. We have to be able to trust it when the devs say it.

One thing to note: the major threads like this in my career have been:

  • Dawnbringer in Arena
  • Class Change Fee
  • Weapon Costs

The two that have been addressed took at least six months of player focus to be prioritized. “Weapon Costs” is right at about six months old probably (I’m not going look up when Divine Protector exacerbated the problem and made it real.) So we’re entering the window that any day I expect a patch to be released where this is fixed, but it isn’t in the patch notes.

I have no clue why the devs tend to fix major player issues with ninja patches and no hype. I think that’s a big part of the perception that they don’t listen. I also think it’s a big part of why I detect dev perception is players hate all changes. We got a giant explainer about nerfing Legendary Tasks. Of course players hated that! We had zero official posts when Soulforge Rotation became a thing. I actually argued with a dev that it wasn’t implemented on the basis that it hadn’t been announced!

Announce the things players like, and you’ll get a lot more positive feedback! If the only announcements are nerfs, you can’t complain nobody likes the announcements.

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Much credibility has been lost and the worst was when they ended the tribute “bug” and not communicated it, then for players to find out (which was initially denied) and than came back with an official announcement.

Transparency of current is what they wish to communicate which would not impact them negatively.

All i want is not even a permenant fix for this.
Lot of our members struggle at events with mediocore builds in the events and even i feel sheepish now to post teams that half of our members can never build due to availability.

They’ve overwritten the weekly weapon in the shop on the Sin of Maraj week with Divine Protector (the irony to offer a divine weapon on a daemon week) and at this stage even the occasional overwrites would help.

It’s a win win for both so i see no reason why this could not be an option.

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My husband just got Mang a few weeks ago, has it been removed since then?

Mang is obtainable through normal gameplay as you increase your mana masteries

Hi hello it is me your Comms human.

I regularly bring up feedback regarding the availability of old weapons with our team, and have also done so with our publisher. At this point in time, we are flat out working on the next update, so there isn’t the time available that we would like to devote to this scarcity.

We have brainstormed several ways to help players get older weapons, but not all of them are within our means during out current development cycle. Also, many of the solutions will upset certain parts of the player base. For example, if we let players buy any kingdom weapon with money during it’s weekly event, there will be players that are unhappy that they have to pay at all. If we choose another avenue, we may not be encouraged to put it in game as there is no clear benefit of doing so. (And before anyone says anything, yes, I understand that the player sentiment would be overwhelmingly positive, which is something I care about deeply. However, if there’s no clear gain and a lot of time must be invested, a quality of life improvement will go on the back burner as we work on future updates. While you may see an obvious reason to do something, we need to back up every decision we make with hard data, and sentiment is not something that is easily identified or distilled into numbers.)

One of the main reasons we do not announce potential fixes and changes in advance is that sometimes we may be working on one, and not know when it will release. We may think it will take a few weeks, but complications may arise or priorities shift, and could turn this into months. When this happens the playerbase gets increasingly angry, often treating us more poorly than when we remain silent. In the interest of avoiding this behaviour, I communicate as much as I can without confirming firm dates, or giving anyone unrealistic expectations. Unfortunately, even when we say we are working on something, we often get players behaving badly towards us when it is viewed that we are not moving fast enough, even if we are deep into a production cycle and simply don’t have the available time and resources.

When we have a firm solution to this problem I will let the playerbase know ahead of time, and include what form it will take. It will likely require a major update to release, so like all of our large QoL changes I will make a thread and preview the changes on stream so the playerbase can have a deeper understanding of what we have done. To be clear, I am not confirming that we are working on any changes now, just that we are aware of the issue and have spoken about it several times in the past. I regularly bring it up with members of the team, and it is something that we would like to address.

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Changes take time, lots of it!

From Sept 2016…

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And those reasons are still as valid as ever. Things get pushed, priorities are established, and we need to juggle all of this as best we can.

As mentioned earlier, older weapon availability is a subject I have raised several times. When I know more, I will tell you, but at this stage there is nothing finite that I can release.

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I understand that. Just keep up the good work that you are doing. All of the gems of wars employers.

OK that was more or less the update I think we needed. Not what we wanted but hey, “we know this is an issue” and “we want to do something” are more than we had this morning? I’m going to use my own words and phrase the rest as “you guys can’t figure out how it should work either, we’re having just as many issues with that”.

So not next update, and honestly from the sound of it there’s no real timeline.

I mean, I could follow that up with something dorky and mean but I’m not really that spiteful. I just feel a little sad that there’s a batch of players who are going to burn out and give up instead of joining endgame.

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Just to be clear, I don’t remember promising anything, and Tacet’s information is second or third hand. If you hear it from a developer please quote directly to avoid misinformation.

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Well, seen i started in 2018 had no clue about the 2016 thread, reading basically exact same reply to exactly same request in a 2 years and half old thread make it clear it got 0 point keep talking about this.

Guess i was lucky and made right in time to get my beloved Yas Pride.

@Saltypatra Couldn’t you just offer the popular ones Earth’s Fury, Trickster’s Shot, Rope Dart etc in flash offers? It’s in the 4.1 patch notes that flash offers will have weapon deals.

If you offer the popular ones in flash offers that will make a lot of people happy while you can take your time to make a better way.

@Maxx, we don’t want to offer stop gap measures, and would prefer to implement a long term, final solution.

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You have said that with other things as well and it’s usually worth the wait. I trust you guys will give us a good way of getting them.

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@Saltypatra Keep up the good work. All of the Gems of wars employees are amazing and awesome. This game gets better every year. Thank you all for making an amazing game.

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I like the game.
It is awesome.
However it’d be awesomeR if you guys would come up with a solution for this issue sooner rather than later.

Thanks and no pressure :stuck_out_tongue:

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On the positive side, im at the top of the xbox leaderboard for owned weapons. Where i will stay :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Okay, I’ll bite and sketch another way to allow players to obtain older weapons:

Weapons have rarities now. Put them in the chests at low drop rates (similar to mythics). Us old folks will drop tons of keys on them.

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Needs a mechanism to avoid repeating weapons, but I like it!