I have to imagine that there are further enhancements coming to hoard bonuses. We should expect kingdom power to go to 30 eventually (orange+cyan stars), if not 35 (red stars). Maybe eventually we will get kingdom power or level bonuses that push hoard bonuses to—or even beyond—+100%.
Right now, certain factions are just miserable to attempt with a faction team at level 300+ (looking at you, Warrens and Sea of Sorrow). I guess eventually we will get enough stat bonuses that they become possible, if still challenging.
I’m just studiously ignoring all high-level faction clears. They’re clearly not supposed to be done, and attempting to do them before we get real support for it is a waste of time, resources, patience and sanity.
I see it the same way. Faction Hoard Bonus is a function of Kingdom Level, and the devs have said that in the long run that the intended max Kingdom Level will be 20. That would likely make the potential maximum Faction Hoard Bonus to be +100%.
Then, there’s that thing that will be discussed on Monday about 4.6. I can absolutely see that thing as a way for players to earn further additional bonuses in the future.
That “thing” shouldn’t have to be wasted on Faction troops though.
Plus the thing has already been discussed under other threads… All be it spoiler ones.
You should know as well as anyone that with almost any new system that is implemented into the game these days, that there’s going to be waste involved to extend the length of the time that system is relevant to players. See: Orbs of Growth, Coin Purses and Gold Rings, and on. That may or may not be the case here, depending on one’s perspective towards the matter.
And yes, there’s a datamine in the spoiler thread all right… that can’t be connected together in any rational way to explain how it all works.
Also, since you are being quite observant on this, did you notice how quickly Salty made herself known in the spoiler thread once the datamine was posted? I’m sure it was more than just to discuss Fullmetal Alchemist with the forum regulars. Just saying. She’s deadly (in a virtual sense) serious about this before Monday’s stream reveal.
And that’s completely fine. I don’t mean to push you into clarifying about it. I just think it’s important to make clear that the changes in 4.6 won’t “fix” the issues I (and many others) have with the Delves.
4.5 provided false hope in regards to Delves.
I refuse to stand by and watch the same propaganda be done again. At least not on this thread.
I’m not claiming you or @Grundulum are trying to lead propaganda here. I may or may not know exactly what you know in terms of 4.6… But most that are reading this don’t.
Will 4.6 help with Delves… Possibly. But not significantly enough… At least not initially. It’s great that the devs have long term plans… obviously that wasn’t always true. But Faction power scaling and difficulty shouldn’t be one of them. A goal that can be accomplished in months is tremendously more realistic for a game with service than one that takes years.
I remember viewing the Delves prior to release as the devs “going all in”. In my personal opinion, they are still on “tilt”. If they actually want to get ahead in the game and improve retention/profitablity. They need to make the game more catered to average Joe and not worry about the 5% of players who will make GoW a cake walk.
I’m really good at this game, I’m great at team building, I’m max starred, I’m a high vip, and I play the game way too much. NOTHING IN THIS GAME SHOULD BE DIFFICULT FOR ME. (Outside of Guild Wars.)
But yet 100% Faction teams are, will be, and continue to be…TOO FN DIFFICULT.
The best solution… Is still the simplest solution… Let me use a weapon/my hero.
It’ll still be Difficult for most and easy to some yes. Like literally every other SUCCESSFUL video game.
@Sirrian you’ve been a ghost so I assume you’re busy. But please if you have a plan to actually fix the issues with Delves. Let it be known to restore faith to your most devoted of followers.
Completely agree with you. But, as you allude in your statement, the devs are clearly designing endgame content to take years to complete naturally, with monetization being the only method of accelerating the completion rate. One only has to look at mechanics of obtaining Zuul’Goth and leaderboards to see this in action.
That isn’t going to happen either. They’re chasing whales. Just look at the leaderboard for the invasion event this week. I’ll use myself as an example. The guild I’m in is struggling this week to clear the event, so I bought out to Tier 6 this week to help out. I’ve perfect cleared the event, which gives me 376 tower kills through today, spending ~1000 gems (not exact of course, but good enough for quick napkin math). Tier 7 gives 20 sigils, which with ravens will yield 25ish towers times 4 for a decent enough ballpark number of 100 additional towers per Tier 7 purchase.
So, I’m at 376.
As of this post, 100th place is at 637. Let’s generously say that’s 2 Tier 7 packs with favorable raven spawns. That’s still 1,000 gems more than I spent. So 2,000 gems currently to place on the bottom of the leaderboard. Fiftieth place is at 804, let’s call that one more pack for a total of 3. Up to 2,500 gems now. Twentieth is at 973, let’s call that 4 packs. Top 10, five packs. Fifth, six packs. Third is likely at eight packs, and second and first somewhere in the 9-10 pack range. So, 5k+ gems for the top of the leaderboard, with a day to go.
And that’s only on PC/Mobile.
There’s completely separate leaderboards for Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. They’re making sweet bucks off of this strategy; far, far more than they were before adopting this operating strategy and catering to the masses.
Intentional by design. They’re chasing the same crowd to mega-spend on Tier 7 packs during release weekend. I have no way of knowing how many packs it took for the current PC/Mobile leaderboard leader to reach 18.4 million points. I’ve never come remotely close to 1 million in one of these events.
Beyond that, the plan forward for the rest of us to eventually clear these delves is becoming apparent.
Very slowly, spread out over many, many, quarterly updates, new systems and hoops are being introduced that if the player jumps through all of them, then the combination all of these incremental upgrades will add up to something meaningful. But, as everyone has posted many times over about deeds, this is going to be a long and painful process.
Since the launch of delves, there have been the following incremental upgrades:
– Faction pets (Delve Launch)
– Application of matching overworld kingdom team bonus to underworld teams (Delve Launch)
– Introduction of additional Kingdom Team Bonus (deeds, 4.5)
– Introduction of kingdom Faction Hoard Bonus (deeds, 4.5)
– Introduction of Xxxxx xxxxxx. (4.6) [spoiler thread]
– Introduction of Xxxxxx. (4.6) [spoiler thread]
4.7, 5.0, and beyond will surely add more and more bonuses to make high-level delves winnable with faction teams. Of course, there will be more jumps to jump through simultaneously, as well.
And that’s exactly why it will never happen. All of these systems they are putting in will be rendered meaningless once the hero(ine) is allowed to count as a faction team member. They aren’t ever going to give up that Potion of Power money.
Your definition of successful is not their definition of successful. You are looking at successful as a functionally whole game that is fully completable. They are looking at success in terms of financial metrics as a business. To them, the health of the game is looking quite well and their strategy is paying significant dividends to them.
And they’ll tell you the same line, as always, which is not incorrect. That they’ll continue to review the effects of each new incremental upgrade and “make adjustments” as needed (see strategy listed above).
Salty’s quite candid these days about things on her streams, especially the PQ one. She’s not hesitated to discuss the shift in monetization strategy (up to the limits that she is allowed to publicly discuss). The entire dev team has complete buy-in on the “new GoW” monetization strategy. Their current strategy is not going to change, and the continued growth of the game will emphasize that this is the right course of action for them to take (from their perspective).
It sucks, I know. All the beta testers know. Shimmra’s championed this cause on the beta boards for several updates now to no avail. Salty, nor any dev (even Sirrian or Nimhain) is never going to be able to come out and say that they can’t tell you because revealing such plans for delves in the future, even partially, might materially impact any future planned monetization strategy for the game.
I doubt there will be any real plans discussed publicly about any further delve adjustments until close to the launch of the next update.
The reason why those Leaderboards have gone up drastically is because they catered to the average Joe with potions. Those potions made it much easier to succeed in those events with minimal efforts. No longer shackled by the difficulty, the whales can then whale freely.
Before potions, many of the former events were unapproachable to people without the troops or stats required to stay even.
As a reference, in this event I got 5xtier 7 (2.1k gems spent in total), and with a perfect run (no losses, no ravens missed, full-clearing every run except one single pure faction run at 500) I reached 3.8M points.
Taking into account that a full clear at level 500 is approximately 100k points in this faction, I would estimate an added cost of ~600 gems per additional 1M points… So my guess would be that the current leader (at 24.7M at the moment) has invested roughly 15k gems to reach that point.
As long as there’s people around willing to make that kind of investment in a single event, don’t expect the current economic model to change anytime soon… seems to be working as intended
The “average joe” isn’t spening 5k gems per leaderboard event.
I’ll agree that potions have assisted the average player with clearing events. That’s a plus. But, at the same time, with an uncapped upper bound for spending, you are correct in that they also enabling whaling. It’s a win-win situation for the devs.
You are correct here, as well.
But, in the absence of potions outside of leaderboard events, isn’t this still the same situation the player base is in now?
We’re still left with the only feasible option being buying potions during limited time events in overly excessive quantities. And… isn’t that the point of this whole thread?
Indeed. The power of people with high levels of disposable income is not to be underestimated. If anything, this is an exclamation mark on why the economic model will never, ever shift back to the way it was (even if one blindly ignores the higher fixed costs the dev team incurs these days from language localization, multiple platform deployment, faster development rate of new troops, outsourcing of work [such as art] to third parties, and on and on).
I would like to point out in my recent combing of the Dev Q&A:
(Mild paraphrase for brevity) “We were just in a meeting for this in 4.5… there’s going to be something cool with the Hero, they can help you win the Faction event.” Source
It seems this was cut, hopefully it’ll be in 4.6.
I would be elated to see Hero + 3 Faction Troops become valid, although the Hero could probably beat some places on their own if you equip something like Earth’s Fury or Yasmine’s Pride.
Knowing that it includes all downloads of the game
Either way, .1% of people on ps4 having the trophy for maxing a single faction, says it all
Especially when I’m positive it’s also rounded up because they don’t do more decimal points
The former is considering all players who own the game and unlocked at least one achievement.
The ladder as well, but is mostly dedicated players who try to get all or most achievements in a game.
I know Factions were designed to be a gem and gold sink. But there’s a big difference between a kitchen sink and a sink hole.
(Assume that every quality 100 hoard cost at least 2k gems to get to 2500. I can’t even fathom how much gold and Treasures were required.)*
*I know a few can get to 2500 with quality 100, but exactly only a few so it’ll balance out.
So basically my question is. Is this the intended outcome?
Per another players request. Please allow me to include 3 more players that are also 35k Renown (but that I didn’t bother to look at prior.)
I agree with you on delves being too much of a gold/gem sink, but I think you know more than one player with max renown, there’s no need to exaggerate to make your point.
They never told me. I don’t check that leaderboard. Seems like it would of been way easier to ask them had I known (compared to asking out an outside guild person). And they don’t post about stuff like that. It’s not their nature to brag.
But I’ll be happy to include their info as well. (Without seeing it, I assume it’ll still support my argument.)
I don’t know what you think I’m trying to do. But keep in mind the devs always know way more than I do. So though I only knew of one (and now 4 players). The devs can see every single one (even those not linked to the database.)
