Most regular games have a somewhat well-meaning atmosphere on their community pages, with the predominant intent to make things better.
Even if we reduce the scope to free “pay to play less” stuff, more often than not the positive and negative views tend to balance each other out.
And then there is the mutual hostility around here. I’m sure, if asked, development would claim, that the forum regulars, who have grown to expect the worst in every change, are overly critical and only represent a fraction of the players.
Doesn’t change the fact, that it would mostly not be considered a normal state outside of here, and even less one, that lasts for years.
Maybe because of money comes first, before us. After the ban wave, we got between 50 to 200 gems as an apology and a talk about an extra vault event when we actually got one less but when a campaign bug happens, it’s given to the “economy” what they deserve. The “economy” is more important than us.
From what I can remember, this community pointed out some issues that could have been bugs, but they didn’t have the access to confirm. The Devs, who had access, said “na, everything’s working normal, mates”.
Then some time later, they fixed those issues. No apologies, no recognition. This has happened many times since then too (the Maze banner, for example).
Then the old community manager started being real sassy, as Aussies do. There’s a few here that took issue with that.
Then the Lead Devs just stopped looking at the forum or taking reports seriously. They’ve moved on to another game (PQ3) and put this one on maintenance mode.
There are some players here that I view as overly critical, but I do have to admit that they are right more than they are wrong.
The starting point is probably different for different people and all of those starting points are valid. Its a combination of weekly new bugs (and most things released not being bug free) and microtransactions in everything being released compounded by dev team reactions (or lack of) to issues.
Biggest factor is the breakdown in communication started a long time ago… it just only got worse from there
It was more like a slow process, a mix of poor quality, promised fixes that never happened, lack of communication. I guess the breaking point for most was Weavergate, the grand finale in a series of extremely badly handled lootbox issues.
Personally, I think it was because the communications skills were lacking. The promises of transparency were criticized whenever there was something that unintentionally wasn’t clear enough, or where the info didn’t make it fully from design → dev → community managers → community. Full transparency in certain areas (event scoring for example) seems odd to me. Couldn’t you just let players figure it out, and tell them they can figure it out if they want to? Lots of other games leave these mysteries to players. For example, if they told people up front that the new dungeon wasn’t random (in game, not just in forums), people would have worked to figure it out.
Sometimes there are bugs that seem to be at a very basic level. For example, a troop just not working (eg the mana burn vulpacea troop). It makes you feel like they don’t care enough about the game to get it right.
However, there are plenty of times when the devs should have pushed back against players being too entitled. The ‘scheduled’ gnome event controversy seems absurd to me. In general, I think most people don’t push back against the louder player base; it feels like a waste of effort. It’s weird that some people are expecting so much from this level of f2p game, like they’re chasing a high they previously experienced and don’t know how to moderate themselves and their expectations.
Pretty much when they became more interested in writing lengthy pamphlets on all the reasons why they shouldn’t fix their process or tooling instead of fixing the process or tooling.
“Please read the list of campaign tasks whenever they’re generated to avoid pushing broken ones live. Takes two minutes per campaign.”
“Please proofread / use a spell checker before hitting ‘commit’. Takes 5 seconds per line of text.”
“Start using a calendar for troop releases, this is the 237th time you’ve slept on a release. Takes 2 minutes per week to maintain.”
“Please launch the game on mobile to check for missing assets for new troops. Takes all of 30 seconds per week.”
all true. but to be fair, you could argue that all this time combined is needed to re-schedule and delay vault events.
it’s not like they would chill in a hammock on the beach. and they often tell us, they’re incredibly sorry. that also has to count for something, right?