It does matter what happens in Gems of War. At this rate of bad decision making and lack of follow up and repair, I will not spend penny one on PQ3.
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What about the intern that gets him coffee 
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I really feel like the decline* is far deeper than GaPs. They are a symptom that causes problems. In my opinion this starts all of the way back around the time when Epic tsks were added. It was then that the raging player base was told that the game was being brought in line with the rest of the industry. If you look at the rest of the live service industry, particularly free-to-play mobile games with tons of low-quality shop-driven mini events that want cash and/or resources spent you’ll see that it has.
We went from one main event each week to a main event, 3 standard daily events, and a weekend event; almost all of which included a resource cost. Then came campaigns, which i feel like were the true, Destiny-Style FOMO cash event (and guild wars no longer being a break from the resource drain). It worked…players began began coughing up cash so they wouldn’t miss out on troops, weapons, and books that would be difficult to obtain later or practically unavailable any other way.
Then GaPs. It’s harder to see these days, but I’ve always seen this game’s in-game economy as bring tightly balanced against the cash flow. Things have to be drawn back or shut down when things get out of balance. The first GaP weekend wasn’t the first time a weekend thing was axed mid weekend. The very first vault weekend got dialed down to almost 0 when to many vault keys were being obtained and Cedric was getting worn out. GaPs could could only be sustainable if there was sustainable cashflow. Gaps are a great way for new players to get caught up and be able to participate in everything the game has too offer, but as people have learned to min/max vault weekends, I imagine that predicament is now a huge factor in balancing the economy, if not a full-on “can we afford to run a vault weekend?” scenario.
I mentioned Destiny earlier, because Bungie gave us insight into this “industry standard” with a GDC presentation. GDC is devs sharing their successful methods with other devs, so they can be successful too. What Bungie said at that conference was that velocity - the rate at which new, cash-based content is shoveled out - is more important than a quality product. Whether IP2 was directly influenced by that GDC presentation, or if the industry standard is just aligned with these values in general, the presentation says it all. “Successful live service games emphasize quantity over quality…even if the product is non-functional at release.”
Gems of War has been on that train since just after that presentation was made; kingdom passes, legend reborn, and holiday events. At every turn, bugs, broken features, and poorly designed “something new” keep generating dissatisfaction and outright fury; missing crowns, krinklemas bans, elite campaign pass being given away; achievements being delayed or non-functional, and a new game mode with restrictions that make zero sense, just to name a few. These forums have been a dumpster fire since December.
Since that little presentation Destiny has been a dumpster fire too, and the toxic player base there is beating Bungie over the head with their own words. The devs don’t respond on forums there, but one had no problem tweeting about already having the players’ money and thus no reason to fix something.
INDUSTRY STANDARD
Live service games are dropping like flies, lack of new ways to wrap the same treadmill in new colors, coupled with poor delivery, unmanaged power creep, and an increasingly complex and cross-wired coding has games circling the drain.
KEEP PUMPING OUT CONTENT AND MONETIZE IT
Every change to the game now affects something else that affects something else that affects something else…bugs get nastier (and start unjustly banning people…)
What do they need in order to fix it? More money…more events, more ways to keep the players time, resources, and wallets engaged.
tl;dr The problems for this game started by chasing what everyone else was doing.This industry is eating itself to try to keep up with the energy cost of eating itself.
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I would agree with that assertion. Back when Salty ran streams as the community manager, she often stated that the studio followed industry best practices.
I’ll add another lens for your analysis, that much of the anger derives from the fact that originally GoW did not push monetization hard at all at first. The push really didn’t start until version 4.0 with the introduction of the Zuul’Goth event mode and what would eventually evolve into the weekly event rotation. Over time, the monetization of the game has steadily increased. Salty also said back in the day that each of the updates had to be self-financing to cover development and deployment costs, and as such monetization functions of an update took priority over developing other things. That observation agrees with the analysis provided in your post. It would also be expected that publisher at some point in GoW’s life demand that the game be able to run on it’s own two feet without significant publisher resources financing everything. At some point every live service game (or any business for that matter) has to sink or swim.
That said, Gems of War is 8.5 years old, which is highly notable for a live-service game. Very few live-service games are functional that long, though Puzzle and Dragons is on year 11 and is still going. It was also known from back in the day that GoW had a five-year operational plan and needed its scope resigned to to last as long as it has. But the game is once more approaching the end of that expanded scope and the devs have signaled that the scope of the game is being extended (“big plans”) once more in version 7.0 (which Jeto has alluded to is the next update).
Side note: While I was searching Steam for the original PC launch date, I can across a couple teaser screenshots with possible new card design formats works-in-progress for 7.0?
On the PQ3 side of things, the game has been baking in the oven publicly for over two years and has been rewritten and re-refined multiple times over the years. The final (as much as a live-service game can be “final”) launch version of the game is being released in 2-3 weeks to the consoles and IMO is functionally Gems of War II. The whats and hows of things in the game may be a bit different from GoW, but for all practical purposes, the final launch version is a modernized version of GoW that feels much fresher and has much deeper gameplay. Passes for game modes are very visible and present, but they don’t feel tacked or bolted on to the game mode for purely monetization purposes, like they do in GoW. The game was built around the passes from the ground up and as such there won’t be a perception of a pre-monetization time for player to perceive and then rage against in the future.
As GoW is aging and no one can say for certain how much life the game has left in it, the studio had to come up with the next game to employ them for the next decade in case GoW reached end-of-service before it was planned to do so.
I also agree. I also believe that this was the economic Pandora’s Box that severely damaged the game’s economy and should have been clamped down upon harder than it was at the time. Folks in the other thread worrying about an Ironhawk rework are right to do so. Better late than never, the devs could indeed use that opportunity to redesign Ironhawk to stem the economic bleeding that frankly needs a tourniquet at this point for the reasons you mention.
One last point, regarding industry standards. What I haven’t seen talked about much yet is industry standard practices when a publisher operates multiple live-service games simultaneously and controls the IPs for them. What they tend to do is run collaborations to cross-promote both games and drive engagement.
Both games already share significant resources between them (for example, the gem dragons in GoW are repurposed/renamed major dragon NPCs in PQ3). It would not be that much of a stretch for either game to formally extend into each other. Major PQ3 player party characters can easily have GoW troop cards made for them and could be assigned to a future kingdom. For all anyone knows, if the devs ever do cross-promotion between their games, the long-lost promise of a third world map from a long time ago could very well end up being Etheria.
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sorry to burst the bubble, those were just one of the old redesigns that the Gems of War community overwhelmingly rejected (rightly so, I didn’t sign up to play a cheap phone game)
The nice thing about Tacet streaming for so long as is that you could look through how things used to be.
From 5 years ago
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We need you back
I’m vip 20, 11, 8, 9 and 5 not free just fair. These trials are a bad addition. They can’t level classes. Feedback is ITS TOO HARD!!
Thank you for teaching me something and your unique point of view
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I agree with most of what you said except the holiday events. It’s an easy way to fully level a pet and we get some much needed cosmetics. It’s always completely baffled me why they made character customization a thing and then basically did nothing with it. Legends Reborn is also another great way to get a fully leveled pet without having to spend gems. It’s just so mind numbingly tedious, but considering how hard getting a fully leveled pet is, I’m willing to bite the bullet.
I completely agree with you and it’s rare for people to understand this is exactly why live service games of any kind (pc, mobile, etc) are often such money grubbing trash fires. The game industry as a whole has figured out over the years that predatory practices get them a ton of money. There’s very little regulation on it, so why wouldn’t they? Fomo, loot crates, microtransactions, battle passes, it goes on and on.
We can see this time and again in Gems of War. Just a small example that really annoys me: they recently took away rerolling tasks and what do you know? You can spend gems to do it instead! Small, insidious changes like this that a lot of people don’t notice or think about along with the overt industry standard, as you said. Very well done post.
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It’s just business. You’ll soon innerstand that.
Well said! When ftp live-service games became ubiquitous, I could see where we would end up. There is no such thing as a free game. There are games that cost the same for everyone and then there are games that some people pay too much for and others pay too little for. When that too much, too little equation gets too far off balance, it draws more people into the “too little” camp, which forces the company to raise the prices of “too much.” This throws the balance off more, causes more people to join the “too little” camp, etc etc. The process is slowed by the barrage of new content and FOMO, but it’s still gonna end in a pile of ash.
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But that’s my point. There is no way to do “fair” cost for some and free for other people. If it’s free for some, that means those that pay, pay for the free people too. In the beginning it can sort of work. But as more people play a game ftp, then it becomes costlier for those who pay. Then it gets to a point where those that pay, get sick of the higher and higher cost and go ftp. That makes a company have to chase more money from those still willing to pay. Eventually, there will not be enough people willing to pay to continue the game.
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I’ve wondered the same thing. I cannot comprehend why they would remove content from the game. What’s worse is they replaced the content with a terrible, frustrating piece of content. Why not just add more content to the game? I didn’t play challenges a lot, but I still used them every once in a while to complete a task or get the kingdom’s level up. They were fine as is.
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It’s not hard to figure out IMO. It’s all about players must not have been purchasing and spending enough in game currency types. Solution - Change the game so that certain elements are going to require more currency to achieve. It is also possible as others have indicated that this is intentionally self destructive, but if that was the goal it feels like they could have done something with less re-write than what they did.