^ This is were i think they need to design things with some extra attention. Darkshot can generate more gems than Flammifier, but it can’t deal extra damage like Flammifier does… Yes, more gems usually means more damage/opportunities in many cases, but the setup required greatly outweights the advantages, mostly because it has the same colors as Dark Maiden, which is a great troop in Zul’Kari compositions.
Changing the weapon colors to Green/Brown would make it better in many ways.
The reality is we are looking into affixes, and there will be a fix. There are many reasons we can’t announce an official date, and this is due to our update schedule and what the priorities for each forthcoming update are. We listened to player feedback and have been planning proposed changes behind the scenes, and I am sorry that I can’t more at this point in time. If we didn’t care we wouldn’t revisit things and make changes. We do care, there are just a lot of things we need to juggle, and we do our best to make sure as many needs are met as possible.
In regards to affixes, not everyone will be happy with the changes we make, and it’s worth remembering that these forums are largely frequented by end gamers. Even if a certain affix isn’t advantageous to a weapon, if we alter it I can guarantee you that there will be a player who liked it and will be saddened by the change. Balance is delicate, so we want to ensure we do the best we can for as many players as possible whilst we are addressing affixes and weapons as a whole.
To touch on the Arctic Fox and Frost Archer art, we understand that some vocal members of the community don’t like it, but it’s not a high priority for us at this point in time. Implementing fixes and ensuring that we have enough completed art for our pipeline is of much more importance than changing the art of two troops that don’t infringe on copyright or see significant use. We updated Phoenicia’s art as soon as we realised there was a problem with her spell image, and these are the sort of art reworks that we need to place priority on. There is a lot of art in Gems of War! As such, we are always trying to stay one step ahead, which isn’t always easy.
And i hope the team stop “juggling” because there is always some new “ball” or “juggling pin” (problems) being added before something else is solved or fixed, sometimes you drops the “ball” or sometimes something unexpected happens.
Phoenicia’s art issue was indentified and solved the best way as it was possible and any sensible person will understand that it slows down the schedules and plans, but as i said i find it very hard to comprehend how the team benefits from still releasing weapons that will need to be fixed later. It’s one more “ball/juggling pin” added…
Please, reevaluate the management practices, planning and scheduling for the game, it’s for your benefit as a short and long-term goal.
A single artwork prevented the release of a Mythic, thankfully that was solved fast since another Mythic was already done, next time things could end differently. And even though postponing the release of a mythic might be considered just the “smallest stone on the players’ shoes” you need to consider how many “small stones” are already there and for how long we were walking in those shoes…
You say the team cares. And I BELIEVE you all do, many others do too, but it’s time to focus on working better, not harder as you are doing! Stop “juggling” things and organise them.
We already have a series of management practicses and procedures in place. A game of this size cannot be maintained without them, and we have assembled an amazing, dedicated, organised and hard working team.
It is all good and well to tell us to stop juggling, but without being privvy to our processes and work situation, it is a suggestion that cannot be enacted. All game development is akin to juggling, there are several groups of players (and our publisher) who are all requesting different things, and have different ideas on what Gems of War should fix, change or add to the game. It is not possible to do all of them, whether this is due to time constraints, budget constraints, or the fact that two ideas may stand in opposition to each other, and therefore both cannot be implemented.
At this point in time we are looking into affixes, and previously our team was quietly working on the 50 gem fee class change, which we only announced last week once we were certain we could implement both it and a new feature that allowed hero classes to be attached to teams. We are always working on ways to improve the game, and listening to player feedback. We can’t do everything at once, but we do what we can, when we can, around our update schedule and future plans. These fixes and features are typically the ones that get “juggled” around our major updates as they (the major updates) are the highest priority for our team and publisher.
It’s also a common opinion I see voiced on this forum in particular that we don’t see feedback, when the truth is we see it all the time and have internal documentation and lists detailing it. We then refer to these lists and decide what we can do for the community.
Oh you have GOT to be kidding me with my biggest phobia ever
Yes, since i don’t have access to any insight about the processes i can’t really say what is being done wrong or right. But the bad upgrades still appearing is something that at least hints at bad procedures and management of designs to some level.
Consider it from this perspective: How it’s being handled right now, by still releasing weapons with bad upgrades gives a clue about these being randomly generated or simply being too contrived to be changed by hand (code limitations) or simply waiting for the fix anyway are all bad choices possible at different points in time.
The lack of cohesion in the spell effects/descriptions and nomenclature in the default language (english) is also another hint about bad practices and disorganisation, the most recent example was the Executioner versus all the other troops with the same effect but named differently. I could understand this happening in other languages, but not on the default one. Another hint at poor management and procedures.
You can say it’s just a small thing that will be “juggled” around until the team find time to take care of it, and that’s true for all accounts. But each time a new card is released with a spell effect/description mechanically identical to others, you pile up more work for the translators in the present and more work in the future as it’ll need to be reviewed too.
If it can be fixed FROM NOW ON, if you stop the “juggling cycle” of adding more and more things to be dealt with later, specially if they are small things like these, then you achieve the short-term goal of optmizing the procedures you have now. You are still working on the long-term goals and not making things harder for later.
Let Executioner be the LAST troop with a different wording on its spell description, if possible as i can imagine code limitations are in place from the hints i mentioned before, let the Darkshot be the LAST weapon with bad upgrades, it would clearly benefits more from an upgrade that creates purple gems instead of destroying them.
That’s all.
So, I’m sure its mentioned above, but why would I want to destroy 3 random purple gems (Umbral affix) if the whole point of the Darkshot weapon is to make purple gems?!
I wish they was able to push out a fast fix so it destroys 3 gems of any other colors than purple. At least for now.
My guess is they pre-emptively gave it the affix ID that will eventually read “gain 3 purple mana”. This is forward thinking so they don’t have to change anything once the affix updates occur!
But they could at least have changed the color of the gem it destroys for now, until we get the affix update. But possibly it is not that easy to change it. I am not a coder, so I will walk lightly.
Sirrian and Nimhain told us about fixes on explosion affixes. And that’s very cool because it’s worst offender from affixes. But I had a feeling that it would be only this fix to affixes.
Please, look into other bad affixes too. We have a lot of gem creation, gem destroy, storm (most recent example - brown storm on Doomed Club) affixes which cripples weapons.
And the explanation that fixes to affixes would upset not end-gamers who enjoy these affixes… That’s a lame excuse. They enjoy these affixes because they think that they work properly and are beneficial to them. I actually met enough number of people who thought that the explosion on Divine Protector is good… before they turned game speed to very slow and saw very clear how that explosion destroys their extra turn.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
The common opinion is that feedback not responded to is feedback gone unnoticed. We don’t see you seeing the feedback, so we can’t really tell whether it has reached you or not. Have you considered replying to feedback? It doesn’t have to be anything extensive, a one-liner is perfectly okay, possibly some rough indicator whether it’s likely going to end up on the “Yay” or the “Nay” list. I suspect that would go a long way towards making the community happier (or at least require us to spend more effort finding topics to complain about 
).
I have played a lot of computer games since I started with DOS based games like Dungeon Hack and Might & Magic I. I am amazed at how receptive the developers and staff are for this game. They respond on the forums and they answer emails, both which can be very critical. Although the responses and the people responding have changed over the years, they are still responding. I can surmise the reasons for this. A person can only handle so much criticism before they become defensive and go on the attack. I don’t think that has happened, but it is human nature to hit a limit of what you can tolerate. All of those times that Sirrian and/or Nimhain would be on Discord and would just pop in and give updates about what was going on? Or you could tag them, ask a question, and they would answer almost immediately. It would be easy to wax nostalgic about the “good ol’ days” when Sirrian would pop into global to just chat, but I can see why he doesn’t. Also, as the game has grown, the responsibilities of the staff have grown. Yes, new staff has been added but the responsibilities have also grown exponentially. Thus, the hiring of Salty to handle communications in order to free up Sirrian and Nimhain for the responsibilities that they have to do to keep the game going.
The new content that is released for the game on a regular basis is astounding. The new troops, pets, kingdoms and yes, fixes are incredible. There are some games that only have the equivalent of 20 troops. So basically, they are releasing a new game every quarter for free. Think of all that goes into that. Artwork, spells, traits, what banner or colors, wording, and then all of the coding that goes into that too. Then there is the marketing, financing and the rest of the business aspects of what is being released. All of this is going on quarterly and that does not take into account bugs, long term goals, tickets, hot fixes, oh and let us not forget the complaints and community demands both here in the forums, in chat and in emails. I am sure they are very glad that we don’t have the office phone number.
But there are reasons for some of the complaints. This game has been a part of my life for so long that I feel like it is “mine”. I have spent more money on it than I care to admit which also contributes to the feeling of being entitled to have a say about what goes on with GoW. This means that I want either no changes made or the changes that I want made need to have the priority. When this doesn’t happen, I get angry because my security and my finances have been affected. The forums are the one place that I can come and voice my displeasure and try and find other people that agree with me. I am not saying that this is right or good, it is just what happens.
I have tried to quit GoW a couple of times but I keep coming back. Why? There are several reasons for this. The first is because there is no other game quite like it. All others that are similar are just pale imitations of this game. I can play it as much or as little as I want and as my schedule allows. It is very forgiving in that way if you are in the right guild and I am. There is always additional content. Do I like all of the new content? No! Do I wish there were some changes? Of course! Is some of the content repetitive and a gem sink? Yes! But it is still different content.
All in all, Gems of War is an amazing game. Not just because of the game content, but because of the staff and the community that I am a part of. (even if I mainly lurk) @Sirrian , I miss the lore that used to come with these posts. But I do understand that time contraints. @Saltypatra, thank you for your patience with us. It is appreciated.
I try to respond to as much feedback as possible! However, I receive feedback across a huge variety of social hubs, so can’t respond to every comment around my other responsibilities. Also, if I have responded to a specific piece of feedback several times, I will eventually stop commenting on it, as there is little else to be said. This is what happened with the 50 gem fee class change, which I addressed several times before needing to move on, as we were still working behind the scenes on a way to assign classes to teams, and weren’t comfortable changing the fee until we had this feature completed and tested. It is also worth noting that a lot of people say that they want a response to feedback, but if I respond saying that it’s not something that is a priority at this point in time, or explain why it would be bad for the overall health of the game, I sometimes get a host of angry players replying to me and contacting me privately. Regardless of this, I still do my best to reply to a lot of feedback, but when that is the response it doesn’t make me enjoy doing so. I do it because it’s important, even though the outcome can be personally unpleasant. (Just for some context, @Fourdottwoone. Myself and @Cyrup were running around talking to a lot of players about guilds prior to planning the 4.2 Update, and passed on as much feedback as possible to the rest of the development team.)
When talking about affixes, I should clarify and say that we are looking into weapons and their upgrades as a whole.
Can someone tell me if I am crazy? I think Tarantella’s boost ratio might not be the x4 claimed in the tooltip. My Tarantella is supposed to do 32 damage, plus boosts due to webbed enemies. With three webbed enemies, I would expect 44 damage. With three webbed enemies, I casted my Tarantella against a Barghast with 42 health, and it lived with 4 health remaining. That’s only 38 damage, working out to a x2 multiplier. Did I miss some armor on the Barghast, or is the troop misbehaving for me?
Yeah, I must have missed some armor. I just got around to testing this again, and got the amount of damage I expected. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯