Okay, it’s an exaggeration, Journey isn’t quite dead yet. It still has almost five days to go from terminal illness to death throes to raising a huge stink. Still, here’s an analysis of what went wrong and how it could be addressed. It’s probably wasted effort, just like most feedback here, guess I’m too old to learn.
1.) Pathfinder spell
Most battles within Journey are against vastly overpowered opponents, due to aggressive scaling. Each battle won significantly raises the level of all subsequent fights. It is common to face troops that can kill you in a single hit, either with a spell or with skull damage. Even on the very first day, and it gets progressively worse throughout the week.
The Pathfinder spell has two components, damage and gem creation. The gem creation part used to be an asset, it created enough gems to almost always get an extra turn. It had to be used several dozen times to whittle down higher level opponents. Failing to get an extra turn often meant losing the battle, making this a somewhat risky but viable strategy.
The Pathfinder spell has been changed to create much less gems, often failing to provide an extra turn. This pushes it from being an asset to a liability. Casting the spell even once for the damage component, let alone several dozen times, is a death wish. It will fail, rather sooner than later, handing over a board containing multiple extra turn opportunities to the opponent, for lethal backlash.
Restoring a single gem or two to the spell won’t help, a 35% chance of critical failure isn’t really better than a 50% chance of critical failure when you have to take that chance several dozen times each battle. This needs an entirely different spell to work out. The Pathfinder is about dealing damage, providing mana and looping, tied to a single tribe, so one approach could look like this:
Deal [Magic + 4] damage to an Enemy. Give all other Allies 5% of their mana, boosted by [Tribe] Allies (+5% each). Gain an extra turn.
Extra turn and mana gain percentage may need to get balanced against each other, this must not turn into an infinite action loop when multiple Pathfinder troops are involved.
2.) Damage output
Other guild game modes assist players in going against higher level troops:
- Invasion has Siegebreakers, which multiply damage output against towers by up to a factor of 10 (double magic from event, five times damage from trait). High level battles are exclusively against towers.
- Raid Boss has Godslayers, which multiply damage output against bosses by up to a factor of 10 (double magic from event, five times damage from trait). Battles have 1 high level boss and 3 low level minions.
- World events have medals, which multiply damage output by up to a factor of 5.8 (100% base damage, three medals each adding 160% extra damage).
Journey has Pathfinders, which used to assist players with a reliable damage loop. This has been changed to an unreliable damage loop, making the troop entirely useless for damage purposes within Journey. Thanks to scaling, players without well developed accounts are now hitting a brick wall fast. After a day or two, they usually face opponents with several hundred combined life and armor, without the former tools to deal with them.
For the Journey event to still work out, one of these has to happen:
- Multiply the damage output of the Pathfinder by 10, similar to Invasion and Raid Boss.
- Multiply the damage output of all troops by 5, similar to World Events.
- Reduce opponent scaling to 20% (yes, down from 20 levels each 5 battles to at most 4 levels each 5 battles).
3.) Score penalties
There are two factors that reduce effective scores as battles get tougher, losing troops and taking more than 10 turns. Those combined can cost players up to half the points. This wasn’t really an issue while the Pathfinder could still loop reliably, setting up and maintaining the loop usually took less than 10 turns, unless the board was very unfavorable.
With the changed Pathfinder, higher level battles almost always end up in the penalty zone, often at max penalty. Reward thresholds for Journey have originally been set on the assumption that players play perfectly, never incurring any penalty. To still unlock the same rewards, players now need to buy extra shop tiers. Since those shop tiers get progressively more expensive, this significantly increases the overall buy-in cost, up to a factor of 3, even compared to the other guild events.
There is really no reason to have scoring penalties here at all. It won’t help to reword them as bonuses, then bumping up the reward thresholds on the assumption that players always reach those bonuses, that’s exactly the same. Drop them entirely. Journey already has the most restrictive troop filters (color AND tribe), an extra lead belt when already struggling in deep water is the wrong way to go.
What players do like is extra points based on difficulty. Start out with less points at first, then gradually scale them up as battles get tougher, similar to Raid Boss. This also allows stronger players in a guild to more reasonably contribute extra and balance out scores of weaker players, to still reach rewards.
All these changes combined will require entirely different reward thresholds. To come up with good numbers, walk the talk. Take some account with average progress, buy 4 shop tiers (which is supposedly your envisioned average buy-in cost to unlock all rewards), add 7 x 4 = 28 daily sigils, play all of them. Shave a bit off your result score (because you claim to be experienced testers, so your result should be above average), multiply it by 30 (which assumes a full guild), that’s your overall threshold budget. Distribute.
4.) Communicate changes
Bets are, this
- won’t get implemented in any way
- won’t even get forwarded to the developers
- won’t even get read entirely
Please prove me wrong.
Anam Cara