Thanks for all your feedback about the Pathfinder Troop rebalances and the Journey Event scoring. We are collecting your feedback in addition to monitoring how these changes are performing by reviewing our analytics and game data.
The Pathfinder changes were in part made due to overwhelming evidence that they were ruining the PvP experience for the player base, with it being more unpleasant the lower level/newer the player is to the game. As mentioned in the blog post about the changes, the issue is with looping extra turns excessively making for a poor gaming experience for everyone, not just new players. Looping Teams can be fun, but not when the looping is uninterruptable and you’re playing against those teams.
If the start of the game or core gameplay feels unpleasant like that it affects player retention - new to midgame players uninstall. We have been adding more analytics to the game as well as doing more first time user experience testing in addition to all the other feedback and data collection we always do and Pathfinders were something that came up consistently as one of the pain points that needed to be changed for the health of the game. Our goal with the changes is to still have the Pathfinders allow for a high chance of refilling their Mana, while making it less excessive.
We’ve seen your suggestions that we give the Pathfinder Troops different Spells for pvp compared to Journey etc. But the cleaner solution at this point in time is to rebalance the Troops to be more suitable for both game modes and review the Journey difficulty and scoring inline with ongoing feedback about that and these Pathfinder Troop changes.
We’ve seen your feedback about feeling like beta testers or bug testers. While we run Quality Assurance (QA, bug testing) and playtesting in addition to automated testing before we release changes to the game, none of this will ever compare to having 10s of thousands of real players trying out changes at the same time. So while we make changes and have predicted outcomes, sometimes there is a deviation from the expected result, usually that difference is small, sometimes you all surprise us with what our more hardcore players can do with the game.
For this reason, we always monitor changes through the game data to ensure it’s having the expected effect and if it’s not, we are happy to tweak things further as necessary for the next Journey Event.
I’ve been very negative about this change but I wanted to say that I appreciate the frank feedback. I admit I didn’t take into account the thought that it might be hurting lower level players’ retention, but that is an important consideration. I still maintain that you guys need to change the Journey event itself to account for this nerf.
I’m still very disappointed that nothing can probably happen for this week but I appreciate you letting us in on the thought process.
As they are now, journey troops are completely dead and unusable. Fine, we can work with that. The BEST singular change you could make now is to simply remove the turn count penalty for miles in the journey event (the penalty for losing troops is absolutely fine). Journey was the most annoying event to play, and will probably always be the most annoying, but the books in the rewards at least made it worth it.
As soon as we get a journey event that doesn’t have a good amount of troop options, it will become very apparent how awful this penalty is. With this penalty, journeys that have a a good enough team will still be tier 4 in the shop, but journeys with terrible troop choices would be tier 6+ (which is unacceptable as a requirement for an entire guild). Literally JUST removing this penalty will at least give us a consistent expectation for how much effort each journey will need.
Also, any news on what compensation will be for people who bought the journey headstarts?
Where is this overwhelming evidence from? Having a tough time in PvP is a learning experience. It can show players what can be done. Instead you want players to win with any team they bring, what’s the point.
I have never ever seen anyone with a negative win rate in PvP. In fact the win rates in this game are always in the 90+% threshold. Which is unheard of normally.
You destroyed a one trick pony type team to save a dead on arrival game mode.
I’m probably more bitter than usual because I had to deal with lag in PvP for over a month to find you’ve been working on this trash.
Thank you for this explanation and taking the time to write it out. My bet is that many people moaning and venting on these forums will be surprised that it’s the new players they so wanted to protect by keeping the journey loopers unchanged actually are the ones who were giving up on the game exactly because of these journey loopers. I’m not a new player, by far. But I’ll be very relieved NOT to get so many journey looper teams to fight in PvP. They were extremely annoying for me. I can only imagine how annoying they were for players who don’t have a majority of other troops and unlocked & levelled classes.
For journey purposes the change seems harsh (probably an overkill in the current shape and form of the event), but if journey event itself gets tweaked some more to make it a bit easier to reach the target score per person (the penalty for 10+ turns feels most problematic; if you really want to keep the limit, then maybe increase the number of turns a little, before the deductions start), then I hope it will all balance out long-term.
You can’t fall for this line about new player experience. Devs don’t care. New players complain the most about the World Quest for medals when they fight the Knight team. That is the first roadblock and remains unchanged.
They removed the challenges in exchange for trials. These were good for new players to fight against until ready for the next kingdom. They’re gone with trials in place where you are locked into crap teams.
These pathfinder troops were easily accessible to new players and easy to build around.
Now new players are back to using Rowanne, hooray.
A 10 year old game and the only good troops added in the last years are dragonite dragons and a handful of mythics, both out of reach of new players. What will new players think when they see that. They see pay to win and they leave.
Sorry, but about the testing process that is claimed was done beforehand, I don’t believe a word about that. At least the quality of the tests and/or the involced people is seemingly questionable - if it envokes such a community backlash.
…Maybe I would be more trustful of such claims if you guys would make a business day lenghty video of “actively testing” and upload it to youtube. Surely many would watch it and appreciate it.
Maybe we, the players, could learn from all your insights, wise gameplay approach, successful strategies and outstanding tactics! f.e. the team you shared in the other thread was highly valueable!
With more seriousness, positive sideeffect of such “proof”: Everyone involved in this “actively testing” process could also gather some valueable knowledge about the game and would imminently understand that the current changes are utter nonsense for the Journey event.
My opinion stands, this was designed to fomo-bait people into buying additional gem offers or even midweek event offers. Ultimate goal is to lower the existing gem stashes of the players. Nice fairytale though that it is because of lower level players. There would be countless things to do instead to help/support/encourage lower level players.
I doubt “the team” will be happy, the inflexibility about implementing/reverting such changes is a proven standard since years. You act coyly about that often combined with the trait “radio silence”. It would take another countless forum postings and topics before it maybe gets any consideration and probably a place at the bottom of the “priority list” whilst the “top priorities” already take weeks to get any positive changes - if at all (because priorities can change, yes? ^^). Big chance despite that it will be “forgotten” nonetheless.
Sometimes the line between “trust issues” and “perception through experience” is very thin.
You want to improve the game experience for new players? Since the devs are clearly so receptive to feedback regarding the new player struggle here’s some freebies:
Reduce the crafting cost of mythics in the soulforge by 50% to 2k diamonds
Increase the amount of mythics available in the soulforge each week by 2x
Remove Diamonds from weapon crafting and replace with gems (most people bought weapons with gems from events anyway)
Add a visible pity timer to keys/chests so people have a guaranteed goal to work towards
Add more Celestial Traitstones to guild event early tiers
Add guaranteed dragonite from the dungeon - oh you cleared all 7 days of Dungeon this week, here’s 50 dragonite.
These are simple catchup mechanics that would help new players and are to be expected in a game of this age.
Now watch this feedback be completely ignored and get Ruby Macaque nerfed instead.
While i personally agree with the first 3, i can see why the devs probably dont want to make those changes. Changes 4 and 5 though, would make for a MASSIVE improvement. Not having a pity timer in general on chests is ridiculous for how many keys need to be used, and the celestial traitstones being moved from tier 10 to tier 13 was probably the stupidest decision when increasing the available reward tiers. For guilds that beginners are likely to join, the celestials are basically out of reach now.
As for dragonite in the dungeon, im a firm believer that you should earn SOME dragonite every day no matter what. At max dungeon level, a perfect run is 120 dragonite, it would be great if you got 20 every day and 100 bonus for a perfect.
It’s just been two days of the event. Guilds are already beginning to struggle in this formerly trivial phase, and there’s five days of event scaling ahead. Hearing that you are happy to do nothing at all right now, while it is already very apparent that more than just tweaks are necessary, isn’t really going to make us happy. The core message here is that since we players have already paid our participation fee in advance, without any way to get a refund, you don’t see any reason to work on this.
How are looping journey teams a worse experience for new players than Zuul teams, skull teams, hourglass teams, impervious teams, diamantina teams, trick and treat teams, wand of stars teams, spiritgem teams, deathmark teams, goblin teams, beetrix teams, empowered teams … even the new terror teams, at least when the enemy stops somehow casting it on themself, the list goes on? Especially since due to the recent influx of journey events, it was really easy for new players to get journey troops and hence have an actual chance to deal with all the aforementioned, which now they cannot. Not to mention, one can pick from 3 opponents in PvP.
As for the current event, I really regret buying the gem bundle, as on day 2 I already couldn’t win and will now ditch the journey troop altogether, since less points are better than none at all. Since I’m in a guild that rarely reaches shiny rewards, preventing people from using those troops is just gonna make it even harder for newer players and guilds that accept them specifically.
It’s ridiculous considering all the other opponents you get in pvp that are way worse, and newer players could actually get hold of journey troops and hence have a fighting chance, not only in pvp but all the other stuff too. Now they will be stun-locked into b-lining to beetrix and gobtruffle, and stuck if they need other colours.
This just doesn’t make any sense as a new player because looping teams are an easier to access troop category that helps with harder content. People can go on and on about better team building but as a new player you do not have access to “better” teams or have the stats to support them but you can get your hands on an old journey troop. Earning the right to better troops is a bit ridiculous because no one wants to actually slog through slow play teams just to say you did when a key troop can help you move along a bit faster and it really is only a little bit faster and helps new players enjoy the game more not less when they can see actual progress by being able to compete in events. You are actually making it more difficult for new players not easier or better and definitely not more fun. I guess it helps pvp but it harms every other game mode and claiming otherwise is nonsense.
They were far from preferred? I think our PvP offerings varied wildly, then. Seekra, Chalcedony and Todd were ALL OVER THE PLACE in PvP. I stopped playing ranked PvP last year (beyond getting to Tier 1 weekly) because of these 3 troop teams, and because of Great Wyrms & Eye of Arges.
It doesn’t even help in pvp because:
You can pick from 3 opponents
There are way worse teams than journey loopers
You will only find them in central spire specifically at the moment
Newer players can actually get journey troops themselves, which is one of the only ways they can beat all the other annoying opponents, including other journey troops in pvp
I don’t know why anyone would buy this. I’m not a new player anymore, and have a bunch of better troops than journey now, but I vividly recall how much they helped when I got my first one.
I think they do indeed. I rarely saw pathfinder defenses, but loads of the other usual suspects. The mentioned triple Wyrm/Arges plus one heavy hitter, Leonis Tower + Enraged Kurandera, empowered Yao Guai, lots of goblin teams, and of course the Orbweaver classic.
