Is there any way that you can give the newest Pathfinder it’s original gem creation count during it’s Journey event? I get why you changed the rest of them, because of PVP and GW, but for the Journey event, where looping is key, and we have to use the troop to get the maximum number of points, is there any way to buff it’s gems created back to the original number?
Or maybe somebody could just look into and comment on the several dozen other Journey related feedback threads? Those that got created as result of Journey becoming unplayable at higher levels more than a year ago?
@Jeto I know it’s not your fault, but this is an issue that has been driving away players for quite a while now. Journey events now cost guilds that still want to participate several times the gems as the other events, on top of having been turned into the most frustrating and time consuming experience the game has to offer. Is there any way your company could be moved to stop pretending everything is okay and roll out something that lessens the pain?
In case you need more info on why the Pathfinder nerf for PvP killed Journey, here’s one of the many ignored threads summing it up:
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no further action required “WORKING AS INTENDED”
One of the dev responses was to slow the rate at which enemy levels scale up after certain key battles.
An observant forum user (sorry, I forget who) noticed the scaling was slowed only for the first few such battles before returning to their previous rapid escalation, and made a bug report. Bramble promptly dismissed it as “Not a bug”.
I’m pretty sure it is. If you’re not in a guild with 30 active players and have to go a bit deeper into the event, enemies soon become absurdly strong, often able to obliterate you with a single cast or skull match.
Unlike Raid or Invasion, the event troop doesn’t get 5x damage to help out.
Meanwhile enemies have 600+ life and armour, taking many hits to defeat. I go multiple tier VII, and the enemies never seem to stop getting stronger. At least in Raid and Invasion, enemies have a level cap.
If you use Hero and Pathfinder (a must, really), you’re left with just 2 slots to form a team from a very limited double restricted set of troops.
I don’t expect Pathfinders to be restored to their endless self looping ways, but scaling down the brutal difficulty / rapid level increase of the enemies would be most welcome.
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Even in a guild with 30 active players you have to go deeper, unless all members have been playing for years and own almost everything released so far. Non-veteran players have two options:
1.) Pick the battles that scale the least. This will cost them about two thirds of points attainable.
2.) Pick the battles that scale the most. This will make them hit the wall that prevents any further progress fast, also costing them a huge chunk of points attainable.
Event rewards are calculated super aggressive, there is no wiggle room. Anything that one guild member can’t contribute, other guild members have to jump in for. There’s also no real wiggle room there, the harder battles get, the less points you get for them, due to the way scoring in Journey works. So the stronger members are stuck with coughing up tier VII purchases, at 500 gems a piece, possibly multiple times, because they are the only ones who still stand a chance at progressing. And each of those battles takes minutes, unless you make a minor mistake or get slightly unlucky, at which point you immediately get annihilated. Fun.
For the record, there seem to be two teams that sort of work at higher levels in the current Journey (restricted to brown giants). One requires hundreds of moves to win a battle, the other requires several lucky rolls in sequence. Both are entirely impossible to field for average players.
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The reason I am suggesting this change, instead of such a wide and sweeping change as point structure, or adding something completely new to the journey troop, like something that the Invasion and Raid troops have, is because bonuses that are specific to a single event are already something that the devs are clearly willing to do. So I figured that the odds of success were higher, even if only slightly.
They can’t change troop behaviour for a specific game mode only, it always applies everywhere. If you are proposing to do this change globally, right now, then change it back in a week, I believe that would require a level of coordination that is way beyond their capabilities. They haven’t even managed to reply to our feedback given over the past one and a half years.
I don’t like defending the developers and programmers, but is it possible that “double damage from the event captain during the Event” is a rather simple thing, whereas “increase the gem generation of the spell” may not be?
… although I suppose it’s possible that similar-ish code could be written to “double the gem generation” of the event captain within the Event. I wouldn’t know for sure, because who knows what sort of rat’s nest the code is these days and how difficult seemingly mundane things might be.
…
Personally, I’d look for a completely different paradigm for the Event Captain. Change the spell in its’ entirety, turning it into something that has the potential for an extra turn when used intelligently by a human player.
Alternately, fix the Event scoring by getting rid of the penalty for “slow play”. And if the Powers That Be are so gung-ho on scoring rules that inhibit the possibility of a ninety-eleven-way tie at the top of the leaderboards, how about introducing variable scoring from some of the World Events, the ones that randomly offer 2x or 3x scoring for an individual battle?
I’ve got a really lengthy document on Journey feedback I just need some time to get it more together, which I don’t have much of.
Was also a big off topic discussion in the 8.4 beta, which I have also collected.
I’ll grab the link shared @Fourdottwoone as well and add it to what I currently have.
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If they can do it with scoring, which they already do, it feels possible that they can do it with the spell as well. It’s also just for a single troop. So all it would take is to release it with one number, and then change the number on the following Monday. It’s not that hard. It’s the same as any other buff/nerf patch.
I addressed the scoring change in my original post. I understand the many frustrations that people have with Journey. I was simply trying to address what I felt was one of the simpler fixes, and one of the ones that devs seems more willing to implement, a buff to a single troop for a single event that expires at the end of said event.
Trying to ask for such a large change, like altering the entire way scoring works, just feels less likely to work. It takes more time to test and implement, and could just feel like it’s not worth the trouble for them.
Why should changing the scoring be that big of a thing at all? I suspect that all that would really be necessary is to change the weighting of certain factors, something that only necessitates altering a single variable in the calculation. For example, instead of “troop dying” being a minus-2, “troop dying” gets changed to zero and the rest muddles along as it already was.
Fix the scoring and I believe a lot (but not all) of the complaints would subside. We could go back to building teams that are good and self-sufficient rather than having to stretch for “maximum speed”. We could fight slowly and carefully at higher levels simply trying to win battles the way we do against high levels in every other form of World Event.
Journey, as most players know, is easily the most hated game mode in Gems of War. From the start, it’s been slow, repetitive, and just not fun to play.
Eventually, Pathfinder troops were nerfed because people were using them in PvP. That change made Journey mode even more annoying to deal with.
We were told the devs would collect data and make improvements. There was one round of changes, but they were so minor I can’t even remember what they were. Nothing significant changed.
Now here we are—Journey is still in a miserable state, and there’s been no sign of any further updates or fixes.
It’s still a slow, painful grind.
Please either:
- Let us use medals during the event, or
- Restore the Pathfinder troops to their original state.
If balance is an issue, just nerf them in PvP and Guild Wars only. Leave Journey alone.
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i missed that this weeks journey post. had the issued already highlighted. feel free to merge this in there
I’m sure it’s atrocious at higher levels, but as someone who buys up to round tier 4-5 most weeks and as a member of a semi-casual guild, I don’t mind it too much. Granted, I don’t pay attention to optimal scoring in Journey. So for me and other relatively casual players, it’s pretty similar to other guild events in terms of length/difficulty.
Journey is interesting in that the more you try to achieve optimal scoring, the worse the experience is, which is not the case for other guild events.
Maybe the formula is baked into the game client (instead of being a discrete asset synced in from the server) ?
There’s 3 easy things:
- Make sure the reduced level scaling applied to every battle and not just stop at a arbitrary point.
- Remove all length of battle penalties especially when it seems they always want to add troop summoners or summon on death troops in the battle.
- Add the stat buffs to every battle in that set. So many times the stat buff is always on the low scoring battles.
There are currently 6 pathfinders in the game that make 3 gems per troop that weren’t nerfed but yet nobody complains about them in PvP or GW’S anymore because you have ruined both game modes
Unless its just a visual bug which wouldn’t surprise me with the way this game is going downhill
They aren’t making 3 gems per troop, the have all been nerfed to 2 gems per troop. What you are showing is the base amount, which doesn’t really matter much. And even that base amount is only 2, yours are at 3 because your troops are at shiny level 2+.
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