I’m trying to think of a reasonably successful free game that isn’t grindy and isn’t P2W. Can anyone think of one? Just seems like one or the other is necessary for a free game to survive…
Agreed, if it wasn’t for Traitstones and Traits, a lot of high level players we see around here would already be gone. MrSammy himself said he’d pretty much stopped playing for a good while there until 1.0.7 came around.
Archenassa’s second latest post also mentioned how her overstock of souls are collecting dust even with all her Mythics. Granted she’s mainly away due to an injury.
Point is, a F2P without grind is either P2W or a game without a lasting community. I won’t deny it’s a lot, but it’s better than a lot of nothing, in my opinion.
It’s the “want it now” mentality. People seem to want to play a game and be able to “beat it” (or “get everything”) in a short period of time so they can move on to the next. I’m not sure how it can be made clear that GoW is a long-term game though.
I’m not sure why there is a need for this topic. If the rating is below 70% than apparently that is how the world sees the game. If the developers want a better review rating, than they should try to make the game better. You want to see a real number, not some artificial number.
The score is below below 70% because almost anyone who played the game decided to play the tutorial then ramped up the difficulty to max then cried when they could not win then left bad reviews. Also the game is ever evolving with new troops weekly. Those reviewers basically made the game unplayable for themselves then complained that it was the game makers fault for not making the higher difficulty easy for them. Also a good portion of those bad reviews are from when the game launched. It would be like say minecraft is the worst game ever because i did not run away from a spider or a zombie when i had no armour or weapon.
Indeed, but is that a positive or a negative for the game?
The game shifted from its early roots of making a team from designed-to-balance troops (that held up till the level cap dos bumped 10->15) to collecting for collection sake only, just to see some numbers grow on boars. And the way to that is playing pushover campaigns over and over.
While it is okay to keep some players in game for reasons only they know, I’d think the same alienates at least a magnitude more players who wold rather want something else than chore and see bars moving 1 pixel up.
Especially as from down there the distance to cover looks like lightyears, so even the “completionist” type would rather pass.
The other games that stayed on despite handing out pain left and right did so IMHO riding on guilds. We know that aspect is able to add a second, even third wind, set some new goals. But this one is riding in different direction. And the “Feature velocity” is abysmal really, it feels like the development team was made up of minus 2 folks.
The bare minimum would be the ability to field core updates every month, preferably 2 weeks. So trivial issues like class attrib leaking into arena gets fixed in timely manner, instead of lingering for 3-4 months waiting next major. Please open your eyes, people and admit is is just ridiculous.
The “problem” with reviews on Steam is that the majority of the strongly negative reviews are old reviews, based on the game version 1.0.4 or 1.0.5, where the most common complaint was that you had to pay gold to enter a battle, which hurt starting players because they didn’t make a lot of gold each day (which consequently limited the amount of battles that they could play).
Newer, updated versions of the game should possibly start with a clean slate for reviews, maybe that would be more fair to the game…
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Considering how much each major update has in it and how small the game is compared to say a triple a game or an mmo this is par for the course. If we were to count ever new troop as an update then the game updates weekly with new content which does not cost the consumer money outright if they just played it. As for those getting into the game it is really easy. By the time you finish the tutorial you know the gist of the game and how it works. I do not thing it is ridiculous. The game has a huge playtime to it just to “catch up” as it were or to “beat it” Basicly to beat the game you only need to beat the story mode and get all the classes unlocked. We could complain about how much content is in the game itself but those are completely optional and more content is added weekly. Due to player stupidity the creators had to level lock difficulty.
The game has 180 troops and 4 can be used in a team. So issuing new troops is hardly something that adds to play value. Especially troops that never get into a team. It just food for collectionists and diversion obscuring the lack of real progress. And excuse to not make the proper update infrastructure being the about only element deployed through data patch.
I’d happily trade troops by dozens for say additional minigames. Or even for fixing the two already in.
This game is only 2 years old or so and yet it gets more major updates than say a popular game like minecraft and minecraft gets less bug fixes than this game per year. To say this game just creates diversions to make people ignorant of time it akes for major updates is poor in the grand scheme of gaming as a whole. How long did it take for batman take to get fixed on pc? I think it is a lack of patience to assume that this game needs monthly updates when a game now a days takes years to make. Also making the game harder for people to play as they get through arena or pvp. They can’t or are having trouble with getting the ai to be smarter without it being cheaty in some way and as for arena the testers of the new treasure hunt must have been really good at it. I like what they did to the two mini-games. I dislike pvp but i hated it before the 1.6 update and yet i loved treasure hunt and like it more now that i can get easier access to maps.
Sir, April 1 was almost a week ago. In minecraft the “content” is the game environment itself. I guess Lego didn’t get too many major updates either, maybe not even one ovr its several decades lifetime. From the same elements you keep building new things yourself.
While in M3 repeating the the same thing gets BORING to majority of people, even those who are in love with M3. To keep it worth playing on changes are necessary.
Alternatively the ability to play with different stuff – and here GoW struggles for the very opposite with the upgrade resource system locking players into just a handful of the potential 180 troops and 100-whatever weapons.
Let’s put some numbers behind the negative reviews so we all have proper context:
- There are currently 458 negative reviews on Steam.
- By my count, 122 of them are NOT in the first 3 months post-launch (i.e., are prior to the 1.0.5 update in Feb '15).
- This means 336 negative reviews are based on the initial launch of the game roughly 1.5 years ago in Nov/Dec 2014.
- Put differently, 73% of negative reviews are from the initial launch.
It’s TOTALLY unreasonable that the game should continue to suffer a Mixed Review score when the vast majority of the negative reviews are from 1.5 years ago when the game was INCREDIBLY different from its current state. No one that’s currently playing would say 1.0 vs 1.0.9 is a fair comparison. Reviews, particularly for F2P games, should have a shelf life. Mobile already does this – each update gets a reset on the review scores (though you can see “All Versions” if you like). And that’s b/c it goes both ways: the live ops on a game can make or break it and the current state of the game is what people truly care about.
If it deserves a <70% score, fine, but let that be decided by the game in its current state, not by its state 1.5 years ago.
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And what is the same stat on the positive reviews?
I can’t count the actual number, but I know that there are more positive reviews compared to negative. GoW at one point was as low as 60 or 61%. Since it is 69% now, that means there are more positive reviews after the fact than it was initially. A good portion of the initial bad reviews were with the paid battle system that appeared to many Steam users as gold = energy = Facebook cash grab game.
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If we were to get rid of all the reviews from the 1 year and older mark then would you say it would have a positive review on steam?
It would be around 76% if the 1st year of reviews were not there. It would take too long to do the actual math, but it has shifted over 8 points since then.
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If you look at all reviews since the gold costs were eliminated (Jan 17) the game’s reviews stand at 88 positive and 19 negative, by my count. Which means 82% positive.
That said, clearly it’s biased by our campaign to improve the review scores, which has happened since Jan. Looking at the reviewers names and hours played, it looks like most everyone with 100+ hrs played that’s left a review is from our campaign (plus a few extras under 100 hrs) adding up to around 33 positive reviews from our campaign. If we eliminate all of those, it’s still at 74% positive since Jan 17.
All that says to me that the ONLY reason why the game isn’t Mostly Positive is b/c of the early reviews. It really does a huge disservice to F2P games which are premised on change over time via regular updates. I’d also add that I think folks in general (and even on Steam) have become more accepting of F2P over the past 1.5 years, which further hurts the game.
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Also, we’re currently at 69.8%. We only need 12 more positive reviews to hit 70%.
So close! Where those reviews at folks?!
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The interesting thing is that the mentioned gold cost in the early game was not even bad really, you got enough to play and added a fine strategy/management element.
Then eventually gold cost of pvp got changed not necessarily in a good way, and when it switched to gold to upgrade kingdoms creating a 1.3 mil backlog… the battle costs should have been removed right then.
We could just convince 3 negative reviews to switch positive. 
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