I agree, Kissing their a##es is what MANY people do and it makes as much sense as being totally against them, they stopped putting the players in mind quite a few updates back.
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I never said nor inferred refund in the slightest way in any of my posts, Simply stopping the support of this game. there’s thousands of others to keep them making money.
The game doesn’t require real life currency to play so relax 
Nerfs and buffs will happen as the game gets balanced from time to time. Don’t like it, don’t play, it’s pretty straightforward 
This is a thread isn’t it… I have spent a lot fo time catching up on it this morning.
To be honest, @Whiskeyjack said it best.
The reality of live service games is that things shift and change, for the long term health of the game. The attitude some players exhibit towards purchases and games is echoed in this thread. Many games see players with these beliefs, Hearthstone gets it, many other mobile titles get it, as it is unfortunately a dominant ideology held by a section of players. However, this point of view is damaging for both the player and the game developers, as it makes players unhappy and developers hesitant to make necessary changes for the health of their games.
I also believe it is worth noting that as developers we do not want to upset players. Firstly, on a moral level. No one wants to hurt and anger another. And secondly? Unhappy players don’t spend money. So that’s a double whammy of why we don’t want to make people sad, frustrated or angry. (Also, sad, frustrated and angry people quickly become abusive online, and I really don’t need to field more hatred online than I already get, thanks.)
I am sorry to hear that some players are unhappy with the exploding nerf, I understand your frustrations. We didn’t make this decision lightly, and believe it will benefit the long term health of the game. We are also working on further balance changes to troops after 4.0. (Mostly buffs, which should make some people very happy. And Kingdom reworks!)
At any rate, I hope this very long response made sense and shed a little light for you all. Please treat each other with the respect you would like to be shown. I have been doing ninja edits to some comments, as name calling is never appropriate or kind.
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Looking forward to this!!!
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Buffs? You mean like restoring things to how they were BEFORE YOU NERFED THEM? 
I like buffs though. I’m oblivious and excited for buffs. <3
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Happy to hear that, i just hope those buffs don’t turn out to be like the “buff” for Worldbreaker who now generates approx. 10 less mana per cast and got a 2 mana spellcost reduction. -8 mana per cast isn’t really a net buff now is it?
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Will this be for the troops that are solely built around exploding and giving the team mana? Gorgotha, Ragnagord, Mountain Crusher and to a lesser extent Abynissia? Also will you be offering refunds for these troops that were badly hurt by the nerf?
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Salty, said it all!
Many players were complaining about the endless turns of Whizzbane of her refilling her mana over and over and over. So, hopefully this is the solution.
Also, many players didn’t like the Divine Meta, so it was nerfed TWICE now.
But, is anybody happy?
Doesn’t sound like it to me.
I guess the old saying is true: You can please some of the people some of the time, but you can NEVER please all of the people all of the time
But, can Salty and Co ever please anyone any time???
What a bunch of crybabies! Grow up everyone and stop complaining!
I’m not going to try to make either of these points. Trying to do so would extend the length of this post by neigh a meter, and both are 100% correct and hit two nails on the head.
I will, say though that for long term game health? The nerf to explosions is one of the best things that they have ever done. And this is a dev team with a history of great and amazing content updates, wonderful humor, and amazing community involvement, so I don’t use those words lightly. I just hope that they continue in this direction.
Nerfs are not bad for a game, and just because something you don’t like happened in terms of game balance doesn’t mean it was a bad decision. These devs don’t swing that nerf hammer often, but when they do, it’s 100% reasonable, and I agree that with the troops currently in the game, Explosion’s mana gain being toned down a bit is a good call.
However, y’all should’ve seen this coming from a mile away, but I’m going to encourage a couple more nerfs with the upcoming kingdom reworks and buffs mentioned by Salty. Know what would make me as happy? Remove the Guild Guardians’ ability to target skulls. And while you’re at it, finding a way to close conversion loops would go a long way towards adding some variety and extending games past 2-3 turns.
People may read this, and think I’m out of touch for complaining about these things, but I can still reliably get wins sub three enemy turns out of a ridiculously old team that hasn’t changed since the Guardians were introduced. The moment I am forced to retire these boring, repetitive teams that sucked all the fun out of the game, I’ll add that shiny P2P armor to my cart and probably lose another 1600-1800 hours of my life to this game again.
Y’know, not that such a thing should be the deciding factor in game balance, but that’s kinda the point. For everyone that’s gonna stop spending money because of a change like this, someone’s going to enjoy it more, and maybe more people will enjoy it more. And that overall kinda balances out.
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I get what you are saying and i don’t necessarily disagree but i think you have restricted view on things.
I could agree with you that explosion managain nerf would be an overall positive if every formerly underperforming explode troop would have received a buff to make up for it, but they haven’t.
Instead those underperformers are now even trashier than before while we still see the overperforming exploders not being all too much phased by this nerf, Infernus because he still has the best damage/mana ratio spell in the game by a huge margin cause he just does too much too good, and the two Gobbo exploders still handily producing enough mana for eachother to get their explosion chains going because they are just too cheap for mass exploders of that caliber.
So what did this change really do for the health of the game right now? I don’t think much good.
And much of what this change will actually do for the future of the game is entirely dependant on how sensible the Devs design future exploder troops…
For example, will they design single gem exploders that are actually powerful enough to be competitive, maybe introduce mechanics that exponentially reward skillfull boardmanipulation with the one explode…or will they continue to design mass exploders that also do a million damage, summon troops, write books and produce tv shows so they won’t even care about just 50% mana generation for their explodes…
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Oh boy, this one’s gonna be fun to respond to. And not in a bad way! My controller is presently dead, and you’ve given me the most engaging thing I could ask for until the new one arrives in the morning. So, I would like to sincerely thank you for meaningful discourse!
Let’s begin!
This is how you get me to go on huge, passionate rants about game design and the constraints of being a developer! Even when the thread originally had very little to do about this! Ideally, yes, every troop would be given a necessary amount of time, attention, and love, and everything, ever would be viable. Not just exploders.
However, taking a step back, lets look at what else has happened very recently. A huge new version update means that there’s a lot of stuff on the Devs’ plates, so let’s talk priority.
Quick disclaimer: I am not on the Gems of War staff, and my personal priorities and opinions in no way reflect their own. The following list is based on personal experience and observation of the development of various games across multiple genres over the span of the past 7-8 years.
Priority #1) Fixing major bugs. You literally cannot afford to care if balance functions if the game itself does not. Bugs can range anywhere from game failing to launch on X platform under Y circumstance, to account data disappearing if you click on the wrong pixel, to visual assets not loading correctly.
Priority #2) New content bugs. Does the new content function? Does the game crash when launching new content? Do all the parts interact as they did in testing? No? Your time mostly gets spent here.
Priority #3) Major game balance. Did any new content come out far and ahead of other parts of the same content? How does it relate to old content? What disruptions might it have caused to the meta? Are there any things that you forsee completely destroying game balance that need either a preemptive or responsive balance change such as a nerf or a buff? Is a single bit of content, or a small subsection of it, outperforming everything else in the game?
The explosion nerf sits here. It takes care of certain overperformers and potential overperformers. Would it be ideal to include buffs to smaller troops to counterbalance this? Yes. However, that’s further down on the list and a completely seperate step.
Priority #4) Counterbalancing major balance changes Did a major change have an impact wider than you’d find ideal? Did a buff cause a troop to become massively overpowered? This is where you take care of that
Priority #5) Minor bugs. Chat’s unavailable, send help.
Priority #6) **Low Priority Troop Counterbalance. Do you still have resources available after addressing everything else on this list? Is the game (mostly) bug-free? Are there no outliers still in terms of strength?
If you still have resources this far down the list, then you can spend the time, money, and manpower on the weaker troops that were also negatively impacted by wider scale balance changes.
Priority #7) Angry bugs. Webspinner.
Priority #8) Minor game balance All of our favorite nostalgia troops go here. Is it currently relevant in the meta? Is the use rate above 5%? You probably took care of it above. If not? This is where you buff underused troops. Moloch goes here. Webspinner actually goes here, despite my personal bias.
Priority #9) Already underperforming troops that were hit with nerfs in a step above
Goblin Rocket, maybe? I don’t know if people still use that with things like Grapplepot around. I know I do, but that’s for a gimmick team that really shouldn’t work, anyway.
IN CONCLUSION
Yes, it’s tragic that a lot of troops were negatively effected, and yes, I agree that they deserve buffs. But the devs here are not omnipresent or omnipowerful. They have a limited amount of time and resources, and it takes exactly those things, time and resources, to address every problem that they have.
There are far more important things to be addressed, and occasionally compromises have to be made to address higher priority concerns. The strong troops with explosions were more of a threat to the game’s health than the already underperforming troops who had little to no impact on gameplay that had that already minimal effectiveness reduced.
Troops effect gameplay more the more that they get used. Stronger troops get used more. Therefore, stronger troops have a higher effect on gameplay, and thus take priority in terms of balance. In an ideal world, everything would be addressed with no cost or time investment. However, we live in a tragically flawed world, where game design is costly and time consuming.
FINAL, BE ALL, END ALL TL;DR OF THE WHOLE POST:
No, I don’t play GoW with a controller, you ninny. It’s for Monster Hunter. Eesh.
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I respectfully disagree with everything you just said.
Okay, great! Now if you could be so kind as to actually contribute to the discussion by detailing why, I’d love to be able to form a proper response. But with a glorified “Yeah, no” formatted to bypass the ten character minimum for a message, I’m afraid I can’t do much to address your concerns.
What do you disagree with? Why? Maybe some sort of actual discussion should be had here.
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TL;DR: Making every troop more viable would create variety that the end game (still) doesn’t have. Nerfing the troops that stand out just slow everything down, and considering this game is a grind slow is not the way to go… for me.
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My entire post was about developer resource management, and my point was that reducing the impact of nerfs on troops that almost never get used anyway takes time and resources that the devs don’t have to spare right now. I think you might’ve missed that part.
I will, however, address your concerns because this is a point that a lot of people might try to make. Following is my ten page lecture titled “Why Overpowered Troops are the Bane of Balance”, presented in limerick form.
There once was a troop named Great Maw
He held th’ whole world in his jaw
He was in every team
And was truly quite mean
But now 'stead of a Maw, there’s Infernus
Yeah, can’t make that last line rhyme, sorry.
If a troop is too strong, then it becomes the focus for much of gameplay, and everyone feels compelled to use them, because the only way to counter a specific strategy is to either adapt to that strategy with a counter, or to use it yourself.
Magic: the Gathering had a similar problem back in the Black Summer of '96 with Necropotence, a card so powerful that the only viable decks… Were Necro and Anti-Necro. GoW had this exact problem around Mab’s release. And Maw’s release. This is why troops need nerfs.
(Edit: Post mostly made so that I could Limerick, admittedly)
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An ode, but gold.
Oh here is the tale of Infernus.
A troop who did quite concern us.
He made explosions and burns,
with many extra turns.
Despite nerfs, he still has quite a turf.
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Let’s hope
One last “note” in this post…anyone that seen my post as an ultimatum OR demanding a refund…needs to get their eyes fixed…seriously…I see that some disagree with my point, while others agree…you see it your way…but the way I see it…this SUCKS and it’s a garbage nerf…moving on.
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Yeah this thread got kinda wild with multiple discussions going on at the same time, bad analogies and then people arguing past eachother with one side arguing the analogy and the other side arguing the actual issue.
What we learned from it is that if you buy something that is faulty, you don’t get to return it in America apparently as customer service is aweful there!
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