I don’t want to offend anyone with my post or make it seem like I’m whining, but please consider adjusting the amount of immortal souls a F2P player can earn in a PVP season. I try to get all the achievements in this game on PSN. Recently you added “There Can Be Only 10” which requires upgrading an immortal to Level 10.
This is easily achieved if you shell out $15 for the season pass, but it’s going to be nearly impossible if you don’t do that. The free spots in the season pass/goals will award you 295 souls for Immortal Glaycia. It costs 550 souls to get to level 10. You need to get the other 255 souls from burning chests. The chests can award souls for any of the 11 immortals as well as silver marks/gold marks/idols. I have opened up several chests, the majority of them did not have souls in them. I have gotten more silver marks than anything.
I’m going to assume the chance to receive souls for a specific immortal is somewhere around 2-3%. I know you can receive between 10-50 immortal souls so let’s assume 30 is average. That means I would need to open between 8-9 chests that had Glaycia souls in them to get her to level 10. That means I would need to open between 250-300 Burning chests to get enough souls to get her to level 10 unless I got incredibly lucky. F2P players can only receive 310 tokens to open Burning chests by completing all the goals so 31 chests in total for this pvp season. At the current rate we’d have to go through 9-10 pvp seasons to get enough souls without getting lucky. I’m sure you will eventually add more immortals and that will make earning this even worse.
This feels to me like the trophy/achievement is being gated behind a paywall. Most F2P games allow you to pay to make life easy or require a lot of grinding to get a similar result. There is no amount of grinding we can do here to make it easier. This seems unfair as it would take an incredibly long time to go through that many seasons.
I think you did a great thing by putting shiny keys in the pvp store for gold marks. Since the achievement “Get 5 Troops to Shiny Level 2” requires roughly 300 shiny keys to do so, it would’ve been nearly impossible for a F2P player without that addition. Now, it still takes time, but it’s doable. I’m in a top 100 guild, and we really never get past the first shiny key in the guild event awards so the addition of them to the pvp shop was very welcome.
Please consider adding burning tokens to the pvp store for gold marks as well or upping the number of souls F2P players can earn with the season awards. The achievement as currently constructed feels like it is locked behind a paywall. The immortals can go all the way up to level 30 so allowing us to get a slightly easier path to rank 10 should not be a big deal.
The game has never been fair to F2P players. Like all F2P games, its designed to where its possible to get anything in the game, but it will be a mind numbing frustrating grind that could take years. The game is specifically designed to be a slow grind unless you shell out the cash to “speed” things up. Its how F2P games make money.
And the new PvP and immortal troops are just the next attempt in the long line of cash grabs that will eventually fade away as new cash grabs are released. Unfortunately, like the shiny troops, the more time passes, the harder it will get to level up a specific immortal, as new ones get released and your chances at getting certain souls will get worse as the pool gets more and more diluted.
I do know completing certain Seasonal PvP goals will get you immortal souls for the “current” immortal. Though I can’t find a specific list of what the reward is for each tier on each goal. Maybe someone who has completed it and has been documenting the rewards can post it.
I haven’t made much of a dent in the goals, so far earning the bronze on them and working toward the silver. However I thinking earning the gold tier (fully completing the goal) nets you 45 souls for the current immortal.
Ladder Climber gave 45 souls for reaching Diamond League (gold unlock), this was already complete for me when the season started and I don’t know remember what the bronze and silver tier rewards were, I think it was just burning marks.
Brawler, winning PvP battles, I have the silver in this and am working toward the gold, and it shows the rewards as 45 souls.
So if you complete all the goals and get the 176,000 VP needed to get all the free rewards, it should be possible to get the current immortal to 10. But doing is going to be a long grind. As the one for golding the Alliance rank requires 560,000 VP I think, and I know I am not getting that one done. Same with the monolith and citadel related goals, I am not sure those are possible to complete in a single season without purchasing more sigils.
One trend I’m seeing in the game lately that discourages completionists like me is the addition of things that can never be completed.
I think a big part of the appeal of games like Gems of War is the pursuit of completing goals and collections. For example, getting all troops, levelling them all to max, fully traiting them, gold medalling them, and getting all weapons fully upgraded.
Recently new things are being added that can never be completed. For example, a natural goal a completionist would want to aim for is getting all shiny troops to max level shiny. However, this goal can never be achieved, since a new shiny troop is added every week, but nowhere close to enough shiny keys to max it (even if you buy every shiny key you can get for money). Consequently, this is not a goal worth pursuing, so I’m not excited about shiny keys.
Immortals have the same problem. A new Immortal will be added each season, but nowhere near enough immortal souls to get on top of maxing everything (even with the premium pass).
This has the added impact of making previously achievable goals unreachable (maxing all troops, weapons or pets).
I enjoyed grinding for pursuable goals, even if they were very slow (such as gold medalling all troops).
I don’t find the idea of pursuing goals that move away from you faster than you can chase them very appealing. It takes away some of the game’s appeal to completionists.
EDIT: The game would not lose appeal for me if I actually reached these goals. I would still play to stay on top of new releases.
Eventually? They’ve said they’ll add a new one every season. Glaycia was added this season, for example. The longer time goes on, the harder it will be to get what you need for the chests.
Thanks to @Dwuemka sharing the infographic on the forum
we know that those are, in fact, possible to achieve which leaves us with one truly unobtainable goal (obvious paygate! As soon as I saw silver task requiring level level 14 I knew this had to be the case) and one pseudo-unobtainable goal.
Short rant
(Pseudo, of course, being 560,000 VP.
After a quick fingercounting, as an example, I would need to to about 90 battles per day (I’m disregarding citadels and such simplicity’s sake).
One might tell me - use victory talismans! Sure, but…last time I checked they didn’t grow on trees and using them on 50 base point battles - and such battles are, guesstimating, 94% of what I’m offered, with 4% of the remaining being below 50 - feels too much of a waste to go through with it.
One might tell - do blood frenzy! Mmm…that would still require me to do massive campaign whenever there is blood frenzy available to compensate for the time when it is not there. How so?, you might ask. Because I only do color regions. I’ve said it before and I can say it again - I find facing illegal team after illegal team in outer ring utterly stupid, so I keep my interaction with that down to absolute minimum, namely, citadel battles and five wins for gold marks. When somebody grows a pair to actually enforce the rules they came up with, I can consider reconsidering. Until then - thanks but no thanks.
I am a daily player since 2014 and am a completionist like you. I am currently missing 2 Sentinels and (obviously) the (dire) troop Kukulkan for which I will not be paying 2500 golden wotsits.
There will, allegedly be a way to forge Kukulkan some day and no doubt the Sentinels will drop for me in the far distant future whilst enjoying the weekly process of The Underspire.
Likewise the weapons related to the Immortals. I now own all the current Immortals so all those outstanding (8 for me) unowned weapons will naturally ‘unlock’ in time but I do technically ‘own’ them already.
Oddly, because all of the above seem ultimately obtainable I am not too phased now having resolved to just owning all and waiting to max them out.
Just wait until you get to a kingdom power that requires a weapon you cant get unless you pay for it. That was the first thing i noticed as a free to play for 7 years now…
Was annoying to hit that unowned button just to see a singular pay weapon
I have zero issue even grinding out 560,000 VP in a season if it meant I could get the immortal to level 10. I only care about the achievement. I know I’ll never have an immortal close to rank 30 and I’m completely okay with that. I did get the 45 souls for being in diamond league, and there are 250 on the free slots in the season pass. If there are additional souls for her built into the silver and gold tiers of those seasons rewards/goals then my post is completely irrelevant. Unfortunately I can’t see those rewards so I’m not sure what they are, but I’ll start grinding today.
Oh I know there’s plenty of things like that in this game. I feel I have been able to achieve a lot of great rewards in this game just by grinding. This one only bugs me because it has an achievement tied to it. If it is possible to get the immortal to 10 as a F2P player then I stand corrected. I know I’ll probably never get one to 30 and I’m fine with that. Also, just wanted to say that you make some great videos and they were really helpful to me when I was a newer player. Keep up the good work.
I burnt out on this game a few years ago, due in part to finding it increasing difficult to keep up with, despite playing constantly and regularly spending money. I’ve returned to play a bit recently, just to check out the new content from the last few patches, and it’s clear things have only gotten worse in that regard. I don’t believe I can realistically approach GoW as a F2P completionist anymore. On the flip side, there is still a tremendous amount of content that I enjoy, but I have to be okay with the understanding that I can’t do or have everything if I stick with it again.
It seems I was wrong here on my post. I will leave it up here since people may want this info but it appears that there roughly 610 possible immortal glaycia souls you can get without chests. I was not aware when I posted this that many of the goals offered 45 glaycia souls for the gold tier. Since it’s 550 to get to 10, you can technically leave once of the gold tasks undone. I’m not counting the one that says Get Glaycia to X rank because the gold tier is rank 20 so it’s not worth mentioning in regards to my post.
This is exactly how I feel. It’s no fun trying to pursue things that you know you will never be able to complete. Like you mentioned later with respect to gold medaling a troop being an enjoyable goal - it’s not the length of time to complete but the possibility of doing it.
Also with the gold medaling of troops you can pick and choose which troop/kingdom you want to work on. So you actually feel like you’re working to something. That’s not possible with shiny troops or Immortals. It’s all RNG what you get and the goal post just keeps moving further and further away.
I used to be a person who every month would buy something to help support the game. HOWEVER, when Guild wars bugs continued for 2 years without being addressed, when even the cosmetic bug of loosing one’s hair on their hero continues to this very day ( a bug that goes back to when we got different armor). The final straw for me paying is when they re-did dungeon -you don’t get token dragonite for actually completing three after finding a trap.
NO you only get it if you RNG through a perfect run. And you finally get enough dragonite you can’t get the dragons you need but you get those you already have, you have more than you need.
While I like the new PVP - I don’t like that I can’t store teams, that offense teams are being used as defense team making it hard to actually play against - and this needing to be in DIAMOND level is really not cool.