After seven+ years of playing gems, having been part of a few amazing guilds, I’m finally quitting the game and retiring. I’m currently at level 1625 and part of one of the top 10 guilds on Xbox (It burns when I PVP, amazing guild, look to join!)
For the devs, a few notes as to why:
The increase in monetization across the board (higher event thresholds, more expensive faction events, the higher priced seasonal event, bringing back dragonite dragons without the promised targeting mechanics, etc.) is off-putting. We dedicate a lot of time and money to this game. I have spent hundreds of dollars on this game over the years and I feel squeezed. I’m VIP level 10 - I should be able to play this game without feeling constantly sucked dry by the new mechanics.
The RNG mechanics with obtaining new troops (underspire sentinels, Dragonite, Horde Mimic, etc.) are weighted to be frustrating, not fun. In particular, spending gems, tons of time, and hard currency to play battles that give you a chance at troops that are meaningful to the experience is a brutal and frustrating loop. I got 6/7 of the new dragons with my stored up dragonite and I just know that the game will make me wait months and spend countless hours and thousands of gems to get the seventh. It’s a frustrating loop I want nothing to do with.
The new PVP system is broken. Why am I not facing heroes? It seem like it’s just PVE/Explore with odd conditions. I think I have won 99% of the battles I have faced these past two weeks and have simply never been challenged. In a similar vein, it takes at least twice as many battles to get through the PVP rewards in the new system, taking up a lot of time.
Lastly, there is just too much going on at any one time nowadays. Gems is a casual game that I would love to play 30 minutes a day. The new mechanics make it a boring game that you have to play 1-2 hours a day to keep up with, with rewards at the end of that loop that are generally frustrating and not rewarding.
I could handle the time if it weren’t just such a disappointment loop. I want to feel rewarded for investing that time and more often than not it feels like the systems (particularly the dragon gem, underspire sentinel, and horde mimic systems) are cheating me.
Good for you. The only way to make the Devs know that their product has gone down the pan is too stop paying into it and stop playing.
I pressed Delete on my VIP 13 account last week because of the things you list and the fact that Quality is most definitely not Assured with each new update.
The guilds I’ve been in have all been excellent, and the player base has done a lot to keep others engaged in GoW. Because of that, I favour guild events over individual ‘events’ but, as you point out, the daily load is now too much and I worked out that I will no longer progress because I’m not prepared to sink the time to play the amount of PvP required to be granted the opportunity to buy the book of deeds on top of everything else. So, I’m already at my max magic as far as I’m concerned, and can’t justify handing them my money and additional time when they simply ask for more of each at every turn without giving me an attractive enough reason to do so.
Agree on the “RNG” gem/cosmic dragons thing. There are people playing with a double Stellarix team, and I do not even have Diamantina yet, due to never getting the 6th gem dragon (until about 2 weeks ago). And now there is a new set of dragons again. I am quite a high level VIP player too, and probably spent more Dragonite than that guy with the 2 Stellarixes. It is the one part of the game that might make me quit too.
Happy for everyone, who is able to make the cut. I feel like I passed that window in 2019, as much as I disdain the game on most days.
Two tiny things, where I would kind of disagree in your list:
I am very certain, that the broken Pvp defense teams are not intentional, but a bug, that hopefully will get worked at in january. My best guess is, that the game fails to save the hero and then discards the whole team.
While gem expenses have been ramped up immensely over the years, it is easy to forget, that the gem income has increased too. Sometimes I remember the early days, when the best you could hope for in a whole day, was maybe two or three gems from a gem cascade, and if you were very lucky, getting five out of tributes. Took me months to get the dragon armour.
I saw teams with hero on the first day. But. On the first day we also had that bug where our attack teams would keep disappearing and had to be re-created over and over. My very far reaching guess is that to fix it, the devs temporarily removed saving of attack teams as defences OR the fix caused a problem with saving attack teams as defences, and the result is we get random 4 troops meeting the criteria as enemy teams, and in central spire - we’re getting old defence teams (I saw several 4x firebomb teams there - I doubt any sane player would intentionally use 4 Firebombs on attack).
Remember that this is only the first iteration of PvP, Sirrian announced it as only first batch of PvP updates to come throughout the year - so both bug fixes and changes to the current shape and form of PvP will be coming in future updates.
I wouldn’t consider this as a bug. More like a bad/flawed design. I just reviewd the battlegrounds release notes to see if there are any informations about players list and it’s not stating any requirements to participate on the pvp system. That would imply that they are getting everyone that has an account.
One thing that is sure is that we would face an attacking team used to play the pvp and not the defence team anymore. Although it’s completely possible to make an attack withou the hero, it’s really unlikely to do so.
But if we are facing players that are not active for a really long time, as we can simply verify, they won’t have an attack team just because they are not attacking. On this case, how the system would deal with this lack of information? How to choose the opponent’s team?
2 options:
a) choosing random teams (suggest a troop);
b) using previously defence team.
Since we are facing typical defence teams (4 bombs, webspinner/dragon, Leonis Tower/EK, etc), I would say the system is using the “b” option.
Now, we have another 2 scenarios:
a) devs didn’t antecipated the inactive players with no attack teams and the system, by itself, decided to use defence teams;
b) there is a control point where, in case of no attack team, use the defence team.
“a” needs an AI parameters that I don’t think they customised for this, but “b” implies that the devs knew about the situation and programmed like that. Therefore, not a bug.
Of course there is a possibility that it’s a bug that is making the AI sentient and doing whatever it wants, but this is GoW. Skynet would preffer something more appealing like minecraft or any battle royale out there.
It seems to be one. A couple of players have noted, that guild mates got matched with them in Pvp, and they were given a random team, despite the player having already set up an attack team in that kingdom.
P.S: Also while you can get put into a 30 account bracket with anybody, no matter how long they are inactive, fight opponents are not chosen among those, but from the players of your general league, who were active in Pvp in the last few minutes.
Someone’s already posted elsewhere that they have faced the same opponent with differing power-level teams, suggesting that the team is compiled separately on each occasion, which fits in with other observations that the lag occurs when first entering PvP (as the teams are compiled), but not when entering each pvp hub within it.
Yes, we can be mostly sure that the lag is caused by the system “choosing” not only the opponent, but what team is to be used. IMO this indicates a bad design. It needs to choose the opponent, verify the opponent’s team and, if there in none, what to do. This takes time if you consider that there are a huge amount of lists of 30 players to acomodate all players existing on this game.
New control points to limit the list of players or micro managing each league could help mitigating this lag.
The meanest post I have seen all day (picture above). But Devs just know this - if I leave soon because I do not have Diamantina and Stellarix (only got Gem Dragon No 6 two weeks ago), and spend six times as much Dragonite trying to get all the dragons, you will be losing a Level 20 VIP player. (One who is quite active in the game also). Enjoy your poor players (or not necessarily poor but maybe not willing to invest in your game) with their lucky RNG.
Know also that I enjoyed your game and all aspects of it - even Arena, PVP and GW, that many do not like. My leaving will be entirely due to the Gem Dragon and Cosmic Dragon RNG fiasco.
PS - I am not wealthy at all - but this is the ONLY game I play so I invested a lot into it…but now I constantly feel miserable at seeing all the dragon teams in PVP and the so-called RNG has treated me very unfairly. So yes I am at a crossroads and will decide if it is better to quit. After all I do not play to feel miserable.
After playing for 7 years, I finally quit in early November myself. This means I quit before the PVP update, but points 1, 2, and 4 are spot on.
I’ve left enough detailed posts over the years where there’s really nothing else that needs to be said.
I genuinely hope people still choosing to play the game are having fun, but the direction the game is headed in is not good. GoW has become yet another whale-hunting, over-monetized confuse-opoly that is hostile to both new players and longtime vets alike.
Ok so if you want to see hero you go to the no restrictions area and you will see hero and more of a challenge battles. Thank goodness the other are easier because if not it would be even slower. I wait for wars week when I want a challenge. Not wanting regular battles to take forever.
All the new Gems they introduced did not give anything to the game to make it better. It’s just more confusion with no meaningful impact. Just be a bit careful when it’s GuildWars time.
With the relatively new UI design Gems is up for one of the “Most Ugliest Looking Games 2023” Awards. Not to mention it’s not that easy to find the ongoing Event you’re searching for - even if you have played it 1000 times in the past. I mean… there are books about Usability designers can read…
