Old Event weapons in the Soulforge

[Razzagor]

Well my brainless carcass can still consider the obvious:

As the class change fee will be removed and we’ll suposedly be able to put different classes in different teams it means having more weapon is a must. This would be highly desirable if all weapons would be better balanced among themselves, but since the devs took at least one step (sort of) in the right direction changing the explosion affixes.

From the spoilers i can already see some neat weapons coming, with great value for more compositions, something that puts even more value into acquiring all weapons you can.

Again, i’m not against selling these weapons for cash, it’s just a bad business to leave the players waiting for so long. It’s a and situation.

[Mithran]

Prior to heroes being power scaled back into the meta, it was mostly a player issue, with the stipulation that you’d also need a certain amount of weapons sometime in the far distant future or you’d be bottlenecked from a power star on a kingdom here or there. As of now, this is not just a “collectors” issue but also an issue with any newer players coming into the game and more casual players that you many want to convert - some of these weapons are extremely powerful tools that drive certain strategies.

When I’m showing off a certain build, and someone asks me how to get x troop, I can give them a direct answer, even if part of it is “you have to wait until x”. When someone asks about a weapon I’m showing off in a certain build, I have to begin with “well… you can’t, really”. The more powerful or useful of a tool this is, the worse. Top offenders are things like Doomed Blade, Trickster’s Shot, Earth’s Fury, and Divine Protector, with many other slightly less worse offenders such as (insert anything here that can board mod or destroy armor + scale), with only of these types of weapons ever making its way into even the cash shop being Divine Protector.

As for them being cash shop only in the future when they do, I feel this crosses the very fine line between “selling an acceleration to something that can make you powerful” and “selling power”. The inflated soulforge crafting costs for these weapons (the Doomed weapons in particular) should already be more than enough incentive to sink the gems to get them from the gem sink event shop when they are first available, as the event shop is by far the path of least resistance here.

I feel the best way to balance both of these is to make the old event weapons have multiple different packs sold seperate from the legacy (super old) weapons, with the event weapons pack possibly including some ingots, then having a soulforge rotation of all previous weapons. Yeah, that would probably mean artificially inflated prices for the actually useful weapons and not the $5 we saw divine protector for exactly one time, but a standard hasn’t exactly been established here for these types of weapons. It is imperative for this to work for all parties that the cash shop occasionally just be the quicker way to obtain said item, but said item be actually “available” (like, on a measurable time scale, not “maybe 6+ months from now, if you are lucky”). As it stands, these weapons at their current soulforge costs are fairly pretty resource intensive to craft such that it is not feasible for a player that needed many of them to be able to craft more than one a week at their current costs (after building up a buffer of Jewels to actually be able to afford the 400 jewel cost for two different colors) let alone the Doomed weapons with their 800 diamond/2000 jewel cost (plus souls and celestials). I could easily see some of the better weapons selling for $10-15 bundled with ingots to upgrade them and also being (more or less) accepted by the community at large so long as there is an actual in-game path to obtain them.

I just don’t think having a portion of the playerbase cut off from so many powerful options is healthy for the game, not for the legacy “haves”, not for newer/casual “have nots”, and not for the devs that have to manage this widening gap.

[Lyrian]

@Mithran

As for them being cash shop only in the future when they do , I feel this crosses the very fine line between “selling an acceleration to something that can make you powerful” and “selling power”. The inflated soulforge crafting costs for these weapons (the Doomed weapons in particular) should already be more than enough incentive to sink the gems to get them from the gem sink event shop when they are first available, as the event shop is by far the path of least resistance here.

What the devs appear to be striving for is implementing “event-only” items, which in other gacha-based games leverages the concept of Fear of Missing Out. Doomed weapons are the clearest example of this, although Sirrian did say that alternative methods may be implemented to achieving forging scrolls.

I’m personally mixed on the issue. On the one hand, this type of design pushes for event participation, which increases engagement, On the other hand, it creates the issue of needing to “be there” for a given event, which is not possible for newer accounts that start after the events in question end.

As I mentioned before, I think the devs’ stance is that as the game always marches forward, more weapons will be released to counterbalance the older ones that were missed. For newer accounts that may never see kingdom power levels over 10, this is probably not that much of an issue, as long as they are in a decent guild that at least clears out the blue statue weekly to buy key weapons from event shops that can cover those weapon costs.

Veteran accounts have their own pending issue in that the weapon per kingdom requirements increase sharply post-10 stars, needing 8 per kingdom by 20 (kingdoms will hit 20 a lot faster than most are expecting, especially once the new kingdoms catch up with with existing ones in the 9-10 star range. Once that happens, look out below, as the 10+ power level progress gates will be hit very quickly and catch many by surprise (such as needing level 20 pets. If vets are not buying the weekly weapons now then… welp, it’s going to be a rude awakening the power launch occurs. I’m surprised no one has posted an analysis on the expected costs of the upcoming progress gates.

My overall worry is that the intent behind the cash shop weapons is to catch veterans when they hit those weapon progress gates, and that newer accounts may be an bystanding casualty in this regard (or as mentioned above are not even considered a factor in this discussion).

[Odirty117]

I would be happy if they just put all the weekly kingdoms weapons in the shop. We just had Grosh Nak pass by, I would have thrown my $5 at them with mirth if Earth’s Fury was in the store. Yet instead we got the Skull Cleaver… Which I’m sure next to no one bought. If they want money, then put the items people are willing to pay for in the shop. I asked a dev about how many EF and TS show up in the top 100 leader boards and the response was “there’s quite a few mangs in there to.” it’s the only option some of us newer players have so of course it’s in there. But that doesn’t mean that EF, TS, and YC give veterans an unfair advantage. I see a bunch of delve teams using YC and TS. There’s nothing that even compares to that.

[ylluv]

This is a collecting game as well! They should look of what are the common solutions that the people from Trading Card Games, like Magic the Gathering and others, use to address this problem.

Getting new players to the game is just one side of the business. But the biggest one is retention. What we should do to keep the players active and transform newer players in veterans.

The sense that there’s no fairness, because I can’t get the old powerful cards, is something that pays a huge toll on that transition between new and veteran. It might not even be true, but the perception of injustice is almost impossible to deal in a effective way.

And in trading card business it was decided that was not a war worth fighting!