It’s hard to disagree with this. I posted about it before but epic tasks killed the game.
I found it really frustrating watching the dev Q&A. Every question, Sirrian basically said “yes” to (or at least something along the lines of “we can certainly look into that”). Except the one about reducing gold costs of epic tasks, which was a straight “no” because, apparently, “there is a lot of gold in the game economy right now”.
Which is a bit like saying there’s no point raising minimum wage because when you look at the FTSE 100 chief exec pay, pay has never been higher.
I agree and so would most long-term players. Financially though, GoW has performed so well that I’d even be so bold as to say that Puzzle Quest 3 will take the backseat going forward. While we don’t have numbers for mobile, we know that Steam player numbers have been largely stagnant for a year. If an additional 33%-50% of profit can be extracted from this largely non-changing base of players every single year while quality continues to tank then what’s there left to say? They tighten the thumbscrews, people throw money at them, they tighten the thumbscrews more, people throw more money at them. Rinse, repeat.
Well, to be fair, back when epic tasks were announced they were outright horrible, at maybe a tenth of the perceived value they have now. A long heated discussion followed, which eventually led to the epic tasks we have now, through several incremental steps. It’s sort of a middle ground, from community perspective it couldn’t have been less, from IP2 perspective it couldn’t have been more. I actually feel this was a very good compromise, I can understand that they aren’t willing to budge here now or any time in the future.