As long as the “pastries” are a solid, guaranteed, objective, unwavering, worthy and… hmmm… rich in calcium rewards that’s ok. Now if the devs expect players to:
Same here. The discouragement is real, even though we try and help them and convince them that it will obviously get better the higher level they become.
If I could change 1 thing about the game it would be explore. When you earn a badge it takes 11 clicks to go from the victory screen to the next battle, it should be 3 tops. A “skip the pageantry” and go to the next battle button would be a god send.
There needs to be higher level explores. Explore 12 is too easy, and there is only a 2% chance to get at token of nysha, which you need 54 of to fully medal just 1 mythic troop. If each fight takes a minute, that’s over 100 hours of grinding per troop. You can’t blame people for wanting their stats to be as high as possible… but this is just cruel and discouraging.
For our very particular kind of members (high gold, no GW) I’ve not seen a different trend in the last 12 months. We had 2-3 members quitting the game in the last year, all before 4.9, no one in the last 6 months.
Problem with making higher level explore is that it isn’t really harder. With troops like HKI, ZG, Scorpius … level doesn’t really matter at all.
I didn’t really answer any poll questions because I didn’t feel right about answering them. When I quit GoW, it’s not going to be any one of these little things.
I saw someone explain they think most people get “the straw that broke the camel’s back” wrong. We tend to talk about it and say, “If they hadn’t done that one last thing, it would’ve been fine.” That’s not the metaphor. The problem wasn’t the last straw. The problem was the thousands of other straws had been heaped upon the camel and nobody did anything about it.
That’s my thoughts on quitting GoW. It won’t be because of some new, bad feature. It will be because of a progression of situations where I emotionally invested myself in providing feedback only to be summarily dismissed. Over time, I stopped investing.
“When you punish a person,
For dreaming their dream,
Don’t expect them to thank or forgive you.”
- The Mountain Goats - “The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton”
I’ve been reading a bunch about game dev lately an listening to podcasts. The most successful people always iterate. They start with a neat idea and implement it in some raw form. They let a friend play it, get feedback, then make some changes based on that feedback. This happens over and over again. A game like Into the Breach takes more than a year of this process. This is important, because of a weird adage. Players are very good at describing what they don’t like, but not always good at describing what they need.
GoW doesn’t iterate. Features release, and while sometimes we get a small tweak in a .5 release, I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that the devs have the freedom to “improve current features” as opposed to “develop a new feature”. That feels like the story of World Events. It’s an interesting idea, but the current implementation has glaring flaws. I get why randomized scoring can be a solution to ties, but I question the “map screen”. An interesting choice would be “choose a hard fight for more rewards vs. an easy fight that offers minimal rewards”. Instead 50% of the time I have “4 choices between identical fights and my choice does not deterministically affect my rewards”.
PvP has more refinement than World Events. But World Events aren’t ever gong to change, if recent history is a guide. We’re suck with the devs’ first draft, and we’re never going to see where it might go, because 5.0 is inevitably going to be focused on some other first draft. There’s no point giving the devs feedback on World Events because it’s not their job to improve what is already in GoW and encourage old players to pay out, it’s their job to develop “new features” to tantalize new players.
So when I quit, it’s not really going to be “the new feature sucks”. It’s going to be the understanding that several features before it sucked, and the dev team is more committed to releasing first drafts than improving previous drafts. Their management might be pressuring them into that, but I feel it’s their job to push back against management to create “a great game” vs. “make this number go up”. So long as I see zero evidence I am wrong, every update is a straw on the camel’s back.
I’m done giving them feedback. They might give a shit, but they sure don’t act on it. How many years does it take to get a simple problem like Anu’s Scepter fixed? I can’t be assed to tell them when I find a bug anymore.
The bulk of the people that I’ve seen quit in the past six months just said that they got bored with the game, or just burned out. One quit because he was angry that “the AI cheats” (a viewpoint I don’t actually share). I think a lot of players reach a certain point in this game where most of the content is behind them, and what’s in front of them just doesn’t seem worth pursuing. They felt for a long time that they were making real progress in the game, and then, suddenly, they weren’t seeing all that much that they had to chase. Should they stick around long enough to get those last few Orbs of Power for Zuul’goth? Or get more Pets to Mythic? Or complete more Pure Faction delves to Level 500? Some people feel like their progress has stalled, and sticking around is just a commitment to grind.
Lots of end gamers have nothing to spend money on. Collection complete with tens of thousands of gems.
I’d like to also add the following QoL change to the list regarding guild events.
Let players get to play their battles throughout the week, no more sigils or war battles locked behind date barriers. Anyone who wants to go out to the cottage on sundays shouldn’t be unable to participate in competitive guilds, specifically in guild war.
For guild wars you can still have daily battles, ex. day 2 can be fought on Tuesday or Wednesday to count towards the 1v1 score and distribute the xp and seals bonus but players can still fight for weekly score throughout the week. Just with the change now you can fight all battles anytime between Tuesday to Sunday to count towards the weekly score that determines the overall bracket leaderboard.
This would require all defenses to be locked in when Day 1 begins (to avoid collusion) but I’d definitely be on board. More flexibility on when to play is not a bad thing.
For other events, I agree, it would be nice to get your full week worth of free sigils all in one pile at the beginning of the week so you can play them whenever you wish.
Of course…both of these things are closely tied to “daily engagement” so we know what the answer to this is going to be 
This.
I would spend money if the game offered something that would make a significant difference to my game experience or team power, but there is nothing for end gamers. The only thing really left for me would be maxing pets and kingdoms, but deeds are just crazy expensive for tiny, incremental stat increases that I will never notice.
All you posted was a link so not sure what your point is.
Someone else had mentioned that Steam has actually increased GoW player activity. I attribute that to the amount of usually mobile players at home playing on PC now. My thoughts are supported by the uptick on console play now due to C19.
That is happening already. Or did I misunderstand your idea?
Wants the ability in Guild Wars to fight all 30 battles on Day 1 so that one can take a vacation the rest of the week.
Right now one is limited to any current and previous day’s battles. There is less freedom as to when one can go into battle because only 5 are unlocked per day.
I have at least 4 members who do this already. Your suggestion is better though since they won’t have to possibly rush on Sundays to do 30 matches.
If they implement that though they definitely need to make separate talent trees for GW defenses. And have those talents lock in for the week. It’s such a pain in the ass to have to constantly alter the tree to work for offense compared to defense that week. I realize it’s a niche gripe, but most QOL issues are. This one effects at least 300 players monthly on each platform.
I for one have basically stopped caring what the dev do because it makes no sense. There are changes now that I don’t even bother playing.
I’ve stopped really playing the underworld – I dislike limitations of troop type and color. (It’s why I dislike Guild Wars so much)
I don’t even bother finishing kingdoms now. It’s just another sink hole…having had all mine done then having them reset…
I just stick with some basics for 1 hour per account. And that’s it.
Fix the bugs
Fix the timeouts
Fix the fact that if something goes wrong especially at the end - no count instead of a count.
But hey… after spending $500.00 dollars on a $25.00 game and knowing I will never be able to finish …sorta told me something about me.
I play now just to do something at the end of the day.
Maybe they can use pet rescue’s mechanism to unhook the defenses from one of the team slots, then it’s just a matter of importing the team code. “Ex. 1,2,2,3,1,1” for traits.
In reality, likely much harder than that but the I think foundations are there. Wonder if they can hook the medals into the code as well.
The UI issue? Well second screen maybe or just hook into selecting one of the 3 medal loadouts? Not ideal but big steps towards the goal.
There was once upon a time where devs actually participated in the forums. Now, they hide behind the face of Salty.
I quit the game awhile ago. The fact that they are slowly pushing the game toward requiring money to advance in any reasonable fashion (i.e. gems for events and higher tiers required for rewards), and the new events being garbage (i.e. World Events)… all had to do with my decision.
World Events had a chance to be fun but no, just more garbage in, garbage out.
When or if I come back I wouldn’t be surprised to see the game requiring 1 gem to play 1 battle of any kind.
Bingo. Salty and kafka are PR so it’s their job to put up with our discontent. They are given limited info and that’s why the whole transparency thing is such a big deal. Of late kafka is becoming more rattled (esp with direct reply tags) but she and salty are basically cannon fodder because of the idiots calling the shots.