Thanks for passing the feedback on—I know it’s a (potentially) big ask from a coding standpoint.
I just also think the effort would be worth it
Part of me also wonders: if progress can’t go backwards, once unlocked, then how would it be harmful for the game to maybe now think you don’t have the previous requirements met?
A “finished” weapon bank could serve as a fix for daily deals, too. A weapon, once finished, is marked as such. Don’t have the daily deals function check the weapons collection for currently active affixes, but rather the “bank” (or even just the weapon collection for unlocked affixes, regardless of whether they are active or not).
And if teamscore lowers—who really cares? It’s a pretty broken measurement anyway, to seasoned players. In fact, it’s sort of a newbie trap—most of the good guilds I know have to spend a lot of unnecessary time and effort untraining players to think a high team score means a good team. Plain and simple: it doesn’t. And I don’t think basically any player who has a firm understanding of the game would even care if the entire metric were thrown away (even if this meant that a new system for calculating PVP gold rewards would have to be implemented).
It’s kind of crazy to think that some of these weapon upgrades, unwanted or seen as harmful by some players, actually add to the team score or perceived difficulty of the team being faced .
A simple and elegant solution would be to allow to check/uncheck desired bought upgrades in this weapon’s upgrade’s list. So desired (already bought) upgrades are applied and not the others.
The cost stay the same so it’s fair.
I’m sort of out of words here. After two years and multiple explanations by the community it still hasn’t been understood what the community is requesting? This isn’t just disappointing, Sirrian would die in shame if he ever returned to the game.
I’ll try once more, even though this is apparently a lost cause.
This is Essence of Evil, a fully upgraded weapon in Gems of War:
Same applies to all other weapons. Uprades toggled off don’t do anything when casting the spell.
This DOES NOT have any effect on the kingdom progression system, because the upgrades have already been bought and don’t go away, they just don’t do anything when casting the spell.
This DOES NOT have an effect on team scores, because the upgrades have already been bought and don’t go away, they just don’t do anything when casting the spell.
This DOES NOT have an effect on daily deals, because the upgrades have already been bought and don’t go away, they just don’t do anything when casting the spell.
This DOES NOT have an effect on that at least one other system you are not thinking of right now, because it is just as irrelevant as all the other imaginary showstoppers that don’t exist.
This IS an utterly trivial feature request to an isolated functionality that could not possibly take any huge amount of time to implement. Is there any way we, as a community, can finally get this request to whoever understands the explanation above and is able to act on it?
I always have to laugh when people, with or without programming experience, without ever laying eyes on even a tiny piece of the code for a game that has continuously expanded & changed non-stop for close to a decade, has been converted onto multiple platforms that each have their own nuances to consider, declare that something is a “trivial fix”.
Tell the 5 star chef it’s trivial to interchange butter & lard in a recipe if you don’t have the other on hand and I’m sure you’ll get nothing short of scorn. Driving a car is nothing more than the equivalent of a bunch of toggles - turn it on/off, press the gas on/off, press the break on/off - I’m sure it’s a trivial change to toggle between manual & automatic if I want my car to do both. And I’d certainly trust the world’s top heart surgeon to operate on my brain tumor - close enough in skill set I’m sure to fill in for each other.
Not a single person on this forum outside the dev team can claim that ANY code change is trivial (I’m not talking about changes to a variable within the code, but an actual change TO the code itself) without any knowledge of how the game was coded & never once setting eyes on the code.
I personally don’t understand why the egregious gem-spawning upgrades haven’t already been swapped out yet, seeing as that requires no code changes. I understand there are some gray area upgrades that not everyone can agree on changing that would give the devs some pause to think on. But at least making the very basic of moves toward addressing the worst cases over the last year should have been a no-brainer and likely would have gone a long way toward creating some goodwill.
Tldr - everyone needs to stop thinking they know what’s involved in changing game code better than those who made it because they don’t & never will, but devs, come on already & swap some of these stupidly OBVIOUS upgrades out.
The toggle suggestion has been made loud and clear, this is really not the issue.
Kafka’s point is that it would require a lot of code rewriting, because what we see is not exactly what the game checks. If you put in 1+1=2 on your calculator in doesn’t just add the numbers, it has to output the correct dashes of which those numbers are made. Not to mention understanding what it means when you press those buttons, because pressing 1 1 means 11, not 2, nor 1 yes it’s really 1. Programming may seem simple at times, but adding features when you’ve built a complex structure (like a game) without the consideration that such features might need to be added it’s not a simple matter of copy and pasting it in.
I’m also in camp ‘This should be fixed by now or very soon’, but telling someone who tries his best to communicate between the player community and the developers and through them the programmers (there are no doubt corporate layers on that end) to ‘just put it in, it’s so simple’ is condescending and rude, especially when it has been explained several times that even if they agree on this solution it would not be that simple.
This is exactly hitting the nail on the head. Identify the problematic affixes, amend them to something that is not potentially suicidal…job done. What’s the issue here? Apathy? Or a hubris that believes we don’t know what we are talking about? We have smashed up our drum kits by beating the same drum over and over and over again. This just fuels the devs aversion to the “negative feedback” that inevitably ensues. You’ve had constructive feedback for a year plus and we get nothing by way of acknowledgement or endeavour to fix the issue. I would never beta test this game because being ignored in forums is 1 thing, but being ignored as a “respected” tester () is a whole different issue
The issue isn’t that it hasn’t been made loud and clear, the issue is that it hasn’t been understood.
No, Kafka’s point is that REVERTING upgrades would require a lot of code rewriting. Because that causes issues with the kingdom progression system (kingdom power levels might have to be lowered if completed tasks no longer qualify), team scores (account power score might have to be lowered if the weapon upgrade was the only factor bumping it up), daily deals (offer pool might have to be adjusted to consider buying the weapon upgrade a second time) and whatever else gets into the way of purchases supposed to only happen once (refunds come to mind).
What we have been asking for all these years is to DISABLE upgrades, to which all the above arguments don’t apply in any way. It’s very apparent that when Kafka was replying to the toggle feature we requested she was actually talking about some downgrade feature nobody really wants. And I’m shocked that this is apparently the feedback that has been forwarded to the developers all the time.
The problem is that this communication doesn’t work out. This is basically beta test reloaded, whatever we say, it seems to reach the developers garbled beyond recognition, for whatever reason. Ever since Sirrian left, IP2 seems to have lost the ability to stay in sync, both externally and internally, which gets us such mindboggling misunderstandings as the story behind Medal of Cedric. I don’t know how to fix it, I don’t even understand where the broken parts are. Maybe that’s why it feels so frustrating.
From design perspective the toggle feature is trivial compared to the downgrade feature, I’m sure the GoW devs would agree if the idea ever reaches them.
That would just add more confusion. There isn’t going to be a universal agreement in regards to which upgrades are good or bad, some are even situational. All that is required is a solution that doesn’t force players to use upgrades they personally consider bad.
I’m pretty sure I’d feel unhappy about the opponent full health/armor troop transforming into a full health/armor frog instead of a half health/armor frog.
Even in this thread there is debate on what should be done and which weapons should or should not be changed, hence the toggle is the best solution. However if it’s going to then be - ‘It’s a major issue, we can do it sometime later’ then that was what we got last time, 18+ months ago.
I think we should be able to pass on that the most important issues are the Doomed Weapons and Essence of Evil.
Perhaps they could be fixed ASAP with simple changes as below, and then the other issues such as warm/hot/carved/astral etc etc be reviewed for later changing to potentially having the ability to turn off after upgrading and upgrading kingdom. For example on a stream we could be told they are viable and if they could see light of day.
I’ve recommended the affix changes in line with what we have been saying in the community since the inception of each weapon. Doomed Crossbow is an example of the affix not breaking. It literally is changing to use that affix and making toad pop first before all effects. Please pass this feedback on to the devs.
/disclaimer if the toad issue is a complex issue, I am sure we could live with changing that to give all green allies 2 mana or something
Yeah, since the current design of affixes is that they all trigger after the main spell effects, my guess is that this one isn’t so easy (so an alternative would be okay, as you suggested).
@Fourdottwoone just a quick note to explain I perfectly understand the request and my response covers both reverting and adding a “toggle”. The game is not built to do that, so every system that weapon upgrades touches would need to be re-coded to some degree to fit a toggle in.
It is a feedback request I’ve passed on though.
I simply explained that this isn’t as simple as adding an on off switch, 1s and 0s, to explain why we don’t just do this instead of changing the affixes etc.
PS. Sirrian hasn’t left. What he did do was stop coming to the forum because he was receiving death threats and was being abused and ended up spending his time on that instead of doing his job of developing a healthy game. He made a public post about this when he made that decision.
I might be getting forgetful in my age, but is there a reason why we can’t get a bandage for the 3 most commonly requested weapons with issues? It says a lot when an affix that does nothing is preferred to what some of these weapons have.
If this is the case, I would prefer that the current system stays, but the order of upgrades could be more logical, like adding the Transform ability first and then applying all the effects after, instead of doing the opposite, which ruins or contradicts the meaning of a fully upgraded weapon potential. One example, EoE weapon.
It seems that the best and quickest solution is to change or modify all listed problematic upgrades and change the order in which they are occurring.
I’ll create another thread dedicated to this issue alone, focusing on +10 - Mythic weapons and +10 - Doomed weapons first. The passed feedback can then be pushed forward and approved, with the personal involvement and approval of the community - players, who have the necessary expertise and can evaluate things more objectively.
This is an important feature that definitely must be addressed.
Death threats over a game… Thanks for clarifying this. He made the right call then.
Except it isn’t: they could easily change the offending upgrades even by a placeholder saying ‘as of 09/JUN/2020 this upgrade does nothing until we have time to change it to something useful’: that way the weapons stop having the known issues, and the date is a reminder of how long it takes them to put this issue ‘on the table’.
it also isnt that easy - that would mean turning off the code for the whole affix, so that would affect every weapon that has that affix to be switched off
at least if i were doing the programming:
affixes would be a separate functions which would be added to weapons as a parameter
so like someone mentioned - it might be easier to change the affix assosiated with weapon → just replace the parameter given to a weapon at upgrade number X,
turning off the affix would turn it off for every weapon having the affix, replacing is the right way to go
I guess things might be a bit more complicated, if for some reason affixes have a fixed level of upgrade where they can be added to the weapon, or affixes can have a “value” assigned to it, and each weapon has a limit defined by weapon rarity of how much “value” weapon can have
if any of above is the case, than even replacing one affix for another might require some thinking and work → either lifting some limits or programming new affixes or just doing some brainwork to replace troublesome affixes with other existing in a way that wouldnt make weapon to Overpowered or that wouldnt break it or make it even more useless than it is now
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