There is a ton of negativity here right now and a lot of it is from me. However, the aggressive tone of my negative feedback is because I love this game and I want to keep playing and keep enjoying it. I’m sure this is true for many of you. This thread is to list reasons why we love this game, what made us interested in Gems of War, and what got us hooked so the developers can read something positive right now and be reminded of why we’re here and why our feedback is strong and emotional. I implore you to join in!
- The most generous resource rates and insane opportunity for premium currency I have ever seen in a f2p game. A player can obtain everything in the game without spending any money and can do so so readily that I, who started playing the game seriously in July, expect to do so eventually despite only having started playing several months ago. Further, I obtain about $100 worth of gems each week. Nothing I know of does this. (That estimate is conservative and the real number is higher still.) This is why I can recommend the game to everyone because of how little it asks of the player to spend on it; I tell guildmates to buy Deathknight mostly to support the devs since most of them haven’t ever spent money. The current outrage is over this very issue, but comparing Gems to most, if not all, gacha games such as Puzzles and Dragons completely, absolutely, totally, and every other adverb you can use favors Gems as these games make the player hit a brickwall if they do not eventually spend money and that cost to keep progressing only begins to rise exponentially from there.
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- All of this is still true despite the recent design choices. These choices are very concerning for other reasons, but that’s not the point of this thread.
- Seamless account sharing and transition between mobile and PC. (This one doesn’t apply to console bros, sorry!) Having some integration between mobile and PC would be cool, but it goes so much farther than that: the feature of having a 1:1 experience itself between these platforms is unparalleled. You don’t have to go to a specific menu, click a button, wait on the first platform, and then do the same on the second platform every time you transition, but you can play a game on one, pick up the other, and immediately be where you were without any work whatsoever. The ability to instantly pick up the game and go or to keep playing on my “desktop” account while out and about is the single biggest reason why I immediately liked this game, continue to play this game, and why I was previously recommending it to others.
- Tons of depth with low complexity. For a designer, maximizing depth (which is good) while minimizing complexity (which is bad) is a huge challenge, but Gems does an awesome job of this and the designers deserve major kudos for this. Most of this stems from Puzzle Quest’s design, but the principle still stands. When recommending Gems to others, they can be very skeptical because “it’s just Bejeweled”, but, as we all know, it’s so much more than that. The amount of planning and strategy that goes into high level matches is great but also greatly rewarding. Bejeweled came out twenty years ago and no one would have believed you if you told them you would make a successful MMORPG based on that paradigm. (MMO isn’t quite right but isn’t too much of an exaggeration).
- Incredible art design and production value. Most of the art in the game is gorgeous and way too high quality for a free to play mobile game for what either is or basically an indie developer. It’s not just troop art either: the kingdom backgrounds are awesome, too. With the exception of some troop art, everything looks great and unique. The game’s appearance as a whole is very polished. It would be acceptable or even expected for a free game of this kind to have terrible art.
That’s all I can think of right now, but I’ll add more as I can think of it. Please comment on what you love about this game! We could all use more positivity during these trying times, both inside of and outside of Gems of War.
