Let’s look at a little more in detail. What would it take for players to receive more appropriate offers, specifically the ingot ones?
1.) Make the offer generator more intelligent, by looking deeper into what players really need. An open weapon upgrade task due to missing weapons won’t ever benefit from extra ingots. IP2 claims that this would take too much processing power, so this won’t happen.
2.) Make the offer generator skip inappropriate offers that can easily be identified as such. This is actually pretty simple, the offer generator already knows which tasks at which kingdom power level players are stuck on, without any deep inspection. Open tasks could just be ignored past a defined kingdom power level threshold, e.g. an open weapon upgrade tasks is excessively unlikely to be caused by missing ingots at kingdom power level 20. This is a server side change that could be done any time and should be very easy to implement.
So, why hasn’t anything been done yet, even years after the issue first surfaced and got reported? This likely boils down to monetization. Players first get shown helpful offers, which slowly turn into very apparent useless ones as players progress. There’s also a very apparent way players can get back the good offers they used to get, they just have to buy all those $5 weapon flash offers that show up ever so often. Each kingdom usually has a paywalled weapon or two that can only be bough for cash, and they increasingly often make the difference between receiving useless or good offers.
TL;DR: Inappropriate offers are just another sneaky way to badger you into paying real money, there’s no intention to fix them unless a big enough angry mob shows up.
So, it been 20 days since “upgrade 10 Ghulvania weapons” showed up as objective and during this time
18/20 daily offers have been ingots
22/57 arena offers have been ingots
all because I don’t own that useless $5 weapon (and there wasn’t even a flash offer begging me to buy it…for that matter, I don’t even recall the last time I saw any weapon flash offer - so much for remotely successful monetization) it’s been 40 wasted opportunities to show something I might actually spend gems on.
While I, reluctantly, might let unhelpful kingdom helper offers due to unmedalled troops slide, ingots due to not owning enough weapons are not in the same ballpark - it’s not my fault that I was never offered a realistic chance to get those weapons in the first place.
Poor design on full display seems about right, fitting description.
From IP2 perspective those offers represent benefits that must only be handed out in very limited amounts. You only get three offers each day, plus up to another three as top end Arena reward. They compete with various cash offers, by allowing you to use resources likely obtained by playing to buy them. If they show you something you have no inclination to buy that’s one opportunity to avoid spending money safely off the table.
Which is why this likely fails Hanlon’s Razor, all grumbling aside it just doesn’t feel executed well enough. Still, how is Fear Of Missing Out working for you? How much attention will you pay from now on to weapon flash offers showing up? Especially in regards to paywalled weapons that might make a difference in up to a year from now?
I’ve been getting kingdom helpers for Ghulvania since it became level 23 almost daily (had the weapons so no ingot offers). Funny enough I don’t get any class XP offers despite needing about 8,000 more xp to finish my classes. No kingdoms are being held up by classes, but I’d be buying class XP to just help finish this grind if it was available.
I’m aware of how it works, just pointing out another way this could benefit them in the long run. I’m sure my classes will be maxed long before they change daily offers.
Just chiming in to restate that my Ghulvania weapon block is due to forge scrolls. You could rework the daily offers to detect this and offer me forge scrolls, or you could add the long promised alternative method of earning forge scrolls.
You get an opportunity to buy a small number of each scroll once every 66 weeks.
It seems like such a simple fix, it baffles me it hasn’t been done. Replace ingot offers with diamond offers (doesn’t help some people but at least diamonds are relevant to missing weapons) and common troop offers for the medal tasks with medals. People may not buy them but at least they wouldn’t be infuriatingly irrelevant
