the old mechanics/drop rates were sufficient to balance between p2p and f2p.
but since then you’ve expanded things.
[1] for instance, there is no possible way to upgrade even one kingdom to level 20 as of now.
the opportunities for books of deeds are simply too rare.
to make any progress on that front realistic, you need to reconfigure how deeds are give out.
and writs are essentially useless. they are sufficient for creating deeds, but no books.
as of now, i have ONE kingdom at level 17, and need 1000 deeds to make enough books to get to to level 20.
that’s 100,000 writs.
then there’s the Tarot troops.
the drop rate in the Vault is heavily skewed toward Cedric.
out of some 60 vault battles, of the ones that dropped a troop, over 1/3 were Cedric.
that might have been okay when there were few other gnomes on the vault, but with all the taro cards int here now, you are look at a % of battles giving troops, of those only 1/3 or less giving non Cedric, and of THOSE you have 9 gnomes, which are also skewed up in drop rates.
THEN you have Tart troops.
that might have been okay with one or two, but now you have 8 and counting.
which shouldn’t even be in the vault.
[3] and don’t even get me started on cursed gnome rates.
Devs said a while back that you’d need six tarot cards to make a special recipe, presumably a new boss troop. I think we are three tarots into that, so will be another eight or nine months to get there (assuming of course they haven’t forgotten by then and just given up on having tarot cards be of any use)
Less convinced about tarot cards now that GAP exists - it’s not that hard to get hundreds of keys, so things are actually easier than back in Heart of Rage days. But I still think it would be good to adopt the guild chest solution and have any troop you already have 4 mythic copies of no longer appear from vault keys.
Cursed gnomes also I think not a major issue - there is nothing actually that useful in the upper levels of the forge, and there are techniques to farm them if you are really focused on completion.
I would also add forge scrolls - far too hard to get given number of Doom weapons in the game now. And cosmetic pets are too rare given their increasing importance for power.
forge scrolls should not need writs for forging. that was just plain stupid. make two the rarest non-grindable resources use the same base for forging?
yes, forge scrolls was another thing that should be reconfigured now that so many doomed and cursed weapons are available.
i think you need to spend… 2-3000 iirc gems to get enough scrolls to max ONE weapon in the tower. getting extra scrolls to max all the previous ones is gems prohibitive for f2p players.
as for GAPs, finding verse gnomes prohibits widespread GAP usage to farm for vault keys.
sure,you can get 100-200 keys easily enough on a gnome weekend.
maybe hardcore players can get more.
but i’ve used about 200 keys the past few months and gotten one copy of one tarot card.
i am a notoriously bad typist and was sleep deprived. plus a dog ate my homework, a cat ran across my keyboard, and i was hopped up on unmentionable things.
also, there’s a war going on! and in a few billion years the universe will die a heat death!
Progress in many aspects of the game is at a virtual standstill due to the scarcity of the resources already mentioned. I’ve fundamentally reached the stage where I barely give Kingdom progression any thought. As a f2p player I am currently monitoring how long it is going to take to craft a single imperial deed from in game resource availability that doesn’t include campaign pass or other cash investment. Soulforge recipes using such rare commodities (often 2 super rares like cursed runes and writs) are beyond the scope of almost every player. How long this imp deed takes may well decide whether or not I continue playing. Too much stuff has drop rates designed to keep progress of super hardcore players under check. The knock on impact to average players is debilitating.
This made me chuckle.