Season of Sands Begins

…Alliance Ranks Were Reset Anyway.

:person_shrugging: :vulcan_salute:

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I’ve been told the Goal requirements are being looked at for Season 3.

I know everyone hoped for adjustments during Season 1 or the start of Season 2, so we’re sorry for the wait! But we hear you!

Some goals will remain quite difficult because we have some really hardcore PvP players who we also want to give some lofty goals to, which does mean that there will be goals more midcore and casual players will be less likely to complete. But the idea is everyone should be able to get some Goal Rewards if they play PvP, it’s just there’s something for everyone including those really hardcore PvPers who ie. finished the PvP Season Pass in 2 weeks :smiling_face_with_tear: (I can’t relate)

Re: Alliance Ranks, the Victory Points wil continue resetting at the start of every season, however we have made one adjustment with more still under consideration:

  1. Alliance chat can be typed into at rank Legionary V (Was Centurion V previously).
    Taken from a post I have in my drafts to address some PvP feedback:
  • Note: The Alliance chat was originally intended that only the most active, highest ranked members can type into it so they can use it to organise the alliance regarding which Citadels to target and provide help to lower ranking members for example.
    • I’ve seen feedback that everyone wants to be able to type into the Alliance chat and have passed that on - if you have any further/different feedback about how you want to use the Alliance chat or who you want to have access, please let us know!
    • We are also aware that due to the unbalanced Alliance membership that the original intent for the Alliance chat makes less sense currently and that something needs to be addressed further in regards to this.
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I do hope the team understands that time-gated goals aren’t a real challenge for Hardcore players so much as it just inconveniences all players at best and still causes frustrations because schedules misalign. A player can still be hardcore player and have to take a week or two off for work thus missing some of the narrow challenges as it is.

Going to repost the handy-dandy chart:

There’s no real reason Mighty Monolith isn’t aligned with Overpower for a similar completion time.

Same with Vanguard and Conqueror.

I think your team should reach out to every player that reached 560k VP or 800k+ VP in season 1 and ask them about their experiences. I’m curious if what’s being offered in rewards lines up with their expectations of difficult goals.

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Saved that table for my notes, I’ve seen it before but thanks for reposting!

We have spreadsheets for things like this in the designs and then compare to the actual data from the real gameplay on the live server to make sure predictions match reality and how it’s affected the overall game as well as taking the actual feedback we received from players as well.

So this is one reason it takes a bit of time as well. I’m curious to find out how all of the above landed when looking at it all at once.

Side note: some of the feedback we got from players was that they actually really like Underspire, but we’ve also had feedback that everyone has felt pressured to play more PvP despite it not being one of their fave game modes, so it would be interesting to see if there’s any interesting data around Underspire engagement when Season of Ice started (just my personal curiousity, we have people who specialise in analytics asking the good questions - I have mentioned this to the team though of course)

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Silver Marks in Burning Chests - any chance to remove em?

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I’ve made a recording of my self asking for this one to save my voice :wink:

No updates yet sorry

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Terra’s Jewel has a final trait that can’t ever be used btw since you’re here

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I’m going to sound like a broken record since the immortal achievement irks me to no end. However, I will try to offer suggestions this time. Can you recommend that the requirements be changed? Instead of getting 5 immortals to level 10, how about getting 10 immortals to level 5. It’s still challenging, not a walk in the park, and still heavily dependent on dumb rng. At least it’s doable even with all the new immortals each season diluting the pool. With the current requirements, you may go many seasons without being able to get a single immortal to level 10 considering the number of souls you need to do it.

Also, the drop rates listed in the game are a flat out lie. It says that the drop rate for silver marks is supposed to be 17%. While immortal souls should drop 48% of the time. I have CONSISTENTLY gotten silver marks over 50% of the time. I have a large enough sample size (at least 16 chests) to confirm it’s not just bad luck.

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Cool. I’ll just skip this season, then.
I went hard in season 1, trying to complete as much as possible, to see what was the expectation that the devs had for players. By halfway through the season, I hated PvP and the terrible design of these goals. They clearly aren’t designed to reward amount of time played or effort put in, for the most part, they’re made to reward playing in a very specific way, every single day, in order to condition players to form patterns of behaviour (I know most of these types of game do this, like the hourly tribute in GoW, and that’s often fine but this is really pushing it past the limit).
Like the fact that in order to finish all the goals, you have to log on nearly every day and play 5 monolith battles, then 5 citadel battles and a guardian battle (most days), then do a bunch of random PvP battles to hunt down the valhawks to replenish the monolith sigils you spent, and earn more VP. And if you skip a day, or you lose a battle (maybe due to bad RNG or stupid restrictions imposed in many regions), you run the risk of doing all that work and still missing out on rewards. And there’s no way to catch up by working hard or being a skilled player. Maybe you can buy your way through, but at that point, you might as well just pay for burning marks instead.
If you wanted to put goals for hardcore players, that’s fine. Promoted is a great example of that, because players can choose how and when they play, even skipping days if they’re too busy, and still work hard to get that goal. Compare that to Mighty Monolith where if you don’t do 5 battle each day you get screwed. That’s just super frustrating, and makes players not want to bother.

And this is another issue. Why are these doing basically the same thing, but with slightly different amounts. Butcher and Brawler are the same, too. Streamline them, make the amounts more reasonable on some of them, and increase the rewards to make up for less goals.

I’m still gonna play some PvP and claim rewards, but I’m not bothering to chase these goals this time round. I’ll wait for the devs to come up with better systems in the next season.

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Then offer these hardcore players a repeating goal at the end of the pass, rewarding 5 burning marks every 20k or so VP. That’s motivating to play more PvP - a worthy reward at the end. You already did this for the kingdom passes, there’s precedent.

Asking us to play for 560k VP (or 800k VP) for 45 immortal souls of the seasonal immortal is insulting.
Build in more leeway into all time-gated tasks (citadel battles, monolith battles, etc.) - for holiday abroad, where internet access is too expensive to waste on a mobile game / being sick / just wanting a break.

Overlord is an insult to free-to-play players - this is not a goal that is for the hardcore community, this is a goal for the paying players. I can’t emphasise this enough.

There are three reasons I picked up GoW at all: 1. the game was recommended by a person who knows my gaming preferences 2. there were no intrusive ads 3. there was no dev-introduced gaping divide between free-to-pay and paying players: practically everything has always been (since I started playing in October 2019; at the time, only Deathknight armor & the individual paid kingdom weapons were unavailable to F2P players) possible for a F2P, the difference was in time taken to achieve things, or time to gather enough gems to do certain things, etc. Overlord goal is something that can’t be achieved for a F2P - and that’s it. And it’s a direct contradiction of the design of the game until this point. Are we to expect an even greater divide between F2P and paying players, then?

I’ve done the 560k VP goal once, I don’t intend to repeat the experience - it stopped being fun at around 300k VP, the rest was just an unhappy forced slog, where I used GAPs to gain as much VP as I could, because I couldn’t stand playing more. While I like PvP as a mode and as an idea, being FORCED to play PvP for these 45 souls, not enough to even upgrade the troop one level, killed the joy for the second part of the season. I was practically burned out and played the bare minimum for the last 2-3 weeks of the previous season because I just couldn’t stand the game, the entire game, any more; in these 2 weeks, I didn’t even finish Underspire - I hope that wasn’t your intent when designing the mode!!!

PvP, in the amount you are forcing us to play to get these 560k VP, is competing not just with Underspire; it’s competing with Explore, with delves, with daily events, including guild events, with our love for the game. This is excessive and un-motivating.

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@Kafka Sorry I am late to the party, but I saw that our lovely lion was here.:lion:

I just want to ask a simple question: “Why were burning chests not developed like shiny chests?”

All the developers had to do was implement a similar formula, and players would have actually enjoyed upgrading immortals and spending money for increased power.

They could have made burning chests have similar drop rates for shiny tokens like this WITHOUT marks and pvp icons:

Normal Immortal token 80%
×10–50%
×20–20%
×50–10%
Seasonal Immortal token 20%
×10–10%
×20–7%
×50–3%

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No need for them to reach out to me, cause I’ll state my experience right here…

Actually, it’s pretty close to what Dwuemka has just said (I didn’t use GAPs because that’s a limited resource for me).

When the 1st PVP Season initially launched, I assumed the VP target would be the top one (800k) but then I saw some people state it was only the 560k. I set my sights on that target and said “when we get there, let’s see if I feel like pushing to that 800k, just to say I did it”.

The plan was at least 10k VP/day. Sometimes I did more because I had more time or whatever.

Well, 5 weeks in I pretty much wanted it to be over. I slowed down during the weekdays and tried to jam as much in as I could on the weekend. When I finally hit 560k in Week 8, I was done.

Unfortunately, that’s not enough to finish “Vanguard” because those are limited to 5 times a week… So it continued.

The rewards are not worth the effort at all. While it has been easy to get 10k on Monday (really only 9k, due to weekly PVP rewards) & Weekends, these things had to be scheduled because I have a life that’s not playing this game. I’m not doing that again in the future. I will forfeit the 45 Souls or whatever.

It’s pretty unfortunate it’s probably not going to change (although I already assumed it wouldn’t) because it’s the easiest thing to point to when asked “Does this game respect the player’s time?”.

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Thanks for the confirmation of unchanged VP and Burning Chests. That will save me much time I can invest in other games.

Will only do the absolut minimum to get my gold marks each day and not open a single Burning Chest until there will be some changes.

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I’m going to repeat this again, even though it has been mentioned many times - please remove silver marks from burning chests! Why is there a need to have a “sorry try again” option when burning chests are so hard to get in the first place? And, I seem to be getting the 50 silver marks at least half the time. 14 burning chests on Sunday, 7 were silver marks and 3 were gold marks. Why do you hate your players so much?

And on silver marks, how about throwing us a bone and letting us convert these worthless marks into gold marks? Or, anything really.

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The community should just post screenshots of unopened burning chests to send a message that we refuse to be disappointed anymore.

I’m not opening a single burning chest until a major change happens.

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Are you quite sure that EVERYONE got these duplicate rewards? Because, I didn’t notice any unusual rewards. I suppose it could just not be obvious. But having completed all goals, it feels like something would have caught my attention?
Anyway, if not all of us got this bonus, it feels a tad… bad?

Actually, if it was just glaycia souls, that could have snuck by me. :woman_shrugging:

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I’ve been playing for a while now, I have spent money in the past to support the game and most recently bought the pvp pass last season. I do believe that well designed new features should be rewarded with money. However… here are my own impressions:

  1. I agree with the many players who dislike the monolith and overpower goals as these force the player into a specific type of gameplay that isn’t fun/rewarding, although the goals themselves are fairly easy to reach, and if you’re a bit short you can spend a tiny number of gold marks to catch up. If these were replaced with something that encouraged us to fight in one of the other regions as a goal (perhaps the seasonal pvp region), it would improve the pvp experience.
  2. Personally, ‘butcher’ and ‘brawler’ are fine, they are nice little bonuses for a somewhat casual player to easily obtain.
  3. Vanguard is extremely unforgiving, with 11 weeks you can only afford to miss 5 guardians unless you pay $. Not a fan, but I guess it rewards those who play regularly.
  4. Promoted is painfully difficult, level 1 and 2 are perfectly reasonable but the final jump to Praefect is apparently designed to burn out hardcore players and/or keep them from playing other modes. I curse whoever came up with that last tier of 560k vp as a requirement, may their name be cursed forever (or until this goal is changed).
  5. Overlord is another cruel joke, may the one(s) who came up with that idea also be cursed forever (even if this goal gets changed, that’s not enough to redeem them). The free pass, which copies Diablo Immortal, is extra stingy but I guess a $15 paid pass feels like a reasonable price for the 11 week season.
  6. Burning chests were designed by someone with no soul, this is a fact. To claim that ‘dryer lint’ was stuffed into the drop pool would be an understatement. I was going to say it must’ve been a mind flayer who came up with that, but that’d be insulting to mind flayers.

Unfortunately, overall I am not happy with how all this was implemented and do not plan to buy the next pass. I’m sure the game got a decent amount of cash from implementing this new pvp, but they definitely lost a great deal of goodwill in the process. If anything, let the developers know that well executed implementation = money AND goodwill, these two are not mutually exclusive.

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Why are you catering to “hardcore” PvP players? This was never meant to be a PvP game!!! it is a game for obsessive collectors - not people who thrive on competition or need to be No 1 on every leaderboard - or even be on a leaderboard at all. Somewhere along the line this game lost its soul and focus. There should be no mythics/legendary troops in the PvP shop. The season goals should be doable by causal players. You really want to cater to people that sit around all day cycling Stellarix over and over to earn VPs 24/7? Seriously - what is wrong with you all?

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Thats O.K.because after gaming “semi-hardcore” for 2 days to get the VP up to buy the new troops theres:


Absolutely SFA (please excuse my Parisian) in the shop!!!

C’mon devs at least try and make it look like you know what your doin’.

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I’ll answer here. I reached 560k VP. I’ll probably do it again. But not for the pathetic reward it gives. Because I want to level classes and explore 1 is too boring, so I do PvP.

As a f2p player who completed everything a f2p player can complete I am not happy with it. Personally I do not mind the difficulty or the grind of it. I very much mind the poor rewards for it.

Let’s look at some numbers shall we?

tl;dr there is no way to make progress towards getting all of the immortals to 30. It is literally impossible.

All of the below assume an average distribution of souls from burning chests. You can get more or less lucky but on average this (12.3/chest) should be the case.

As a f2p player you can* get 1233 immortal souls per season. 655 directly from the pass and goals and 578 (on avg) from chests. This is if you finish the season pass and all of the season goals*. You need 2550 to max out (lvl 30) one immortal. Two are released per season. You get 1233 souls out of the 5100 needed to max out two immortals. You make about 24% progress towards maxing out two immortals. In other words you will never, ever, under any circumstance, end up with a maxed out immortal. It will not happen. Let alone maxing out all of them…

*You can’t actually finish the later overlord season goals without paying. The true number of souls is lower than I have calculated with.

So f2p is bad. What about p2w? Let’s assume you’re a whale and a grinder. You complete everything. You buy everything. Nothing will stop you from maxing out those immortals. Except, the game will. You get 5047 immortal souls per season. 2255 directly from the pass and goals and 2792 (on avg) from chests. You need 5100 souls to max out two immortals. Close but not enough. You will max out the season immortal most or all of the time. As for the non-season immortals forget about it. Maybe you can max out one or two but all of them? Literally impossible. Doesn’t matter if you play for a year or a hundred years. It is literally impossible to max out all of the immortals.

Note that I have assumed that you never get souls for an immortal that you have already maxed out. You can. Which makes the actual numbers even worse. You will never finish all of the immortals.

It’s fine if games have endless goals that don’t have an end. Players levels is an example of this. That works, as long as it’s not too powerful making everyone have to grind to keep up.

It’s bad if games have finite goals (lvl 30 on all immortals) that are impossible to achieve. That just makes it frustrating. No matter what you do you are moving backwards. Getting further and further away from completion.

What can be done.

Let’s start with the endlessly repeated suggestion to remove silver marks from burning chests. For winning 120 battles (brawler 1st level) you can end up getting the same reward as finishing five battles in a blood frenzy region with a region bonus. It’s a slap in the face.
Preferably make burning chests only give immortal souls.

The rewards for the season goals need to be increased. Especially the last tier. All that grind, all that effort, and it doesn’t feel rewarding. At all.

This. This will help in two ways. People who finish the season pass but will never get to 560k VP actually have something to continue playing for. People who finish the 560k VP goal will still have something to play for. Win for the more casual grinders and win for the more extreme grinders.

Either release one immortal per season or significantly increase the reward numbers (chests/souls) everywhere.

As a f2p player I will not comment on the p2w side other than to say it also needs improving. Often in f2p games you can grind or you can pay or do a bit of both. With immortals paying for everything you can does not in any way reduce the grind.

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