Just nerf everything in site…Event keys, gems etc. Give everyone plenty of maps though…if they had done this I would actually be closer to agreeing with you…wait.
Yeah, I know. There’s not a lot of positivity abound. I’m just mentioning that:
- Don’t discount the silent majority; and
- Often in a UI refresh there’s one or two core hangups that, when cleared, make a tremendous difference in perception.
For me, it’s the inability to parse the state of an ongoing battle. I need to be able to tell, at a glance on my phone, if a troop is about to die, or about to fill, or if it has a vital debuff. These things must be fixed. Everything else will feel less bad when they are (though possibly still worse than they used to).
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@Sirrian
Thanks for replying, but seriously?
Why not install and downgrade the entire office to Window 8.0 because it uses Metro for a desktop interface and Microsoft stated emphatically at the time its better for all users, case closed. Nice big squares for everyone! Unless Apple, Sony, and Microsoft are paying you per player please do some due diligence toward your customers. Have @Saltypatra Look at Global Chat or the forums. Your wonderful game is not Office Mobile 2010 edition. I understand there won’t be a rollback, but you need a UI consultant this week. AND please ensure you incorporate some type of fantasy theme, there are lots of examples out there… Even some using black and white text with (fantasy) appropriate fonts.
Thanks for reading.
Historical Ref:
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this 100% on forum and global chat the only places i know of that people who play this game regularly talk enmasse all i see is people saying they hate the ui now thats not the whole game using global obv but its much more than just the forum oldtimers saying it!
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YES!!!
NO, this black and white contrast hurts my eyes so badly!
YES!!!
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3 year on STEAM - Gems of War
The fact that up until January 2017 there is a nice clear growth, then it tapers (bad sign) and then drops.
1 Year chart
6 Month
This is the chart that really would have me worried if I was their Director of Marketing (I do this job real life for another company)
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just read 20 new reviews on google play every single one saying new update is an epic fail most of them having given the game good things to say about the game before update that is saying something
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So You did this remarkable heist of community funfare to please Big Bosses ?
I for one really thought this game was a Gem of Wonders to be cherished in midst of a myriad of other nameless duplicated trash, and now you want to give its reputation of a most-likely-to-be-a-cult-game to the all-duplicating corporate wolves ?
You have been brave and adventurous to have given birth to such a fine game, now be brave and honourable and listen to what the polls and community has to say to You.
Sincerely thankfull of a year of every day game-play as it was and apologizing these hard words.
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That’s some interesting stats on Steam (those charts aren’t entirely accurate though to be fair)… but we see the numbers as an aggregation across all platforms, with mobile being by far the largest part of the audience, so Steam gets a little lost in there. We still value our Steam players though, so it’s food for thought - and we ARE listening (I’ll post on some action items based on the feedback later today). @Lyya is quite correct though when she says that a live service game is democracy run by its paying audience… if people stop paying, we investigate why, and adjust accordingly. No red flags there yet - but we keep an eye on that every day!
Lyya is also quite correct about silent majorities… we’re actually receiving quite a good amount of positive player feedback in PMs, but they’re obviously not comfortable posting here because of the large number of negative comments. If we judge it by the usual 10:1 negative:positive rule, we’re probably doing a bit better than breaking even.
Still, we’d like to do better than break even, so bear with us while we keep improving things for everybody.
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@Sirrian you sniped me! I was just about to post to this effect!
I can second that we are getting a lot of positive feedback privately. Hopefully by the time we make some much needed improvements (especially to readability) a lot of the issues of the game causing nausea and eye strain should be addressed. Implementing a new UI will always see it’s fair share of criticism and backlash, but we felt that it was an important step moving forward for the future of the game.
However, I have been collating feedback across all our various platforms, social media, and forums. Thank you for all being so passionate about Gems of war.
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Also… just to share some GOOD news ,we just got word of a Google feature running on our game this week, and we’ve been added to a special Xbox promotion too !
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And as a native from the said country i must warn you: If they offer as welcome gift less than a dozen crates of bananas, five crates of coconuts and three adult capybaras as pets, then they are being cheap… 
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But can we know why you release a patch with:
- obvious readability issues (even on the Twitch preview it was obvious…)
- only a part of the new UI better than waiting for a full new UI
???
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I’ll have to re-negotiate our contract, as I had no idea capybaras were a legal form of currency in Brazil!
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As I am/was a Steam-only user, I can assure you that last week when I was on the GoW store page, the recent reviews were still set to “Overall Positive”. Now they are set to “Mixed” and all the latest ones are bad ones because of the UI. I don’t know if that means anything to you, though, since mobile is apparently such a big thing? I don’t even have a smartphone or tablet, so I dunno - I won’t even deny that maybe for mobile users the new UI is better since I don’t know mobile devices.
But really, is running both UIs and giving us a choice really so hard? (Not a rhetorical question, I have no idea how much programming that would take.)
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Sure! And I’ll be completely candid with you guys as always.
First of all, let’s talk readbility… There are a few things combine when something like this happens (explaining stuff here, not making excuses btw):
- What is obvious to one person is not always obvious to another. It’s why I frequently lose my sunglasses, and Nimhain points out they’re on my hat! In this case, particularly if you’re under some time pressure (see below), and know the UI REALLY REALLY well, you’re just not thinking about it in such a critical manner. When we go in and take a hard look at it, we can SEE issues now, but we were looking for and fixing different types of problems leading up to release.
- A readability issue is always worse when you’re NEW to a UI. This is a big problem game devs often encounter. By the time you are late enough in development to be doing fine tuning, so you are so accustomed to a UI, that you’re not necessarily seeing problems a new player will see.
- The designers did not play on small-screen devices enough for 3.2. We played a LOT on PC due to some bulid issues on mobile. That’s not usual, but it kind of bit us in the butt here. Readability issues are certainly compounded on small screens.
- We’re a business and we have dates that we need to hit for all kinds of reasons. I’m not at liberty to discuss all reasons here, but there are SO many people, departments & processes involved in a Gems of War release now, some of which need to be locked in weeks in advance, that we not only need to regularly release every 6-8 weeks, but occasionally a date will be moved forward at us last minute for reasons beyond our control. We lost a few days of polish on this update, and I feel the readability would have been improved had that not happened. We’ll certainly try to build a little extra buffer in there for the future though, in case it happens again!
Finally, regarding a “half-finished” UI… the regular release schedule we have means that it’s not feasible to completely rework the entire UI at once. We have to split it over a few updates. We were aware going in, that we’d likely get Steam review-bombed (we’re certainly not the first game to suffer THAT old chestnut), but we feel the long term gain is probably worth it!
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Yes, unfortunately it is. Contrary to what some may claim, supporting two UIs has both an up-front cost as well as a maintenance cost. Part of IP2’s motivation to get everyone on one code base was so they could get to a point where they could implement each new feature only once. I can’t imagine they’d want to go back to the old model.
At this point, useful feedback involves correcting the course for the new UI. It’s not helpful to keep repeating, “Revert!” If they’d wanted to have that option, they would have solicited feedback before the release.
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Thank you for the fast reply!
I understand and if even making it a VIP feature means not matching the maintenance cost it makes a lot of sense that running both is not an option. A lot of people have asked if it could be a paid feature (from what I have seen on this forum, less on the steam forums) but with no idea how the price scale runs and how much extra work it would mean, I can comprehend that.
I also understand the marketing and find it quite clever - the new kingdom, now the extra attention through google… that all will bring new players in (and keep old ones to stay maybe a bit longer until they got adjusted) - and I agree that it will pay off for you, even if a lot of people will quit now.
I think it would be very helpful, though, if you would specify what “correcting the course” means. Readability and making the game playable again is obviously a big thing, but are feedbacks like “we miss the fantasy theme, this is too sci-fi” or “the white font is painful” or “the images are too small” even helpful/wanted or is the look/feel/colors of the UI fixed since it was said that it was supposed to be “modern” now? I think if you give people a better idea of what might still change (back) for the better, old players on the verge of quitting might give it some more time or at least leave quickly without hoping against hope that things will change and stop complaining and leaving bad ratings that way.
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Beta test (why this one is not possible?).
My disappointment as a player who spend surely too much time on this forum by day is how you don’t “use” efficiently the community (ie beta testing)… All this shame should have been avoided. Even a screenshot two weeks ago will have outline the readability issues (yes we get some of them but not the good ones and the preview (twitch) was done too late)… If you need feedbacks, we are here for that.
Maybe some lines in the contract with your publisher are the real issue…
Do you have a very approximate date for the finished UI? Next year?
don’t give up:grinning: