Sirrian's Design Thoughts (Last 4.7 Epic Task Update)

Official News
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From fearless leader Sirrian, to you! Here are his thoughts about the new Epic Guikld tasks, and what went behind their re-design. Unfortunately, Sirrian won’t be responding to questions in this thread, but we thought it was a good idea to shed some further light on the changes, and how we approached them.

Take it away, Sirrian!

Re-designing the Epic Task System over the last week has been quite a challenging project! Thank you to all the community members who provided feedback to help make sure no segment of the player-base was missing out in any way. Although we have LOTS of data about current Guild Tasks and Legendary Tasks, that doesn’t always convey the emotional attachment people have to certain rewards and systems in the game, but that’s what direct feedback is for, and why we opened up the data on the new system to the wider community, not locking it into the Community Beta like we do with many other new features.

First and foremost, the Epic Task system was meant to be about giving more things to players when they need them. As always, we’re in the business of making fun, not taking it away. Making fun things is how developers and games thrive, and why we’re still growing Gems of War after 5 years! The first system fell short in this regard, but as always, we’re eager to listen and make changes.

Still, we can’t just pump more things into an economy without balancing it out. After reviewing a LOT of data, we believe there was just TOO MUCH value tied up in the LT’s chance of Legendary/Mythic troops… and we could release that value and substitute it for Deeds, Ingots, Tokens, Chaos Shards & Pet Food. Basically, mid-game players seldom see troops from LTs, but they ARE the ones asking for those other currencies. End-Game players on the other hand mostly get troops from LTs that they already have… so that is often low value to them too. Despite the feedback that Gems is a Card Collection game, and the chance at those troops is important for Guilds, you DO get the chance at those troops from all the keys we give, so we still feel that we’re offering more value now when and where it is most needed. There was a similar issue with all the Glory given out in LTs… we thought it would be nice to lower that and translate it into other requested resources.

So… With the redesign in the last week, we defined 3 core goals that we wanted to achieve:

  • All Epic Tasks had to return the same Value as a LT or better. In other words, if I complete 100k + 200k + 250k + 350k tasks… that should give an equivalent reward to about 80% of an old LT. We’ve slightly exceeded that now, especially with early rewards.

  • We would not increase the overall cost of the new Epic Tasks past 31.5 million.

  • If any guild completed all the new ETs, they had to be sure to receive ALL the rewards they would have previously gotten on average from 31.5 LTs (minus some glory & the chances at the troops). Of course they also get some new Skill Bonuses too!

We felt that the pass at the end of last week was almost there, but feedback identified a few shortfalls in the new rewards, as follows:

  1. Low Tier ETs were a little hard to get into for some low-to-mid-rank guilds - so we’ve dropped the cost of Tier 1 and increased its value a bit (Tier 12 has seen a slight cost increase to compensate).
  2. The Jewel amounts in Tier 4 were underwhelming. That was an oversight on our part, and has been corrected. We’ve also stolen the Gem Key from Tier 1 and popped it in here, which has allowed us to fill Tier 1 with even more stuff.
  3. The Token rewards in the Red ET Tree didn’t feel rewarding ENOUGH. So we’ve increased the rarity of Tokens in there.
  4. In general, Tiers 9-12 felt like they needed just a tiny bit more in them, so we’ve slightly increased rewards in there too.

An interesting point was made in last week’s feedback that keys were now TOO spread out. We did investigate that, but came to the conclusion that they were ALSO spread out in the old LTs too, so nothing would really be lost in this new system. ETs were more about targeting a secondary currency like Writs or Tokens, while still receiving all the mish-mash of Keys that LTs would have given.
Finally… We’re quite happy with Epic Tasks now. No player should be receiving less deterministic rewards than they did from LTs, and all players should benefit from at least some of the new currencies we can distribute each week!

As always though, send us your feedback. Gems of War will continually be a work-in-progress!

Final Changes

We have made further tweaks, which boil down to this:

  • Task 1 now costs 100k (down 50k), to be a bit more accessible to mid-game players.

  • Task 12 now costs 850k (up 50k), to compensate for above, as this tier should be for end-game players.

  • Changed task 1 Rewards: Removed the Gem Key, but added more unique resources to help mid-game players (these resources are extra and were not deducted from other tiers).

  • Changed task 4 Rewards: Now has 50 Jewels, and also the Gem Key from task 1.

  • Revisited tiers 8-12 in some reward trees to give a little more of the unique resources associated with that tree.

  • The Red Epic Tasks now have much better Tokens in them.

Below are the re-worked tasks.

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Cool. Interested to see how this goes with 4.7. Glad to see some feedback has been received and a lot of thought has gone into this. Bummer about the lack of top rarity tokens though.

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Great write up!

Something to consider for the future is give us more options on how to spend glory.

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it’s always nice to see a dev team look at the feedback and find ways to make both sides happy instead of over looking it and waiting for it to blow over. good on you infinity+2, you get a gold star today

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Thank you @Sirrian for the thoughtful response. And thank you @Saltypatra for being the “Voice of the Sirrian.”

I know it’s unrealistic to expect it from 4.7.
But with 4.7.5 or 4.8.
Please simply make Epic Tasks an option instead of a requirement to do LT.
Let the guilds decide which resources they value more. I think a lot of guilds will still choose the Epic Tasks route. But the more freedom and guild a player can have. The better it is for the game.

Ultimate feature request.

Require guilds to finish 6 of any tasks to unlock legendary Tasks on a seperate tab from Standard/Epic Tasks.

That will allow for complete freedom of choice.

Yes repeat troops are useless. But not nearly as useless as my 100k+ gold key collection thanks in large part to Brown Standard Tasks. :man_shrugging:

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It is definitely much better than the original version but maybe a requested addition to the soul forge similar to ingot upgrades? Token upgrades!! Admittedly the red tasks still fall a little short for the cost of tiers 8-12 i dont know very many players who care to upgrade all their epic and below troops or who use more than a handful on a regular basis so i dont think many of these tokens would do more than sit on a shelf as upgrading troops with medals has no real value on any troops you dont regularly use so after a few weeks the low level tokens will just build up like the ingots once all the weapons are upgraded even low levels use alot of legendaries

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Another suggestion perhaps add badges or tokens to legendary tasks ?

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Or tokens of legendary/mythic to LTs

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This was a great explanation! Thank you both Sirrian and Salty for your continued communication and dialogue with the community! I also appreciate the explanation or rather the confirmation that this was an LTs nerf. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that system was being abused. People will still fight for them to come back but I think this is the best option you could come up with to meet player demands.

Obviously rebalancing of tasks resources needed to happen and I think that was done well!

Seriously lol? No way were Nysha and Anu gonna be added. It’s a farmable resource, we are extremely lucky they upped the tokens again.

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I’m still not happy about the tokens, as I’d hoped the max rarity would be at least legendary. But I think overall epic tasks now feel like something helpful rather than something we’ll resent doing and try to circumvent, which is a much better way for a new feature to be. So the vast majority of complaints people had shouldn’t apply, there’s really not much reason to even want to skip to LTs anymore. I’m really glad that our feedback was heard.

If we got 1 token of Nysha or Anu per week, it would still take 9 weeks to get a single medal. That makes almost no difference, except to help soften the bad RNG some people are inevitably gonna get from farming.

Honestly, with the current droprates, calling Nysha/Anu tokens farmable is a stretch. I’d be curious to see the data on how many players even have a medal of Nysha.

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I think this update is absolutely wonderful! Thank you so much for keeping us updated on this @Saltypatra since the community seemed to be filled with so much dislike towards Epic Tasks as they were originally introduced. However, the response now seems to be so much more positive with the changes and updates you’ve shown us. This dev team is the best that I’ve ever seen, taking feedback at face value and making adjustments accordingly.
Thank you and the whole team for making us players happy.
(P.S. I was happy with the old Epic Tasks, but don’t tell anyone else. These resources are great for my stage of the game!)

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I heard that there will be no additional Hero Classes once all Kingdoms have a Hero Class. I also heard that there will be no future Kingdoms released other than Delves Factions. There are however several “Cloudy” regions on the Krystara map that in the past were places where new Kingdoms did pop up. Since this is a @Sirrian thread, and @awryan is a longtime and knowledgable player/forum contributor, is there a reason to save gold keys for eventual new Kingdoms?

I had let my Gold Keys accumulate for just an eventuality, but about 3 months ago decided to cash in all 36k of them. It took some time, but I thought it would get some gold, gem, and other use out of them.

As for Glory Keys, I used 398 when Drak-Zhum was the Kingdom, as I needed both mythics and 22 overall. I got neither, nor did I get either Orc mythic a few weeks later when I used 78. Naturally, this is to be expected, as at .11% it would take 900 or so to expect 1, so I’m not complaining so much as explaining that I don’t see the reason to stress so much about getting more LT, Glory Keys, etc. One month I spend 2000 guild seals and pull 2 Vash D’agons, the next month I spend 11k seals and get 2 TWQ when I already have 1, a 4th Gaard’s Avatar and a 2nd Champion of Gaard. The next month 8500 seals and no mythics pulled. I’m not disappointed when I use Gold Keys, because I have no expectation of getting lucky with them.

I agree that people should be able to spend their resources as they see fit. If they’d rather do LT, I say let them do LT. I’ve never thought LT rewards were worth the effort, but that is just my opinion.

As for new addition options to the Soul Forge (such as token or badge upgrades), I’d prefer a new Kingdom style quest, such as a Butcher Shop, where unwanted excess pets can be cut up into pet food. Sure, excess Puddlings might not be the best source of nutrients, but pet food is in short supply these days, and I have 7 extra Peace Pidgeons now. If we can disenchant excess troops for souls, where is the harm in turning excess pets into food?

Thank you for your time, good luck, have fun.

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You can do this already by going to the pet and “trading in copies of it”.

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This is a much better compromise, obviously the numbers before were fairly stupid in too many places. At this point I am basically reduced to nitpicking, but nitpick I shall…

The gold costs need readjustment after the tier 1 was reduced to 100k, they need to be more leveled out. Basically, the cost to go from 1 to 2 shouldn’t be twice as much as the cost to go from 2 to 3. I feel like lower guilds who can just reach these will be immediately turned off going for tier 2 because its so far away by comparison.

To that end, could make the following changes:
Tier 2: 200k → 175k (-25k)
Tier 10: 600k → 625k (+25k)

Or something similar. But this puts tier 2 squarely in the middle of 1 and 3, and for that matter it smooths out the other end as well.

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ooh, thank you, I had not noticed. I guess I never bothered to check. Still, I’d like a butcher shop. What do they give? Food? Or other pets?

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Ryan posted before me but yea you can go to upgrade and trade in extra copies

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The extra pets can be turned into food.

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Playing a little much Pokemon Go lol. Perhaps you’ve seen this particular reference …

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This is a lot better, but my biggest worry is that all of these writs/deeds, ingots, and to a lesser extent, chaos shards(you can get souls from extra troops) will be useless once we have as many as we need. There’s no value in extra resources that only get you one thing that you only need a finite amount of.

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That was awesome, I laughed so hard I had a cough attack. Exactly what I needed.

I can’t wait to play Gems again, good bye excess peace pidgeons. :grinning:

Edit: Thanks to all for pointing out this feature. I love this community. You are all so passionate about this game, and helpful as well.

On a side note, I have seen a real life slaughterhouse: not a happy place, or source of fond memories. At least the 6 pigeons, 12 MoonMoons, 2 Minishrooms and Frogpole didn’t suffer. I’d like to think Kit Sith and the 4 Luckys did tho. (not a fan of cats) (or Elves)

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