Total agreement before and after this statement, but not during. Glory keys is the best keys! A (small) chance to get even the best troops, but cheap enough not to worry about blowing through a few thousand of them.
4 Likes
Good post overall! 
Good catch!
Forgot that raw resources can always be converted to their keys by the same name.
Noob-ish mistake 
It’s almost 300k seals and I earn them at about the same pace everyone else does, I just haven’t spent any in years. But gem keys are a premium currency, and you can bet 505 games is all WTF about players with tens of thousands of keys or gems and wants something done about it.
1 Like
Player A is just as active as you are.
But you use your keys and save your seals.
Player A saves their keys and uses their seals.
Both of you have all the troops.
Both of you hoard resources.
But you’re pointing the finger at Player A? 
2 Likes
It’s 505 pointing fingers, and I’m sure I’m on that list of players with too much stuff also.
But just like gems in guild tasks or a weekly 1500 gems guild wars victory, it was great while it lasted. But I can’t expect them to give out that much loot for free forever.
505 didn’t tag me or reply to my comment.
Or claim it’s players like myself’s fault.
As I said before…
It’s a farce to blame anyone but 505 for the changes.
But if you’re going to blame those who play too much and hoard their resources.
Be sure to thank us when you do. Because most of us are actually also responsible for spending most of the real money in Gems of War.
Remember that 100% free to play player who has 20k gem keys? … Yeah I don’t either. Weird. 
1 Like
I will adapt… and thrive under these new rules
Et vous?.
Yay! More jewels! 
…except for diamonds which are needed the most 
It’s come to my attention that a lot of guilds are breaking up and disbanding already.
It seems like most guilds who can’t complete all 12 tasks are looking for guilds who can do all 12 guild tasks, however there is maybe a dozen of those guilds total.
It’s wonderful that some guilds will adapt, like ours, but many guilds are disbanding & quitting.
6 Likes
His name is kino. He left. He had over 20k gems. He was a hoarder. a bad one. Only used keys during mythic weeks… From level 100.
They exist. Very, very rarely.
20k gem keys is not the same as 20k gems.
But yeah I should make more clear.
20k gem keys and has all the troops in the game while being a free to play Slayer.
Accurate. I couldn’t remember his last key count (and can’t find the Screenshot on discord) i only remembered his gem count.
But a gem count is pretty difficult to maintain at least for when you aren’t Bracket 1.
You can spend 800 gem keys and still not get a mythic.
That’s why getting a legendary or mythic is so much better.
1 Like
It’s really just about juggling numbers efficiently. 1000 gems keys will get you one mythic. On average. Which means that short term you may get less, or you may get more. But in the long run it will be one mythic. And if you know what you are doing it will be the mythic you want, not a mythic you’ve already got.
Over the years I’ve received roughly a dozen mythics from legendary tasks. Each of them was a duplicate, worth 100 souls. I’ve also received more than 40 mythics from keys. Except for a very lucky Champion of Anu double pull, each of them was new to my collection.
Not disputing that getting legendary or mythic troops from tasks feels nice. But I’d rather pick mythic troops myself than get random duplicate ones picked for me. Keys for the win.
4 Likes
Let’s put this in context. Sirrian states repeatedly that more than 28 daily battles ( I think that was the number) is excessive. Buy yet, the new faction requires 4 fights to progress as opposed to the minimal value of 3. The grind for maxing a new faction is horrific and once again the troops are appalling; meaning players will hit the gem stash and potions to defeat a game concept that is almost impossible under normal conditions. We have a faction troop that sits in the shadows and in the off chance it actually casts, the spell is equal red and blue to that already on the board. Can someone please explain the value of this troop? Or most faction troops? We still awaiting the promised improvement to the non event faction solution. Players have been idiotic by hammering their gem stash for potions etc in their impatience to get it out of the way. This approach will never inspire the devs to deal with the real issue. Why would they when you are bypassinging the problem by spending cash on gems? We wreck the game for ourselves and the devs just laugh at us as they bang another wagu beef on the barbie. It’s hilarious and getting back to Sirrian, 28 games? Get real. Ur game design requires far far more commitment than that. In 2020 over gaming will be officially recognised by the medical professionals as a disorder. Sirrian, gems, all devs and their producers are the most guilty of perpetuating this unhealthy reliance on gaming. Sirrian stating the 28 is absolutely not reflective of his true motive. Play and pay all day every day. So he doesn’t have to work at all. This guy is duplicitous in the extreme.
At this point, I take it as what Sirrian wants in the game and what we actually get are two very different things.
Sirrian wanted pets to be this grandiose exciting thing that could give bonus effects in new and exciting ways.
Instead, its a very unexciting collectathon with years of unreleased uninteresting by the number pets on the backburner with way too much time wasted on cosmetic event pets. There’s 20 cosmetic pets in-game (counting the purchased one), which is at least 4 months (being generous on my counting) worth of wasted potential for something that amounts to nothing.
Its a shame, because the game Sirrian presents actually sounds fun. What we have is questionable at times
On paper, delves could have been very fun. The way its been delivered and barely improved upon is something different.
7 Likes
This statement, which I saw on stream months ago, is being repeatedly misquoted and taken out of context.
The game is designed to make you fear missing out on daily low-hanging fruit. The design is that every day, you’re “obligated” to do:
9 AB battles
3 Dungeon battles
4-8 weekly guild event battles
These 16-20 battles should take an average player about 20-30 minutes; this is a deliberately chosen play interval designed to maximize your addiction without making the game feel like a burden.
He was saying that recent features, like delves (and now the explore grind), are inflating the number of battles players feel obligated to do to avoid missing scheduled resources, and that the team views that as a problem because of burnout. Put another way, it’s a question of daily battles vs daily maintenance battles.
7 Likes
I mean you’re hitting upon a core problem in our world right now: the worship of More.
For some people, “good enough” is a thing. Their business makes profit, it pays enough that they will be able to retire, they’re doing what they like, and they’re praying nothing rocks the boat.
That is considered immoral by many. Lazy. The only thing acceptable is to aspire for more. It doesn’t matter how or why. More is good. All else is failure. This is why we have multibillionaires who could privately fund their employees’ salaries with their interest for 50 years complaining about minor taxes. They need more to satisfy the drive, even when it’s demonstrable they have more resources than can be imagined by most people.
This is the de facto arrangement for a business. They want more. GoW has bragged about its numbers several times. Those were good that year. If 505 subscribes to the Cult of More then last year’s numbers must be improved. If you have standards, they are eventually going to get in the way of “more”. Eventually, you will reach the cap of revenue that an ethical F2P game can expect to attain. That is not going to please More. Next year must be better. For a time, you can dig around and find little places where it doesn’t hurt your feelings to abandon your once-held values. It’s not so bad to have a stamina system if it’s optional events, right? The core gameplay is free. It works. The players spend. More is satisfied. You save your job for another quarter. But now you have to make more.
It makes me think of part of a verse from the song Unicorn Tolerance from The Mountain Goats:
More is always hungry. It is never satisfied. It never actually rewards you for feeding it, it only promises that if you’d do it just one more time, you’ll get that reward. GoW is More. It will never ask you for less. It will never ask you to “maintain”. You are Shinji Ikari, and you are never going to make Gendo happy.
The dev team are not your friends. They are serving More. You can smell it in every new feature. If they could just feed More, their bosses will be happy, right? Their bosses are also feeding More, and this percolates all the way up to the stakeholders. They’ve invested in many companies like 505, because they also feed More.
It won’t change. The only thing you can do to escape it is settle for Less. That means finding one of the games out there where $10 means something. But that is a risk, it might be feeding More also. Or giving a $60 console game without DLC a chance. Some of them can give you years of play. You have to settle. It’s hard. But GoW has begun to represent More, and it’s getting hungrier every release. You know exactly where this road ends, and there is likely no diverting from the path.
I read a long dang article by the guy who founded Gumroad about this, about how in his quest to feed More, in letting investors fund his business, he nearly lost himself. There was a time where he was under so much stress and pressure to deliver More, he contemplated the end. But in a stroke of luck, the majority investor agreed to sell back his stake for a steal. With the power to run his own company again, the businessman stopped feeding More. He focused on making Enough. It still works, and now he’s happy. This paragraph’s not for you. It’s for the people who are feeding More and seeing what it does to them.
6 Likes
Fantastic post and I totally agree. But…the duplicity of the devs and their incessant attempts at deception will crash this house of cards for sure.