Slow down releases and QA

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

It is clear the game is lacking QA.

Devs, the event schedule is arbitrary, it does not need to be set in stone. If you need more time, push back releases.

For example, the faction this weekend is broken (no images, room path doesn’t match the maze background, banner potentially incorrect). It should have been delayed, and a gnome event could have been put in its place. No planning needed for a gnome event.

Alternatively, pick a random old event like a Raid. Something that has already been done so you don’t need to make new troops or weapons.

Curious what the community thinks. Should the devs slow down releases?

(Edit after Monday’s stream) I brought this up during the stream so I’m sharing @Saltypatra’s comments here. The schedule is hard to change because they don’t have full control of it, it’s set in part with 505. They are looking at improving QA at least.

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2

I’ve never really felt the ‘need’ to push out a certain number of troops in any given period of time has been good for the game overall.

The company line has generally been “new content = stable income”. There’s precedent for them temporarily delaying things, though, e.g. Stonesong Eyrie, I think? Or pushing back Mythics, e.g. Vash’Dagon (still not perfect).

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3

I can’t speak for all spenders, just myself. I couldn’t bring myself to max out the faction this weekend because of how broken it is. I stopped buying the campaign pass, and buy fewer gem boxes because of the issues lately. I doubt I am alone in that, though I do not know if there are enough of us to trigger a change.

Personally I don’t mind if releases slow down. If content was released in a more stable state, I would spend more.

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4

What’s kinda sad here is this faction is already later than normal (probably to avoid setting a new faction during Christmas/New Years). So this is the state of this faction pushed back…

The next new faction is in less than a month to compensate.

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5

New content and fixing old content are different jobs done by different people.

Fixing new content and fixing old content may be done by the same people, not sure.

Obviously they are not fixing new content all that much lately. Or old content.

Conclusion: content-fixing people have been on holiday or something … ? For, like, a year or two?

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6

I am a spender too, VIP level 17 now. I think this guild wars will be my last. The game is no longer fun, too many bad decisions being made. I think the devs have taken their eye off the game ball and are just concentrating on the revenue ball. Well I have spent $1000’s and enjoyed doing that until now. Feeling very sad.

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7

By keeping future events on the same timeline, delaying one event means there’s less time to do the next. :frowning: If one is pushed back, everything should be pushed back I would think.

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Personally, I disagree with the devs’ belief that “less content = fewer players”. I think it’s far more complicated than that. For one, burn-out and cumulative annoyances are undoubtedly factors in players quitting the game.

I’ve said before, that rigidly sticking to a schedule is a dumb thing to do.

Here’s the thing, though: you can’t be sure if you don’t ask.

I think it’s long overdue to issue a survey to the community, essentially to inform some of the play statistics they get on their servers.

I would also send an “exit survey” to the email address of anyone who registered their account but hasn’t logged in for over a month.

Like most of us, in our work context, the devs live in a bubble, full of assumptions about the game and the community. This is fed by their statistics, internal discussions, discussions with other people in the industry, etc. With community opinions channeled through a single person (@saltypatra), the bubble is never truly pierced.

On top of that, what Salty “hears” is not filtered for wisdom or experience. I think this is clearly shown by the nerf to Skeleton Key. Truth is, the AI really doesn’t play Skeleton Key terribly well. So there’s a high likelihood that the beginning players who complained about it were upset because they weren’t winning 100% of the right-hand choices in PvP – which both Salty and Kafka have correctly stated is an unreasonable expectation. Plus, as beginners, they may not have the good advice needed to build good teams.

Okay, I got carried away there, lol.

My point: Unless you ask your community specific questions, like a survey, and classify the responses based on game experience, you just can’t know what’s really going on with your game.

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9

I generaly agree with idea that less, but a higher quality content would be beneficial to the game and players.

Sometimes “less” means “more” :slight_smile:

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10

If we get another update that focuses on monetization instead on quality fixes, improvements and balancing… what then?

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That wouldn’t be something i’d personaly call “higher quality content”.

Thing is, there shouldn’t be “missing image” or troops spells not working as desribed. These things should be caught up while QA and fixed before release, even if it would mean we would get such content later than planned.

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Adding my two cents:

There is already always something to do in the game. I know there have been lists in other threads but I’ll just add the permanent activities here:

  • PvP
  • Explore
  • Treasure Hunt
  • Arena
  • Finishing guild tasks
  • Delves (until finished/stuck)
  • Kingdom challenges (until finished)
  • Pet hunting (which is arena or PvP)

These are things players can do/work on every day. Those who like grinding can always search for medals/gold/pets since those will usually benefit them or their guildmates in some way. Those who don’t will be playing whatever mode they enjoy the most. And these are the things that are always available (although delves have a daily cap and kingdom challenges eventually end).

For the weekend events, most of them are already set in stone, like Raid, Invasion and Vault Weekend (excluding Arena event since the general consensus is that it needs reworking). That leaves:

  • Bounty, which amounts to one new troop every 6 weeks;
  • New weekly troop, which may be bugged on occasion (Haunted Guardian spell, for example) but is generally non-problematic;
  • New monthly mythics, don’t remember any being bugged per se other than not as useful as they could/should be or having duplicate traits with new names;
  • New legendaries, which might suffer from same issues as mythics with duplicated traits and not being as useful as they could/should be;
  • Campaign, which is its own can of worms but works as intended, as divisive as it is. Also follows kingdom rotation.

So that leaves the 3 biggest unknowns:

  • Factions: every six weeks, there’s 4 troops, a banner, a delve map (and associated path mapping), and lore. Seeing as this is almost always a profitable weekend for them with regards to gem investment, I would assume publishers/devs would make it a priority to get it right. Ideally, and speaking for myself here, I only really want 2 things from faction QA:

    • Make sure all images and pathing work as expected
    • Make sure troop spells and traits work as expected (example Mechataur saying it does splash when actually dealing light splash.). Also, I still don’t understand why King Minos had Greedy trait.
    • (Bonus) have 1 dev play 100, 300 or 500 pure faction, with or without potions, and manipulating hoard level. It doesn’t have to be easy, it doesn’t have to be challenging, just enjoyable. Again, if people want to spend enough gems to make it easy/fast, that’s beneficial to them, but many others will join in if it’s also enjoyable.

  • World events: these bring new lore, sometimes a new weapon and happen every week. Until they bring a new type of medal bonus that isn’t spells and/or skull, the new names and designs given to them are moot. I don’t really have an issue with these events since our guild enjoys it. I know this is not a universal feeling, which is why this fits into the “biggest offenders” list.

  • All other bugs (and QoL improvements): These are things that might not be a priority for devs/publishers but has at least been on their radar for a while. As a developer myself, I understand that bugs that looks small can end up taking much longer (especially when dealing with multiple platforms), but that daunting bugs can also be much simpler to resolve that they might first appear. While I added QoL to this section, the main focus is bugs. Reason being that if things go through an adequate QA process in the first place, most of the more obvious bugs would’ve been found, if not resolved.

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14

Probably a poor reference to King Midas :wink: but who knows…

15

Just editted the post to include @Saltypatra’s comments after I brought this up in the stream. Her comments were that the schedule is hard to change because they don’t have full control of it, it’s set in part with 505. They are looking at improving QA at least.

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I personally would love to watch @Saltypatra do a pure faction run! Even if she dies, doesn’t use the best team strategy (after all, that’s for the community to figure out, not for the devs to tell us) it’s fine. I think even if nothing changes, watching her do the hard pure faction runs would at least prove to the community that they do play their content and understand the community’s grievances. …Also, watching her struggle would be funny too, sorry not sorry Salty. :wink:

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On topic:

In the past, Salty has said on stream that 505 can the priority order for content that is per-determined to be developed in each update. If a feature does not make it in time for the update, it gets pushed to next one. Monetization features almost always have super-priority in the order of development.

Adding to the QA comment, Salty hoped that being formally part of 505 would give them access to additional QA resources from 505 directly that they did not have before.

Off topic stuff:

Salty has already said on stream that the devs have no intentions of ever streaming a 500 pure faction run. She’s given a number of very valid reasons for this decision (time constraints, player skill, account power level, luck, etc.).

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Personal opinion: Frankly, in addition to the valid reasons Salty gave, I also personally believe that there’s another reason that was not mentioned and the community is to partially to blame for this. If a PF500 was completed on stream, it would set a standard on what the expectation is regarding clearing them and the devs do not what this knowledge to be public. Why? Because people are spending silly amounts of gems/money on Potions of Power on clearing PF500s during delve events. If the knowledge that the “bar” for having a decent chance of clearing PF500s were set by design at a level that ~99% of the playerbase currently cannot reach and ~95% of players in the future will never reach, how many current players would stop purchasing Potions of Power in delve events? A significant number, I would think.

I also believe that the current situation with delves is partly to blame on consequences from the settled-upon flawed implementation of the delves. If delves were functioning as what was probably their original design, raising treasure hoards would be a very similar situation as the current deed situation. But, the flawed implementation resulted in factions being able reach max score well before they were intended to be maxed out. And now, there is an expectation in this community that every faction should be able to reach 2500 renown on their release weekend.

If the devs do implement some form of “Delves 2.0” for the eventual third map, I would think that the flaws from the Underworld delve implementation will be addressed. That will make the new factions appear to be harder to max out than they are now.

And you if made it this far down in this post, my personal measuring stick of where a “fair” expectation for PF500s to be clearable reasonably probably is, it would be Hoard 250 - 300 + Level 19 (100% bonus) for a True Hoard of 500 - 600. Like kingdom leveling, faction maxing was supposed to be a multi-year project.

7 Likes