Hello.
I have been playing this game for 9 whole years, since February 2015. It had it’s moments of brightness and darkness. Sometimes I felt awesome playing it and sometimes very upset. But I always could resist and keep playing the best match-3 game out there (I tried different ones, but 8x8 board to use is the most awesome part of the game).
I have to say it’s the first time that I feel like quitting. Game becomes unplayable and I never felt like that so strong about it. Somehow I could always resist hard time by focusing on the parts that I liked and keep going forward. Now I can’t. The last part standing which kept me playing is gone.
Game recently had 2 very good updates (rare!) among tons of bad ones. Merchant update in explore + underspire (congrats).
The problem with underspire is that it’s enjoyable only with some kingdoms. It only shows huge gap in balance between troops of kingdoms/type. Sometimes it’s super nice to explore underspire and sometimes it’s a torture, where every fight last ~5 minutes (and you still lose).
I’m actually telling it since years, that game lost it’s balance and many ultra-rare troops are way better than epic or legendary, but who cares. Devs don’t plan at all, for example who remembers meta team hero/infernus/ubastet/ishbaala when devs released especially to counter it mythic fallen valdis (or whatever this sh*t troop was called) but then they nerfed ishbaala and uba instead, making newly released mythic one of the most useless? There are hundreds of such examples throughout the years. So underspire sometimes is PITA. Balance the power of kingdoms, try to play your own game and see which kingdoms are too weak. If you can’t do that, make less restrictions, only to color or something.
Next failure is new PvP. Yes, we can say it at this point, pvp was always part of the game, where if I hated new updates and newly added things, I could always come and play pvp, the last bastion standing, which could be enjoyed even with non-existant rewards. It was still so-so with these random teams as defense, but now not anymore. Of course Stellarix is a small part of the problem and I hate the idea, but it needs to be nerfed. But there are many more problems than Stellarix.
What is this Blood Frenzy in pvp… it means don’t play this place because enemy get 50% buff while you can buy some usless small buff. Only makes the game slower. I think one of the strongest parts of the game always was MANY & FAST Wins. Not anymore. I made some years ago 1000 winning streak in pvp, now I get 10% loses every week. And I have nearly all troops/weapons and generally top of the world stats.
Journey was unplayable at some point. You lowered difficulty and… it’s still unplayable. You probably won’t even know why, because you don’t play your own game (or you play like we saw on some streams, no comment). The problems with journey started when you nerfed these troops (mana generators) which you release with every journey event. It was still bearable when we could use them. But why you nerfed them? Because you added shiny buff levels which really made them too strong. Sometimes I think the biggest harm to the game are devs. Making problems and solving it with even more problems. There are even famous memes on discord channels about it. More examples? Aranae medals… +4 attack and then you released Medal of Seasons +4 to 3 stats and Aranae became useless. Why didn’t you buff it to even +8 attack? It’s been 3 years already if not more… Dozens of such examples.
Something I had in my heart for years: I was leading with friend some ‘academy guild’ where we taught new players about the game for some years. It was time when “Skeleton key” had it’s time to shine and it was really easy to keep new players playing, because it was strong and easily obtainable. I raised the whole big bunch of new generation players, many are still playing. But when you nerfed it, keeping new players to the game became really hard. Common, it was fast, but wasn’t even that strong, nowadays would probably be only decent without the nerf (and totally useless with the nerf, none use it anymore). How stupid to nerf it, you have no idea how many players you lost back then. How many just left, because after long time they couldn’t get any good team. I can tell it from my own experince.
About GW, if you will ever run it again, you should rather update it to make ally/enemy town where guild master would set defenses of their players in locations to capture. And players can attack teams which they choose at these locations based on their power and team and experience. GW was nice like it is 7 years ago, but it could have a little push forward nowadays. That’s just an idea.
Not sure how much longer I can resist. I will probably quit the game soon as playing it, only gives more frustration than joy. I believe you will somehow make it playable as always, but please! Plan your actions more carefully.
