We know that the guild update is split in 2. We have nothing concrete but there are clues in the feature request section.
There’s an important distinction between treasure maps and the treasure hunt minigame. Regardless of the value of the minigame, the maps themselves are meaningless if it is trivial to acquire them. By “meaningless”, I mean they don’t require the player to make choices based on the quantity they own. There are only two states: you have a map, and can therefore play the minigame, or you don’t, and you can’t. It doesn’t matter how many of them you have. If you are never in danger of running out, then there’s no purpose for them as a collectible resource, and access to the minigame should not depend on it.
While top guilds won’t complete the treasure map guild tasks, instead preferring to rotate the more valuable tasks, “starter” guilds more likely will, providing their members with a supply of maps. Once they build a board control team, they’ll get maps with some regularity in battle, and once they unlock Tyri, they can trivially collect as many maps as they want.
Maps as a limited resource implies that treasure hunt is supposed to provide something special, or be a better source of resources than other, freely accessible activities. Why limit access to it if it’s worse? However, because maps become trivial to accumulate, the minigame cannot be a better source of resources than other activities without displacing them.
However, just because maps are meaningless does not prevent players from attaching value to them. Many players see them as untapped resources, things they already own, but aren’t worth the time to unpack. This causes a certain amount of frustration, leading to these kind of requests:
My argument is that the maps themselves should be removed, and players should only play the minigame if they enjoy it, rather than out of an internal pressure to spend the maps and gain access to the resources they represent. Either that, or some other way of spending the maps should be implemented, one that players can use to deplete their stock faster than they can acquire them, so that players have a meaningful choice to make in how they spend them. The all-too-frequent suggestion to just make them into a new kind of key seems like it would accomplish that on the surface, but would more likely make playing treasure hunt an even worse choice than it is now, while simultaneously encouraging players to farm for maps. It’s a very naive solution, and I think a very poor one. I doubt the devs want farming maps to be the optimal strategy. It’s trivial, but not necessarily fun or engaging.
1 Like
Two features I would really love to see for this game is some kind of minigame(s) that allow earlier game players to have a late game experience and late game players to have an early game experience. For example, a mode where troops are drafted in some form of format from all troops in the game in which everything is level 20 fully traited. As well as a different mode where you draft similarly, but only have X amount of levels and traits that you have to disperse between the picks.
The two issues I have seen on my 2 accounts is that early game has a huge grind for team variety whereas late game has so many strong defend teams that there are only several meta decks at any given time that can fend decently against them. These decks in late game are also so consistently strong that there is no need to make teams that counter a specific team like this game is made to be. Most late game players can use 1 team to defeat any team. From a balanced and fun perspective, that should NOT be happening.
7 Likes
I think arena pretty much does that for both sides…
Except for the “all” troops.
The problem with Arena is that you don’t get to pick from all troops AND you don’t get the fun experience of traits. I think it would be great to have a new mode that is similar to what Tacet described. In that mode, you could actually challenge your own ability to make teams with synergy. In Arena, you don’t actually get to use your synergy knowledge to the fullest because you don’t get to see all 9 troops at once. Plus, traits aren’t even a part of the equation. There are many troops that aren’t complete without their traits.
In other words, I’d love to see a game mode that allowed the players to pick from all troops. The troops would have all traits and be mythic. Like Arena, you’d be given a choice of 9 random troops. Unlike Arena, you’d see all 9 on screen at once. Then, you’d have to pick the three (or 4) that worked the best together. This way, you could fight a variety of team compositions and experience the full power of a troop. I’d play this mode all day long if they had it.
1 Like
Arena is extremely limited and doesn’t even reflect early game gameplay anymore. My level 40ish account is already past the scale of Arena. PvP reaches level 18s and 19s by level 50ish or earlier. Arena also was made way before traits existed and does not factor them. Contrasting that to questing that gets traits at level 50 and all the people who start getting traits around 30-50 makes Arena not even representative of early gameplay anymore.
2 Likes
The problem I forsee is, what is to stop people from just not doing that single type of mini game all the time and not bothering to worry about traiting up their own units?
No question the dev’s have a balance they manage. What is too rewarding, we still want some percentage of sales.
On the other hand, without a game that truly can be free to play, you cannot advertise it as such.
Moreover, as long as a game is focused on fun first and foremost, it will always attract players and an active community / player base. Within any player base are those willing to spend often, spend sometimes and those who never spend. Those ratios are based on means and time… not whether a game mode is too fun.
As long as the devs balance resource desires with rewards, while keeping game modes fresh and fun, they will no doubt attract a growing audience, and the above brackets of player will continue to flock to the game.
The moment it becomes too grindy, they loose player base, and the brackets within that shrinking base diminish, so they either respond by making things harder i.e. more costly in time, or they respond by loosening up the slots and adding more variety to create a larger base and larger samples of each type of consumer / player of their product.
In the end, it’s a design decision… but there are plenty of paradigms based on fun and variety that line the pockets of interested shareholders. There is clearly a voice for more variety and game types though. Up to devs to see and sort out a vision that includes such a road map.
One thing i would love to see as a possible feature request or mini-game could be newly added ‘random’ items obtain from playing. people may hate this idea and its whatever, but just thoughts that came to mind.
New said minigame could be similar to a slot machine, or just have different modes requiring ‘tasks’ completed during a match
Currency rewarded/required for mini-games could be somewhat like this-
Everlasting token- get 4, 4+match of any color in a row
Heavens Jewel token- get a cascade of one of each mana color in one game
Crucifixion token- get 3, 4+match of skulls in a row
Giants token- get a 7+match
others could be included like
Use 100 blue gems in one game, receive reward.
I know this thought is crazy, just bare with me here but what if they are talking about daily quests? Think about it, console has had daily quests for a long time and pc/app shares their success with console and console does the same. So what if tasks have reached a point to where they can be shared with pc/mobile? [quote=“Sirrian, post:1, topic:8880”]
along with a new (hopefully more interesting) way to earn Arcane Traitstones
[/quote]
Crafting stones was highly requested but so were daily tasks as well. This might mean daily tasks are coming which i would think have tasks that rewarded trait stones. He specified that it was not crafting but if they were working on a mini game, it would take too many resources. The pvp update was beta tested and look how it turned out. The team is only 10 members in total so a mini game would be too much but a task system that was already implimented in console only needs to be converted to pc/mobile with not too much work.
1 Like
Would love console and pc/mobile to be cross platform… but, seems like that’s DOA.
I do not think so. The devs have told us that they plan to make console and pc/mobile playable with the same account.
The question is… would this really be a problem? There are some people who play the game at the moment who only play Arena for example. And there are some who don’t do PVP at all (so traits are less important, as the quests trait amounts scale with your own). So while I think your question is worth considering seriously, I’m not sure if it would be a “problem” per se.
To add to @killerman3333’s comment: I believe the devs have also stated that it’s a legal issue with Sony and Microsoft that prevents the game from becoming cross platform with PC/Mobile.
2 Likes
Isn’t that similar to the “Arena variants” we were begging for since Arena was first introduced?
If you mean just a free-from-all format that would IMO defeat the purpose to gather any resources in the game. Why I need any troop, soul or traitstone if I can just pick any evolved team and play with it? Unless it consumed some premium resource opening another can of worms.
In HEX I really like the "terrain effect"s. That could serve as a good twist-up factor. Without being hard to develop either just like the arena variants, though all the game history shows the cost/effect was not ever a factor in the planning (or the valuation is massively skewed)
Actually we said that we would like to, however current legal issues prevent us from being able to. Also currently the consoles versions are on different servers to the pc/ mobile servers.
3 Likes
Cut short the quote, but: I am perpetually short of maps.
I’m in a guild that avoids the map tasks, so that’s not a source. I used to be in a guild with lower requirements where we’d do maps… but with generally modest donations, we’d get 2-4 maps a week? It was never enough.
Before the Tyri change, I bought maps with glory fairly often.
Chains? Yeah, that happens. Sometimes. Not enough.
And then Tyri–if I’m playing normally, I’ll cast her 2-3 times in a game. At a 20% chance to get a map with each cast, that means that I get a map from her every 2-3 games.
I don’t know how other people build up these huge stores of maps, but I am a person who likes to play treasure map and I have to keep track of how many maps I have and use them less often than I’d prefer.
2 Likes
Yes, maps are a meaningful resource for some people, and honestly, I don’t have the data necessary to determine what proportion of the player base that’s true for. But I hold that it’s still trivial, albeit time-consuming, to acquire maps using Tyri or looping teams, and that people running out of maps because they like to play TH is even worse, because it drives people to farm for them. I don’t think it’s a healthy play cycle, and I would think the devs would feel the same, considering this:
Have a talk with your guild, check if there are other members who like to play TH, maybe try to convince them to allow map tasks based on that. If it doesn’t work, consider moving to a guild with a similar contribution level (or better) that does allow map tasks, there should be a few around.
I’m in a top guild that has no rules regarding task types. quite a few of our members like to play TH, and map tasks are completed often enough. I have over 1K maps, but it doesn’t bother me, since I know other people enjoy theirs.
2 Likes
I just go into a challenge with Ragnagord, Tyri, Green Seer, Tyri. Spam stuff for a while. Come out with maybe 4-5 maps per. If I want maps I’m not going to try to compromise and do it in PVP.
1 Like
Maps hold value as long as there is a demand for them. If 80% of the player base plays TH then the value of maps must be high, however it seems like the more maps you have, the less value they have. It is just like money. A poor person sees a dollar as being worth a lot but a billionaire sees it as chump change.
2 Likes