Yea, just when I got traitstones for full traits 
Unlucky! He’s still one of the best troops. Plus you can get him refunded if you like
Honestly, I don’t think the “nerf” they gave him changes much at all. If anything, people will move him from slot 1 to slot 3. His spell and passive 3rd trait are still VERY powerful.
Not really complaining, at least they tried, but the only reason I wanted Khorvash touched was because he was being used too much in PVP. So far, I’m still seeing him quite a bit.
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Agreed, this wasnt a nerf this was just showing they are unwilling to actually nerf him. His OPness is in his damage and utility output, not in how fast you can kill it.
But its obviously on rails with what this game is supposed to be according to the clueless devs; Faster and faster till its 100% chance single round button presses to win.
‘clueless devs’
How on earth can you be so rude?
Seriously, I can’t believe some folks.
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Those are some sour grapes.
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Welcome to honesty and accuracy. Its common knowledge devs are clueless on how much damage their direction deals to this game as ive thoroughly explained it before. And as for my credential… Ive been holding dev positions myself in many franchises. But heck, korvash isnt even an issue anymore… fotm is so thick in this game now that theres a whole list of successors created to compete with rather than nerfing excess (as ive explained countless times) that have made 90% of the cards in this game obsolete. (which spells out fotm based competition which means you are forced to look up fotm meta decks as nothing you come up with without will be able to put a dent in anything, combined with that this game is designed to end matches faster and faster… almost all fotms are oneshot cards now… either that or overloaded to be both aoe and full-team-fillers in one. Stop making excuses and blaming the messenger. This game wont have long but im starting to think its just designed for a cash in so that this company can pump it into some shit triple A that will be made entirely for investors rather than players… a shame since this game has…or had… pick one’ so much potential… If devs would just listen and understand that choosing for quantity instead of quality is only putting more knots on the noose… it can still be taken off.
Hi wskill,
Thanks for the feedback… I’d respectfully disagree with your predictions, but…
I’m actually quite interested (honestly interested, not trolling) in what franchises, original IPs, and games you’ve worked on, and what positions and roles you’ve held on those developments that lead you to such conclusions.
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Event administrator (co admin), moderator and content creator on several large population UO shards (runuo), Indepth guide creator on several fighting games such as soul calibur titles, SF etc. worked together with many indie game creators as im a video game music composer freelancer and have multiple title OST’s on my name. Also helped with alot of brainstorms on game-content and mechanics. You can disagree but youd have to explain what you disagree on… devs have on multiple occasions made clear the orientation is on buffing weaker cards with fear of refunds on fotm, so the exact thing ive warned for (the powercreep) is currently happening and already has caused its main problem; FOTM. I cant repeat that enough times. Your fotm model is going to end this game i guarantee it. Because the number of viables will become smaller and smaller. People already consider most cards ‘‘kingdom level cards’’ meaning they have no worth whatsoever beside counting towards kingdom level quantity. You want me to explain it all again? I made a whole essay about this practically in one of the older threads. I have written nigh books about this problem when Ultima online was booming but made the exact same mistake in the wake of world of warcraft going for the quick …short term hype of powercreep, ruining the game in the long term as its content no longer had any room for actual gameplay beyond just using the latest artifacts. In GEMS case … cards. Wake up man. You guys want this game to make money then dump it or do you want to have your company to have a good name… associated with quality?
Brilliant. You’ve really proved you have the credentials to provide advice and “guarantees” to the devs.
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Opinions are like arseholes, we all have em. And they all stink. Lol
Interesting responses now you’ve stopped insulting the dev team. Would like to see what Sirrian replies with.
Tbh he isn’t saying anything different than some of us have been. He’s just doing it in a terrible way. I also think he’s wrong about the reason why it’s happening as well.
Fotm is easy to fix on paper. Even though Fotm is a broad term for what the current situation is.
But you can tell he’s way past the point of adding anything constructive to the conversation in terms of how to make it better.
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Because … I ALREADY HAVE. Its just that the developers continue on this road of selfdestruction rather than listen, thats exactly what i just said.
Yeah you’re fed-up so to speak, that’s what I meant.
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Do you really think so? It seems to me that in a game with so many combinations, some will always rise to the top. Balancing all these troops, especially given the rapidly growing troop base, is something that requires constant tinkering not just a one off fix.
That’s assuming we are talking about the same thing here; my interpretation of flavour of the month is the current most powerful troop combinations used in defence.
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All that you just said is true. Sorry I probably shouldn’t use the term easy lightly. I just meant on paper you would know exactly what you need to achieve very easily. It’s just the doing part. I honestly think it would require a much bigger team than they have now, but it is doable.
Sadly every step of the way troops have been left behind. It is what it is. They should either create a system where cards automatically buff themselves(more than they do now), or about every 6 months-year(or sooner) they will need to re-buff troops manually. So I would start there, buffing all the older troops. I also would release viable troops more often and in bigger quantities. But I understand why they don’t do this, because of the manpower and pacing. The goal is obviously to keep all the troops they want to be used around the same balance, but this is hard to achieve when different troops do different things. Power is relative. (I.E True damage vs. Death mark)
They have so much on their plate as a small team I understand why this happens slowly. They need more people dedicated specifically to helping balance as they go along with content throughout the year.
Those are of course just my opinions, and I have no idea what i’m doing. I do well to put my own socks on in the morning. With the up-most respect to the Devs. I know their job isn’t easy, especially when so many jobs fall on so few people.
Also in the end, all of the time spent balancing troops could be a waste if even 1-2 outliers seep through the cracks. It instantly throws all the balancing you did out the window. So yeah, pretty much explains why balancing has never been the main focus. These types of games are hard to balance, end of story. I certainly don’t envy their jobs. 
Plus everyone is pretty much in agreement that since balancing doesn’t really add anything new to the game, that time is better spent elsewhere.
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Which of those have touching points with development? Ive been a moderator in a huge multiplayer game, but i have no clues about developing. And administrator is just a guy who ties moderators together, no closer to development. Content creator? Like all the troops and features and balance changes that all other forum users are suggesting? Welcome to the team, you are one of many.[quote=“wskill, post:154, topic:17405”]
Indepth guide creator on several fighting games such as soul calibur titles, SF etc
[/quote]
A guide (even indepth one) can be bad. Very bad. It could be writen by a complete noob and it would be worse then not having a guide at all. So no point of braging about it.
Still not seeing the developer side. But you can give our devs advice on music, i have no doubt about that.
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Hi @wskill,
Awesome to hear you’ve worked on game guides, soundtracks, and some indie projects. People who make stuff for games are awesome in my book!
Well then, here we go… 
I’d like to address a number of your points, but firstly I have to say, given the conviction with which you stated your case, I’d assumed that you were either a business analyst for a successful F2P title, or perhaps someone who had held a lead management/.design position on a very successful game. So a lot of what you say is going to be conjecture, based on your observations over the years, no doubt… but you simply cannot know the things you say without having performed that role in a professional capacity. Conjecture is good though, and I’m happy to give you the point of view of someone who’s been doing this for a living for 3 decades.
Now as for what I disagree on:
TL;DR
While I don’t disagree that elements of the game (e.g. card diversity & balance) could be better, I just believe you don’t entirely understand the complexity of a problem that may (or may not) exist, and you’re oversimplifying a solution.
Also… we’re not evil, and the game’s not dying! 
LONG VERSION
1. You attribute motivations to our studio without really knowing much about us
First… We’ve been around since the 80’s, and have made lots of titles from Warlords to Puzzle Quest that have, all modesty aside, done pretty darn well, sold a lot of copies & won a lot of awards… I’d say we’re pretty well associated with quality already. And as you would see from our history of games, AAA isn’t really where we’re at… we really enjoy making smaller, deeper, innovative titles.
Secondly, we’re a privately-held company… we don’t have investors. We do have publishing partners like 505, and we also have games that we develop fully independently.
I really think you’re just trying to take a cheap shot at us here though… but I like to set the record straight
2. Your numbers on card usage are entirely made-up based on your own view of the game
I follow the card-usage stats pretty closely, since that’s one of my jobs. Many different cards are used at many different levels of play. In mid-game (L100-L200) for example, the card usage ramps down quite slowly, leaving a LOT more cards in common rotation than 30. In early game, as you would imagine, it’s much higher, since players don’t have all the cards levelled to choose from yet.
Secondly, there is nothing wrong with having a meta (or fotm as you call it) - especially one that shifts from time to time. League of Legends has a meta that gradually shifts 3-4 times per year, and I don’t see that game doing poorly. The thing is, metas are good… because they help a large number of players deal with complex systems by simply following the lead that other players set by crunching the numbers. There’s no crime in that… lots of people enjoy following a meta. Shifting metas are even better, because they freshen things up… and you’ll notice that our meta shifts about every 3-4 months (though I’ll admit Bone Dragon has been in the meta a little longer - we have plans for him though)
Changing the meta too fast though… that makes people leave for sure!
Furthermore, card spread has shifted favorably again with the event system, and I expect it will shift favorably once more after Guild Wars releases.
3. Your conjecture that the game is dying is incorrect.
The reality is that weekly content-addition has been a huge success for this game. The more regularly we’ve released content, the more players have stuck around… and it’s allowing us to grow, without doing very much advertizing at all. That alone is HUGE in the world of F2P. In other words quantity is ONE of things that enabling us to both survive and thrive.
Trust me that we DO spend a LOT of the time focusing on the game staying healthy and the best way to do that.
And when I say “game health” I mean juggling a whole bunch of stuff including retention, monetization, engagement, game balance, new content, etc…
For every person who says “Just do this thing”, there are lots of others saying “No, just do THAT thing!”. This even happens within our own studio.
What I’m trying to say is maintaining game health is something composed of LOTS of levers. Nobody has all the answers… not me, not you, not anybody on my team, or 505’s team. It’s WAY too complex a problem for one person to get everything right.
HOWEVER, when a bunch of very experienced people from a number of disciplines all put their heads together and work on the problem, using not only their experience, but the feedback of the community, and the datapoints we capture from millions of games & players, we increase the chances of Gems staying healthy CONSIDERABLY! That’s what we’ve been doing, and I think it’s working out okay… but it is ALWAYS going to be a work in progress.
So really, it’s pretty presumptuous to think any one person alone can even see what a “problem” is at any stage, if something even is a problem, let alone know exactly how to solve it!
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First of all, it has been in the past my job to solve such problems. I have been active in the industry for 15 years but that does not mean its all i have been doing. Im a puzzlehead, i see patterns, i fix patterns. I have seen countless titles like ultima online go under while it couldve been so much more, qualitatively more. Ultima online still has players because it had freeshards but its nothing like what it used to be, its practically a ghost. I sense sarcasm in your post here and there but that might be because its hard to communicate subtleties of conversation online, same goes for my posts i suppose. This is not a epeen battle, from the start ive been trying to help because as ive said before i used to like this game untill it changed so much… lets not repeat myself how. Yes i know there are layers of the game which uses their own cards and its mostly the late to endgame that has a very static meta. That actually underlines my point… you see its not meta that is bad… and a shifting meta is a natural thing… however when you need to shift that meta PERSONALLY as the devs with competing units there really isnt a shifting meta at all now is there. Players cannot shift this meta. There is no counter meta to overloaded cards. Yes perhaps i am not very nuanced or subtle about these things as someone noted but ive explained this all over the internet and in person to people so many times im tired of it. I did take the time to thoroughly explain the powercreep problem on this forum before and it was obviously ignored wholly. Other people say the same things, alas not as confrontationally. I do because ive seen this happen before on ultima online freeshards, in fighting game franchises, with some ex clients of mine in the indie scene. Its quite ironic to start about League of legends… the very example of how you can make serious mistakes as a company such as changing skins that were already bought… (aside that riots income doesnt come from players but from events, god help us if you guys ever create such a thing… i doubt it though (no thats not an insult, i dont do insults) What league of legends did in terms of balance is THE underline here… they actively as devs tried to change a changing meta and with it made it static. Not only that they created archetypes that didnt exist prior and then ‘‘balanced’’ units around it (units being champs here) (im talking about jungling for instance). This wasnt a new feature, not a new role. .the role existed… but it limited players abillity to shift the meta… and thats exactly what you would be doing by creating fotm cards… you try to influence a meta that should be self changing BY the players. I hope this comparisan helps you to see that. As for having or no having all the answers. Bring me a balance problem and i will solve it. No charge.