Don’t forget folks this is deliberate from the developers.
They want us to pay for gems, so everything has arrived last 2 patches with grabs for gems. Add monetisation or more of it too.
We spent a long time building kingdoms up for tribute increases. These are indirect gem sinks.
Now pre 7.0 we were casual reqs. I look after the player as much as I can, I give them time off in other guilds and holiday breaks or help carry issues when players are in need of breaks. We just focus on GW and I ask players once a month to get together and compete. If a player wants to step back for longer or retire, we have none Gw guilds or none event guilds. We can and do move players who want to GW up to replace, but there are only so many players these days.
Now no sigils or T2 won’t get stuff done with a few doing T4/5, so the devs have targeted this so gem managers are hit too.
The problem was maybe pre 7.0 you had more choice to skip things. I mean I skip everything I can to avoid burning out after 7 years, but now players are feeling that they need do more and then it proliferates into where we are now an anti player and anti guild game.
The game is anti player.
And it’s now the worst anti guild it’s ever been.
I look at what’s on offer from events and literally to me at least it’s not worth it. The only thing of value are books and they are not on offer enough. So I can still play but I’m now under more pressure to support guildees more and they are to support their guild.
And it has a knock on effect with players burning out and recruits being also dodo like …
We kept casual reqs tbf but now there’s more pressure for warriors to help
I think it is okay that there are a few hard-core guilds for people who play all day long (car guards? retired people?) - however the problem is there are not enough casual guilds that are actually ACTIVE. Like someone else said, several of them are dead and hardly play at all. It is difficult to find a casual guild that is not obsessed with completing everything, but that is still quite active. These mid-range guilds are literally a handful only.
A hobby is a hobby is a hobby. Spending 8 hours playing GoW is no different than playing golf 8 hours except one is far cheaper than the other. It has been mentioned several times in this thread that there are multiple guilds that are for a variety of levels. I’m glad your guild works well for you and your people. But I think a lot of guilds have legitimate concerns about the amount of guild events now that require even more time than hardcore players want to put in and especially more than midlevel players want to put in.
A lot of players really have to pick and choose what to go after. Personally I’m mainly going far on the Journey and Raid Boss events. They give the most for the effort put in and the troops are useful later on as well so it’s worth it to get the specific shiny tokens for them.
The rest of the events are casual and guild wars are totally optional. LOL.
I truly respect the grinders who can compete at high levels to finish every single event and I like that we also have a home for people who just want to leisurely play but not expecting to get all rewards.
Still, if we had a vote in it (which perhaps we do with enough voices) - yes, please make the rewards for events more obtainable for everyone alike.
I got a modem dial up screeching wav as my launch music in Windows. Sets up the mood nicely.
Sometimes I feel like I have been using the internet more conciously, when I had to pay per minute, and loading a site could take a bit.
On the other hand… I may be the only one, who ever watched videos on youtube at 56k. 1 minute video = 30 minutes preloading.
@Jerry_the_skunk You’re like a modern day Neo plugging into the Matrix when you start up Windows. That’s so cool.
I remember when 14.4k was so amazingly fast and finding usergroups amazing (gosh back when fax machines were standard and we were using those brick motorola cell phones that was handy as a hammer)
7.0 hit us hard. Both of our endgame guilds started losing players. We lowered our gold requirements to bolster recruitment and we went from 5 active guilds to 4 as we combined ranks.
People are citing things like “game is a chore” and “game is taking up way more time than I like” when they quit now.
These developers are actively pushing people away from the game, and instead of pulling the plane out of its nosedive, they keep right on making things less fun while piling on more monetization.
To be clear, I don’t consider an average of T4 for an event to be all that bad, especially as we’re not dealing with Gem-sucking weekend events anymore, but the score requirements are hitting people hard who don’t have the right combinations of troops and the new “use this thingy for double score!” crap effectively robs the most valuable resource players have - their time. It seems anything that can be done to slow down play is being done, and I can only assume it’s to get people to buy more tiers (for the stat buffs) and those silly boo$ter pack$. (Literally making the game un-fun so people pay to skip the gameplay. Bravo, devs. Bravo.)
Ive been losing interest in this game since the latest update as well. For me the game is becoming too money hungry and that is a major turn off. I still play because of the years Ive invested into the game but if they start adding more ways to pay I think I will be done for good. Dont need a mobile begging app.
While I always was more of a cartoon guy and never really went out of my way to find stuff from Japan, that did not run on daytime channels, there’s a couple of anime series, I got good memories of.
Lady Oscar (eng: The Roses of Versailles) and Mila Superstar (eng: Attack Team Number One) are among my DVD collection, and yes, I did drag a couple through emule, back when filesharing was more of a thing. And with shows like Rock n Cop (eng: Futurecop Urashiman) I would not know how to find them, especially in the dubbed version, in any other way than this.
Whee, I am dating myself at a pretty specific time window. The generation, that failed to grow up and clings viciously on their childhood memories.
I just hope, we are not messing up the current kids too much with that retro obsession; at times it feels like 75% of what is released these days are 90s revivals.
Regarding the ramping up of monetisation, that was mentioned above as one of the reasons to drive players away, I think we still have not fully comprehended yet, what the introduction of the new shiny concept means. It’s not like they will stop at any point with those and allow free players to catch up; if you want a full set of shiny III troops some day in the future, not even gems will help you, but only loads of money.
I believe it will be like with any other resource in the game. Initially, dragonite was also hard to get; so were cursed runes; so were imperial deeds, colored deeds… now the bottleneck is shiny tokens for making troops shiny and books of deeds (which can be, indirectly, farmed from merchants & angels via colored deeds). After enough time passes and a specific number of players has earned and spent enough of the new resource and enough income has been generated by this new resource, we will get more ways to get them - and another new “shiny” and “in demand” resource will be introduced, delegating the current “most wanted” resources to being stockpiled on a virtual shelf, with only a fraction of it ever used again.
The only thing that comes to mind is preparation for kingdom power levels rework / expansion beyond 30, as more and more kingdoms are already at 30 max or will soon be.
The uses for cursed runes and dragonite are limited. Deeds and books as well, though at an insanely high number.
The only ressources, that once were a rarity and that keep being required at a constant basis, are traitstones, ingots and souls (I still got nightmares from double colour traitstone farming six years ago). Yes, I know that those are by now even more abundant.
I am aware, that we will get more options to farm shinys; after all there is a ressource to create keys, that has not even been available yet. But at the same time, there will be more to come, each week, and the thousand troops, that are already there will get their shiny form too eventually of course.
I suspect, development will ensure, that it will never be quite enough, for at least five years or so.
And please imagine looking for a specific shiny token, once there are thousand possible troops to draw.
This feature is downright evil, and they will milk it until the game is dead. Worst case of cash-lock since campaign passes.
Every single resource in the game has limited use - with some having more uses than others. Diamonds - once you’ve crafted all mythics, they are just piling up endlessly. Traitstones - once you’ve traited all troops, you’re earning more traitstones than you need for one-two troops per week. Ingots - once all weapons are done, they stockpile faster than we get new weapons. Chaos shards - once you get all underworld troops and all delves maxed out, you hardly need them at all. Dragonite - at the moment, once players get all 7 dragons, they pile up (for as long as we don’t get another set of dragons). Cursed runes have a longer life-span, I think, as they are used for forged scrolls - and I personally still need tons of those, even with orbs of forging being a thing. Soulforge gets new recipes from time to time, so we are getting more uses of various things. It’s just that except maybe dragonite, most players who’ve been with the game longer than about, say, 3 years, have hoards of all resources. The only thing they don’t have is shiny keys to make a certain number of troops shiny.
The question is - when we will learn what we need those shiny troops for, and how many of those we’ll need.
The mechanism is already here in the game, this is nothing new. It is vile and evil, yes, but not new. Try targeting a specific legendary or mythic troop via keys other than event keys - it took me a year to get Divinia the first time round, and there were less than 1000 troops in the game at the time (we are at 1300+ now)! Or even better, try targeting a very specific pet from the pet gnome pool that you need one last copy of. In my two guilds, there are pets we haven’t seen at all in many months as pet rescues, despite being very active Vault pet gnome hunters.
The mechanism isn’t new. “shiny keys” is just the newest resource we all want just because it’s scarce and there isn’t enough to go around to make all eligible troops shiny right away.
The current generation is messed up in all new ways so don’t worry Besides when I was growing up it was all fifties and sixties nosta;gia. As I recall the saying was “The nineties are going to make the sixties look like the fifties.”
But my students love all the new anime, so when I list my favs it’s like, "Ghost in the Shell? Ah my Goddess? Scrapped Princess? Bueller? Bueller?
…
That’s so cool. 
