I could have sworn I read something about the possibility of addition tasks being added if guilds were maxing out tasks too quickly, but I struggled to find it for citation.
Moving on, what constitutes tasks being completed too quickly? As of this past week, my guild completed all 12 tasks on all 6 statues within 5 hours of weekly reset. Most of the people in the guild didn’t even get a chance to contribute, because once they logged on for the first time [of the week], everything was already finished.
Anyway, if I could get a developer’s word as to whether there are any advances in this proposal, when they could be could be expected or if I dreamed it up entirely; that would be great.
Well, i usually leave an announcement saying “Try not to contribute more than 1 millon on monday” which is directed at 4 or 5 players.
But we at Intrim II are also completing all tasks on Monday. Right now, i would prefer to have the devs reply, saying if they want to get more data, or they want to discuss the data internally, before trying to find the balance in mythic tasks.
Since less than 10 maybe 15 guilds can finish all the tasks, I am not really viewing this as a problem except for a small 1% of the player base.
It is already very annoying to play Against the top 10 guilds as they max everything too fast (and I think they need to scale these bonuses back), making them even more powerful just makes the game unfun for the other 99% of players.
There is nothing wrong with people getting the bonuses for maxing out the statues. It’s a small conciliation considering the major hit we took when glory keys/gems were nerfed to hell and back.
Why would you view it as a problem if it doesn’t affect you? Doesn’t that go without saying?
Due to the way the matchmaking system works, it is rare that you even fight a team that you are underqualified to beat, based on their Battle Rating (BR). To be honest, stat boosts are another thorned rose for end-game players, because the ONLY enemy teams we fight in PvP are others that have full stat bonuses; effectively cross cancelling any upper hand. The only place we get to enjoy the bonuses is outside of PvP.
I’m actually wholly against stat bonuses, including kingdoms and guilds. It isn’t necessary and only serves to increase the distance between those who have played for a long time and those who haven’t. This is already compounded by the fact that veterans likely have everything ascended and maxed, so adding extra stats on top of gem mastery and ascension seems pointless. As you said before, this advantage goes away when two high level people fight each other, so why does it exist in the first place? It exists so that higher level players have a significant power increase over lower levels, which happens organically anyway.
Battle rating is already highly skewed, and when I was level 200ish, I was already fighting level 1000 players. I understand kingdom and guild bonuses are strong incentives for players, but this can be accomplished just as easily with non-battle rewards. I hope 10* kingdoms don’t come out for a VERY long time, because it will further encourage a pointless power gap.
That being said, I think adding more non-battle task rewards is necessary, as developers don’t want their more dedicated playerbase leaving because the incentives are not commensurate with their playtime
I know you are talking about high end (hard core) guilds here. But I have noticed something happening with mid-level guilds … or at least the one I am in. Several of us hit the 1500 seal cap in two or three days and cannot do more to raise the guild chests unless we spend RL money. We can still pvp or whatever and dump gold into tasks but we have been unable to get their rank past 8, maybe one or two to 9. But it is a long grind without a lot of incentives. I have noticed play times decreasing.
We discussed getting one task to 12 and then working on the rest but it severely curtails rewards. And due to diminishing returns the higher you get going to 12 on one made the rewards from that very costly while spreading out the donations gets us a lot more for less. I guess all of this is to say that there are … to me anyway … issues with the new system that are affecting not just high end guilds.
But this is only one guild experience. I do know of one other person who played this game for over a year and was guild leader of what I would call a mid-level guild and who got so frustrated with this system that he turned over his guild to someone else and quit! I have no idea if my guild’s experience is a common one mid-level, but I suspect it is.
The new guild system has brought many positives to new players. It has also possibly increased income to the GoW makers because if you want more seals than the 1.5k that is the only way to get them.
The Devs are in a hard spot. F2P games are in demand but how do you get funds then to keep the game going, even if you did a kick start sort of game development approach? How do keep everybody happy? How do you best spend the dollars you do have? Aim to please the majority would be my guess while finding some kind of hook that produces some kind of revenue. Is that what they are doing? And if so, can you blame them?
I see. To digress, I can agree that the your return on investment diminishes immensely the higher up you go on the tasks. We are aware of this, but we don’t really have anything else to spend our gold on and it’s the only way to get remotely close to the rewards we were previously accustomed to…
If I’m honest, the entire concept of “we’ll see how the top guilds are doing after update” seemed like a ruse from the start. We, as a guild, were donating 35 to 40 milliongold per week before the update and the maximum gold you can put into the guild tasks now is around 16 million. It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that many of the guilds are going to be hitting the cap weekly with ease.
Call me jaded, but many games I’ve played in the past have had major updates that drive away a fair portion of their loyal fanbase. You may think this tragic, but I disagree. The updates usually cater to new or mid-game players. These players bring in friends and family through recommendation, increasing the chance of IAP. The counterpoint is that it leaves seasoned players with nothing more than a bad taste in their mouth, often with little to no explanation or reform. I suppose you don’t need everyone to stick around, just enough, considering you’ll have a fresh batch of customers with an itch trigger finger hovering over the buy button.
As a side note, @Sirrian being on holiday explains why we don’t yet get responses from him or @Nimhain yet, as I expect she has to do a lot more work to compensate for his being away.
I actually notice the opposite more frequently in the games I play. For instance, in Marvel Puzzle Quest, their “updates” within the last year or so have been oriented towards their loyal playerbase/whales, including the introduction of a higher tier, a new currency, and ways to earn additional levels on existing characters.
A lot of F2P developers rightfully realize that the majority of their revenue stems from the top 5% of paying customers, so they appeal to those players to spend more to make up for all of the free users because most people will not spend much if any money at all on F2P games.
Gems of War is the exception here, and I think it’s because of how little need there is to spend money on the game in order to progress. Aside from DeathKnight Armor (which isn’t necessary, only very useful), most players get the majority of their resources freely from guilds. This is furthered by the fact that other items in the shop are horribly overpriced and serve as a trap for newer players getting into the game
