On this week’s official Gems of War stream, someone made an excellent quality of life suggestion. Unfortunately, I don’t feel it was properly understood, so here’s an explanation of why it was such an amazing suggestion.
The Idea
When a new tribute becomes available, let the player know with one of those side-of-the-screen pop-ups that currently appear when mail arrives or a portrait is unlocked or the daily quest is completed.
The Reasoning
A huge part of progressing in Gems of War (probably the majority of time spent in the game) is grinding for Class XP, Souls, Traitstones, Gold, … That usually involves playing hundreds of battles in a row without ever returning to the map screen. (This is something I doubt any of the developers have ever experienced – which makes perfect sense, as they don’t have time, being busy working on the game.)
While we’re grinding, the game does not currently provide any notification when our Tribute is available. So despite the fact we’re playing the game, we actually get less Tribute than we would if we were in chat with the tribute icon visible, not actually playing at all. This doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Fortunately, one of the recent updates introduced the ability to show on-screen notifications at the moment when some goal is achieved. This is in the form of an animated, flag-like box on the right side of the screen, accompanied by an audio cue. These usually appear when we complete the daily quest, gain a goal-oriented portrait (eg: reaching level 100), or receive mail.
In my opinion, it makes perfect sense to link hourly Tributes to this alert system.
Postscript
It would also make a lot of sense to link the guild-wide, PvP-triggered Pet Rescue to this alert system. The standard Pet notification system was recently upgraded (strangely, without any announcement) to trigger on more game states, but it still doesn’t trigger as frequently as we would like.
