There’s at least 64K players on Steam/mobile (I just checked my PvP rank which is 64,460 and I have 1928 points). Who knows how many players are on the consoles. But just from the Steam/mobile numbers, I’d be surprised if there aren’t more than 30 people who make a purchase every day from GoW.
It’s Friday. 64k people have made tier 1 this week in PvP. Half of them probably haven’t played since they made tier 1. At least 90% of the player base plays for free. 8% has made one purchase in the past year or so. The devs are making enough to sustain the game. But they’re not making millions off of it. I’ll concede and say at the max 130 purchases are made daily.
I’m not trying to be argumentative, but you seem to be throwing a lot of numbers out there. Have they been said somewhere?
I’ll certainly agree with you that the devs aren’t making millions off of it (because I would certainly like to see a return to Warlords TBS, while there are others on the I2 forum who always check in to see about Warlords RTS) . But other than that, there are a lot of assumptions seemingly made. The only thing we know for sure (barring some hard data that might be forthcoming) is that we don’t know anything for sure.
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You… literally… brought the numbers into the conversation. The devs don’t disclose any numbers publicly. So any numbers discussed are best guesses.
You can check for event spoiler at Taran’s site here regularly, If that help.
Right now in-game notification is only a day ahead on Thursday on News section.
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Soooo…I’ve been playing for almost 3 months and have no idea what a “vault event” is. I had to find a YouTube video just to know what you guys are talking about. How is this not put somewhere that we can see it? Yes, I did see posts saying it’s in the events section somewhere, but who has time for that? Whenever that pops up I’m trying to close it as fast as I can to get my gold and tributes that are flashing at me. I would be nice to see some notification in either the guild, games, or even put a gnome icon on explore. Someplace that gets checked frequently. There is no way I should play a game as long as I have and as often as I do and not know when an event has come and gone!
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I think because the concept of a vault event was not part of their design.
When treasure gnomes released, their drops and rates were WAY too high, and people got a lot of stuff. The devs had to adjust gnomes within 24 hours. Players were cheesed off about this, so the vault events were a peace offering. “What if we made some weekends have rates more like what that was?”
Also I lack some sympathy because this has always been present in F2P games I play. There’s always a News thing, and tons of people either turn it off or skip it without reading it. Then, invariably, when something that was in the news gets missed, the players who ignore it say it should’ve had bells and whistles attached.
Heck, for a long time the only thing in the news for this game was which kingdom/troops got bonuses this week. THAT was a good time to complain. Now that, generally, everything happening TODAY has an entry, it’s not such a strong complaint. (And, in terms of plans… I don’t slight the devs for not assuming people plan weekends around GoW. That’s really not healthy.)
Make the news your “first login” routine. Tap every panel and make sure you know what it says. Now that the devs actually use it, you won’t miss news.
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According to the devs, the original gnome rate at release was the vault event rate.
Edit: choosing numbers at random, the gnome rate at release was 1/30, which was the intended vault event rate. The intended normal rate was something like 1/100 or 1/300. When the devs changed the gnomes to this rate, people broke out their torches and pitchforks. So the devs changed the normal rate back to 1/30, and made the vault event rate 1/10. (Of course, this was accompanied by a reduction in Treasure Gnome drop rates.)
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Thank you for agreeing with me that no one reads the news. Just get rid of it. Devs of all games are always trying to communicate to gamers through some sort of news on a loading screen or special tab. It’s as if their putting an office memo on the break room bulletin board. It’s poor communication and misses the target audience. Communication needs to be done through the game play. GoW is actually much better at it than most games. If you need to know what “Freezing” is it’s written right there. I don’t go to another section to look it up in a game guide. News should be delivered in a similar effective fashion.
There is no reason whatsoever they can’t give us 7 days notice for vault events. The date is certainly “locked in” by that point.
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Sorry for the late reply, I don’t get on the forums during the weekends.
So perhaps I should have said “quantifiable/verifiable” numbers. You and Razzagor were discussing guesses about people who might be buying stuff during Vault events (300+ and 30), so the numbers were introduced there. I was trying to say that the 30 number seemed unreasonably low and gave numbers that are easily gotten within the game to show how many players there are on one platform alone. But then you stated “90% play for free” (?) and 8% has made one purchase (?), none of which were “backed up” so seemingly come out of nowhere. I mean, it could very well be 50% play for free because the other 50% have bought the Deathknight armor at the very least, or 20% have bought one of the Path of Glory bundles to get a mythic. No one knows (right now, that I know of).
However, I’m not trying to quibble on the numbers, whether it’s 90% or 50% or 100% of who pays for what and when. What I’m trying to state is that the player base is fairly large among all the platforms (that seems to be lost in the “forum bubble”) and the revenue brought in must be enough to keep the game going for 2+ years. Trying to guess who’s buying what during a particular time seems… futile. But if guesses had to made, steer towards more reasonable/realistic 
I don’t really like picking things apart but I disagree pretty strongly with some stuff.
We didn’t have it at one point. Then there was lots of dicsussion of people who didn’t know an event was going on, and it was demanded. It doesn’t hurt you that it’s there, and it helps the people who use it.
How exactly do you communicate through gameplay that a thing which is usually so rare many players never see it is less rare than it usually is for a limited time? A floating Luther head that interrupts the match? OK, what about people that accidentally tap through it and then wonder what it said? What about people who want to grind if there is a Vault event but would rather just check tribute if there’s not? What about things like, “a new mythic troop is now in gem chests”? Gems has a lot of stuff that doesn’t come through in gameplay.
Oh, so this is why we have a weekly “How does Frozen work?” thread? Or a monthly “I’m not getting my Attack buffs while Entangled?” No one has ever adequately explained why Anu’s Scepter says “a chosen color” but can’t choose Blue. The in-game text is inconsistent at best and incorrect on average. It’d be nice if it were better, but in many cases I think “having no text at all” would be better than what we have. Then at least people would come ask, “Wait, what does this do?” instead of filing a bug report because what happens isn’t the same as what the game says.
I guess I’m too new to the game to know how things used to be or the errors in the information given in-game.
My suggestion for communicating through gameplay was to simply put a gnome icon or picture on the Explorer tab. They could even put something similar in the game section where the Gnome vault is located. They do this for pet events pretty easy. They have a popup every week to purchase the current event Legend. When a Mythic comes out it is shown in gem keys. They do this already for almost all events. I’m just asking that they do the same for vault events.
There’s a popup every week with the week’s events. It tells you when there’s a Vault event ongoing.
No there isn’t…Oh, you mean the load screen that’s in the way when you first load in. BIG DIFFERENCE!!!
Seriously, what’s your problem? My suggestion is good for the game. I get that the current setup works well for your brain, but a small added element will help the rest of us.
I don’t know, your refusal to spare 3 seconds of your time a day to click on the news icon doesn’t seems like the game’s communication problem, but your own. There is no excuse to not check the news next after collecting your tribute.
There are enough pop-up notifications in the game already. There is no need to program extra pop-up just because some people don’t bother to read the news in the game, then get mad when they’re missing out.
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