Tuesday faction events are not healthy

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Okay, we need to talk about how these one-day faction events are borderline abusive. I decided to spend the 3000 gems needed to buy enough sigils to get Fang Moor to 2500. I even budgeted hours (and hours) in a single business day to the task.

I get to level 500 for the pure faction run, and I fail. Repeatedly. At this point, I could walk away, but that means giving up the gems and time already spent, and having to do the entire thing over again in the future. So I succumb to the sunk costs and keep going. And going. And going. Between charm spells and infernal armor, many runs end early. (Those effects are laser-focused to ruin the day of attack-boosting, skull-driven teams. Which, of course, Fang Moor is, with no ability to restore life except that one potion. Ask me how happy I am to have the AI specifically tuned to stop faction teams.) When it’s not that, it’s RNG leading to unfavorable outcomes of spell casts (with 12 skulls on the board, creating 14, I can’t get a single match?).

By the time I finally win with a pure faction team, this is what I have spent:

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This tells you only how many gems I used, and does not reveal the time I had to commit. Which was equally absurd thanks to trying to use a slow faction team on a five-battle path and retrying so often.

I am happy to drop gems on factions. Really, I am. But I am never doing this single-day event stuff again, until or unless it is changed so I do not have to start at level 20 each time. I don’t even feel happy about being finished. I just feel gross for how it completely ruined my day/evening/night.

Some of this post is me venting about the experience. But I am dead serious about how the current faction event setup (and map layouts, and team designs) seems to be preying on players and human psychology in a really, really disappointing way.

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Took me t7x11 as well. Same thing as you.
13 reds on board, turn 15 yellow to red …
no 4 matches more than a few times. I had to drop skull guy in my final run due to number of times it backfired improbably.

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You’re the fourth individual to share that they did Tier 7, 11 times to get today’s Faction to 2500. (Of those who I saw comment they went for it today.)
Which is simply ridiculous.
Since feedback is getting us no where.
I’m starting to think the best option is to no longer waste gems on Faction Assaults. Just buy enough tiers to get the awards and that’s it.
Once enough players stop wasting their time and resources. The devs will have to take notice of our plight. And it sounds like the next Faction is the perfect time to start the boycott.

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Now here’s where I get dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.
The AI difficulty/AI RNG are dictated by how many tiers a player buys solely in Faction Assaults. In other words… The more tiers you buy, “the luckier” you get.
Therefore making it truly pay to win.

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I think you’re onto something, actually. I was dreading the Bulette room in my pure faction 500 run. But it never showed up, and neither did the Lamias, despite a fairly large sample size (I got Viper a whooooole lot, and a fair few dwarves.) And the run I finally won, I got Dragon Hatchery, which I don’t remember seeing any previous time today.

Edit: I am not going so far as to claim gem spending makes you luckier. But I do wonder if there is code that changes room appearance rates based on whether you are doing a pure faction run or not.

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I still wonder how many people think Gems of War isn’t pay to win in some areas.

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As a side topic of discussion, let’s chat about the implications of the phrases “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and “law of unintended consequences”.

If potions did not exist, there would be vastly less pressure to complete factions in a single day. Buying tier VII over and over would just give you more chances during the 24-hour period, but not make it materially easier each time. If you chose not to finish by daily reset, you could just go back to spending your daily delve sigils and have not lost anything.

However, once potions were thrown into the mix, suddenly the sunk costs become much, much higher. They were introduced as a way to lower the barrier to entry for players, making high-level content easier. (All of this, of course, was an incentive for players to spend more gems.) But since they expire, you need to finish the content for which you needed them. And that leads us back to the OP.

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Just the thought of going all in on a Tuesday can destroy my day. We need some better solutions before 2021…

A player that have reached level 500 with a non faction team should be allowed to choose whichever level he/she wants to start out with with an all faction team at Tuesdays events. Buying the potions is bad enough itself, tons of hours added on top of it is inhuman.

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Factions were intended to be tackled over a long period of time, and to keep you busy for a few of the weeks between releases. This is why we’re so aggressively capped on delve attempts at 3 global delves per day.

They were designed (with the implementation of potions) so that the only realistic way to complete them is to blitz through them in one day by spending 3000 gems (7ish x tier 7). This is fundamentally at odds with the stated intent of the game mode.

I don’t think the events are intentionally exploitative, I think they’re just badly designed. But yeah, they’re not healthy.

Literally all of these problems go away if you change the faction team requirement to something else. Cap it at 250 (with 2x renown per delve level), give double stats for using the faction team in its own faction, redesign every faction team so that it has a way to win when outstatted, change the faction pet bonus to be gigantic and only apply in delves, …

Off topic, but most people will be able to get the first point of magic from factions with next month’s release (the 18th faction). Was it really intended that clearing every faction to 2500, which takes hundreds of hours, would only give +2 magic? Sirrian made a comment a long time ago about adding cool rewards to high renown levels, so I was hopeful that the system would be reworked, but it’s looking less and less likely.

I like a lot of things about delves, but they’ve been broken since launch and it looks like they’ll never change.

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Maybe devs suggested raising the faction hoard, and with level 14 kingdom the hoard stats will increase by 50%. But even at level 500 your magic will be at level 77 without potions, which is not enough for some factions.

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It took me 5 tiers 7 tiers to finish this delve pure faction.
I took the day off, so nothing might bother me. I put some music on. And i matched, ad nauseam :slight_smile:
I have to agree this cross the line of what is healthy or not. We should not have to restart from scratch everytime we do a delve we already got to level 500.
If they want us to spend gems, they should at least allow to convert these sigils in free pass (if i have already level up to 300, allow me to automatically “buy” my way to 300, with some arbitrary reward). It would save a lot of time and energy and the players would still use these precious gems…

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I cannot agree more to all this. Yesterday was the first time I maxed a faction in a one day event and it was also most definitly the last time. Spending hours to get to level 500 and then starting those painfully slow pure faction runs only to be unlucky in the final room and having to start again. Nope, that is torture and made me hate my life. No problem with the gem cost but I wont risk my sanitiy again.

So please allow us to progress in the game without demanding our mental health. Thank you!

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This isn’t winning though. This is pay to lose. Unless you want to call drowning in misery a win, which would be … very odd?

I haven’t done more than tier 2 on any of these Tuesday faction events, EVER! It is NEVER going to happen! Given how mind-numbing the three day events are, I am starting to think I need to cut back on the tiers I spend on them also (which is 6 max but even so…).

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I wish I could click “like” to the original post until my phone battery dies. One day delve blitz is sickening; I tried it once and was so weary by the time I reached level 300 that I stopped playing despite having more than enough sigils to complete the whole thing (in theory). 250 battles minimum in one day is almost 10 times what Sirrian recommends as healthy play!!! This is just wrong, not borderline abusive but way over the line abusive. Perhaps we should be allowed to decide our progression as others have said. That way we could perhaps go up 3 levels or so every time we triumph and thus balance the time required between a 3 day and 1 day event. I think @awryan is right. Boycott the 1 day events other than the tiers needed for the rewards. Everyone is justifiably sick to death of delves and a senior dev should really explain how this style of play is in any way enjoyable or psychologically acceptable. It’s way beyond the time where the devs can stay in the shadows and not engage with the community on this topic. More than 2 hours of regular daily play is viewed as potential gaming disorder. This company promotes a structure particularly regarding delves where players feel complelled to play perhaps twice that amount on a regular basis. We really deserve some feedback on this and similar threads which universally condemn delves as very, very bad news for the psychological wellbeing of many players within the community.

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I seriously doubt they’re going to ever let you skip levels and then give you rewards for it even if it costs sigils. Seems a little too generous.

If they ever implement a skip system, it will probably be something that forces a trade-off between rewards vs time. Something like spend X sigils to attempt a delve X0 levels ahead. Win, you advance further than usual much faster at the expense of the rewards you might have earned if you did it one sigil at a time. Lose, you don’t advance and just wasted X sigils.

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Ok I’m VIP but I’m now done spending any money on this game until the (won’t happen) shift from the pursuit of greed and imbalance occurs. I’ve spent £15 in the last 2 years and that was 3 minor flash offers and the steam pet.

I’ve never gone higher than T2 on weekdays like @Shimrra and tbh I skipped it completely last week and nearly skipped it this. I ended up doing it at 1am (Tier 1) in the morning and thought wth I am doing (again!).

That was after the weekend, 2 days later. This weekend I bought T4 and just stopped at 240 through sheer boredom and how long it takes/took. Completely unhealthy.

In the last faction, you might as well just match skulls cos it’s borderline that mana even matters when you transform etc. Skulls come up against 50% skull reduction or 65% reduction and it’s savagely in favour of AI.

I’ve already made a commitment to never buy past T4 on faction events. Now I’m reducing that and might not even bother at all. I’ve got far better things to do than to deal with the RNG of random game over, like death mark in faction runs or Night Hag or double Lamia.

There’s imho a design here that the factions are so hard (Stupid) so that more gems and money are spent. Like with other areas of the game and the attitude and contempt shown to the player base on most things, it’s just clear to me.

I have never bought Tier 7 in factions. I do faction 500s. without potions and if I can’t do them with my 3 daily goes, I will not lose any sleep or sanity or the oodles of bad time anymore on faction event weekend. 2 Vault keys - more chance for rubbish.

I hope other people make similar choices until the time factor at least is changed.

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I’ve never understood why they didn’t implement a choice of start level in FA.
Where’s the devs’ loss?
You got less easy run, less event point, less resource gain and instead you gain TIME.
So, really, where’s the matter devs?
The pots needed to get a full faction run would be still needed, you’ll get the same gems (money) AND the turnout of player would be extremely larger.
Think about who have a whole day to dedicate to this massacre and instead who have a couple of hour and would really really like to give an hour and a lot of gem to complete an otherwise nightmarish task.
The current decision is a non-sense to me.

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I understand what you are all saying and agree with most of it.
But no one is forcing you to drive yourselves to distraction trying to get to 2500 in one day. The farthest I ever attempt to go is level 200. Even that is too much gaming in one day for me.
Isn’t this somewhat self induced?
There was a comment above that delves were never intended to be completed in one day. I believe that they won’t be changed now after 17 soon to be 18 have been released no matter how much we complain.
Doubt this will be a popular opinion but I am just stating my thoughts.

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The point is that if you want to reach level 500 outside of events you would need an incredibly high hoard level to stand a decent chance. With a faction like Werewoods you basically need to gain higher stats than all opponents. Getting your hoard to that point takes an insane amount of gold (and quite a few treasures).
So, from a strategic perspective that leaves events/potions as the only plausible option. But then you run into the issues listed above: that it takes an ridiculous amount of time/dedication and gems within a specific day or weekend.

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The problem here isn’t the event itself, is that’s the devs contradict their own claims about their intentions with delves. They tell us that factions are supposed to be a long-term progression, but then they make it so that the only non-miserable way to do pure faction 500 is on the weekend it’s released. They tell us that potions aren’t supposed to be a solution to pure faction 500, but then they don’t give us any alternative method, leading to ridiculous attempts to do it on a Tuesday.

I personally have never bought enough tiers to reach level 500 in a faction event, because I like pacing myself and being able to progress in delves over the course of weeks. I don’t want to have nothing to do between faction releases, and the devs say they don’t want that either… So where’s the solution to back that up?

Right now pure faction 500 isn’t just a long-term goal, and it isn’t just hard, on many factions it’s pretty close to impossible without spending millions upon millions of gold and somehow getting far more legendary/mythic treasures than anyone ever actually receives. And more than anything else, it’s not fun. Something absolutely can be fun even if it’s extremely hard, and that should be the design objective here. Instead, doing pure faction runs without potions ends up being hours of very slowly beating against a wall while praying for the one-in-a-million amazing RNG you need to win. These teams aren’t fun to use, and are nowhere near capable of handling the content they’re supposed to be designed for.

The answer isn’t really to change faction events, it’s to give us an alternative option. My suggestion would be something like the epic/legendary battles available on most events, except instead for the duration of a delve. Basically, let us spend all of our daily sigils on a single run for a huge stat boost. Of course there are still some faction teams so bad that high stats still won’t be enough, but chances are it’ll at least be possible most of the time.

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