Can we get some Gems of War Classic, before all the shit after 3.5?
The more recent updates added the less I play this game, I even installed something else to replace GoW now more and more.
You will add your updates to new gow and I will enjoy old GoW (probably with majority)…
just dreaming…
My guild is just in a bad position because I am very accepting of new players and love helping them learn the game. We hit legendary tasks last week and it was a hoot. It’s not something we do every week. It just really sucks to know it will be permanently out of reach for a guild like mine that helps newer players with a few veterans.
I’m here to address a few points.
There was a lot of feedback from end-game players about a lack of ways to get Deeds, and from players in general about wanting more way to specifically target resources.
It allows us to let players target the resources they need without negatively affecting our economy.
Players were asking for many of these resources to be added to Legendary tasks, but we were not able to put them there due to their ability to be excessively farmed, imbalancing the game and economy.
Most guilds don’t make Legendary Tasks, and these guilds now have more choices of the resources they want to focus on getting.
This will be a small re-balance of the economy, trading keys for other resources, many of which are gated and can’t be purchased. Eg, writs which can be used to create Deeds.
We skewed the costs of the new Guild Tasks higher so it would naturally encourage early gamers to invest in the Tasks that benefit them most. (Which certainly isn’t Writs!)
Unfortunately, cosmetic items aren’t a viable way to support Gems of War. In order to make enough money from cosmetic items we would need a significantly larger playerbase, which also comes with further associated costs. Very few players make cosmetic purchases in Gems of War, as we have seen in the past. On top of this, implementing new cosmetic purchases is expensive. Even with pre-existing assets, there is more work to be done behind the scenes to release cosmetic items for purchase, and the cost can outweigh the profit. We understand that cosmetic purchases work in other games, but those games aren’t Gems of War.
I want to take a moment to commend everyone on keeping this thread both civil and informative. I appreciate it very much, especially as this is a highly contentious issue. Please continue.
Now I am faced with kicking all the newer players that can’t contribute, which are the only ones that need those resources ironically…I have no interest in buying resources that aren’t useful for everyone in the guild.
Edit - Not to mention the value of what you are getting in terms of chaos shards for example, is absolutely awful for the amount of gold required.
I don’t envy your job right now. It’s not so much the idea of epic tasks that people are mad about, so much as the choice of resources and how much it raises the bar on activity. The universally useful resources are being replaced by limited use resources.
Token will always have value.
Chaos shards/treasure troops would be useful if it wasn’t so ridiculously expensive to upgrade hoards. If it was more linear, then it might be viable to not use potions and these two resources would have more usefulness. The bottom two rarity treasures aren’t worth using because it makes future upgrades more expensive. I would rather have low value gold keys than a coin purse.
Maybe pets food mixed with actual pets might make that one useful. Pet food by itself is less useful.
Deeds will be useful for a while, and then it won’t be unless there are more kingdoms or uses for deeds coming.
If you guys had the new ones the same cost, you’d only be doubling the bar. The screenshots show double the cost, which mean 1+2 = 3, triple the bar we have now.
Those same guilds won’t be able to afford the changes.
New players need troops, as many as they can, so the first 6 standard tasks will always benefit them more.
To say otherwise shows how out of touch the devs have become with the game. Which was bound to happen. You keep adding more content to the game while the devs themselves have and less less time to play. So you start doing things that you think we want, but it’s not what we want.
Like the devil, you’ll give us what we want, but it’ll only cost us our souls.
I know no one asked for writs. But deeds sure.
Are you telling me pet food will destabilize the economy? No one is paying money for food. Pets sure. But not food.
No one asked for chaos shards, no one who knows how to play did.
We want the gotcha style low hanging fruit style treasures to be removed from the game. Not forced upon us more when going for legendary tasks.
Add ingots to explore, so that new players can farm them instead of wasting gold.
And tokens (unless they are guaranteed legendary or mythic ones) are useless to most since they can be farmed easily.
So basically… You decided to add 1 new guild task. But to just add one would be too hard to code. So you duplicated the code and made 5 other tasks that are crap.
It’s too late I’m sure… But just remove shards from standard tasks and add writs.
Tasks weren’t broken. So you went to “fix” them and here we are.
“Very few players make cosmetic purchases in Gems of War, as we have seen in the past.”
This is laughable. You sell something not appealing and expect customers to dump money on it, and blame us for lack of sales. You certainly know how to serve customers well, good job.
Add all keys into these new epic tasks and we all wouldn’t be in such an uproar.
The problem with this is that with 30 people in a guild, there’s not likely to be a consensus on where to contribute gold. These “epic” tasks are a great big stop sign in the face of most guilds. “Here’s all the stuff available…enjoy never getting most of it.”
All but the absolute top end guilds will need to try and prioritize certain tasks over others, and that puts incredible pressure on guild leadership because everyone values each currency differently. If 4 players love Delves they’ll value Chaos Shards, if another 7 players want to work on powering up Kingdoms they’re going to want Writs, and if 3 people are diehard pet fiends they’re going to want pet food. At least with the standard tasks it’s relatively easy to determine which things are priority, but with this new system the waters are going to become incredibly muddy, incredibly fast. By design, I’m sure.
I’m going to make the assumption that most guilds will wind up going the route of spending most of their gold on the cheapest levels of tasks. There will be some exceptions but with the cost doubling relative to the costs of normal tasks, my assumption is that the instinct is going to be to grab the lowest-hanging fruit in most cases.
With that in mind - instead of getting a useful handful of keys each week, we’re going to get what…a few Writs, a few pieces of pet food, a dozen Chaos Shards, and we’re supposed to be happy about that?
And instead of adjusting drop rates you guys came up with another system that will still not provide any meaningful ways to get more deeds for wast majority of playerbase(you said most guilds don’t even make it to LT yourself, and we are talking about 5-10 LTs to maximise deeds statue only, unles you seriously expect anyone to stop putting gold into key statues), but would drain huge amounts of resources from players and will take away ability to get stuff that we already have?
On a guild scale. So, we have couple guys in the guild that are working towards pushing delve levels and pure faction runs, i guess we should tell them to look for a new guild because most of us don’t and we value deeds more? Also, kick anyone who is not interested in farming explore 12, for good measure, because we won’t be doing badges either. Correct?
Translation: we don’t like the fact LT provide uncapped useful resources.
So early-mid game player now can chose to not obtain keys, that are the most important resource for them, but instead to go and spend gold to get to spend more gold faster. Because player agency and players love making choices, right?
Out of curiosity, what tasks do You, @Saltypatra, personally, think benefit new players the most?
Well this update has a good chance to shrink player base even more, so… Anyways. I launched the game and tried to find any cosmetics you are refering to. There are 2 hyper-expensive avatars, one of which is bugged. That’s… it? I remember there were icons and portraits for ingame chat in flash offers\timed deals, if i remember correctly? Am i missing something?
Wait, what? Trading Key for other resources, not the other way around? Why would we want to trade Keys, the main source of troop acquisition, income of which is getting nerfed again and again, for something else?
While also introducing things like emojis and titles mind you.
@awryan writs are being introduced as a way to get more Deeds.
@aluoaniki I personally thought the lapina and dwarf packs were pretty great! However, even with more really cool cosmetic options, Gems of War isn’t big enough to sustain itself on cosmetic purchases, and they often aren’t worth the time and money invested to create, implement and release them. There’s a lot of data in the industry that points to this phenomena, and only VERY large playerbases make this a viable strategy.
On a side note, emojis and titles require very little work to release, unlike the kind of cosmetic items people are referring to in this thread, such as armour skins, hair styles, etc.
I will be checking in on this thread and monitoring it, though will be replaying rarely. I have provided as much information as I am able to at this period in time.
Oh and let’s not forget boys and girls that Delves are finite. Once we hit 34 there won’t be anymore. So all these extra tasks centered around them will be useless if GoW lasts that long.
So if the change is a success…shards and Treasures will be useless in 2 years.
If the changes are unsuccessful… Shards and Treasures will be useless in 2 years (since GoW won’t exist.)
The GoW dev comments about cosmetic items conflicts with what I have seen every other F2P dev say in interviews. I think it’s just another place where you don’t understand how to make it work and pretend “the world just works this way”. Somehow GoW is good at making money the only ways most other devs consider “much harder”.
Fact: I have spent upwards of $100 on a game with cosmetic items this year. I have maybe spent $10 or $15 on GoW.
I’m not just being a jerk. I’m telling you how I spend my money and you’re telling me I’m wrong. The explanation that it doesn’t work is hard to swallow from people who confidently state they’ve done millions of tests against the RNG then change their mind when a player who’s spent less than a day looking at the numbers calls the bluff. You made two avatars, charged too much for them, then asserted “this doesn’t work”. Sometimes the reason stuff doesn’t work is you did it wrong. You only know one trick: “Make the stats bigger, and sell stats to players.” You’re going to run out of room eventually.
What about being able to change our avatars to an existing card. Like what If I wanted to look like the Grey King for my hero? No extra cost in artwork since we already have it, just a little time to change the code so avatars are changeable, much like our pets, kingdoms, armor, appearance are all changeable already. 
The big deal here is the keys tho, which are infinitely more valuable to everyone since they’re the main source of getting cards, and the core of this game is as a CCG (card collecting game + match 3). All players need cards, new, mid, as well as vet players. These tasks are detracting from that, and on top of nerfing keys that are given as a reward for those who are playing more than most, which is a good thing that players are encouraged to play more and able to get more LT’s. Instead we are cutting the supply, and putting it behind 3x the work to get to it. Making epic guild tasks that cost 31.2mil to complete (15.6 x2, based on starting value 5k vs 10k for brown vs epic brown tasks) on top of the 15.6mil for normal guild tasks adds up to 46.8mil / 30 and you get over 1.5mil per player. Most ‘top’ guilds only ask for 500k from their player base, and expecting them to play 3x more is unreasonable and definitely not sustainable. Any guild that is currently doing less than 30 LT’s will never see one again, and those that do 30 will be struggling to get any.
One of my previous ideas was to make guild tasks (GT) more accessable to more players, currently I believe most guilds can only handle doing about 2 guild tasks a week out of 6. With epic tasks (ET) being about twice the price most guilds can only afford to do maybe 1 ET. I don’t see how that is helpful to the community. One of my previous proposals that I made on GoW Community (discord) was the lowering of the GT cost as well as the ET cost.
For example: GT 15.6mil → 10mil, ET 31.2mil → 20mil = 46.8mil → 30mil.
This way you will be asking for the player base to increase work production (playing time) to be double to produce 30mil/week instead of 15mil/week to finsih all the tasks. This is easier to swallow with a bump in 2x the effort rather than 3x which is really an unreasonable ask of us.
The players are not against the idea of Epic Tasks, what they are upset about is the time sink cost, and nobody is going to just play 3x as much, they will just head off to other games to find more fun rather than more grind for less resources. What I mean is we are seeing more time invested for less valuable resources as in less keys since we have a bigger wall to get thru to obtain more keys.
If LT’s are limitless and this is the issue, I rather you just lower the cost of the GT & ET’s so everyone can get them, but increase the cost in LT’s to 2mil each rather than the current 1mil.
The top 1% who are getting 1500 gems from GW B1 rank 1, this is no problem, and maybe this is the source of the infinite resources, that are only afforded to the top B1 and is unrelective of the majority of the player base.
To increase a game’s base players, there has to be a fun and enjoyable game, not a 2nd job, and if you have a good game that is fun, then players will tell freinds by word of mouth and old players would return as well, growing the player base. Squeezing a turnip isn’t the right way to do this.
Because they were extremely random, and because it was slated to take two or three years.
Now we get the flexibility of writs (which should have been included immediately) and the number of deeds we get per week has increased due to the tasks, pending however much the AB ratios change (we only have the writ mission thing going in but who knows).
Based on what I know of writs and some more rough calculations based on the main deed tracking thread, our time estimate moves from “24 months” to “20 months”. Not sure if that’s worth celebrating. However, we’ll be able to focus-fire purple deeds to nail the magic kingdoms. (Of course… if everyone’s doing it then it doesn’t really make a difference in the game does it …)
I understand that from your explanation. It’s the only task that should of been added.
Going with 6 epic tasks instead of 1-5 was clearly a coding issue.
Like any compromise, both parties should be unhappy.
So make 3 epic tasks for the same amount of gold as the original.
The only reason people need shards and Treasures for Delves is because the Delves are too Difficult to do with a pure Faction team.
They were supposed to be a gold sink. But even if you sink gold into them, they are still too Difficult.
So people just give up on doing them instead of investing the millions of gold they were supposed to into them.
A delve shouldn’t have to go over 200 to be able to complete.
So many bad decision are made by y’all because no one on your side has any clue about delves. That ignorance is now corrupting (or has been) other sectors of GoW. For the love of God, educate yourself with this facet of the game. Or have no game to educate yourself about… because that’s where you’re headed.
Keys are the most valuable resource in the whole game, because this is a game where the main goal is to collect all cards.
There is no way that you can replace keys with another currency and say that the change is equal.
Your spending habits may not match the rest of the GoW population. That’s the only way I can see for both “Slypenslyde likes to spend money on cosmetic items” and “GoW cosmetic items lose the dev team money” to both be true.
Alternatively, one of statements might not, actually, be true.
Let’s play Occam’s razor:
If adding cosmetics to the game, even with pre-existing assest, cost so much they don’t want to even try, why are we getting “festive” themes for skulls on a monthly basis?