Like many players, I’m on the verge of getting burned out. My friends are leaving and getting bored of the game. Being level 1130ish and having already contributed monetarily to the game, I feel less and less like my game experience matters. The quality of the product I have been investing a massive amount of time into for a particular entertainment experience is becoming more and more questionable. The steady stream of weekly content and bigger updates is giving me a particular perspective on how things are going to go, and I should not be surprised from here on. I feel like the flaws in this amazingly entertaining game’s quality are only now becoming visible.
So I’m going to give my perspective on what area of the game needs the biggest improvement in quality, and I want to know what others think as well.
(Elaborations on the poll choices)
Improving the game’s broken chat system. Improving guild features, like guild war ranking and point system, accurately purging dead guilds, and possibly having a more interactive and accurate guild finder.
Addressing the pre-alpha quality class system with its multiple overlapping traits/talents. Also taking another look at weapons, and how the hero overall effects game balance.
Adjusting outliers and making many more troops in the game viable. Adjusting the rewards given making every game mode worthwhile for different reasons. Alter prices to stimulate the use of soulforge and in-game shops. Re evaluating what it means to reach different progression levels in the game and keeping a purpose for higher level players to keep playing.
Much the way the game is already going. New troops, new game modes, new kingdoms/factions.
Chat system, guild system, leaderboards and game community
Hero implementation, repairing the class system, balancing weapons/classes, new hero content
Troop balance, adjusting rewards, shop prices, game progression
New features, content, game modes, UI, art, bug fixes
*Other
0voters
My choice is majorly #2. If I heard that the devs expressed interest in this area, I would be overjoyed to play happily for a long time to come.
When I see the sometimes self-harming, sometimes game-breaking, sometimes overlapping talents and traits, I feel like devs don’t care. It simply looks, and feels sloppy compared to the rest of the game. I know that much better can be done. As a player, I don’t have to like how the class system is, but it should look like its fully developed and be cohesive enough that I don’t see a paltry game of word association be the entire basis of a class’s available talent tree. Very few classes have a strong enough association with their namesake to justify their existence.
I feel like there is a myriad of obvious things that can be done in this area. Me giving a a specific suggestion as to what, would defeat the point. The point is that this system is undone and I I know that there are many developers capable of finishing it with their own ideas.
Some of the options to vote kind of overlap each other. I feel there is a great lack of overall care these past months leading to unsatisfatory results, it could all be sumarised in:
The driver (Devs) is taking a curve at 120Km/h (Design direction) without considering if the passengers (players) are wearing their seatbelts (interface/software/mechanics properly working)… After that, complains are made (feedback from the players) and the driver just nods, promises it’ll be better next time when in fact what changes is that the next curve will be done at 180Km/h…
Well, some good things also come our way, but it feels that those only gets done after too much discontent and grievances…
Buggy code. When you have to test after each patch to see how things work now - see Sunbird and A. Weaver combo for example - every time you cast the Sunbird, its an adventure on what fills your empty slots.
Reading the text of the cards tells you what is supposed to happen, but in the end, it seems the documentation is what does the code actually do today - which changes a lot.
Some have been seriously game breaking - Princess Elsbeth targeting opponents for example.
Indicates lack of proper QA of the code.
The balance issues you have are similar - lack of QA of game balance, usually believing RNG can balance something like Megavore.
Weapon upgrades for basically what everyone else is already saying about the system.
Some hero class trees are so much better than others, its almost laughable. Then there’s the Class Level 100 traits being mostly situational and usually the worst talents of all choices.
The Wind class tree is especially useless and needs a total redo. The best talent in the Wind tree is All Yellow Allies start battle with 10% Mana. which is pathetic compared to Morale’s All Allies start battle with 15% Mana. (and 15% mana start is still mostly useless)
We are actively addressing 2 or your major areas of concern.
We are hoping to update to chat in a way that will greatly ease guild and global communication. In the interim there are many guild changes and improvements that are the core of our 4.2 Update. One of these improvements is a more interactive and accurate guild finder. (PS, 4.2 is releasing in December!)
Sirrian made a committment to look into affixes and trees, and is currently doing so alongside Nimhain. We are re-evaluating how these work and hope to have a solution in game in the near future.
We frequently listen to player feedback, which is why we are actively looking into improving both of these areas of concern.
Yay! This is better news to me than getting new game modes, new troops, new classes or even new worlds! Thank you guys. I trust that acknowledging these issues and being willing to name the developers looking at it is a garuntee that something better is on the way.
If the class system soon matches the rest of the quality in this game and chat gets reworked, then we will be in an excellent place! Those are the only issues I can honestly say are subpar, and that’s being non-objective.
If game progression (rewards and endgame content) gets reevaluated, then I would love playing Gems with the same fervor for months to come.
We’ve been hoping that too, for well over a year now. Is there any rough estimate when this might come to pass, like second half of 2019 or sometime in 2020? And is the “greatly ease” part just a rework to make it work reliably or are there any additional features (e.g. player to player communication) planned?
For me, the thing most lacking in quality is the inconsistency between what cards say and what they do, as well as the inconsistency in wording across cards. This is all stuff the community can catch (and has caught) prior to release, but by the time the text is available in English it’s apparently too late to change. Changing text should be much easier than modifying hero classes, adding chat functionality, or widespread balance changes (I get that stuff needs to go to translators, but that can be done electronically at the same time new text gets sent). That’s why I say it’s more lacking than the options you listed: it should be easier to change, but for some reason it hasn’t been.
The curse of the game text is localization. Everything they write has to be translated into however many languages. I want to say Sirrian commented on the cost of this in a recent stream but don’t remember details.
Me, personally, I’d have taken one look at that and decided to write code that generates spell descriptions from abilities. This would mean any abilities that do the same/similar things might only need to be translated once. For example, “Deal {magic + 3} damage to a random opponent.” is very common. Bonus: doing this helps standardize the text for abilities, since the obvious way to make a subtly different new behavior would be to write a new chunk of code with a different description.
A downside: it encourages the team to make fewer unique abilities as it becomes cheaper to reuse old ones. I think that is overcome by the utility of not having to re-translate strings whenever a new content patch is released. (It seems the translators never get it right on their first pass.)
But it’s more fun to write a chat server/client from scratch, instead of using any number of freely-available infrastructures that have existed since the 70s, so that’s what we’re getting instead.
Fully agree with this one. Once you have unlocked a class there should never be a charge of any kind to do so. There are several events going at same time during a week that may require a better class. Changing every day or even a couple times a week depletes gems way too fast when obtaining then for all the events is already a pain in the ass. If they were not so focused on making money on those that can and will buy more gems, focus on keeping players happy and interested in the game.
