Lovecraft > Martin
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Only in writing speed…
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reviving old topic is better then starting another topic about exact same thing.
guys please move the pvp balancing / meta thing in here instead of spoiler topic 
100% agree w op. 4x spirit fox just yet wasted 15m of my time continually being irritated by setback after setback . THE cancer in all of gaming has always been the deliberation of 'sabotage and mana burn is exactly that. It is the definition of that which only and exclusively serves to upset. If the buisness model of this game continues on this path of sales imbalanced over quality it 'will die off and that is a guarantee i have seen take place in countless great games sucked dry by such passion lacking stupendous decision-making. Take it from an old ex uo admin: ALWAYS balance DOWNWARD, never upward compensating. It wrecks existing paradigms and creates new problems infinately till rollback. -cal\wskll
please explain it in human linguage 
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I think @wskill is saying that not allowing powercreep is a good thing… allowing new items to be (if uncertain) a little underpowered, then over time adjusting things down towards them is safer than balancing “upwards” and pushing the level of power of individual cards higher.
I would 100% agree with that sentiment under perfect conditions, i.e. if we had unlimited funding, and millions of customers who understood game design.
The reality of managing an F2P game is somewhat different… we rely on sales to exist, and sales rely (for the most part) on emotion.
We have lots of things we have to manage from our side as part of game design other than just the game balance - player retention, player spending, player engagement, etc…
I believe a system that continually balances downward can manage the game design REALLY well, it just can’t manage the emotion involved in those other elements (spending, engagement, retention).
TL;DR… We agree, to a point, but the reality of running a business forces our hand sometimes.
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Downward balancing = nerfing excess.
Upward balancing = creating new counters to excess
Upward balancing does not eliminate the problem but creates new ones. Its only function is to short term compensate a specific while that does not undo that a vast percentage of other units cannot compete.
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I understand that, servercosts, making a living for staff etc. But there are much better ways to create revenue that you really should consider instead of dumbing down or even potentially killing your game with such quality undermining downward spirals that i know eat up most of your devs resources in trying to rebalance infinitely instead of being to focus on more constructive matters such as how to make or keep the game (more) fun.
For example the best revenue creator is this; personalization.
why do you think that costumes/hats/colorpallettes etc do so well in the world of online gaming? Because they make people feel like they are involved, that their team is really their team.
So how about designing color pallette changes for cards that you can buy, how about designing custom gem appearances (unless that conflicts with the overall theme intent).
Another good way to increase monetization and get more people to play instead of push people away with the obvious p2w traps; milestones.
You already have this a bit with VIP but honestly thats just too expensive for everyone but a small amount of the hard core (permanent) of players…
I already explained a time ago how revolving tasks rather than static ones that only changed the next day etc would make people keep playing rather than just do the dailys and log out again… same goes for everything; players want gameplay increasing features not gameplay reducing features and sure you could say its so that people dont end up going to a gems of war anonymous rehab center but still…
So about that, being able to get something nice for every 5 bucks you put into the game, which is a range of cost that literally everyone can muster up would push income. Combine that with my previous suggestion of personalization options and you have something going.
So lets say you make pallette swaps to cards available that you have a miniscule chance of getting from keys (that dont add a card, just a pallette option to use in your decks, same chance/rarity as getting a mythic per which makes getting the palette swap of a card you badly want even rarer, ofcourse only cards you already have you can get a palette swap card for etc) These are simple to make from your resources/team while adding alot of psychological positive to the game. Then make these palette swaps also a reward for every 5 bucks spent. chaching. No effect on balance, max revenue increase.
And thats just one option i know would work.
-cal/wskill
Honestly, as someone who works in the industry and looks at the sales numbers on this stuff for a living, I have to respectfully disagree with you.
Perhaps you manage a F2P business model in the games industry too, and are seeing different numbers… if that’s the case, then we’re looking at wildly different data.
Personalization is not a big earner unless you’ve already scaled up the game to millions of players. Gems of War is doing great, but we’re not there yet.
The problem, I believe, is that players see successful games with personalization features & assume that it’s the reason the game became successful, when it’s not actually the case (and I’m certain there are some exceptions… I’m talking in general terms based on data I have observed from numerous games).
The money made from skins, dyes, etc… is great safe “low-hanging fruit” when your user-base is massive, but we’re just not at the point yet where we can make significant profit from that.
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As far as I can tell game has more players then it ever had and the numbers keep growing. I wouldn’t say they are killing the game, they are making 100% right moves.
Your are right that most huge games (in terms of 100k+ daily player base) make most of their profits through selling stuff tuned to cosmetics. League of Legends as best example. In order for this to work a bit larger player base is needed and a way to have a more certain retention of players. Now I’m not saying gow doesn’t have a good retention. But new features still need to be introduced before they can go for personalisation section. Customization won’t ever bring new players, new features will. Once player base is large enough they can focus less on new features, and more on bug fixing and art options.
But once the player base is large enough having a way to add animated troops (hearthstone style) would probably make a masiv profit for them. Who wouldn’t want animated horseman killing them from opponents defense. And who wouldn’t want to put their animated troops on defense to show how cool they are! I mean players low doing that.
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I can finish my comment now (I had to give @nimhain a lift home… she was still working here at midnight - lol)
I think everything you suggested @wskill is a great idea, and certainly we’re looking ahead to that stuff eventually.
Once we’ve scaled a bit (the evil plan for 2017!!!) and solved some of our Adobe Air tech issues, we’ll definitely be looking to add some more personalization (loved that idea about the rare color drops btw).
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Ups i commented pretty much the same thing you did but haven’t seen your comment so sorry for doubling it xD
This discussion takes an interesting turn towards financing of the F2P games.
Funny, because a few days back I was just thinking about it. I play for about two months now and so far I am VIP level one. I’d love to go higher, but… the things at the shop are either not very interesting (weapons for around 5 euros), easily obtainable by playing or way too expensive. I’d like to show more support, but buying things I don’t need or simply want is not in my nature 
It would be cool to have more options to buy something small, not necessarily powerfull but more… I don’t know. Meaningful? Funny? I would chip in more often then Like give me a chance to get one VIP key for an equivalent of price of beer 
I’m sure you guys are giving this a lot of thoughts and I don’t want to teach you or anything, just wanted to share how I feel about the in-game ‘real’ money purchases. I still love your work and will get something new from your shop soon 
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The absolute main focus should be ; how to make my game inviting and addictive. Not how to make my game generate money on the existing (low) playerbase. Very little on gems of war is inviting apart from the gameplay model, its art and the slotmachinesque rewarding. Definately the current monetization options are not inviting in the slightest. I have often bought content in many games ive played, still buy content in games i play but i wont lie… i have never bought anything in gems of war because its simply a waste of money, when you buy keys for instance for 60 bucks and are wholly dependant on luck… that just doesnt cover the expenses. People want to know what they buy. The single costume you can buy for again a shitton of money only 1% of all players will even consider is only 50% gold/souls higher than the ingame costumes therefore not worth it. VIP could be getting alot more customers if the prizes werent so damn high and the top shaved rewards were more interesting. Lets say VIP 5 would not cost you 60 bucks, more people would get it just to be able to open VIP chests. More people would be attracted to the game knowing a portion of its content wouldnt be locked away behind that high mountain. Be realistic… this isnt a full price - store game in the slightest. Its a good game, better than alot of games, but its compact, very limited. These prices are WAY too high to generate consistent revenue. Im afraid i might come off harsh here but i dont want to see this game get worse over time by bad choices because of these money struggles that can so easily be solved by opening up to more demographics of classes and adding options that take barely any resources.
Right now the only affordables to the general public that doesnt sink their bank account into this game (-which is undoubtly a very very small amount of people) are a bit of gems that can be easily obtained in the game itself by completing one or two sets of daily tasks. How is that inviting? If you want to increase the playerbase then give more volume to the game, as i said before people look for more gameplay not for less. More volume = lower thresholds, and the bits of tips i gave in the prev post.
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Thanks sirrian, i just want to help with a game i love to play and i also want those who work on this game to get good money out of it so the game doesnt suddenly has to close its servers after ive put in years of time on lvling every damn card i have lol. Im not trying to belittle anything im just direct and honest just so thats clear.
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One thing that has a nice value to be bought are guild seals. I think prices are way to high though.
1 key should be 3$, 2 keys 5$, 4 keys 9$. And that would see a masiv increase in purchase. A price of 9$ will give same profit if it’s bought 2 times more and more profit if it’s bought 3 times more. And it would be bought about that much more. Also many would probably go for buying all 3 options because some people can afford spending 3+5+9, 18$ on a game a week. This way they will still buy it but less consistent when it’s not that much rewarding.
Absolutely! We’re all friends here, and your points are clear, and well-made. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to jump in and discuss!
I personally think we strike a nice balance between the two.
If our main focus was making money, we’d have implemented an energy system. Fortunately, our publisher 505 Games, are great guys who trusted us to make a game that was free of energy systems, so we could focus more on the gameplay.
All I’ve really been arguing is that reality dictates we spend equal resources on making sure that the money gets made in the safest most reliable way. For us, and many other F2P games, that is a gachapon mechanic (lucky dip, keys & chests, etc…)
I completely respect your opinion on the value of the items in our shop… but it turns out that when a F2P game looks at its playerbase, as a whole, a gachapon performs really well… especially for a game at our stage of evolution with decent mid-sized-and-growing playerbase.
The good news is that Gems isn’t in any danger of closing servers any time soon, it’s been steadily growing for 2 years with little-to-no advertising. We noticed the other day that our concurrent users on Steam alone (our smallest of the 5 playerbases, I think) was triple that of the recent AAA title Battleborn (or so I was told). So definitely not a low playerbase, but not in the millions where we’d like to be!
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Oh thats also a nice idea yah, might also open players up to the concept of VIP with the early vip key gets while it has low threshhold. Thats really the main issue on revenue right now, too high threshhold. Alot of small expenses are much more attractive to customers than a single high expense. Upvoted.
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