What has inno done well and what has been a bomb?

[edeba]

Here are some things that I think have been good and bad. What do you think?

Building size increases for workshops and manufacturer has been a good thing.

As cities become bigger you do not end up with massive increases in resetting manufacturers and workshops. One game I played was still introducing 2x2 buildings as main required building as city size increased from around 10x10 to 60x60. So what was great fun rearranging and making a city nice looking at say 25x25 became massive later on and avoided as much as possible. It was a massive job replacing so many small buildings with stronger other small buildings and basically drudgery and game maintenance was no fun at all.

Battling a computer enemy has been a good thing.

Games where you battle each other just leads to all kinds of player conflict and dissatisfaction. I tried out the beta of one game that was simply shut down in 6 weeks and all money spent refunded because good players so quickly slaughtered weaker players, weaker players quit pretty fast. Then they handicapped good players to the point that they were being slaughter in that there was nothing they could do. With a computer to battle everyone can win more than they lose.

Adjusting buildings to be weaker after player investment has been a bad thing.

Unbelievable that you play events, spend money to win event pieces, and then they decide to change and downgrade the pieces. Everyone who spent money on events where this has happened should have gotten a refund, and there was no consideration of this what-so-ever. Clearly if you purchased a luxury car and then the dealer switch it, you know that is wrong and I just do not see any difference in what inno did with some of these actions. It is harder to see that it is wrong to downgrade stuff after people have invested to pursuing a benefit, but it is still wrong.

Failure to address seriously poor interface issues has been a bad thing.

The fellowship adventure should have been withdrawn and fixed after the very first event. The programmer gets an F for interface design and inno gets an F for lack of response on this issue.

 

[DeletedUser2818]

Adjusting buildings to be weaker after player investment has been a bad thing.

Unbelievable that you play events, spend money to win event pieces, and then they decide to change and downgrade the pieces. Everyone who spent money on events where this has happened should have gotten a refund, and there was no consideration of this what-so-ever. Clearly if you purchased a luxury car and then the dealer switch it, you know that is wrong and I just do not see any difference in what inno did with some of these actions. It is harder to see that it is wrong to downgrade stuff after people have invested to pursuing a benefit, but it is still wrong.

Agree on all accounts, but especially on this one. Thankfully I didn't sell those grand prizes and they now have some of the best pop-per-tile ratios... but I had to use a lot of RR spells to get them up to date. Kinda felt like paying for something twice. They could've provided refunds in so many ways - diamonds, blueprints, RR spells, whatever. Instead all we got was a magic residence if I remember correctly, which felt like getting your car wrecked and getting a toy car as a refund.

I'll also add a couple of bad things:
Balance of AWs is really bad.
Let's face it, some are so powerful they feel mandatory to have, and others are an utter waste of space. A lot of rebalancing/fixing has been done, even recently (think of the armories), but AWs lie there forgotten.

Management of endgame players when it comes to map completion and exploration.
There's really little to no motivation to keep scouting once you get to the expansions cap. Sure, some of your AWs and stuff that depend on the completed number of provinces such as seeds per day from the trader will go up, but by such negligible amounts they don't feel like they offset the disadvantages, such as the absurd amount of time scouting takes, which feels especially punishing during events that require scouting, alternatives notwithstanding (some of the alternatives such as research X are simply not available for endgame players, and the vapor one in the current event is too dependant on MA RNG).

Constant recycling of previous event buildings.
Pretty self-explanatory, and rather disheartening given how past events were much more varied and almost always brought new things to the table. The Spring Flower Cage has been offered twice during the last event, and it's already making a reappearance on day 8 of this one? Come on guys, you can do better than that, at least recycle older stuff!
Kudos to the artistic team with the new stuff though, they always do excellent jobs.

 

[SoggyShorts]

Powercreep by leaps and bounds
As I predicted everyone seems disappointed by the Stonehenge after getting a massively OP Firechicken. Let's face it, you'd place the Fire even if it gave you a 10% bonus instead of 50%. New and powerful is good, but balance decisions are clearly being made by people who don't play the game in any serious way. The most important part of the Phoenix event was the new pet mechanics which are a good concept- making it so powerful right out of the gate was a mistake though IMO.
It's like buying her flowers and chocolate and a diamond necklace on the first date...WTH is your plan for the second date? Disappointment, that's the plan.

Failure to address seriously poor interface issues has been a bad thing.

The fellowship adventure should have been withdrawn and fixed after the very first event. The programmer gets an F for interface design and inno gets an F for lack of response on this issue.

This and only fixing an issue on mobile that has been crap for years on browser e.g. visits
I can't believe that they found the perfect fix for the FA with the Challenge events "medals" system for productions and failed to implement it.
It's insane that they allow any T1 to work for the Manufactury Challenge medals and didn't fix that in major events where Elven plank players can fit 2 buildings in the space of steel players.

 

[Heymrdiedier]

apart from whats allready mentioned id add some extra:

Good:
i think recently there have been alot of good changes that have been done coming from feedback, in the past that feedback got ignored (or so it felt).
Example: extra quests added to phoenix, armories being revamped (and orc houses as well even tho we gave that feedback when orcs got introduced), tweaks being doing to the quests in current eventquests, being able to reduce tournament cooldown (albeit with a wonder) moving tournament window so its better suited for all realms.....
Wishing wells: this addition is a very good one in my opinion, it gives player the feeling they dont have to buy to play, that they can get what they want if they just give it more time. Which results in them playing longer. Which in term means those players will end up spending more diamonds (more then they gain from wishing wells in many cases)

bad:
* i think they whole combat revamp has been a bad move. it killed the fun for a lot of players, and it said we need to take the bitter pill now so that it gets better later on. Well i still think theres some major flaws in it. Some enemy units being overpowered for example (sorceress). The -defense buff that with -30% reduces your 80% defense into a 8% defense. the promise of extra units to remove the flaws. We are now 2 years further and we still dont have all the units at 3 star so still not very comparable.
* retroactive change of squad size mechanics which resulted in old time players being screwed over and nothing to undo it.
* huge diamond price increase of expansions. Some people managed to buy 20 diamond expansions for the price of 1 expansions now. Screws the new players over.
*A/B testing, i really dont like that some players get something new and others don't. If they want to test something new, isnt that what beta is for? just let everyone test it and if its not okay just undo it on beta. It also gives me a very nasty feeling, gives me the impression they wanna test us how to trigger us into doing things we dont want (like buy more diamonds) without giving us someting valuable in return.

 

[edeba]

I like that we have seen some of the older event buildings come around again. I actually found it hard to believe that they put some previously very hard to get buildings as daily prizes...

Constant recycling of previous event buildings.
Pretty self-explanatory, and rather disheartening given how past events were much more varied and almost always brought new things to the table. The Spring Flower Cage has been offered twice during the last event, and it's already making a reappearance on day 8 of this one? Come on guys, you can do better than that, at least recycle older stuff!
Kudos to the artistic team with the new stuff though, they always do excellent jobs.

 

[DeletedUser2818]

I like that we have seen some of the older event buildings come around again. I actually found it hard to believe that they put some previously very hard to get buildings as daily prizes...

Yes, that was nice, but a double-edged sword as well. For instance, I kept the Tower of the Winter King for years, because it was the grand prize I had payed and sweated for a lot, I like it looks-wise and I didn't wanna delete it. Even though it was big and there was no official news about RR yet. When RR were deployed, I spent a lot of them in upgrading it to the current chapter. I don't regret doing so, but if that were to be offered easily as a daily prize, after I payed real money to get it in the first place, a lot of patience in not deleting it till RR hit (without even knowing RR would become a thing, I was just only hoping for it), and a lot of RR spells to bring it up to date... well, let's just say that seeing it as a daily prize would be bittersweet but more on the bitter side of things. I've already experienced that feeling with the Rise of the Phoenix building. It was a grand prize I payed money for, and it was just given away as a daily prize. I do realize being upset that others can now get for free what I once got by paying real money is not the most rational thing to do... but we're not rational beings, and that's what I feel.

 

[edeba]

Yeah, I did that on live as well, brought prizes through the chapters with RR spells and it looks like they are freebies this event...

Total bomb with how bad the restoration spells were implemented and then they trashed what people had done with them by giving prizes as dailies...

Yes, that was nice, but a double-edged sword as well. For instance, I kept the Tower of the Winter King for years, because it was the grand prize I had payed and sweated for a lot, I like it looks-wise and I didn't wanna delete it. Even though it was big and there was no official news about RR yet. When RR were deployed, I spent a lot of them in upgrading it to the current chapter. I don't regret doing so, but if that were to be offered easily as a daily prize, after I payed real money to get it in the first place, a lot of patience in not deleting it till RR hit (without even knowing RR would become a thing, I was just only hoping for it), and a lot of RR spells to bring it up to date... well, let's just say that seeing it as a daily prize would be bittersweet but more on the bitter side of things. I've already experienced that feeling with the Rise of the Phoenix building. It was a grand prize I payed money for, and it was just given away as a daily prize. I do realize being upset that others can now get for free what I once got by paying real money is not the most rational thing to do... but we're not rational beings, and that's what I feel.

 

[Deleted User - 62044]

The fellowship adventure should have been withdrawn and fixed after the very first event. The programmer gets an F for interface design and inno gets an F for lack of response on this issue.

the rotating missions are the cancer of this game, eliminate them now or I hope that the fellowship adventure is an event will disappear forever.


- the dayly search for the building hut for the neighbourg help, OMG they change all the graphics of the game less the only necesary, bad years of bad work

- I don t buy more diamonds if the game is constanting changing

 

[edeba]

As far as I know, you can't get the chests on mobile, but really, at this point, just a pop-up, "your lucky day, the locals have brought gifts" and get the stuff without searching for the chest, and get it on mobile as well.

I think the FA could be a lot of fun, but when you are actually competing, 6 days is way too long. 2 or 3 days would be better. It could still be a 6 days event, but the cut of time for winning should be 2 or 3 days, and then everyone have the 6 days to complete to get the map prizes.

And then if they had a system that captured everything you collect and an interface where you then go make your badges, so you can just do your resets and then do your badge collection as a separate activity.

I was just thinking, if they had this kind of system, they could have badges that have overlapping resources so toolboxes might be a part of 2 or 3 different badges, with other stuff and they you could really get into having to do more planning to get the right badges to finish. And, it could also be random as to what comes up for each way point of the map. So you can see what's needed, see if you have what's needed to make the badge, and then place it. They could open up what's needed to make badges further, coin, supplies, orcs, relics, kp instants, relics, runes, etc... The programming would just need to make sure it tests for the highest chapter of members and not ask for anything the fs can't make. One path could be that the badges that show up are chapter specific, if you are chapter 6, they are designed for a player at chapter 6. And then the badges should just be called WPO1 for waypoint orange 1, WPG5 for waypoint green 5... No more making badges in advance, you make them as you go to use them with the FA interface. If two people make the same badge at the same time, only the first in can be used.

the rotating missions are the cancer of this game, eliminate them now or I hope that the fellowship adventure is an event will disappear forever.


- the dayly search for the building hut for the neighbourg help, OMG they change all the graphics of the game less the only necesary, bad years of bad work

 

[SoggyShorts]

@edeba no need to complicate the FA, simply use the medals system from the challenge event to make badges.
1 beverage = 1 dwarven badge.
Simple simple simple.

As for locking ranks on days 3? I don't really care so if that makes it more interesting for spenders/rank chasers, sure.

 

[DeletedUser2818]

@edeba no need to complicate the FA, simply use the medals system from the challenge event to make badges.
1 beverage = 1 dwarven badge.
Simple simple simple.

That'd be a quality of life improvement of gargantuan proportions, I hope someone takes notice and forwards this to the devs.

 

[slide]

I'd rather have an FA pot of badges, you make them and contribute to the pot to be spent as needed by individuals - AM, Mages etc - it can be hard to be online at the right time to get badges put in at times especially if they're waiting to go in and by the time you're online again the path has moved on and you don't have the right badges - feels like tail chasing!

 

[SoggyShorts]

That'd be a quality of life improvement of gargantuan proportions, I hope someone takes notice and forwards this to the devs.

I've been suggesting it for over a year- long before crafting challenges even existed, so dont hold your breatops:

I'd rather have an FA pot of badges

Never gonna happen. Spending a few diamonds to "skip past " a way point due to impatience is a huge money maker.
A pot would also destroy competition since a FS could go from zero to 25,000 points in the last 10 minutes of the event.

 

[DeletedUser2818]

I've been suggesting it for over a year- long before crafting challenges even existed, so dont hold your breatops:

Well, I've been able to hold my breath for 2 years and half knowing that sooner or later the possibility to upgrade event buildings would've become a reality, so my lung capacity is at least capable of that

 

[SoggyShorts]

What's insane is that in the last Live Q&A they mentioned that they are still looking for ways to improve the quest cycling.
"No godamnit you found it already--stop looking and start implementing!"

 

[CrazyWizard]

What's insane is that in the last Live Q&A they mentioned that they are still looking for ways to improve the quest cycling.
"No godamnit you found it already--stop looking and start implementing!"

Sorry they have huge amounts of stocks in a manufacturer for bloodpressure medication.
Unsolving these blood pressure raising issues is a way to improve there stocks

 

[edeba]

I've definitely been in an FA where someone was spending, but for the most part I don't think there's been much spending on the FA in my FS and we have a lot of spenders. But what there has been is exhausting repetitive continuous effort. It simply burns you out and develops a high level of contempt and dislike. The very first FA our group went out so all in, all the maps are done in 2 days and there's more than 4 days left in the pit.

The one time I was in where there was obvious spending, I didn't know whether to thank or have a discussion about the reasons to not spend money on the FA. By my calculations the player had to have blown at least $300. I think there might be an occasional badge that someone buys, but it just isn't obvious when you have the conversations in chat about who's making what and when it will be ready and you have discussions in advance about what needs to be made and people commit to making the badges.

I say 3 days because all of the teamwork, strategy and game building stuff happens in 3 days and when we compete, we are done in less than 2. We finally decided to just do one path per page but I think there would be more interest if the competition part was half as long.

@edeba no need to complicate the FA, simply use the medals system from the challenge event to make badges.
1 beverage = 1 dwarven badge.
Simple simple simple.

As for locking ranks on days 3? I don't really care so if that makes it more interesting for spenders/rank chasers, sure.

 

[DeletedUser2818]

I've definitely been in an FA where someone was spending, but for the most part I don't think there's been much spending on the FA in my FS and we have a lot of spenders. But what there has been is exhausting repetitive continuous effort. It simply burns you out and develops a high level of contempt and dislike. The very first FA our group went out so all in, all the maps are done in 2 days and there's more than 4 days left in the pit.

The one time I was in where there was obvious spending, I didn't know whether to thank or have a discussion about the reasons to not spend money on the FA. By my calculations the player had to have blown at least $300. I think there might be an occasional badge that someone buys, but it just isn't obvious when you have the conversations in chat about who's making what and when it will be ready and you have discussions in advance about what needs to be made and people commit to making the badges.

I say 3 days because all of the teamwork, strategy and game building stuff happens in 3 days and when we compete, we are done in less than 2. We finally decided to just do one path per page but I think there would be more interest if the competition part was half as long.

Well, as far as FAs go, I don't think spending is a big issue. Organization, coordination and ambushing is what makes it or breaks it, not the occasional impatient guy IMHO. I say this as someone who's not afraid to spend for permanent (well, as close as it gets) stuff, but hasn't spent one diamond in FAs - and in a group of like-minded people, we managed to rank 1st. As to the lenght of the pit phase... yes, it's exhausting. Yes, having to wait for the guy with the other badges to wake up because there's an 8-hours timezone difference between the two of you is excruciating. But at the same time, it's exhilarating. Sure, you could cut the tension by cutting down the pit and overall FA time, but you'd also cut the sense of accomplishment that comes from performing well in one. I'm not just talking about 1st places, any place on the first 10th felt extremely gratifying to me personally.

 

[slide]

Well, as far as FAs go, I don't think spending is a big issue. Organization, coordination and ambushing is what makes it or breaks it, not the occasional impatient guy IMHO. I say this as someone who's not afraid to spend for permanent (well, as close as it gets) stuff, but hasn't spent one diamond in FAs - and in a group of like-minded people, we managed to rank 1st. As to the lenght of the pit phase... yes, it's exhausting. Yes, having to wait for the guy with the other badges to wake up because there's an 8-hours timezone difference between the two of you is excruciating. But at the same time, it's exhilarating. Sure, you could cut the tension by cutting down the pit and overall FA time, but you'd also cut the sense of accomplishment that comes from performing well in one. I'm not just talking about 1st places, any place on the first 10th felt extremely gratifying to me personally.

I've never felt a sense of accomplishment when taking part in the FA, just a huge sense of relief that its finally over - the communication is the hardest part, made doubly worse by the lack of being able to use mail on the app... Inno have given with one hand (the quests) but having to keep all communication to the FS chat means that other non-FA issues can get overlooked.

 

[Richord]

dozens of topics and now opinions of all those mixed in 1?
probably started with the right intentions, but It doesn't make things easier...