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Discussion Autumn Zodiac

maxiqbert

Well-Known Member
Please do not force us to posting messages. Anywhere (private messages / chat). I have experiences with one game I played years ago where players had quests to do that and everyday I was getting amount of messages like "hi", "sup" or "sldkfkrdhdkj".
the quest could be post a message with a specific content or to a number of people (like 3)
 

Deleted User - 81190

Guest
those who do not follow the common sense recommendations - and one of those is always keep every building maxed - because it is the best use of space.
LOL. No, it's not. Plenty of examples of higher levels = lower efficiency. I can pick a random one - T1 manus. I have L24 ones because I need them for sentients. Upgrade to L25 will net me a whopping 5% production increase (or about 1 tile), while requiring 653 extra pop - which is a 15% increase, and is certainly more than 1 tile worth of pop. I am not even talking about extra culture required, or 44K worth of T1 and 44K worth of T4 and other small change. And I am definitely not even talking about event buildings that would be even more efficient.

Best use of space? I think not.
 
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maxiqbert

Well-Known Member
it's common knowledge from the beginning of the game that you have a better efficiency with lower level buildings
 

Karvest

Well-Known Member
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DeletedUser2868

Guest
Autumn event.. a bit boring and repetitive.. three times only relics and then three times solve x tournening or province games..and so again.. in the end thankfully the brown bear works!
 

UlyssesBlue

Well-Known Member
Now that this event is finally over I thought I'd give a summary of my experience.

In previous events I have done as much as I possibly could, because they were fun, and the prizes were good. Even if I wasn't fond of the grand prizes, there were usually several good things in the daily prizes that made it worthwhile getting lots of event currency. None of this is true for the current event. The quests are tedious and repetitive, there's no interesting story to follow, the prizes are mostly ordinary, and the intentional slowing down of quest completion means there's very little to do each day for the event. All up, it's simply not fun. The result is I did the bare minimum required to get the prize I wanted, then quit the event. The whole thing felt like a chore.

To make events fun again, I suggest a few changes:
- remove the level requirements for workshops/manufactories
- make quests truly random instead of the existing conditional system designed to slow people down
- bring back the storylines
- find a different way to limit progress if you think people will get too many prizes from the unlimited quest system, e.g. this rather excellent suggestion of quests scaling in difficulty depending on how much event currency or artefacts have been won. Essentially you'd still have unlimited quests, but things would gradually get much harder such that winning too many prizes would be unreasonably costly in time or resources, but winning a reasonable amount of prizes would be quite doable.

I don't see an issue with some people bolting through all the quests (or enough to get the major prizes) in a short space of time. If this is what they find fun, or is how they want to play the game, then I don't see any reason why they should be stopped, so long as there's a reasonable method to prevent too many prizes from being won. (The key word is 'reasonable'. The current method is definitely not reasonable.) If the above linked suggestion is implemented, then anyone who was able to bolt through most of the initial quests would not get significantly more prizes than someone who takes their time, but neither would they be bored by finishing the event too quickly, as there would still be unlimited quests that they could do if they wanted.
 

Heymrdiedier

Well-Known Member
- find a different way to limit progress if you think people will get too many prizes from the unlimited quest system, e.g. this rather excellent suggestion of quests scaling in difficulty depending on how much event currency or artefacts have been won. Essentially you'd still have unlimited quests, but things would gradually get much harder such that winning too many prizes would be unreasonably costly in time or resources, but winning a reasonable amount of prizes would be quite doable.

why not turn the event currency around, you start with the quest that gives you the most currency and you get less and less as further as you get?
I don't want to see your suggestion become implemented bacause i fear that means 1 quest asking for scout 7 provinces.
 

UlyssesBlue

Well-Known Member
why not turn the event currency around, you start with the quest that gives you the most currency and you get less and less as further as you get?
That's an interesting solution. I can see that working quite well, and it would definitely address the issues I mentioned. You'd get the first few artefacts quite quickly, but later ones would take longer, and by the time you'd reached whatever is meant to be the limit the quests wouldn't necessarily be harder, you'd just need to complete a ton of them to get anywhere.
I don't want to see your suggestion become implemented bacause i fear that means 1 quest asking for scout 7 provinces.
Perhaps not quite so extreme. More like 'scout 2 provinces' at worst, and you'd only see quests this bad once you'd already collected a ton of prizes and had well exceeded the limit for what the game designers wanted you to win.

Perhaps a third option is to have some quests award prizes other than event currency, e.g. spell fragments, enchantments, relics, 1x2 buildings, or other minor prizes. At the beginning of the event all quests give event currency, then as you progress the non-currency quests start off rare before coming more common as you gain more. Once you reached a certain limit then the non-currency quests would be very frequent, meaning you'd have to complete tons of quests to gain much.

I think either of these three solutions could work well if implemented correctly. They would make it difficult to achieve tons of prizes, without making things excessively difficult to achieve a reasonable amount of prizes.
 

Deleted User - 81190

Guest
why not turn the event currency around, you start with the quest that gives you the most currency and you get less and less as further as you get?
I think this would be contrary to devs desire to keep players "engaged" for the duration of event. Most people would get what they can relatively early on, then bolt. Remember, scaling up to 188 was done to max gain in the last week of the event.
 

Lovec Krys

Well-Known Member
The only way of players to be engaged during the whole event is when they can win much more than developers intended, otherwise (if players get much less) players become angry and frustrated with the event (too much work for too poor rewards).
 

DeletedUser2829

Guest
Yep, thats the inherent contradiction that Inno can't resolve. A player works on an event for a week, wins X amount of stuff. If you want them to work for 4 weeks, you gotta give away 4X stuff, or annoy them.
 

iDavis

Well-Known Member
Event is over here. If somebody told me how much do I get in this event with my CH 4 city, I wouldn't believe him. Except all other rewards, time boosters (in amount of ~200% compared with invested) I managed to get 2 brown bears (without spending diamonds), what was my main goal on both live and beta (on live I will get there in few days). On the other hand...

I have been playing this game since it's closed beta version and after experiencing this event, I can say, it was the worst event we have ever had in Elvenar. The distance between fun and difficulty was somewhere around NY and LA, organization around balancing was as logical as explanation of decreasing golden keys cap and till today I'm trying to forget how they attempted to calm this community down by releasing an alternate "research a technology" for scouting a province quest. And being honest, after experiences from many previous events I won't be surprised at all, if next event comes with exactly same quest troubles as we had now in the beginning.

My overall impression about this event is bad. I do like endless quests (as many of us) - I understand it keeps players active during whole event, but in case of this one it is like "I want to get a bear so I will do this horrible stuff for 3 weeks". I already started counting days till the end and am really looking forward to rearranging my city back, to normal and effective state. I do really recommend to rethink and rework the content of event quests, as well as an algorithm which "guarantee" randomness (because repeating the same 3 quests over and over again is exactly that ship which takes a player more and more away from island called "Fun").

What am I currently wondering about the most it's, if time boosters requirements for massive event gameplay developers consider more expensive (or better say enough expensive) than building lvl 1 workshops during mermaids, because if not, we won't probably see them in daily rewards anymore (or will change quests so they will become useless).
 

DeletedUser2710

Guest
@iDavis I completely agree, somehow Inno managed to achive the worst of both worlds: on my live world I managed to obtain two bears up to now, and there are still 10 days left to go for a third bear without spending diamonds - which is certainly more then Inno intended - but I lost all joy and can t be motivated to do any further quests :(
In my opinion the infinite quest idea simply doesnt work out in practice. Many ideas were brought along in this thread for the following events, lets hope Inno doesnt ignore them.
 

lika1961

Well-Known Member
I did not manage to get a fully evolved bear here and so decided to get one on my live world. Even used some of my time instants although I really did not want to. When I got the "gain 11 relics" for the 3rd time in a row this morning after having repeated quite a few quests multiple times, I stopped. Again, no fully evolved bear for me, but I just can't face the tedium any more. I used to love events, now not so much. Please bring the fun back.
 

DeletedUser2561

Guest
I did not play this event on Beta, but halfway through it on Live, enough to give my personal feedback.

First, some minor things:

I do like the zodiac sky artwork! I did like the mermaid chests (shells) better than the zodiac chests (spheres), simply because they had more different looks and thus were easier to recognize and pick.

I do like the "rotate to shuffle" of the chests after you click on one. At least the beauty of it. But not the time involved. It seems to me that each shuffle takes less time compared to mermaids, but still, while clicking through some thousand keys, the shuffle time will add up and eat a complete evening of my spare time. I would love to be able to see and click the next chests without waiting for the visual shuffling effect to be complete.

I do like the different chests, which allow me to choose between higher chances for daily prizes, for main prizes, or chest rewards.

I do like the main prizes being given as early quest rewards and getting evolution artifacts by gambling. Last year at Harvest Festival, it was sheer luck whether we would get Krarak or not. I won on one server but lost out on the other two; felt like a hit in the face after completing all quests. With artifacts, luck decides between getting your building to level 9 or 10, which is a much smaller difference.


Now for the bigger issues:

I do not like the random quests. Elvenar has a jigsaw of buildings as a central feature. This allows for optimization by careful planning, and being able to have MORE success by careful planning is the main reason I like this game (plus the fact it contains no PvP and I can sleep at night without fear of anyone destroying my settlement). Random quests go contrary to planning. And they go contrary to fairness - I may perform worse than my neighbor (or my own settlements on not-so-important worlds) although I invest more time and planning into it, simply because they have more luck with quests.

I guess (and regret) you will not go back to fixed quest lists, but could you make them only partly-random, a bit more fair and plannable? People complaining here about getting the same quests over and over do NOT want a true random system (because true randomness is guaranteed to give some players back-to-back quests when the number of players is high enough). But rather a kind of "cooldown" on quests: Once you have done a quest, it cannot reappear for the next 5 quests. I would prefer a system where every player gets the same quests. I guess I got to be realistic, so ... they could be in an individual order if randomness is really necessary.


I do not like endless quests. They do sound great on paper; at the end of the event you can spend some boosters to complete just three more quests to get that last artifact. But endless quests put a lot of pressure on us. With a closed quest list, I could plan and power through event quests in a week when my spare time permitted it (which I liked) and then relax for the rest of the event (which I liked too). Or I could go slower, knowing that I will get the quests done before the end of the event anyway. With endless quests, there is no relaxing, and going slower always means I will have achieved less at the end. Instead of enjoying the completion of quests, I feel pushed to complete more. I have a job that offers enough pressure, I don't need that in a game.


Also, as you see, in its current form endless quests spell disaster. People are getting 10 evolved bears where you were expecting them to get three. But if you give players the possibility to fulfill endless quests, you must not act surprised if some actually do. That is pretty much predictable. OK, you have several possibilities to stop people from gaining far more than the "border of reasonably achievable artifacts" (no matter whether that border be 9, 18 or 27):

a) Make all quests noticably more difficult. Will affect anyone, not only those few players getting too much. Majority of players will complain quests are too hard, and they will be right about it.

b) Lower rewards of all quests. Will affect anyone, not only those few players getting too much. Majority of players will complain chests are too expensive, and they will be right about it.

c) Double the number of keys needed for each main prize after the "border". Keep doubling every 9 artifacts. Will only affect those you are actually trying to slow down. Of course the affected players will complain about the high costs.

d) Double the cost of keys per chest after the border, and keep doubling every 9 artifacts. Almost the same effect as (c) but affected players will also get less daily prizes, which may or may not make a difference in complaing.

e) Reduce the frequency of artifacts (after the border) among the flow of main prizes: Not every second prize is an artifact, but every fifth only. Again similar effect as (c), but power players will get more expiring buildings to compensate for lower number of artifacts, and less reason to complain.

f) Calculate how many quests are neccessary to reach the border, and after that number of quests done, dramatically cut quest rewards down to 20%. The practical effect is similar to (d), but I think it will generate a lot less complaints. Why? If the costs of prizes suddenly skyrocket at a later step in the prize-gaining process, people will feel betrayed that their hard-earned keys suddenly lose value after reaching the border. But if the quests give less keys in the first place, this clearly states "you have reached the end of regular quests. Proceed futher only as a bonus". My personal favorite.

g) Don't offer endless quests. Easiest way to limit event currency and thus limit prizes won. Rich people can still buy extra currency with diamonds, so no harm done to the company. (My REAL personal favorite, but I think I already mentioned being realistic)
 
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