• Dear forum reader,

    To actively participate on the forum by joining discussions or starting your own threads or topics, you need a game account and to REGISTER HERE!

Autumn Zodiac

Marindor

Well-Known Member
Forumann_zodiac.png


Dear Humans and Elves,

The Zodiacs of Autumn have formed, and magical occurances are expected to happen. The Gods Kirit and Krarak combined their powers to form an entrance to their divine world, as when the stars align, legend says, three mighty Bears will follow their lead and arrive at the cities that are worthy. The Brown Bear leads the Warriors and grants them fertility, the Polar Bear supports the scholars, and the Panda Bear brings richness from other lands.

Celebrate Autumn Zodiac together with Glisal, a magical creature -half man, half horse - who appears every year around fall to assist you during this enchanted season.


Between now and October 3rd you can solve Glisal's quests to gain Golden Keys, which you can use to access Spheres containing Daily Rewards and other prizes, including some returning buildings from previous autumn events. By unlocking Spheres, you will also acquire Stardust which lights up the stars in the night sky and brings clarity to the constellations that guide you towards the Grand Prizes. Golden Keys can also be found in the surroundings of your city and are available as a random reward from the Mystica Object in Crafting.

EvflowBear2.png


Amongst the Grand Prizes of this event, you will find some Bear Artifacts, which you can use to grow the three magical Pet Bears this event will bring to your city:

Bprogress.png

(3x3, bonuses depending on type, chapter and stage, can be fed with Pet Food)

The quest line of the event is indefinite, enabling you to collect as many Golden Keys as you please. The more Golden Keys you collect, the more Bear Artifacts you can obtain to evolve your bears. But choose wisely which bear to grow first, as it takes plenty Spheres to open to unlock the Grand Prizes needed to come by the Bear Artifacts they require.

This event comes with a set of new quest conditions, one of which requires productions to come from buildings of a specific level. Level 1 Manufactories and Workshops won't suffice in this case, but you're certain to be successful with these quests if your buildings have been updgraded at least to the levels that became available with the previous Chapter in Research (or if that Chapter didn't contain Research for an upgrade, the Chapter prior to that). The amount of productions required by these quests has been lowered accordingly.

We wish you a lot of joy with the Autumn Zodiac Event and would love to hear your feedback in our discussion thread!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that there can always be differences in event layouts, balancing and prizes between Beta and Live release.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Marindor

Well-Known Member

Event changes


Dear Humans and Elves,

We have received a lot of varied feedback regarding the new quest types of this event, especially ones requiring specific building levels to proceed with the quests. While we still believe that these quests allow for a more leveled and therefore fairer playing field, we recognize that requiring these building levels may have come at too short a notice. For that reason, we will make some balancing changes to the event.

To achieve that, we will make the following changes to the event:

The probability for quests that require productions from a Workshop with a specific level, has been reduced by, on average, more than 30%.
That means that you will have lower chances of receiving quests that ask you to produce anything using a building with a minimum level. This also means that other conditions are more likely to appear, meaning you'll have to spend less time overall on working towards productions of this type. Since the event was balanced with the harder quest conditions in mind, we expect players to finish more quests and thus also lowered the cap of the increasing amount of Golden Keys per quest earlier, at 80 Golden Keys.
Furthermore, in the next days, we plan to make one additional change to the event:

We will make it so that productions done with Magic Workshops count towards Chapter-based production quests in the event twice. This to ensure that your Magic Workshops are also giving a bigger advantage in the event.​

We are aware that this may require changes to strategies already laid out, but, based on the feedback we received, we saw that quick action was required to keep a fair playing field for as much of the duration of the event as possible.

Should you have feedback about these changes, please do not hesitate to leave a comment in the discussion thread for Autumn Zodiac.

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team
 

Marindor

Well-Known Member

Summary of Autumn Zodiac feedback and next steps


Dear Humans and Elves,

Over the last weeks we've been getting lots of valuable feedback on our Autumn Zodiac event from you, for which we are very grateful. Your feedback is very important to us, which is why we want to take the time to anwser to it in some more detail, and include an outlook on what we plan to take with us for future events. This in an effort to offer transparency and actively involve you in our ongoing process of improving our events for you to play.

Accessibility for all players
We have to consider that our events are available to players of all Chapters, including the very newest players, who cannot yet craft Recipes, gain Vision Vapor or Enchantments from the Magic Academy, or complete Encounters in the Spire of Eternity. Therefore, we will need to offer alternatives for these quests, which we can do with Scouting- or Research-related tasks more easily for early Chapter players. For further-advanced players, the tasks to play some Encounters in the Spire or to craft Recipes should generally cause no issues to complete, and will remain the intended option for them to choose. Ensuring that the event is playable for people in the earliest Chapters of the game is also the reason why event quests never require Tier 2 or Tier 3 Goods productions, Sentient Goods or any other options that are only unlocked significantly later in the game.

Randomized Quests, Quest variety & abundance of Scouting quests
With our previous event, the Summer Mermaids, we introduced a brand-new mechanic to our events: randomized quest tasks. With these, it became possible for us to create a less linear event progression and allow for an open-ended quest line. This has allowed us to remove the cap on the number of quests we could offer in our event, meaning you can complete as many quests as you wish.
When analyzing the Summer Mermaids event, we saw that the randomness was not yet at the level that we would have wanted, and we attempted to address that with Autumn Zodiac, but we see that we've now seem to have flipped the scale to the other side. For upcoming events, we aim to bring back more variety, by limiting how often quests can appear in direct succession. This should prevent cases where you ended up receiving the same quest task back-to-back. We will be testing these changes on Beta with our next big event that is to come and invite everyone to participate in said test.
That said, we can see that the randomized quest system allows every player to play the event to their own capabilities, and not have their quest line end prematurely. Therefore, we intend to keep the randomized quest system, albeit with potential tweaks, such as looking into avoiding the back-to-back quests mentioned above.

An important point of feedback voiced repeatedly over the last weeks has been about quests asking you to Scout a Province, and other World Map-related quests like gaining Relics or finishing Encounters. For Autumn Zodiac we have already added alternatives for these quests, and we will keep doing so going forward. We hear your feedback that these kind of quests take a long time to finish in higher Chapters and could push players to Scout further than they probably should, which is why we want to address this. However, we will not completely remove World Map related quests altogether, but we see that we limit them.

New Quest types & level requirements
A big change we introduced with Autumn Zodiac is quests that require a certain level of Workshop or Manufactory to complete. These quests have been at the center of your feedback for several reasons, including not having (the time to build the) required level of building in your city, and because the task was difficult to understand. This type of quest will stay, but for future events we are keeping an eye on quest completion rates for this type, to confirm that the balancing is working as intended. Should this not be the case, we can still adapt the likelihood for it to appear during the event, as well as the balancing of said requirement. One thing we want to improve already is the in-game explanation on how these quests work. During Autumn Zodiac, we have already added hint texts, available in-game in the quest window, to give some more clarity for the requirements of those quests. Unfortunately, these hints are not available in the app, causing some confusion for our app-only players. For upcoming events, we plan to make these quest hints available on Mobile, too. This will not only help in events, but also with all other quests that have such hints (e.g. quests in the earlier chapters or for the Guest Races).

Rebalancing of Autumn Zodiac
During the first days of the event on Live, we had to make some adjustments to the event's balancing. This was unfortunately necessary, but we also understand why it was not an appreciated change, especially with the given timing. The rebalancing of a running event is not a decision that we take lightly, which is why we keep this as a last resort. For Autumn Zodiac, we definitely took action too late, as we should have made these changes before the event started on Live. Therefore we have planned a set of changes that allow us to take these decisions earlier. Please do note, however, that we won't always be able to avoid rebalancing certain aspects of a feature or event, even if it is already live, as certain developments (e.g. potential bugs or exploits) might sometimes force us to take action immediately.

Further changes to the ongoing event
Finally, we want to clarify that we do not plan to make further changes to the Autumn Zodiac event on Live. Even though we hear your feedback, we do not want to make yet another update that will affect the event now, after everyone laid out and adjusted their strategies after the initial balancing changes. As we have seen with the first quest adjustments, changing the available quests would also pose the risk of quests breaking or changing their tasks under certain circumstances, which is something we wish to avoid.
Thanks to our ongoing data analyses on the event, we can see that the event difficulty and player progression are currently at the intended level, and that many players are already successful in upgrading their Bears - with rates comparable to previous events such as Summer Solstice and Summer Mermaids.

We hope this post sheds some light on our intended changes to upcoming events as a result of your feedback. Please do let us know if you have any comments by posting in the Autumn Zodiac discussion thread. We would be happy to hear from you.

Thanks again to everyone who's voiced their feedback - we are lucky to have such an engaged community in our world of Elvenar!
clear.png


Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team
 
Top