Beta, how is it used?

[DeletedUser283]

thanks a lot @Marindor for your reply
now on to some comments

We've had that question before and what it comes down to again, is game balance. If each building would have it's own queue, players would be able to train 3x as many units in the same time as now and that would disturb the game balance. The game is designed to have players train an X amount of units in an X amount of time. A lot of game elements are related to that: World Map Provinces, Tournaments, Effect of Ancient Wonders on armies, the amount of supplies being used etc.

well well..
my advice to players : Inno has mentioned "game balance"; brace for impact and pray whichever deity you may believe in;
or not.

and ?
what has game balance to do with having large armies ?
if I had 1M troops in storage, I could still not fight and win on the world map, so ?
if I had 1M troops in storage, I could still not fight lvl 6 in any tournament province because I just do not have the time, and do not feel like waking up at 4:00 am to play, nor spending money to buy diamonds to speed up the stoopid 16 hour timer;
hence if I ever was able to train gazillions of troops, it would not make a difference

one reason I can feel though, is maybe (maybe) the dev team has been made aware of issues faced on FoE by players having over 2000 units in their barracks, but this is only due to the fact that the FoE team insists on representing each unit by a dedicated icon on screen, and the amount of eye candy is too much for flash (and for the memory of an average computer like mine);
in Elvenar, units are shown by type-quantity, and the problem does not exist.

The reason behind this, is that players basically find it annoying when we put up ingame announcements. Therefore we don't want to make it a habit to put them up every 2 weeks (and on Beta we even get more updates than that). This decision has been made based on player feedback about the announcements. We're currently working on reshaping them though, so when we have the new layout and players don't find them that annoying anymore, this might change.

I see that Inno are reluctant to activate popups to inform players about game changes, but they are not that picky as to avoid popups about "buy this now! gone tomorrow" like we had y-day

Well, we'd have to put that into perspective a bit more: If you mean by "reconsidered" that we would blow off the whole change: That's indeed not an option. The way the Wholesaler worked, was harming the game and would do even more so in the future (different reasons are already mentioned in the thread about that so I won't go into them too much here). If you mean by "reconsidered" that alterations could be made: This is a very possible situation. One of the main arguments brought up by our communities, is that the price increase on a daily basis is very steep. We have of course forwarded this feedback and the statistics on it are being monitored closely. We need to actually see the stats about how it works out though, to be able to determine if tweaking is necessary here, or if it's working as intended by our game designers now.

now this is positive
honestly, asking for more and more coins/supplies/goods for the same amount of returned goods is not about game balance;
and I reject the "game balance" mantra as a whole, because it has been used too much in the past as a lame excuse;
transparent communication about what was wrong, why it was wrong and why it had to be changed, even if that forced Inno to admit that they feared that allowing players to do this or that could hurt the corporation's bottom line, would have been fairer
I am getting less steel (steel is hard to come by these days) for my excess coins, but I still have excess coins because I (almost) do not scout anymore; except of course when some event quest tries to make me fail to win the final prize of the event (kudos here to the posters of spoilers who allowed me to start scouting early);
what worries me more is how badly it can hurt small players who have difficulties with trading small amounts, because they do not produce much, and how it quickly becomes unaffordable for them...
(when I take those small offers, I sometimes receive grateful messages that make me wonder what I did that was so exceptional )

 

[DeletedUser1877]

I also would like to thank you Marindor. Like many others, I do not 'like' some of the changes and the reasons given, but I am aware there are reasons behind them I cannot see from my position.

I do wish there was something that could be done about the "hooligans" who are filling the forum with their vitriolic diatribe rather than constructive co-operative posts. I often feel they are simply seeking attention by out shouting everyone else.

 

[Marindor]

Hi guys,

Thank you for your responses and it's really nice to read that our efforts are being appreciated by you. Of course we will forward the feedback to discuss how we can improve on the Beta process and functionality. It's good to have this conversation so thank you for that.

About the way we announce Release Notes: The current announcement system we have indeed doesn't give us the option to checkmark announcements that have already been read, hence the negative reactions on too many announcements. We are currently working on changing the announcement system so when it's improved, we can of course give your suggestions a try and announce our new game versions there with a link to the respective forum threads. Please have a little patience though, for the new announcement system is not yet ready for implementation

 

[DeletedUser1852]

Well, this is a perfect example of what I mean: Why would I put all my effort into writing explanations when players waive them away as being "cheap excuses"? Why bother giving the reasons and explanations if that's how you feel anyway? I'm a very straightforward guy and have always been honest with you, even though that often means not giving you the "popular" answers. I've had over 15 years of experience in Community Management and have never lied about things to my communities, so I don't think I deserve to be described as someone who just makes up cheap excuses. When you ask me for a reason, I'll give it to you when I can. You might not like it, but I'll be truthful (or tell you I can't say more than I said, in some cases). I'd rather be honest and not giving you the favorable answers, than lying to you or make things up to appear a little bit nicer. That's what you can expect from me as a Community Manager.

@Marindor please don't stop to explain the reason why. this is the main reason why I read this beta forum, to find answers of the reasons behind changes. I often read and take them back to my fellow players on live servers to make them better understand.
You are doing a great job as a Community Manager and I appreciate the time and effort you put into it very much even more so I am amazed how much patience you have in responding to all kind of comments - the nice ones and the not so nice ones...

"We are pleased to announce the following update, and we hope these changes address the issues of this and that, while encouraging these and those, and we felt it was needed because of this and that"

This approach on Live might help with your feeling of hitting a wall. Especially since a dozen or so voices on Live may drown out any Moderator response given on page 5 or 6 and players first visiting the thread will not read all 12 pages that a few voices have flooded.

I like this suggestion of Soggy very much to incorporate the explanations or answers to questions that have been talked about in the release notes discussion on Beta into the announcement or even the first post where moderators ask for feedback about current planned release in live servers.

This is an easy way to value the time you as a Community Manager and the Beta players who give Feedback on beta invest into discussing and would provide players on live servers with a little more information beforehand since I feel that (and I do not want to imply that moderators on live servers don't do a good job!!) there seems to be less time to respond to people's answers at live forums (judging form the number of responses one sees from moderators there) - I know that there will always be people who simply don't like changes for one reason or another and those always seem to be more vocal than those who don't mind or even like the changes.
The information is already there, why not use it?

 

[DeletedUser283]

there is still one thing that puzzles me;
we are on a beta server, and whenever a new version of code is deployed, we get release notes ... afterwards
while on the live server, they get an announcement beforehand explaining that with next update this and that will change;
I am sorry to say that, and I do not want to imply that it is what is happening, but everytime my session expires and I reload and see a new version ID, then jump to the forum and see your new post in the relase notes, @Marindor , I cannot help but thinking :
"holy crap, they deployed the code first and then gave him the info "

 

[Marindor]

@Philplessis : I understand what you mean and the reason behind this, is that Beta is very "sensitive" in many ways. Sometimes even we know if something has made it to the game version just before it's being released on Beta, so we don't really have the possibility to post the Release Notes days before release (since this is the period during which a lot of bugs are still being fixed). Another reason is that it's relatively common that game versions are being postponed on Beta, so we can't always give an accurate estimation on when a release will happen here (though you all know it's usually on Wednesdays every 2 weeks anyway). So this makes it a bit hard to post Release Notes a few days in advance on Beta.

 

[Brummbaer]

@Marindor: Thanks to you for all these comments

I want to highlight: You do a good job as Community Manager!!!!

I'm not one of those "Nobody's", I read all of your comments and transfer these information to my fellowship.

 

[DeletedUser1877]

Hmmmmmm, something wrong here, a thread I look forward to reading?

 

[DeletedUser1721]

Talking about this "game balance": It is indeed true that we often tell you a change has everything to do with game balance, without going into too much depth about it and the reason for this, consists of multiple reasons. First of all we can't share too much details about the future of the game yet (as explained) and secondly: We'd come down to the "immature responses" again. I don't really like to call them that, but let's use that phrase for lack of a better word for it, so we all know what we mean. A good example of this is the Battle Redesign feedback thread. As you might know, I've put hours and hours into long posts to explain exactly why these changes were necessary for the game balance, but despite that, the explanations were mostly ignored and people were just complaining about how bad it was for them in their situation, how bad our game designers were, how we screwed up the game, how we would lose players, how we didn't care about you guys etc etc. People weren't open to the reasons behind the change (and believe me: We wouldn't put so much time in these changes if we weren't certain that they were necessary, in the first place), didn't take the time to think about these reasons and just kept on ranting. Although we did alter and tweak a lot after this implementation, based on your feedback (which was very valuable) and knew that the balancing process would take several weeks to several months based on feedback and statistics (and next update you will again see some alterations), all the hours we put into explaining why keeping the old system would hurt the game balance in the long run, were being ignored. For me this means that putting so much effort into explaining why exactly something is necessary, is quite useless and I feel like I'm hitting a wall when the players don't read these explanations and aren't open to consider them. As you might know, Community Managers are the only support team members who get paid around here and that's not nearly a fulltime job for us, so we have to make choices in how to allocate our time. For me personally: I'm not going to put half of my time in writing long explanations when they aren't read and players mainly only think about how negative something is for them in their situation, instead of listening and considering the consequences in the long run. I'd rather allocate my time to processing your ideas, forwarding your feedback, reporting the bugs to our development team and other tasks I have to do, with which I feel I'd accomplish more in terms of community support.

Another important thing I'd like to address is the feeling of distrust your mention towards our development team. I think it's a bad thing that this feeling exists because I know how much dedication our Game Team and we all put into this game and of course we don't do things to harm our players, but we do them to preserve the game's future. We have a lot of big ideas for this game and want to keep it around for many more years and in order to be able to do this, we indeed have had to make some (big) changes. This is however always with good intentions and because we know the changes are necessary and we never do this to upset you, to lose you or because we don't consider your interests or feel you're not important.

These two paragraphs, put together, make clear the reasons for my distrust of the developers.

Well, that and the wholesaler one, but I accidentally deleted that one.

For me, as someone with programming experience, major changes which are questioned on beta shouldn't ever be released to live until the feedback is addressed, release schedule or not, and if people on beta can point out reasons why this change affects people in a way the developers weren't anticipating, the patch shouldn't go live until these concerns are addressed.

Furthermore, describing the reason for the changes as "game balancing issues" is... I'm struggling for a word here, high handed? Distant? Vague? Some combination of all three? It is much, much easier to understand "the difficulty of the tournaments is designed to take into account a one building combat queue" than simply be told "there are balancing issues that this addresses". That way, I can evaluate the reason why the devs want to push the change through against the problems I have found with the change to make a rational argument (perhaps the devs should look into the fact that anyone with a job can't run one combat production building for their entire work shift because production of units is so fast now, and should consider allowing multiple buildings to produce at once to make up for this lost time? I don't know, I don't personally like the combat system anymore, so someone else would have to think about this) rather than simply say "you say rebalancing, but it sounds to me like all the devs want is to force us to cough up more cash". A prime example for this is the wholesaler change... you say that it's meant to encourage trading. Players have pointed out many examples of why the wholesaler changes don't actually encourage trading, which need to be addressed, because these are people who are actually going to be hurt so badly they might quit because of this if it's not fixed. I would even go so far as to say the old wholesaler was covering over some genuine flaws within the game, and now that it's been changed the flaws are obvious, and hurting people, and correcting them needs to be a high priority. And yet, it's all getting lost in the whole argument of "this is not rebalanced I don't like this". And the fact that the devs ignored the genuine flaws which were pointed out in favor of releasing this to live adds to the distrust, because of the aforementioned "if there are game breaking changes in the beta as it currently is, the changes in beta shouldn't go live" thing. Combined with the "rebalancing is more important than these issues" thing. "Rebalancing" is a very vague word, and makes it hard to put arguments in favor of deferring something to later in the sort of context that they need to be in in order to be cohesive arguments.

Also, some idea of what is coming down the pipeline would have helped tremendously with the initial wholesaler change feedback. My major problem with the wholesaler change is the way it interacts with the fellowship tournament update, where suddenly you have a fellowship that's scaled to provide goods for 1/3 of its fellows every week suddenly providing goods for all of them, and some of them have higher costs than others. The wholesaler change may or may not be balanced, but it feels very unbalanced when you look at it and this other update together. The combat system update would have been easier to appreciate if it had been initially presented to us as a plan of what is coming when, so that the initial releases of new combat units weren't "oh, here's another useless unit with no idea when it will be upgraded" and so that it actually resembled something with a plan, rather than "more balancing changes".

tl;dr, can you try not including the words "rebalanced" or "balancing" in all statements you make for a month, and instead focus on the reasons for the rebalancing? It would make it so much easier to understand.