Hi
@calenmir ,
Please let me try to explain it a bit more to you. I don't know if it will satisfy your current feelings, since I've already explained this multiple times, also on different rebalancing topics and it basically comes down to what other players also already told you, but maybe this explanation will help you understand things like this a little bit better from a company's perspective
Let's go back in time, about 3,5 to 4 years. Many of our Beta players, including myself, were here from the very beginning so they might remember those days. Elvenar was being developed and was entering its last stages of development before Close Beta would start. This was an exciting time for the whole team and basically, the whole company. While the last finishing touches were made behind the screens, we kept our players up-to-date with various blogs and on January 20th, 2015 Closed Beta started! Beta keys were ditributed in limited numbers to players who signed up for Beta and we started testing the game mechanics as the were in those times, slowly adding more and more players to see if the game would keep up with higher numbers of players as well.
After a certain amount of time, Closed Beta became Open Beta and the game got tested and prepared for a launch on Live markets. What's very important to understand here, is that Elvenar is only 3,5-4 years old and back in those days, we were in our very early stages. At this point, you always hope that a game will succeed. There are more games that don't make it to an actual launch, than games which do. Of course when you're developing a brand new game, you have a rough idea about where you want the game to go to in the next 1, 2, 3 years, but it's not really possible to look very far beyond that. You just hope players will like your game, player numbers will increase, and the game will bring enough revenue to make it through your targets and decide whether or not it will be profitable enough to keep the game running for a longer time.
The game, back then, was a very simplified version of the game we're playing now. Players from those days will probably remember it: There were no Fellowships (although we already had them planned). There were only 5 chapters. There were no Guest Races, no temporary goods, no mana or devine seeds, no tournaments, no chat box, no events, no quest lines stories, no Fellowship Adventures, we didn't even have Ancient Wonders yet! The game was running kind of OK the way it was (a lot of features were still missing and of course we had bugs, whishes and complaints back then as well), but the first focus you have as a company, is monitoring the game's performance, loyalty of players, revenue and if the player numbers increase enough to push the game through.
All these features I mentioned, got added in the next couple of years. As a company, we noticed that the game was becoming succesful, our team of game designers/developers got bigger and we started adding the requested features little by little. This is also the moment where you see that you indeed have a game here which is going to survive on the long run, and you start thinking further ahead in the future as well. It's not about "surviving" the first 2-3 years anymore, it's now about making this game a long term success. As you see from some other browser games, these kind of games can keep being developed and become over 15 years old, so when you see your game is doing well, you start preparing for this as well.
Let's say that on a pace of 2 new chapters/Guest Races per year, we want to continue with this game for at least 10 more years. That means that by that time, we'll be 20 chapters further, so around chapter 35. This also means that all the balancing changes we're doing, should be prepared for that. We don't want to rebalance every game element each 2-3 years. We now know this game is a game for the long run, so this is also what we keep in mind when (re)balancing things. You might understand what features like Ancient Wonders, Tournaments & relics, and Event Buildings do to the game balancing as a whole. It's just a very different situation than 2-3 years ago.
Therefore, when I'm talking about the future of the game, I don't mean the whole game would fall down drastically from one day to the other. What I mean, is that we're keeping our goal to make this a long-term game in mind when we're rebalancing stuff. We now have more game elements which influence the overall balancing than 2-3 years ago and we need to keep that in mind as well. We also know our plans for the upcoming years, the influence those will have on our game, and we know the whishes of our communities which we want to include in our developments (like an opportunity to upgrade event buildings).
Maybe in cases like this, it sounds simple: Just leave a few buildings untouched and make the rest upgradeable. But this is not the way that fits with our long-term-game strategy. It would not be very clean codewise (since we'll have spells that will upgrade all event buildings. It isn't nice to make certain buildings a non-event building so they can't be upgraded by these spells), but also: it wouldn't benefit on the long run. We want these buildings to be attractive even in chapter 35, if you wish to keep upgrading them. We don't want them to stay on a certain level. That's the whole point of making them upgradeable in the first place. Another solution would be to neglect the requests for upgradeable event buildings, but that's also not the option we'd like to go for. We like to implement things in the game for which our player base is asking. After all, the target is to make it a fun game for them. Yes, implementing and changing things will take time and you'll never be able to satisfy everyone, but if certain features get requested a lot, as a company we do want to do something with that. Sometimes, when it comes to a need for rebalancing, it means we'll have to swallow the bitter pill temporarily, to make sure an adjustment will make it in the long run and to be able to implement it without having to reject it.
As said: I don't know if this answer changes your feelings, for my experience as a Community Manager has also taught me that how well you may try and how nice of a compensation you're offering, you'll never satisfy everyone, but I do hope this at least helps you understand why we make certain choices with our future goals in mind, even if it means a temporary disappointment on the short term