Discussion [Discussion] Release Notes version 1.17

[Elderflower]

We haven't banned cross tier trades in our Fellowship because it is a way of helping new members rise up. We also encourage beginners to post unfair trades, for example 100 marble for 400 planks or 25 elixir, that more advanced players can accept if they want to for the same reason. So far we have not had unscrupulous advanced players in our Fellowship behaving in the way Bobbykitty reports. We see our Fellowship as a way of helping all of our members to progress together.

 

[DeletedUser651]

But I do have a question: why exactly are these trades bad? From a balancing perspective they are perfectly balanced and acceptable

Muf-muf, I spent a lot of time explaining exactly why those trades are bad. What wasn't clear? Those trades are terribly unbalanced in the amount of resources of space it takes to make the goods and the corresponding houses and culture I didn't even mention.

You try it. You make a god account and have six level 15 gems factories. Then try to build all the planks factories you need and all the houses you need to get the workers for those factories and all the culture you need as well and you will find that you need more space for the planks factories than you need for the gems factories. Try it. In an average sized city it isn't that hard to have 6 gems factories going in a 3 hour stretch. So now try to produce 150,000 planks in a 3 hour period so you can make the fair and equal trades.

You can change the numbers of gems factories you have, that isn't important. You can have one gems factory that takes 20 spaces and the corresponding planks factories you need to produce the proper number of planks for an even trade takes you 175 spaces plus additional space for houses and more for culture.

And sure, people will take the trades for the newbies. I can give them what they need without trading. I can always help them.

You miss my point elderflower. It is about the possibility of making all those trades. It isn't possible economically as a long term viable plan. Not taking the economic limits of space that we have into account. Basically, the devs are forcing the entire Elvenar world into behaving "unscrupulously" with the new wholesaler.

I need an additional 175 spaces for more planks factories to make enough planks in the same space the gems factory takes up. Plus, I need more houses and more culture if I wanted to build them too.

The laws of economics are hard and fast. We have limits on production SPACE. One thing takes hundreds of spaces to produce while trading for another that takes tens of spaces to produce. You cannot consistently force the world into trading things that take uneven amounts of space to produce. It will lead to shortages.

Can someone explain this better?

Lest anyone think this is only a problem between tier one and tier three, it holds true for all the tiers, I just picked tier one and tier three to illustrate.

 

[DeletedUser1657]

The other key argument with cross tier trades is time. A person can produce in 3 hours 500 (made up number) tier 3 goods which equates to 2,000 tier 1 goods, it takes either a lot of factories (space as mentioned by bobbykitty) or time by dedicating a tier 1 factory for a long time to make the equivalent amount of goods. These are commodities that players hold very highly, more so then coins and supplies.

 

[DeletedUser283]

the wholesaler as it was is needed by players because the game IS out of balance form starters !

how ?
because in order to maintain a working city we need many, many inhabitants, which in turn requires plenty of residences, which provide tons of coins;
and this is where the devs went wrong (and it goes the same way in other games from Inno) : we end up with too much gold, however there is a max capacity to the main hall ..so there are times when we hit the ceiling hard, and we must do something with this gold;
the wholesaler comes in as a simple solution : drain the excess coins, balance the inventory a bit, everything's fine;

now you guys are making the wholesaler more complex to use because we cannot anymore buy whatever we want; you could simply had limited it to increasing the prices until midnight, then reverting it to normal, but this did not look smart enough, you had to annoy us some more ...

I understand that being forced to drain my excess coins by purchasing goods I do not need will force me to use the market to rebalance my inventory;
as long as I can find convenient offers it will be fine;

now what happens if I have to place offers ?
simple : whenever some nice neighbour takes one of my offers, this will use one line in this notification screen that is way too short, and I may loose a notification about received help, that I will consequently fail to return;
returning help and establishing stable relationships with neighbours is paramount because since the poorly designed orcs buildings, I have lost quite some space to residences and I had to sacrifice culture.

so if you guys are so eager to modify the wholesaler to force us to go to the market, give us a 5 day notification screen, period.

 

[DeletedUser651]

These are commodities that players hold very highly, more so then coins and supplies.

It isn't about choosing one resource over another. All resources are important. You can't say this. As a newbie, coins and supplies are where you face the most shortages. So, if they rebalance the goods trades and don't take that into account they would just stop any newbie from being able to get started in the game.

It is such a horrible idea to nerf the wholesaler the way they have. Most of us won't feel it as much as the newcomers will. But there aren't many newcomers on beta, and they never believe me. They will toss this on the live servers and wonder why some of the newcomers quit. And they will wonder why all the goods are getting so out of balance.

I understand that being forced to drain my excess coins by purchasing goods I do not need will force me to use the market to rebalance my inventory;

Yup. And because they don't understand the space issue, this change will destroy the balance of goods in the Elvenar economy.

 

[DeletedUser283]

not mentioning the permanent shortage of some goods in some neighbourhoods (steel, crystal, elixir, rings a bell ?)

 

[Heymrdiedier]

Thanks for sharing. I know these trades are not appearing in the Trader as often as same-tier trades. But I do have a question: why exactly are these trades bad? From a balancing perspective they are perfectly balanced and acceptable, but apparently they are not perceived as such by the community. It would be very helpful to know what exactly is so bad about this kind of trades. Could you help us with that?

I think the new wholesalesman isn't that bad altho i will be using it a lot less.

Tier 1 stays same price, tier 2 is cheaper, tier 3 is A LOT cheaper

The main issue is the ammount of tier 1 you can produce per square compared to tier 3, and then the trade says, 1 tier 3 = 4 tier 2 = 16 tier 1. If that was true, 1 square of tier 1 building should produce about 16 times the ammount that 1 tier 3 square produces. This is totally not true as bobbykitty allready pointed out.

So now the wholesaleman makes tier 3 even cheaper to buy, so now its 330 tier 3 = 340 tier 1. lets just say a 1:1 ratio. in other words trash all your tier 3 factories, just buy them from wholesalesman, and trade them downtier: trade 340 tier 3 for 680 tier 2 or 1360 tier 1. Those trades will go fast since its its a 2:1 ratio where the trader suggests 4:1 is fair.

 

[DeletedUser1590]

... I'll go back to playing solitaire. At least ther ethe rules don't change every week.

.. in any other area that would be considered as fraud: sign a contract and the terms change .. loan money and the conditions are altered every week because of "balancing" problems.

Mind you it could well be considered as fraud here, I started the game, I liked it, I invested real money. Now these past weeks the game has changed so drastically I no longer like it, I would not have invested any money in this game if these had been the rules 10 months ago.

What rubbish! I play in 6 fellowships and in every one of those we trade a lot. In case you need reminding, we all have different boosted goods and therefore can't generate enough goods without trading. If you were to rely on the wholesaler, your city would last about 5 minutes.

The reality is you have never made an effort to develop things like an alternative use for supplies. To keep a city in balance, you need a certain number of workshops which produce supplies. Since the battle system has been messed up, less supplies are used for training, so now we have an excess. Clearly this was not anticipated. Big surprise. You make battle unattractive and people stop fighting. Ooh, now we have too many supplies being generated. And those neighbour visits that we encourage generate more of the pesky supplies since we encourage people to upgrade their Main Halls to higher levels which means they earn more supplies for visiting neighbours and fellows. Lets change the wholesaler. The lack of logic is astounding!

The biggest problem with the wholesaler is not the ratio, it is the fact that you decide what I want and how I must pay for it. So, if I have an excess of supplies, I must buy silk. Why? I don't need silk. How does this help me? And now the price goes up every time you buy. Really? To me the wholesaler has always been a very small part of the game - purely used to get rid of excess supplies and in the process get some of the goods that are not easily traded. That is all. It is the ONLY place where you can get rid of excess supplies.

You keep blabbing about things being "in balance", yet at every turn you make great efforts to mess with that balance. The thing that irritates me the most is the rubbish reasoning that is used to justify bad decisions. People were allowed to grow their cities to a point that you did not anticipate and instead of admitting this, we have been given an ever growing list of pathetic reasons for bad decisions. And constant changes that don't bring anything good to the game.

Mostly you seem to under-estimate our intelligence. Do we have big cities because we are stupid? I think not. We have played the game within the allowed parameters only to find things being taken away daily to accommodate lack of foresight. It seems like a case of lets change things and then see how the players react and make superficial changes if they freak out too much. Really?

Remember, players are customers. If you want people to keep buying, you need to give them something to come back for. And right now there is very little that makes me excited about this game.

Thank you lika1961, well said, that pretty much sums it up. My feelings precisely.

 

[DeletedUser1721]

As another example of why this just doesn't work:
This week, on my main city (in the not beta world) my Fellowship's steel production boosted players spent all of their steel participating in the tournament. My Fellowship is now extremely short on steel. Players who can buy steel from the wholesaler (boosted in marble and planks and have extra coins and supplies) are buying it so that the Fellowship has steel reserves while the boosted steel players recover. With the changes you want to implement with the wholesaler, we would not be able to do this, and my Fellowship would go from short on steel to critical, unable to progress through research, levels of steel shortage. Either we wouldn't be able to buy enough steel, or we wouldn't have surpluses in whatever resource the game wants us to spend to buy the steel, or we wouldn't even be able to buy steel that day. I buy from the wholesaler when I need the good I'm buying from the wholesaler because I couldn't get it by trading for it.

Not being able to buy the goods I can't get by trading because neighbors and fellowship members happen to all be needing whatever good I need at the same time as I need it means that I need the goods from the wholesaler right then. Not in a few days, not in a few hours, now, because I spent the entire time I was putting the KP into the research trying to trade and failing, and now I need to unlock the research.

Agreeing on the whole why are you asking us to explain why cross tier trades are so detrimental thing. You literally replied to a post explaining, in detail, why cross tier trades are so detrimental, asking for an explanation.

 

[SoggyShorts]

Thanks for sharing. I know these trades are not appearing in the Trader as often as same-tier trades. But I do have a question: why exactly are these trades bad? From a balancing perspective they are perfectly balanced and acceptable, but apparently they are not perceived as such by the community. It would be very helpful to know what exactly is so bad about this kind of trades. Could you help us with that?

@Muf-Muf @Elderflower @Mykan @Caanna @ag123 @madzix @Bobbykitty

Here is a visual of why 16:1 is not fair in any way

If you run elixir to get planks at 16:1 here is what your city needs:

Spoiler: 62,000 planks

If you want to run planks to get planks here is what you need:

Spoiler: 61,880 planks

I didn't even try to get the workshops, population or culture for the plank city, since it would be impossible.

 

[lika1961]

Thanks for sharing. I know these trades are not appearing in the Trader as often as same-tier trades. But I do have a question: why exactly are these trades bad? From a balancing perspective they are perfectly balanced and acceptable, but apparently they are not perceived as such by the community. It would be very helpful to know what exactly is so bad about this kind of trades. Could you help us with that?

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a prime example of how things work now. There is outrage amongst the players because of the ridiculous changes made to the wholesaler and we get asked questions about why cross-tier trades are not a good idea. What about it is difficult to understand? And why do you not already know this? Most players seem to. The only thing that should interest you is the fact that players don't like it. Only that.

I think I have figured out the problem though. When the battle system was changed, it was done in such a bad way that a lot of players stopped fighting and started negotiating to gain provinces. People who had lots of goods thought hey, I have the goods - I'll just negotiate my way through it. Particularly those who didn't particularly enjoy fights anyway.

This of course meant that in spite of valiant efforts to stop those of us who had "gone too far", people were still gaining provinces. SURPRISE! You can also gain provinces by negotiating! Oops - we never thought of that. Now, how do we stop these pesky players from doing this? Break the wholesaler. That will certainly stop them from doing silly things like developing their cities and neighbour visits. Good - the game isn't broken enough, lets do some more. Eventually we should be able to get rid of all the senior players. They don't bring much to the game anyway. And their complaining and criticism is really irritating!

 

[DeletedUser1721]

This actually goes back to when the developers thought Orc residences having barely any increase in population per square was acceptable because the population per building was higher, and the coins per building was higher. The developers seem completely unwilling to acknowledge the fact that reward per space on the map is more important to players than higher reward per building. The buildings themselves might be balanced, but the space the buildings take up is not balanced at all. At least, not in the terms that Muf-Muf is using.

Edit: And yes, it is true, that an occasional cross tier trade might be accepted, if they were simply never posted otherwise... but that is absolutely not the case. Again, I haven't seen it on my beta world, but one of my new neighbors on us4 persists in attempting to post 100 silk for 400 steel trades, 100 gems for 1600 steel trades, and so on, in massive quantities. Tens of thousands of tier 1 goods worth of minimal quantities of tier 3 goods demanding thousands of tier 1 goods. There is absolutely no reason anyone in their right mind would trade more than a thousand of one good (more than one entire tier 1 factory's 3 hour production) for a fraction of a three hour production from someone else's tier 3 factory, let alone do it more than once. It's clearly someone who is only building tier 3 manufactories trying to get all their goods by trading cross tier. This makes me so enraged that unless I know for a fact that the person is out of all of their tier 1 goods and is simply trying to build up all three types at once, I will ignore any cross tier trades.

Really. At the moment, each of my planks manufactories gives me 635 planks every three hours. Each Magic Dust manufactory gives 971 per hour. Rounding to the nearest 100 gives 1000 dust per manufactory per hour, and 600 planks per manufactory per hour.

100 dust is therefore 1/10 of one manufactory's three-hourly production. "Equal" trades mean that it can be traded for 1600 planks. 1600 planks is 2 and 2/3 of one planks manufactory's three-hourly production. I'm not going to accept that trade under most circumstances. There's no way. Since I have 6 planks manufactories and 4 dust manufactories, it's almost half of the planks I can make, every three hours, for a teeny tiny fraction (1/40) of the dust I can make in three hours.

 

[sunrae]

I don't want to spend tools on the few extra scrolls I need - I don't have an excess of them. I want to spend coins - but no I am not able to as the choice has been removed. This is not free and democratic, it is more stressful than real life, and I play this game to relax and have fun !!

 

[DeletedUser651]

Thanks Soggy! That visual might help. Though I think you meant on the second one that if you want to run planks to get elixir.

 

[SoggyShorts]

Thanks Soggy! That visual might help. Though I think you meant on the second one that if you want to run planks to get elixir.

You could look at it either way. I just wanted to show @Muf-Muf how easy it would be to make 62,000 "worth" of tier 1 goods with T3 vs how hard it would be with T1 manufacturies

 

[DeletedUser1767]

There's this sort of Occam's-Razor-failure issue that keeps coming up like a quiet elephant whenever people mention how many changes have happened to the game to keep people from advancing too far on the World Map. That is to say: if the specific problem is too many people getting too far on the World Map, isn't the easiest solution to implement put a hard cap on scouting provinces rather than introducing a lot of changes with potentially wide-ranging problematic trickle-down effects?

Like, if that is their ultimate goal with all of these changes, why not just do the obvious simple thing and say: "Okay, you can get this far above the minimum for each chapter but after that your scouts take a vacation until you research the next Advanced Scouts"? And if the answer to this question really is "because diamonds," well, that doesn't actually make sense either, because there's no point in using diamonds to scout when you can just buy premium expansions (unless you're using the diamonds because of time constraints?), so the obvious thing to do there would be to just offer more of those. There are already hard limits on how many expansions you can have anyway.

I am honestly really confused about this.

 

[DeletedUser1721]

There's this sort of Occam's-Razor-failure issue that keeps coming up like a quiet elephant whenever people mention how many changes have happened to the game to keep people from advancing too far on the World Map. That is to say: if the specific problem is too many people getting too far on the World Map, isn't the easiest solution to implement put a hard cap on scouting provinces rather than introducing a lot of changes with potentially wide-ranging problematic trickle-down effects?

Like, if that is their ultimate goal with all of these changes, why not just do the obvious simple thing and say: "Okay, you can get this far above the minimum for each chapter but after that your scouts take a vacation until you research the next Advanced Scouts"? And if the answer to this question really is "because diamonds," well, that doesn't actually make sense either, because there's no point in using diamonds to scout when you can just buy premium expansions (unless you're using the diamonds because of time constraints?), so the obvious thing to do there would be to just offer more of those. There are already hard limits on how many expansions you can have anyway.

I am honestly really confused about this.

This change, at least, seems to be motivated more by the fact that they want to encourage people to trade than anything diamond related. Which is why I've been pointing out all the reasons I can think of where, even when trying to trade with other players, this new wholesaler is bad. I absolutely don't see the old wholesaler as a substitute for trading with other players. I see it as a gold and supply sink, in part, but also something which makes up for other players not being able to trade at the moment when a player critically needs a specific good type. Which is something which happens. It's also a substitute for other players being willing to trade, but unwilling to trade fairly, such as players who post cross tier trades. Which is also something which happens.

A player should not be stuck in research for days, at the whim of the wholesaler, because they need 2k crystals and their fellowship members and neighbors who make crystals also need crystals.

 

[DeletedUser908]

I hardly ever use the wholesaler to purchase goods I need for something. I use it primarily as a coin sink -- a place where I can get rid of excess coins so I can continue to collect coins once I reach the limit my Town Hall will hold (which I really think is far too low, but that's another story). Now I have really no way to get rid of those excess coins. So this will probably result in fewer visits to help others out, since why should I if I get no reward at all? This change was not a good one, you need to return the wholesaler to what it was before. Please. Please. Please.

 

[DeletedUser1665]

This had a direct effect on trading between players and that is something we're trying to solve with this change

OK I am a weezer that just barely has made it into Chapter 2 on Beta. I have purchased what I could for the last couple of days from the Wholesaler and now have cross tier trades up just hoping I will be able to get enough goods to be able to pay the fee for the very first Advanced Scouts research (which as a reminder is the first research in Chapter II). It won't even do me any good because I can't produce enough goods to negotiate at this point and with my sword dancers and basic archers at squad size 3 I can't even punch my way out of a paper bag much less come close to winning a fight in ring 3. Not only are the more experianced players complaining, the system works so much against a Newbie anyone that discovers this game now will just quit after their first week!

 

[DeletedUser1767]

This change, at least, seems to be motivated more by the fact that they want to encourage people to trade than anything diamond related. Which is why I've been pointing out all the reasons I can think of where, even when trying to trade with other players, this new wholesaler is bad. I absolutely don't see the old wholesaler as a substitute for trading with other players. I see it as a gold and supply sink, in part, but also something which makes up for other players not being able to trade at the moment when a player critically needs a specific good type. Which is something which happens. It's also a substitute for other players being willing to trade, but unwilling to trade fairly, such as players who post cross tier trades. Which is also something which happens.

A player should not be stuck in research for days, at the whim of the wholesaler, because they need 2k crystals and their fellowship members and neighbors who make crystals also need crystals.

Totally agreed with all of this. It also seems like they don't realise that sometimes the Wholesaler actually facilitates trade, such as when you're in a fellowship that is perpetually short on one good (why does this always seem to be marble?) and people with extra coins and supplies get it from the wholesaler to trade to people who can't afford to do that.