It's not so much optional anymore, ..., they're making the tournaments more and more combat centric.
This whole update with Fellowship tournaments suddenly motivates every single person in a fellowship to aggressively push to complete tournament provinces every week. That's so much more in the way of goods than the game is balanced around, ...
The punitive costs on negotiating, combined with the fact that now everyone sort of has to participate, forces people to choose between fight or not be able to participate.
Sorry, but
technically it is still
entirely optional, even though it is true that, if you aim at getting the most of possible options in the game, which many players, including me, naturally tend to do, or if you aim at top rating, top technological advance, and so on ..., which many other players (not always the same ones, I am not really in that group) tend to do, then you
have to seriously consider fighting, but you are
never forced to .
I do not deny they made many mistakes with their incompletely thought through revisions of some systems
, especially big balancing blunders that I have been one of those criticizing, first on the French forum, then here.
As I said before, I still do not understand why they increased the difficulty/cost of tournaments when revising the combat system
. It was not necessary, not really clearly announced and even counter-productive regarding their goal to slow down players on territorial conquest.
You are perfectly right about the fact that when implementing the new fellowship oriented tournaments they apparently did not take into account, at all, the strain on resources that would result from more people trying to participate more frequently to this much more attractive system... The best proof of their lack of thinking on this point is what they have done right after: unnecessarily butchering the Wholesaler, thinking this would lead people to rely more on the market, as if they were not already trying to do that, considering the old Wholesaler rates...
There's also the fact that they're massively increasing the size of required buildings, while not massively increasing the amount of new space we're able to obtain. They say that they do this for the sake of puzzles, but... I confess, I don't really care about puzzles ...
Upgrading the buildings in my city is a sign of progress to me. Deleting them sucks, because it feels like all that time I invested on them, proud of the fact that I got all my buildings to x tier at last, is wasted, because there isn't space to upgrade them all, and to me, that isn't what a city builder is about...
Maybe Inno should just.... design a new tetris, and use all their ideas about puzzles for that, and go back to making Elvenar a city builder.
I quite agree on that point
, not for the same exact reasons, but with similar conclusions.
I might like puzzles a bit more than you, but I feel there is a point where puzzles, when they are becoming too complex for most people taste and are starting seriously damaging other aspects of the game, should not be the only thing the developers take into account!
For instance, some of us like their collector event buildings
, which tend to become obsolete, a waste of space in pure puzzle terms
... Why not allow us to preserve them, even inactive, in a storage space or "museum park" (as recently suggested by the French community)?
Another example of how too much puzzle could kill the game is the size of the new Sorcerers university buildings. Many people cannot see how to naturally fit them in the space they have without making serious mistakes (due to the evolving size of building with their level) that could require destruction and rebuilding, as they would not have enough reserved unused space to move these... Where is the fun of that? True, you can always use ElvenArchitecht to plan safely (thanks to its authors). But is it really normal that your only viable option to play safely this fantasy-themed construction game is to use a third party tool? For me, it is a big hint that they likely went a bit too far on the challenge level
...
This problem though was there from the start, even though less intense (but this is just a consequence of a richer game, with more chapters, bigger cities, ...). I fail to see how an "Elvenar Classic" version would change that
.
Over the last 6 months there has been almost nothing added in the way of building a city, its been about battles only.
One might argue that the guest races are about building a city, but I think its a very roundabout way of doing so...
And then the influence of the guest races is so huge there is hardly a difference between the cities anymore.
Sorry, but not
only .
As
@Dony pointed, first, you almost had two entire chapters to play (Orcs were still rather new six months ago) and a new one is coming
. Guest races are obviously a way to introduce new building concepts/constraints (one good example being the "volatile resource" called mana) while allowing player to avoid being bored by introducing new fantasy themed designs for the newest versions of our buildings (not always to everyone taste, but is it possible?), periodically changing their sizes and orientation, ... You might not like that way, but it is a way of progressing in your city building
.
You seem to regret differences between the cities, but there are still some small differences (orc roads, MH designs, ...), more than you might have seen. Again you, and other people in favor of a mythic "Elvenar Classic" version, seem to underestimate the complexity of the game as it is: each building variation requires more specific graphic data to be loaded. From a technical point of view, you might argue that they were already much too lax in the way of indulging players with such small differences
, considering the loading time of some of the more advanced cities and various incomplete display bugs, all related to the size of the current graphic data.
If you are talking about building performance differences, that existed in the first chapters, then tend to disappear with the guest races, that is likely simply because someone realized that what appeared more realistic in the first chapters might rapidly turn into a balancing complexity nightmare as new chapters were added. The last, quite catastrophic, instance of such differences I encountered, was in the detailed characteristics of magical buildings
.
Second, there were several events, with their own issues for sure, but they rather tend to improve with time in my opinion. Yes, they are designed to keep the more active player busy while waiting for a new chapter, but that is a rather good way to do so, rewarding them in the end with buildings that mostly have very good characteristics that approach those of premium buildings, so you could see them as semi-free premium buildings
.
Obviously, the combat system revision took much more time than expected and had more bad consequences than they wanted
. But it is mostly because they underestimated its complexity. That does not mean some changes were not needed: the old system was badly balanced for advanced players, who could conquer some provinces without much losses, using the good unit combos, its empirical construction made it difficult to change, blocking the developers to deliver promised new units, ...
Though, they never stopped working on other parts of the game
.
As for being too far out: I've already stated that was the most crappy argument they ever made. And that is because there IS NO TOO FAR OUT technically speaking. The only real limits are the edges of the world map.
You are completely missing the point! The technical problem is not really (at least, not mainly) with territorial expansion on the world map (even though you might see that there is likely some technical limit, if you try exploring the neighborhood of one of your fellowship member, or a random player, who is located far from your own neighborhood: loading information of his/her neighbors to populate the map can be very far from instantaneous), it is with the maximum size of the detailed view of our cities
, the symptoms being:
- (sometimes very) long loading times for advanced and big cities,
- incorrect/partial display bugs of some buildings in the city view.
They do not want to slow down world map conquest for itself, they want to slow it down as a way of limiting access to "province" city expansions
.
Research expansions are already limited through defining the research tree and premium expansions were limited in two ways: total possible number reduced, price steeply increased.
The reason I say this is because it still is possible to go out as far as you want, because every requirement can be solved with diamonds. So if one really is set on spreading out further, the game has left that possibility open, showing that
A - there is no technological block
B - it really is all about the money.
Everything is actually possible, until you hit the hard technological limits (which actually exist, you can be sure), but only if you are assuming you have an infinite amount of money to spend on the game
.
But which percentage of the players do you think can afford that? The answer is actually quite simple: 0% (the counterpart of infinity
), because not even the richest people on earth have that and, assuming they like and play the game, they would likely not choose to spend all their money on it, or would not be so rich in the first place
.
I have no idea what their actual figures are, but anyway there is likely not that many players that will be ready to invest more than, say, about 50$ a month in the game and with that amount you are far from being able to "do as you want".
If there exist a few people who are ready to invest more, what would be the benefit for Innogames to stop them? Avoid eventual complaints on game performance from such a little number of players, that might realize by themselves that they are just getting the consequences of their own excess? Anyway the number of players actually flirting with the technological limits because of that should be so small that it would not really matter.
So propositions A, and thus B, are not at all demonstrated
.
Furthermore, many examples in the past months, show that, if they likely try to increase their revenue (I do not doubt that and why would they not?), they are not that good at it
:
- magical buildings pricing is a complete mess, actually inciting people to wait the latest moment possible before buying them,
- they first increased the number of premium expansion (up to 33) keeping them at a reasonable price, so that many more players were tempted, but then suddenly decided to reduce the maximum number (to 23) while unreasonably increasing the prices.