The Spire rewards are nice - but the system is flawed, IMO
I just made a comment on the US forum, and thought to repeat it here in the hope that someone in the design team gets to read it.
The current system of making artifact fragments available only in the Spire is badly flawed - a newcomer to the game will want to have an evolved old building like Fire Phoenix and Brown Bear, which come from an era where really powerful evolving buildings were offered which have never been matched in power for a dedicated fighter.
The designers acknowledge this and make those buildings available as Crafting Recipes - but once the newbie has this building - how is he / she to evolve it? Most of my players only got one or two Bear and Phoenix artifacts from doing Spire right to the top every week for six weeks; some players got more and a few did not get any, which makes this a lottery where the average newcomer will take several years to fully evolve these powerful buildings - which is clearly unfair and a sign of a flawed system.
My suggestion is two-fold:
1.
Make all the evolving available in crafting and let us choose which we want. Allow us to choose from a drop-down box of all the crafting recipes and pay let's say 5 diamonds to buy any recipe that suits our needs - with a limit on how many times you can buy in a given time, and a limit on how many times you can buy any one recipe. This would be far superior to the current lottery system where you pay 50 Diamonds to get a new set of recipes - which might be just as junky as the set you are replacing. People would be very happy to spend small amounts of Diamonds on recipes and far more people would do so than at present - which would give the designers a very pleasant little income stream, thank you very much.
2.
Give us Artifact Fragments, so we can collect these and eventually evolve any building we choose - see below, the answer I just posted in US Forum, in reply to the question 'which prizes would people really like in events'.
Artifact Fragments!!! So that people, particularly newcomers, can decide for themselves which building they want to evolve, instead of having a few random artifacts thrown at them in a lottery in the Spire.
I do understand that the developers are trying to preserve the rarity value of artifacts, so as not to offend the players who paid real money to evolve their buildings - but if we got lots of tiny artifact fragments in different game modules, like spire, tournaments, events, FA waypoints and even a daily log-in bonus, we could collect for several months and eventually make one Artifact that we REALLY wanted.
The designers could preserve rarity value by setting a realistic exchange rate for the fragments, that would make crafting an 'Universal Artifact' hard, but not impossible.
I do hope one of the designers listens to these suggestions!!