Discussion Release Notes version 1.54

[Maillie]

I don't understand. It appears that the top fellowships that are able to easily reach ten chests every week are the only ones coming out ahead with the recent changes. The smaller or newer fellowships that don't get to see the 10th chest now HAVE to use their KPs on Ancient Wonders. If they stand no chance of reaching that goal then they also can't get back the population they lost without paying for diamonds. I believe more thought should go into the smaller players, for instance: Why make ALL the KPs go into Ancient Wonders? Why not Chests 1-5 be usable KP's? Why hide the event building upgrades behind the door that can't be opened? Once you reach the Willows most players get rid of the old event buildings, I have none left in Halflings in my live city. That fellowship has many smaller players who worked very hard for their Glossy Gardens and trees, etc. We're ecstatic if we can make it through 7 chests because we're not an "Or Else!" type of fs. I am very sad for the smaller players in that fellowship. I believe they're going to feel quite defeated, since they can't just magically get their population back to continue to build and grow. We only have the Archmage and me in Halflings, no one in Elementals yet. I'd guess that more than half are well below Woodelves and rely on what will now be a disaster for them. I would hate to lose these great people who have been with us for some time.

 

[Buttrflwr]

...What I can share right now, is that based on your feedback and the data we see, we are indeed currently investigating solutions for the drop in population. We expect to have more details on that next week.

THANK YOU. I will just sit on these negative little buggers and continue to slog my way thru these nasty orcses. At this point I don't even have energy to rearrange my admittedly poorly arranged city to upgrade my ONE up-gradeable residence. The culture loss I can deal with, there are always ways to increase culture. Pop is just another story altogether when you have things you HAVE to upgrade and build. Did I mention I am tired of orcs? It was bad enough in live. And thank you for your response on the premium culture bldg upgrades, it was worth a shot. I loved my Protector of the Woods. He was really cool, but just inefficient after awhile...Perhaps you could consider offering similar premium culture bldgs to the ones in lower chapters, but at higher values. Some of the original ones were cool.

And I totally agree with @ashrem ...Warning is NOT Elvenar's strongsuit when major changes are afoot. It really should be. Especially one as drastic as this. If we had been warned, we could MAYBE have taken some kind of preventative action. Not sure what, but something. At least been prepared. Making the reductions AFTER the implementations would have made more sense, imho. But then, I am not a coder, so there's that.

 

[SoggyShorts]

And I totally agree with @ashrem ...Warning is NOT Elvenar's strongsuit when major changes are afoot. It really should be. Especially one as drastic as this. If we had been warned, we could MAYBE have taken some kind of preventative action.

More important than warning us is wasting developer time imo.
This is Beta, so we can expect some surprises and for us to be used a guinea pigs. The wasteful thing is that if they had told us their intentions, we would have given the exact same feedback that they just got. I appreciate that they are now trying to think of a way to mitigate the negative population issues, but for us it was very easily predictable (not that we are smarter than the devs, but we do play the game, and there's thousands of us)
It would have saved time using us as sounding boards for the idea before spending time on the rebalance that they may now be spending time re-rebalancing.

 

[DeletedUser1163]

Sure you can upgrade everything with diamonds, but I really dislike this strategy of InnoGames when they say this change is by requests of the players, while it's actually about pushing players into buying more and more diamonds just to keep up with the changes

I agree with you Ritsel. Whenever the trains were delayed in NYC, the train conductor would say, "We're sorry but due to a sick passenger, the train will be delayed." It seems NYC has a lot of sick passengers. The strategy of this game has shifted to greed. Why make it easy for us to upgrade, make us pay for everything we want.

 

[DeletedUser1163]

Why would you want to upgrade event buildings? The buildings in the higher chapters are so huge and considering we have a limited amount of space in our cities, we might have to delete a lot of event buildings in order to make room for those buildings.

The Forum has been crashing maybe because millions of Elvenar players are furious at what was done to this game. This is a quote from one of the members of our fellowship. “Inno has sabotaged our game play without giving any notice this was coming. It’s totally unfair and my heart’s not in it to spend weeks trying to get out of negative population so I can upgrade a building again. I feel like deleting my city and be done with it.”

Others are also thinking of leaving because they are done with all these changes to a once fun game. I was hoping this was a good idea the game devs had but from all the negative responses, it’s BAD!!!!!

 

[SoggyShorts]

This is a quote from one of the members of our fellowship. “Inno has sabotaged our game play without giving any notice this was coming.

I think maybe...just maybe... that player shouldn't be a Beta tester....

 

[Buttrflwr]

More important than warning us is wasting developer time imo.
This is Beta, so we can expect some surprises and for us to be used a guinea pigs. The wasteful thing is that if they had told us their intentions, we would have given the exact same feedback that they just got. I appreciate that they are now trying to think of a way to mitigate the negative population issues, but for us it was very easily predictable (not that we are smarter than the devs, but we do play the game, and there's thousands of us)
It would have saved time using us as sounding boards for the idea before spending time on the rebalance that they may now be spending time re-rebalancing.

Agreed. I had to re-read your post twice, as I thought at first you were saying that it was ok the way they did it, but upon re-reading it, we are basically saying the same thing. I have played several beta versions of online games, and this is the first game I can honestly remember not being told of crucial game play changes ahead of implementation. I don't mind being a guinea pig, or I wouldn't be a beta player, but it is poor planning on their part not to use their beta player base as sounding boards on major changes like these, before implementation. I am sure that the dev players don't run barely sustainable population cities like we sometimes have to, so their cities weren't affected by the changes like many of ours were. As you say, now they have to re-balance the re-balance, or at the very least offer some sort of pop comp.

 

[Ashrem]

More important than warning us is wasting developer time imo.
This is Beta, so we can expect some surprises and for us to be used a guinea pigs. The wasteful thing is that if they had told us their intentions, we would have given the exact same feedback that they just got.

I'm not sure there's any (let alone much) wasted programmer time. None of these changes should require any code, it's just database adjustments that should have been handleable by any intern who understands spreadsheets and a calculator. "Change all the buildings from this list of events so that they conform the the formula [blah x blah x chapter / mapgrid]

 

[Maillie]

For your questions about the blueprints and magic buildings: Your current blueprints will indeed be converted into the new spells, which will be usable on both the Magic Residence/Magic Workshop AND Event buildings

I'd like to ask, why then can't the Instant KPs be used on BOTH the Ancient Wonders and the Tech Tree? This would be so much better for the small players, particularly those in newer fellowships, and still appease the top players with umpteen AWs and loads of KPs per tournament

 

[edeba]

I have specifically argued that there is something wrong is the approach to the calculation in how you get such a massive change in the event buildings that for orcs they are useless and you commented that it had something to do with mana, essentially supporting the difference, not digging into why it is happening and what the inputs are to make this serious imbalance.

"Balancing" is talked about and used to justifying trashing parts of the game that players have invested in all the time, yet when a real and drastic imbalance, as with the event buildings for these chapters is beyond obvious, we aren't getting feed back on the logic here.

As I stated, there is a real flaw in the logic and the variable definitions which leads to bad data in, bad data out. I would really like to see a reassessment here.

Maillie's comment speaks volumes of the problem, "once you reach willows, most players get rid of the old event buildings." To have such a strong line in game play is simply an imbalance by design. Design can be fixed.

Eh? I have commented that orc level event rewards suck every single event.

I don't understand. It appears that the top fellowships that are able to easily reach ten chests every week are the only ones coming out ahead with the recent changes. The smaller or newer fellowships that don't get to see the 10th chest now HAVE to use their KPs on Ancient Wonders. If they stand no chance of reaching that goal then they also can't get back the population they lost without paying for diamonds. I believe more thought should go into the smaller players, for instance: Why make ALL the KPs go into Ancient Wonders? Why not Chests 1-5 be usable KP's? Why hide the event building upgrades behind the door that can't be opened? Once you reach the Willows most players get rid of the old event buildings, I have none left in Halflings in my live city. That fellowship has many smaller players who worked very hard for their Glossy Gardens and trees, etc. We're ecstatic if we can make it through 7 chests because we're not an "Or Else!" type of fs. I am very sad for the smaller players in that fellowship. I believe they're going to feel quite defeated, since they can't just magically get their population back to continue to build and grow. We only have the Archmage and me in Halflings, no one in Elementals yet. I'd guess that more than half are well below Woodelves and rely on what will now be a disaster for them. I would hate to lose these great people who have been with us for some time.

 

[Deleted User - 60107]

The "logic" behind the significant difference in Culture between Orc-level event buildings and Wood Elf-level event buidings was explained once, long ago. Apparently the reson was that once you reach Wood Elves you need Mana and event buildings do not produce mana, so in order to make them attracitve/useful to players in Woods Elves and later event buildings give much higher Culture-per-square. Which resulted in a significant jump in values between Orcs and Woodelves.

Obviously, things have changed since. We now have event buildings that give mana (and some even give seeds - a resource that didn't even exist back then).

 

[SoggyShorts]

I have specifically argued that there is something wrong is the approach to the calculation in how you get such a massive change in the event buildings that for orcs they are useless and you commented that it had something to do with mana, essentially supporting the difference, not digging into why it is happening

Ahh I see. Part of this I'm sure has been my personal bias against culture only event buildings.
Actually the last pure culture building of any kind that I placed was a couple snowy charming trees in chapter 7, and I regretted not getting more winter stars instead.
My suggestion has always been that a P&C building should give a little more pop/sq than the residences in the next chapter, or if they are small, then maybe a little more than that. This allows players to replace them each event. Provided of course that a new P&C is available every major event.
For a pure culture building in orcs, I'm not sure how to fix that issue. Sure, a higher culture per sq building would help someone if the event hit very early in chapter 8, but the closer you are to needing mana, the less likely it is to stay in your city very long.
I mean does anyone build the campfire BBQ? It's unlocked about a week before willows, so I don't see any purpose for that building at all.
Perhaps if there was a pure mana building in chapter 9 that could be paired with a pure culture building won in chapter 8 where the combined culture&mana per square was at least equal to building willows?

I'm not sure there's any (let alone much) wasted programmer time. None of these changes should require any code, it's just database adjustments that should have been handleable by any intern who understands spreadsheets and a calculator. "Change all the buildings from this list of events so that they conform the the formula [blah x blah x chapter / mapgrid]

Right, that's why I didn't say programmer time, but rather developer time as in whoever is making decisions. Whoever decided on that list of buildings that were deemed too powerful at certain chapters, and then decided how much they needed to adjusted (your blah x blah x chapter formula)
TBH even if they got it right the first time, I think some of it was still wasted time- I mean was the change to crystal unicorns needed?

It's also a matter of appearances. Naturally information about this update has been spread to the live servers and is already creating ill will towards inno despite the fact that by @Marindor's statement it will possibly go live in a different format. In the meantime people are annoyed for no reason.

 

[Ashrem]

Right, that's why I didn't say programmer time, but rather developer time as in whoever is making decisions. Whoever decided on that list of buildings that were deemed too powerful at certain chapters, and then decided how much they needed to adjusted (your blah x blah x chapter formula)
TBH even if they got it right the first time, I think some of it was still wasted time- I mean was the change to crystal unicorns needed?

But in the context of your suggestion, we could not have given them opinions on the changes until we knew what the changes were. Unless your idea is that we were going to give feedback based on a vague "We're thinking of nerfing some event buildings in order to make them upgrade-able." without knowing the details of the planned nerfs?

 

[SoggyShorts]

But in the context of your suggestion, we could not have given them opinions on the changes until we knew what the changes were. Unless your idea is that we were going to give feedback based on a vague "We're thinking of nerfing some event buildings in order to make them upgrade-able." without knowing the details of the planned nerfs?

Actually, yeah.
Nerfing buildings = reducing pop = negative pop for some players.
Not an impossible leap, but certainly easier to make the connection for players who have old buildings.
I don't imagine many on the dev team are playing with cities that have 5 or 6 glossy gardens.

 

[Heymrdiedier]

for me, everything past orcs is rebalanced fine. Everything orcs or earlier has a very big impact. The question that rises for me is, how many people still have those orcs or earlier versions. I still got a lot but maybe im one of the few.
Im looking forward to summer event now tho, so i can can hopefully replace them with some pop buildings from my chapter.
(So please consider adding a decent pop/culture building in summer event, and dont focus on set buildings only)

 

[SoggyShorts]

The question that rises for me is, how many people still have those orcs or earlier versions.

During winter the best culture&pop was the Father Candy Cane, and there weren't any P&C from easter, so anyone in chapters 5-8 at christmas could still have some.

 

[Heymrdiedier]

During winter the best culture&pop was the Father Candy Cane, and there weren't any P&C from easter, so anyone in chapters 5-8 at christmas could still have some.

but xmas was after march 2017? so the rewards of that event wouldnt have changed.

 

[DeletedUser1681]

During winter the best culture&pop was the Father Candy Cane, and there weren't any P&C from easter, so anyone in chapters 5-8 at christmas could still have some.

My buddy from live server was inactive for about a year, came back just a couple of months ago, finished orcs a few weeks ago.... he has winters stars, snowflake castle, galcier gardens, igloos etc.
Yesterday we compared the list from earlier this thread (about drop in values) and he's looking at something like 3000 population disappearing. He's been upgrading some residences, building some new in order to upgrade production... but now all that new population will disappear and he'll be still something like -2000 pop. That is if this rebalancing goes live. Is he eagerly waiting for the challenge ? There is not a rude enough "smilie" in Elvenar to describe what he said. I did my best to convince him to just wait for a while and see what happens.

 

[Brummbaer]

I can confirm, that event building after that time, are also effected (e.g. Father tree of candy cane)

 

[Dawien]

but xmas was after march 2017? so the rewards of that event wouldnt have changed.

Not all indeed, but those prizes that were originally introduced in earlier events are affected ... (such as the Father Tree of Candy Cane which originates from 2016 I think)

@Marindor confirmed this a few pages back:

You received it in the last winter event, but the building was originally introduced during Snow Flurry event the year before, so it is a "before march 2017 building". Is that the right definition @Marindor ? So, all buildings originally introduced before Rise of Phoenix event are concerned.

Yes, this is indeed correct.