Hi guys,
First of all, thank you for your feedback. Please let me make one thing clear: As I've explained numerous times by now, we have reasons to wait with the release of the Elementals and those reasons don't change according to whether or not there are events. It won't be long anymore, but the one thing doesn't have anything to do with the other. So the "we want a new Guest Race" feedback doesn't have anything to do with this QLE. Therefore I'd like to ask you to stick to the topic of this thread here, which is the Robert Redbeard questline event. You can either be happy that we offer you something in addition to the regular game while waiting for the Elementals, or you can just ignore the QLE and stick to your normal game progress if you're not end-tech yet but please do stay on-topic here and let the contents of your posts be actually about this QLE. Thank you
Sure. From someone in the industry, here's my feedback:
1) Your rewards are pathetic for the amount of effort invested in these events. We spend extra time building and setting ourselves up to even be capable of completing these events and our reward is a garbage building that will be demolished shortly. The fact that there is no blueprint system to upgrade these buildings from one chapter to the next is laughable. As others have said, these should be the BEST buildings in the game. Even if they were good rewards ...
2) The quest system is obtuse for the year 2018. Why do I need to go to third party sites to see the entire quest line? Why do I need to do things I normally wouldn't do to complete a quest that rewards me with things I don't even want? Why do I need to make my city WORSE to complete these quest? Instead of rewarding me for being rank 1 and having a properly built and designed city, you punish me and force me to reserve a section of my city for level 1 junk buildings. This is stupid and rewards cheesy designs based around completing events and adventures. Even if the system was streamlined and functional ...
3) Fatigue. You spam these events at us one on top of the other. There is no time to build-up any sort of excitement for them. We're just fed-up of constantly having these events and quests littering our city. Even if you spaced them out more evenly ...
4) Integration. Your events should be used to build hype for your upcoming content updates. You should be hinting to upcoming guest races with your events, and get your players salivating at the future. Your cycle should go something like this : Guest Race -> Event -> Guest Race. Consider either one quest line or one event between each Guest Race MAXIMUM. Even if you manage to hit the nail on the head for all four mentioned issues ...
5) Purpose. If your current design flaw is that not enough players have reached end-game and you need more players at Halflings to release Elementals, your events should be a catch-up mechanism. Between each guest race, events should provide a way for players to reach the current end-game slightly faster. You can do this by providing guest race goods based on your current chapter, or bonus KPs.
The whole event system is a heaping pile of garbage. You need to go back to the drawing board and redesign from the ground up. Keep in mind, this should take next to no development; your problem is a DESIGN issue, not PROGRAMMING.
The programming issue is likely surrounding your new Guest Race. You came up with a concept without proving it, and pushed development on something nobody asked for. In this day and age, you need to FIGHT to keep eyeballs glued to your game. The best way to do this was to drop Guest Races every 3-4 months. Trust me when I say, the majority of the hype in this game is NOT events/quest lines; it's your Guest Races. Focus on getting Guest Races out every 4-6 months ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM before attempting any new features or functionalities. Do you think you will have benefited more from adding this functionality or dropping the Guest Race 4 months ago?
You may be making good money in the short term by getting newer players to spend on events, but as for the long-term health of your game you are catering to people that likely have a shorter attention span and are less likely to be here a year from now. It's a mistake many devs make. Your population will decline and if you are constantly chasing new players and ignoring the old players, you will accelerate the spiral of death your game is currently in.