Hi everyone,
First of all: Thank you very much once again for your active involvement. While I'm not able to answer all of your questions just now, I'd like to explain a bit more about this:
Now 2 players in the same chapter with the same production do have a different tournament difficulty based on how much they invested in the game, either buying premium expansions or by leveling wonders.
How is this different compared to the old situation, and what is the reasoning behind this move, and why does it specifically target the biggest elvenar fans that are the most active and in case of expansions are the players that fund the game?
Let me start by saying that we're not trying to "target" a specific group of players. What we're trying to do with the new difficulty calculation, is make sure that the difficulty calculation matches the actual player progression. To oversimplify it: Let's say player A produces 2000 crystals a day and needs to pay 200 for catering 1 province, player B who produces 20.000 crystals a day should need to pay 2000 for that province, to make it relatively just as challenging. Once again, that's of course oversimplifying it, but that's the basic of this idea.
In a game like this, player B can produce these 20.000 crystals per day in multiple ways. E.g.
- It can be a high tech player with high level manufactories and no premium expansions.
- It can be a mid tech player with some premium expansions, therefore having 2-3 extra manufactories compared to others
- It can be a low chapter player with very high level AW and therefore getting more bonuses and producing more
What we ideally don't want to do, is favor one play style over the other. By just tying difficulty to chapters, we would basically encourage players to stay in low chapters and massively boost their AW without progressing in the game. This would also encourage using push accounts and creating extra accounts with which you do nothing besides building some AW, manufactories or armories and use these resources to boost the tournaments. While we don't have the illusion that we will be able to get rid of pushing entirely, we at least don't want to encourage it or make it attractive.
Therefore our aim is, for example for players who put 3000 KP in their AW, to make it just as hard/challenging as for someone who put these same 3000 KP in their tech tree. This is not to "punish" anyone, but it's a way to try and make it fair play for everyone, no matter your play style. I'm not saying we're there yet and we have found the ideal solution to everything, but that's what we're aiming to achieve.
At the same time, we feel it's important to make sure progression feels rewarding. In other words: Progression should always give you more benefit than the negative impact it has on difficulty. The problem is a bit that it may not alway be perceived that way. If you take out a single factor of the whole difficulty calculation and emphasize on that, it might seem as if you're punished for e.g. leveling your AW or for purchasing premium expansions. Nonetheless, these things always give you way more benefits than the impact they have. For example:
- If you're a chapter 10 player with 8 AW on level 20, you'll have a way easier time in the tournament than if you're that same player without these 8 AW. It might sound contradictive, for because of these 160 AW levels your total difficulty will be higher, but these AW will give you so much bonuses, extra units, resources etc that overall they will help you have an easier time in the tournaments. Even AW that aren't directly related to battles or resources, e.g. when they only provide population, will save you so much city space which you don't need for residences anymore and can now use to place extra manufactories, armories, event buildings producing resources/units/orcs, that overall they will always help you more than the relatively low impact they have on tournament difficulties.
- The same goes for the premium expansions: If you're that chapter 10 player and you have 10 premium expansions which give you a lot of extra space to build extra armories/manufactories/event buildings, this is worth far more than the impact these expansions have on the total difficulty (which is even less than regular expansions have). Here it is the same thing: Would you try the same tournament without these 10 premium expansions, the overall required units/resources may be lower, but you'll still have a much harder time in that tournament, because you don't have all this space for extra buildings, which still give you a lot more benefit than they cost you in terms of difficulty.
So this is the overall goal of this system: Reward progress, but still make sure that the challenge stays there on all levels. Overall of course the game and therefore the tournaments should be made a bit easier by progressing (hence the examples above: you'll have an easier time in the tournaments with AW than without them, or with premium expansions than without them), but we don't want to make the game e.g. entirely pay to win, where you buy 20 premium expansions and e.g. get all the rewards basically for free every week for you and your fellowship. We don't think that's a fair approach either, neither is it fun if the challenge is totally taken away because you have high level AW or purchased expansions. Of course, some players want everything for free and would be fine with that, but games do need to have a certain challenge to stay enticing in the long run.
That being said, what we see from the feedback now is of course we are not fully there yet (which is to be expected after just a first external test run). So far we see the feedback from casual and mid tech players is basiccaly that the new system is working fine for them. They don't have too hard a time, often even get a bit more points than previously, and with a lot less tedious clicking.
What we also see is that a lot of high tech or very fanatical players feel the difficulty curve is too steep, required resources have increased too much for them and the rewards are not in line with that. This is the "upper end" of our player base, so to speak. I read a post of someone who said it's kind of intimidating to post their feedback as a casual mid-tech player between all these big, fanatic, die hard gamers. We should keep in mind, especially here on Beta, that we have a very serious core group of players who are often very high ranked on their Live servers, really into trying to analyze and understand all formulas, and very vocal when something gets introduced that doesn't directly benefit them. And while it's certainly good and valuable feedback we should look into, we also shouldn't lose sight of the fact that our main player base consist of players who play very casually, maybe login once or twice a day and are not that much into doing all the math and stuff. They enjoy the game in a relaxed way, while others get their fun out of calculating the most efficient way to create their cities and produce their resources and such. The same is what e.g. happens with events: A lot of players just like to play events casually, win some nice looking buildings and have fun with the graphics and the extra incentive, while for other die hard gamers, the first thing they do is look at the stats of the main reward building, compare it with previous event buildings and base their opinion of the whole event purely on how valuable they feel the reward building is and/or if they can win a Wishing Well.
Neither play style is good or bad. As you know, I love you all, even though we sometimes have to step in and guide the discussions a bit when things get too heated. That's not a problem, we all have our love for the game, both the creators, the players and the support team. We should just keep in mind that not everyone plays the same way and different players can experience things in a different way.
So, back to where I was: Right now we see that for the biggest group of players (casual, mid-tech) the changes are basically working fine. They'd like to see a bit more variation in the tournaments again, also to be able to plan more and come up with a strategy with their FS. We are currently looking into bringing this back a bit more. When we have more specific info on it, we will certainly let you know, but we're looking at ways to e.g. make certain unit types appear more in certain tournaments, so that you can plan on that again and also to bring the value of the expiring battle bonus buildings back a bit, which was indeed also a valid remark.
We also see that for this core high-end and die hard player group, the vast majority of the feedback is that in their situations the new setup is too hard, requires too many losses, doesn't feel rewarding enough and has too steep of a difficulty curve. I can't share anything specific on that yet, as we're still investigating all your examples, analyzing the data and are working on figuring it all out. As I said before: We won't rush the implementation of this on Live, and we want to do it right, so we're taking the time to find all the edge cases and make sure the balance is right in this "upper end" of our player base as well.
I hope this at least answered some of the questions, specifically about the reasoning behind it all. As I said before: We're not there yet and we know that, and we also know that we'll never be able to reach a totally ideal situation, but we're trying hard to get as close to that as we can. Thank you for bearing with us, staying patient and providing us with your feelings and experiences as that's what helps us most right now.
