Discussion Tournament Changes (post-release)

[edeba]

By the way, anyone remembers the claim that the new format reduced catering costs in half? Half of what - I don't know, but that's a whole another issue.

That was a blatant lie. The only reference point is to what we had and the only truth is we can do way less and it costs more.

I may have understood wrong, but I thought it was add together the old cost to cater all four encounters and then divide that total in half for the new catering cost.

Yup, my expectation from my comprehension of the English language concluded that as well. They made military impossible to use, bringing it in line with the insanity of the goods cost.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

So long as we're getting onto initial claims - how about the one that said the benefit of every AW level will always outweigh the impact of the extra difficulty it creates.

I only have one AW I am considering selling once this goes to US Live, so I consider all the rest I am keeping to have benefits that outweigh the tiny amount each AW level impacts squad size. And the vast majority of normal or regular players would probably feel the same.

 

[Pauly7]

I only have one AW I am considering selling

And this is my point. The Ancient Wonders are supposed to be amazing buildings that are powerful when invested in. You are one who is positive about that, but even you have one you might sell. Proving my point that the reality is contrary to the claim.

This is the one part of this change that gives me that sick feeling. I've spent years building my city and years investing in these AWs... and now I'm considering deleting some? As a concept that seems so wrong

 

[SeekerElora]

I really like the tournament changes. One fight per province works nicely, and comparably I'm paying about the same amount in goods to cater one province (at least once I hit 10, which is where I start catering) as it does to cater 1 encounter at the same number in my city that's a chapter ahead in one of the live worlds. Overall, a very positive experience for me. I haven't been able to look at the tournament since the most recent update changed amounts of coin/supplies to cater, though, so that may have changed. We'll see.

 

[Deleted User - 89608]

I've played since 2016, but never on beta til now. These proposed changes will have such a huge impact, I could no longer stand aside. Elvenar may have started as a city-building game, but it's evolved a lot over the years. For me and many others, the tournament *IS* the game. Without the tourney, spire and events, Elvenar would be like watching paint dry.

These proposed changes would impose a difficulty wall that would be exceedingly difficult to overcome. I am concerned about losing the ability to achieve the success I already enjoy, let alone being able to ever push higher. This would change one of the most fundamental aspects of the game, and not for the better. I've played every tournament since they became fellowship-based and when time permits, I push to around 40-50 provinces for 5-6 rounds. There is simply no way for me to accurately test these changes with a chapter 1 beta city.

I am VERY concerned by these things in particular:

1. The drastic increase in player vs enemy squad ratios even in the first round for anyone doing a dozen or more provinces.

2. The difficulty formula using expansions (including premium expansions). I've already refrained from placing any more expansions that I've earned and have stopped buying premium expansions! Inno made a change that reduced the impact of premium expansions, but it's still there. It's very simple. Don't punish players for spending diamonds! Why would I ever buy another one?

3. The difficulty formula counting AWs. There would no longer be an incentive to use any AW that doesn't directly aid in completing the tournament or Spire.

4. The notion that these changes could go live without addressing the many concerns that have been raised in this feedback thread. Players have provided alternate difficulty formulas and ratio tables to help address these problems, but I haven't seen any response from Inno about that.

Alternative formula to consider:

Base the tournament difficulty on *mandatory* squad upgrades alone. It's intuitive and would keep difficulty in line with progression. Then let optional squad upgrades improve the player vs enemy ratio. As it is, players have been confused for years about why squad upgrades might hurt them. Now players will still be confused when they learn that squad upgrades would have no impact on the tourney at all. This swings the pendulum too far in the opposite direction.

Regarding diamond sales:

I understand decisions are made based on the long term financial benefit for Inno. I support that. After all, the game only exists so long as there are players willing to buy diamonds. But by including premium expansions in the formula, I fear it will discourage people from spending diamonds on them. (I've already stopped.) Remove expansions from the formula entirely.

Perhaps the unstated intent of the higher difficulty is to reduce the amount of KP we earn each week. Combined with the recent reduction in cost to purchase KP with diamonds, this makes a lot of sense. But if you piss off everyone by taking away what we can already do, we'd sooner quit than spend diamonds on KP that we could previously earn through gameplay.

There are SOO many other ways Inno could earn money which have yet to be explored, many of which don't even affect gameplay. I'd pay diamonds for exclusive avatars. I'd also buy premium culture buildings if they could be upgraded. It would be fun to have an entire city based around a particular chapter's theme, but it's impractical if all those premium buildings are outdated a chapter later. New premium-only skins for some buildings would also be nice. And none of that is pay-to-win.

Beyond that, all the occasional offers that pop up for time boosts, troop instants, artifacts, etc should always be available through an in-game micro-transaction store. Though I personally would still prefer to win these through gameplay, you'd get a lot of people tossing diamonds in for these perks. Do all of that and you'll stop caring so much that some people earn a lot of KP in the tournament. I know many players that would readily buy some bear or phoenix artifacts with their hard-earned or purchased diamonds.

What I like:

Since I fight upwards of 50 provinces for 5-6 rounds, that's as many as 1200 encounters in a week for just one city. That is A LOT of clicking. Reducing it to one encounter per province is very helpful. But this also comes at a cost. Right now, early tournament encounters are the best place to learn how to fight since the losses are minimal. If the tourney, spire & world map encounters are all difficult, players who are learning how to fight will have a huge barrier to entry.

To offset this, I propose introducing a new ability for the barracks to access "training" fights. Let players explore fighting using all possible units in fake random encounters with zero losses. Even as an experienced fighter, I'd find this incredibly valuable for testing troop combinations and practice fights I might otherwise cater.

(Sorry for the length. First post on beta might as well be a long one.)

 

[Marindor]

@Risen Malchiah No problem, we like well worked out feedback here, so thank you for that, and welcome to Beta of course!


On the subject of catering being a more viable option to fighting, I noticed there's still some misconception. Compared to the "old" setup, we roughly cut the catering costs in half when compared to the fighting option, to make catering a more reasonable alternative. Of course, with the new difficulty balancing, when provinces get harder, the catering costs will also be higher. I think this part was interpreted as if provinces got half as expensive one on one, but we have to consider the difference in difficulty setup here. It's not as if the difficulty changed only for fighting and catering was meant to remain at its old values. It's all connected, but when comparing fighting with catering, catering got about half as cheap in comparison as before. Hopefully this helps to clarify that point.

 

[spennyit]

@Risen Malchiah No problem, we like well worked out feedback here, so thank you for that, and welcome to Beta of course!


On the subject of catering being a more viable option to fighting, I noticed there's still some misconception. Compared to the "old" setup, we roughly cut the catering costs in half when compared to the fighting option, to make catering a more reasonable alternative. Of course, with the new difficulty balancing, when provinces get harder, the catering costs will also be higher. I think this part was interpreted as if provinces got half as expensive one on one, but we have to consider the difference in difficulty setup here. It's not as if the difficulty changed only for fighting and catering was meant to remain at its old values. It's all connected, but when comparing fighting with catering, catering got about half as cheap in comparison as before. Hopefully this helps to clarify that point.

This seems like doubling the price before discouting at 50%. Maybe I am still missing the point :-(

 

[PaNonymeB]

@Risen Malchiah No problem, we like well worked out feedback here, so thank you for that, and welcome to Beta of course!


On the subject of catering being a more viable option to fighting, I noticed there's still some misconception. Compared to the "old" setup, we roughly cut the catering costs in half when compared to the fighting option, to make catering a more reasonable alternative. Of course, with the new difficulty balancing, when provinces get harder, the catering costs will also be higher. I think this part was interpreted as if provinces got half as expensive one on one, but we have to consider the difference in difficulty setup here. It's not as if the difficulty changed only for fighting and catering was meant to remain at its old values. It's all connected, but when comparing fighting with catering, catering got about half as cheap in comparison as before. Hopefully this helps to clarify that point.

And that's why I made a comparison of catering costs/squad size ratio, and it turned out that

T1 catering costs had been roughly divided by 3, T2 by 4, T3 by 5 and orc costs had been doubled. And for mana, coins and supplies it's ×infinity as there were no cost before
With this week's changes we're closer to /2 for all, but still not there.

So, in addition to halving catering costs, you decided to completely change the balance of goods asked in tournaments, now asking for much more orcs, mana, coins and supplies and less goods (especially T3.) Why ? You didn't give any reason for the change in the announcement.
Plus, you made catering costs much more random than before. Reduction of number of encounters indeed contributed to this increased randomness, but for some unknown reason you decided that now encounters would ask for some random selection of goods instead of always some goods of each tier and some orcs. This change hasn't even been announced.
So @Marindor, what motivated these changes ?

 

[edeba]

Compared to the "old" setup, we roughly cut the catering costs in half when compared to the fighting option, to make catering a more reasonable alternative.

This seems like doubling the price before discouting at 50%. Maybe I am still missing the point :-(

The truth comes out, but to avoid misunderstanding should have just said squad size was increased to the point the catering now seems like a reasonable alternative.

There was absolutely no cut here and to have worded it to suggest so was deceptive and dishonest.

 

[Pauly7]

Of course, with the new difficulty balancing, when provinces get harder, the catering costs will also be higher. I think this part was interpreted as if provinces got half as expensive one on one, but we have to consider the difference in difficulty setup here.

That makes sense, but the original quote (I'm not going to look for it, word for word), was that the costs of catering would be virtually halved. I don't remember ever seeing even the implication that the costs would be halved as a ratio compared to the new fighting costs, which will be four times as expensive as the original, therefore the catering costs would, in fact, be doubled.

No need for a response on my account, my focus is not the increasing difficulty. I'm only concerned with difficulties person to person being too great and ineffectual AWs being in the equation... Just had to say something though.

 

[DeletedUser3289]

Please quit the cat and mouse game Marindor. The game doesn’t irritate me per say, than the dishonesty/ misleading wordings.
(from mountain hall output to your current statement)
Is it too difficult to be clear and precise.

 

[Lovec Krys]

So, in addition to halving catering costs, you decided to completely change the balance of goods asked in tournaments, now asking for much more orcs, mana, coins and supplies and less goods (especially T3.) Why ? You didn't give any reason for the change in the announcement.

Motivation is easy. By adding more decaying or limited goods, they can restrict players more then with just T1-3 and at the same time lowering T1-3 amount allows them to say that they have lowered negotiating costs.
So while for some very low provinces this makes negotiating easier, their goal is to prevent advanced players from negotiating when they can no longer fight - coins/tools/orcs/mana prices are in those provinces as insane as is the enemy squad size, so you would loose your coins/tools/orcs/mana very fast.

 

[edeba]

The difficulty curve needs to be less steep and the increased cost from AW is too steep as well.

What I see as a problem is now there are free diamonds from the spire and they are kind of in competition with paid purchases, only kind of because some things are so over priced, without the diamond boost from rewards the purchase would not happen.

So, why not give an option for extra diamond purchase deals that can only be made from certain levels in the spire. So, I suggest a 2x2 one week expiring building that gives 50% attack and health that has a declining price with how far you go in the spire, so 500 diamonds at high halls, 400 diamonds at laboratory and 300 diamonds at the top, and you can purchase all 3. There could also be a spell package, 5xPoP, 5xEE, 3xMM, 2xIM, 3xPF 3xCC with the same prices, 500 at high halls, 400 at laboratory and 300 diamonds at the top.

 

[edeba]

I just took a look at the spire on my live server and 8 groups made gold. That's 200 players getting the 275 diamonds. The tournament and spire are completely integrated and there's been a bunch of really dumb processing that just alienates the players.

My idea for consumable, desirable prizes, with an option in the price range of what you get from the spire is a far better way to deal with all of these free diamonds instead of hammering players into extinction, as in the case of my FS losing a very good players because of this.

My idea of going up by 8% in difficulty per levels and 2% per province is also a much better idea. It still ramps up difficulty, but doesn't endorse this nonsense that high end players should have their tournament scores slaughtered by 70%. I've been playing the tournament competitively since day one and what I proposed is much more difficult and I think competitive players would spend spire diamonds and then some on the type of consumables I've suggested to compete.

The slaughter to what AW levels give should also be changed. With every AW levels counting, there should not be any cut to what they give as with the 31-35 levels.

Why not test that on beta, give everyone a 2x2 50% health and attack at the beginning of a tournament that must be placed within say 24 hours, make the suggested reductions to ramping up the difficulty and see how players do and how the feedback goes. Can also do a week without it.

 

[DeletedUser1953]

Actually when I saw this claim I thought that average catering costs per squad size would be halved. So then, I looked at catering costs reported by two players in beta and live for a whole tournament with similar total squad size, and here were the results before this week's changes :
https://beta.forum.elvenar.com/index.php?threads/tournament-changes-post-release.15204/post-88487
So T1 catering costs had been roughly divided by 3, T2 by 4, T3 by 5 and orc costs had been doubled. And for mana, coins and supplies it's ×infinity as there were no cost before
With this week's changes we're closer to /2 for all, but still not there.

You do not compare with the same squad size but the same situation : 2 cities at era X with the same AWs.
Even in this case, it depends on the city, for example, on my live city with 450+ AW level, max premium ext, end of tech tree, the cathering cost will explode surely ^^

 

[ErestorX]

Please quit the cat and mouse game Marindor. The game doesn’t irritate me per say, than the dishonesty/ misleading wordings.

Since mathematical or game related arguments did not help, I would like to support that with a different kind of argument. The first Inno game I ever played was grepolis. Too much pressure to be online as often as possible but apart from that I liked it. I started Elvenar because of a 10 Euro vulture Inno sent me - I had never heard about it before, but since my experience with Inno was positive, I tried it and liked it as well. I have to admit I stopped paying Inno for the pleasure of playing after I wasn't allowed to undo the optional troop research when that one started to increase my losses in tournament.

I might quit the game or play it for some other reason than before when this update that punishes me for putting more KP in wonders and having placed all expansions comes live. But even if I quit after trying to get as far as possible in the new tournament a few times, I might play a new Inno game if a vulture arrives in the future - over all I had a lot of fun playing elvenar and maybe it is time to quit anyway.

But the kind of blatant lies you are telling us here @Marindor (always more benefits of adding wonder levels or placing expansions) ensures that I won't. If I should receive a vulture in the future with Innos name on it, I will throw it away in disgust - remembering that Inno is not a respectable company anymore. Please make sure this feedback reaches the person who is responsible that you have to state that you reached your balancing goals although you didn't even try!

 

[PaNonymeB]

You do not compare with the same squad size but the same situation : 2 cities at era X with the same AWs.
Even in this case, it depends on the city, for example, on my live city with 450+ AW level, max premium ext, end of tech tree, the cathering cost will explode surely ^^

No. Actually I looked at two independent reports, one made by a chapter 15 city last March on live (long before tournament changes came to Beta), and another from a chapter 12 city on Beta. The chapter 15 city had higher base SS but reported total costs for several numbers of provinces. So I was able to pick the number of provinces so that the total SS is similar to the total SS for the Beta city. So, I compared with the same squad size.

 

[Ashrem]

but on the other hand you want to take acquired rewards from high* end players and not give them anything in return, only that they smile, keep playing as if nothing happened and be happy?

Sorry, I misread that earlier. You are correct, I don't think high end players need any compensation for no longer being able to easily accumulate thousands of relics, spells, fragments and KP with very little effort beyond a tolerance for boring repetition. Especially since all it ever did was cause people to complain there aren't enough things to use them on.

 

[Jackluyt]

1. I have various cities which are tailored to fighting with strong Wonders and lots of crafted Vallorian Valor and Grounds of Orc Strategists - but these cities still produce good amounts of goods. In my smaller cities which used to fight all the way to the 26th province every week, I find that I need to start catering at about province #13 - 15.
It is simply not possible to make the massive numbers of troops to match the enemy in provinces above that, after round one - despite having 13 maxed Armories in that city (mid chapter VI)!

I think this is overkill - like many changes we see from the game designers.
I do agree with most of the changes and congratulate them on their new ideas - it is now a joy and a pleasure to go click click click and tournament over for the day!
But really, one needs to be able to fight a little deeper than the current change allows, IMHO. Otherwise what is the point of building Military Wonders up to level 30 if you only use them in the first half of the Tournament?

2. Because there is a greater variation of enemy, one hesitates to use Enlightened Light Range and Mage Magnifier buildings - because at this time one does not know on a Tuesday if they won't get used to full advantage that week, if the wrong kinds of enemy predominate.
Perhaps it is time to consider scrapping these and replacing them with a five-day-expiring single building that increases the fire-power of ALL units? Something nice to add to the Spire!

 

[DeletedUser332]

Speaking as someone who's regularly been a top Tournament player from the start, I feel that Tournaments were long overdue for a rebalancing. I like all the KP and rune shards I'm getting every week as much as the next person who's getting them, but I'm well past the point where I'm able to convince myself that the old Tournament system is engaging gameplay worthy of the rewards. Spending half an hour each round doing nothing but clicking over 2,000 times to get through all of my provinces has turned into nothing more than mindless busywork. I've actually grown to prefer the Spire to the old Tournament setup, as (minus the timers to unlock the gates) I can complete the whole thing in less time than it takes to complete a single round in the Tournament, and I have to actually pay attention to what the enemies are when selecting my units since there's no pattern to it.

I can't really comment on whether or not these changes are the best way to do it, but I can definitely comment that I think these changes are overall an improvement. They affect everyone so it's not really putting me specifically at a disadvantage, and above all else, I won't have to spend at least two hours a week doing nothing but clicking on encounters anymore. The time savings are what's really important to me!