Kefa
03-02-2015, 12:06 PM
Player Notes: Week Ending 28 Feb, 2015
Well, this has been an eventful week, hasn't it? I'm really hoping things settle down soon, back into a normal groove. Since November we have been tossed to and fro on a wild ride of shifting ground with game parameters changing entirely, then changing back, new game-changing units and buildings in the store, and then the... well, I'll talk about that thing later. But, of course, this is war, and what is supposed to be stable about war, right?
EVENTS:
World Domination: “Classic”
As far as the event itself goes, everything seemed to work pretty well. Points seemed to vary allot more than we are used to, but it was nice to have a war with less math involved in selecting targets again. I think overall the points scored were higher than in the past (meaning total points, not points per hit), or, at least, they sure were in my team's division. A few surprises popped up when some low level players' stats suddenly jumped by billions between the beginning and end of some battles, and I'm sure some players were tempted to throw their phones against the wall.
I can't tell you how nice it would be for the Faction Leader – who is trying to make decisions for the team, call battle orders, do his LTQ hits, etc, and just even play his/her game along with everyone else – if we could make buying walls easier! Wow, just, wow. Month after month we deal with this, and month after month we beg for a change. Just please, please, please, make it so we can scroll down to wall level 15 and press “buy” - bulk choices would make it even better. I challenge you, go in and open an actual game, try and get your personal epic boss kills done before the deadline, get your FLTQ hits done before the deadline, and then build 50 level 15 walls before the WD event starts. Trust me, no one on the dev team would feel this is the right way to do it if you experienced it under the pressure of actual gameplay.
Frontline:
For me, a mid-week Frontline event was actually a nice change, but 3 days was too long.
-I and several other players experienced an almost impossible time logging in for this event, especially when switching between games on the same device. On my iPhone 6 there were whole days when I simply couldn't log in at all and had to play only on my iPad.
-The event still experiences allot of lag when your whole team is trying to deploy 200 deploys each as fast as they can all at the same time. Allot of battles ended with many players left with deploys stuck in the “Deploys Pending” box.
-Thirty-minute wars are better than 60-minute wars, and probably the right formula for this event. 60-minute wars are 50-55 minutes of doing nothing.
FLTQ/LTQ:
My past comments on these things remain. I'm not kidding, everyone is sick to death of these for only one reason – there is zero gap between the end of one and the beginning of the next. Everyone loves a good LTQ or especially FLTQ when the rewards are fitting to the required effort, but running them back to back to back to back has (for real, guys, seriously) ruined the fun of the event. When it was one per cycle it was something to look forward to. Now that it's constant it's just another droning. Plus, the difficulty is out of proportion with the reward. I know there are people with +50 and even higher energy regen per minute, but they really are the top 0.2% of players, and even +50 can't finish a master goal chain. It's really discouraging to work hard for +8 energy (+11 total) and have that be nowhere near enough to finish a prestige LTQ chain. I imagine anyone starting the game today who isn't already connected with some top players looks at this game as a base building game and doesn't bother with any events.
Lockbox:
Same story, different box. Prizes weren't great, so as for me, I didn't bother trying much with this event.
Raid Boss:
The forum speaks on this one. I graphed the boss health and compared to previous runnings of this event and found that the slope of the boss health as you work up the levels is now fairly linear – and I really, really like that fact. I think it's really good that it takes more than one player to defeat a level 60 boss. If it were me, I would take it even further, and make it a straight linear progression from level 5 through level 100, then a second, slightly steeper, linear progression from 105 through 150. However, I really think the peak of the graph is too high. The boss 150 health should have come down 20%, not up 5%, and everything in between be based on that. No, a top 500 team should not be able to finish RB masters, but really, a top 150 team should be able to, if their whole team participates, don't you think?
The game is only fun if a player believes they can actually accomplish something significant.
Wow, that seems like all those events couldn't have happened in the week from 2/21 - 2/28, but they sure did!
Well, this brings us to the big issue... and I honestly hate to even talk about it at all, but I would be quite remiss if I don't.
THE "GLITCH"
First of all, Gree made a big mistake. Actually, they made several mistakes, and each mistake compounded the others. It's really wrong to call it "The Glitch", since it really was several errors, which compounded each other. But to try and put the whole experience into a rational perspective, I'm going to put the emphasis on the mistakes made by Gree:
Firstly, a major, game-changing update was released on a Friday, right before the game's flagship event, and not long before all the company's employees who communicate with players go home for the weekend. Had it been released on Monday after WD, the affects would have been lessened, and the company's response could have been faster. (I could mention, had it been more thoroughly beta tested by actual players, the issue may never have made it to the public in the first place, at least not in the devastating scale we experienced).
Secondly, the issue that allowed some players to purchase rank-restricted units from other players' inventories before they have achieved that rank (which, I hate to say, I mentioned in last weeks' outstanding issues before the release) was exponentially highlighted by the release of some new, very strong cash units. It wasn't so noticeable before since the only units previously available were some quite expensive valor units, but now that new ranks were added and new cash units made available, this outstanding issue simply exploded since some players were now able to blow up their stats through a loophole in the code.
Thirdly, the price in the system for the sea unit was apparently off by 1 decimal place, making them cost just 1/10th of the apparently intended price, which allowed the same people to buy 10x more of them than they would have been able to had it been correct.
Fourthly, the reduced price allowed people to recycle the units for more cash than they paid – a perpetual cash machine – and build up a significant stockpile of valor in the process. (by the way, this could be prevented entirely if the recycle feature were simply based on a formula that pays back a percentage of the items' purchase price instead of using a hard-coded figure) In fact, some people did this to such an extreme that it exposed another un-resolved issue: the 32-bit number restriction thingy on Android. This is going to be devastating to the game if it's not fixed in every possible area, by the way.
Those stacked mistakes caused a great deal of havoc and greatly upset the balance of the playing field, to the point that a top 500 player who has been playing for 6 months could instantly now be strong enough to become untouchable by even many players on the top team who have been playing since the beginning.
The Player Responsibility: Gree made mistakes, big ones, and some peoples' response to the errors made things even worse. Sadly, this chain of events created an environment where the players turned against each other on a personal level. Gree made the mistakes, and Gree took action to correct the mistakes. The mistakes hurt some players, and the correction hurt other players. But even more sad, the conversations are still going on regarding us vs. them, to the point that now one person has even made it into a platform vs. platform class issue and compared other players' responses with racism and racial casting. I say it's sad because the issue is not iOS versus Android, privilege versus oppression, or even righteous versus cheaters – the real issue is that bad code was released that created an unfair playing field, and the timing was so poor that it allowed an entire WD event to occur before the company could even recognize the problem, much less respond. That is where all the focus should stay, and as a player I would love to see a plan of action described to prevent such a thing from happening in the future.
New Features:
Level Cap increase from 300 to 350: I'm hoping this will help some people to be able to score better points in WD. With the allies and number of units capped, though, I don't really see the benefit of leveling up, unless they also increase the allies and number of units brought to battle.
Player Base Land Expansion: Doesn't work yet
Vault Capacity Increase: Honestly, it's irrelevant. Players who are afraid to have more cash on hand than what fits in their vault are going to be held back from doing much in the area of cash until they realize it's not that bad after all to be over vault.
New Ranks, and subsequent new units are available. The high ranks are not easily reached and require a very significant effort, but the units you can buy when you get there are significant enough to make your game untouchable to anyone who hasn't achieved those ranks. Some people aren't going to like not being able to beat people who have made these ranks. I think it's great, though, because the game has finally come to a place where ranking up actually benefits the player instead of punishes the player. Anyone can rank up; all it takes is a little understanding of how to maximize your BP and allot of diligence in getting it done.
Building Levels increased to 20: Apparently applies to cash buildings and the new gold bonus buildings, but neither to existing buildings nor unit buildings. Be extra careful with this one since that 32-bit issue still exists. Don't upgrade any cash buildings past the point where a single collection will yield over 2.1B, or you'll get some negative results.
New PvE prizes: New, very nice prizes are out for the standard PvE missions, even a +1 energy unit. I think this is great and gives players something worth doing; However, since there are also back to back to back to back to back LTQ/FLTQ events going on, which also use energy, we are perpetually forced to choose whether to do the limited time quests or the standard quests.
OUTSTANDING ISSUES:
Were any of the previously reported bugs from 5.0 and on back addressed in the latest release?
Missing Splash Screen: Like last week's splash screen about the deprecation of soldier equipment, this week's splash screen about the prize for reaching level 350 by March 31st often doesn't load properly. Most times when you open the game it tries to come up but fails, the screen stays grayed, and you have to tap somewhere without knowing what you're tapping to clear it. This has happened several times in the past, including with the splash screen regarding the re-release of the old Limited Edition Buildings. Please fix this going forward, it's very frustrating – fix it so the splash screen loads properly and can be closed with the red X.
Commas: We really need commas in the long numbers in game! With the inflation over the last year, and now exponential inflation over the last 2 weeks to both stats and cash, we really need separators to be able to read these numbers more easily. Some of us can't see that tiny screen as well as others, and some separators would be a huge help in determining whether that number is 30 billion, 300 billion or 3 trillion.
And all the same issues mentioned in the prior Player Notes posting are unaddressed, including:
-"Ghost" targets (not) appearing on NPC maps - targets from other maps that are tappable from the wrong map when moving from map to map.
-Previous PvP Raid and Attack results re-appearing when hitting NPC targets
-Profile Display: Fights won/lost appearing reversed, and crediting reversed, in the profile screen
-Collection icons still not appearing over buildings ready to collect
-Raided icons still not appearing over buildings that have been raided
-Our own buildings still sometimes appearing on NPC maps
Lots of others, but these are the ones that personally affect my game playing the most.
Well, that's about it. I'm really not looking forward to a 7-day long WD, and I hope the company will reconsider the deployment of that event based on all the negative feedback here on the forum. That said, I am looking forward to the next WD event and seeing how all these new changes affect the playing field now that things are settling down.
I want to keep playing. I hope that Gree kind of leaves things alone for a while and lets things settle in. Equipment is gone, leave it gone. New units are here, leave them here. New ranks are here, leave them here and make people work for them. War will be fun again so long as no more giant monkey wrenches are thrown into the gears. And please, for goodness sake, remove the LTQ/FLTQ events back to one of each per cycle. Seriously. Please?
Well, this has been an eventful week, hasn't it? I'm really hoping things settle down soon, back into a normal groove. Since November we have been tossed to and fro on a wild ride of shifting ground with game parameters changing entirely, then changing back, new game-changing units and buildings in the store, and then the... well, I'll talk about that thing later. But, of course, this is war, and what is supposed to be stable about war, right?
EVENTS:
World Domination: “Classic”
As far as the event itself goes, everything seemed to work pretty well. Points seemed to vary allot more than we are used to, but it was nice to have a war with less math involved in selecting targets again. I think overall the points scored were higher than in the past (meaning total points, not points per hit), or, at least, they sure were in my team's division. A few surprises popped up when some low level players' stats suddenly jumped by billions between the beginning and end of some battles, and I'm sure some players were tempted to throw their phones against the wall.
I can't tell you how nice it would be for the Faction Leader – who is trying to make decisions for the team, call battle orders, do his LTQ hits, etc, and just even play his/her game along with everyone else – if we could make buying walls easier! Wow, just, wow. Month after month we deal with this, and month after month we beg for a change. Just please, please, please, make it so we can scroll down to wall level 15 and press “buy” - bulk choices would make it even better. I challenge you, go in and open an actual game, try and get your personal epic boss kills done before the deadline, get your FLTQ hits done before the deadline, and then build 50 level 15 walls before the WD event starts. Trust me, no one on the dev team would feel this is the right way to do it if you experienced it under the pressure of actual gameplay.
Frontline:
For me, a mid-week Frontline event was actually a nice change, but 3 days was too long.
-I and several other players experienced an almost impossible time logging in for this event, especially when switching between games on the same device. On my iPhone 6 there were whole days when I simply couldn't log in at all and had to play only on my iPad.
-The event still experiences allot of lag when your whole team is trying to deploy 200 deploys each as fast as they can all at the same time. Allot of battles ended with many players left with deploys stuck in the “Deploys Pending” box.
-Thirty-minute wars are better than 60-minute wars, and probably the right formula for this event. 60-minute wars are 50-55 minutes of doing nothing.
FLTQ/LTQ:
My past comments on these things remain. I'm not kidding, everyone is sick to death of these for only one reason – there is zero gap between the end of one and the beginning of the next. Everyone loves a good LTQ or especially FLTQ when the rewards are fitting to the required effort, but running them back to back to back to back has (for real, guys, seriously) ruined the fun of the event. When it was one per cycle it was something to look forward to. Now that it's constant it's just another droning. Plus, the difficulty is out of proportion with the reward. I know there are people with +50 and even higher energy regen per minute, but they really are the top 0.2% of players, and even +50 can't finish a master goal chain. It's really discouraging to work hard for +8 energy (+11 total) and have that be nowhere near enough to finish a prestige LTQ chain. I imagine anyone starting the game today who isn't already connected with some top players looks at this game as a base building game and doesn't bother with any events.
Lockbox:
Same story, different box. Prizes weren't great, so as for me, I didn't bother trying much with this event.
Raid Boss:
The forum speaks on this one. I graphed the boss health and compared to previous runnings of this event and found that the slope of the boss health as you work up the levels is now fairly linear – and I really, really like that fact. I think it's really good that it takes more than one player to defeat a level 60 boss. If it were me, I would take it even further, and make it a straight linear progression from level 5 through level 100, then a second, slightly steeper, linear progression from 105 through 150. However, I really think the peak of the graph is too high. The boss 150 health should have come down 20%, not up 5%, and everything in between be based on that. No, a top 500 team should not be able to finish RB masters, but really, a top 150 team should be able to, if their whole team participates, don't you think?
The game is only fun if a player believes they can actually accomplish something significant.
Wow, that seems like all those events couldn't have happened in the week from 2/21 - 2/28, but they sure did!
Well, this brings us to the big issue... and I honestly hate to even talk about it at all, but I would be quite remiss if I don't.
THE "GLITCH"
First of all, Gree made a big mistake. Actually, they made several mistakes, and each mistake compounded the others. It's really wrong to call it "The Glitch", since it really was several errors, which compounded each other. But to try and put the whole experience into a rational perspective, I'm going to put the emphasis on the mistakes made by Gree:
Firstly, a major, game-changing update was released on a Friday, right before the game's flagship event, and not long before all the company's employees who communicate with players go home for the weekend. Had it been released on Monday after WD, the affects would have been lessened, and the company's response could have been faster. (I could mention, had it been more thoroughly beta tested by actual players, the issue may never have made it to the public in the first place, at least not in the devastating scale we experienced).
Secondly, the issue that allowed some players to purchase rank-restricted units from other players' inventories before they have achieved that rank (which, I hate to say, I mentioned in last weeks' outstanding issues before the release) was exponentially highlighted by the release of some new, very strong cash units. It wasn't so noticeable before since the only units previously available were some quite expensive valor units, but now that new ranks were added and new cash units made available, this outstanding issue simply exploded since some players were now able to blow up their stats through a loophole in the code.
Thirdly, the price in the system for the sea unit was apparently off by 1 decimal place, making them cost just 1/10th of the apparently intended price, which allowed the same people to buy 10x more of them than they would have been able to had it been correct.
Fourthly, the reduced price allowed people to recycle the units for more cash than they paid – a perpetual cash machine – and build up a significant stockpile of valor in the process. (by the way, this could be prevented entirely if the recycle feature were simply based on a formula that pays back a percentage of the items' purchase price instead of using a hard-coded figure) In fact, some people did this to such an extreme that it exposed another un-resolved issue: the 32-bit number restriction thingy on Android. This is going to be devastating to the game if it's not fixed in every possible area, by the way.
Those stacked mistakes caused a great deal of havoc and greatly upset the balance of the playing field, to the point that a top 500 player who has been playing for 6 months could instantly now be strong enough to become untouchable by even many players on the top team who have been playing since the beginning.
The Player Responsibility: Gree made mistakes, big ones, and some peoples' response to the errors made things even worse. Sadly, this chain of events created an environment where the players turned against each other on a personal level. Gree made the mistakes, and Gree took action to correct the mistakes. The mistakes hurt some players, and the correction hurt other players. But even more sad, the conversations are still going on regarding us vs. them, to the point that now one person has even made it into a platform vs. platform class issue and compared other players' responses with racism and racial casting. I say it's sad because the issue is not iOS versus Android, privilege versus oppression, or even righteous versus cheaters – the real issue is that bad code was released that created an unfair playing field, and the timing was so poor that it allowed an entire WD event to occur before the company could even recognize the problem, much less respond. That is where all the focus should stay, and as a player I would love to see a plan of action described to prevent such a thing from happening in the future.
New Features:
Level Cap increase from 300 to 350: I'm hoping this will help some people to be able to score better points in WD. With the allies and number of units capped, though, I don't really see the benefit of leveling up, unless they also increase the allies and number of units brought to battle.
Player Base Land Expansion: Doesn't work yet
Vault Capacity Increase: Honestly, it's irrelevant. Players who are afraid to have more cash on hand than what fits in their vault are going to be held back from doing much in the area of cash until they realize it's not that bad after all to be over vault.
New Ranks, and subsequent new units are available. The high ranks are not easily reached and require a very significant effort, but the units you can buy when you get there are significant enough to make your game untouchable to anyone who hasn't achieved those ranks. Some people aren't going to like not being able to beat people who have made these ranks. I think it's great, though, because the game has finally come to a place where ranking up actually benefits the player instead of punishes the player. Anyone can rank up; all it takes is a little understanding of how to maximize your BP and allot of diligence in getting it done.
Building Levels increased to 20: Apparently applies to cash buildings and the new gold bonus buildings, but neither to existing buildings nor unit buildings. Be extra careful with this one since that 32-bit issue still exists. Don't upgrade any cash buildings past the point where a single collection will yield over 2.1B, or you'll get some negative results.
New PvE prizes: New, very nice prizes are out for the standard PvE missions, even a +1 energy unit. I think this is great and gives players something worth doing; However, since there are also back to back to back to back to back LTQ/FLTQ events going on, which also use energy, we are perpetually forced to choose whether to do the limited time quests or the standard quests.
OUTSTANDING ISSUES:
Were any of the previously reported bugs from 5.0 and on back addressed in the latest release?
Missing Splash Screen: Like last week's splash screen about the deprecation of soldier equipment, this week's splash screen about the prize for reaching level 350 by March 31st often doesn't load properly. Most times when you open the game it tries to come up but fails, the screen stays grayed, and you have to tap somewhere without knowing what you're tapping to clear it. This has happened several times in the past, including with the splash screen regarding the re-release of the old Limited Edition Buildings. Please fix this going forward, it's very frustrating – fix it so the splash screen loads properly and can be closed with the red X.
Commas: We really need commas in the long numbers in game! With the inflation over the last year, and now exponential inflation over the last 2 weeks to both stats and cash, we really need separators to be able to read these numbers more easily. Some of us can't see that tiny screen as well as others, and some separators would be a huge help in determining whether that number is 30 billion, 300 billion or 3 trillion.
And all the same issues mentioned in the prior Player Notes posting are unaddressed, including:
-"Ghost" targets (not) appearing on NPC maps - targets from other maps that are tappable from the wrong map when moving from map to map.
-Previous PvP Raid and Attack results re-appearing when hitting NPC targets
-Profile Display: Fights won/lost appearing reversed, and crediting reversed, in the profile screen
-Collection icons still not appearing over buildings ready to collect
-Raided icons still not appearing over buildings that have been raided
-Our own buildings still sometimes appearing on NPC maps
Lots of others, but these are the ones that personally affect my game playing the most.
Well, that's about it. I'm really not looking forward to a 7-day long WD, and I hope the company will reconsider the deployment of that event based on all the negative feedback here on the forum. That said, I am looking forward to the next WD event and seeing how all these new changes affect the playing field now that things are settling down.
I want to keep playing. I hope that Gree kind of leaves things alone for a while and lets things settle in. Equipment is gone, leave it gone. New units are here, leave them here. New ranks are here, leave them here and make people work for them. War will be fun again so long as no more giant monkey wrenches are thrown into the gears. And please, for goodness sake, remove the LTQ/FLTQ events back to one of each per cycle. Seriously. Please?