Question for developers

[Warmonger]

Come on now funzio this game has been unplayable for over a month now. It's gone far past the laughable stage. What is the point in playing with no pvp? As your full time fix is taking far too long you need to introduce a temporary fix to stop the loss of hard earned valor units. How about eliminating all unit losses until its fixed? Then we can at least attack again, complete missions and play again properly. Can you not understand that this is taking too long and killing your game????????

[P4TR1C14N]

I must agree on this with Warmonger.

Strange behaviour from developers on this. Seems they want to squeeze and force ppl to pay (which maybe is in reality also happening which might them think to keep it as long as possible like this... money money?)

[Wildfire]

We've heard nothing for so long I'm not sure the developers still regard it as broken.

I and I think many others in the 50-60 levels have been increasingly attacked again the last couple of weeks, to try to figure out what was going on I looked closely at several of the people doing the attacking who appear in my revenge list and was quite surprised at how they had their armies set up. I'm level 69 with 15K defense, these people who attack again and again and again, win or lose are in the level 80-95 bracket, their profiles indicate 15000-20000 successful attacks with at most a tenth of this number of losses. They are not the typical players you see at these level though, here I mean the likes of Agent Orange, JMC etc who post their stats in these forums, these players are only about 15000 attack and defense, give or take 1000 and have low numbers of allies always considerably less than twice their level usually from 150-170. They tend to have 75-100 gold units and lots of the usual valor items but not much else. None seem to have a great economy either, all I've come across are sub 100K. They are literally carrying out hundeds of attacks a day, so have they found a sweet spot in the current pvp equation with these settings as for me the unit losses would be catastrophic with anything like this amount of attacking?

[digitalwalker]

We've heard nothing for so long I'm not sure the developers still regard it as broken.

I and I think many others in the 50-60 levels have been increasingly attacked again the last couple of weeks, to try to figure out what was going on I looked closely at several of the people doing the attacking who appear in my revenge list and was quite surprised at how they had their armies set up. I'm level 69 with 15K defense, these people who attack again and again and again, win or lose are in the level 80-95 bracket, their profiles indicate 15000-20000 successful attacks with at most a tenth of this number of losses. They are not the typical players you see at these level though, here I mean the likes of Agent Orange, JMC etc who post their stats in these forums, these players are only about 15000 attack and defense, give or take 1000 and have low numbers of allies always considerably less than twice their level usually from 150-170. They tend to have 75-100 gold units and lots of the usual valor items but not much else. None seem to have a great economy either, all I've come across are sub 100K. They are literally carrying out hundeds of attacks a day, so have they found a sweet spot in the current pvp equation with these settings as for me the unit losses would be catastrophic with anything like this amount of attacking?

thanks for the info:)

i think the key is that theirs troops are almost filled by "strong against" units and i am convinced that this kind of army brings a huge advantage than normal armies (refer to my thread on strong against units analysis), including suffer less units losses.

i am considering start a new character with only do pvp, and not build economics at all, as i am thinking the amount of cash used to build a strong economics is sufficient enough to build a strong army and then farming cash and valor by pvp, then use gained cash and valor to buy more powerful units and then pvp again and agin. This cycle may be possible to generate and possibly is the case for those players you mentioned.

[Wildfire]

thanks for the info:)

i think the key is that theirs troops are almost filled by "strong against" units and i am convinced that this kind of army brings a huge advantage than normal armies (refer to my thread on strong against units analysis), including suffer less units losses.

i am considering start a new character with only do pvp, and not build economics at all, as i am thinking the amount of cash used to build a strong economics is sufficient enough to build a strong army and then farming cash and valor by pvp, then use gained cash and valor to buy more powerful units and then pvp again and agin. This cycle may be possible to generate and possibly is the case for those players you mentioned.

That might be it getting lower losses than normal would be the key, so maybe a smaller but equally strong army of gold and strong against units will lose a lot less units then a more conventional one. Trouble is it's near impossible to test and those who know justifiably (it is war after all!) wont be saying anything.

[digitalwalker]

That might be it getting lower losses than normal would be the key, so maybe a smaller but equally strong army of gold and strong against units will lose a lot less units then a more conventional one. Trouble is it's near impossible to test and those who know justifiably (it is war after all!) wont be saying anything.

indeed. And my low level account is going to develop in this way, so i will report to forum after i tested.

[nickname]

I wholehearted agree with the OP. This game is 1 week away from deletion for myself. Boring as hell now above lvl 50. I just check in to collect cash like a Pavlovian dog. No attacks coming in or going out. Funzio developers are too busy updating superficial elements instead of making the gameplay great.

Yawn. Time to go.

[Agent Orange]

I'm on the fence on this issue. The game needs a huge overhaul in order to fix the problems it currently has and I'm not so sure it can be fixed given the state it's in now.

PvP missions are pretty much dead, the only one's doing a lot of attacking are those with huge armies and high attack and defense scores. I'm talking about players in the 70,000 to over 100,000 range and there are a few. Basically they are so powerful that they can just go in and wipe out any player below them.

And that is the problem, if you 'fix' the PvP mechanic you open the door to a major blood bath since the only thing that I can see as even a slight deterrent is that attacking some players is not cost effective no matter how powerful you are. I could be wrong but that is what is tempering my attack and defense strategy at the moment.

These players are attacking to scoop up as many valor pts as possible so they can then go out and increase the size of their armies by buying loads of valor units thus creating a rather vicious circle. If vlor units change well then these players are going to continue to get further and further out in front.

As I mentioned in another thread, the only deterrent I see now is to make it difficult for others to attack you and the way to do that is to study their armies to pin point weaknesses. Now the rest of my strategy hinges around the the theory that skill points and unit strengths are actually factored into the game and not just another broken feature. Therefore by targeting air and sea specifically with defensive units that are stronger against those units.

So that leads me to the question, is the games mechanics really that broken or are we missing something such as how the person being attacked is set up?

For example my low level player is testing this exact theory and they are not being attacked. When they are the opponents losses are so high that they don't come back.

Sadly this defensive strategy does make for a boring game but unless you have very deep pockets it's about the only way to keep from being totally over run by higher level players.

Then we have the rivals list, in the lower levels it's working out pretty good in that players seem to be fairly evenly matched but this goes all to heck over a certain level which seems to be above 60 now. At this point everyone gets tossed into the fight so if you've been turtling and not building an army you are now screwed.
Granted you can't fly under the radar forever.

I just wonder what will happen if the devs' do 'fix' the problem with high losses of valor units and then those that get slaughtered because of this suddenly realize that maybe this current situation wasn't as bad as they thought.

But the main problem is that the dev's let the gold players get too far out of hand, heck if I had deep pockets and a forgiving wife I would have done exactly what they did and that is to instantly build a force that was pretty much unbeatable. Problem is I suspect that the game must be even more boring for them now.....

[Wildfire]

PvP missions are pretty much dead, the only one's doing a lot of attacking are those with huge armies and high attack and defense scores. I'm talking about players in the 70,000 to over 100,000 range and there are a few. Basically they are so powerful that they can just go in and wipe out any player below them.

The ones I'm seeing are only around the 15K range and they really are attacking hundeds of times a day, thing is none of them are free players you just can't get to the same balance of allies and attack strength without a fair gold spend. Without the gold you simply wouldn't be strong enough. I wonder do the low ally numbers mostly hide them from you too.

[Agent Orange]

We've heard nothing for so long I'm not sure the developers still regard it as broken.

I and I think many others in the 50-60 levels have been increasingly attacked again the last couple of weeks, to try to figure out what was going on I looked closely at several of the people doing the attacking who appear in my revenge list and was quite surprised at how they had their armies set up. I'm level 69 with 15K defense, these people who attack again and again and again, win or lose are in the level 80-95 bracket, their profiles indicate 15000-20000 successful attacks with at most a tenth of this number of losses. They are not the typical players you see at these level though, here I mean the likes of Agent Orange, JMC etc who post their stats in these forums, these players are only about 15000 attack and defense, give or take 1000 and have low numbers of allies always considerably less than twice their level usually from 150-170. They tend to have 75-100 gold units and lots of the usual valor items but not much else. None seem to have a great economy either, all I've come across are sub 100K. They are literally carrying out hundeds of attacks a day, so have they found a sweet spot in the current pvp equation with these settings as for me the unit losses would be catastrophic with anything like this amount of attacking?

Ah the dreaded valor whores! A clever strategy actually, they go down and pick off a lot of lower level players utilizing the bug in the rivals list which tosses higher level players a lot of weaker ones. Our rivals lists don't always take into account ally count so I can see many lower level players with just a few allies .

No economy because they are based 100% on attack and raiding. If I could see their stats I would suspect they have poured a lot their skill points into attack and why they can win attacks even though their attack score is lower then their victims defense score. I would also bet that the rest went into stamina so they could do a lot of attacking.

Also if they are buying a lot of gold they can keep topping up their stamina for only a 10 gold hit so if they have lots of stamina all ready a 10 gold top up would be a very economical way of doing things.

There is dark side of this and I can't help but suspect a few of the accounts I've seen lately were hacked.....

[Ramshutu]

Speaking as a developer (but not for funzio, I may add), I don't think this is a bug; at least not in the strict sense of the term. If it was a bug it would have been fixed by now. The code here is not an algorithm for cracking 64 bit encryption, and I can't see much to go wrong.

I suspect; that either a bug was fixed, or some change in stats, or interpretation of those stats on purpose in order to resolve some balancing issues, and caused some foreseen consequences. (in geek parlance this is called a 'feature')

The problem here is not that the system is broken, it is the lack of feedback and communicating as to what is going on. At the end of the day, Funzio are not developing a nuclear missile delivery system, subject to all sorts of ITAR restrictions. More feedback with what is going wrong, and what is being done to address the problem can be given without revealing trade secrets.

Without feedback on issues like this, gaming communities (and I have been a member of many) can be made to feel unimportant and make it feel like the company in question is 'the evil empire'. This can lead to frustration which can lead to anger. We all know that Anger leads to hate, and that leads to the dark side of the force.

[Wildfire]

Ah the dreaded valor whores! A clever strategy actually, they go down and pick off a lot of lower level players utilizing the bug in the rivals list which tosses higher level players a lot of weaker ones. Our rivals lists don't always take into account ally count so I can see many lower level players with just a few allies .

No economy because they are based 100% on attack and raiding. If I could see their stats I would suspect they have poured a lot their skill points into attack and why they can win attacks even though their attack score is lower then their victims defense score. I would also bet that the rest went into stamina so they could do a lot of attacking.

Also if they are buying a lot of gold they can keep topping up their stamina for only a 10 gold hit so if they have lots of stamina all ready a 10 gold top up would be a very economical way of doing things.

There is dark side of this and I can't help but suspect a few of the accounts I've seen lately were hacked.....

I think you're right on the mark there, I just checked one out after their routine visit, they've gone up 490 wins in the last 14 hours. The only way to fight so much has to be to use gold to refill the stamina. However, they're attacking me a near 16K defense so they are not just going for soft targets, so you'd think they'd be losing units at a phenomenal rate, best case you'd expect to lose 750-1000 units across 490 attacks and probably a lot more.

Which brings me back to my original thought, there must be a combinations of numbers of units / number of allies / strong against units etc that is working to deliver much lower losses than most of us are seeing. I have noticed a sharp reduction in my losses of expensive units against them by tailoring my defense more in line with digitalwalkers strong against theory, it definitely seems to help. As to how to achieve the same when attacking I've no idea, everytime I think I'm getting somewhere dropping snipers, flametrower soldiers and warthogs rather than expensive units I'll drop a couple of hornets and a cruiser or worse.

[Tramp Stamp]

I'm amazed at the tolerance level of you guys. I must be a masochist because I have no idea why I haven't deleted this game yet.

[youj]

I'm amazed at the tolerance level of you guys. I must be a masochist because I have no idea why I haven't deleted this game yet.

It's not like you are attacking anyone anyways. Why do you want to quit?

[Tramp Stamp]

Game's boring in just about every aspect.

[Ramshutu]

Game's boring in just about every aspect.

I disagree, I giggle every single time i engage an npc or attack a persons avatar and they fall over.

[Tramp Stamp]

I disagree, I giggle every single time i engage an npc or attack a persons avatar and they fall over.

I will say I am highly amused when I attack some chick NPC and hear a masculine "GAAAAHHHH!"

[Hugh Bris]

This isn't a question or a gripe session but more of an observation. I still really enjoy the game and it's been very fun for me. My point that is on topic here has to do with the fact that super-high level characters raid and attack me all the time. This wouldn't be a problem for me but we're talking disparities of 60 to 100 levels above mine. I don't have to "win" the game and I'm definitely not a sore loser but when someone spends $10,000 here they shouldn't be able to get to me until I reach close to their level. You read that correctly - $10,000. It's not like I blame the person (although they hit me two and three times a day) but it would be nice to only have to deal with people within 10 or so levels up or down. I know that allies are a factor too and it's been said brilliantly here about matching poeple of similar strengths. I have lots of patience as I have no clue how difficult a game of this magnitude must be to program. I don't know...just two cents lol.

[Maverick50727]

... They are literally carrying out hundeds of attacks a day, so have they found a sweet spot in the current pvp equation with these settings as for me the unit losses would be catastrophic with anything like this amount of attacking?
Sorry guys I've been busy the last few days and haven't had time to post or read much. My work now blocks Funzio.com on their content/firewall filters (no more reading at lunch or breaks LOL) I apologize in advance for the length of this post. But FWIW, I have some possible points and info that could go along with Wildfire's niche comment. I agree with Wildfire that some people have found this niche as I tried, but in my experience it didn't work for me as I'm playing now as a 100% free player. Most of you guys know how the rival list varies by the level you are at and # allies, but this data may be useful to some.

History:
I'm a free player in the 60's range, When the high loss blood bath started my high end units were all valor instead of high end cash. I lost 1/3 of my attack/def stats in days. Still to date I have not been able to recoup the extreme loses due to the way I had relied on them too heavily and could no longer do profitable valor goals or raids. Having not played as long as others I didn't really know how the rivals list worked to group your rivals. I saw some value in a unrelated post by ShawnBB (you guys really beat him up). He said he didn't seem to see the same losses, but also wasn't doing much attacking. The thing that got my attention was his level and # of allies. In communication with him he was L61 160 Allies (rival range L57-64 and ally range 53-230). I on the other hand L60 403 allies (rival range L57-63 ally range 295-310). I was way above my 300 allies required for my level 60, while he was running almost 50% below his. So he could see people in the same Level range, but with ranges of allies far below mine (my ally range difference varied 15 his range 177). In theory he could attack people in his ranges that were far weaker (bring less units to bear for their level) and was himself taking in less units, thus his losses in theory would also be less than most of us.


I decided to take the handicap of being able to bring less units battle and reduce my stats for better rivals/victims. Starting Feb 1&2, I took a week and did some tests. Here were my findings:
Started L60 403 allies
- My (295-310) ally range didn't change at all until I dropped from 403 and went below the 300 mark (Lv60*5), really marginally change starting around 280. I only went as low as 240 then returned to 450+ allies where I'm at now. During testing I started with a large amount of cash and replaced any lost units I could with identical ones or stronger.

Before (L60 300+ allies)
-Losses 3-5 units per attack
-couldn't make any profit from attacks/raids based on loss values
-highest level player incoming players that ever attacked me was 10-15 levels above me
-people attacking me a mixture of free, low end and medium gold players (average attack/def 15,000-30,000)
-wasn't able to profit on valor missions Attacks/Raids for 1000 valor earned cost me approx 1300-1600 in lost valor units

During testing (L60-62 240-280 allies)
-Losses 1-3 units per attack (drop)
-sometimes made a profit until reached 240
-highest level incoming attacking players increased 20-46 levels above me
-people attacking was more weighted to low end and medium gold players (average attack/def 10,000-60,000)
-I was able to profit on valor missions Attacks/Raids for 1000 valor earned cost me approx 700-800 in lost valor units
-I won more fights when people attacked me, I wish I knew if they were really stronger, but I didn't want to take the chance on attacking them back. For the ones I could see and match in my rivals list, some were indeed stronger than me, but only by 2-3,000 so my strong against units seemed to pay off there.
-I started to win $ for incoming attacks, which I hadn't seen for a while
-made a discovery that there was even a goal for # of allies (I think may of had these in the early levels but I can't swear. I found the goal cycles increasing Attack > Defense > # of Allies > Attack again. I guess I had bulked up my # of allies so much at one time early in the game I guess I wasn't eligible for the ally goal so mine just cycled from A > D > A. Noticed this "new" ally goal after I completed a Def increase, I had a goal for 400 appear, but didn't notice until I was down to 300. I increased allies back to get the goal and it cycled to the Attack goal, then I dropped my allies back down to below 300 for testing. After testing I took it up to 400 again where I was rewarded before then completed the Def goal again, next one was 420 allies, also completed the 450 allies (350K payout). If these have been in the game since the beginning levels, my quick bump of allies may have lost me large amounts in potential payoffs in the Ally goal type !#@$!%)
-since I had completed the higher levels of A/D goals, dropping each ally meant losing power of 4 of my strongest units, thus I found it harder to increase A/D back to make my goals. This also meant I had a harder time making $ to replace my losses.

Conclusion
While this may be profitable to some, disadvantages and losses still out weighed the gains for me. Maybe this niche will work for gold players with their indestructible units, people with larger economies to replace loses or those who have access to stronger cash units. Yes I saw lesser losses!!!, but I also saw lesser returns in goal incomes, so unless you have a stronger economy and the right unit makeup it may or may not work for some. Before my avg 3-5 unit loses included loot, valor, meat shields like amp. troopers and snipers, and occasionally the middle (seals) and higher end units. I drew the line when I had reduced my allies down 240 and to the point where the lesser 1-3 units I was loosing almost always included flamethrowers, seals and subs which had "strong against" bonuses attached. I could have gone lower and gone into my meat shield being my sea units with lower casualty rates (possibly meaning less losses since they have very low casualty rates vs. High (Flamethrowers &Seals) and Medium (Subs), but I didn't want to take the chance on losing cruisers and more valor units as my meat shields. I may revisit when I have a different unit makeup, but at this point I've decided it is better to build my economy and military building upgrades to have better units and be able to replace losses without having to depend on valor as much.

[Agent Orange]

I will say I am highly amused when I attack some chick NPC and hear a masculine "GAAAAHHHH!"

I have to admit that I like it when the rival does a moonwalk.

[Agent Orange]

I'm amazed at the tolerance level of you guys. I must be a masochist because I have no idea why I haven't deleted this game yet.

Marriage does that too you...... whoops did I really say that.....

[Agent Orange]

This isn't a question or a gripe session but more of an observation. I still really enjoy the game and it's been very fun for me. My point that is on topic here has to do with the fact that super-high level characters raid and attack me all the time. This wouldn't be a problem for me but we're talking disparities of 60 to 100 levels above mine. I don't have to "win" the game and I'm definitely not a sore loser but when someone spends $10,000 here they shouldn't be able to get to me until I reach close to their level. You read that correctly - $10,000. It's not like I blame the person (although they hit me two and three times a day) but it would be nice to only have to deal with people within 10 or so levels up or down. I know that allies are a factor too and it's been said brilliantly here about matching poeple of similar strengths. I have lots of patience as I have no clue how difficult a game of this magnitude must be to program. I don't know...just two cents lol.

I feel your pain, yes this is a huge problem. The game got too far out of hand too quickly and now I honestly don't see an easy fix. The whales will continue to attack the lower players on their lists because they are easy targets but the problem is that has to be rather boring since there is no real goal once you get that far.

I do suspect there is a bit of fighting between a few of the really high level players so it may be a contest to see who now has the deeper pockets. But some of the fall out is that in order to really drive their war machines they also need to pick off the lower level players to gain valor so buy valor units. Otherwise I would say they have nothing to do since they have probably bought and leveled up all the buildings they can buy.

So that begs the question, now what?

I don't know, I guess eventually at some point more and more players will fill the upper ranks and that will take some of the heat off those currently getting killed. But the problem still remains once you get up in the higher levels, what the heck do you do?

The weak players are probably trying to tread water so that they don't get killed and those that are hit too often are probably getting fed up and wiping out their bases. Although today I cam across something rather interesting in one empty base players inventory. Steel Cargo Truck, Cannon and Air Cannon plus some units that someone else was questioning the other day in the forums. Granted the one's I saw could be PVM loot.

Anyhow back to the question, I think at this point the game may need to evolve into round 2 for those really high level players who are pretty much unbeatable. I guess Funzio could just leave things the way they are and let lower level players get fed up from being attacked non stop or they could turn their backs on the big gold spenders and corral them all into their own level away from the rest of the soft targets. Either way I can't see an easy solution including a fix of the rival listings and the attack/raid algorithm.

I think the missing link for me is the lack of collaboration in this game even though we have allies and that might be a direction the devs can take to make the game more interesting and to provide more goals for everyone. I've always thought the game has a lot of potential but it feels like it popped out of the oven half baked.

Perhaps some new level where everyone is collaborating together against a common enemy or perhaps a split into teams based on your country.....