Guderian40
10-16-2012, 08:49 AM
After following different threats in the forum I thought it could make sense to collect some ideas for improvements here. As I am now able to open a separate threat for that, here you go.
WARNING: Lots of text, extended reading required…
As I mentioned in one of my last posts, MW is the leading war strategy app so far for me, one year ahead of its competitors, but it should be continuously improved and enhanced – and I am strongly uncertain if this might happen.
It is not enough to do some cheap 30 seconds surveys, it is also not enough to hold meetings discussing how to reward players who spend 10,000 $ a month. And it is a funny idea to spend some T-Shirts and do a poetry competition – but it does not enhance the game.
But unfortunately I think GREE will concentrate on new apps (first copying the model of the old ones like CC, MW etc.) and the next upgrades will more or less be bug fixes only. Hope to be proven wrong though.
Here some ideas for improvement, I added some more compared to the last post and ordered it differently. Manyof these ideas were already posted or mentioned somehow, but never as a kind of collection.
Please feel free to add your own ideas (add numbers) and tell the others which you support, dislike or think it’s just crap ;-)
-------------------------
Complexity vs. easy to play and start
Like other games MW was easy to start with, but still demanding, interesting and addictive in the beginning. But after some levels you discover that it is just about adding points for attack and defense, like all the others. I find this quite boring.
1. A wild mixture of unit or class names from WW1, WW2, after war, phantasy. The real history of war and technology have nothing to do with it. But even in reality there exist more than 50.000 units and names if you only count the big powers in the last 100 years and add the prototypes.
2. In the middle of the game you notice, that all is just only an adding and comparison of two figures (A/D). How can a submarine attack infantry and vice versa? An idea is to have specific attack and defense rates agains Inf, Ground, Air and Sea (GREE was working in this way by adding “strong against...”, ok, but not sufficient.) So a submarine works only against sea units and can only attacked by some of them and some air forces. Compare early war strategy games like Panzer General. That’s the most crucial point for me to make the game kind of “strategic”!
3. Another idea is to have country specific units like the Sherman tank for the US – with individual attack and def. values against enemy Inf. Ground, Air and Sea.
-------------------------
No social interactions
GREE is advertising on their homepage with bringing the world together. But apart from so-called alleys (which number most of us even hold low in the beginning of the game) and visiting their bases (pocket money, irrelevant from level 5 onwards), there is no social interaction in the game. I think this is better solved in Global war (which is apart from that much more boring), where you can gain gifts to your (small and active) army members and have a chat room between them. This would also provide some financial benefits for GREE as there is a motivation amongst players to buy units to get gifts.
4. Improve social interactions: small personal armies, chats, gifts for members, INTERACTION!
-------------------------
Punishing for level up – exp. points
This is common to almost all app strategy games I saw so far: If you do a lot of missions or fights (which should be the central and for me most exciting thing in a war game) you get “punished” by experience points and fast leveling up. So most players (apart from the very heavy gold players) are sooner or later camping, idling and building up a massive economy. This has nothing to do with strategy. How to solve this? Difficult, just two quick ideas:
5. You could also give exp. points for new buildings, upgrading buildings or camping per day
6. You could increase the no. of points for leveling up (they did that for the higher levels, same as Global war) or give optional exp. points (like the money) after doing missions.
--------------------------
A “War” Game
It makes no sense to raid or even attack in the medium to higher levels. Even if you win, you will lose more units (and gain too much exp. in the lower levels) than you win money, enemy units or battle points. It is not worth it. But what are you doing then – collecting nice virtual pictures of phantasy units?
7. Make battling and raiding more rewarding, more money, more battle points, more enemy units, more fun – less obligatory exp. points
-------------------------
8. The Boss…
There should be the same chances to get the loot from the boss event for low and high levels independent of your current tier. It should be even simpler to get it in the higher levels, also for light and non-gold players.
9. The Boss loot
I agree with some others who mentioned the “inflation” of the loots for the boss and other events over the time. That leads to an imbalance of the game and should be stopped.
-----------------------
Free players vs. gold players
Also this is common in games like MW, but some have solved it in a better way or are at least trying to do so. As a free or even light gold player it does not make sense to play past level 100-150 even with full economic power. No solution, but I saw some good ideas in this forum which even take into account the financial interest of GREE, some of them:
10. Limit of gold units to each player (e.g. 70%)
11. Not only levels, but also A/D values, iph among others (combination) should be taken into account when choosing the rival lists – so new classes can be defined
12. You can attack all players above your levels, but only few lower than your own if not attacked
13. No. of attacks and raids to inferior enemies could be restricted, so there are no “sudden desserts” any more…
----------------------
Other points
14. The “nation balance” in the game does not work. It only makes sense to play Russia or the Union Jack in the long term or even from the beginning. To play the US or Iran is never ever a benefit, Ground forces and Infantry (Germany, China) have much lower values, even the ones bought with valor are inferior now. And GREE is serving the high players with more planes and ships anyway.
15. Your vault should be filled up automatically when earning money till you reach the limit. It does not really make sense to do that manually, does it?
16. Inventory – get a clear structure
Just order the different units according to their attack or def. strengths (or gold, indestructables first) – even better if we could see which units were brought to battle (I know, difficult because of the “strong against”)
17. Decorations – give them sense
I visited at least 1.000 friendly or enemy bases – haven’t found any of them yet. Why? Just because they are of no use. Even the girls do not spend 8 gold for a red ugly tree. A possible solution would be to give building which are surrounded by a fence a 1% plus on defense, by sand sacks +2%, by concrete walls +3% and by a gate (bought by gold) by +4 %. Anyway, give them some sense…
18. Defense building – make them a real benefit
Up to now they do not make any difference. There defense values should be at least 5-10 times higher. Even the gold defense buildings make no difference. But it is not worth raiding anyway at that levels.
I wanted to stop before reaching 20 – so I do not mention topics like Support, Bugs, “Magic” box events, silly “Boosts” (some of them are by far too high, unbalancing the game even more, some are not working…) I shut up now.
WARNING: Lots of text, extended reading required…
As I mentioned in one of my last posts, MW is the leading war strategy app so far for me, one year ahead of its competitors, but it should be continuously improved and enhanced – and I am strongly uncertain if this might happen.
It is not enough to do some cheap 30 seconds surveys, it is also not enough to hold meetings discussing how to reward players who spend 10,000 $ a month. And it is a funny idea to spend some T-Shirts and do a poetry competition – but it does not enhance the game.
But unfortunately I think GREE will concentrate on new apps (first copying the model of the old ones like CC, MW etc.) and the next upgrades will more or less be bug fixes only. Hope to be proven wrong though.
Here some ideas for improvement, I added some more compared to the last post and ordered it differently. Manyof these ideas were already posted or mentioned somehow, but never as a kind of collection.
Please feel free to add your own ideas (add numbers) and tell the others which you support, dislike or think it’s just crap ;-)
-------------------------
Complexity vs. easy to play and start
Like other games MW was easy to start with, but still demanding, interesting and addictive in the beginning. But after some levels you discover that it is just about adding points for attack and defense, like all the others. I find this quite boring.
1. A wild mixture of unit or class names from WW1, WW2, after war, phantasy. The real history of war and technology have nothing to do with it. But even in reality there exist more than 50.000 units and names if you only count the big powers in the last 100 years and add the prototypes.
2. In the middle of the game you notice, that all is just only an adding and comparison of two figures (A/D). How can a submarine attack infantry and vice versa? An idea is to have specific attack and defense rates agains Inf, Ground, Air and Sea (GREE was working in this way by adding “strong against...”, ok, but not sufficient.) So a submarine works only against sea units and can only attacked by some of them and some air forces. Compare early war strategy games like Panzer General. That’s the most crucial point for me to make the game kind of “strategic”!
3. Another idea is to have country specific units like the Sherman tank for the US – with individual attack and def. values against enemy Inf. Ground, Air and Sea.
-------------------------
No social interactions
GREE is advertising on their homepage with bringing the world together. But apart from so-called alleys (which number most of us even hold low in the beginning of the game) and visiting their bases (pocket money, irrelevant from level 5 onwards), there is no social interaction in the game. I think this is better solved in Global war (which is apart from that much more boring), where you can gain gifts to your (small and active) army members and have a chat room between them. This would also provide some financial benefits for GREE as there is a motivation amongst players to buy units to get gifts.
4. Improve social interactions: small personal armies, chats, gifts for members, INTERACTION!
-------------------------
Punishing for level up – exp. points
This is common to almost all app strategy games I saw so far: If you do a lot of missions or fights (which should be the central and for me most exciting thing in a war game) you get “punished” by experience points and fast leveling up. So most players (apart from the very heavy gold players) are sooner or later camping, idling and building up a massive economy. This has nothing to do with strategy. How to solve this? Difficult, just two quick ideas:
5. You could also give exp. points for new buildings, upgrading buildings or camping per day
6. You could increase the no. of points for leveling up (they did that for the higher levels, same as Global war) or give optional exp. points (like the money) after doing missions.
--------------------------
A “War” Game
It makes no sense to raid or even attack in the medium to higher levels. Even if you win, you will lose more units (and gain too much exp. in the lower levels) than you win money, enemy units or battle points. It is not worth it. But what are you doing then – collecting nice virtual pictures of phantasy units?
7. Make battling and raiding more rewarding, more money, more battle points, more enemy units, more fun – less obligatory exp. points
-------------------------
8. The Boss…
There should be the same chances to get the loot from the boss event for low and high levels independent of your current tier. It should be even simpler to get it in the higher levels, also for light and non-gold players.
9. The Boss loot
I agree with some others who mentioned the “inflation” of the loots for the boss and other events over the time. That leads to an imbalance of the game and should be stopped.
-----------------------
Free players vs. gold players
Also this is common in games like MW, but some have solved it in a better way or are at least trying to do so. As a free or even light gold player it does not make sense to play past level 100-150 even with full economic power. No solution, but I saw some good ideas in this forum which even take into account the financial interest of GREE, some of them:
10. Limit of gold units to each player (e.g. 70%)
11. Not only levels, but also A/D values, iph among others (combination) should be taken into account when choosing the rival lists – so new classes can be defined
12. You can attack all players above your levels, but only few lower than your own if not attacked
13. No. of attacks and raids to inferior enemies could be restricted, so there are no “sudden desserts” any more…
----------------------
Other points
14. The “nation balance” in the game does not work. It only makes sense to play Russia or the Union Jack in the long term or even from the beginning. To play the US or Iran is never ever a benefit, Ground forces and Infantry (Germany, China) have much lower values, even the ones bought with valor are inferior now. And GREE is serving the high players with more planes and ships anyway.
15. Your vault should be filled up automatically when earning money till you reach the limit. It does not really make sense to do that manually, does it?
16. Inventory – get a clear structure
Just order the different units according to their attack or def. strengths (or gold, indestructables first) – even better if we could see which units were brought to battle (I know, difficult because of the “strong against”)
17. Decorations – give them sense
I visited at least 1.000 friendly or enemy bases – haven’t found any of them yet. Why? Just because they are of no use. Even the girls do not spend 8 gold for a red ugly tree. A possible solution would be to give building which are surrounded by a fence a 1% plus on defense, by sand sacks +2%, by concrete walls +3% and by a gate (bought by gold) by +4 %. Anyway, give them some sense…
18. Defense building – make them a real benefit
Up to now they do not make any difference. There defense values should be at least 5-10 times higher. Even the gold defense buildings make no difference. But it is not worth raiding anyway at that levels.
I wanted to stop before reaching 20 – so I do not mention topics like Support, Bugs, “Magic” box events, silly “Boosts” (some of them are by far too high, unbalancing the game even more, some are not working…) I shut up now.