Dear Gree,
By now I hope you fully realize your mistake in executing this new update, I myself had a very frustrating war weekend. I do believe you will be hard pressed in finding a lot of people who really consider this an actual improvement. But please bear with me on this post cause I do want to give some ideas on how you may actually improve the situation, which all things considered might not even be so difficult to do. This is going to be a lengthy post though.
First of all, I want to clearly state why for me personally this update is a complete failure. In my 9 months of enjoying myself in this game, yes all you oldies i'm very fresh in the game, I have seen maybe a maximum amount of 10 strong weapons or armor being released and I do take the weekly items in account. Until now this wasn't a big deal cause with gems or lots of luck in a box event you could get your one desirable strong item for killing those monsters effectively. I do admit that all this time I wondered why you could stockpile so much gear when the stats were so weak compared to units. Units or building a strong army was off course the foundation of the game, the stronger the army, the stronger you will become.
Now I do think that implementing an extra use for gear was a good idea, but needless to say your implementation could hardly be more dissapointing. In 9 months I managed to build an account with 175million attack giving me decent chances in war, but in 9 months I hardly ever had a chance of building a decent stockpile on gear. Which with the new update leaves me in quite a nasty situation. With the new update you have 2 stats that are basicly decided by your gear, army equipment and hero strength. So the balance of the game has entirely shifted, units are no longer the foundation of the game, gear is. BUT you have never given people a fair chance of getting gear, especially newer people. Which leaves the situation as such, 175million attack but hardly any gear loses against any old player who competed in infinity sword event. I have no chance competing against over 45k army equipment, NO CHANCE AT ALL!
Now as I said in the beginning I do have some ideas to improve the current situation. Make it a bit more logical, compared to the old system as it were. So here goes.
First of all: Make one stat created by units and ONE stat created by gear and make your battle calculation on those. With this renewed battle calculation make the outcome of the battle for 70-80 percent decided by your units stats. After all, for all these years this was the FOUNDATION of your game. You can't just switch the playing field and expect your customers to just keep on playing.
Secondly: If you want to implement a more important role for gear, make sure everyone has a chance of actually getting gear that is worth mentioning. I'm not sure if you realise but the gear you can get from vouchers or crafting in general is complete rubbish, it needs at least a factor 10-20 increase to be worth using for most items.
Following the gear, if crafting is so important I do expect you to release much more ways of getting chest or actually a way of obtaining certain materials. I think of buying in shop with gold, having some sort of workshop where you can let some material be created over time, much possibilities but at least SOMETHING.
Thirdly: Even with crafting there is still the issue of no decent way to actually get good gear on any interesting method. Vouchers are nice and all but are slow to get and building gear like this will simply take ages and isn't very competitive. But for me personally you already have in the game what you need to create a good method of obtaining gear, namely TRIALS.
As you did with units, you can do the same with gear. They are there for everyone, the more active you are the more benefit you can get from them. And they can give a competitive way for new and old players to increase their gear strength efficiently. Just give any player an option to get gear or units when starting a trial. And please make the gear at least worth getting not like with crafting. To make guild event and related vouchers more worthwhile though, attach bonuses to them. Faster material creation, faster crafting, more chance of improved crafting results, possibilities are virtually endless.
To conclude I do hope you will make some changes fast cause I'm afraid that otherwise you will lose a whole lot more then players, you will lose income from those who spend. Cause really, why spend much on a game that flips over the way it works at random anyway.
Hopefull to see some improvements very quickly, and I sincerely hope you do realize now that you need the change the way you "create" new ideas. Something in your game development team is seriously wrong.
Kind regards,
Saint-BEL