Feedback - Re-balancing of the old combat system / production / adventures

I had a gut feeling that Invasion of the nords was going to be beat like IOTP on the loot and I sold all mine off for 35-45k and ran one for giggles. That artic mine will now always remind me of you.... because I thought my luck was bad with Invasion of the Nords but it could be worse and I could Raubhautz.

Actually I might just start using that expression to describe any situation that goes sideways. Hey could be worse, could get Raubhautzed. Fear not though I sent this to River for you. We are pretty much besties so I am sure it will be fixed.

"Also River wanted to mention one other thing. On the forums there is a lot of cry babies angry over silly things like removing weapons from the loot etc. However there is one guy that sticks out named Raubhautz and I have to be honest he has a fantastic point. Changing Invasion of the Nords so that it drops less Frozen Manor's or possibly none (I am betting just less) is a REAL jerk move since that adventure can only be bought with gems. This late in the game its important to keep customers happy because its much harder to find new ones and he clearly is someone who spends money on the game (or Invasion of the Nords wouldn't be a problem) so you guys really should make things right for people who spent gems on Invasion of the Nords. People take what they spend their money on seriously and I can also tell you that telling him that Invasion of the Nords still drops 'great' stuff makes it seem like you don't play the game and are just trying to calm him down; because the loot he was showing it dropping was terrible.



Figured we were practically friends with all the tickets now so would give you my unsolicited advise enjoy your weekend."

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Originally Posted by Souldestroyer

This is to the Devs.

Especially if they are level 35 and under. Just wanted to give a heads up from a change that seems to have some unintended consequences hurting lower levels trying to level up.

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Traitors is pretty good loot now and WOTS isnt that bad either which drops old friend still. Give those a try and you will be happier. If you can run some outlaws.

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Originally Posted by AetiusWMD

I love all the new changes, I was semi-retired but these PvP is making me to come back.

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can you tell us what are all those changes you like?
I dont like any of them... so, one of us is confused...
Voting all over the world for the new itens in Guil market section and changing the loot, for exemple in Sleeping Vulcano, is so stupid...
For these days, my explorers, doing a artifact search or rarity search just bring useless stuff...
PVP is nothing what we where expecting...
Just watch the market and you get a ideia of the future of this game....

Removing SA and IOP for map frags from Market. Did you bother to tell anyone about this?

It was all over trade tab in zues for weeks at least. Also on test server for I dunno a month maybe.
I never read change logs so couldnt say since i keep up to date in other ways.

I am very sad reading all of the negative posts on forums. 6 months ago we had bunch of new players coming into guild excited about his game. Short after this the "new combat balance" was announced and the drama, anger and all unanswered questions made us guessing about the future of this game made a terrible shift in the sentiment.

All BB needed to do was to make epic weapons cheaper and faster to make to give us the "carrot" needed to make us want to use them. Instead the devs first lost all credibility by the chain of changes that at the end had to be abandoned because of the absolute negative feedback from players. Second pinch of salt was adjusting loot tables (nerfing our rewards for doing adventures) without providing a clear data as a chance to discuss it.

Two sticks in a row with no carrot and the devs credibility down in the gutter. What the hell is going on? Way to introduce environment of fear and rumors completely turning off any player who even thought about investing some real money in this game. Just sad to watch you guys making one blooper after another and alienating your own player base more and more with silence. Just makes me sad.

Production week should last a week, otherwise call it a Fortnight.

The current ore add and rewards are insufficient.

Trade has been adversely effected.

New players may experience additional challenges from artificially inflated resource cost.

I would like to see the weapons added back to the loot please. Would like the Splash Damage of the MMA to be returned and in proportion with the original damage as before the changes were implemented please.

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Originally Posted by Koshko

I'm possibly waiting two weeks before commenting (much) because the 50% faster weapon stuff. I really can't judge how much I'll need to tinker with my island right now, other than getting in more recyclers. I will say that cutting the time on the carpenter without changing the wheelmaker times makes absolutely no sense, especially considering how few Carts we will need for the Cannon chain now.

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*I picked a random poster to address this matter and throw my 2-cents in as there are many similar comments*

The production changes to smelters and weaponsmiths/forge and etc. are all temporary for approximately 2 weeks.

Having said that, I think this situation is another of UBI/BB intending to give us a bone, but not thinking the whole thing through before doing so. By saying they were increasing our production, all they did was lower the TIME TO COMPLETE the respective cycles for the buildings; the result is that, yes in the same amount of time, we output 2x the output... However, this is NOT the same as a buff where we get a 'free' 2x/3x/4x and etc., but we are using 2x the resources to build the items as well, resulting in a tremendous burden on our coal, iron bars, iron ore, bronze bars and copper ore (titanium bars also if you normally have these buildings awake).

By doing it this way, BB is not really giving us anything, we pay for every resource at full price and in 50% of the time, resulting in many players running low (out) of required resources.

A more acceptable plan would have been to 'buff' our buildings or some equivalent process that actually gave us a bonus resulting in 2x production. I am sure that in all the tools for designing this game, such a thing would not be terribly difficult.

lol - gotta get back and find some iron bars for sale...

:xbow:

As if there was nothing else:

One thing that would have been REALLY nice when letting us move buildings around for 2 weeks, would be to allow the relocation of Storehouses/Improved Storehouses. Having to tear them down and rebuild them is a pain and costly in terms of resources.

I know that the BB excuse had to do with leaving a sector without a (Improved) storehouse wipes out all the other buildings in the sector. (imho - players who are that careless/foolish deserve it)

Please. I am never going to be convinced that there is no programmer available in BB/UBI employee that could code moves/deletes of storehouses to check that it is the last one in the sector; and if so, deny the action and present a friendly message informing the player of the reason.

Just a thought...

He is a few points:

First off i get the point with the complaints that are coming in about PVP.. I agree that the rewards are too small and arent creating a need to do them. The rewards need to be adjusted and better thought out. Like add grout to the list or something worth going after.

Second off Fairy Tales are still easy to do and people need to stop complaining about losing a few more troops as I Do one FT a day just as I did before the change so to say you cant do fairy tales anymore is crazy.. Learn to use a sim and stop taking the easy way out. BTW This loot is good.

Third thing is can someone please tell me what in the world you guys are thinking about the rest of the adv loot.. what format and I hope you used one that made you give out loot that is less than the required goods to do a adv. I know for a fact that some of these loots are a crime to take in after doing a adv. I understand you want weapons out ok kool.. But give us some to work with other than 200 copper ore or 250 Iron ore: What are we too do with that junk.. or worse yet Fish food or meat depos.. thats just insane...

Overall I support the changes but you guys really do need to fix the Loot Balance if weapons are out Fine.. put something in the loot to make Advs worth doing because right now and this is a Fact only Advs worth doing is Tailors and thats it anything else is a crime to do. Oh and Whirlwinds for example a CoOp you guys pushed so hard for us to do earlier this year loot is so bad that it dont cover 1/3 of the loses.. Come on for real.. Thats just crazy

Agreed the co ops seem to have been hit really hard. You have to take into consideration that they are already unpopular due to the fact 1 player can go MIA and jam the entire system up. Make the reward worth the effort, as they are a better mechanic for the game than the endless LS selling as companionship.

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Originally Posted by Mmsown

thanks for the support omega. I did read patch notes... specifics were suspiciously absent.

First of all, it was not mentioned in the patch notes AT ALL. There was a link to the Dev's diary for more info on PVP. NO MENTION that you had to read through Dev's Diary for changes to EXISTING adventures.

Secondly, you had to scroll way down past the PVP info (which I had no interest in) before finding this:
Epic Raid unit Rebalancing
Some of the units used in the Epic Raid adventures were rebalanced.
Hitpoints and Attack damage were changed, some units can deal out Splash Damage.
Also, the amount of XP for defeated units was adjusted in some cases.

Every player I know refers to the "tailor" adventures as fairy tale. My mistake in not knowing they were actually called "epic raid". No mention of which adventures, which enemies, or what "splash damage" would entail.

If you feel this is "very clearly stated", then you and I have totally different versions of "clear".

Again, thanks for your support.

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Fairy tales are not considered epics. The epics are SE, BK, DB, and RB. I didn't know the FTs had been changed too!

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Originally Posted by Raubhautz

*I picked a random poster to address this matter and throw my 2-cents in as there are many similar comments*By saying they were increasing our production, all they did was lower the TIME TO COMPLETE the respective cycles for the buildings;

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that IS increasing production

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the result is that, yes in the same amount of time, we output 2x the output... However, this is NOT the same as a buff where we get a 'free' 2x/3x/4x and etc., but we are using 2x the resources to build the items as well,

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that means when you do buff them your buff is that much more effective

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resulting in a tremendous burden on our coal, iron bars, iron ore, bronze bars and copper ore (titanium bars also if you normally have these buildings awake).

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so buff the raw material production or sleep half your BB buffed production buildings

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A more acceptable plan would have been to 'buff' our buildings or some equivalent process that actually gave us a bonus resulting in 2x production. I am sure that in all the tools for designing this game, such a thing would not be terribly difficult.

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if you can't understand that the temporary BB buff we got isn't quite literally the BEST buff we have ever had then there is nothing we can do for you

edit: also the BB buff was annouced a couple weeks BEFORE maintenance so you had plenty of oppurtunity to start stockpiling on resources then, it's only your fault that you didn't keep on top of the upcoming changes.

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Originally Posted by popknotsonu

I would like to see the weapons added back to the loot please. Would like the Splash Damage of the MMA to be returned and in proportion with the original damage as before the changes were implemented please.

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MMA's have not changed at all and I did confirm that to be the case (also haven't heard of any bugs regarding the MMA)

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Originally Posted by MourningCloak

Fairy tales are not considered epics. The epics are SE, BK, DB, and RB. I didn't know the FTs had been changed too!

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The merchant tab called "Epic items" is almost exclusively fairytale related stuff. Yes when mousing over the adventures it states fairytale not epic however since the merchant tab does say epic and they have been out long enough for you to know that, I really don't see any reasonable confusion here.

Something that would probably help players see what they can expect would be to publish the items and quantity ranges that could be expected in the adventures. cempire.org had been doing so, but their tables do not reflect the current offerings. A nice example is as follows:

http://cempire.org/images/f/f2/Nords2_loot.PNG

nice, what adventure is that with the FM or is it the old Nords 2?

Raub really only complained about getting the deep shafting from Invasion of the nords. Which seemed like a really reasonable complaint to me, and I'm probably one of the harshest critics of the whiners.
He definitely had read patch notes too. You can see from his posts he was trying to illustrate to others what the changes did.

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Originally Posted by Moonlime

nice, what adventure is that with the FM or is it the old Nords 2?

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...precisely what it is; the old Nord's 2 as it is affectionately known. Be awful nice if BB gave us more of a clue of what we can expect from the new and improved adventures/loot... especially if we are expected to cough up gems.

Just finished another adventure and again received more settlers as loot than I lost while running it, which I need to put into my star because otherwise I'm instantly at max population. My island was balanced so that I could run 2-3 adventures a week and have just enough population/weapons to replace them (now with all the fishies I have, I could probably bump that to 5-6 adventures a week if I wanted). From time to time I would receive extra settlers and use some buffs to run an extra adventure. Now I'm just collecting settlers in my star (they can attend the three village schools that I'm not using). Granted, it is just a minor nuisance to have more clutter in my star, but it would be nice to be able to trade them or in some other way make use of them (soylent green is people).

In the meantime, any suggestions of a good adventure (where the guides still work) worth doing to burn a bunch of recruits?

guides work. It's the guides for the fairytales that need updating.

I'm with you Gwalben. I would like a list of adventures that were not affected by the recent restructure. I read somewhere that all fairy tale, plus any with "bosses" were changed, is that right?

Very strange. Doing DP and sent general to attact 2 camps. First an interception then the target camp. Heard attack sounds and the target camp showed being attacked. After a bit the dust stopped and the attack sounded again, more dust. It stopped again then attacked the thrid time with dust. Then the color bar showed on the first camp. Battle over then attack on second camp. Results fine, but graphics are terrible.

Edit: Attack on Bone Church started over 7 times before finishing. This would be a big problem if blocks were involved.

I had all kinds of problems running an adv yesterday. Transferring generals keep building camps, generals attack camps and get stuck in endless loops. I hope maintenance fixed the issue, otherwise this will be a pain.

fairytale adventures have now become next to impossible. i am done spending money on this game. i have spent a ton over the past year. now i will just go on to chat with friends and do some of the routine. eventually i will get bored like many others and we will all be gone. the loot is a joke. you charge 1495 gems which is real money to me since i have to buy them for invasion of the nords and now all i get as loot is a decoration!!! your kidding right. you must think we are idiots.

Cash cows Emmo, not idiots:P Moooooooooooo!

Uh, guys and gals: There is no way I am the first to submit a ticket on this problem, but it has exacerbated itself since the incorporation of this expedition 'feature'. However, it is getting worse and is no longer cute.

On adventures, when 'transferring' generals from one location to another, there may be horrid delays in a visual confirmation of anything happening; the general may take down his tent more than one time (percent counter going to 0%), the general may stop half way to his location and disappear... only to reappear later at either his starting location or at his final destination.

Now, when attacking, similar things are happening: attacking generals appear to start their attack and start marching in on the target only to disappear... yes, again either to reappear at his starting position as if nothing happened OR suddenly appear attacking the target.

Some blocking generals (and generals involved in 1st wave attacks) will complete their mission, start the march home, then turn around and go back to attack the camp they just got beaten by!?

Well, this problem is costing me troops. Troops I did not need to lose and not for my error. I lost 121 Elite soldiers, 60 Soldiers and 123 Recruits in the last adventure that did not need to be lost but for this nonsense. Naturally, BB will not offer anything for compensation regardless that it was in their coding...

Fix this stuff, will you? It seems that you all spend MUCH more time on 'features' most players never wanted, and you spend little time fixing what is already broken. These are not funny. BB approach is that of not taking the players (also known as customers in some parts of the world) seriously. More than anything else we want a game that works.

Just a suggestion, which is not the first of its kind: Fix what is broken, leave the rest alone until problems that exist are resolved. And, yes, a ticket has been submitted.

:xbow:

You made the steel weapons a little too fast. It should have been 18 minutes instead of 17 minutes and 20 seconds. Now it's going to be impossible to actually balance the system. Either you are going to producing excess steel bars that are now otherwise useless, or you will run at small negative unbuffed for the bars.

buff and buy the 2 recyclers during the Christmas event :)

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Originally Posted by Koshko

You made the steel weapons a little too fast. It should have been 18 minutes instead of 17 minutes and 20 seconds. Now it's going to be impossible to actually balance the system. Either you are going to producing excess steel bars that are now otherwise useless, or you will run at small negative unbuffed for the bars.

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Sleep your steel smelter every so often or use them for making infantry, now they aren't useless are they?

Funky generals. I hit two camps in one go. After finishing the 2nd camp the general instead of coming back to his garrison... went on going somewhere north of the map. Just, taking a stroll... I don't even dare blocking anymore... I knew something was up when I saw a rubber duck in a garrison of one of the new generals...

I know on test people reported very weird generals behavior. Could some interns at BB take a look at it? Because more and more post are surfacing up about stuff the generals do.

Interns?? :)

Despite the weirdness, I have only had a problem with one block, and I don't think that was the bugginess but rather lag.

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Originally Posted by Wimpy

Interns?? :)

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rofl

Did BB anywhere address the issue with Invasion of the Nords or are they just emulating the old German Chancellor Kohl, who was famous for sitting problems out till people get tired of talking about them?

Re-balancing of the odds to get a Frozen Manor in the Invasion of the Nords was not mentioned at all even in the patch notes. Not only that but when I purchased my gems they also had not announced the change of weapons as part of the loot. I am seriously considering calling my credit company and complaining of a miss-representation of what I was purchasing as the gems were purchased with the idea in mind that I could use them for premium time and for premium adventures to receive the loot the way it was represented at the time of my purchase. This is fraud in my mind and my credit company will back me for a full refund of the money I spent for the gems as they were represented at the time of purchase! And yes I am that mad about it that I am n=more than willing to go to court over it!

The changes were announced, but no detailed info was provided. Saying "some units in some adventures were re-balanced" doesn't give any real info. It could be much more useful to tell players to be careful with specific adventures because the guides are no longer valid. This should be in BOLD CAPTIONS on first page after the patch so nobody would miss it. Yes, players are annoying (from dev point of view) but all customers are. Providing solid info and lots of it is really saving countless whines later in the future.

Besides BK and RB are also "epic adventures" and they were not changed. Should have given a list of adventures that are changed instead of this "broad" layout. I would assume as programmers you guys know the value of detailed, accurate data... Just because there was a broad and wild discussion over the changes on test forums doesn't mean all players know what's going on.

i don't know, the game is changed so that its not so much "auto" now have to pay attention. I'm really bad at the pvp but trying to rise to the challenge. It would be kinda fun to know who you are taking the island from, and it's kind of cool to get loot even when you lose, or is that a glitch to be taken away? I'm not quitting because of all of this change, but boy did my isle change, now every day i have to adjust something, lol. i really wish we could have some more levels or some kind of way to add another island maybe? thanks for trying to make a positive change anyway. As you say it is a free game if you don't want to spend cash on it.

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Originally Posted by Plumz

Did you consider class action suit? :)

The changes were announced, but no detailed info was provided. Saying "some units in some adventures were re-balanced" doesn't give any real info. It could be much more useful to tell players to be careful with specific adventures because the guides are no longer valid. This should be in BOLD CAPTIONS on first page after the patch so nobody would miss it. Yes, players are annoying (from dev point of view) but all customers are. Providing solid info and lots of it is really saving countless whines later in the future.

Besides BK and RB are also "epic adventures" and they were not changed. Should have given a list of adventures that are changed instead of this "broad" layout. I would assume as programmers you guys know the value of detailed, accurate data... Just because there was a broad and wild discussion over the changes on test forums doesn't mean all players know what's going on.

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Good points. However, BB will NEVER address this one as they have no leg to stand on, and the fact that they never really address specifics in any case.