Feedback: Changelog 04/13/2016

[Perwyn]

Instead of messing around with existing adventures that are working (if it works don't fix it) why not just come up with some new ones in those same difficulty ranges?

I agree with Alice, it's so very sad that every time somebody finds something that makes completing an adventure easy and shares it on the forums, BB pounces and has to change it. Or in the case of Island of the Pirates make it very hard to get anymore. Who's getting hurt by someone being able to easily complete an adventure anyway? What revenues are lost? What advantage is gained over other players in a game where you're not playing against other players in the first place?

In the case of being able to use a few nukes to finish DB and get a witch tower, well OK, I can see that. But then again, there should be somebody on BB's staff who's job it is to play the game all day and go "what happens if I do this?" It's called testing. (Please don't get me started about the test server!)

I've known coders in my past professional life who wrote a bunch of code, fired it up and if it didn't crash figured it worked. Then they'd take it live and cause an abysmal mess and someone, usually me, would have to come in behind it, clean up the mess, and fix the bad code. This seems to be how BB has operated for years now. Where I worked, we documented all these occurrences and honed our staff down to people who actually were competent at their jobs. End of problems or at least a major reduction in ones that are preventable by good programming methods and habits, which includes extensive testing prior to release.

I've got to give credit where credit's due and say I was pleasantly surprised when the expansion upgrade went as smoothly as it did. I was bracing myself for a wild ride with that one, and it went very well overall. It's the small stuff that is wearing people down around here. And the small stuff is easily minimized by <1>giving it the same "weight" as the big stuff, <2>by using proper testing methods and <3> by not fixing what isn't broken. ~Finis~

[TinyJohn]

Adventure: Defence areas are removed for boss camps on The Nords, Invasion of the Nords, Surprise Attacks and Arctic Explosion.

Vikings are aggressive and they don't let anyone waltz across their camps, leaders included. Please put back the defence areas of boss camps.

[Koshko]

My advice is to play all the Black Knights you can now before they inevitably nerf it to be as completely worthless as the other epics.

[Pteris]

It seems to me that there has been a marked decrease in the amount of and number of participants in these Forum discussions... Is it that people just don't care, feel that their input is ignored, have observed that information sharing is being utilized for nefarious purposes by BB, all of the above; or perhaps something else?

At any rate I personally feel that it's a shame when anyone in our community feels like they cannot have open discussions for fear of censorship (including self-censorship), or misappropriation of their information and ideas. Such an environment is liable to "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs!"

And I, for one, am growing increasing unhappy with: the way things seem to be turning out for all of the above posts and excellent reasons given; with the impacts on lower level players; with an arcane support system that automatically assumes problems are fixed; with the lack of direct in-game two-way support communications; and with the lack of proper testing of Game Updates that introduce even more bugs for all of us to suffer with!

If BB continues to discourage new players; continues to increase the burden on a player's ability to level; and spoils the chances of actually having fun playing this game including all of the content like adventures, expeditions, scenarios, etc. -- the end result will be an inescapable and foregone conclusion towards a self-fulfilling prophesy of deliberate sabotage...


P.S. Whoever designed Treasure of Knowledge (ToK) adventure should be locked in a room and forced to complete 1,000 of them before letting them out or anywhere near the design platform again! Please do not spoil enjoyable aspects of game content in a similar fashion (there is a real difference between challenging and suffering through) with the next Game Updates...

[Perwyn]

It seems to me that there has been a marked decrease in the amount of and number of participants in these Forum discussions... Is it that people just don't care, feel that their input is ignored, have observed that information sharing is being utilized for nefarious purposes by BB, all of the above; or perhaps something else?

Maybe it's because the game has been continually dumbed down so much over the years most new players juss cain't reed noh moe.

P.S. Whoever designed Treasure of Knowledge (ToK) adventure should be locked in a room and forced to complete 1,000 of them before letting them out or anywhere near the design platform again! Please do not spoil enjoyable aspects of game content in a similar fashion (there is a real difference between challenging and suffering through) with the next Game Updates...

LOL.... I've always secretly hoped there was a special "hell" for bad programmers much as you describe.

[Raubhautz]

Consider ToK and it's mandatory use of 'Hulk Smash' troop losses is akin to the BB scheme with Expeditions (sorry, I will never call a pseudo PvE game PvP - see War Commander or Evony as crummy as they are, they are PvP - we do not even have any evidence that we are in fact attacking other players when we do 'vs. Player' Expedetions). BB seems to want players to exhaust resources in a BIG way, so since instead of making fun, strategic aspects to adventures, they take the easy way out, throw in a bunch of new camps with powerful enemies, giving as many of them as possible splash damage (like ALL AB troops seem to have this skil). Looks like this is the direction.

[Perwyn]

Yeah, with both expeditions and Ali Baba, the design element that stands out is the use of bottlenecks to act as governors and slow down play. The strategies that have to be employed in this regard are not "how do I win this battle" but rather, "how do I budget my troops and resources to be able to run at least one Ali Baba a day".

What really hits me about the elite troops and resources (and I find it sadly hilarious) is that now that we only need one weapon per troop we're getting resource drops (platinum ore) in the tens of thousands per adventure. I'm constantly deleting the overages from my star menu cause what am I supposed to do with 660,000 platinum ore plus another 90,000 in my star menu? I don't know who figures this stuff out, but I think they need new batteries for their calculator.

Lemme see if I can think of anything else to veer even further off topic here.......nope, guess that's it.

[Wimpy]

I will be happy to take any items off your hands that are taking up too much room.

[alice007]

I will be happy to take any items off your hands that are taking up too much room.

Same here... because now that Perwyn has mentioned the extra ore.. I am sure BB will one day make it a rare drop, and players like Perwyn will be one of few who will have plenty to even sell it on TO at premium.. I don't mind any of that, as long as the spare one you are deleting, you can send a small portion of it my way

Else, as easy as it might be to get the ore, Please don't suggest even remotely indirectly, to make the game even harder.. Otherwise, i'd very much hate not getting to level 56+ soon enough.. and might even quit despite the $s I already invested in the game.

[Perwyn]

Hmmm....... given the things that we've been talking about over the past couple weeks, maybe I shouldn't have typed that!!! But then again:

YWC 8,000 platinum ore
2nd Thief 6,000 po
3rd thief 8,000 po
ToW 16,000 po
Oil Lamp 20,000 po
Princess 50,000 po

See what I mean? The amounts are so excessive. I guess they're meant to cover the losses for someone who has no idea how to run an adventure, never uses buffs on their production chains and uses skunk buffs on their barracks 24/7.

You simply can't push that much platinum ore (in the form of swords) thru the barracks even running it 24/7 with skunk buffs due to the slow speed of the barracks. And if you're making troops in the ratios needed for these adventures, not all swordsmen, cause they're not the equivalent of recruits, then the need drops further. So who did the math on this? Did they just throw up their hands and say "Aw #$@% it!! Make it huge!"??

I appreciate that they didn't want anybody to run short of ore. Sincerely I do. But I don't run these adventures nearly as hard as some of my friends, I have 650,000 storage and it still continually overflows into star menu when I accept my loot.

Apologies to everyone in advance if BB one day cuts the platinum ore drops severely because of this post. But hey!!! Nothing I'm saying makes these adventures any easier to run lol!!

And Alice...... check your mail.