If Conquest was too easy and they wanted to make Maul hard for players to get, Kyno, I would suggest another epic confrontation. Like Malak and Gen Sky. No one forced CG to use Conquest as their new way to release powerful characters into the game. They made that decision. We would all have been happy with getting loot and relic mats and r8 stuff (impulse detectors instead of shards? yes please!) instead of a character shard and then there'd be a shiny new event they could release to get all the impulse buying money they wanted.
You keep arguing that Conquest was too easy (I bristle at the notion that it was 'free' as such a statement implies you think my time and the time of other players has no value; I would assume you don't mean to imply that, but that's the way myself and alot of other ppl seem to be reading that) and they wanted ppl to have to, in effect, spend for Maul. Well they never had to release Maul this way. They chose to. Maybe it would have been better to make an epic confrontation, in hindsight. But it seems more like this event is punishing us than it is helping them.
I agree another EC would be great. We have many options, but Conquest was designed for this and to get around the issue of hoarding mats to finish toons like EC releases.
Conquest was designed to be used for character release, so I highly doubt they are going to not do that.
I am one of those people who believe if you are offered something for free, that the time it takes to get it, while a consideration, is not part of the price. In this case, we were going to play the game anyway, and just like the good days where you can get to a high spot in arena without a refresh, I consider that free, as i dont need to input an additional resource.
How could DR be working as intended AND have a bug fixed?
This isn't the type of action/reaction that wins favor.
It was working as intended because Dr doesn’t apply the debuff even if it is worded that way; it didn’t matter how they codbefore the deathmark feat. When they programmed the feat they most likely overlooked this part.
However, as the skill text clearly states that Dr applies the buff, they changed it so players can take what’s written for face value, which is good imo.
If Conquest was too easy and they wanted to make Maul hard for players to get, Kyno, I would suggest another epic confrontation. Like Malak and Gen Sky. No one forced CG to use Conquest as their new way to release powerful characters into the game. They made that decision. We would all have been happy with getting loot and relic mats and r8 stuff (impulse detectors instead of shards? yes please!) instead of a character shard and then there'd be a shiny new event they could release to get all the impulse buying money they wanted.
You keep arguing that Conquest was too easy (I bristle at the notion that it was 'free' as such a statement implies you think my time and the time of other players has no value; I would assume you don't mean to imply that, but that's the way myself and alot of other ppl seem to be reading that) and they wanted ppl to have to, in effect, spend for Maul. Well they never had to release Maul this way. They chose to. Maybe it would have been better to make an epic confrontation, in hindsight. But it seems more like this event is punishing us than it is helping them.
I agree another EC would be great. We have many options, but Conquest was designed for this and to get around the issue of hoarding mats to finish toons like EC releases.
Conquest was designed to be used for character release, so I highly doubt they are going to not do that.
I am one of those people who believe if you are offered something for free, that the time it takes to get it, while a consideration, is not part of the price. In this case, we were going to play the game anyway, and just like the good days where you can get to a high spot in arena without a refresh, I consider that free, as i dont need to input an additional resource.
What is debatable is what is consider ‘playing’. For instance, if sim tickets didn’t exist, i would have quit the game a long time ago, even if playing the battles could be consider ‘playing’. So following the Conquest road is playing, because it’s a fresh battle everytime and not just ‘press auto and watch’. Feats who basically are like a light puzzle are fine too imo. But repeating the same battle over and over just to make me spend energy… please charge me more energy for battles instead but don’t ask me to mindlessly play them again, because i don’t qualify that at quality entertainment.
Kyno Is there any reason that we've not seen any real post from someone at CG about all the concerns with the way conquest currently is?
I am worried about all the people that are going to quit the game because they refuse to give some kind of statement about the current situation.
I imagine that doja or crumb would have to post the statement from who ever gets to make that kind of decision, but I think it would really go a long way to keep players around if they do in fact truly plan to take a long hard look at their latest decisions via conquest.
I imagine that saying, "we are aware of the sentiment, but have no plans to make changes at this time" would be seen as just stoking the fires. Players are going to make the choices they are going to make.
Or they could just make changes to make the player experience better instead of spewing out another round of this grindy, overly time consuming and bugged out game mode? Just an idea though. Then again, why would the devs do something the players want?
Who doesnt love free stuff.
There are some interesting conversations going on, but not about this.
What free stuff? There was zero compensation for the shutdown due to all the bugs when Con7 was first released. The only thing given back is what players spent so it was just like a hard reset. Zero compensation for the shutdown in general.
I’m just confused in general by your comment? Are you saying that the devs refusing to make any changes until Con10 is acceptable? We should just suck lemons because of their stated cadence and do this overly grindy, un fun and insanely time consuming game mode? Also please refrain from that “want vs. need” nonsense because many players NEED to do conquest to unlock Maul to actually make LV worth their investment or for some to keep their R8 material income going.
The devs should’ve taken an extra week to tweak the feats or tweak energy refresh rate or stamina refresh rate. Plenty they could’ve made minor tweaks on to make their monetization goal a reality but also make the grind and time commitment less burdensome on the players
Most comments about not running this version are to revert to Con6 style, which was basically free if you played it that way. Yes I know you were not directly saying that, but most of the desirable changes players are talking about reduce the expenditure, which was seemingly a goal they are going for.
When did I say anything was or was not acceptable? Or anything about lemons?
Please dont try to make something a need by extending someone's choice to go for LV. I didnt open that door, so maybe you shouldn't if you dont want to discuss that further.
We both agree they could have made changes to increase the enjoyment of this mode. I am also disheartened by the fact they do not seem to want to change this set of 3. I hope they will look at future changes to this game mode.
Their have been discussions about other changes to help "offset" the changes made here, similar to what we have already seen, but only time will tell what makes the cut and what doesn't. I would use the term "QoL" but that horse has seen better days, and I am not in the know enough to start any rumors like that.
Con6 was not free. Was it getting them the money they wanted? I’m sure it wasn’t.
I spent 0 crystals unlocking CAT, because the previous conquest model could be completed for free. Yes, lots of people did blow crystals on refreshes - but nobody needed to.
It seems obvious to me that one of the reasons they adapted the model was to make it flat out impossible to earn the max crate without spending crystals.
So this is all your fault!!!’
I found the guy responsible gang!! Let’s get him!!
How could DR be working as intended AND have a bug fixed?
This isn't the type of action/reaction that wins favor.
It was working as intended because Dr doesn’t apply the debuff even if it is worded that way; it didn’t matter how they codbefore the deathmark feat. When they programmed the feat they most likely overlooked this part.
However, as the skill text clearly states that Dr applies the buff, they changed it so players can take what’s written for face value, which is good imo.
If Conquest was too easy and they wanted to make Maul hard for players to get, Kyno, I would suggest another epic confrontation. Like Malak and Gen Sky. No one forced CG to use Conquest as their new way to release powerful characters into the game. They made that decision. We would all have been happy with getting loot and relic mats and r8 stuff (impulse detectors instead of shards? yes please!) instead of a character shard and then there'd be a shiny new event they could release to get all the impulse buying money they wanted.
You keep arguing that Conquest was too easy (I bristle at the notion that it was 'free' as such a statement implies you think my time and the time of other players has no value; I would assume you don't mean to imply that, but that's the way myself and alot of other ppl seem to be reading that) and they wanted ppl to have to, in effect, spend for Maul. Well they never had to release Maul this way. They chose to. Maybe it would have been better to make an epic confrontation, in hindsight. But it seems more like this event is punishing us than it is helping them.
I agree another EC would be great. We have many options, but Conquest was designed for this and to get around the issue of hoarding mats to finish toons like EC releases.
Conquest was designed to be used for character release, so I highly doubt they are going to not do that.
I am one of those people who believe if you are offered something for free, that the time it takes to get it, while a consideration, is not part of the price. In this case, we were going to play the game anyway, and just like the good days where you can get to a high spot in arena without a refresh, I consider that free, as i dont need to input an additional resource.
What is debatable is what is consider ‘playing’. For instance, if sim tickets didn’t exist, i would have quit the game a long time ago, even if playing the battles could be consider ‘playing’. So following the Conquest road is playing, because it’s a fresh battle everytime and not just ‘press auto and watch’. Feats who basically are like a light puzzle are fine too imo. But repeating the same battle over and over just to make me spend energy… please charge me more energy for battles instead but don’t ask me to mindlessly play them again, because i don’t qualify that at quality entertainment.
I believe we have already agreed that this is not an entertaining change. And I agree, I would be ok with the average cost staying the same, but less grinding/repetitive game play.
I loosely consider an time in app (when interacting, not just spinning toons) playing the game. This is a managment game, so many levels of it are not in any actual battle scenario.
The first 6 conquests were very engaging, I used a a lot of different teams, those were actually fun, and I was able to get r8 materials without having to spend of leave my guild. Now I was only able to use 6 or 7 teams max, couldn't get anywhere close to r8 mats, what a joke. Thanks for effectively taking away the only source of r8 mats for a bunch of people. I was trying to finish cat but was unable to due to reduced shards increases amout of stupidy pointless feats. Guess my useless JMK can keep sitting on the bench.
In this case, we were going to play the game anyway, and just like the good days where you can get to a high spot in arena without a refresh, I consider that free, as i dont need to input an additional resource.
Maybe you were going to play it anyway. Maybe I was going to play it anyway. But people can and do quit every week, and there's no entitlement to players. CG has to make the game fun if they want people to play.
Not to mention that a Conquest reward is only "free" if you were going to spend that much time on the game Conquest or no. If conquest requires a much larger time input than you would otherwise invest, then it's not free even though it doesn't require an additional resource. More of the same resource is still an extra cost.
Finally, ECs are not the only possibilities. JKL requires a very large investment without requiring hoarding a specific currency. JKL isn't an Epic Confrontation since it doesn't result in a 5* unlock, supplemented through currency expenditures, but an event that requires JKL level effort, whatever you want to call it, is probably appropriate for Maul, given his power level. Any criticism of the EC style events isn't really relevant, since there are many other possibilities for Maul's release than merely Conquest and EC.
Just release reasonably powerful characters through Conquest and the mode can be fun again without, from CG's perspective, giving away the store.
How could DR be working as intended AND have a bug fixed?
This isn't the type of action/reaction that wins favor.
It was working as intended because Dr doesn’t apply the debuff even if it is worded that way; it didn’t matter how they codbefore the deathmark feat. When they programmed the feat they most likely overlooked this part.
However, as the skill text clearly states that Dr applies the buff, they changed it so players can take what’s written for face value, which is good imo.
If Conquest was too easy and they wanted to make Maul hard for players to get, Kyno, I would suggest another epic confrontation. Like Malak and Gen Sky. No one forced CG to use Conquest as their new way to release powerful characters into the game. They made that decision. We would all have been happy with getting loot and relic mats and r8 stuff (impulse detectors instead of shards? yes please!) instead of a character shard and then there'd be a shiny new event they could release to get all the impulse buying money they wanted.
You keep arguing that Conquest was too easy (I bristle at the notion that it was 'free' as such a statement implies you think my time and the time of other players has no value; I would assume you don't mean to imply that, but that's the way myself and alot of other ppl seem to be reading that) and they wanted ppl to have to, in effect, spend for Maul. Well they never had to release Maul this way. They chose to. Maybe it would have been better to make an epic confrontation, in hindsight. But it seems more like this event is punishing us than it is helping them.
I agree another EC would be great. We have many options, but Conquest was designed for this and to get around the issue of hoarding mats to finish toons like EC releases.
Conquest was designed to be used for character release, so I highly doubt they are going to not do that.
I am one of those people who believe if you are offered something for free, that the time it takes to get it, while a consideration, is not part of the price. In this case, we were going to play the game anyway, and just like the good days where you can get to a high spot in arena without a refresh, I consider that free, as i dont need to input an additional resource.
What is debatable is what is consider ‘playing’. For instance, if sim tickets didn’t exist, i would have quit the game a long time ago, even if playing the battles could be consider ‘playing’. So following the Conquest road is playing, because it’s a fresh battle everytime and not just ‘press auto and watch’. Feats who basically are like a light puzzle are fine too imo. But repeating the same battle over and over just to make me spend energy… please charge me more energy for battles instead but don’t ask me to mindlessly play them again, because i don’t qualify that at quality entertainment.
I believe we have already agreed that this is not an entertaining change. And I agree, I would be ok with the average cost staying the same, but less grinding/repetitive game play.
I loosely consider an time in app (when interacting, not just spinning toons) playing the game. This is a managment game, so many levels of it are not in any actual battle scenario.
If time in game wasn’t worth anything then games like this wouldn’t keep track of that to measure success of their game.
Bottom line is that there’s no reason they couldn’t take these last couple weeks of sentiment and reworked some of the feats to make this less of a chore and second job. We get our fun, they get their money. A win for all but of course that’s not how TopCash or MarkyMark do things around here.
I'm just waiting for the spin job on how "the level of player engagement was even better than we could have anticipated"...
On a serious note, if they spent so much time rebuilding the game on a new platform to make it easier for them to create and adjust content, then you'd think they'd be willing to work a little and make the next conquest less of a steaming pile
They are keeping an eye on the situation, feedback and the data to determine how things will proceed. As we have seen in the past, they do try not to be too reactionary. This is another reason why we are unlikely to see any major changes from the planned set of 3.
Cool, so burnout from such a chore incoming. This last conquest was a failure. It wasn’t fun. I dreaded getting on trying to do the feats. Way too much of a grind and time commitment. Way too repetitive.
Please place your feedback in the appropriate place. All we can do is relay this sentiment and hope Doja can work his magic.
I agree about it not being fun, and hopefully this set is just a data point they use to not go this far in later sets.... only time will tell.
Doja work his magic? Some of the worst decisions since the Sith Raid rewards fiasco have come under Doja. Please do tell of this Doja magic?
Under Doja? I think you dont understand the shape of or his position on the hill, and which way things roll.
I understand quite well. Which is why I immediately question his ability to "work magic" if he had influence at all all these threads he monitors and uses as a way to convey to player sentiment would not seem worthless. But hey we can act like the dude is actually influential for whatever reason you folks want to.
We can act like that, because he does, but that doesn't mean things happen over night, it takes time, ingredients, and a fair bit of knowledge, just like real magic.
Then why is the game in the public relations and playability state that it's in now? Are you saying without him it would be worse? I found that highly doubtful. He is superfluous at this point. He might say the random funny thing or show up in a discord server here and again to placate the beta tester who runs it. But I'm lost at anything substantial he has added. Real magic...LOL.
Just release reasonably powerful characters through Conquest and the mode can be fun again without, from CG's perspective, giving away the store.
Unfortunately it doesnt leave them a place to release higher level characters, which was the plan.
It's still an interesting suggestion.
CAT and Maul are on the same level as JKL, no? He was released outside of CQ, therefore these could as well. I can appreciate the effort at the event, and it was fun, but not any longer. I'd argue, what's the difference if you do it two days or two weeks? To do it in two days you had burn a stack of crystals. Those same people can STILL do it in two days by burning even more crystals, which, i'd imagine they have the money to do. Regardless, it STILL takes them 3-4 conquests to get the end goal of the character regardless of how fast the complete it. I can't imagine the devs care one iota if a whale gets a toon 2 days into conquest 3 or 12 days into. In the end, it still took 3 months on the normal schedule.
As for the changes, who do they punish? Those who don't spend heavy. If you're a whale, you've spent enough to zip through conquest as it is. If not, you've got enough to spend to zip through conquest. If you're not in a super high end guild regularly doing the new rancor, you're now blocked from R8 without flat out spending cash. That is not cool and a great way to drive away the masses.
Feats were less challenging than they were designed to try and make people use resources to level teams they had no other need to. There was more of a challenge before, IMO, to figure out how to do a two sets of battles (normal plus a refresh) with the teams that would be be competitive without burning down stamina too far. Now? Why should a I waste a refresh if i don't have a team to get the feat? Before there was a chance. Now? much less so for a large number of people.
I'm just waiting for the spin job on how "the level of player engagement was even better than we could have anticipated"...
On a serious note, if they spent so much time rebuilding the game on a new platform to make it easier for them to create and adjust content, then you'd think they'd be willing to work a little and make the next conquest less of a steaming pile
They are keeping an eye on the situation, feedback and the data to determine how things will proceed. As we have seen in the past, they do try not to be too reactionary. This is another reason why we are unlikely to see any major changes from the planned set of 3.
Cool, so burnout from such a chore incoming. This last conquest was a failure. It wasn’t fun. I dreaded getting on trying to do the feats. Way too much of a grind and time commitment. Way too repetitive.
Please place your feedback in the appropriate place. All we can do is relay this sentiment and hope Doja can work his magic.
I agree about it not being fun, and hopefully this set is just a data point they use to not go this far in later sets.... only time will tell.
Doja work his magic? Some of the worst decisions since the Sith Raid rewards fiasco have come under Doja. Please do tell of this Doja magic?
Under Doja? I think you dont understand the shape of or his position on the hill, and which way things roll.
I understand quite well. Which is why I immediately question his ability to "work magic" if he had influence at all all these threads he monitors and uses as a way to convey to player sentiment would not seem worthless. But hey we can act like the dude is actually influential for whatever reason you folks want to.
We can act like that, because he does, but that doesn't mean things happen over night, it takes time, ingredients, and a fair bit of knowledge, just like real magic.
Then why is the game in the public relations and playability state that it's in now? Are you saying without him it would be worse? I found that highly doubtful. He is superfluous at this point. He might say the random funny thing or show up in a discord server here and again to placate the beta tester who runs it. But I'm lost at anything substantial he has added. Real magic...LOL.
If you dont believe in real magic, I cant help you.😉
Do you think it's in this state because of thim? If not then yes it would be very different without him.
I feel like they explained themselves quite well, with regards to changes made, and not making the battles themselves any more difficult.
They did, in fact, make battles more difficult. They introduced Overprepared IV, for instance.
They were talking about the overall event, meaning stepping up the difficulty of "all battles", vs the over arching changes they made around the event itself.
I feel like they explained themselves quite well, with regards to changes made, and not making the battles themselves any more difficult.
They did, in fact, make battles more difficult. They introduced Overprepared IV, for instance.
They were talking about the overall event, meaning stepping up the difficulty of "all battles", vs the over arching changes they made around the event itself.
That's a pretty shameful level of semantics dancing on CG's part there.
I feel like they explained themselves quite well, with regards to changes made, and not making the battles themselves any more difficult.
They did, in fact, make battles more difficult. They introduced Overprepared IV, for instance.
They were talking about the overall event, meaning stepping up the difficulty of "all battles", vs the over arching changes they made around the event itself.
That's a pretty shameful level of semantics dancing on CG's part there.
Making changes to the overall game mode, as was being discussed there, vs balancing in the game mode itself, are 2 different things. It's not semantics, its 2 different conversations.
I feel like they explained themselves quite well, with regards to changes made, and not making the battles themselves any more difficult.
They did, in fact, make battles more difficult. They introduced Overprepared IV, for instance.
They were talking about the overall event, meaning stepping up the difficulty of "all battles", vs the over arching changes they made around the event itself.
That's a pretty shameful level of semantics dancing on CG's part there.
Making changes to the overall game mode, as was being discussed there, vs balancing in the game mode itself, are 2 different things. It's not semantics, its 2 different conversations.
“Changes to the overall game mode” or “balancing in the game mode itself”
Sure sounds like a distinction without a difference. Please explain how the hell those two things different? ffs
I feel like they explained themselves quite well, with regards to changes made, and not making the battles themselves any more difficult.
They did, in fact, make battles more difficult. They introduced Overprepared IV, for instance.
They were talking about the overall event, meaning stepping up the difficulty of "all battles", vs the over arching changes they made around the event itself.
That's a pretty shameful level of semantics dancing on CG's part there.
Making changes to the overall game mode, as was being discussed there, vs balancing in the game mode itself, are 2 different things. It's not semantics, its 2 different conversations.
When they announced these changes they said they did it because they wanted more engagement. The only announced changes to the energy cost, in their claim, to increase time spent on conquest. They made no mention of the feats being increased nor did they say that we were getting MORE repetitive and grindy feats, while also having the room for error for the max crate decreased. I would’ve respected them more if they just would’ve been up front about it instead of their usual corporate speak nonsense
I feel like they explained themselves quite well, with regards to changes made, and not making the battles themselves any more difficult.
They did, in fact, make battles more difficult. They introduced Overprepared IV, for instance.
They were talking about the overall event, meaning stepping up the difficulty of "all battles", vs the over arching changes they made around the event itself.
That's a pretty shameful level of semantics dancing on CG's part there.
Making changes to the overall game mode, as was being discussed there, vs balancing in the game mode itself, are 2 different things. It's not semantics, its 2 different conversations.
“Changes to the overall game mode” or “balancing in the game mode itself”
Sure sounds like a distinction without a difference. Please explain how the hell those two things different? ffs
Balance within the game mode involves changes to things like adding new elements such as over prepared IV, and other modifiers, that are not used everywhere, just to make certain battles more difficult. These are applied team/node wise.
The discussion that point came from was about changes to the game mode as a whole. They did not make it more difficult across the board, for example changing the % increase across sectors. This is applied to the whole game mode.
2 very different things. We will see balance changes many times, new teams added and tweaked to get them in line, but that doesnt mean we will see changes to the over all game mode.
“ The first thing we considered was making the battles harder but that would have locked out a number of players from participating and didn’t really address the issue long term. Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters, nodes will now cost more energy to battle and there is a bigger focus on completing a variety of new Feats. “
That’s the wording of the update. No mention of overall battles vs balancing battles, just “Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters”.
“ The first thing we considered was making the battles harder but that would have locked out a number of players from participating and didn’t really address the issue long term. Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters, nodes will now cost more energy to battle and there is a bigger focus on completing a variety of new Feats. “
That’s the wording of the update. No mention of overall battles vs balancing battles, just “Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters”.
Correct which is where my comment was referencing. Then a reply referenced internal elements used for in mode for balancing teams/battles.
I'm just waiting for the spin job on how "the level of player engagement was even better than we could have anticipated"...
On a serious note, if they spent so much time rebuilding the game on a new platform to make it easier for them to create and adjust content, then you'd think they'd be willing to work a little and make the next conquest less of a steaming pile
They are keeping an eye on the situation, feedback and the data to determine how things will proceed. As we have seen in the past, they do try not to be too reactionary. This is another reason why we are unlikely to see any major changes from the planned set of 3.
Not blaming you, but it's interesting how they will move swiftly to nerf anything they think is too generous to the community yet they only keep an eye on things that are clearly damaging their game.
I think CG need to get their priorities straight. They must all have Ferraris by now judging by the way they like to make earning anything ftp incredibly time consuming to entice people to pay their frankly absorbitant prices.
“ The first thing we considered was making the battles harder but that would have locked out a number of players from participating and didn’t really address the issue long term. Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters, nodes will now cost more energy to battle and there is a bigger focus on completing a variety of new Feats. “
That’s the wording of the update. No mention of overall battles vs balancing battles, just “Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters”.
Correct which is where my comment was referencing. Then a reply referenced internal elements used for in mode for balancing teams/battles.
They don’t ever say anything about balancing though. At least not in the Conquest 7 Dev post. Their only mention of the actual battles is the swapping out of Bosses + adding MiniBosses, and the section I quoted saying they wouldn’t increase the difficulty of encounters. They didn’t even mention they’d be changing the possible teams.
Where’s this reply? Is that referring to you in this thread or another Dev post somewhere?
Balance within the game mode involves changes to things like adding new elements such as over prepared IV, and other modifiers, that are not used everywhere, just to make certain battles more difficult. These are applied team/node wise.
The discussion that point came from was about changes to the game mode as a whole. They did not make it more difficult across the board,
With respect, Kyno, and I'm not trying to make things difficult for you, just to clarify my problem with CG's communication, there's a difference between making an individual encounter more difficult and making the entire event more difficult. I know you agree with this as you've been making the distinction yourself.
However if they are going to make more than one battle or encounter more difficult, what language could you possibly use except "We are making (some) encounters more difficult?" If you are not doing that, what language would you use except, "We are not making (any) encounters more difficult." In each case the parenthetical words do not change the core meaning of the sentence, although they limit possible interpretations. (In particular the use of "some" in a sentence that they didn't use would have negated a possible interpretation where "all" battles were increased in difficulty. On the other hand the word "any" really doesn't change or clarify the meaning of the second sentence, the one that they actually used, at all.)
On the other hand, if you were going to increase the difficulty of every battle, that would be an increase to the difficulty of the event as a whole.
You're saying that you interpreted them as saying that they would not increase the difficulty of the event as a whole and/or that at least some encounters would not be increased in difficulty.
But when they say, "Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters, nodes will now cost more energy to battle...," the obvious interpretation to most people is that they aren't increasing the difficulty of **any** encounters. And yet they clearly did. In fact, I lost p1 battles with my BH that I won easily in previous conquests, despite the fact that my BH had improved significantly in the meantime because of the JMK and Executor quests, so I suspect (though I don't have hard data for you) that there were more tweaks to difficulty than just the introduction of Overprepared IV. As you know, simply changing a team's composition can do a great deal to change the difficulty of an encounter, and they obviously tweaked team compositions as well.
The best you can say about this is that they were entirely too careless with the truth. They knew they were changing the difficulties of the encounters. They told us they weren't. Perhaps there are some encounters whose difficulty wasn't changed, but I think really the only thing that anyone could truthfully claim is that they did not implement a Conquest wide flat bonus to all encounters. But that is very different from the meaning of the statement that they actually issued.
And, again, maybe they're just really, really bad at communicating their intent. Just because they said something was untrue while knowing it was untrue doesn't make them evil. You can tell a lie by accident. But what they said was still misleading as all heck. Even if I agreed your interpretation was reasonable (and I am on the fence with that one, despite agreeing context matters), it is certainly UNreasonable to say that people who interpreted that statement as denying that any encounters would be more difficult didn't have good reasons to believe that's what CG said. In fact, that's the plain meaning of what CG said, however you think that meaning might have to be adjusted for context.
In the end, I am not accusing CG of being evil, or having ill intent. I'm accusing them of saying something false without making any assertions at all about whether the falseness was brought about by accident or on purpose.
I don't know what's in CG's minds. I'm not a telepath (or a Jedi). I do know that if what you're trying to say is that you didn't increase EVENT difficulty, you should probably say that, and not that you didn't increase ENCOUNTER difficulty.
This is about wisdom and language skills, rather than good or evil, and telling thousands of fans of the game that they misinterpreted CG's statement really isn't the wise approach. If they're writing things that are widely misinterpreted, the wise thing to do is for someone responsible for communication to jump into the thread and say, "You know what? We got that one wrong. While we still believe that the possible meanings include what we intended, it's obvious that our intent didn't come through clearly at all. We did increase the difficulty of many encounters. You're not hallucinating. We got our communication wrong, and we will, as we do with everything, constantly try to do better in this area."
I'm not trying to demonize CG, but you're constantly trying to assert in this thread that they haven't made a mistake. But they did make a mistake, even if (as you seem to think) it was a mistake of vagueness that leads to misinterpretations.
The pushback you're getting would be greatly reduced if instead of trying to say, "THERE WAS NO MISTAKE!" CG simply acknowledged that was bad wording.
No one can get better without admitting that they fell short in the first place. The habit of denying that anything is wrong (and it does seem to be a habit to me) in the first place leads naturally to pessimism that things will get better.
Why not try to see communication as a two way street where if the wrong message is communicated it's at least partly the fault of the writer and not all on the reader?
Personally, I think talking about "encounter" difficulty rather than "event" difficulty pretty much precludes any possibility of any increase in difficulty at all for even a single encounter. But hey, I'm open to the idea that there was a different intent and all that. And I can try to see things from CG's point of view in the future. But if CG isn't willing to do the same thing, then that's going to rub me the wrong way, and a lot of other readers/players as well.
“ The first thing we considered was making the battles harder but that would have locked out a number of players from participating and didn’t really address the issue long term. Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters, nodes will now cost more energy to battle and there is a bigger focus on completing a variety of new Feats. “
That’s the wording of the update. No mention of overall battles vs balancing battles, just “Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters”.
Correct which is where my comment was referencing. Then a reply referenced internal elements used for in mode for balancing teams/battles.
They don’t ever say anything about balancing though. At least not in the Conquest 7 Dev post. Their only mention of the actual battles is the swapping out of Bosses + adding MiniBosses, and the section I quoted saying they wouldn’t increase the difficulty of encounters. They didn’t even mention they’d be changing the possible teams.
Where’s this reply? Is that referring to you in this thread or another Dev post somewhere?
You take a quote out of context, and would like me to fill in the context for you? Ok, I guess.
First the entire post that quote comes from is about the event over all, but they also lead into that quote with this, again discussing the game mode:
In addition to updating the experience, this Conquest also seeks to address some of the issues we have seen in past events. We designed Conquest as an event that players would engage over the course of 2 weeks but we found that most players could rush through the event in the first few days and then went back to clean up a few feats afterwards. That was the extent of their engagement for the entire 2 weeks and there was little reason to continue playing this mode.
They also start the post with talking about regular changes, which are the internal adjustments to the game mode, changing teams, feats, and other elements within the mode.
Take it how you want, but changes to the layout of the game mode vs difficulty, is a different conversation than the addition of a particular modifier in some battles/sections.
The simple fact that most people (at least the ones I've spoken to) understood CG's difficulty claim to mean that the encounters weren't going to be harder is proof that they didn't construct their point very well in their announcement. Instead of leaving their moderators to argue over semantics, which only enrages the vocal portion of the community further, maybe a manager of the community could chime in and clarify. All he has to say is, "Hey, guys. There's seems to be a lot of different takes on this sentence. This is what I meant. Sorry to those that misconstrued. I will try to be more explicit in the future."
“ The first thing we considered was making the battles harder but that would have locked out a number of players from participating and didn’t really address the issue long term. Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters, nodes will now cost more energy to battle and there is a bigger focus on completing a variety of new Feats. “
That’s the wording of the update. No mention of overall battles vs balancing battles, just “Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters”.
Correct which is where my comment was referencing. Then a reply referenced internal elements used for in mode for balancing teams/battles.
They don’t ever say anything about balancing though. At least not in the Conquest 7 Dev post. Their only mention of the actual battles is the swapping out of Bosses + adding MiniBosses, and the section I quoted saying they wouldn’t increase the difficulty of encounters. They didn’t even mention they’d be changing the possible teams.
Where’s this reply? Is that referring to you in this thread or another Dev post somewhere?
You take a quote out of context, and would like me to fill in the context for you? Ok, I guess.
First the entire post that quote comes from is about the event over all, but they also lead into that quote with this, again discussing the game mode:
In addition to updating the experience, this Conquest also seeks to address some of the issues we have seen in past events. We designed Conquest as an event that players would engage over the course of 2 weeks but we found that most players could rush through the event in the first few days and then went back to clean up a few feats afterwards. That was the extent of their engagement for the entire 2 weeks and there was little reason to continue playing this mode.
They also start the post with talking about regular changes, which are the internal adjustments to the game mode, changing teams, feats, and other elements within the mode.
Take it how you want, but changes to the layout of the game mode vs difficulty, is a different conversation than the addition of a particular modifier in some battles/sections.
I looked in the context of the Dev Post. They didn’t mention the actual Battles anywhere in it besides where I quoted. They wanted to increase the length of time players spent on Conquest, “considered” increasing battle difficulty (or “difficulty of the encounters”), and “instead” increased energy costs and Feat difficulty.
Replies
I agree another EC would be great. We have many options, but Conquest was designed for this and to get around the issue of hoarding mats to finish toons like EC releases.
Conquest was designed to be used for character release, so I highly doubt they are going to not do that.
I am one of those people who believe if you are offered something for free, that the time it takes to get it, while a consideration, is not part of the price. In this case, we were going to play the game anyway, and just like the good days where you can get to a high spot in arena without a refresh, I consider that free, as i dont need to input an additional resource.
It was working as intended because Dr doesn’t apply the debuff even if it is worded that way; it didn’t matter how they codbefore the deathmark feat. When they programmed the feat they most likely overlooked this part.
However, as the skill text clearly states that Dr applies the buff, they changed it so players can take what’s written for face value, which is good imo.
What is debatable is what is consider ‘playing’. For instance, if sim tickets didn’t exist, i would have quit the game a long time ago, even if playing the battles could be consider ‘playing’. So following the Conquest road is playing, because it’s a fresh battle everytime and not just ‘press auto and watch’. Feats who basically are like a light puzzle are fine too imo. But repeating the same battle over and over just to make me spend energy… please charge me more energy for battles instead but don’t ask me to mindlessly play them again, because i don’t qualify that at quality entertainment.
So this is all your fault!!!’
I found the guy responsible gang!! Let’s get him!!
Lol
I believe we have already agreed that this is not an entertaining change. And I agree, I would be ok with the average cost staying the same, but less grinding/repetitive game play.
I loosely consider an time in app (when interacting, not just spinning toons) playing the game. This is a managment game, so many levels of it are not in any actual battle scenario.
Maybe you were going to play it anyway. Maybe I was going to play it anyway. But people can and do quit every week, and there's no entitlement to players. CG has to make the game fun if they want people to play.
Not to mention that a Conquest reward is only "free" if you were going to spend that much time on the game Conquest or no. If conquest requires a much larger time input than you would otherwise invest, then it's not free even though it doesn't require an additional resource. More of the same resource is still an extra cost.
Finally, ECs are not the only possibilities. JKL requires a very large investment without requiring hoarding a specific currency. JKL isn't an Epic Confrontation since it doesn't result in a 5* unlock, supplemented through currency expenditures, but an event that requires JKL level effort, whatever you want to call it, is probably appropriate for Maul, given his power level. Any criticism of the EC style events isn't really relevant, since there are many other possibilities for Maul's release than merely Conquest and EC.
Just release reasonably powerful characters through Conquest and the mode can be fun again without, from CG's perspective, giving away the store.
Unfortunately it doesnt leave them a place to release higher level characters, which was the plan.
It's still an interesting suggestion.
If time in game wasn’t worth anything then games like this wouldn’t keep track of that to measure success of their game.
Bottom line is that there’s no reason they couldn’t take these last couple weeks of sentiment and reworked some of the feats to make this less of a chore and second job. We get our fun, they get their money. A win for all but of course that’s not how TopCash or MarkyMark do things around here.
Then why is the game in the public relations and playability state that it's in now? Are you saying without him it would be worse? I found that highly doubtful. He is superfluous at this point. He might say the random funny thing or show up in a discord server here and again to placate the beta tester who runs it. But I'm lost at anything substantial he has added. Real magic...LOL.
CAT and Maul are on the same level as JKL, no? He was released outside of CQ, therefore these could as well. I can appreciate the effort at the event, and it was fun, but not any longer. I'd argue, what's the difference if you do it two days or two weeks? To do it in two days you had burn a stack of crystals. Those same people can STILL do it in two days by burning even more crystals, which, i'd imagine they have the money to do. Regardless, it STILL takes them 3-4 conquests to get the end goal of the character regardless of how fast the complete it. I can't imagine the devs care one iota if a whale gets a toon 2 days into conquest 3 or 12 days into. In the end, it still took 3 months on the normal schedule.
As for the changes, who do they punish? Those who don't spend heavy. If you're a whale, you've spent enough to zip through conquest as it is. If not, you've got enough to spend to zip through conquest. If you're not in a super high end guild regularly doing the new rancor, you're now blocked from R8 without flat out spending cash. That is not cool and a great way to drive away the masses.
Feats were less challenging than they were designed to try and make people use resources to level teams they had no other need to. There was more of a challenge before, IMO, to figure out how to do a two sets of battles (normal plus a refresh) with the teams that would be be competitive without burning down stamina too far. Now? Why should a I waste a refresh if i don't have a team to get the feat? Before there was a chance. Now? much less so for a large number of people.
If you dont believe in real magic, I cant help you.😉
Do you think it's in this state because of thim? If not then yes it would be very different without him.
I can assure you he is integral to the process.
They did, in fact, make battles more difficult. They introduced Overprepared IV, for instance.
Also by narrowing the number of possible opposing team comps.
They were talking about the overall event, meaning stepping up the difficulty of "all battles", vs the over arching changes they made around the event itself.
That's a pretty shameful level of semantics dancing on CG's part there.
Making changes to the overall game mode, as was being discussed there, vs balancing in the game mode itself, are 2 different things. It's not semantics, its 2 different conversations.
“Changes to the overall game mode” or “balancing in the game mode itself”
Sure sounds like a distinction without a difference. Please explain how the hell those two things different? ffs
DISCLAIMER: Post is subject to change.
When they announced these changes they said they did it because they wanted more engagement. The only announced changes to the energy cost, in their claim, to increase time spent on conquest. They made no mention of the feats being increased nor did they say that we were getting MORE repetitive and grindy feats, while also having the room for error for the max crate decreased. I would’ve respected them more if they just would’ve been up front about it instead of their usual corporate speak nonsense
Balance within the game mode involves changes to things like adding new elements such as over prepared IV, and other modifiers, that are not used everywhere, just to make certain battles more difficult. These are applied team/node wise.
The discussion that point came from was about changes to the game mode as a whole. They did not make it more difficult across the board, for example changing the % increase across sectors. This is applied to the whole game mode.
2 very different things. We will see balance changes many times, new teams added and tweaked to get them in line, but that doesnt mean we will see changes to the over all game mode.
That’s the wording of the update. No mention of overall battles vs balancing battles, just “Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters”.
Correct which is where my comment was referencing. Then a reply referenced internal elements used for in mode for balancing teams/battles.
Not blaming you, but it's interesting how they will move swiftly to nerf anything they think is too generous to the community yet they only keep an eye on things that are clearly damaging their game.
I think CG need to get their priorities straight. They must all have Ferraris by now judging by the way they like to make earning anything ftp incredibly time consuming to entice people to pay their frankly absorbitant prices.
They don’t ever say anything about balancing though. At least not in the Conquest 7 Dev post. Their only mention of the actual battles is the swapping out of Bosses + adding MiniBosses, and the section I quoted saying they wouldn’t increase the difficulty of encounters. They didn’t even mention they’d be changing the possible teams.
Where’s this reply? Is that referring to you in this thread or another Dev post somewhere?
With respect, Kyno, and I'm not trying to make things difficult for you, just to clarify my problem with CG's communication, there's a difference between making an individual encounter more difficult and making the entire event more difficult. I know you agree with this as you've been making the distinction yourself.
However if they are going to make more than one battle or encounter more difficult, what language could you possibly use except "We are making (some) encounters more difficult?" If you are not doing that, what language would you use except, "We are not making (any) encounters more difficult." In each case the parenthetical words do not change the core meaning of the sentence, although they limit possible interpretations. (In particular the use of "some" in a sentence that they didn't use would have negated a possible interpretation where "all" battles were increased in difficulty. On the other hand the word "any" really doesn't change or clarify the meaning of the second sentence, the one that they actually used, at all.)
On the other hand, if you were going to increase the difficulty of every battle, that would be an increase to the difficulty of the event as a whole.
You're saying that you interpreted them as saying that they would not increase the difficulty of the event as a whole and/or that at least some encounters would not be increased in difficulty.
But when they say, "Instead of increasing the difficulty of the encounters, nodes will now cost more energy to battle...," the obvious interpretation to most people is that they aren't increasing the difficulty of **any** encounters. And yet they clearly did. In fact, I lost p1 battles with my BH that I won easily in previous conquests, despite the fact that my BH had improved significantly in the meantime because of the JMK and Executor quests, so I suspect (though I don't have hard data for you) that there were more tweaks to difficulty than just the introduction of Overprepared IV. As you know, simply changing a team's composition can do a great deal to change the difficulty of an encounter, and they obviously tweaked team compositions as well.
The best you can say about this is that they were entirely too careless with the truth. They knew they were changing the difficulties of the encounters. They told us they weren't. Perhaps there are some encounters whose difficulty wasn't changed, but I think really the only thing that anyone could truthfully claim is that they did not implement a Conquest wide flat bonus to all encounters. But that is very different from the meaning of the statement that they actually issued.
And, again, maybe they're just really, really bad at communicating their intent. Just because they said something was untrue while knowing it was untrue doesn't make them evil. You can tell a lie by accident. But what they said was still misleading as all heck. Even if I agreed your interpretation was reasonable (and I am on the fence with that one, despite agreeing context matters), it is certainly UNreasonable to say that people who interpreted that statement as denying that any encounters would be more difficult didn't have good reasons to believe that's what CG said. In fact, that's the plain meaning of what CG said, however you think that meaning might have to be adjusted for context.
In the end, I am not accusing CG of being evil, or having ill intent. I'm accusing them of saying something false without making any assertions at all about whether the falseness was brought about by accident or on purpose.
I don't know what's in CG's minds. I'm not a telepath (or a Jedi). I do know that if what you're trying to say is that you didn't increase EVENT difficulty, you should probably say that, and not that you didn't increase ENCOUNTER difficulty.
This is about wisdom and language skills, rather than good or evil, and telling thousands of fans of the game that they misinterpreted CG's statement really isn't the wise approach. If they're writing things that are widely misinterpreted, the wise thing to do is for someone responsible for communication to jump into the thread and say, "You know what? We got that one wrong. While we still believe that the possible meanings include what we intended, it's obvious that our intent didn't come through clearly at all. We did increase the difficulty of many encounters. You're not hallucinating. We got our communication wrong, and we will, as we do with everything, constantly try to do better in this area."
I'm not trying to demonize CG, but you're constantly trying to assert in this thread that they haven't made a mistake. But they did make a mistake, even if (as you seem to think) it was a mistake of vagueness that leads to misinterpretations.
The pushback you're getting would be greatly reduced if instead of trying to say, "THERE WAS NO MISTAKE!" CG simply acknowledged that was bad wording.
No one can get better without admitting that they fell short in the first place. The habit of denying that anything is wrong (and it does seem to be a habit to me) in the first place leads naturally to pessimism that things will get better.
Why not try to see communication as a two way street where if the wrong message is communicated it's at least partly the fault of the writer and not all on the reader?
Personally, I think talking about "encounter" difficulty rather than "event" difficulty pretty much precludes any possibility of any increase in difficulty at all for even a single encounter. But hey, I'm open to the idea that there was a different intent and all that. And I can try to see things from CG's point of view in the future. But if CG isn't willing to do the same thing, then that's going to rub me the wrong way, and a lot of other readers/players as well.
You take a quote out of context, and would like me to fill in the context for you? Ok, I guess.
First the entire post that quote comes from is about the event over all, but they also lead into that quote with this, again discussing the game mode:
They also start the post with talking about regular changes, which are the internal adjustments to the game mode, changing teams, feats, and other elements within the mode.
Take it how you want, but changes to the layout of the game mode vs difficulty, is a different conversation than the addition of a particular modifier in some battles/sections.
I looked in the context of the Dev Post. They didn’t mention the actual Battles anywhere in it besides where I quoted. They wanted to increase the length of time players spent on Conquest, “considered” increasing battle difficulty (or “difficulty of the encounters”), and “instead” increased energy costs and Feat difficulty.