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Must be a sobering thought if your team don’t really need you.
At least that would make worth getting! As it is, thousands of these are stacking up with no purpose.I'm surprised we haven't seen a badge for collecting spell fragments.
Definite FAIL from an FA fanatic.Right, which just pushes diamond use and Spire. We should have a vote on pass or fail for this version of FA.
LOLDefinite FAIL from an FA fanatic.
Oh yeah... updating of the spreadsheet! That did take some time, not just updating the new info after removing the obsolete, but also making sure formulas would still work. There were a few I didn't catch until we were in Stage 3 heh. I'm glad I had seen things on the beta forum and noticed the badge order seemed a bit odd, but used the Pit information to order the badges on my spreadsheet.The badge orders were irritating, and required a lot of special work, tedious work to adapt our old spreadsheets, and then the Wiki's order of badges did not match the order in which badges were displayed either. For players who are meticulous, this was very annoying. Some adaptations of Spreadsheets were done by slotting new badges in places held by prior ones, some were done ahead by using the wiki, which was also incorrect once the Adventure was underway.
Agree with you in every aspect!Alright this is going to be a bit longer. But since our community managers always like to get facts to take back to the devs here comes a fact.
First of all I want to say that this was the best FA in a long time, in my FS the majority of payers seem to prefer the new system over the old one. But there are some rather simple improvements that can make the experience even better for both casual as well as competitive FS.
The intention was to make as many badges as possible of all the different ones. I didn´t spend any all week with exception of a couple of garbage badges, so I could post this here in the end (not going to do that again I think, heck of a boring thing to do). This is my inventory 2 hours before the end of the FA:
View attachment 4962
City setup: 150 WS, 75 lvl 1 factories (reduced from 100 after day 1), 10 lvl 31 T1, 4 lvl 23 T1 (built after day 1).
I played 2 full tourneys (total of 30k points) and 2 full spires.
My MA was running CC 24/7 and I have 11 Spire Libraries producing CCs.
I stopped producing guard badges early on and as you can see still by far the most common badge. yes I produce more troops than most people, but we have now 3 separate training queues and the badge does not reflect this change. So at least triple the costs for this badge based on when the training buildings become available. Personally I would prefer more than just tripling the requirements to give this badge a semblance of value.
I also never used instants to make the AW badges, since they also invariably always end up in the garbage bin. Please increase requirements here as well based on chapters.
My tourney scores are of course not representative for average players, but the 3 connected badges are of very different values, elemental marbles and ghost bottles are so common as to be rather useless for me (but should be faily balanced for average players), while the witch hat is one of the 5 limiting badges in the FA.
WS and small factory badges are very easy to make and pose no problem to increase or decrease according to needs, so I don´t see much need to change them.
The Druid staff seems to be fairly balanced as well.
Now on to the difficult badges that decide on the score in the end. I here talk about our FS as a whole.
The obvious 2 first ones are: Bracelets and Vision Vapour: these two were extremely limiting right from the start, we saw a huge underproduction on day 1 and decided to upgrade our T1 production as a consequence. For VV of course timeboosts and occasionally diamonds for flipping the MA were necessary. As we increased the production of those 2 badges another 3 started to become similarly limiting: Money bags, witch hats and tiaras. All other 11 badges are of no consequence in this form of FA.
As a general rule these 5 badges need to be increased to get a semblance of balanced badges.
Bracelets: Include all 3, better all 6 Tiers allowed for production, it will make the badges easier to produce mainly for casual players (who do not teleport factories), but also for competitive players, because of other sources of goods, like event buildings that produce other goods than T1. The main benefit would be the lowered disruption of game play for everybody. Right now the situation is that instead of shanty towns we now build T1 farms, that is not exactly a big improvement. Let us use all factories it will greatly increase participation in FAs.
VV: I see no reason why 1 VV should not be enough for one badge? It is enough to collect 1 CC for a druids badge and I would say that is easier to accomplish and a rather well balanced badge. So 1 VV per badge is not too easy. Mass production will still cost both timeboosts and diamonds (for flipping the MA) of course, but somewhat less so.
Money bags: Are roughly in sync with bracelets/VV and should be made easier accordingly. It takes roughly 60 Neighbour visits per badge right now in higher chapters, It should definitely be decreased somewhat.
Witch hats: Why do you need to gain 2 enchantments to gain a badge when 1 CC is enough? PoP and EE are a little faster to make than CC in the MA, but the most commonly produced enchantment is MM and that takes longer than CCs, so the average should be the same. Why have higher requirements for less useful enchantments than for CCs?
Tiaras: same again: if gaining 2 enchantments is too much how is spending 3 supposed to be balanced? I can´t spend more than I make. This is only possible to maintain by hoarding tons of enchantments in the inventory, from a perspective of disturbing gameplay less I say as well: 1 enchantment is enough.
Since all these changes will remove "critical" badges and make them normal badges instead it means of course FAs will become easier, if Inno finds the current difficulty OK, they will have to increase the requirements on map waypoints to make up for the change, to keep the difficulty constant. But it would be far preferable to have a much more equal value of badges that on top of it would allow more participation of all kinds of towns.
I'm sorry @Gargon667 but I see it differently.
I think the new system is more disruptive. Before players could chose what items they could make every day depending on their schedule; sometimes you'd pick farmers, sometimes bakers and sometimes necklaces and blacksmiths. Now everyone must make bracelets and the most efficient way is the 3h production so it requires you to try to fit as many 3h production as you can every day. I tried to but because I just didn't have time to log in during the work time. Sometimes I can, but often things line up so that I can't. The druid badge: if you log in in time to collect just 1 CC you get 1 badge, if you log in too late you get 1 badge for 2 CCs.
And I don't think the new FA is more accessible to smaller cities, not at all: they have lower level MA, less provinces in tournaments, less time boosters, less spells, some not even access to the Spire yet, no timewrap, often no polar bear, few (if any) diamonds and ofc much less space... Before it was mostly a matter of space, now it's everything.
Also, I find that between the weekly tournament & spire and the frequent events we have plenty to do. I don't think the events are boring because of poor prizes; poor pries make them disappointing, what makes them boring is that they come too often, just like FA. If you eat your favourite meal every day you'll get fed up of it sooner or later, no matter how much you liked it in the first place
Having challenges and mini events and other similar short events maybe wasn't making Inno money directly but I think that by keeping players less bored they would ultimate achieve that result. Most players that are willing to spend on a game have a max monthly budget they can use for that. Giving them more event won't make them spend more money simply because they can't. Giving them a good event less often will make them spend all they are willing to spend. Well that's how I see it anyway
Well, maybe for a regular payer it was decrees but I found that for me, who always tries to do more than the average in FA, it was a bit of an increase because we actually use more teleports. Before I'd teleport all my big buildings, build a shanty town, then delete the shanty town and bring back my usual stuff. Now I teleport big buildings to summon other big T1 buildings + make shanty town but then after it's done I need to use more teleports to remove the temporary T1s. I don't know about others but I am really not that lucky with getting teleports. Despite going to the top of the Spire every week. I had weeks when the only one I'd get is the one from the team rewards. And I have forgotten what the purple chest looks like, I get it once in a blue moon and then never teleports from it.With disruptive I mean having to delete/teleport your whole town. For competitive teams the advantage is small (or non-existant), because instead of shanty towns we now need T1 farms of silly proportions. But for regular players the need has been decreased I would say.
If that's really the case then it's an improvement indeed but I'm not so sure. For one it depends on what we call smaller cities. The really small ones don't have a big relic boost. But a very small cities run by a super active player who has achieved an above average relic boost might have a big advantage indeed. I think that how efficient a city is at producing bracelets depends more where you are in the game than the size of the city. For instance I have played this adventure with 2 cities: 1 in elemental and one in chapter 15. With the elementals one I had already unlocked the T1 upgrade and had 5 t1s at max level + 4 at pre-sentient max. With the one in chapter 15 I haven't unlocked the upgrade yet but I had 8 T1 at max possible (which are in fact the same T1 I have in the "smaller" city). With MMs on I could make 2 bracelets in 3h with the elemental city and less than 1 in the other (I had always to timeboost 1 additional 3h production to get the bracelet). So basically if you are in a chapter that has an T1 upgrade and you have unlocked and upgraded T1s then you're at an advantage, in other cases you're at a disadvantageOn the small town argument I disagree completely. Before it was about space 100%. The smaller the city the smaller the potential contribution. Now there are badges that do NOT depend on space. The biggest point here is bracelets, they are FAR more easy to make the smaller the town is. And the bracelet is one of the absolute most important badges right now. A small town that makes nothing but bracelets in the new system will be a far better contributor to the end result than any small town in an old FA could ever have been.
As to your last point, I suppose, as you say, they have a team of experts that do know what they are doing but I really can't imagine who these offers are for. You are probably right in your estimate but all those ways of thinking are strange to me plus it makes the game a bit boring for those of us who try not to take shortcuts and play the full thing.
A few less-trumpeted thoughts...
1) My fellowship went through the Maps in 3 days, about the same as the previous FA in the previous style, and so spent about the same 3+ days in the pit. My fellowship has a wide spread of players, with some higher players able to make shantytowns, and others with less capabilities. That said, they all felt more involved in the FA through the whole 6+ days this time, as they were more able to continue to contribute into the pit in what felt like more meaningful ways. Partly, it's the younger cities in the old-style FA feeling bummed when they enter the pit and half their badges became useless, and now they see a use for all badges for all 6 days.
2) At least in my opinion, the wider number of needs for the badges made the FA feel more like a regular quest-based event. Collecting Relics, solving Encounters, gaining Vision Vapor; those have been quest goals, not FA goals. If this is the style of FAs going forward, and we're going to continue to follow Quest Events with FAs (at least the major QEs), to me it's just going to feel like we've doubled the number of QEs per year.