Hi everyone!
First of all of course we'd like to thank you for your feedback and for sharing your concerns. We are well aware of the points you've brought up and are monitoring the impact closely. As you might have already guessed, the changes to the Crystal Lighthouse and Bell Spire are related to both the Ancient Wonder balancing and the upcoming improvements to the NH System. For those of you who have already played on our mobile app: You'll have a bit of an understanding about the way we want to go with Neighbourly Help and the time it takes. Because NH will take a lot less time in the (near) future, we will also have to consider balancing here so that's always a bit tricky. We want to help you make NH less boring and time consuming but this also means we can't keep giving tons of goods for something that will take almost no time anymore. The actual mechanic, when overused, is actually way too strong in comparison to the costs of these Ancient Wonders and will be even more so when the time to perform NH will be significantly reduced.
Also, it's important to try to look at this objectively. These changes have the biggest impact on our most active players because the players who did take the time to do NH for ages, had of course the most benefit from the amounts of goods this rewarded them with. Objectively though, most of our players (even amongst active players) do not perform a lot of NH and will in the new situation, have more goods with less efforts needed.
We want all of our players to perform Neighborly Help and many do not do it because they do not see the advantage of it. Having bigger and more accessible rewards will actually trigger more players to give Neighborly Help overall. So on a global scale, more help will be performed with this change despite the fact that our most active users will probably slow down on it. For the vast majority of players, this new system will offer more rewards (as most players mostly help their 24 fellowship members or less) and with less efforts. Bigger rewards requiring less efforts will make it attractive to more people to perform at least the amount of Neighborly Help they need to get these rewards.
We also strongly believe that the players giving a lot of Neighborly Help are not doing this only for the rewards and, indeed, it should not be the main reason to give Neighborly Help. The rewards are one incentive, the tools and coins you automatically get are another and the satisfaction of helping your in-game friends is the strongest and most important one for us. If the players who perform a lot of Neighborly help, do believe it’s overall not worth the effort, they can do less of it and spend the gained time into other aspects of the game too.
Hopefully we have been able to explain a bit more the reasoning behind these changes now. We know the changes can have quite an effect on very active players when they are used to perform hundreds of NH's per day but we will also have to keep in mind what would be best for the majority of our players. However we do take your feedback seriously and will keep monitoring the statistics about the effects these changes have for further optimization.
Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team