Discussion News From Elvenar!

[Silmaril]

Dear Humans and Elves

Recently our Project Manager Lukas was interviewed to shed a little light on some aspects of the game, as well as some upcoming changes.

A copy of the full interview can be found in our Community Corner News from Elvenar!

We hope that you will enjoy reading through.

kind regards
Your Elvenar Team

 

[Laurelin]

Since this same interview has already been posted (translated from the Czech Forum) in the 'News from Beta' thread, and because I assume that cross-posts will be deleted, my response to this is currently here, pending my finding time to edit it to match the (not significantly) different translation just posted on this Forum.

 

[Silmaril]

I would imagine most Community Managers will be adding this to their Forums as it is quite a nice but rare occasion that we have this sort of information we are able to share.

 

[Pauly7]

Thanks for setting up this thread @Silmaril

 

[CrazyWizard]

Shows how detached those devs are from the game, and how much they ignore mathemathical truth in favor of comformation bias.

They picck out the data they like when to confirm epxansions aren't detrimental. progression is detrimental.
Ok the say maybe wonders, but thats not the issue, it's the way the formula has been build from the ground up thats wrong.

and that they still ignore.
They look at "generic data" from players with premium expansions. but that data is corrupted by incorporating a "low flyers"
example:
The new nike running shoes are only affective if you run faster ~15km/h.
You can claim these shoes have no benefit when you look at all the runners in a marathon, most of who run much slower.
But when you look at the competive side of the field you see the difference, this has been a controversy for years in the running world as not everyone has access to the same shoes (today less of an issue as competitor brands also have improved and shoes are mostly all for sale now)

Or like oscar pistorius, this legs where much more efficient in running than real legs, just because he ain't faster than everyone else does not make them less efficient. it's just that not every has no legs, and if those legs would be allowed in regular competitions and a usian bolt like person stands up with those legs, should all the competition now amputate there legs? or should we admit that those legs are more effcient and ban those legs/handicapped people from "normal" competition?

You can cloud the truth by hiding it in a large crowd, and call them edge cases. but that does not make the truth go away.

Also "improvement of the spire prizes" who else got the shivers going over there spine?
To many times instead of adressing a nerf, which can be valid and most of us can understand. they often package it in fancy paper and lie that it's an improvement.
I fear that this is just another lie, like many before. for all sakes if a nerf is needed come out with the truth and explain it to us. we are grown men and woman who do understand it, even if we do not like it.

 

[Pauly7]

Also "improvement of the spire prizes" who else got the shivers going over there spine?

Yep, I agree. For a long time they've talked about replacing the Library Set with "something better", but right now I'm trying to make sure I have all the Libraries I will need because I fully expect the replacement to be a whole lot worse. They will tell us that it's better because it gives boost +1 sentient goods, but I can almost guarantee that it will be much worse. They will add in to the mix the chance to occasionally win a Phoenix Artefact - probably at the expense of Magic Workshops, which they will take off the table - So they will be able to wrap it all up together and say "Look how much better it is now. You said you wanted us to sort out the scrolls problem and give you Phoenix artefacts."

 

[DeletedUser6472]

I think that nerfing spire rewards would be the last straw for many top players, something to make that brewing decision of quitting this game really easy... In light of how many players have left so far, Inno should come up with a ton of carrots at this point, not another stick.

 

[CrazyWizard]

The spire set is an issue that needs to be adressed, and should have been adressed about the time it came out, from day 1 I told them it was a time bomb.

This is one of the issues with "I am in the forest elves chapter" mindset.
That set is fine if you use it as "intended", but you should look at things how they could be used not as intended, but how could people use it in a way it's not intended.

even when you tell them they screwed up, and explain why, they just ignore it every single time untill the issue is so severe that there is no other choice and then they start only to consider making changes. it then takes a while to implement it.
This happens every single time.

They have now shooed awat hundreds if not thousands of players, some of who could have generated a good amount of income, just because there are soo screwed by they set.
Especially on all the worlds they opened shortly after it's introduction.
These worlds were affected the worst. playing on a new world with scrolls as bonus makes it almost impossible to play, and only a little possible as long as enough scrolls players quit, because it's unplayable.
this means 33% of each new player is $!@%$%.

But yeah I expect a lot of other prizes to be nuked, with the excuse the "new set" will fix the issue.
That new set might be an improvement, but at the same time they introduce a overall big nerf.

At least thats how most of the changes we have seen in recent years turned out, only a few were indeed "improvements".

 

[Diane 6213]

Ya, last week was a bad week. I lost 2 really good (trades and NH) long time neighbours. The first 100% because of the tournament changes. The second was on the fence because of the tournament, but the shuffleboard, that did it for her. Nice to know that they read our feedback. What a waste of time and effort. But I am still convinced that is their goal, to get rid of the long time players. Really, nothing else makes sense to me.

 

[DeletedUser501]

They are nerfing everything, they are trying to diminish ( every time they can) the prizes, and at the same time elevating the difficulty of everything...o course the spire is next to nerf!!!

Do you remember the good troop instants that they gave before (those that gave you 25 and squads)? The 30 KP instant as daily prize in every event instead of the crappy 10 KP one???

They will make a complete mess of the Spire, I´m pretty sure they will target time instants(for bad), spells fragments(for good), magic buildings(for something bad), PP (for the good) and diamonds of course (for worst)

 

[Pauly7]

Do you remember the good troop instants that they gave before (those that gave you 25 and squads)? The 30 KP instant as daily prize in every event instead of the crappy 10 KP one???

Yeah, those were the days... Also, 4 x 20 hr time reducing instant as a daily, with 4 x 8 hr being one of the possible extra chest prizes!

 

[DeletedUser6472]

ironically that was also a time when Elvenar's P&L showed greater profit, when you give - you get back tenfold lol

 

[Timneh]

It is a pity no one asked why they keep throwing events at us when players have said many many times that there are too many now.

 

[DeletedUser6472]

It is a pity no one asked why they keep throwing events at us when players have said many many times that there are too many now.

They did ask that and we also asked about tourneys and spire, but were ignored again. They did reply to my question though about why the filler prizes are so miserable this year, according to them we'll get more of stuff, than usually. I'm wondering if they didn't understand the question or they really believe that 1 KP or 1 relic prizes are more than what we used to have lol.

 

[Pauly7]

It is a pity no one asked why they keep throwing events at us when players have said many many times that there are too many now.

The answer follows a familiar theme. They are interested in attracting new players to the game and not nearly so interested in satisfying the established players. This is why tournaments are painfully easy in the earlier provinces and painfully difficult in the later ones. They say that they want the tournaments to "favour no one", but they actually want them to favour new players.

Events are constant because they want there to always be something exciting available whenever a new player ventures into the game, hoping it will hook them. If it doesn't, then they are faced with the weekly tournament, which they will find exceptionally easy. After a while they'll be thinking "Hey, I'm actually pretty good at this if I'm already only X points behind the big players", not realising progress will only get harder from there.

There's actually very little of this game that now isn't aimed at attracting new players. The only thing we really have is Fellowship Adventures. They are inserted for one week out of every six in an attempt to retain existing players. All the more strange that FAs actually divide opinion, so the one thing for existing players isn't (in my opinion) that effective.

The whole process is a little bit like car insurance. Offer really cheap rates to hook new customers. Hook as many as you can, then hopefully X% of them stay anyway, once you hike up the price in year two.

 

[Far Reach]

I'll add my thanks also to @Silmaril for setting this thread up.

Lukas says (about the tournaments):

We've been evaluating tournament data, reading player feedback (in fact, thanks to your nice CMs, we get a lot from the forums), implementing player feedback and understanding the impact of tournament changes on the game.

This is encouraging. In due time, it might be helpful to explain how provided player feedback has led to changes. Of course the vast majority of suggestions can't be implemented (simply because of resources), but it is good to hear about those which are. It would also be nice to hear when analytic observations land with the devs , and assist with the wider understanding of game effects.

from the analyses that we have been running, we can't see that players with more premium expansions now perform worse than players with fewer premium expansions. On the contrary, these players continue to perform significantly better than comparable players. The same is true for Ancient Wonder levels, progress in the research tree and ordinary expansions.

It would be worth checking that these analyses genuinely are checking tournament capacity, and not something else. Someone who obtains lots of expansions through game knowledge, skill, money, commitment or some combination of these, is likely to deploy the same qualities in the tournaments. We need to be sure that we are comparing like with like. One way of doing this, might be to compare catering, auto-fighting and manual fighting tournament performance separately. Knowledgeable manual fighting, hugely outperforms auto-fighting and this is one way in which highly progressed and committed players can still compete. What do the stats look like when manually fought provinces are removed ?

In addition, we continue to monitor players at the top end of the spectrum to ensure that costs are not disproportionately high at a certain point. However, since the number of players in this area is quite small, it takes a little longer to have any meaningful results to our analyses there.

I take the above to mean that conclusions are being drawn primarily by data analysis (of tournament performances) rather than human consideration of the implication of the formula itself. Some players will naturally try to "beat" the formula - considering extreme cities (eg minimum expansions, no non-military wonders - or previously not researching optional squad size upgrades !) in order to get an advantage. The lack of data-points means that human insights will be necessary to prevent such instances getting out of hand. (I know that there are data-science approaches which could in theory be deployed instead - but don't see that GANs would be practical for this scenario.)

To give an illustrative example:

It is the case in Britain that boys born in the Autumn (September, October and November) are hugely more likely to become professional footballers than those born in the Summer (June, July, August). A similar effect is seen in other countries, but sometimes the months involved are completely different. The explanation is simple. Boys who are amongst the oldest in their school year are advantaged early on (relative to peers) and get more football experience etc. This explains the difference between similarly capable (but differently practiced) children later in life. This is a massively statistically significant result but is hard to account for unless one knows what to look for.

 

[Far Reach]

It is a pity no one asked why they keep throwing events at us when players have said many many times that there are too many now.

The answer follows a familiar theme. They are interested in attracting new players to the game and not nearly so interested in satisfying the established players.

In a bid to cut through a little of the cynicism, I suggest that you might be interested in a Games Developer Conference talk (admittedly from 2014) by Innogames called "Beyond Spreadsheets: How to Generate Operational Impact with Analytics". The approach is to use analytics to spot players deemed likely to leave the game ("churners") and target them with initiatives to keep them happy. If this approach is still used then presumably events are assessed to engage a decent proportion of these players.

The link is here incidentally: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020883/Beyond-Spreadsheets-How-to-Generate

 

[Deleted User - 1759805]

The approach is to use analytics to spot players deemed likely to leave the game ("churners") and target them with initiatives to keep them happy.

I don't know about that. Literally a few days ago a member of my FS decided to quit due to all changes, and reached out to support to stating just that and asking about how to delete their account. Not fishing for anything, the decision was pretty much made. So no need to run advanced analytics to identify. Well, the response was along the lines of "don't let the door hit you on the way out". Obviously much more polite, but zero effort was made not even to retain, but even to understand the reasons why. Several other FS members were pretty jarred by that.

 

[CrazyWizard]

I do not het this idea of whacking "old" customers for new ones.

How could this benefit you?

So how do you get new players

• advertisements
• referrals from existing players

So if I remove existing players my only platform left is advertisements.
Also, even if a player doesn't "spend" as much as new players, it's a steady source of income.

Lets call it to a real world example.

I am an IT buisness calles "IT lovers plc." setting up IT networks for clients,
When a new client comes is it makes the most money, they need a new network set up, this means new servers, switches, manhours and the lot, aka big money. after setup it's "just" management fees and a bit of replacement but not the big bucks anymore.

So I lure them in with very low management fees, enticing them to come to me, I sell them my junk, make some good bucks, and then increase the bill for management fees with 10% each month forcing them to leave A.S.A.P.

Do you think this buisness model makes sense on the long run?

• When a new project arises will I come back to IT lovers plc.? (example what if another succesful game is advertised I am interested in in the future and I see the words inno-games would that not instantly shoo mee away)
• Would I recommend this company to my network, or if I hear one of the people in my networld they are considering working with IT lovers plc. would I warn them about how shitty that company is?

How on earth does a focus on on new customers only and negelecting old customers benefit your company in the long run.
As far as I know this crap only works in a monopoly or in a cartel where companies all do the same crap becomming sort of a monopoly.

In any other case this does not make sense. at least not to me.

 

[Killiak]

Obviously much more polite, but zero effort was made not even to retain, but even to understand the reasons why. Several other FS members were pretty jarred by that.

The most money is made off a player in the first 6 - 12 months. There is no need to retain after that, and it is clear to me at least that this is company policy.