War Mages!
With the number of games and new players we have now, we’re getting a lot of actionable data and feedback (thanks). We’ve started tuning.
Matchmaking has generally improved with the last few rounds of changes, but there are some new wrinkles.
In Survival Mode (PvE), we are seeing fast games with players of similar level ranged but also smaller team sizes. This is because we had some aggressive settings there. We’re going to loosen these a bit, allowing the matcher to search for a slightly longer time – this should produce games with full teams more often. (Note that, for survival, we adjust content to suit the number of players, so if you get in game with less than five players, the game will tweak things to suit your party.)
In Siege Mode (PvP), we are seeing far more drops at the hero selection and far more games canceled by a player who does not ready up when a match is found. There’s a problem with removal of players who do not accept matches, meaning that one absentee player cycles through multiple times ruining multiple games – this is getting fixed now and will be live soon.
Some players were apparently trying to complete some of the “play 10 games as” quests and dropping when they didn’t get the correct hero. We’ve since replaced these with a hero neutral “win five games” quest so that that motivation isn’t there. If a player had one of the old quests, it’ll still be valid until they complete it, so this change will take a little while to filter.
Siege was also seeing some good groups of players that were assigned to teams in bad ways. We have changed the algorithm so that it does a better job of creating the fairest possible teams.
On rewards, one of the things we’re seeing (both in numbers and comments) is that some of our rewards aren’t working as intended. In a few places, there are just errors, but in others things aren’t working as we intended. We are tuning this (and please expect more tuning in the weeks to come).
One of our main issues is that there are parts of this that are missing. For example, you don’t have a good way to steer yourself toward rewards with consistent progress (to say “I want this trap, so I’ll do X to earn it”) and you don’t have a way to exchange stuff you don’t want for stuff you do want. Some new parts will be happening, but we’re going to tweak things to improve this while we’re waiting.
One of the big issues right now is the hero chase. We recently eliminated all of the quest rewards except for skulls or rift embers, which is intended to make it easier to earn a hero. We’re also going to adjust early level up rewards to include rift embers so that players can work toward unlocking heroes. (For players who have already leveled up, we’ll be going back and granting the embers you would have earned.)
The hero recipes were also all set to a baseline and had not been adjusted. If you look at the store, you’ll see we offer heroes at different prices but the recipes do not have this same spread. That’s being adjusted and will be in after the next update.
Trap upgrades and parts are in a similar boat – these are also getting a look and I expect tuning there too.
Thanks for playing!
Reminder: this announcement pertains to the North American service only. Please stay tuned for updates to the European service from the Gameforge team!