Dear Glu,
I've been seeing a lot of rage posts about patch 1.2 recently, so I wanted to take a moment to better articulate the community's concerns. This will likely be a long post, so here's the short version first, and then address each issue in more depth.
TLDR:
1) There are far too many required micro-transactions.
2) The rune system is interesting, but confusing and obviously an attempt to force micro-transactions.
3) The high cost of gems, otherwise known as "You're targeting the wrong audience."
4) Solutions!
Long version:
1) There are far too many required micro-transactions.
I'm a relatively new player, and I've just level-capped my first character and I'm starting on end-game content. A big drawing factor to EW3 was that it gave me a chance to scratch that "Diablo-itch" at random times during the day. I could login and kill a boss in a few minutes, and then go back to my day. The gem microtransactions were very tempting, but I never felt they were absolutely required -- whenever I wanted a few gems, I just watched a few video commercials to help support your game and we both won.
Patch 1.2 changed all of that. Now there are gem requirements everywhere, most notably on rune combines, and the game now feels like it's trying to beat me up in a dark alley for my hard-earned cash instead of just offering me cool options.
2) The rune system is interesting, but confusing and obviously an attempt to force micro-transactions.
Your implementation of the rune system is very (...very...) confusing and undocumented. Without message boards, how would players even know where to start? Do we need to socket our weapon with a certain element (fire/ice/lightening) to kill certain bosses? Are they all the same, just different spell effects? Are there specific levels on the new rune tower that require us to switch out all of our runes? Do we need to stack a certain element in our armor, or go for diversity? The questions rage on.
One of the biggest problems is that players have no way of knowing what's killing them, because there's no combat log or in-game text to tell them HOW they took or dealt damage. So if Hellboy punches me in the face for half my life, does that mean that it was all melee and I need more defense, or do I need more fire resist runes? Just playing the game, there's no way to tell.
This confusing rune system leads people to believe that this was a blatant attempt to make money. And by the way, I just paid a huge sum of gold to combine a high-level rune, and it exploded in my face -- not only did it cost me a ton of gold, but all of the effort that I had spent to collect those runes (and all of the gold I had spent combining the lower level gems). I was so furious that I almost deleted your game right then and there.
Like many players, I simply will never buy gems from a company who employs this type of business model. As a game designer, if you ever find yourself saying "I'm going to destroy my player's loot unless they pay me real money EVERY time they want to upgrade their gear!" then you're doing it horribly, horribly wrong.
And that brings us to...
3) The value of gems, otherwise known as "You're targeting the wrong audience."
Currently, the most cost effective way to buy gems is the $9.99 for 260 gems. That's 26 gems for a dollar. So lets look at the math for various items in the game...
* Upgrading a single rune (without it blowing up): $1.15
* Upgrading your backpack to max capacity: $109.61 <--- Sweet jesus.
* Buy 10 Gold Tokens (random loot): $34.61
Just to name a few. This means that for the price of upgrading my inventory space, I could buy the entire Diablo franchise (Diablo 1, 2, 2xpac, 3, and 3xpac) *AND* still have money left over to buy Torchlight. Just for the "privilege" of having 200 inventory slots.
So, in a nutshell, you're targeting the wrong audience. People just want a Diablo game on their phone that doesn't require a time commitment. That's all. There's a lot of other things competing for that money, and it's all looking a lot more tempting after 1.2. I've personally gone back to the new Diablo 3 expansion, and I can only imagine what everyone else is doing.
4) Solutions!
The good news is that the solutions are pretty straight-forward. =D
1) Remove the "chance to fail" on runes. Period. Make the combine cost gold *or* 5 gems (30 gems is insane), and make it always successful.
2) Make the runes interesting. Make lightening attacks jump to nearby targets. Make fire set elites ablaze for delicious damage-over-time effects. Make ice slow monsters and lower their defenses. Seriously dude, this isn't rocket science. Games have been doing this for decades now. But releasing 3 gem-types that simply do a flat percentage of damage......... really? Seriously??
3) Make armor runes give stats, not elemental resistance. Or simply add stat-runes and leave resistance runes for specific boss fights ("Going to farm Hellboy? Throw on some fire resist gems!"). That way players could socket their gear with +defense, +item find, +energy reduction, +crit, etc. You know, "things that make sense." (As much fun as wondering through an elemental tower hoping that you're wearing the right elemental rune type is...)
4) Give people the option to pay a one-time fee to unlock a daily gem feed. Seriously, if I could trust you as a developer, then I'd love to "buy" your game. I'd put down $5 to open up access to a "gem mine" that sent me 30 gems a day to my mailbox. But I'm not going to pay over a hundred dollars just to hold equipment on my character, and I'm certainly not going to throw over a dollar at you every time I need to upgrade a rune. :mad:
GO FORTH AND DO BETTER
Comments
There would not be a single thread with a complaint about the update if all this was implemented. I mean we even have to pay gems just to unsocket a **** rune smh
Listen to your audience Glu, we are what keep your company alive.
Just to add; a new update is supposed to be exciting and fun, while adding new things to make game play more interesting and possibly diverse. It SHOULD NOT, however, cause a player to regress, making previous content that was attainable now unattainable, and run your pockets for all your worth.
Boss's and dungeons I was able to farm before the update should be just as easy to farm after the update
If I need runes to make the content just as easy, then so be it, but you should have started us with enough runes,drills, etc., to get back to where we were before, not throw cheesy offerings at us for a "chance" at a decent rune and then pay money if you want more chances. Ridiculous!!
Personally I'm just completing the Daily Hellboy quest for the time being until another update is implemented to right the wrongs.
I don't get why you are comparing Diablo to this game.
This is an app, the other is a computer game. One is meant to pass the time and be a little fun, and the other is meant to be hardcore.
Guess which is which?
Position - CO Guild Leader
Device's: Google Nexus 9 / Samsung Galaxy S4
Roms / Operating System: Cyanogenmod 12 Lollipop 5.0.2
Agreed....and if this was a pc game, they're gonna need much better updates.
About runes and their chanches to evolve: come on guys, they give you tokens after you failed xD.
Seriously Glu, you don't wanna lose your good/real players, but this is what you are doing.
This exclusivist and capitalistic method will bring you nowhere. Start to think on your way Glu, please.
Sorry but I dont understand why do you have to unsocket a rune? I'm destroying mine by replacing it a new rune. What makes a business alive is the revenue. Its always part of a business plan to raise money for their business to grow and hit larger market.
This is a freemium game so all I can ask now is glu to give me discounts so i can buy gems lolz haha 222 pesos is too much for 110 gems only, hehe glu please give me discounts haha
Good post thought the solutions need some work...
1- yes for sure. And possibly make it 3 gems to combine (as the hints say) and not the current 5.
2- there are 3 items that can have damage runes, weapon, ring, tailsman. Most people have one type of rune in each, so how would the effects work when you have all 3?
3- stat runes would be great (wow did this and it worked well) but stat runes and element runes would take up lots of inventory space
4- or something similar. Ive always said the game is unbalanced with gold, so possibly increase the gold&/gems you get in game
also
* make drills far more common
* make blue runes drop from lv 35+ in fire tower
I do appreciate the effort you put into that post Luckboy so thanks.
Unsocketing ur runes means u save whatver it was that you unsocketed. Especially if they are blue or green runes which are hard to get from combining and luck drops
Endgame players are frustated/bored and new players don't stand a chance. Hurry and make the necessary changes GLU or you won't have a player base left. Start worrying when the rage posts end, means people are finding something else to play.
Well said.. Glu remember less people posting here means they are busy with something else.. Like this topic genuinely spot on.. Please take a closer look into this..
From experience, feedback that is implemented is more often related to gameplay rather than transactions. With that said your "solution" suggestions may help with that.
This thread is a good example of how to effectively communicate feedback.
The main concern in the update (in my opinion) is the rune combination failure, farming 50 steps of lotus every hour and a half to scramble together the outragous amount of runes to upgrade is a real drag...
A green gem failing, fine, but when you go on to upgrading to blue runes(AND you get a increased chance of failure!!) is isane, Im 1 blue rune away from epic Fire rune, im terrified, all that work MIGHT go to waste, or pay what, 70? 100 gems?
Remove this cheap-*** idea or if any lower the cost, and i think its a great patch.
(Also please stop having lesser runes drop all the way up till stage 50.. Common runes after 25 and blues around 45-50!)
<Ex0duS>
I guess I'll shut up and let you guys carry on.
But really, most people can get further in tower of heroes now.
Truth is, actual gameplay is really bad now especially for newer or mid campaign players.
Legendary bosses and levels have been buffed up wayyyy too much, so much that take for eg. After fully upgrading the highest gs gold weapon you can get from legendary cyclops isnt enough to beat it (cyclops) at all anymore. Even with runes it is useless unless you have 3 blue damage runes inserted. The only new people that can level through the campaign now are hackers and those who spend loadsa cash in the spin offerrings.
Then that brings us to runes. We get 2 chances to farm tower every 3 hours and it takes many runs just to get 5 white runes of the same type so that we can combine just to get a common rune. And then even after doing so several people have had that combination fail despite the 'low chance of failure' . It makes no sense that there is a chance of failure in the first place when collecting runes takes up so much time and effort and even costs us coins. Maybe increasing the cost of combinations would be fine but giving us failure chances is extremely detrimental to the game.
why are common runes called common when they are extremely rare?
why does it say in loading message that you need 3 runes to combine when in actuality you need 5?
there are many of us that can't pay for the high cost gems, students, people without visa cards, people with low income. Please make this enjoyable game better for us, listen to your playerbase..