1.5.5 Kingdom Changes

Official News Developer & Patch Notes
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Upcoming Kingdoms Changes in Update 1.5.5

Update 1.5 isn’t even out and we’re talking about 1.5.5???

Yes!

Because two of the changes in 1.5.5 impact Kingdoms, we wanted to make sure everyone had plenty of notice about the changes.

We will be following up with the deets on Update 1.5 – Dragons of Light tomorrow and the rest of 1.5.5 closer to its release (towards the end of January)!

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This has been on our quality of life list for a while now.

We had Kingdoms bending over backwards to make sure as many people as possible had the opportunity to fight the boss and earn rewards. It was actually really positive to see players taking such a collaborative approach to Kingdom Defense. However, as nice as this was to see, we also recognise this wasn’t exactly the most fun way to be playing.

With 1.5.5 we are introducing Overkill!

  • The Kingdom Defense event will now continue for its full duration, and not end immediately upon the boss dying
  • The boss’s health continues to count down in battle as the Kingdom deals damage to it. However, the boss will always start with at least enough health to match the damage required for Gold rewards so everyone in the Kingdom will be given the opportunity to attempt to achieve Gold.
  • The health bar in the various Kingdom Defense UI screens will count up with damage done, instead of counting down with remaining health.
  • As before, rewards will be sent out at the end of the event
    • You can review the rewards for both success and failure on the Kingdom Defense Rewards screen
    • Pressing the ? button on the rewards screen will toggle between success and fail rewards

Note:

You must be in the Kingdom as the Kingdom Defense Event begins in order to participate and claim rewards.

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We are making some changes to the Kingdom Bazaars. This is partially to help line up areas such as the Kingdom Bazaar with other areas of the game, such as Quest Pass.

However, we also needed to make some changes to balance the economy of the game.

We know that you’re all aware that as a free-to-play game we have to carefully balance our in-game economy and that it’s important to us that we’re making sure things are accessible to our players while also making sure we keep on top of inflation and deflation of resources inside the game.

Unfortunately we didn’t foresee prior to the release of the Bazaar in its current format quite the number of Gems that would be obtained via the rewards. The current number is over and above anything else available within the game, including via our premium passes.

We are sure that you folks in our community are aware that this is fairly unsustainable in its present form, however, we also wouldn’t want to change the structure of the Bazaar rewards without time for your Kingdoms to adjust and finish out whatever track you’re currently on.

As such, the following changes will not apply until the next Quest Pass reset after the release of 1.5.5

  • The Kingdom Bazaar Reward Tiers will be brought in-line with the Quest Pass resets
  • Bazaar Reward Tiers will reset when the Quest Pass resets every 28 days
  • Purchases will still count towards increasing your Tier
  • Each Tier Reward can only be collected once per 28 day cycle
  • Bazaar purchases available will not reset to a lower tier
    • E.g. Your Kingdom gets to Bazaar Reward Tier 10 by the end of the 28 days. On the first day of the new Bazaar cycle, your Reward Tier will be reset, but the available purchases will stay at Tier 10.

As before:

  • You will need to have joined a Kingdom prior to Daily Reset (GMT 00:00) in order to purchase from the Bazaar and earn rewards for that day
  • You can only progress one Bazaar Tier per day

Reward Tiers are changing:

  • There will now be 28 Reward Tiers to match the 28 day reset
  • Tiers 21-28 are our “cooldown” Tiers that will be obtainable at the Tier 20 amount
Tier Purchases Reward Amount
1 5 Gold 300
2 10 Random Shards 60
3 15 Gems 50
4 20 Ore 100
5 25 Gold 750
6 30 Random Shards 120
7 35 Gems 100
8 40 Relic Tier I 1
9 45 Gold 1500
10 50 Random Shards 240
11 60 Gems 150
12 70 Relic Tier II 1
13 80 Gold 3000
14 90 Random Shards 480
15 100 Gems 300
16 110 Crystal 1
17 120 Gold 5000
18 130 Random Shards 720
19 140 Gems 400
20 150 Relic Tier III 2
21 150 Gold 2000
22 150 Random Shards 480
23 150 Gems 200
24 150 Ore 500
25 150 Gold 2000
26 150 Random Shards 480
27 150 Gems 200
28 150 Crystal 1
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Can you confirm we are losing 9800 gems a month at tier xx?

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Whew, inflation hitting game economies too. Central bank of I+2 to action!

It was either this or add an extra 0 to all gem costs!

/Econ

Let’s focus on the good, overkill ahoy!

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Players:

Can we have an overkill mode so we don’t have to police ourselves in doing too much damage?

PQ3Devs:

Yes, but you will lose 9800 gems per month!

Players:

Oh no! well, that isn’t so bad, it’s only 9800 gems per kingdom per month

PQ3Devs:

Oh, no, that’s 9800 gems per user per kingdom per month

Players:

=(

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Well… to be honest, I will be skipping passes when the change to bazaar happens. Why? Because there is simply not enough in the passes to be worthwhile. What made a pass worth grabbing was being just a little shy of where I want to be, without the pass. The change will mean I won’t be where I want to be with or without a pass. So why would spend money on a pass? If I have to wait 8 weeks, I may as well wait 16.

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@Tresk do you have any other feedback on passes? What you would like to see to make them worthwhile for you?

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The ability to choose Crystals, Glyphs, color of runes/scrolls, etc.
There is far too much random stuff to make investing money in things worthwhile. There is so much to develop and upgrade that its honestly ridiculous that you pay money and end up getting crystals you dont need and minion glyphs that are essentially worthless.

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To clarify, I currently do buy the quest pass. I will just not be inclined to buy it with the proposed changes to kingdom bazaar. I’ll explain that first and then what it would take to keep buying it if my gem earnings are cut…

In the current state of the in game economy, the quest pass just barely meets the threshold of feeling worth the purchase, for me. There are a lot of arguably worthless things (lookin at you gold, keys, rando gear and rare relics! heh) but crystals, glyphs and the trickle of gems when added to what I’m earning elsewhere, usually makes me feel like I’ve gotten somewhere for the month. So I buy the quest pass.

Basically I buy passes to accelerate forward momentum. But I have to feel the momentum in order to want to buy the gasoline to thrown on the fire, though. (Sorry for the metaphor salad.) This is especially true when the gasoline has a lot of dust bunnies floating in it. I’m a daily player in a top notch guild. I’m still gem starved. There are all of these new nifty things to do with gems and I can’t do any of them. If I do my best to conserve, I can pick up some glyphs each week. Sadly they will likely be minion glyphs but that is a topic for another day. The main point is that with what I can eek out with my earned gems added to pass rewards, I can usually do something with my gear/spells that feels like I didn’t just waste a month of my life.

If my gem earnings get cut in half? Then the pass is just stuff that is going to help me get somewhere in 3 mos. If I have to wait 3 mos, I might as well wait 6 and spend the money on one of my other games where it gets me somewhere.

If my earned gems get cut as proposed? I would need quest pass to either have no random factor (at least on glyphs and crystals) or to have no useless dust bunnies like gold, rare relics, random gear, random spells, random minions, to continue buying it. So that would mean more gems, more glyphs, better relics, etc instead.

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Maybe you can increase the gems quantity from premium passes instead of cutting off bazaar rewards.
Follower rework introduced new ways to spend gems and damn it’s expensive even with current bazaar. If you decrease our monthly gems income by 10k, reforging will become the dead feature because it requires thousands of gems to get anything with useable stats. Or maybe you can reduce the prices for crafting/reforging?

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Every change that gets made all I ever see as the underlying factor that spurs the change is greed. That is so disheartening as a player to just see greed by your companies everywhere.

Me and my kingdom were so excited for this update because we were hoping for some new features for kingdoms so we could have more fun things to do together and when I read this I was heartbroken because all you did instead of add fun new mechanics was take away one of the few things my kingdom actually loved.

Do you even understand that earning gems via the bazaar was actually one of the ways that people in kingdoms could actually feel that this game is worth playing? Your monetization system is nothing short of greed, everything is over priced and this is one of the few ways that players could feel like they could actually succeed.

Now all you have done is make it even harder for kingdom leaders to keep a kingdom together. Now players will quit the game even faster when they realize there is no way to make it in this game without throwing cash as your company.

Your idea that you actually have a FTP model is a joke. Your company cannot be that stupid to actually believe you support a ftp play style. The only play style that this game supports is “Give us all your cash if you ever want to get anywhere”

I am so disgusted at this decision. :frowning:

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Signal boosting these statements, as I am 100% in full agreement here.

Momentum is everything in this game, and for quite awhile, there hasn’t been any momentum on the end-game side of things. Everything is far too expensive and momentum doesn’t happen when even a modest paying player has to act like Scrooge McDuck towards every offer in the game economically (this also makes it very easy for a player to handwave away Flash Offers in this mindset).

Recently (my guild was very LTTP with the Bazaar Tier XX situation), I have started personally experiencing momentum towards upgrading things. And you know what? I liked it. It loosened up my mindset towards the game. I started letting myself live a bit more “dangerously” in game with purchases.

It’s a whole lot easier to convince a person who can upgrade Things 1, 2, and 3 to purchases Upgrade 4, than it is to convince a person who can’t even upgrade Thing 1 to make that Upgrade 1 purchase.

Yeah, 400 Gems daily is over the top broken. But that momentum that everyone is really venting about losing is what needs to be preserved via other methods.

Premium passes need to have the perception of being premium to players. Some of them are in need of a refresh/update.

Quest Pass is OK. (Best source of Glyphs in game)

Season Pass is only currently “worth it” at Platinum (for bank tokens and access to Seasonal Mythic relics only, otherwise meh).

VIP Pass is near worthless and is badly outdated. There’s nothing premium or VIP about it at all. A couple of Armor Glyphs every 100 days when there’s a “free” Glyph (for gold) offered weekly. The 1-2 follower crystals (also every 100 days) is fairly meaningless when players can buy them weekly or more than that from the monthly Quest Pass. Everything else in the pass is filler material. Extra daily low-tier keys doesn’t mean much now that opening chests with Food a thing as replacement for keys. No account VIP bonuses (like in GoW) are granted to the player.

Premium passes NEED to feel like that are premium and “worth it” to encourage players to purchased them.

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The problem of your purchase system is overprized deals and poor pass bonus. Market gem won’t be an issue and it will let players stay here for awhile longer. If you wanna push players to purchase something, make them worthwhile first.

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@Jeto can we have relic costs re-evaluated with the reduction of gems? This is from Adventure:

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after 28 days of playing, I will be able to buy 1 legendary relic. You may think you’re giving us too many gems, but you’re also giving us way too much stuff to use our gems on.

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I want to add my voice to the chorus here, because as a (mostly) f2p player, the 400 gems a day made me feel like I could accomplish things in the game again. I recognize that someone who buys the (usually disappointing) quest pass three or four times a year isn’t your target audience, but I’d like to think that we’re important enough to consider or you wouldn’t have gone with a freemium model.

If the problem is that the paid passes suck compared to the free rewards everyone’s getting, then to me, it seems like the solution is to improve the paid content, not just to wail on the free rewards with a big nerf hammer. Taking away rewards is a surefire way to trash player morale. Please don’t do that.

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Maybe I’m stupid, but I didn’t get the whole idea with the 28 day reset of the bazaar.

Let’s see if I got it right.

According to the example, if we get to tier 10, after the reset, we will have to do 50 purchases in order to get tier 1 gold. Correct?

What about day 2 after the reset? Are going to go to 60 purchases (tier 11) for tier 2 reward or we are going to stay at 50 until we get to tier 10 again?

And let’s say that our kingdom gets to the last tier of 150 purchases. If the assumption that the highest purchases tier remains even for the lower tier rewards, theh that means 150 purchases on a daily basis without any way of resetting it. It doean’t make sense to me.

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Welp, I was all excited about the other changes until I saw the changes here. This is just… I’ve said before that you seem to think you have to be stingy to make the game work, and this proves it. Your economy is “carefully balanced” at a level of stinginess that is frustrating and unrewarding to players. And anything that doesn’t feel like that gets changed to be worse. The solution is not to nerf things. The solution is to balance your economy for free players at a less stingy level so that players can feel rewarded. And increase the value given by premium things to actually be worth money. I’ve gone into detail before why they aren’t worth it.

You’re greatly overvaluing the price of things, and that causes you to charge exorbitant amounts. The things you’re selling are ultimately pixels that you can create out of thin air you know. Yes, you need to earn a profit. And yes you’re paying for labor. But you need to keep in mind what exactly you’re selling. I’m not sure why you think the value of the things you’re selling are so high. Things in games mainly sell because they speed up progress (people are paying for time) or they’re unique. Most of the packages you offer don’t do much of either. Or don’t do enough of either for the prices.

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Heya! Just want to clarify-

As your Tier goes up, the deals available in the Bazaar change.
So if your Kingdom gets to Tier 10, you’ll be getting Tier 10 Bazaar Deals and you would have collected the Tier Rewards (the Gold etc) up to Tier 10 as well.
When the reset comes after Day 28, the Rewards track resets (so you’ll only need the 5 purchases to get the Tier 1 reward), but, you will still be getting the Tier 10 Bazaar Deals to purchase from.

The language with “Tiers” essentially meaning 2 different things is confusing. We’ll be taking a look at changing that and representing it clearly in the UI so it’s easy to see your Bazaar Deals Tier vs your Rewards Tier.

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Thank you for clarifying! Now I understand and it makes sense.
I think the confusing part in the example is the “available purchases will remain”. There is purchases column in the table and that causes the confusion for me.

If you change it to “available deals in the bazaar will remain” it will be clearer.

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I’m pleased that I will no longer spend money on this game. So there’s that.

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Holy cr@p! We must be in the end days. lol :joy:

Exactly right. Every week, I hoard every gem. I actually get depressed when the guild directive is to spend 35 on something. I do it because duh 35 < 400. But its still a bummer. And flash offers have been mostly a joke for me. $50 for a weapon? Really? lol But occasionally there is one that isn’t full stop moronic and I still tend to wave it off.

Right? THIS! This is what makes sane people loosey-goosey. Feeling like you are moving along, maybe even getting ahead. It makes you want to go with throttle up. But the Oliver Twist thing this game seems bent on makes me want to say meh.

Note to devs… I can’t speak for anyone else (everyone is different) but I spend more on games when I’m already at or close to ‘powerful’ than when I’m not. I’m not totally sure why. But if I had to guess its because its too hard to even guess what I want until I’m close to it? If everything seems eons away? I just don’t buy anything.

I disagree that it is over the top, broken. BUT… I speak of the current situation. With changes to pvp (please Dog tell me they did not forget about fallen ring) the situation is changing. Virtually everything meaningful in this game costs gems or crowns and the real world spend is flat out nuts. It is. I recently started getting back into MMOs after a long absence. Way way better bang for the buck in MMOs.

I have always been a person comfortable with paying for games. People gotta eat. But I’m not going to pay double for 1/4 the fun. That’s just nutso

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