Kingdoms slowly dying

Early Access Archive Early Access Game Discussion
1

Hey, I was wondering. I am seeing two once fairly active kingdoms dying as people are fed up with the way this is handled or just get bored of lack of functional changes or the game itself.

I tried to rejuvenate and that has been middling. Most of the >50 or >100 CItadel level players barely log on anymore.

How are you guzy faring? I see that Dragon’s peak is aggrssively recruiting for weeks suggesting they have the same issue @Tacet

Devs, what is going on?

Things like the Event issue with someone consistently scoring 900 higher (cheat or no cheat) - I’ve participated in one of maybe the last 10-15 events for that reason.

Drop rates - why play dungeons and skirmishes anymore?

Gold - what to do with it?

I kept busy trying to build different characters up and am not done yet. Once they are clothes in epic and maybe the occasional legendary with no mythic on the horizon - what to do?

I really enjoy(ed?) the game and am still playing GOW where the incentive to keep playing has been a lot better, guilds are not dying there or at least still have decent influx of players.

Am I venting - dunno? More wondering where this is going with hopes a little crushed.

8 Likes
2

This is the most likely culprit. Given the length of early access and the ongoing structural economy changes, there is virtually no “content” released since launch other than Events. Many players who play regularly quickly exceed the available content so it’s not all that surprising that attrition is the biggest issue.

I know in Throne of Odin we have tried to make things as entertaining and rewarding as possible along the way (much of which we’ve documented in other posts). But the reality is most longer-term players have little need to continue playing. PvE Strategy is still mono-color/barrier/stun oriented; PvP is Turn0 gear-oriented. Once you have those build outs, there is little else to strive for.

Hopefully the economy adjustments are about done and perhaps more content and QoL will start to be present in the updates. That will go a long way towards reinvigorating existing players.

Gems of War has the advantage of being a long-running “collection” game which incentivizes continued play. There is little strategy at this point in the game (equip overpowered World Event medals, use Tesla/Queen Bee, fast farm with Ironhawk or Phoenicia, etc.) beyond a small bit in Guild Wars. People continue to play to get the next troop, the next kingdom advancement, etc. PQ3 has a long way to go before it starts hitting those marks.

P.S. (EDIT - added after) - it also doesn’t help that the CX experience here has been a massive failure. Mostly this is the developers’ fault due to the length of early access but plenty of developers have made that a strength by really engaging with the early access player base and keeping them both informed and involved. That hasn’t happened here and the strain of it is really showing.

This was almost 3 months ago:

Beyond the actual release of 0.39 which was primarily an overhaul of a couple of economy/activity mechanics, that’s all we know. It’s hard to look forward to something when there is nothing to look forward to.

3 Likes
3

A game in Early Access should really be building up momentum and engagement ahead of officially launching, and then positive word of mouth helping drive more players to the game.

Instead we see the community dropping out from a mix of boredom, lack of content, lack of updates or frustration with the updates. IMO most of the updates have been around slowing progression and dangling the carrot of legendary and mythic level gear without the drop rates to make them obtainable, while the game content simply doesn’t require them.

Issues get raised here and feedback given, but little positive change seems to come from it. The devs don’t really engage here at all, and the best it seems we can hope for is a non-committal “we’ll pass it on” with no indication if change will come as a result. Some do, most don’t and some go in the opposite direction to the feedback.

Kingdoms seem to have been completely ignored as a feature for at least the 6 months I’ve been playing. Being in a dead kingdom is no fun, so we cling to the hope that the next update will make it more fun to play, encourage people to join kingdoms because they are beneficial and make it make sense for them to be full and active. Instead of the current state of things where the bazaar daily deal is the most competitive piece of PVP this game has to offer.

As it stands now I see the game has a few phases:

Get each character to L50.
Get equipment to beat Difficulty X dungeons.
Get equipment to beat PVP round 0.

Then as Sibelios says above - there is little else to strive for. Login each day to check the daily challenges, hope for desirable relics, follower crystals or gems. Scrap everything you find due to lack of storage. There are some goals to help pass the time between updates, though doing +500 PVP fights for 0.1% gain is hardly inspiring.

Having some idea of where the game is heading would help, but as linked above that was months ago…

1 Like
4

I mentioned this ages back in another thread.

I wasn’t wrong. XD

It is very obvious that the game won’t be sustainable with the current inventory and glyph/relic system.

They are also scaring away all the paying players by not only making increasingly more horrible options for money, but actively making many things people have already spent money on like monthly subscription and battle pass even worse value than the questionably bad value that it already was.

Also did a topic as early as April somewhere on the forum mentioning how many dead currencies there were within the game. That number is now in the dozens despite the game not even being launched yet. This is a huge issue with Gems of War that I assumed they would have learned from, but they are basically double downing on dead curries for Puzzle Quest 3.

Basically only 3 currencies exist: gems (that they keep reducing ways of getting them), glyphs (that are obtained at a rate of like 1 every week/month), and mythic relics (that are realistically only obtained 1 per month off of pure RNG on daily challenges).

3 Likes
5

Yeah, I am aware that most has been mentioned before. The flogged horse that has died half a year ago.

I was looking for someone to pick me up, infuse some hope.

Well, I will keep playing the game anyways, though I have joined the not any longer paying players a long long time ago (around the time the flogged horse died).

Yeah, there are a lot of dead currencies in gems, but it takes some time till they die. Admitted, the game is a lot older. And there is always a new card to get each week, a new mythic each month plus the odd whatever.

There really are no carrots dangling here are there? Well, I still am working towards a playable class each and I currently only at one that easily beats x, one that can, one that is most fun of all but can’t and two that suck. But yeah. Meh.

Well, we will keep playing or at least logging in and see where it goes. Just sad to see more people go than join, or at least feeels like a game in the latter days, and that prior to launch.

6

Some interesting kingdom stats of my own:

84 people have left my kingdom from inactivity since 1/6/2021 to 22/12/2021
43 of them had over 1000 crests earned in the old crest system for the kingdom
22 over 2000
13 over 3000
4 over 4000
2 over 5000

4 people have basically been in my kingdom from the start
1/3 of my current kingdom have been playing for 3 months or longer
1/5 for 2 months
and the rest less than that

I haven’t seen this many people inactive straight after a patch since 0.37 was released. There seems to be an influx of new people every patch but that number seems to be getting less and and less each time…

2 Likes
7

This! And PQ3 has whiffed hard on this with the draconian inventory limits. Boring repetitive gameplay? CHECK! Ability to accumulate endless amounts of stuff you think you need, but don’t? FAIL!

And this. The entire point of participating in an early access is helping to shape the game. Or at least feeling like it. In the entire time I have been playing (I missed the first few weeks), I’ve never felt like there was any kind of serious value in communicating issues. Even bug reports go largely ignored for too long. FAIL

The gameplay loop has not changed at all. As you said. Ok. But its kinda weird that every change seems to want to change that, but instead doubles down on that. That tells me that they aren’t playing it. It feels more like, Them: “Make it harder to do that thing! So they will do other things!” Us: “Well now there is literally no way do do anything but the thing.” So the so called balance changes are also a FAIL.

I still think there is hope. All it would take is for the devs to maybe play the game and for the communication people to be given both the time and the permission to…ummm… communicate?

4 Likes
8

Lyranica and I have been hiding in a zombie guild since 0.34. It’s never really gone anywhere and the guild leader bailed ages ago and went back to GoW, on a promise to someday return when the game starts moving forward in a meaningful way. A second-in-charge keeps the guild going recruiting people that leave as fast as they are added to the roster. On the plus side, during the recruitment dips, we get get to feast on the food deals as the majority of the guild are casual or marginally attached players and barely play, On the down side, during the recruitment bumps, we fight on food deals the same as any other top guild. Ironically, this fighting causes players to quit the guild, which tends to make food deals more accessible, so… :smiling_imp:

But, if this guild were to ever fully fall apart, we would surely be picked up easily by one of the major guilds here given our advanced account status.

I think we have been, but mostly in a negative way. We are shaping the game, but the response generally has been to make things harder/more annoying in response to high-end players actually succeeding at the game. Many of the changes in recent updates on the top end have been to intentionally slow down progression in the game going forward.

The devs seem to be really afraid of addressing the major gameplay issues that are not tied to monetization, or just have been pushed way way back onto the back burner. Issues, such as:

  • Barrier is still absurdly overpowered for the benefit it provides and general ease of attaining this status effect, while most other status effects are generally meaningless in contrast.
  • A two-turn loop of alternating Stun, then Barrier (in either order), fully evades the purpose of Boss Stun Barriers.
  • Turn 0 PvP wins are still possible (and even worse are meta). This leads to exactly one type of build being viable in PvP. Literally, all the devs would have to do here is to simply cap starting mana % at anything under 100%. No gear changes would be needed at all. Of course, the problem with this change is that a lot more players would tie at 24750. As such, this change would mandate a new PvP scoring formula to avoid this outcome.

QFT. Still being “frozen” at the starting point of the game’s story for 9, going on 10 months, and counting leads to a lot of staleness. Some fresh air in the game is really needed.

2 Likes
9

These are quite literally the very last things they should change. Well… ok the pvp thing should happen sooner.

But if they nerf the barrier / stun loop, in the game’s current state, you would be lucky to find a kingdom because very few people could (or would want to) play.

It’s been a pattern, the entire time I’ve been playing, that they concentrate on nerfing what we do, instead of really looking at why we do it. Spoiler alert: we do it because it’s basically the only way. Every time they make the enemies hit harder, it just makes this truer. Removing the option of multiple spells, made this truer. Removing the ability to use other class spells, made this truer. Increasing the mana cost of spells, made this truer. The latest mana changes, made this truer. I’d go as far as to say the changes to marks and the earlier changes to gear evolution, also made this truer.

I did my first play through on a necro with no barrier until I finally got a saviors shield while I was doing chapter 12. But that, as you know is a maybe barrier on being hit. Stun was slightly more doable, but not by much. During that time, I was changing spell combos left and right to try to beat the next fight. Beating the next fight was not guaranteed, but trying to work it out was at least interesting. Almost like it was… a puzzle? :eyes:

But with each patch, they just keep making the option pool smaller and smaller. I played the entire story on my shaman using only blue spells. Just because I wanted to see if I could do that. Plus, at the time I didn’t get shaman, haha. But it was kind of cool and fun to do that.

Now I basically do the same thing every pve battle. Like a robot on an assembly line. Yay?

As for pvp, there is always going to be a tie as long as there is a max score. They could get around that by throwing in some randomness like gow events. But considering the hard cap on participation, that would be really unfair. But yes, they could do something with the scoring math to get us out of the “only meta will do” scenario.

Also… Merry Christmas! If you do not celebrate that, then Merry Day!

1 Like
10

Kingdoms will also empty out because it’s not fun for new players.

As a relatively newer player, there is trouble in the starting game, perhaps due to all these adjustments. My biggest problem is that after the initial 4 days, I feel little to no sense of progression. I can’t tell if my hero is getting stronger. Sure there are some numbers hidden somewhere that say they are, but besides a slowly climbing level, you don’t see it. A basic, mostly inconsequential choice of doing something small every time you level makes you feel it (eg GoW, choose meaningless elemental stat). Much later, I occasionally see a blue piece of loot, but I usually have to wait a day for the chest to open.
There are so many different resources that I feel only mild disappointment when I open a chest if I don’t see a blue gear. Perhaps I’m getting some amazing evolution item. Who the heck knows? Or cares?

I’m stuck on a loop of do story, get stuck on dungeon, grind for a few days, continue on. It’s not fun. I don’t see any dialog choices after the first 2 dungeons, any sense that I’m in control or unique or special or making a difference in the world. It’s basically stun control monsters as much as possible, and hope for good drops (board and chests). Maybe if they did vertical strikes for additional damage/status changes, or something it wouldn’t feel so horizontally flat.

If players at the bottom feel similarly to me, then what’s the point of joining up with a long term kingdom? They’re going to empty out without new blood. I’m definitely not recommending this game like I did with GoW. The Puzzles & Dragons feel was nice at the start, but it’s not enough.
I really want to love it because it has the Puzzle Quest name on it. I even played the heck out of Galactrix! However, it’s becoming hard for me to want to grind through story mode.

1 Like
11

I’ve played in over 50 beta’s or early access. Some for the same game in multiple rounds of it. By far this is the worst in terms of communication. Sadly overall its not the worst one I’ve been part of. Going purely by how GOW beta’s go I feel like its gonna sadly go the same way. I haven’t been in a beta for 505 games but maybe the community manager there @WarlockPrime would be able to advise or what not the team on some tips and info to make the experience better? Otherwise it feels like this.

1 Like
12

100%. We are months removed from a substantive game update (non-economic adjustment) and we literally have no information about upcoming updates/releases. There is literally no way to be interested or excited as a player or kingdom leader in cases like this.

Any person coming along at this point and viewing the activity on the forums would assume this game is vaporware.

4 Likes
13

Help! Am I lost? I’m new here. I see the forums, but am looking for the actual game. I just get a sign up link. Is this game dead?

14

Hi @Ardrael ,

The reason that there is a signup link is that the game is still in Early Access and not yet officially released. The current version of the game is available on Android and in very limited areas of the world on iOS, with greater rollout coming sometime in the future. The game is planned for a full worldwide release sometime in 2022.

2 Likes