I’ve been playing for months (.34), and I keep persevering. I even spent money at the start as I always like to support the developers to some degree. Then .35 happened, and .36, and .37! Each update making some things better, but most things worse! It’s so damn frustrating. Like you’re being punished for being enthusiastic about the games potential. And the game does have a lot of potential, provided the developers stop focusing on monetising and focus on the gameplay! It doesn’t matter how many purchase options they add to the game if no one is playing it!
A few things that are really frustrating at the moment:
Inventory. Spending 25% of the game time sorting your inventory is not fun! There is no logic to restricting peoples inventory slots. It doesn’t encourage people to spend. If anything it restricts spend because we focus on a couple of characters instead of all of them. Also having more equipment would encourage players to buy more upgrade material.
Connectivity. This is a big one. It’s been happening for a long while now. In normal fights it really doesn’t matter. Frustrating but not detrimental other than a little lost time. But in PvP or leaderboard challenges it’s really annoying. One disconnect can be the difference between 1000 gems and 100 gems. And these disconnects happen multiple times a day. I’m surprised I haven’t broken my phone with how angry it makes me feel at times. Is that how you want your players to feel when playing your game?
Animations. I love the graphics in this game. Some very talented designers have been involved and it was a real selling point when I first started playing. However, I don’t want to see them every time I play. The delay they cause is really frustrating. Allow us to switch them off, please! I understand that you need them for marketing purposes, but once the players are invested, fancy graphics that slow gameplay as excessively, as these do, will only cause frustration. That’s not the way to keep people playing!
Resources. Rebalance them please. Too much food and not enough ore is frustrating. Too easy to get superior shards and impossible to get mid-range ones. OK, maybe there are a few salvage tricks players can use, but did you really design things for this to be a viable option? Just balance the shards based on the type of chest. Allow us to upgrade shards similar to the marks formula, but also allow us to downgrade them! Relics should be farmable. Not easy but better than the current levels. I open dozens of chests every day, and salvage 95% of gear received, but it’s been weeks since I found a relic anywhere other than the stores or the daily challenges. Glyphs should be rare and I don’t have an issue with the current format. Then again, I have plenty of gems so buying them isn’t currently an issue.
PvP and leaderboards. OK, I’m used to leaderboards being controlled by the Whales, but that doesn’t stop it being annoying. Surely you can come up with something a little better balanced than the current format. Spending a week to earn 50 gems isn’t appealing, especially when you can frequently get more from a single daily challenge.
Citadels. This has been mentioned a few times but as it’s supposed to be a major achievement to get one, make them configurable please. We need the ability to redistribute our points. Play modes change, and where I originally believed I’d focus only on Paladin/Yellow I now find I want to focus more on Shaman/Green. So my bonuses are wrong. Where I originally believed defense was critical, I now find I prefer attack. When I first started with the citadel I didn’t realise how important starting mana was. You can charge us to change things. Or limit us to once a month or something. Just allow it!
Timeouts. I’m not referring to the disconnects here, but the way the game claims you’ve been inactive for too long. I play on my phone, as I’m sure the majority of other players do. Sometimes I have to answer the phone and do some work. Frustrating for me I know, but it happens. If I’m on the phone for 30 mins, or working, the game does a timeout. This is so bloody annoying, especially when you’re doing leaderboard or pvp challenges. Why? It shouldn’t matter if I’ve left the game for a short while. It’s not affecting anyone else. There aren’t any realtime challenges. I should be able to leave it for hours if I want. In theory I should be able to close my game and come back to the same spot when I’m ready, but that’s probably asking too much.
No more moves. The game has been ending your turn since at least .36, but .37 added that lovely little (no so!) message that tells you it’s finishing because you don’t have any more turns. What’s really annoying is this happens even when you have spells left. I don’t like the idea of more buttons to press, but if the logic can’t figure out you have spells left, we should get a ‘do you want to end’ button pop up. Better still there could be an end turn button somewhere that you can press whenever you’re ready.
I’m sure there are more areas I could ‘moan’ about, but I’m as bored of writing as you are of reading! I know this is an Early Access game, and I expect bugs and changes, but I don’t expect silence from the developers. I’ve played EA games many times, and usually the developers want the game to be a success. They don’t just use the release to get some free beta-testing, but they communicate with the player base to make the game better. Afterall, as I’ve said before, we are your potential evangalists! We will talk about it and can either make or break it’s success.
Another change that hasn’t helped is battles were extended to take much longer but provide nothing more for it, while creating new frustrations such as battles timing out because they took 30 mins (one battle on a mobile game!) or the connection just bugged out and you lose the progress.
Inventory management is painful - after almost every battle I’m having to discard 99% of what I find for lack of storage. Would be great to focus farm gear for different characters, but totally lack the space to do so. The addition of set bonuses is a nice addition, but requires even more storage to work with.
Resources
Nowhere near enough ore to keep more than one, maybe two followers active.
Food - not enough uses for it. Used for levelling follower, but then only the bazaar deal.
BUT @RubiconX if you want some unrequested critical feedback, you have pointed out too many logical and rational arguments in one post
Ironically as I timeout for “inactivity” to write this post 6 battles into a L100 daily dungeon, what will likely happen next is that one issue will be “identified”, it will then be “reported” to the dev’s and 9/10 issues will be left unaddressed (and who knows what the dev’s do with player feedback of the 1/10 issues?).
I, like you and may others here, really like the game/franchise and want it to be successful, but are being woefully let down in the identification of issues that blind Freddy could see (if blind Freddy could play a mobile game), and the lack of communication about identified issues - let alone those issues being actually addressed.
Storage, guilds, citadels, timeouts, animations, spell balance, mythic chests, PvP etc. etc. the list of issues is long
Find a group of engaged players, for a small in game “reward” you could have access to a “virtual assistant” that plays 1,000’s of hours of your game and easily point out the areas of concern as experts
I didn’t go far enough
Find a half dozen forum regulars - gift them VIP for a year (cost = $0) and get their feedback via an online team meeting or two
How valuable is their information?
How cheap is gifting an annual VIP or giving them a 1 word credit in the game files compared to the value you can get for them?
IT IS AN ABSOLUTE BARGAIN
Take the low hanging fruit and support your supporters
The inventory limits are not fun, and need a dramatic change. It’s not that I want to keep everything I loot. But having to constantly stop my game play to clunk on over to the inventory and deal with that, is not fun.
The gameplay mechanics are simple. That simplicity in itself, is not a negative. However, simplicity creates a feeling of repetitiveness. Even repetitiveness is not in itself a negative. However, when you take simple and repetitive AND add in slow as mud, that is a negative. For me, doing simple things can be fun, doing repetitive things can be fun. Doing simple repetitive things at the pace of a pregnant snail going through quick sand? Not fun.
Chests, right now, are not fun. The reward in higher rarity chests, rarely feels like it was worth the wait. This one, I forgive. Because it feels like something that can’t be changed until other issues are addressed.
There have been some nice QoL improvements since I started in April. The addition of challenges and events, also nice. The changes to the shop feel like an improvement. But the pace of the gameplay and also progression are a total fun sponge, atm. The inventory limits are not even in the same zipcode as fun.
This is probably the single most disappointing part of this whole experience. No disrespect to Jeto and Gman and Salty, etc. but every interaction on here is “hey we hear your feedback and we’ve passed it on to the developers” as if the developers are on the moon in a box that is opened once a day for air, food, and apparently one-way messages with no possible return communication.
Also, happy to see more feedback like this. I for one am exhausted at shouting a this black hole
I have to say, many many goodbpoints with which I agree here. In fact, all 8 points the OP made are, well, on point. I really want to keep playing this game but I’m on the edge Im afraid.
It really feels like we are just free beta testing and an experimental wallet piñata rather than a vehicle for any meaningful change. Either the team is in way over their heads compared to our expectations or there are higher ups that are being malicious and dismissive towards the player base that really want to see this game get better
Just reposting my gripe list that I summarized right after 0.37 since many items are synonymous with @RubiconX’s items as well (might as well keep this list alive!):
I think it’s safe to say that the majority of us feel the same way. Any intelliegent person would notice how many of the ‘testers’ agree with each other. You could almost be mistaken in thinking that we know what we’re talking about!!
I am not sure. I have the feeling that as consumers we are equated to imbeciles. Cause if we were intelligent we would be devs? We would not be playing the game? Not sure what the underlying thought process is there. I for one definitely have spent a lot less time on the forum as the issues and descriptions kind of repeat themselves. I have hope for the future, which it is said it the worst of all evils for it prolongs the torment of man.
Animations
I absolutely agree on first post, especially on animations. I find them annoying and unnecessary. I would rather se bigger gems and gem board as it’s tricky to touch exact gem when timer starts counting. Give us option to choose btw bigger gem board without animations or current smaller with animations
Those size scaling issues apply throughout the game, not just the gem board. Trying to change loadouts is incredibly fiddly on a phone screen. I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs are doing all their design work on a PC with a 24" screen, but what looks good at that size and aspect ratio with a precision pointer in a mouse, doesn’t scale down to well to a 6" screen with a fat finger for a pointer.
Likewise accessing chat or messages/rewards in the top left menu - tapping with my thumb I’m covering all those buttons and just hoping it picks the correct tiny button.
