Sons of the void/Secluded Experiments

[Driller7]

+1

well noble residence deeds which don't use a license are available from the gem store, but you can also get buildings such as the white caste/dark castle and witch tower that do a similar thing, should these be removed as well because they cost bluebyte gem revenue?

A high level player will likely have 20+ farms, getting 20 silos at 10% chance would require ~200 sotv runs. That's a much better use of the adventure than the current one which is just a case of deleting it.

Secluded Experiments is pretty hard to do and its much rarer to get than sotv, it wouldn't cause a sudden flood of players with too many matermills.

Besides, these buildings are available for some of the seasonal events, if you wait long enough then you don't need to spend gems on them at all.

[Dopey]

I have 94 Sons of the Veld and 32 secluded experiments in my star menu doing nothing. If BB made these adventures viable to play it would be too much of a boost as I’m probably not the only 1 with loads of them collected. There is no point in deleting them as it costs you nothing to keep them and one day BB might do something useful with them. This is why lots of people will have lots of them.

My belief as to why we have Outlaws, SE, SofV, VtV and to a lesser extent Witch, DP and Traitors is for filler. It’s like 3 cherries on a slot machine. You really want the jackpot symbols, 3 bars or the 3 bells to get something tangible but generally you only get the 3 cherries and win 10p after putting 50p in.

We want the Nords or BK but we often get Outlaws, SE, SofV, VtV. This is so it looks like our Explorers aren’t just coming back with map frags all the time. It helps make us think we’ve won something. So I doubt BB want to change this system.

If you think of sending out explorers as a slot machine game it makes a lot more sense on what you’re playing. They don’t want every pull a Nords and they don’t want every pull a map frag either so instead they give us Outlaws, SE, SofV, VtV.

If however they were so inclined to change things I find myself agreeing with the No Team. At least no in terms of what we have at the moment getting improved.

My suggestion would be to get rid of SotV completely instead of changing its loot or exp. Its worth nothing so there would be no outcry if all stored SofV were deleted, the only reason to keep them is in case BB do change it for the better. After getting rid of it BB should then tweak the map a bit here and there and then call it a different name maybe ‘Daughters of the Void’ and then release it again. However going from what I said to before I think they need SotV in the game to give us our 3 cherries every now and again and instead of getting rid of it or changing it they would be more inclined to do what they have already done which is to just bring out more adventures while still keeping a nice stable of filler adventures to flesh out the win ratios on the Explorer fruit machine mechanism.

[Kotugo]

I disagree about the fillers, when you send an explorer out to look for adventures and he only returns with map parts, that is the only filler on the fruit machine. None of the adventures would have had development time with the intention of them sitting in your star menu or being deleted, they wanted people to play a variety of adventures. This is the reason adventures like vtv get played, they are not as good as nords or black knight, but they are good enough to be worth the losses. The problem we have is most the "experience" adventures do not feel worthwhile since you get the experience from using a ton of troops.

If improving the rewards is asking too much then maybe they should be rebalanced so they are more like the nords, ie lots of experience with minimal losses due to lots of last strikers.

[Dopey]

I disagree about the fillers, when you send an explorer out to look for adventures and he only returns with map parts, that is the only filler on the fruit machine. None of the adventures would have had development time with the intention of them sitting in your star menu or being deleted, they wanted people to play a variety of adventures.This is the reason adventures like vtv get played, they are not as good as nords or black knight, but they are good enough to be worth the losses. The problem we have is most the "experience" adventures do not feel worthwhile since you get the experience from using a ton of troops.

If improving the rewards is asking too much then maybe they should be rebalanced so they are more like the nords, ie lots of experience with minimal losses due to lots of last strikers.

I see the map frags as the fruit machine having a sticker slapped on it saying ‘Every go a winner’ not as filler since map frags are actually useful, unlike SotV.

If they want people to play SotV then why did they make the losses so high compared to what is gained? They can’t be that silly to think at the time of development that this map was a winner. They had to have played it, seen the losses and the gain and realised no one would do it when just about every other adventure would be preferable to it.

My cynical view is they would have developed some adventures that are sinkholes and a waste of time. The more people they can get to do them the longer it will take them to ‘finish’ the game under the guise of making progress by completing SotV. The longer we play the game the longer they have to temp us to pay them some money. It might also make people get frustrated if all they keep finding from there explorers is SotV so they go to the gem shop and buy a Nords. So I would argue there most certainly is value to putting some development time into a few adventures like SotV. Plus we have no idea of the development time, it could have been half a day or half a year.

It’s a free to play game. The whole game play dynamic is different to that of the old pay up front way. They needed to make the up front paying game good to play and fun once you’ve brought it so that you will actually buy it.
With free to play I fell what game developers do instead is make the game they want to make as though it was on the old system of paying up front then let the bean counters come along and take out the fun bits or the things that make the game more accessible. Then to get back that accessibility you then need to pay or take months of boredom to grind your way there instead. The SotV adventure helps them do this.

My cynical view is they have made a variety of adventures we CAN do. But only a few we want to do, some we will do if we cant find any others and then finally ones to act as the filler we wont do to frustrate us into giving them money or playing the game for longer so they have more time to get us to give them some money. These are then the ones we get the most often as well.

Let me put it a better way I’ve around 450 adventures sitting in my starmenu and if I hadn’t stopped playing for around 3-4 months I would have had a lot more. If BB made it so they were all good to do like the Nords I would get through this game a lot quicker which they don’t want. So by making sure there are ‘filler’ adventures mixed in with the good ones it makes it seem like we have a variety and we just choose to play the good ones.

The problem with why some adventures get done and some don’t is purely down to loss and reward. I don’t know about these days but when I stopped playing a few months ago if you were to sell the resources needed to make the troops you would loose on SotV you could buy 2 Nords, train the troops to do them and still have a profit and 54k Exp.

This suggests to me either BB made a big mistake, in which case why didn’t they fix it? Or BB purposely calculated SotV into the adventure pool as a sinkhole.

The fruit machine theory is what it feels like were playing to me.

The Nords and BK are the jackpot

SFTR is the bells

Pirates, Horseback are the 3 bars

Witch, DP and possibly Outlaws, Traitors and VTV are 1 bar

SotV and SE are the cherries.

The map frags are the equivalent to the fruit machine having a sticker on it saying ‘Every go a winner’. But going the map frag route makes it a grind for us to collect enough to do anything with so BB have more time to get us to spend money on there game.

However I feel like I have said to much on this now and what my real point was that I believe we have too many SotV out there now for BB to come along and make them all suddenly worth while to do. So there is never going to be a dramatic change to SotV this far into the game. Nor do I believe BB ever wanted SotV to be as viable as the nords.

The only way I see SotV making a come back is when the Nords and BK reach 3000gc to buy and SotV is still 1 fish. Then its possible things will reverse and people will sell there nords for 3000gc and use it to build there army up for SotV and get 33k exp instead of 27k.

[Polymer]

My 2p thought on this is that I doubt BBs compute an adventure on its gc value. It would be crazy for them to do it as 1 day an adventure can be 10gc and next one 200gc, depends on the players mood and whatever guide suddenly becomes available. So you could scratch gc value of an adventure out of BB book. What they probably use when designing one (if they use anything at all) is a math function related to difficulty, spots available, camps (related to difficulty itself it seems anyway), troops needed to destroy those camps, loot offered (resource and not gc wise), xp offered. And all adventures would relate to that same optimal function giving in the end a close result +-X%.

[brutus1900]

make any buildings available as reward, decorations!

[ambandil]

they need to do something to make these duds viable though- the difference in doing SE versus vtv is so great with the rewards not being in proportion whatsoever to the extra number of troops lost/time spent (both in xp and number of troops) So the only real incentives to play Se and to a slightly lesser extent SOTV is playing a different adventure or needed for quest tree

That is just too few incentives really and something needs to be done to rebalance this a little bit and make it a viable choice for people to play (maybe for the ultra rare chance of an extra lootspot (which ironically is available on an adventure that is already desirable to play due to the epic building and limited trooploss for xp gained) or epic buildings or upped resources (aiming for the simple solutions that leave the adventure intact)/upped chance of desirable resources (so granite, gold refills, gold coin etc- not titanium or saltpeter which are useless in current situation anyway)

So simple things that make people play these adventures for specific purposes even if they run at a relative loss compared to some others but they yield you a desired result ( Kind of like how motherly love gives you coin or gold bars always as a reward)

This should take relative little development time and will make the adventuring experience a lot better for many by (perceived) additional choice - in this case meaningfull choice because the argument that you already have the chocie to play these adventures is like saying you already have the choice to cross the road if there is no pedestrian overpass- when the road is a 7 lane freeway- only an idiot would do this as a meaningfull activity :P

[Dopey]

Any ‘extra’ things added to the loot table will always have a percentage chance to drop. Something players want like an angel gate will likely have a 2% chance to drop. Adding on an extra special slot will also be a small percent chance. None of these will attract players enough to elevate SotV to make it even a mid range valued adventure. Heck even if they added on a 100% chance of an 8th slot and filled it with one of the better collections of stuff it still wouldn’t have much of an impact compared to the troop cost.

Sotv is long, complex, has high troop loss, no significant difference in loot table compared to many of its competing adventures and while its XP is high, because it’s the main reason to do an adventure for every player and everything else we gain is subjective its XP value is off-putting as well.

To make it viable BB would need to decrease and increase where appropriate across all these areas and in some cases in significant amounts. I’m talking for instance like instead of 1000 Steal Swords they would need to give 8000 Steal Swords or instead of 500 Gold Ore, 2500 Gold Ore. Which they will never do and if they did they couldn’t allow us to then use the 100+ of them we have stored up as it would be too much of a boost. Increasing the amount a little bit like 500 Gold Ore to 700 Gold Ore would still make SotV useless and ignored by most players since there would still be a good chance you will get the more useless items in each slot and little increases across all slots still wouldn’t add up enough to off set the rest of the issues SotV have to make it viable.

I believe SotV is a vital sinkhole for BB to have in its adventure pool. Because of this I’m against them changing it as I feel it’s a waste of time. What I would prefer is they bring out a couple more adventures not quite as good as the nords that can be found by our explorers, not exclusively brought by map frags and from medium search and above. I think this is a much more realistic goal to ask BB to do.

Lets say there is a 5% chance to get a nords and a 70% to get a SotV on any given pull of the fruit machine explorer mechanism. To ask BB to keep the % the same but make SotV 80-90% as good the nords (therefore making it worthwhile to do) then we will be getting a 70% chance to get something nearly as good as the 5% chance Nords adventure. I believe BB have purposely setup the system we have so that this doesn’t happen because they don’t want it to.

What is more realistic to ask of them I feel is to leave in the 70% chance to get SotV adventure and introduce a brand new adventure that is 80-90% as good as the nords and viable to do. Then make that adventure have a 10-15% to drop mixed in with the nords AND SotV from our explorers.

I feel BB need SotV in the explorer finding pool and for it to be bad it is. Getting them to change it is not what we should be asking. As any change they might do to appease us will still make it totally naff as they cant make it good enough for us to consider it worth while to do without breaking there sinkhole fruit machine system. We would be far better off asking them to add the ‘little bit’ more we want in the form of a chance to get a new worthwhile adventure. It would mean they can still keep a better sinkhole % and we would get that ‘little bit’ more out of the game we are looking for.

SotV is a lost cause imo.

[Tage]

We also need to remember that Sons of the Veld is a resource adventure.
Thus you cannot compare it to those epic adventures giving fancy buildings...

You need to compare it to other experience adventures, and none of them give anything fancy in the loot. They give XP.
I once made a comparison between the most common experience adventures.
It is based on having a veteran general and crossbowmen, and playing them all according to my guides.
In that comparison SotV isn't that bad (a good incentment to get that veteran general)...

• Play Horseback 5 times to get 36,150 XP and lose 1890R 450B
• Play Witch of the Swamp 6 times to get 33,978 XP and lose 3018R 120C
• Play Traitors 4 times to get 34,840 XP and lose 2084R
• Play Dark Priests 6 times to get 35,850 XP and lose 2226R 72C
• Play Stealing from the Rich 3 times to get 35,610 XP and lose 1929R
• Play Sons of the Veld once to get 33,440 XP and lose 1410R 220C

[Makedon]

+1, generally agree with whatever tage says