[Feedback] Dev Notes: Weekly Challenges

[lordloocan]

Clever move by BB gifting everyone a chunk of tokens. Now they will have used them to upgrade buildings and so will not want the whole weekly challenges item removed from the game. 10/10 for sneakiness to whoever came up with the gift...

If the challenges did other than ask for the huge use of resources, the sacrifice of significant troops, and adventures that depend on other adventures loots then I might give it a shot. As it is the challenges are too poorly constructed to believe anyone even worked on them who has also played the game.

If the game is all about balance, what is balancing the use of all these resources, what are we getting in return? You can say the tokens to upgrade buildings. If people really want to see how poor that return is work out how many tokens you will need to fully upgrade say a third of the buildings you have that they can be used on and then work out what you have paid to get maybe a few hundred/thousand troops. I suspect you will find the answer very illuminating - not sure anyone in BB HQ did the sum themselves but if they mail me I can send them some typical figures.

Finally, even though I have left my comments I fear they will fall on deaf ears, judging by BB_Alex's notes. Phrases such as ' I decided to focus....', 'I decided to go with the increase....', ' I do not plan to remove....', 'My personal goal is to....' etc all seem to imply the only person making the decisions are BB_Alex and that one is paying no interest having set out en-trenched positions.

Sorry BB_Alex and anyone else reading this at HQ but judging by game chat your customer base is shrinking rapidly. Though maybe that is the plan so you have a reason to close TSO just like Anno?

PS And now they have the temerity to run a gem 100% Happy Hour, talk about rubbing our noses in it.

[Lothir]

I totally like the weekly challenge, BB should just remove doing adventures as a part of the challenge......... And then BB should make a bean quest, so those of us who doesnt do adventures, can make beans

[SmurfAsH]

Perhaps letting some tokens be reward in the subquests would make WC considerable fair enough to "approach"..

[Tine122013]

while I agree with the weekly challenges and the mechanisms behind it. I will struggle to complete 3 advs (treasure of Wisdom) due to time constraints. 2 would be a challenge but 3 is out of my reach.

[conasatatu]

I don't post on forum often, but I am hoping that if more players will voice out their opinion in this matter the better, and maybe, just maybe things will turn around for the better. I had about 10 different options on where exactly on the forum to write this post, maybe that will be the one that devs are actually reading. I play the settlers since 1995 and I was always a massive fan. I joined the settlers online in 2012 and reached lvl50 by 2014 and left the game for three years. I came back 3 months ago and I was amazed with all the improvements and that the game was alive again with more events and new content nearly every week. BB- thank you for that!
Now. I still play settlers IV, I get maps from "the settlers map source" website, every time there is a new map posted by my favourite map creator, an anonimous person with a nick of RR, I cheer up for good few days. Up to date she created 624 maps for the settlers IV, ALL of them challenging, different, hugely appreciated and downloaded by thousands of fans, maps that I look forward to play, maps that I usually fail on the first attempt and then play again and again. This game was released first time in 2001, the graphics are terrible, there are bugs on windows 10 (btw just like on xp, vista and win8 haha) there is no mates to chat to and no global interaction. But this game is awsome and CHALLENGING. Maybe it is time to give a call to RR and ask her to explain you what she does to your standard settlers game that it is still being played 17 years later!!
I am considering leaving TSO again, let me show you why. I got the archaeological quest and gave my resources away, that's grand, the resources are for spending. But when i was asked to do 6 of scenarios I have never seen or heard of i headed straight to the trade office. This is a resault:
http://prntscr.com/lm66ct

And that is what I saw the next time I opened TSO: http://prntscr.com/lm6dqt

Looks like no one is selling those, guild resources are dry as well, I was told I wasn't the only one that never seen them before, it isn't due my three years long break, this is just a very very rare dropping scenario. I cant buy it. I cant produce it. I cant do this quest. My explorers are being on the constant search for them scenarios with no luck.

Finally i got one of the scenario from my guildie and i did it. I started it, I looked through pink glasses, collected, went back to main island, created the buffs, applied them, collected, got back, created, went to scenario island, applied, collected, got back home, created, went back to scenario, applied, collected and so on and so on for like five times. I finished.
And I cried. I cried because I realized it's just too challenging to keep thinking that BB has any sort of respect to its player base. Requesting to do that scenario once is mundane, its a chore and a torture, do it three times in one week is just something I will never understand.

Weekly challenges are optional, this game is optional, BB please read our posts, ask RR how to make this game playable, get devs that do understand the word "challenge", and most of all try your best not to loose more players!!

[Andywarlol]

Thing that annoyed me was wasting so many resources on getting to the bit I can now not complete within the time. I dont have 3 first thief adventures. How am I supposed to get them in time? If you're going to make a long chain, let me view each step so I can see if it's worth starting. If not, give me a cancel button. Some people will do these, most will not. Make it easy for me to decide if it's possible for me to do it, without needing to go trawling other areas to find the chain. Why hide each step? I don't understand how most of this game you need to view off-site forums to be able to play sensibly. Most unusual.

[Tomislav11]

Make adventure/s completed difficulty based (gives players more options)
Get rid of the elite troop production/donation. (amount is ridiculously high and I do not even do daily/guild Quest that need them)
Get rid of the doubled resource donation after producing said resources and lower the needed resources by half (at the moment you need (for my level) 8x level 6 buildings to get needed resources in 12h if unbuffed.
Lower the number of later level resources need for Recruitment quests.

Would not mind losing the time limit, but do not see it as a problem.

[fishslice]

Posting my feedback here as requested but its also relevant to the 2 other threads complaining about the recent Weekly Challenges hotfix breaking the Mountain Clan Adventure Chain.

BB - The BB leadership who set standards and influence support and development behaviors are (in my opinion); incompetent, lazy, totally lacking any customer empathy, devoid of the notion of customer service and unless attitudes and behaviors change quickly this game deserves to die, long before flash which its based upon does.

My reasons for this opinion are;
The same as a lot of the other posts here plus...
The fact that somehow the changes made to introduce the fix for the broken implementation of weekly challenges has now broken the Mountain Clan chain of adventures and so far the reaction to those players impacted has been to leave them hanging waiting for an updated position from BB some time next week. And even this position isn't communicated by support but only in a forum thread.

Myself and many other players have experienced a new defect within Giant Battle (others have similar experiences with other MC adventures) that makes it impossible for me to finish. I logged a ticket on Thursday, received an email response Friday requesting confirmation as to when I started the adv. I responded within the hour and then later that morning I sent a follow up email asking what BB suggested I do as I wasn't looking forward to a weekend of non-adventuring and inability to compete in the silly weekly challenges. No response.

I contacted BB in-game to ask similar and I had a good dialogue with the BB person but alas all they could advise was that they didn't know what advice to provide. I suggested that BB may want to "allow me" to cancel the adventure and they would replace the adventure, the lost resources / buffs etc when a fix was available. No reaction from BB forthcoming - just a suggestion to post my thoughts here as the info is collected and heard.

The info may be collected and heard but that doesn't mean there is any real likelihood of BB reacting to what they have heard. I for one am digging my heals in and taking the view that the defect wasn't there the last 12 times I did this adv, it only appeared after the failed hotfix and BB have not offered to replace the adv and resources. I will therefore wait till next week for an update as promised. If the result is that you dont fix the adventure and advise me to cancel it but fail to replace the adv, resources, buffs and my wasted premium then I will be following many other people and voting with my wallet (and possibly my feet as well).

[Ediik]

I wonder how many People are still working on this game. After reading lordloocans post I deduce with his highlighting of "I..." that it maybe could even be only one Person who is actually programming this game now. Before I thought of maybe 2-3 People but now... So either this guy is the one who is making decisions or he is probably programming alone. In consideration of the actual state of the game I wouldnt even sort that out.

[cat_flap]

After attacking the first weekly challenge in my normal bull in a china shop attitude, being a bit gobsmacked at the numbers involved and some of the seemingly outlandish requirements, dropping buffs left, right and centre to get everything done as soon as possible, becoming immensely frustrated with the inability to get any Wisdom adventures from repeated Third Thief adventures the happy event of the Hotfix came along which allowed me to complete the first weekly quest without doing any Wisdom adventures.

Since then I have just left the new instance of the weekly challenge sitting there to see how it performs with no particular intervention. Its started to make a few things a bit more apparent than they at first seemed.

My comments on time taken to do things are based on that the vast majority of my workyard's run at L6 and have a relatively balanced input/output to keep most stuff gradually increasing where needed and to produce the special stuff relatively quickly when required. My elite has a single +50% add on.

In respect of both the resource and troop parts of the weekly challenge they appear to have been designed so that they can be achieved running workyard's and barracks unbuffed for about 48 hours. As there are three stages to each "half" of the challenge this fits well into the week timeframe. With the addition of buffs including spring park, footie pitch etc these can be achieved even though the numbers are pretty horrendous and probably don't fit in too well with the way that the game has historically been played.

A danger here though is that when you have been running your barracks flat out for months to keep up with elite troops for adventures its hard to see how you can fit in a few hundred besiegers etc, but of course the +50% helps. (The fact that you are building them just to use them straight way isn't the best incentive. Personally I find allocating the troops ok even if I don't like it, but building them in the time-frame does tend to mess up any ability to pre-plan. This does seem to have been thought about on the resource side of the challenge but not on the recruitment side).

The biggest problem with the weekly challenges as I see it is the adventure sections. Two problems.

Firstly the coop adventures - It has been a major problem for some time getting the numbers together at the right time (even in a large guild) to do these adventures efficiently, to suddenly try to do them repeatedly is a big stumbling block and must be virtually impossible for those not in large guilds. One of them maybe but repeatedly?

Secondly the AB's at the end of long acquisition chains (WC to 3rd thief to Wisdom being the classic). BB seriously need to get the randomizers they use to allocated % drops sorted out. This is nothing new and of course I have no idea over what time-frame BB calculate the percentage. However in a situation when you are looking at having to complete part of a challenge in a limited time-frame it is that time-frame that you judge the randomizer on. If something is meant to drop 50% of the time you expect 1 in 2, consider yourself unlucky if you get 1 in 4 and pretty rapidly conclude something is wrong if you don't get 1 after 7 goes. As I mentioned earlier this is nothing new and seems to affect all adventures, it must be years since I have heard of BK dropping a castle.