Spire of Eternity feedback

[DeletedUser5676]

Event? I don't see The Spire as an event anymore than I see the Tournaments as events. I guess I don't see it as "insulting" because it's just a thing in a game, and I don't care. It's literally a random thing. If people are feeling insulted by something in an online game, there are other things they can be spending their time on.

Whether it's a capital-E-Event or not is irrelevant. It's something that happens sometimes, but not all the time, with a start and end to each occurrence, therefore it is an event (not Event), like tournaments and earthquakes

Its not a random thing. Its an inducement to participate. In part, make up for the cost of the "not-event" which is expensive and difficult. it is being proffered as something special we can win only by participating in the "not-event."

Yes, I get to decide where to spend my time, which won't be on the Spire. Did you have a point in saying so, or were you simply implying that those of us who feel insulted by the way it's laid out should shut up and not complain in the feedback thread?

 

[qaccy]

Spire sounds like the initial version of the Fellowship Adventure. Too much work/cost for not enough rewards. At the rate they're going with new features, I'm actually starting to worry that Inno's going to rebalance tournament rewards eventually to bring them in line with everything else.

 

[DeletedUser]

Its not a random thing.

The Genie is a random reward.

were you simply implying that those of us who feel insulted by the way it's laid out should shut up and not complain in the feedback thread?

Certainly not. I don't imply...if I meant to say that I think you should shut up, I would have said so.

I am speaking specifically about the Genie. Not about The Spire itself or how it is laid out, or about the costs of participating or anything else.

This is what I am talking about:

When I said to you, "It's literally a random thing. If people are feeling insulted by something in an online game, there are other things they can be spending their time on", I was still talking about The Genie. Obviously, I should have worded it differently. My apologies to you for not being more specific in my reply. We all make mistakes.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Whether it's a capital-E-Event or not is irrelevant. It's something that happens sometimes, but not all the time, with a start and end to each occurrence, therefore it is an event (not Event), like tournaments and earthquakes

The in-game announcement for the Spire says it will be a weekly thing, running from Sunday to Friday, though the first one for Live does not start til tomorrow, so it is not a "sometimes" thing. That means we will have both the weekly tournament and the weekly Spire adventure going at the same time for most of the week every week.

 

[DeletedUser5676]

If it's not happening all the time, it's happening some times. Scheduled, or otherwise and whether or not they cancel or delay it sometimes.

All of this because I referred to it as an event and someone got worked up that it isn't an Event. Can we move on now?

 

[DeletedUser]

@Enevhar Aldarion you know, you and I shouldn't get so "worked up" about events, apparently.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

@Enevhar Aldarion you know, you and I shouldn't get so "worked up" about events, apparently.

Or over people who seem to go overboard when disagreed with. lol

 

[DeletedUser14718]

Way too hard. I just lost all my troops and I know how to fight and am the best fighter in our FS.. Now I have to make a few for the tourney later today. I will advise my FS to not play this.

 

[qaccy]

Although the unit matchups are quite different from what I'm used to seeing and the squad sizes are FAR too large, obviously designed to drain large amounts of troops quickly to expedite diamond usage, I have to say level 1 isn't too bad so far. That said, I'm definitely going to stop playing as soon as I see something I can't fight through. In a nutshell, the retraining time for lost units is far too high for the rewards. I can take 100 squads' worth of units into most tournaments and walk away with more than a dozen enchantments, several rune shards and over 100 KP, whereas here in the Spire I'll get some combination of spell fragments and time boosters and perhaps a building or two. The funny thing to me about offering time boosters here as rewards is that, as a fighter, I see them merely as a half-measure to compensate for the aformentioned much longer retraining time for units. Could just as easily do away with them as rewards and simply reduce the Spire's squad sizes by a factor of about three.

I won't be doing much more with this feature for the next couple of years, which I imagine is how long it'll take for Inno to gather the relevant feedback that finally gets them to rebalance it.

 

[Heymrdiedier]

Although the unit matchups are quite different from what I'm used to seeing and the squad sizes are FAR too large, obviously designed to drain large amounts of troops quickly to expedite diamond usage, I have to say level 1 isn't too bad so far. That said, I'm definitely going to stop playing as soon as I see something I can't fight through. In a nutshell, the retraining time for lost units is far too high for the rewards. I can take 100 squads' worth of units into most tournaments and walk away with more than a dozen enchantments, several rune shards and over 100 KP, whereas here in the Spire I'll get some combination of spell fragments and time boosters and perhaps a building or two. The funny thing to me about offering time boosters here as rewards is that, as a fighter, I see them merely as a half-measure to compensate for the aformentioned much longer retraining time for units. Could just as easily do away with them as rewards and simply reduce the Spire's squad sizes by a factor of about three.

I won't be doing much more with this feature for the next couple of years, which I imagine is how long it'll take for Inno to gather the relevant feedback that finally gets them to rebalance it.

i think the point of those time boosters is so you can use them shorten the portals in the spire

 

[DeletedUser20951]

My expectations were beneath the bedrock for this... Truly, though, sloppy launch. No sound effects (window dressing, but holy shoot, no one noticed that very basic functionality missing?!)? No way besides annoying hovering tooltips over each resource to tell where your supplies are at so you can keep better track of how much you are expending while in the Spire? The difficulty is still way too high? What do your developers actually do? Because they are not doing their jobs, obviously (and I don't want to hear platitudes or excuses for this). Almost nothing gets fixed in a reasonable amount of time, features are released from beta testing broken and I genuinely wonder why it even exists in the first place, and any sort of accountability is utterly lacking, with, instead, the customer base being blamed for not being patient enough. This isn't fricking nursery school, it is a business earning money from consumers and has an obligation to provide a decent product in exchange.

 

[Queen Draggon]

My expectations were beneath the bedrock for this... Truly, though, sloppy launch. No sound effects (window dressing, but holy shoot, no one noticed that very basic functionality missing?!)? No way besides annoying hovering tooltips over each resource to tell where your supplies are at so you can keep better track of how much you are expending while in the Spire? The difficulty is still way too high? What do your developers actually do? Because they are not doing their jobs, obviously (and I don't want to hear platitudes or excuses for this). Almost nothing gets fixed in a reasonable amount of time, features are released from beta testing broken and I genuinely wonder why it even exists in the first place, and any sort of accountability is utterly lacking, with, instead, the customer base being blamed for not being patient enough. This isn't fricking nursery school, it is a business earning money from consumers and has an obligation to provide a decent product in exchange.

This Spire thing is NOT GOOD!! I am not in a situation that I can do 3k in tourneys with my FS, AND waste giant amounts of troops on the Spire as well!! It takes to much time to train them and I do all battles in tourneys. I only cater if I run out of troops. Which for at the tail end of chapter 10, I have no extra room for The Mermaid Event, AND Spire AND tourneys at the ssame time. It costs way to much to negotiate, and u have to find the right "combination" which is just idiotic. This really does feel like a way for Inno to keep that money rolling in off the Diamond Whales! Which is just plain WRONG!!
Why does Inno take YEARS to do something, and then more YEARS to fix the problems they created???? I mean geez, this game seems like its on its last legs now and Inno is just trying to desperately do something, ANYTHING to stay afloat. If that is the case then I would say they are not to smart as there are a million things they could do to make the game more enjoyable, more fair to ALL players and their respective LvL's/chapters, as well as the many many bugs and glitches that 3 yrs after I started playing, are still an issue. As a business owner/operator I do not see these sudden new changes and additions to the game as well planned or thought out, they were just simply thrown together, as fast as possible, tested for a small amount of time and they didn't bother to listen well to the beta players as many of the same probs are still probs with the live one. So, Inno, if ur so hard up for money, maybe u should talk to some younger programmers who actually have an idea of what and how to create things fairly for all players and can actually program things and fix any bugs right away. I see all these changes causing many ppl to leave the game. The level of unfairness to all players is just disgusting, its not well balanced or options given based on lvl/ch. I started doing the Spire first thing after my visits this morning and I went thru way to many troops to get a little bit of fragments and several tiny coin rains which I have NO USE FOR, besides maybe disenchanting, and they give so little frags that I could care less about them. This is just another example of Inno's sheer and utter laziness in creating this stuff. If they were TRUE to the game and its income, they would do much better then all this latest CRAPOLLA!!!!!!!!!
Inno is far to desperate for their own good, and ours.............................

 

[DeletedUser12171]

My first impressions:

A silly joke that I won't be wasting time and resources on.

1. Squad sizes ridiculously large
2. Convince option is a stupid way to throw resources away

I'm not even complaining about the prizes but the gameplay is simply undigested food that comes out of one's behind

I'll keep my resources for the tourney and continue getting hundreds of KP, dozens of runes and enchantments a week instead.

 

[Queen Draggon]

My first impressions:

A silly joke that I won't be wasting time and resources on.

1. Squad sizes ridiculously large
2. Convince option is a stupid way to throw resources away

I'm not even complaining about the prizes but the gameplay is simply undigested food that comes out of one's behind

I'll keep my resources for the tourney and continue getting hundreds of KP, dozens of runes and enchantments a week instead.

That was my first impressions too, and stopped after I saw just how much troops and or resources/goods it took to do these and the rewards I got were crap. So, an utter waste in my opinion. In all respects....................

 

[Fayeanne]

Oh, I agree completely. I've seen it in a city and it's quite attractive, so if a player is interested in aesthetics, they have a reason to keep it after it expires.

The question is: What does it look like once it expires? A lot of expiring buildings stop animating after they expire and look far less interesting that way.

 

[DeletedUser3602]

Maybe the Spire was invented to try and slow people down in the tournaments?
To get to the 10th chest with an FS, members only need to earn 2000 points each (or something close) and that can be done quite easily. I think that if you play 5 provinces to 5 stars and up till 20 only 2 stars, you're there.
Doing more will get you more spells, relics, shards, ranking points and especially kp's, but it isn't necessary to open all the chests and get that blueprint. Maybe Inno wanted to lure people away from earning all those extra kp's?
I myself find playing the tournaments to be getting a bit boring and I'm in an FS that gets the 10th chest easily, so I'm okay with a new way to spend my troops.
But... I've only played the Spire once (got a piece from the Moonstone library in the mystery chest, but only Portal Profits from the big last chest) and I didn't pay much attention to troop losses. I did encounter 1 fight that was undoable, so chose to negotiate and I have to say I really don't like that you have to use diamonds to get more turns. It's a guessing game, only a little bit of thinking is needed, so I feel diamonds are a very expensive way to undo your bad luck. I would much rather see that changed to (an insane amount of) coins / supplies / goods or anything else that you can earn back with a little bit of work

 

[hvariidh gwendrot]

looked at it and am advising fellowships to not do anything spire related (1) inno releases to live with bugs still attached vs doing it's job in beta and why waste time/resources till those get found and shook out (2) it takes away from tournament play for almost everyone so why take time/resources away from something that does pay out to this ... if i read correctly the greatest prize awarded is a wishing well ? um having options for game play is fine but i would sure like an option to clear these "events" off my screen when they will never be participated in, maybe one day if they ever make it worth it but now it seems more a pit to be avoided

 

[The Unbeliever]

How insulted is your intelligence?

https://en.wiki.elvenar.com/index.php?title=Expiring_Buildings

I don't find something that offers me the chance to win diamonds every 12 hours for 100 days very insulting, but that's just me.

It's insulting to the intelligence of the player base as whole since;
1. The Genie is what, a 5% chance on the very last encounter of the Spire?!

2. The costs in both troops & goods/resources to even get to that chest are astronomically high. (like, costing MILLIONS of resources, for just a tiny, random chance at obtaining this building!
Even in FoE's version of this, the 'worst' chance you get at one of the rare 'exclusive' guild expedition prizes in the final tower is at least 10%. (and those buildings don't eff'ing expire either!)

3. WW's (which this thing basically is) are infinitely easier to obtain, and are even being basically just handed out to us in most every big event now. (either as a daily special and/or within the 'grand prize' rotations)
You have to actively avoid just playing nowadays to not get at least a couple WW's.

So yes, giving us a clone of an easily obtainable, popular building, but only *after* you spend (quite literally) millions of resources, and then reducing the odds to outright joke levels, while still keeping the building with the 100 day expiration date *IS* downright insulting the basic intelligence level of your players, while also trolling them for good measure.


All Inno needs to do to fix this thing and balance it is;
a) reduce the amount of diamonds obtained, OR, reduce the % on getting the dias
AND
b) MAKE IT PERMANENT!!

If the Genie where a permanent building that gave out say 25 dias @2% odds, or even 15 @20% odds, players would chase after getting one or two... (or more!)
As it is though, only those players who have nothing else to spend their troops + resources on (ie: the 5-10% or so who have 100% completed the entire tech tree and sitting around bored out of their skulls waiting for Ch.15!), will even contemplate going that deep into the Spire, due to how horriawful the balance is.

 

[ajqtrz]

Like all things, you can do a cost/benefit analysis of the spire. The costs are pretty easy to measure provided you take the time. Bht benefits, on the other hand, not so easy. What is the benefit of having the "glorified wishing well" (I think somebody called it that) ? To some it might be the "bragging rights" of having completed it. What the value of that? Ranking points? coin and supply instants?, spell fragments? Even the value of the portal profits is relative and a product of the perception of the one valuing it.

What makes something valuable is, generally speaking, it's rarity and portability. If it's rare you get psychological value in having achieved or found it. And if it's portable as well, meaning you can sell it for something or a lot of other things, that makes it twice as valuable. How does the spire stack up to this?

The prizes are not rare. Available in almost any event and probably at a lower cost. Except for one or two I guess. Are the one or two (I'm not sure of how many unique to the spire prizes there are so I can't say but it appears to me they aren't exceptional in their impact on the game, beauty, ability to impress, or portability). Thus, the cost/benefit ratio of the spire may be less favorable than other events, tournaments, and fellowship adventures.

In addition, any cost benefit ratio would need to ask the question of the impact of this on that. As many have noted, there is the cost of draining resources from tournaments and even if you have 1000 instants to allow you to keep up with both, eventually you will have less than 1000 and then less than 900 and then less than 800 and so on until you have less than you need to do both. Of course, it might be fun in the mean time and the fun you get is part of the equation as well.

Now, given this, if the devs really want people to play the spire they need to make the top prizes so extravagant, and the effort to hard, that only the elite of the elite make it each week to the very top. I'm not sure what such an extravagant prize or set of prizes might be but they should be something you can only get from climbing the spire to the very top, spending insane amounts of resources and troops, and which has a lasting and huge impact on your city and status in the game. "Spire Hero" should be a rare badge of honor worth earning and displaying and mark the player with "rights and privileges" befitting such a hero.

In the end though, as it stands, for me, it's not worth much effort if any. And I'm going to encourage my fs to avoid it as we make an effort to move into the ranks of the 10 chests fellowship list.

AJ

 

[DeletedUser4372]

Seems another guessing game where we lose stuff for so so prizes

and he is being nice. After trying it on 3 different servers? I will not be wasting my time. This is as useless as the clan quests. nothing but a time sink, prizes are not worth the time wasted let alone the materials. My opinion at least.