Does anyone like the AW cost changes????

[JayJayP]

I've been playing for years now. While the new changes to AW costs didn't take anything away, they certainly did make it extremely hard to upgrade those buildings any more. And now that relics have no use to upgrade Ancient Wonders, once you reach the 700% bonus why do you need to collect more relics in the tournament??? More relics are worthless at that point. Given how hard it is to come by the royal restorations most of my ancient wonders will sit not upgraded for months once all the knowledge points are acquired. So now Ancient Wonders can stagnate and we made one of the "rewards" from the tournament useless. I guess that's progress.

 

[Dhurrin]

Well, the good news is that Inno made an announcement that the cost will be changed. The amount of needed spellfragments will be greatly reduced for most levels, especially the lower levels.
The change has already been implementend on bete and will follow soon on live.

See the post by @FaunWillow on the beta forum

Announcements and Release Notes (Discord)

These offers are an offence to the players grrr

beta.forum.elvenar.com

 

[Silver Lady]

@JayJayP
You’ll still need relics to craft enchantments in the MA. I craft mostly MM and a few CC in my MA pretty much 24/7 so I go through a lot of relics.

 

[Glandeh]

@JayJayP
You’ll still need relics to craft enchantments in the MA. I craft mostly MM and a few CC in my MA pretty much 24/7 so I go through a lot of relics.

While that is true, even before the first change to wonder upgrade costs (to frags, CC and RRs) I got way more relics from the tournament than I could possibly spend crafting. Yes, I had my MA running 24/7 and used boosters as well, if more than one usefull recipe came up. Now I get even more useless relics. I do hope that one of the planned changes will take care of that.
Another way to get rid of some extra relics is to build the Valorian School of Sorcery (chapter 21 wonder, boosts MA creation time). Just one problem with that: you unlock it at the end of chapter 21 .
I look forward to the last change that will reduce the cost of upgrading a bit.This wonder upgrade problem could probably have been avoided if the runeshards had not been valued at 15/10KP (in other player's/own wonder).
And NO, I do NOT like the new upgrade costs.

 

[Darielle]

I have several wonders sitting, and nothing to spend KP on, because I'm tech locked as well as locked on wonders with the costs. So yes, I detest the changes more than I can possibly say. And it is NOT spell frags that are the problem for me ... it's ccs and rrs. So while this is nice, it doesn't make me hate the changes any less.

 

[Silver Lady]

While I appreciate the change in SF and I’m just about sorta ok with CCs the RRs are still going to be a problem. So ultimately not happy.

 

[MichaelMichael]

No, I did not like the changes. Ultimately, SF was the biggest problem. RRs were next in pain. I ended up buying RRs with diamonds -which means I lost an expansion. I stopped crafting to burn CCs so I lost many mystical objects and accumulated CCs. The painful part IMO is that upgrading any building with RRs is never worth it now. RRs have a reason for being before the change. That original use is not a good use for RRs any more, much as using plans to upgrade magic buildings is also retarded due to RR needs.

In summary, the changes are a horror and eliminates parts of the game that were not broken for the sake of "what?!"

 

[Myne]

NO

 

[crackie]

They totally botched the PR on these changes. After all the complaints, they doubled down with a hard line and said, "Nope, we're not changing the new wonder costs. It is what it is." And now, they're singing a new tune and admitting the changes were a bit overboard. Yeah, great...thanks. Mine and so many other fellowships I know lost like 25% of our players over this. Was that step really necessary?

 

[Pheryll]

And now, they're singing a new tune and admitting the changes were a bit overboard.

You mean this tune:

How to Embrace the Change:
Prepare yourselves for a more accessible journey to enhance your Ancient Wonders and make the most of these reduced Spell Fragment costs. This improvement empowers you to reach higher levels with ease, bringing new dimensions to your strategic gameplay.

 

[BrinDarby]

Was that step really necessary?

Spoiler: No, it was not

Yes, those whom have everything,
need not buy anything.... (waves)
We must replace them, ... with newbs.

I just don't think whomever is running the show, is looking
longterm/big picture. Was it a clever ploy to get a bunch
of old timers to leave..... prolly not.. Was it a $ grab to help
the bottom line...... plausable, jury's out tho.. Could it just
be a big Oooops....... doubtfull.

Did it radically change the game, yes it did. Good or Bad,
is beside the point now. Crackie is right, they took a hard line
and many players said fine, I'm outta here. Then they do a
180 on 1/2 the problem due to feedback and I can only
guess, game data itself.

Some ppl have said they can live with the changes, but the
upgrade costs are nuts. Even cutting SF cost, does nothing
to address the RRs. The simple fact SFs/CCs were there to
compliment in symbiosis, the MA. Now, thats been mostly
reduced to a crawl ... worse than a basic nerf.
BPs/RRs, were designed to allow retention of some like'd
bldgs over time and to upgrade Magic bldgs. Just like MA,
now those core functions are crippled. As we have now
seen, orig tweaks were too far. I don't blame Inno for try'n
to get a few xtra bucks, but they went too far. SFs got chg'd
we can only hope a tweak to RRs.

 

[MichaelMichael]

NO

The simplicity and succinctness of that reply had me laughing out loud - Well said Myne!

 

[Fayeanne]

I found this post on the EN forums to be quite entertaining and informative:

Is it easier to upgrade Ancient Wonders now?

This will be my final post on the forums. It is a response to Inno’s recent Discord post with the same title. Warning, it's a long one. The recent AW changes are ridiculous. This is not an opinion but is objectively true using mathematics. Let’s answer the question once and for good using...

en.forum.elvenar.com

Having been observing this AW change for the last few weeks, I've been wondering what the developers were actually trying to accomplish. I don't mean in terms of making money. I mean: How do they expect Ancient Wonders to be used?

Even if you ignore the Spell Fragments (as the values have changed since the above post was made)... 24 years to upgrade all Ancient Wonders? Obviously this means the developers do not intend players to build all 40 AWs. So what do they intend? How many Ancient Wonders do they expect the "average" player to have? Do they intend for players to have only two or three? Maybe four or five? Do they intend for players to mostly upgrade their Wonders to level 10 or maybe 16 at most (note they point out that this is 75% of the power of max level), and intend for levels 20+ to be "expert" levels that require a lot of time and effort to get to that only the most hardcore players (and/or those willing to spend Diamonds) would ever achieve?

I think one of the confounding factors that is skewing their data (that surely they would have accounted for, but maybe not) is that, at the time when the change was made, people had a lot of Spell Fragments and other resources gathered up. Maybe not raw, but a lot of players had a bunch of buildings sitting around in their inventories from chapters past that could readily be turned into SFs, or placed and sold for CCs and RRs. So immediately after the change, many players were still able to continue to level Ancient Wonders like normal...for a little while. So as the developers were looking at their stats, they probably were seeing, "Look, people are still leveling their Wonders at about the same rate, so this change wasn't that bad."

But what they need to take into account is once those players burn through all of their resources they've stored up over the years...that's it. All upgrades will come to a screeching halt. I don't know how soon this will happen, and obviously some players will stop upgrading their Wonders before they run dry on resources in order to save those resources for other purposes. But it could well be the developers saw a majority of the players burn through four years' worth of Spell Fragments in a couple of weeks and realized finally that this is unsustainable. (Or maybe they read the post above. Or did similar math themselves.)

I haven't run the numbers, but if you assume only, say, five Ancient Wonders upgraded to level 16 only, perhaps that is in the realm of feasibility? (As in, something a player could accomplish within a year, not 24 years.) This may be what the developers were envisioning from the start. It would appear to me that building a whole bunch of AWs and/or leveling them to 30 or 35, was intended to be a luxury of sorts, not a common occurrence. We were all spoiled by how easy and cheap it was to build and level them previously, it would appear...

 

[Ravmin]

Wow, those numbers are insane! I agree that Inno’s “rebalance” was an attempt to slow wonder progression and their expectation is that you should only be able to have a select few wonders. Unfortunately the current implementation has nearly stopped wonder progression completely. The driving force behind these changes I believe is completely monetary.

It’s understandable that Inno needs to turn a profit from Elvenar and it would appear that is not happening. The cauldron, ads, discord, and now these wonder changes all show a pattern of creating more revenue. What they have actually done is driven players away. My coin cities are up 20%.

Hey Inno, here’s a tip, instead of taking things we already have and asking us to pay more for them, you should add new elements that we would be willing to pay for. The cauldron concept was great and I was excited for it prior to release. A new feature of the game that allows you to boost the production of your city. The implementation of it was terrible. It is overly complicated and the benefits are minuscule at best. With the new wonder costs, the chances that I would spend diamonds or spell frags in the cauldron have gone from near-zero to not-in-a-million-years (which is about how long it will take to level my wonders)

 

[Darielle]

I worry about the coming FA and wonder badges. Will they become the new coin badges? Will people have so many filled AWS that they can't upgrade that people have a hard time donating those kp to get wonder badges. Keep in mind that in order to reach 100K points, which is pretty much necessary if you want to land in the top 5 nowadays, your fellowship will need over 1400 wonder badges. Will they even be able to get that many to make a top 5 finish with so many people saying that they no longer want kp?

The worst thing, however, is the fact that they have TOTALLY DESTROYED an AM's ability to gift a good player for exceptional service or play. When people no longer want KP as a gift because they can't upgrade anyway (and they'll need those empty spaces to be able to complete event quests) what is an AM supposed to do to recognize and acknowledge great players? WHAT IS THERE BESIDES KP? Inno better come up with something quick before they totally dishearten other AMs as they have disheartened me. I enjoyed giving gifts.

I honestly believe that Inno simply didn't think of this aspect of the game. They didn't think of a lot of things, IMHO.

 

[Myne]

I worry about the coming FA and wonder badges. Will they become the new coin badges? Will people have so many filled AWS that they can't upgrade that people have a hard time donating those kp to get wonder badges. Keep in mind that in order to reach 100K points, which is pretty much necessary if you want to land in the top 5 nowadays, your fellowship will need over 1400 wonder badges. Will they even be able to get that many to make a top 5 finish with so many people saying that they no longer want kp?

The worst thing, however, is the fact that they have TOTALLY DESTROYED an AM's ability to gift a good player for exceptional service or play. When people no longer want KP as a gift because they can't upgrade anyway (and they'll need those empty spaces to be able to complete event quests) what is an AM supposed to do to recognize and acknowledge great players? WHAT IS THERE BESIDES KP? Inno better come up with something quick before they totally dishearten other AMs as they have disheartened me. I enjoyed giving gifts.

I honestly believe that Inno simply didn't think of this aspect of the game. They didn't think of a lot of things, IMHO.

I've lost another player...I am totally dreading an FA. I have numerous players that are totally locked out of AW's due to the inability to upgrade. We warned this would happen. We begged them not to do this. We showed our displeasure by stopping financial support, even to the detriment of our cities.
I say this with a heavy heart. I feel we are on a sinking ship and only going through the motions right now.

 

[BrinDarby]

I worry about the coming FA and wonder badges.

VisionVapor( ArcaneResidue ) will also be effected
with ppl not crafting in thier MA to save SFs/CCs. I'm
sure there's 1-2 other badges I'm forgetting that also
will be effected alot.

Making upgrading AWs harder shouldn't mean that
other aspects of the game are destroyed in the process.
Basic MA functions and upgrading Event bldgs/Magic
bldgs have been totally Fubar'd. Its a super paywall !!

 

[iamthouth]

I stopped crafting in order to upgrade the Ch21 wonders when they were released. When these AW upgrade changes were first launched I could continue burning through by disenchanting Portal Profits. That stockpile is nearly at its end now. Waiting on the latest reduction in spell fragments to go live to US6 now, then I can continue to upgrade already filled wonders again.

For paying players to have functioning fellowships and other people to take their trades, the game needed a large pool of players, many who would be non-coiners. Chasing those away by making aspects of the game much more difficult, only hurts the paying base.

 

[Honeybubbles]

Nope!

 

[Yavimaya]

NO.