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    Your Elvenar Team

Autumn Zodiac Event Feedback

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Ashrem

Oh Wise One
It would be nice if they'd group Difficult/medium/easy tasks on three lists and rotated through them. But even that is fraught with peril. Whether scouting a province or completing a tech is a hard task or an easy one depends on your chapter.

But frankly, there is no way of doing things randomly that is going to be fair for everyone. Someone is always going to get kicked in the nards by the random generator, while others have smooth sailing.

An ideal setup from the players point of view might be different task lists for each chapter. (or how many required squad size updates you have, since that tells them exactly where you are) Then they could ask to collect Sunflowers or Sentient goods or Jolly Jelly. Set up a list of 50 tasks for each required squad size, and don't let them repeat until you've finished the list, or taken a new SS tech so you move to a new list.

They could also just take a single list of 50 or 60 items, sort it randomly a couple of dozen times to create a number of fixed lists, then assign you a list with your first quest. Once you're on that list, you stay on that list until you complete it, then it assigns you a new list at random. If there are at least 20 different versions of the list, it will be a lot harder for people to pre-plan.
 

Jackluyt

Platinum Leaf -FB
71930877_10214929956823045_1825462337474134016_n.jpg


Here is the official response to all the complaints about the Autumn Zodiac Event.

Dear Humans and Elves,
Over the last weeks we've been getting lots of valuable feedback on our Autumn Zodiac event from you, for which we are very grateful. Your feedback is very important to us, which is why we want to take the time to answer to it in some more detail, and include an outlook on what we plan to take with us for future events. This in an effort to offer transparency and actively involve you in our ongoing process of improving our events for you to play.

Accessibility for all players
We have to consider that our events are available to players of all Chapters, including the very newest players, who cannot yet craft Recipes, gain Vision Vapor or Enchantments from the Magic Academy, or complete Encounters in the Spire of Eternity. Therefore, we will need to offer alternatives for these quests, which we can do with Scouting- or Research-related tasks more easily for early Chapter players. For further-advanced players, the tasks to play some Encounters in the Spire or to craft Recipes should generally cause no issues to complete, and will remain the intended option for them to choose. Ensuring that the event is playable for people in the earliest Chapters of the game is also the reason why event quests never require Tier 2 or Tier 3 Goods productions, Sentient Goods or any other options that are only unlocked significantly later in the game.

Randomized Quests, Quest variety & abundance of Scouting quests
With our previous event, the Summer Mermaids, we introduced a brand-new mechanic to our events: randomized quest tasks. With these, it became possible for us to create a less linear event progression and allow for an open-ended quest line. This has allowed us to remove the cap on the number of quests we could offer in our event, meaning you can complete as many quests as you wish.
When analyzing the Summer Mermaids event, we saw that the randomness was not yet at the level that we would have wanted, and we attempted to address that with Autumn Zodiac, but we see that we've now seem to have flipped the scale to the other side. For upcoming events, we aim to bring back more variety, by limiting how often quests can appear in direct succession. This should prevent cases where you ended up receiving the same quest task back-to-back. We will be testing these changes on Beta with our next big event that is to come and invite everyone to participate in said test.
That said, we can see that the randomized quest system allows every player to play the event to their own capabilities, and not have their quest line end prematurely. Therefore, we intend to keep the randomized quest system, albeit with potential tweaks, such as looking into avoiding the back-to-back quests mentioned above.

An important point of feedback voiced repeatedly over the last weeks has been about quests asking you to Scout a Province, and other World Map-related quests like gaining Relics or finishing Encounters. For Autumn Zodiac we have already added alternatives for these quests, and we will keep doing so going forward. We hear your feedback that these kind of quests take a long time to finish in higher Chapters and could push players to Scout further than they probably should, which is why we want to address this. However, we will not completely remove World Map related quests altogether, but we see that we limit them.

New Quest types & level requirements
A big change we introduced with Autumn Zodiac is quests that require a certain level of Workshop or Manufactory to complete. These quests have been at the center of your feedback for several reasons, including not having (the time to build the) required level of building in your city, and because the task was difficult to understand. This type of quest will stay, but for future events we are keeping an eye on quest completion rates for this type, to confirm that the balancing is working as intended. Should this not be the case, we can still adapt the likelihood for it to appear during the event, as well as the balancing of said requirement. One thing we want to improve already is the in-game explanation on how these quests work. During Autumn Zodiac, we have already added hint texts, available in-game in the quest window, to give some more clarity for the requirements of those quests. Unfortunately, these hints are not available in the app, causing some confusion for our app-only players. For upcoming events, we plan to make these quest hints available on Mobile, too. This will not only help in events, but also with all other quests that have such hints (e.g. quests in the earlier chapters or for the Guest Races).

Rebalancing of Autumn Zodiac
During the first days of the event on Live, we had to make some adjustments to the event's balancing. This was unfortunately necessary, but we also understand why it was not an appreciated change, especially with the given timing. The rebalancing of a running event is not a decision that we take lightly, which is why we keep this as a last resort. For Autumn Zodiac, we definitely took action too late, as we should have made these changes before the event started on Live. Therefore we have planned a set of changes that allow us to take these decisions earlier. Please do note, however, that we won't always be able to avoid rebalancing certain aspects of a feature or event, even if it is already live, as certain developments (e.g. potential bugs or exploits) might sometimes force us to take action immediately.

Further changes to the ongoing event
Finally, we want to clarify that we do not plan to make further changes to the Autumn Zodiac event on Live. Even though we hear your feedback, we do not want to make yet another update that will affect the event now, after everyone laid out and adjusted their strategies after the initial balancing changes. As we have seen with the first quest adjustments, changing the available quests would also pose the risk of quests breaking or changing their tasks under certain circumstances, which is something we wish to avoid.
Thanks to our ongoing data analyses on the event, we can see that the event difficulty and player progression are currently at the intended level, and that many players are already successful in upgrading their Bears - with rates comparable to previous events such as Summer Solstice and Summer Mermaids.

We hope this post sheds some light on our intended changes to upcoming events as a result of your feedback. Please do let us know if you have any comments by posting in the Autumn Zodiac discussion thread. We would be happy to hear from you.

Thanks again to everyone who's voiced their feedback - we are lucky to have such an engaged community in our world of Elvenar!

Kind regards,
Your Elvenar Team
 

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The Unbeliever

Well-Known Member
Ideally, they need to divide the quests in to "very easy", "easy", "moderate", "hard", "very hard" lists, and set the RNG to roll twice - first roll decides which level of difficulty, then the second roll for the specific quest itself.
Weight the initial 'difficulty' roll to land mostly between easy-moderate-hard, and it would be a lot more difficult to get into the hellish cycle of just 2-3 constantly repeating quests...

Then give each of the 5 different lists their own set currency bracket, ie: "very easy" = 10-15 currency vs. "hard" = 60-70 currency, etc...
Therefore, it can hopefully limit somewhat the amount of 'free' currency so as to avoid the scenario where players are earning 3-4+ Lv.10 buildings w/out any diamond spending.
*OR*
If someone does win that much, then it's because they've literally just sat in front of their game for 16-18hrs a day for every day of the event.

As for the lists themselves, they can do things like:
'Very Easy'
- move a building
- gain 25 pop
- gain 50 culture
- gain 200 marble/200 steel/200 planks
- produce beverages 2 times
- etc...

'Easy'
- produce T1 boost 3hr production 2 times
- produce 5min/15min workshop productions 4-6 times
- gain 100 troops
- gain 2 relics
- complete 1 encounter OR 1 spire encounter
- etc...

'Moderate'
- produce T1 boost 3hr production 5 times
- produce T1 boost 9hr production 3 times
- produce up to 9hr workshop productions (max 5-6 times for 3hr/ 3-4 times 9hr)
- gain 1-2 stack/s of units (current squad size)
- gain 4-6 relics
- 3-5 VV's or research a tech
- etc, etc...

'Hard'
- add in *large* numbers of 5/15min workshop productions, but able to use Lv.1's (ie: 70-80 5min or 40-50 15min, etc...)
- add in *large* numbers of 24/48hr T1 productions, but able to use Lv.1's (ie: 12-16 24hr or 10-12 48hr)
- add scout/research to this level
- alongside larger quantities of the various 'current or previous -3 chapter' productions, etc...

'Very Hard'
- scout 2 provinces OR complete 48 tournament encounters
- gain 15-20 relics
- gain 9VV or research a tech
- add in even larger quantities of the various productions, but doable via Lv.1 buildings (ie: 20-25 T1 24hr productions!)
- etc...

Note: just spitballing a small amount of the quest ideas really, the main issue being that being super-duper-successful means finding a 'perfect balance' between the 'new' current/previous chapter system while also making some use of the previous Lv1 turd towns...
And ideally, the "very hard" bracket would only have something like a 5% chance every time, (but would award like 85-110 currency per quest!), while the "easy/moderate/hard" would be generally spawning at a 25/35/25 rate, leaving the cheap & quick "very easy" to spawn at a 10% rate...
It would still mean that the majority of the quests on average (60%) would be moderately to decently time-consuming, but no longer gank players with the absolute BS levels of sheer trolling like:
- Scout/Research
- 3 stacks of units
- Scout/Research
- Scout/Research
- 11 relics
- Scout/Research
- Scout/Research
- Scout/Research
 

Deleted User - 3932582

Guest
But frankly, there is no way of doing things randomly that is going to be fair for everyone.
Well, I think doing things actually at random would be "fair" to everyone - fair in a sense that you may still roll unlucky sequences, but it can happen to anyone, just as well as rolling lucky sequences. Similar to event chests - while outcomes for the same event currency amount can be quite different for different players, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but by and large it is consistent with stated probabilities of outcomes over long term.

When just about anyone reports 4/5/6 same quests in a row, out of selection of 21 possible quests, there are questions as to how exactly quest randomizer works. Unlike with chests, we don't know what underlying probabilities are, and we don't even know if they are static and/or the same for everyone. But for any reasonable distribution we're seeing way too many events that were supposed to be pretty infrequent, statistically speaking.

I think purely random quests with reasonable probabilities attached to them (e.g. 50% scouts / 2% everything else is not reasonable ;) ) would be fine. You will still get crappy sequences once in a while, but it shouldn't be as bad as we're seeing right now.

And attempts to add some order to chaos are indeed fraught with peril. Some players will inadvertently be screwed, either due to their playstyle and/or where they're in the chapters. And these players will get screwed every single time. With purely random approach there still will be winners and losers, but it won't be that correlated with their play style, and it will change event to event (well, even that is not entirely true depending on which quests will be assigned higher probabilities).
 

Tauriel Dragonwood

Well-Known Member
Thank you T6583. I can't fight in the provinces on the World Map because they're all Very, very, very Hard. But I can fight in the tournaments. Choosing the right bear is a conundrum. The brown bear will make my troops stronger for battles in the tournaments but the polar bear will help me with goods negotiating in the provinces on the World Map. Wish I could have both of them. From what I've seen, I don't come across too much pet food to craft when I'm working in my lab late at night. Seeing a brown bear running across the battlefield, now that would be a sight.
 

Tauriel Dragonwood

Well-Known Member
Has anyone noticed the sound has changed? Hope it's not my computer causing this change. When you click on a magic mirror or complete a quest, you don't hear the sound from a guitar string anymore. You hear a thud. Let me check to make sure it's not my kids wrestlin' with each other. Nope, not them.
 

Deleted User - 3932582

Guest
Seeing a brown bear running across the battlefield, now that would be a sight.
Obligatory bear cavalry meme:
BearCavalry[1].jpg

Not really. How would you like to wait 40 hours for your scout to return to complete a quest, then find yet another quest to do that same thing, not once but SIX times. Ugh.

OK, here is my quote, with emphasis this time: 'Well, I think doing things actually at random would be "fair" to everyone'. 6x scouts in a row is an extremely unlikely event for any reasonable assumptions of underlying randomness.
 

Deleted User - 3932582

Guest
OK, so for those who are interested in what overall observed frequencies of #90+ quests are, I have compiled some empirical data based on quests posted by @Enevhar Aldarion, @Errandil (on EN forums) and myself. Overall, this is slightly less than 500 quests, so should be relatively indicative. Well, assuming underlying probabilities are static and the same for everyone - which is a big if.

So here it is:

AZfrequencies.png


If anyone kept accurate records of their quests past #90, feel free to chime in. Even with 500 quests less frequent probabilities would be pretty sketchy.
 

GlamDoll

Well-Known Member
Some players will inadvertently be screwed, either due to their playstyle and/or where they're in the chapters. And these players will get screwed every single time.

Along with everything else, you laid-out. I, do take a certain amount of comfort, in knowing, at least, you expressed that, which I could NOT!

Thank you! Not only for your post, but also, for sharing the 'link', on what Inno has to say.

In short, I am impressed with your posts. As for Inno's...no comment.
 

DeletedUser3468

Guest
Obligatory bear cavalry meme:



OK, here is my quote, with emphasis this time: 'Well, I think doing things actually at random would be "fair" to everyone'. 6x scouts in a row is an extremely unlikely event for any reasonable assumptions of underlying randomness.

Yes, I totally agree that actual randomness would be wonderful both from pov of the players in later chapters who have 40+ hour scouts to the small players like my little chapter 2 town where, after struggling for days to finish another "buy 10 kp" was hit by yet another one (3rd or 4th in a row... I've lost track but it now takes my daily gcp - gross city production - to buy a single stinkin' kp. They just keep getting more and more expensive with no reset like goods in the Wholesaier (cough - blackmarketeer - cough). Some actual randomness would be much appreciated!

BTW: Love the memes, both the one you posted and the one The Unbeliever linked to. (and couldn't help flashing back to our last D&D session with brand new group where one of our players can shapeshift to bear form... and has the big bear playing piece to put on the map too! Nothin' like having a big old bear show up to shake up the enemies!)
 

GlamDoll

Well-Known Member
I seem to mainly get the scout province one the most so this seems accurate

Rest assured! You are not alone. I am not saying it's an epidemic, BUT, I am not denying it either....

Yeah, IDK what Inno's game plan' is, but $$$ does NOT seem to be the number #1 priority....

But, per usual, I am awaiting INNO, to prove me wrong, regarding the matter at hand, so-to-speak.
 

Deleted User - 312108

Guest
@ElegantZara or for now - I am burned out on the forums and the game :) back to my books and puzzles!

@MinMax Gamer really I want the alternative quest to be the toolbox quest because while annoying EVERYONE can do it easily! Some days I speed them, some days I don't. (Or really a 9 hour which I mostly can't be bothered with speed boosting).

@Sheianna I am someone who is rampantly against the Buy KP quest because it does get expensive and there is no reset. I advocate GAIN KP, make those carting libraries valuable. I hope things are going better in your chapter 2 city. I try to advocate for quests that won't force the player between the event and being able to progress in their city. Not sure if you play on mobile at all, but NH is very easy on it and going out in the world to do it can gain you a fair amount of coin. Browser it is a pain to do.

@The Unbeliever I did make a similar suggestion a couple weeks ago :) https://us.forum.elvenar.com/index....lding-and-event-quest-valuation-update.21016/
 

mucksterme

Oh Wise One
So all I will be able to do is sell the bear, because why having Stage 6 or Stage 7 Bear and MAYBE hope to upgrade it one day?!

I think getting the bonus from a level 6 brown bear would be worth it.


Thank you T6583. I can't fight in the provinces on the World Map because they're all Very, very, very Hard.

That's the choice you make when you skip the optional researches.
But, as someone who did all researches, I think now that you made the right choice.

And you can always cater.
 
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