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    Your Elvenar Team

Neighborly Help

HonuMoana

Active Member
I've stopped doing Neighborly Help on the Map. I only do it within my Fellowship. Is there really any point any longer to bothering with the neighborhood help?

The game has clearly devalued it, since there is no Fellowship XP for it. The game is complex and there are many things to manage in even an intermediate city. Why waste time on this?

Some folks need the coins and supplies, but there are definitely better ways to get those.

This seems an unfortunate turn of events. Neighborly helping is one of things that attracted me to the game.
 

Huor

Guest
I polish the map everyday. It allows me a few runs through the wholesaler and gives me pretty much as many supplies per day as 2 level 22 workshops. Love it! Plus the return polish keeps me at +170% production almost all the time. With the latest change, I use the browser now as it is easier to run through everyone now that they are all grouped together. All this good stuff for about 5-10 minutes effort a day.
 

Flashfyre

Well-Known Member
I've stopped doing Neighborly Help on the Map. I only do it within my Fellowship. Is there really any point any longer to bothering with the neighborhood help?

You mean besides the good feeling of actually helping others, with no enforced quid pro quo?

The game has clearly devalued it, since there is no Fellowship XP for it. The game is complex and there are many things to manage in even an intermediate city. Why waste time on this?

There never was any Fellowship XP for it, so why is that an issue now? Who says it's wasting time?

Some folks need the coins and supplies, but there are definitely better ways to get those.

So, you're willing to pass up free coins, supplies and, yes, culture bonus because there are "better ways"? As my grandmother used to say, "Never pass up free food."

This seems an unfortunate turn of events. Neighborly helping is one of things that attracted me to the game.

And I see no reasons given as to why that should have changed. What did you get "in the before times" through helping your neighbors that you aren't getting now? AFAIK, nothing has been removed from the NH system.
 

Darielle

Chef, Scroll-Keeper, and Buddy Fan Club Member
I polish the map everyday. It allows me a few runs through the wholesaler and gives me pretty much as many supplies per day as 2 level 22 workshops. Love it! Plus the return polish keeps me at +170% production almost all the time. With the latest change, I use the browser now as it is easier to run through everyone now that they are all grouped together. All this good stuff for about 5-10 minutes effort a day.
What Huor said!! With a high level Blooming Trader Guild, those goods purchased with coins/supplies really come in handy. With the changes made, it's so much easier to give help (and yes ... I went through my entire neighborhood of 200 plus people by visiting cities over the course of a day ... but not every day (whew!) Now I can do it every day! YAY!) It takes me about 10-15 minutes, but that's as opposed to 90 minutes (broken up into parts) before. Big difference, and I love getting all that free stuff. :)
 

crackie

Chef, Scroll-Keeper, Buddy's #1 Fan
The game has clearly devalued it
I think it went the other way. They started out thinking very lowly of neighborly visits if they neglected giving browser players a usable interface for years. It wasn't worth taking off work to have enough time to visit everyone in your neighborhood. Most browser players just didn't bother, BTG or no, or only returned neighborly visits from notification. Then suddenly...OMG, they started giving us things we asked for! Longer notifications AND improved neighborhood interface (and now, rollover badges in FA)! Now it's worth the extra coins and tools because you can get it done before the next leap year arrives. If those aren't worth it to you, then there is already a large group you can join who have spent years neglecting neighborly help and didn't think twice about it.
 

Enevhar Aldarion

Oh Wise One
Because of all the changes to the notifications, I have 20+ pages, or over 120 cities, for return visits every day. Some visit back every day, some every couple of days, and some drop off after the 5-day limit. And now with the new visiting function on the world map, I can run through all 300+ discovered neighbors fairly quickly and I do that once every week or so now. Because of my large discovered neighborhood, that means I visit a lot of newer cities that cannot visit me back and that means I am giving them valuable help that they need while small. And it shows they are not alone and people out there care that they are playing the game, rather than ignoring them and not caring if they stick with it or quit.
 

ajqtrz

Chef - loquacious Old Dog
If you like a lot of space because you don't need a lot of Residences and/or Workshops the neighborhood visits are a must. Here's how I keep my coin/supply production high enough to get rid of all but 2 Magic Workshops and 5 Magic Residences.

1) Each visitor is worth 5% increase in your coin/supply production from residences/workshops. So you will have to have SOME to make this work. The trick is to have so many 5% boosts to your culture that you can keep lowering your Residences/workshops.

2) To make that visitor visit you have to find them and encourage them with a visit of your own...over and over, because some players only visit those who have visited you. If you, therefore, visit 200 players a day you will get between 40 and 100 return visits. It takes some time for your visits go get that high, but they will get there. I visited 370 each day for a couple of weeks before I saw my daily visits get to about 125. Now I do the 370 about 2-3 times a week for maintainance.

3) For every 2 EE spells you get about 5% a day if you have the visitors. So now you need EE spells. How many? That depends on how high you want your production of coins/supplies to be. In any case you take the number of visits you are now getting and divide by two. That's how many 5% upgrades you can potentially have since each visit is effective for only about 1/2 a day. In my case it's 62 or so. However, I can't produce 125 EE spells each day (which I would need to keep all those 5% culture boosts active 24/7). But I can produce about 20 a day and, once in a while a few more. So my average cultural boost is 50% and I run my culture at a steady 220%. And that, with a other things, is enough for me to run my Chapter 18 city on 2 Magic Workstations and 5 Magic Residences.

4) And have a good amount of space for my guest races.

So it's really in how you wish to play the game. Like I've said elsewhere, it's a complex game where one thing you do here, pops up and changes something you do there, which, in turn, changes another thing in another part of the game. Figuring it all out is kind of fun and why, I think, we keep playing. Other than having the opportunity to write really long messages in the form, of course. LOL!

AJ
 

Zoof

Well-Known Member
I don't know how it is with higher level cities, but I can say that for me and my chapter eight (almost nine!) city, neighborly help is of great direct value to me. With my ostensibly offensive overzealous overscouting "problem" and a chapter-current Main Hall, I have 18 pages worth of people to visit, which gives me about half of the maximum gold I can hold. I don't know how that value scales with respect to MH level, or if it does at all. I only use personal experience here.

I do the neighborly help thing almost every day, and on those days, doing the neighborly help is a high point. Maybe my Zoof-flavored lizard brain just likes to see the numbers go up? I won't deny that the fact that I do it so often likely factors in on how much help I receive back and that such help is a great boon for my city. I do love that culture bonus, after all. But whenever I do the neighborly help, my decision tree at the time stops at "Does this make my coin count go brrrrt?" Is it wrong to think like that?
 

Deleted User - 849864783

Guest
I'm very new to the game but I absolutely love doing neighborly help. It's fun and every few days I pop in to see a city. Gives me ideas and just because some of them look sooooo fabulous. And it's nice to let someone know you like their city and appreciate all they have accomplished! Maybe I am naïve but, for me, it's part of the charm of this game.
 

Zoof

Well-Known Member
I'm very new to the game but I absolutely love doing neighborly help. It's fun and every few days I pop in to see a city. Gives me ideas and just because some of them look sooooo fabulous. And it's nice to let someone know you like their city and appreciate all they have accomplished! Maybe I am naïve but, for me, it's part of the charm of this game.
That's the magic of it all! Every once in a while, my lizard brain stops jabbing the do it do it do it do it button in my consciousness and I stop to smell the flowers, so to speak. See what I'm actually helping and notice the beautiful artwork. Even if you don't have to go into said city anymore, the popup gives you a brief glance at what's there and I think that's where beauty meets practicality.

Much of my city-gazing these days are involved in being a globetrotting raccoon, sniffing out delicious trash that people leave behind in their Ancient Wonders. Along with my meticulous notes on where I am and where I'm going, I jot down cities with notable appearances or names. Like how there's this one player with a cat-themed name. Their city's name? *a cardboard box*. Or a player whose name is "Oh no my bees" with a city "Oh no my hive"
 

Kadhrin

Well-Known Member
I've stopped doing Neighborly Help on the Map. I only do it within my Fellowship. Is there really any point any longer to bothering with the neighborhood help?
I hear your frustration. Y'all are on the frontier in Winyandor -- there are a LOT of inactive cities around you.
If you keep a watch on the Notifications, and on the trader, you'll start to see some names that keep coming up. Then you can go to to the map and do only those cities. On W, y'all can completely ignore almost everything that's more than 7 rows north of you or 14 rows west of you: it's all inactives. I'm about at the northwest corner of active neighbors for y'all.
 

thx569

Member
I've been in fellowships that are really stingy with visits. The whole point of doing visits is to help each other to get higher boosts. The more folks that visit me, boosts my goods boost. An added feature are the free 'coins' and 'hammers'. There is a big advantage to visiting everyone you can (you get a reciprocal visit - you hope), You need think your shortsighted argument through a little better.
 

fitress

Well-Known Member
Hope this is the correct place for this question. Have they changed the way visits are "compensated" (probably wrong word)? We used to get the extra goodies on the 1st contact, and then the other 2 would come randomly. I have been noticing that is not always the case now. The other day, my first reward did not come until contact #43, sometimes within the first 10 contacts, but today I went through 66 contacts without a return. I refreshed, went manually to the map, etc., but no dice. I don't think I'm in the "twilight" zone (in the 11/12 hour thing). Any thoughts please.

By the way I absolutely love that they expanded the list. I used to go to the map after I had exhausted the list thinking I was missing maybe 5 or 6 contacts, but found that I was really missing 10-12 per day..........Anyway, thanks to the bodies that do that stuff for us.
 

Enevhar Aldarion

Oh Wise One
@fitress The first visit after the new game day begins is always a reward chest, or what used to be the chest you had to search the city to find. If you just happen to start your visiting a little before the start of the day, you won't hit any of the three rewards until the day starts. Remember that Daylight Savings shifted that by an hour, so maybe you are still visiting at the same time, but the time change means you are actually starting on the old day and not the new?
 

fitress

Well-Known Member
@fitress The first visit after the new game day begins is always a reward chest, or what used to be the chest you had to search the city to find. If you just happen to start your visiting a little before the start of the day, you won't hit any of the three rewards until the day starts. Remember that Daylight Savings shifted that by an hour, so maybe you are still visiting at the same time, but the time change means you are actually starting on the old day and not the new?

You may be right. I thought I was outside of that (what I call the twilight zone), but I went back to my map and the 1st one got a reward. I tried a couple more with nothing. I'm sure it's OK, so I'll just wait for the next cycle. Thanks for your time.
 

lunasea2

New Member
I am having the same problem. worked fine yesterday early aft. today at 9:30 pacific time I am not able to find 2 more rewards after several visits now, after having done a few visits around 5pm and getting the first.
 

Zoof

Well-Known Member
I am having the same problem. worked fine yesterday early aft. today at 9:30 pacific time I am not able to find 2 more rewards after several visits now, after having done a few visits around 5pm and getting the first.
That's because "tomorrow", when the chests gets refreshed, is at 5PM PDT. Were you only a little earlier...

Now that I noticed, "tomorrow" occurs at midnight UTC, which doesn't care if we do DST or not. Seems to track with what I remember between EST and EDT which is 7PM and 8PM, respectively.
 

lunasea2

New Member
That's because "tomorrow", when the chests gets refreshed, is at 5PM PDT. Were you only a little earlier...

Now that I noticed, "tomorrow" occurs at midnight UTC, which doesn't care if we do DST or not. Seems to track with what I remember between EST and EDT which is 7PM and 8PM, respectively.
New day starts for me at 5pm PDT, this is only a problem of since today. I collected them all for yesterday but not for today. this is on Elvenar, a glitch or on purpose. Tonight I have gone through 11 pages of return help and only one bonus reward.
 
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