The Question of Why

[DeletedUser2757]

As it seems many of us have reached the point of spending as much or more time talking about this game as actually playing it, I invite imaginative speculation as to the real explanation for WHY the developers have implemented the apparently illogical changes to the game recently.

It's been repeatedly pointed out on many other threads that the changes reduce income for Inno, drive new and existing players away, make the game less fun and more tedious, and generally baffle those who enjoy solving a good puzzle. And the stock response by developer representatives and apologists that these changes were needed for "balance" makes as much sense as the answer to the old "How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?" joke. (It's "fish".)

One theory is that Inno gave the developers the heads up that the plug would be pulled on our favorite little browser game at the end of the year, so the Elvenar devs went nuts monkeying with specs for larks and giggles. But if the Snow Flurry Event starts next week and lasts 35 days, that means the game will be continuing into the coming year -- scratch that one.

Other ideas I've heard run the gamut from the Elvenar developers lost a bet with devs from other Inno games and had to introduce the wacky alterations, to alien abduction/influence. My personal favorite currently is that the entirety of Elvenar is actually some grad student's sociological research project, and I can't wait to read the final thesis with all the statistical analysis of player reactions to various stimuli . . .

Anyone else got a pet hypothesis?

 

[Sir Squirrel]

I wonder if it has to do with the actual limitations of the flash player itself. I also seen an online post about Microsoft wanting to replace flash with a more secure player or something like that, not to long ago.
I'm having issues loading city's now with a fairly good desktop computer, getting white screen and invisible city's sometimes, so would guess the city's getting to twice the size they are now, might have to reload the page every other city.
My 2 cents anyway. good post by the way!!

 

[SoggyShorts]

Unresolvable bugs
The old system was technically limited compared to what we now have and due to this, there were bugs in it for moths that couldn't be resolved without breaking the code. This means that if we kept to the old system, these bugs could never be resolved.

New Battle Units
As I said, the old system didn't allow us to implement the new battle units. That's exactly the reason why the Fairy Units were on "coming soon" for several months. The only solution here in the old system, would be to keep upgrading existing units, which isn't fun at all.

Expansion Balance
One of the main complaints at the moment, is the limitation on World Map expansions this rebalancing brings. We know about this, but the truth is that a lot of top players currently have way more expansions available to them then they should in this phase of their game. This takes away the strategical decisions you have to make as a player to design your city as efficiently as possible, because there is space enough. This disrupts the game balance too. There are a lot of players who can build so many manufactories e.g. that they literally have hundreds of thousands of goods in stock. There's no fun in that. Tech tree progress should be a bit challenging as well. We're going pretty well on it with the Guest Race goods that you need, but the rest of the required goods can just be laughed at because you always have enough of those, for there is room enough for a bunch of manufactories anyway.

This is from either Marindor or Muf-Muf, I forget

 

[DeletedUser43]

I think they are freaked out by the amount of goods that players have and they are trying some way to stop that. They seem to have totally forgotten that they had players sitting here for months and months waiting for new content and they had nothing to do except make goods and have them pile up. So they are trying to change something that has already happened. It won't help.

Same with the new battle system. Everyone has pretty much stopped bothering with battles since they can't be won. That means that people will skew their cities to be negotiating cities, and make more and more goods and do more and more negotiating. Then they will freak out that everyone is negotiating too much and nerf something else to try to fix that.

 

[DeletedUser2963]

I actually thought that they were probably trying to move this game into the mobile app world, and it required massive changes....

 

[Sir Squirrel]

they had players sitting here for months and months waiting for new content and they had nothing to do except make goods and have them pile up.

This is what I believe they are trying to slow us down for, so they wont have players at the end of chapters waiting for more content. I think they are trying to slow us down enough to have another chapter done before players have beat them. To do that they have to put up road blocks to slow us down, then we find away around and they put up another!

 

[DeletedUser2757]

I'm just having trouble chasing their logic. Once the advanced players reached the end of the tech tree and had nothing to do but accumulate goods, which they theoretically could cater to accumulate expansions until all available grids slots were filled, then the devs could have introduced Ancient Wonders to spend the KP on, and offered more and different things to build on the expansions slots (always offering other/better items for diamonds), and then built a bridge/portal/whatever to a second city to expand onto for more building. The possibilities of what they could have done, that at all points should have resulted in more income, but they chose a "rebalancing" that made them less money. It doesn't make sense. When I follow the money, there's just confusion. Maybe aliens were involved . . .

 

[DeletedUser3686]

I actually thought that they were probably trying to move this game into the mobile app world, and it required massive changes....

This makes most sense really.

I also play Forge of Empires, another Inno game, and at one point there was a discussion about as aspect of the game that is only on the desktop version. A good chunk of members said that they only play the game on mobile devices. If Elvenar has a similar user base as FoE, Inno would probably benefit highly from creating a mobile version.

If the game is mobile, then a good number of users have quicker and more constant access to the game, so if it takes longer to finish, that's probably the goal. I work at home so access to my desktop is never an issue for me, and hence my progress has always been steady. It would be a different matter if I worked in a place that didn't allow work computers to be used for anything other than work. That's where a mobile aspect could come in handy, and where progress being slow wouldn't be as big of an issue for most players.

 

[DeletedUser2870]

The changes that would be required to go into the mobile-app business would be a reason I could understand, though it would not explain all the new units (pretty much duplicating each other).
Not to mention that I seriously doubt the fighting will ever be a success in an app. Those who want to log in from a mobile device already do so by installing for instance the puffin-browser on their phone or tablet and can do pretty much everything that way already. An app may make it easier, true, but if one weighs everything it's questionable whether it's worth all of this.
I'm using that browser myself on my phone and it is hell on paying the NH visits, but that's hell on my desktop too and takes way too much time. And the fighting isn't something I do mobile, but I'm sure I wouldn't even with an app that made it possible.

As for them being afraid of people getting to the end of the techtree: it may indeed be something they fear, though the reason for that is beyond me. Perhaps they then feel pushed into releasing new content that isn't ready yet. If so, their reasoning is faulty.
When they released the first part of the woodelf chapter it took ONLY 4 DAYS for the top (buy-to-get-there) players in the worlds I'm in to have even the most advanced buildings already up and thus be at the end of the released research. So there will always be people at the end. Heck, for some players (me included) it's part of the goal to get to the end of the research before the next chapter is released.

If people like that, why not let them? Are they afraid those (few) players will get bored and quit? It's a very unlikely assumption but even if it were true it's hardly worth chasing away a hundredfold, or even thousendfold as many active players by frustrating them, which is what they are doing now.
And I say it's unlikely because those top players had been waiting at the end of the dwarven chapter, the end of the fairy-chapter. Then were waiting at the end of the orc-chapter and now are waiting at the end of the woodelf chapter. And still they return.
I was waiting at the end of the fairy-chapter for less then a week myself. And at the end of the orc-chapter for while longer. And now working through the woodelf-chapter. The waiting at the end of the last chapter is not what drives people away from the game. Getting the feeling that it's becoming impossible to get there (or advance at a pace the PLAYER HIMSELF likes) is what drives them away.

What they should be thinking of is not trying to prevent players from getting there, but what to offer them for achieving it. Like for instance give 500 diamonds when someone unlocks the last tech of the last chapter.
Sure, more people would go for that goal. Again, so what? It would mean a lot more active players and it would get players involved again and give them a goal apart from just placing the buildings.
And if someone reaches that point, yes, it's likely he will slow down. Yet again, so what? by that time he's likely to have invested many hours and very likely a tidy sum of real money. And is likely do so again when the next chapter is released, because he will have the feeling he;s getting somewhere, achieving something. Not to mention that when someone has invested such a lot of time, effort and money it is less likely they will write it off.
Sure, some people will get bored waiting for the next chapter and perhaps leave the game. But right now a LOT of people are getting bored with the game at all levels, and therefor leaving the game already.
That's much more of a problem than having people wait at the end of the last chapter.

There is only one valid point in the fear of having people wait there and that's the unlimited stockpiling of goods by players, which can be used to buy KP's when the new chapter is released to make a fast run (though the increase in cost/KP bought will at some point put a stop to that) or to upgrade Wonders.
Yet if that is the only reason it would have been so much easier to cap of the maximum of goods that can be stored, just as is done with coins and supplies. It actually makes no sense to go through elaborate gamewrecking changes instead.
Also because right now for many players there's not much else to do but stockpile, not because they're at the end of the techtree, but because they can't advance any further due to the roadblocks.
Add to that the fact that more and more players are leaving the 'battle-route' because battling has become impossible and so are focusing even more on stockpiling goods to prepare for negotiating. Thus the fear of having players doing this and responding to that in the way they have they are only increasing that problem instead of solving it.

So why are they doing it? I think they feel pressured by people getting to the end, and see it as a threat because they will then feel obliged to come up with new stuff again. And apparently, they have a lot of trouble coming up with new stuff. (Look at the new units that are being released, all mirror-images, nothing new).
If that is the case they should consider asking the players for more ideas (and hey, offer a reward for the ideas that are implemented. That keeps players involved).
Another option would be to bring in another person for the dev-team with another gaming background who can bring fresh ideas.
But they also shouldn't feel so threatened by that attention. It's ok if a dev-team lets it be known they are human too.