Fix the Museum - No Lottery, weaker, visible, and less painful to use

yemen

Approved user
Joined
Mar 24, 2017
Messages
680
The museum as it currently stands has nearly killed the game for me. I have mostly walked away from wars, dumped several alts, and only play my primary in a cursory way these days. I have other problems with the game as well, but the museum is the biggest. I have some practical suggestions that I think might fix the museum, and a potential path to get from where we are now to there. So for those who are just going to say “we’re stuck with it, they won’t undo it now”, read through first.

Issues with the museum:
Lottery - adds a random casino element to the game, completely different from the entire rest of the game design. I am not interested in competing with people who have just gotten luckier than I have, that is completely inconsistent with the premise of the game.
Terrible interface - generating and deleting artifacts is so bad it isn’t fun in any way. Collecting 5 different resources and sorting out which you need is stupid.
Overpowered (OP) - those who win the lottery, suffer through the grind, and / or buy their way through it are ridiculously (and silently) powerful compared to those who don’t.
Invisible - attackers and defenders have no idea what boosts their opponent has, or what the magnitude of those boosts is. This is both thematically inappropriate (a museum is for DISPLAY) and practically very different from the rest of the game. Library and uni boosts are invisible, but have a fixed maximum. And they factor into war weight directly, so can be guessed at from war ranking to some degree, to the extent it is accurately calculated.

Lottery:
Instead of randomly generated artifacts with randomly generated names and boosts, I would suggest that for each artifact, we choose a type (weapon, jewelry, etc), choose a name from a list (famous historical people presumably), and then choose which bonuses go on that artifact from another list that includes all the bonuses available now in the respective type of artifact. Each bonus can only be used once on an individual artifact, and there is no crossover between categories on different types of artifacts (so no more than two identical bonuses from two different weapons, legendary could make it three).

Each bonus starts at 1% (0 boost). To upgrade the boost by 5 or 10 (to 6% or 11%) requires spending a large number of fragments, but you know exactly how many. Upgrading to 10 costs more than 5, doing a second category takes even more, etc. The overall “boost” of a given artifact can’t be more than 25 (all 6% lines, or two 11% and a 6%, or anything in between). Setting that less than or more than 25 would be fine within reason, but put a hard cap there.

Bonuses to a category (say fighter HP) are capped at 30% total - exact number doesn’t matter much, but the same for everyone and can’t be more powerful than the university. That includes as many artifacts as it is on, including legendary - excess boost will be shown as 30% (40%) in red to indicate to the player that you have more boost to that category than can be effective.

War artifacts should be the same as regular, but with more limited effects just as they are now. Total cap to a war boost should be 20%, smaller than regular ones to match that limit.

At any point, you can change the boost category on a line of an artifact to a different one of your choosing for a small crown cost. This is not random, you pick the new one, and is exactly like changing out a wonder, and should cost less than that.

Terrible Interface:
Make an even halfway decent interface for the suggestions above, and this will be fine because we aren’t doing it thousands of times for no real reason or payoff.

Also, get rid of blueprints completely. Just directly use fragments to do everything - passing fragments through to blueprints by generating and discarding artifacts was a bad idea, get rid of it.

Researchers and benefactors add nothing to the game either. Merge them into supplies, leaving only two resources for the entire museum, that can be seen on the main museum page easily.

Overpowered:
Capping the boost to a single category would go a huge way towards fixing this. Also, having everyone being able to design their artifacts and not subject to random whims means both sides are getting similar boosts. This would also resolve many of the complaints about the dock.

However, certain categories of boosts are just intrinsically OP - “All defensive tower” boosts to HP and damage are ridiculous and should be removed entirely. Changes to your own or enemy defender spawn time are also very strong and may need to go.

Make only one of the 4 categories be for economic boosts (jewelry?) and the other (pots?) be unique in some way or be eliminated, instead of both of them having some random assortment of offensive / defensive / economic boosts as it is now. The possible range of defensive / offensive boosts is way too big if you keep these as extra offense / defensive boosts as they are now.

Invisible:
For MP, at least display defensive boosts to the attacker before the attack, without the numbers. So I may not know if you have +10% or +30% air defense damage, but I know you have a boost to it, and it will be no greater than the max, and that high level players are likely to have the totals maxed out. Show me the actual numbers on the final screen, so I can understand why I so unexpectedly won completely / lost utterly.

For war, change the whole setup. Defensive artifacts should be changeable during planning day, and become locked in at the end of it. Then they are displayed to the enemy in full detail (random invisible boosts have very little place in war, the university and library hidden boosts provide too much of this already in my opinion). Offensive boosts can be changed until you do your first attack, and not after. At that point they are displayed to everyone. This matches the existing rules around coalitions for consistency. It also helps to make cheating obvious and not invisible in the most important area for most active competitive players - wars.

That does require that war artifact categories be appropriately separated out so that entire artifacts are only offensive OR defensive, not both. Should be an easy change when reworking artifact generation.

This gives attackers who are flexible and have invested in multiple sets of artifacts a way to be rewarded by switching around their artifact choices in response to their chosen opponents defensive boosts. And defenders can coordinate their choices of coalition and artifact to match what they believe attackers are likely to try. Together it encourages strategy and investment.

All of that would make it harder to cheat, give people some pride in their progress, and increase the strategic aspects of the game. The opposite of what the museum does today.

Transition - how to get from here to there:
Everyone has invested in the museum as it exists today. Some with lots of effort and time, and some with money. Some who have won the lottery will be mad if they lose what they have. But a mixed system that favors the fortunate few won’t work going forward, we need to put everyone in the same system and on even footing. And those who have spent money should not lose it. So here is my suggestion:
1. Every existing artifact from the old system is removed. All fragments, blueprints, supplies, etc invested into them should be returned to the player as fragments.
2. Legendary artifacts that were not paid for with cash are modified to fit within the new limits. So are paid artifacts, but the players have the option to convert them into an appropriately large number of supplies / fragments instead (what they would have gotten by spending the money directly) if they don’t want to accept the reduced artifact power. Or possibly some sort of one time crown bonus to compensate.
3. All unused blueprints should be turned back into fragments at the appropriate ratio we got them in the first place. All benefactors / researchers are turned one to one into supplies.

At the end of that, everyone is starting clean in the new system, but those who have already done a lot of work in the old system are in great shape to start building in the new one, with lots of supplies and researchers to work with.

I'm sure there will be quibbles with a lot of the details, but I think this idea would redirect a lot of the frustrating aspects of the museum, and bring it in as an aspect of gameplay that supports the strategic and competitive gameplay elements of dominations that we all love. If you agree, I would like to see this still sitting in front of the community and the developers when they come back from end of year holidays.
 

Bootney Lee Fonsworth

Approved user
Joined
Jan 12, 2018
Messages
459
Agree with everything you've laid out here, though I'd just settle for a less cumbersome interface. Since multiplayer battles are pretty much an all-or-nothing prospect these days I can't even be bothered to grind out a few artifacts while waiting for troops to rebuild. Instead it's just becomes a painfully boring task I force myself to do every few months when there's some sort of discount.

There's plenty of space on most modern phones/tablets. Just have 5 artifacts appear at once and give us the ability to mark them for sale from the same screen.

I wish you luck with this, but a simple streamlining of the process is something that should've been done yesterday.
 

Blood

Approved user
Joined
Apr 24, 2017
Messages
154
They know it’s a mess but I have a feeling they will do nothing. They heard all the museum complaints yet instead of experimenting with options that would make the player base happy they jamed it up our a...I mean pushed it in world wars.
 

yemen

Approved user
Joined
Mar 24, 2017
Messages
680
I don't disagree, but hope you are wrong. Decided to try a constructive path forward rather than continuing to harp. As it is, the addiction should gradually fade away as my teammates drop off.
 

oddin

Approved user
Joined
May 17, 2018
Messages
1,586
this is how they should have implemented the museum in the first place!! What a great idea! Choose what you want but within certain reasonable limits. Also, the resources for the museum are way too many (fragments+blueprints+supplies+researchers+ladies!!!!). We said that right from the start that it should have been less.

But I am not optimistic that they will listen to your great suggestion because it is a complete redesign of the whole system and they will not invest the man hours required to do it. They will only fix the easy parts about crafting, selecting, discarding artifacts and nothing else.
 
Last edited:

pckrn

Approved user
Joined
Apr 14, 2016
Messages
666
i like the overall idea, but a few things to comment on:

the hard cap per artifact of 25% and per line of 11% - isn't this too limiting?
bonus cap per category of 30% is good, but when coupled with the cap per artifact, it would be just one option at 30% and another at 20% and that would be it. the university buffs a lot of different stuff at 30% each so why not let the museum also buff more variety of stuff?

with such caps, there isn't enough room for variety, which is one of the things i actually like about the museum. tank hp vs artillery hp, fighter dmg vs paratrooper dmg, etc.
also touching on variety, by moving all the econ bonuses together, you remove the dilemma of having to decide between increased loot vs weakened enemy defenses. and for econ artifact everyone will just have 30% all loot and 20% oil loot. everyone.

with these changes, there would now be a reachable maximum. which means there will be many people who 'finish' the museum, which means devs need to create something else for people to do lol would they be up for it?

compensation for the transition - rerolls should be compensated as well. you've called for everything to be compensated completely, so i'm guessing you simply forgot about the rerolls though.
 

Blood

Approved user
Joined
Apr 24, 2017
Messages
154
How are they going to make money when there is no one playing or spending money
 

yemen

Approved user
Joined
Mar 24, 2017
Messages
680
The limit per artifact is intended to be the boost limit - so each line can still be upgraded up to 10% past that. So if you have an artifact with 5 6% lines (a boost of 25% compared to starting each line at 1%), your final bonus is 15% per line fully upgraded, for a total bonus of 75% from that artifact, split between 5 categories. You could also have two lines at 20%, one at 15%, and 2 at 10% - still adds up to 75%. It caps artifact power at 75% instead of 100%, which an 11% on all lines would allow right now. Even lower than that might actually be better, just something to prevent every artifact from being legendary quality.

The university and library buff basically your entire offense and defense at this point. I think the museum is intended to be more targeted (pick your top priorities), rather than being a blanket boost to everything. But they can control how many slots are available in a redesign. Right now the only limit is that you are likely to get some crap boosts mixed in with any good ones - the lottery that makes an extremely rare artifact with 5 useful categories and decent percentages much more valuable than anything else.

In this system, I think it is important to keep categories separate - because otherwise, someone will build two artifacts for a slot - one to load on offense (econ boosts and various weakeners to the enemy base / boosts), and one for the same slot to load for defense. I don't want the final result to encourage regular artifact swapping for multiplayer, that would just be painful and grindy again (one more task to remember to do when logging on / logging off).

And everything in the game is designed to be maximizeable at some point. Except for the museum, which at the moment just asymptotically approaches maximization until the annoyance is greater than the expected return on generating new artifacts. That asymptotic and annoying thing is bad design, not fun.

Rerolls I had just forgotten about, good call.
 

yemen

Approved user
Joined
Mar 24, 2017
Messages
680
What Blood said. If it keeps people from quitting due to frustration (no one on my team likes the museum at all), they can keep making money from them.
 

Christopher Wood

Approved user
Joined
Dec 27, 2018
Messages
1
I agree totally, I hate the museum! Feel like it is a total wast of my time. Whenever I go into it the fun meter drops through the floor. The last time I checked I had over 130,000 fragments to use! I keep thinking about everyone that somehow gets through it to get something and then they have a big advantage on me, it will be one of many things that kills this game but if they wanted to start somewhere to fix it this would be a great place to start!
 

pckrn

Approved user
Joined
Apr 14, 2016
Messages
666
yemen said:
The limit per artifact is intended to be the boost limit - so each line can still be upgraded up to 10% past that.

my mistake

I don't want the final result to encourage regular artifact swapping for multiplayer,

haha im guilty of swapping artifacts. i dont mind switching back and forth; to me its like hunting and gathering, where you do a little chore to get a little extra. but if we were to try to stop it, separating by whether the bonus is economic or not wont prevent switching. increased loot and loot refund are both economic but one takes effect on offense and the other on defense, and promote switching. increased loot and weakened enemy defense both go into effect on offense, so does not promote switching. defender spawn time buff isnt economic but it still promotes switching of weapon artifacts. these should be separated by whether they take effect on offense or on defense. and then there is the problem of a lot of the pottery bonuses that go into effect only when you take certain actions, and therefore would be very difficult to prevent switching.
 
Last edited:

yemen

Approved user
Joined
Mar 24, 2017
Messages
680
I don't care at all if people have to rearrange artifacts for purely economic boost. If it is a grind for me, I will just choose my best option and not swap anymore. Similar to people who have a base layout that is just for collecting maxed road gold; I won't switch back and forth for that, but it doesn't hurt me that anyone else does.

But having to swap them around just to stay competitive on defense or offense is not fun - you kind of need to do it to keep up, but gets tedious very fast. I think they should completely split out the offensive and defensive boosts, and make sure they only appear on separate categories from each other. Right now, they are not split out, and it encourages a mess of switching as you just described.
 

pckrn

Approved user
Joined
Apr 14, 2016
Messages
666
I don't care at all if people have to rearrange artifacts for purely economic boost.

in that case the current jewelry and pottery is ok as is, no?
people that dont care for economic boosts can leave it on weakening enemy defense for jewelry and boosting their own denfense for pottery. all the other stuff - loot, refund, oil well, vault interest, etc are all economic boosts that can be ignored and dont need to be bothered with swapping artifacts for. the only thing that really encourages switching to be competitive would be defender spawn time for weapons.
 

yemen

Approved user
Joined
Mar 24, 2017
Messages
680
I really don't want them to do anything that increases grinding, and having to remember to make changes every time you log in / out feels like that to me. I think it will cost players, and they can't afford to lose them.

But if they implement the main part of my request (no more lottery and randomness, and some hard caps on available boosts) without any of the other improvements, it would be a huge step. The rest is design details.
 

Ripple619

Approved user
Joined
Jun 1, 2016
Messages
16
Boy, I couldn't agree more.

The museum is absolutely no fun. Putting the fragments together is a chore and maddening. Would you like to put one artifact together... or, oooh, five? I appreciate the depth of research that went into making the descriptions of the artifacts but it's lame and I hate going to the museum.

I hate it more with war artifacts. DITCH THE MUSEUM PLEASE
 

No Angel

Approved user
Joined
May 1, 2017
Messages
1,386
Yet nobody mentioned about Storage.

I think the presence of Museum has different impact for everyone. I personally don't mess with my museum until I collect 30k fragments. Then I spend a special time to craft most of them. I've found several good 11% boosts, my favorite would be those with 11% all resources looted, and 11% enemy defender spawn. For war hall, I have boosts for 6% heavy tank damage and 6% fighter damage as favorites. They were all gathered at early stages of crafting, I rarely craft.
Collecting blueprints and supplies now. Then I will mess with crafting again.

Back to business.
Very excellent ideas up there! Changing the whole museum system though, is a revolution. Museum is technically brand new feature. We will have to test drive it. Having it for a couple of months will only give time to add features, so massive changes in museum will not happen anytime soon. We should understand it.
Other people out there have no problems with the museum, they just don't speak up here.
The most important issue about museum though is its boost visibility. This might be implemented (cause it's an addition, not a revolution); you guys have to keep suggesting it!
​​​​​​
 

Blood

Approved user
Joined
Apr 24, 2017
Messages
154
You know that’s not an option after the unbalance especially if pay to whiners are using it
 
Top