Introduction: Joe “Muet” Grubb - Lead Designer

BHG_Muet

Design Lead
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Nov 12, 2018
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72
Good morning! I’ll get through what I can today before meetings start…

1. Do you have any intention of showing off your opponent's 'artifact' at World War?
- Unable to approach strategically because you do not know the other person's Artifact.
You may have seen Top Guild World Wars , but the average person is divided into defense and offense groups.
In order to be more strategic, I think you need to know the other person's information.
It is a different concept from a trap.
I made a previous comment about the Museum’s issues here and agree that it is the wrong kind of hidden information. Addressing it will take some time. It’s always a challenge when the information is a giant ball of stats and I want to make sure we do it right.

2. If the matching system improves, can you increase the rewards for each season?
- There is too little reward for the current World War.
We need an opportunity to get them involved.
War loot is receiving a change when the MM update rolls out. More info will come later.
 

BHG_Muet

Design Lead
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Nov 12, 2018
Messages
72
Matchmaking could simply be fixed by simply taking account 75% of top players into calculations. Something Clash Of Clans successfully implemented. Why in the world is there a need to take every account into war ranking calculations? Let's be rational about it - bottom 25% accounts don't decide the outcome of the war. They hardly affect anything and their contribution to total firepower is also insignificant. Also if they do manage to 5* a base, they do it with 2min+, which is ok. But when it comes down to time breaker, there's almost certainly a need for higher player to narrow 2min+ down to 1m20s+. All of this so called "bad matchmaking" is caused by sandbaggers and it all could've been eliminated by calculating war weight regarding 75% top players. This is something Clash of Clans did and they are pretty successfuly, no? So why not copy a working mechanism that's proven itself to work?
I touched on it briefly in the introduction. But, yes. The new system will be able to identify a difference in power level within the Alliance. It’s a bit more involved than just weighing the top 75% differently. But, internal tests have shown it to be very effective at separating sandbagging. I'll be studying the results carefully after we roll it live. We're building it to be easily tuned so we're prepared to make changes if we see holes emerge.
 

BHG_Muet

Design Lead
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Nov 12, 2018
Messages
72
Hi Joe and welcome.

I have just one question this one was also mentioned in a Twitchstream by TinMan.. Please look again at the Shipyard/Dock rewards. The higher levels get worse rewards as the lower ones. The Wall blessing is gone and a diamond option is not available please take care of it.
A lot of my initial focus has been around War. So I don’t have anything definitive to give you here. I’ll take a look, though. If we find that rewards should be updated, those changes are pretty easy to push through.
 

BHG_Muet

Design Lead
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Nov 12, 2018
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72
Welcome BHG_Muet. I been playing this game for 3 years and understand the need for the rebalancing as the game have gotten stale with 5* in wars being the norm. I think the main problem with this rebalancing is the lack in communication. So my question is will you be bringing back design spotlights and state of the nation which we're both well received.
Absolutely for Design Spotlights. The next spotlight will break down the upcoming MM changes. If the community liked the State of the Nation posts, I can consider reviving it (I don’t think we’ve done one since I joined BHG). I’m partly hoping that those won’t be necessary for communication if I’m able to provide insights more frequently. But, we’ll see - maybe it is better to keep them.
 

BHG_Muet

Design Lead
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Nov 12, 2018
Messages
72
I'm all for transparency but it seems a lot of the players here are blindly supporting Grubbs goals because he is saying the right thing, after screwing up immensely in players eyes. I don't think people realize that he was part, or in my guess, was the one who took initiative on the rebalance and is trying to save face. His statstate is giving false hope of changes the games needs and have already been mentioned in the past. There is nothing new here that I was not aware of. So for the sake of being transparent, BHG_Muet, how much of the recent rebalance was under your control? You have been with the company for half a year now, correct? Again, I implore you to take initiative on handling cheaters. Your initial statement on cheaters sounds like you are only doing what is on your job description and handling cheaters is not your problem. Not a great attitude to have on the subject. I think it is your problem. You should be bringing some legitimacy to the game design and cheaters are making your team look like a joke.
I’ve been with BHG about 5 months now. The design work had been completed before I joined the studio. But, it went live under my lead and I signed off on it. So yes, it was under my control. As you all were, I was initially skeptical of a change like this to a longstanding game like DomiNations. But, my skepticism had nothing to do with the specifics of the change (or I wouldn’t have agreed to it). Changing anything that is core to the experience of a live game is cause for scrutiny.

My original comment about cheaters was not to sound dismissive. As the community will hopefully learn, whenever possible, I’ll share what info I have. Sometimes that’s an “I don’t know”. That shouldn’t be taken as “I don’t care”. I started looking into the topic yesterday as a direct result of the numerous times it was surfaced in this thread.
 

BHG_Muet

Design Lead
Joined
Nov 12, 2018
Messages
72
Thanks everyone for the questions and comments. It was awesome to read so many posts that didn’t ask questions but just wanted to share detailed thoughts on the game. Hopefully I was able to provide a little extra insight. Keep an eye on the upcoming changes and please continue sending your feedback. I’ve got a day full of meetings but I'll be around.
- Muet
 

alexandria

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Jan 18, 2018
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I appreciate your response. I think you are on the right track then, but only time will tell how you manage any obstacles from fixing the core issues of the cheating going on. Even if it's not directly under your scope of responsibilities, I hope you bring this issue at your next office meeting and press the people responsible for handling cheaters to really take charge of making things right. You have a lot more power in voice than us players in creating change.

My final question for you; not sure if you can share on the subject:

How is data exactly being taken for determining success of the rebalance? Is this part of QA's job? If it is they need to set new KPI's because whatever they are reading does not translate with the loss of play time from players.
 

Bryan_k

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Oct 30, 2018
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Persia - Yep weird mix of Medieval/Classical defences even on some Enlightenment bases. We have the same problems; I'm just ahead of you by an age. No way would I attack a half decent GA base. Strangely I got attacked twice today by GA players (first time in ages) - both times they got wiped out with very little reward. I agree the tougher buildings have also shown up the AI limitations; I rallied the troops away to regroup/heal then watched in amazement that all the foot troops charged across and attacked a market *next* to a redoubt. They all got wiped out of course.
 

oddin

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can you please answer some of the points I raised on the previous page? thanks in advance
 

No Angel

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Just promote OSH.

People will still buy even if TT died on first defense. (Or, hack - worse thing).
 
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shukra

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Jul 12, 2017
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welcome muet

1 -- gold/food/oil sink for active players. idea: 95% age rss capacity for 1 (5?) crown. if impossible, a diamond. longshot: alliance 'bank'.
2 -- make league position desirable over being at low medals and grinding for artifacts. no motivation to play dynasty, even though i could.
3 -- improve the chat system. at the least, 'whisper' function inside an alliance.

<3 may you be treated with rhetorical respect and compassion, and attend our game with skill.
 
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Navalis

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Welcome aboard Joe! Thank you for jumping on the Forums and sharing some of your insight. The community will welcome your input! I too miss Heroes of Might & Magic II. That was a fun game.
 

No Angel

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Hm talking about MP right. My accounts belong to all ages. Iron accounts nah, I don't care, they're just to fill WW list. Medieval to Enlightenment : foot troops! Always foot troops to loot and you won't lose much yet you still always have a chance to get NTG.
Industrial - above : I usually part my MP into 2 sections, the NTG raid section which involve main army (still use barrack troops, I don't use fancy oil based troops except planes), and medal dropping section (which involves 1 foot troop only 😆 trust me you can get 300k from destroying farm and gold piles with a single infantry). I play below 800 medals, sometimes 1k but I can't stand it, I'm a neurotic medal dropper.

That's all, nothing fancy, less stress, and your goals achieved.
You might not become the best attacker in the game, but at least you'll have fun raiding and it's less stress! Even with some more silly rebalance coming 😆
 

Manifesto

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Most of your frustrations seem based around increased strength to defenders, hence my comments to reduce or remove the recent defender boosts.
I'd be happy if this was the only retraction they made.
 

Persia

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Don’t use foot soldiers in Medieval. Even when I was German and had Junker special troops, they sucked and got demolished by virtually any catapult.

Some say to attack collected farms and caravans that are in close proximity, but raiders are more effective for that purpose anyway. Any moron who puts all of their easily obtainable resources basically adjacent to one another is easy to hit. Foot soldiers are even worse now that every defensive building is buffed. Horse raider spam is more effective than it’s ever been. My old account was Atomic and I could at least five-star poorly made Atomic and Global bases with an Industrial army. Nowadays, I don’t want to touch that account because it will be so unfun to collect everything I need to upgrade and get up to date.
 

NoVelcro

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Mar 22, 2017
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No Title

Hello and welcome. Great to see your role created, and the passion you have

Like many of the players posting before in this thread... I too have been in top 100 alliances for well over a year, and have between line rooms, discord rooms have contacts in over 30% of the top 100 alliances.

i really want to work with you to blight out cheaters, if which there are 3 very very bad alliances in the top 100.

See below.

this alliance for moths has been hacking and cheating every war. We have masses of evidence of their cheats, what they do and how they do it... but from the community point of view nexon seem to be doing nothing.

is there any path forward on this, as this one issue is making many long term paying top players in the top 20 quit the game.
 

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LitanyOfFire

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Aug 24, 2017
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Hi BHG_Muet, I'm glad to see a designer stepping into the forums- that's not easy to do, and it means a lot to all of us.

I wrote an overly long piece (see attached link) after the third stage of the rebalance, and noted that I was OK with the changes because troops were wiping out non-military buildings quickly, but were much faster at clearing civilian structures. That changed with phase 4, and I'm now finding it very difficult to destroy bases before the timer runs out, even with a largely anti-building force.

Is the team looking at any plans to extend or change the battle timer?

One other thing I noted in my long post was that I only saw two ways for max level armies and defenses to compete while troop cards are in the game- that either troop cards are an "optional" part of high-level attacks, and regular armies+troop cards will stomp defenses, or that troop cards are essentially required for high level attacks and that defenses are balanced with this in mind.

To the team, is troop tactics being part of the attack a fun "optional" addition to attacks, or is it part of the vision that players will always use them as a portion of their army? Or a third option I have missed?

Thank you for reading, even if there is no reply, it really does make me feel better about the direction of the game.
 

LitanyOfFire

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To respond to your question about the stronghold- it would be useful to know if they have troop tactics, and it would also be useful to know if there were donated defenders in the town center. Town center artillery is a really big deal to consider when attacking, and my strategy changes completely if I know it's not there. (Like I have seen a reply of another alliance member attacking before I do.)
 

skychan

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Sep 16, 2018
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Would you find it useful to know how many Troop Tactics your target has (but not the exact Tactics)?
Yes this would be very nice to know.

No. Combat in DomiNations already places a large burden of knowledge on players. New players learn relative power levels in MP and those learnings shouldn’t be flipped just because the mode changed to War. But, we are considering ways in which we can increase rewards in MP, including modifications to the DOMINATION! Bonus.
Right now MP is a mess. With a low account I can't even finish off bases because there is so much HP's in troops and buildings it's impossible. On higher ages this can be somewhat mitigated by using factory troops, but the problem there is that you NEED oil, so you cannot afford to spend it on factory troops for fighting multiplayer battles.

I know you are saying that relative power levels are learned in MP. But that is really no longer the case, especially with the opacity of artifacts. In MP I have bonus's to lots of things I don't have in war, and enemy bases have bonus's to many things they won't have in war. The Coalitions only exacerbate these combat differences which on top of the now war museum means that there can and will be swings of more than 100% in how effective or ineffective units will be between war and mp.

I won’t say it will never happen. But, we’re currently pretty happy with where Barracks troops ended up. Your point about a viable Barracks composition while transitioning is ideal and is what new players entering Enlightenment + should experience. Part of the pain of the rebalance is that this transition is also hitting higher Age players who never transitioned. “Pivot pain” is something we’ve talked about a lot internally. Pivoting as a CWA player to Factory compositions is painful and slow and it can feel like you’re stuck. As mentioned in my initial post, we’re exploring ways in which we can alleviate this pain. Keep an eye on upcoming Events.
This is find as a philosophy, but it ruins fun for a game. Players simply cannot afford to spend the oil on using all factory troop armies. The losses even on a win are prohibitive and result in net loss of oil. (unless doing heavy tank raiding.) Therefore it is necessary for regular barracks troops to be capable of winning. What's more they need to be capable of getting those full 5* victories, NTG's and diamonds without having to spend 2 hours per try. Currently the benefit of attacking is ridiculously low compared to the costs.

You need to get many 5* victories, and often in multiplayer, at least 14 perfectly distributed victories by Global Age every 2 days to maintain NTG's for your war coalitions. That's in a perfect world where the one's you need appear, and are on bases you can actually 5*. that's 14 hours of training time give or take just to replace the expected losses for your perfect victories. And that is I remind you in a perfect situation where every attack got you exactly what you were looking for.

When you compare that need for perfect victories against the desire of the game designers to make 5* victories very hard, and rare in war there is a huge disconnect. Stating that you don't want base defenses to be different between war and mp only makes this problem greater. The very fact that MP and WAR museum bonus's have different maximums (which is a good thing) only furthers this innate disparity between the two modes.

Please reconsider trying to keep them so strictly tied to one another.

As you are new, here is one though on how to ramp up war difficulty without overwhelming anyone.

Simple hp modifiers based on your opponents level of glory. Devise a division method and then multiply all the defending units/buildings etc HP by the attacker's glory. For example my alliance has 23,988. So multiply any base we attack in war by 239% of it's HP. For a starting alliance with very low glory it is easy. For the very top alliances it is hard. But by it's very nature by the time an alliance has a lot of glory they will have gotten used to how that affects the difficulty of war. It also acts as a natural balance making a stronger alliance have to fight harder.

Just implementing a change like this instead of the previous 4 steps would for our alliance have resulted in almost the same change as ALL these modifications to the game, but without having made it a chore to play MP.

As you are now reworking matchmaking and leaderboard etc, now would be a time where you can do something similar.

This also will make it so that battles between top alliances, where BOTH sides are getting 200, 300, or even 400% boosts to the HP of their target's buildings and troops will naturally find it very hard to 5* in war, so those 1-4* attacks will become valuable, without it impacting the time in between wars, the ability to advance ages, improve troops, gather materials, or even compete in the various leagues.
 
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