Why I do not buy crowns

[dbukalski]

Actually you never told me how fast french units are build, I saw it on bamboos videos at first. And sniping came naturally, you saw how I raid, it is different from what you do.

But I agree that our 'loot battle' pushed me to do a little bit more research, caz I didn't expected devs may allow such a huge imbalances which make them loose quite a lot of money. Being british I spent some crowns at least )))

I didnt tell u how fast french build. I showed u with battle reports. And with the gold/hr calculations. And let u figure it out from there. Because i didnt want the forums to go crazy with the info then they take it and spread it to the rest of their friends. That just escalates how quick the wave comes crashing down. If u needed booquad vid to put it all together thats fine. But it was the peices i showed u that sent u investigating. I didnt expect u to start a campaign against it once u put it all together. But...ill be about half done with my lvl13 walls so while i would have preferred the nerf happen just a little later its all good

There was no stopping the nerf anyways. I was seeing a steady increase, shift in the number or french players on the leaderboards.

It was usa elite that started to switch first in large numbers and one of the reasons i joined them for being quicker at figuring things out.

I wouldnt say sniping came naturally to u. Before u hc sniped u british mixed armied it. U didnt start sniping until the information was out there for u to find. My tips, booquad vid. I finally posted vids when bhg was well on the way to nerfing the technique

If it was natural u would have come up with it urself. Which doesnt mean u dont do a good job. U could stand to do some more infantry baiting though give ur units some extra breathing room

Before booqua was posting vids of sniping, he jumped aboard at some point. Before raider sniping was a thing. I was hc sniping. the day hc got nerfed i was raider sniping.

Now that ur raider sniping ur not happy with overpowered effectiveness. Ur complaining about it like its the end game of dominations and theres no reason to play. Rather than treating it as the temporary boon to ur gold. The benefit of outsmarting the designers. Finding the chink the game design which gets found by top players in any game then closed when the masses start using it.

For me there is fun in coming up with the chinks/kinks in the design and benefiting for as long as its possible. This allows me to keep up withe big spenders and cheaters

Dont worry the 5 starring days will come

 

[Aurelius...]

Get a refund for the *extra house*. Shouldn't be a problem with a brief explanation. Apple refunded it to me very quickly.

 

[Aurelius...]

Need to fix the *no opponent found* problem. Redgar made a suggestion in another post. Other options to make the game more exciting between battles include adding alliance wars and other alliance related activities like testing bases. In addition, I suggested a duel option, which might be linked to revenge, and would allow people to challenge others, who are currently active, for medals (revenge is against people who are inactive without treaties, which is almost impossible).

 

[dbukalski]

For me these temporary early game inbalances are the reward for early adoption. Being their for the bugs and growing pains. Being there when alliance wars wasnt in the game so there wasnt as much fun to be had.

 

[Redgar]

I don't think I've seen any Booqs vids, but I checked Bamboo's while he plays different army.

Also, before IA age release and less closeupps with those often 670k gold loots, british were doing quite good in around 2m per hour without league reward, so after cheat bases became IA max in one day, there were no hope for them for a long time.

All your victories will be destroyed with new age, balance and cheats sooner or later

 

[Hunter Killer]

The discussions here would fit the topic "Why I quit", which is the next step after "Why I do not buy crowns". There are at least a few reasons that make me consider it at the moment:

1. The broken peace treaty bug where you can get attacked multiple times while under peace treaty. This happens for defeat peace treaties but also paid peace treaties. With this bug, there is no point in trying to go up the medal ladder, you can lose 100 medals overnight and that will demoralize any legit players. I've put up with the bug 4 times already and got crown compensations for it to reach my dynasty objective. But what is the point of pushing to 3400 for instance when you'll move up by 10 net medals a day and one day lose 100 overnight?

2. The long wait times to upgrade. We are currently close to 2 weeks upgrade for IA buildings. What is going to happen in global age, space age? Months of waiting to upgrade a cannon tower? It's getting ridiculous even if they add 2 more workers at every age. It just means people will connect once a week to check and eventually quit playing. There is nothing else to do than just farming, the medal race is dead due to broken PT. And no one in their right mind will speed up months worth of upgrades with crowns at the current rate of dollar per crown. So the game will be owned by cheaters or millionaires past global age.

3. The compensation scheme from Nexon is nowhere adapted. I can admit softwares have bugs, I work for a software company. But when something really bad happens like losing 100 medals when you're at 3200, 300 crowns is useless and a joke of the dedicated players base. Start by giving back lost medals instead of saying it's unfair to other players. Is it fair that someone loses 100 medals because of a bug and you can't/don't want to reverse that?

4. Alliance wars and global/space age are just an oasis in the desert right now. There's no target release dates whatsoever and no idea how advanced they are. This could be months away or years away, who knows. Players are not going to hang around waiting for these if they can't properly play the game right now. Fixing the game as it currently exist should be the main priority. Because if these new features are released and cheaters are still around, we'll start getting smashed by max global army on day 1. And I'm sure they'll find a way to hack alliance wars too. So adding more content while not fixing the underlying issue that make people quit. By the time space age is released, how many legit players will be left, still waiting for monthly building upgrades? Probably just dbukalski

I'm not a paying customer so they may not care about my opinion. But it's a shame this great game is run by amateurs who spend their time "rebalancing" (i.e. force people to use crowns to switch nations) instead of tackling the fundamental functionalities of the game (village swap bug, broken peace treaty bug, no opponent situation, broken medal system, and so many more listed by everyone in this forum).

 

[firedancer]

Honestly speaking, no matter how much we rant here, it is useless. The reason is because the business model only requires 2% of the player base to sustain the entire ecosystem.

So those that can pay their way to max their bases will not mind because their money solved everything (i.e. invulnerable to cheaters, have crazy walls, stay at the top etc.) and those of us that play but don't pay, don't actually matter to them because we are just overheads. It is much better to spend time to create things that make people wait for weeks or months to entice the 2% to pay for it, than to reduce the waiting time to please 98% of non-paying customers (and risk upsetting those who paid).

Every "I quit" post in this forum doesn't make a dent to the revenue unless the player is like paying for the game or is a top priority customer. As long as the "whales" are happy and continues to pump money into this game, we free-loaders can just hang around and live with it. Like dbuk said, after a while (maybe a year or so), we will become quite high level players anyway.

 

[Hunter Killer]

There's no point of having an official monitored forum if Nexon can't take constructive feedback from the dedicated players who are actually beta testing this game for them. So I do have some hopes they are open minded. How many people at Nexon actually play the game in real life conditions, waiting for building upgrades and trying to win battles in normal conditions (i.e. not attacking some bots)? Probably not a lot.

Many of the people you hear in this forum are in the top 200, they have pushed the game to its limit, stress testing it for Nexon who probably doesn't have the resources to do it themselves. We should be rewarded for our work and feedback and not ignored. We are trying to make this game better for 100% of players.

If the game is so crap that the total number of players decreases, 2% of 0 players is still 0. Trying to be short sighted and focus only on revenue will kill a potential cash cow. I know plenty of paying players who are fed up and want to quit (some already did). It's not just the non-paying customers complaining.

If the main target for revenue are the noobs who buy crowns to speed up iron age and quit at gunpowder age (which I believe is the majority), then we'll never see global age and alliance wars because it's not going to generate more revenues for them if we just talk about income.

 

[Aurelius...]

Firedancer,

No offense, but that's not accurate. The target is, and should be, large numbers of people paying some reasonable amount of money on a monthly basis. The whales are gravy, but not the bread and butter. Also, without a large active player base, the whales will go away. To grow the player base, the game needs to be fine tuned. Actively posting, and collaborating to push for changes will work. But it will only work if we support each other and really help the devs to understand what will make the game better.

Having said that, this game should be a top 10 revenue producer, and it's not. Why? Because recent updates have been driven by getting people to spend, and not improving the game. We need to determine what the most important improvements are, and relentlessly post until the changes are made.

 

[Aurelius...]

Well said.

 

[Tipek]

I haven't spent a dime as of yet, but if things actually ever significantly improved I'd consider it. Besides the points already mentioned, especially the old glitches and the hacks that continue to reward hundreds of thousands of crowns to players completely free of charge, I wouldn't buy crowns to speed up build times because no matter how much I spend I'll end up waiting for something else anyway.

However to be perfectly honest, I don't think I'll be playing long enough to ever see these improvements and new features. Frankly, having just entered EA a few days ago, I've come to the conclusion I'd rather quit than drag my feet through an age everyone else got through for free or at a drastically easier pace before the relentless waves of nerfs. Not to mention every time I get rolled over by a hacker or my game crashes I get a little bit closer to uninstalling for good.

 

[Hunter Killer]

Another thing I have noticed is that on the app store, the ratings were 4.5 stars when I started playing (around May) and now it's at 3.5 stars and ever going down with very detailed negative reviews (so not some teenagers rant). If things don't change and the game continues on its broken path, it'll eventually reach 2 stars one day and no new players will even want to give it a try at that point.

Who has installed a game with less than 3 stars ratings recently? I know I don't if there are less than 4 stars, I don't have time to waste on half-baked games when there are thousands of games to play on the app store.

If you don't take into account on-going customers' feedback, you may have the most perfect game one day (global age, alliance wars, no more bugs, etc...), but if no one installs it because it's too late, you are screwed anyway.

The time to curb the momentum is now, when there is still strong support for the game. Afterwards, it will take a huge marketing campaign to get people to even try it based on past awful reviews that one can read on the app store (scam, crashes, cheaters, etc...).

And to talk about mobile app business, what is important is not the 2% paying customers, it's the total number of users that define whether the app is viable or not. The median app half life for a game is 2 months. They've been pushing things up by releasing to the Asian market (which is very video-game oriented but also very volatile and following trends). Once the number of users have peaked and they can't do anything to retain the people quitting, there's about 4-6 months left before collapse if I refer to the studies I can find.

This game has a great concept but it'll end up in the graveyard of failed apps if it can't tackle all these challenges. And then they'll be a somewhat similar new game, and people will move on.

 

[Redgar]

Actually what pissed me off more than anything is that some players get refunded 12000 crowns while others 300 crowns for the same issue and had to report it multiple times. It was like a spit to a face for me, honestly. I left one alliance where the guy received 100k crowns for free and now it happens in some smaller scale on the top too.

 

[Redgar]

Luckiky, that business model collapses if players mass-quit, so they have to care about us too ))) once whales max out their bases they need to socialize lol to show how cool they are. And if the hall is empty, they are bored and quit too

 

[Redgar]

They have a huge reserve on buffing the game in terms of fun and revenue, while they keep on nerfing it and wasting content and time.

If they went for training blessing nerf, it means they are out of creative ideas and their numbers aren't good to attact new audience. Damn, this game should be showing TV adds already while it suffers on ARPU. I think that ARPPU is fine, but conversion is low.

Those AAA dinosaurs managed to convert paying players like me into non-paying. Trully amazing!

 

[dbukalski]

Im seeing 4.5 stars in google play store and 4.5 in itunes

 

[Hunter Killer]

No Title

This is what I see in my app store. The worst is when you start reading the reviews. Skip the ones from noobs who just installed the game and start rating it while in iron age. The ones who went a little bit further are just destroying its reputation.

 

[firedancer]

So far I see, most of the suggestions that helps make the game more interesting will usually land on deaf ears. However, if there are any thing that could hint or be manipulated into making the game more frustrated for players to milk their $, then it will be implemented. That's why nerfs are so easily to get thru.

Now most of everything in IA is like more than a week. I'm not sure whether they have a cap for things. Like CoC, everything is capped at max 2 weeks and nothing goes beyond that. But looking at this game, I think the cost jump from GP to EA is insane then the upgrade times jump from EA to IA is insane and we still have a long way more to Space Age.

 

[Redgar]

Yea, each time they make dramatic building times jump, they should deliver a house, so players at least have this fake feeling that it's gonna be faster for them. May be those players without starter pack should receive two houses, whatever, but everybody should get at least two extra workers. )))

You are right the game already looks slower than clash of clans, while new supercells games pretend to be faster. And there have to be new ages still...

May be they should make lower crowns prices on those long upgrades, and deliver more free crowns, idk. But the game is broken almost in each single aspect including city building

 

[USA Elite Will]

WHY SHOULD WE HAVE TO PAY FOR CROWNS WHEN CHEATERS GET THEM FOR FREE! BAN CHEATERS AND WATCH YOUR CROWN PURCHASES SKY ROCKET BHG!