Mike

[TheRealPP]

First of all, id like to say congratulations. The game has proven much better than I honestly thought it would be, bar a few minor tweaks here and there it still manages to fuel my passion for 'hitting' people, fighting for res and orbs, and still keeps me addicted, just as old woc did, so kudos on that!!

Now with that being said, I do have a few issues id like to discuss, mainly this new thing of everyone 'against' my team, and I mean that in terms of a few things I have read on this forum, yes we have a big number of players (10-16 or somewhere in that region) and most of us quit the game we was playing (for a good few years) to come back to woc, which I think speaks volumes to the regard in which we hold it.

Unfortunately for single player teams, or less organised teams ect, we have a team that has held friendship from old woc, we speak and communicate outside of the game in a private chat group, we make plans and execute them to a point where we are currently the dominant team, which I understand does bring a level of anger, hatred, jealousy ect.

But we are a collective that has so far played the game to how it has been set out by you, we didn't complain when another team was dominating using the supervirus bug, we just continued to play and attack as intended by the gameplay structure.

The point I am trying to make is, I see you trying to 'bend' to other players and teams ideas because they aren't capable of beating us currently, the idea of you resetting the alpha test server is quite frankly abit absurd, everyone is levelling just fine now, like I did mention, at first the lvl1s v 1s would be a grind, but eventually it evens out so people will be against different levels as they progress making it slightly easier.

I personally believe the 1-2 month travel east is far too long, and eventually nobody will want to rebirth to do it over, which will result in a mass of over levelled nations filling up the 'biglands' area, stifling the progress of those just reaching it.

Team play has always been the biggest factor in woc, even with manpower as it is currently our team has managed to get to level 100, but that was a lot of clicking and waiting, and then clicking again involved, if you try to make it so say a 1 man team can preform aswell as an organised 6 or more manned team I believe this will drive some people away, I understand the 1 man teams do need to be able to be capable of competing too, but i don't have the answer to that.

i appreciate you taking the time to read this and look forward to any further discussions on the matter

[Dev]

You also have to look at it from this side too.
Who is going to want to keep playing a game where 1 team dominates? A team of 4-6 is still not going to do anything against 4 or 5 nations with 15 players all teamed up with 24 hour coverage.

That'll push people away when they spend hours and hours, maybe more than the people have spent in your team, but because it's 4vs15 they still can't get anywhere in the biglands.

It'll also get boring for you guys, why would you play a game where nobody can give you any competition? Most people are just casually playing the game by themselves, so you're not going to see any real competition for awhile anyways.

I'm a casual player, I play just to play a game. I don't have to be on top, or anywhere near the top. I don't have to be in a team that takes shifts to cover a game 24 hours a day, I play 2-3 hours a day and I'm having fun as it is. If sitting up there by yourselves is fun for you guys, then you're getting what a game is supposed to give, enjoyment.

[Mike]

Thanks for the well thought out points, and I'm glad you're enjoying the new game so far.

You're on a large, organized and very successful team right now, and that's great. My goal is not to keep players from being successful, and it's definitely not to keep any specific player or team from being successful. But you say you are playing "as intended" -- the thing is the game is still a work in progress, and there are loopholes that in some cases give too much of an advantage to certain tactics. I basically threw a bunch of rules in there knowing I couldn't possibly predict all the ramifications of them ahead of time, and now during testing is when we find out what works and what needs to be changed. Closing loopholes will inevitably be a disadvantage for the nations that used them; for earlier loopholes like supervirus and geo efficiency it was mostly other peoples' nations that were affected; in the case of current ones like splash damage and leveling off of very weak nations, it will affect your nation to the extent that you're using those. The goal isn't to take away your advantage or punish your team in any way; it's to close up exploitable holes in the rules and so encourage competition. Large and well organized teams like yours will continue to have a strong advantage, and that's how it should be.

Resetting the alpha server isn't necessary, it's just a possibility I threw out there to get feedback on. (None of that feedback has been positive yet, so the idea in on the back burner unless/until it becomes a lot more necessary). My thinking was, we don't have too many players in the game right now, and half of them are at level 100 in 2 days because of loopholes that need to be closed, so after closing them, maybe we should reset everyone so that the players we have are closer in level and are in competition with each other.

Rebirth is a tough issue and I don't consider it settled. If no nations ever rebirthed, then the high level areas would get clogged like you said. But when rebirthing a nation loses a lot, so I could see it being a jumping off point for a lot of players. If their nation is forced to rebirth, I would think a lot of players would just choose to quit. That's why I figured in the new version I'd make it a choice, and give players a 'carrot' for choosing to rebirth (the opportunity to have their nations grow more powerful in each successive rebirth cycle) -- rather than the 'stick' of a rebirth countdown and forced rebirth. I don't think we've had enough nations yet in the new WoC for that option to really be appealing yet. The idea is that if you're struggling to get up to level 140 and being beaten by nations that are at 180+ due to having rebirthed, that would make rebirth seem more appealing. The thing is that if a nation's power increases by 10 levels with each rebirth cycle, as it does now, then there can only be so many rebirth cycles. Thus why I figure each cycle should last at least a month or two. Also (and this would hopefully be better with more players as well) every stage of the game should be fun; playing at level 10 or 40 should be fun as well as competing for Fire at level 120.

But, I'm open to ideas on all this. How would you, and others, like to see rebirth work? Do you prefer the forced rebirth of old WoC, and if so why? Do you dislike the 10 level bonus that comes with each rebirth in the new WoC, and if so why? Do you have any new ideas for how rebirth could work?

[TheRealPP]

Thanks for replying,

Dev, I understand what you are saying but that point only speaks to the current situation we are in, that being its alpha test and not many players are online,

When the game opens up to the others and new players joining too, the domination effect should take a huge slide, mainly because it might be a team of 15 with full coverage but the team will be getting hit at res and orbs and probably the main too, by everyone else trying to get them, for example if there is say 20 nations in biglands and our team is 3-4 of them nations it still makes it 15+ nations, solo or team, going against the 3-4, so this will create a big open war, orb fights, res fights, main battles, and truces being formed, and I think this kind of thing is vital to the games success.

My team has spoken in private numerous times over this issue, and I promise you our intention is not to completely dominate all the bigland area, its foolish to even think we could, we want new players joining, we want solo players to fight for orbs, we want the game to last and in order for that to happen, battles have to break out for orbs and res all the time.

We are certainly not going to be horrible in our approach either, for example a single player admitted to us in chat that he was attacking orbs when our team was offline, this is no problem and actually a good strategy on his part, all we will do is fight back for the orb, we are not going to act all powerful and say 'you cant take our orbs blah blah we gonna checker and 1 square you blah blah' doing that will only drive players away, we will merely just fight back for any orbs or res and that's more than fair for us or anyone else to do.

Currently its easy to dominate because of the low numbers on alpha, things will look a whole lot different when the game opens up to everyone.

Mike,

The problem is, if you covered any 'loopholes' up or nerfed certain temps or nerfed manpower more so single or smaller teams have a more even playing field to the bigger teams, it still wont fix the issue, we could for example make 8 nations and keep swopping from one to the other and still level them up, albeit we might stay the same level as everyone else but then we still have a higher amount of nations as apposed to everyone elses 1 or 2, I just really cant see the way to stop a big team from being quicker and more well rounded than smaller teams, but ill leave that up to you to think of something lol.

I don't think the rebirth system itself is the issue, infact I actually like the idea that you can choose to rebirth or not, it adds another twist on what tactics to follow, I think the issue is the timeframe in which in takes to gain back, for example if a nation is level 130, holding a decent amount of res and orbs, and its taken them 1-2 months to get to this point, they will never click that rebirth button until absolutely needed to.

I have a few ideas on this though:

Go back to the old rebirthing system, but with it taking so long to hit a certain level now, the timer will have to be extended much more than old woc, so if it takes a month to reach the level in which the rebirth timer starts, I think the timer will have to be around 2-3 weeks.

Stick with the new rebirth system and have the move east take around 2 weeks instead of 2 months, nobody is going to want to spend 6 months doing 3 rebirth cycles lol.

This last idea is probably my favourite but maybe the hardest to try and execute,

Stick with the first time moving east as 1-2 months, but when you click rebirth you come straight back as level 40, and each rebirth cycle after that you come back as level 40, but each time for up to a certain amount you gain like a 0.5% boost to your stats and caps, this will allow the lower level areas to stay quite clear for the new players ( nobody wants to see vets rebirth and then start bullying the newer players away from the game) and also will give a greater incentive for the higher levels to rebirth, obviously these numbers are just for the sake of the post, I'm not sure what numbers would work best.

Also maybe making more quests for rebirthing numbers 'rebirth 50 times gives 2k creds plus so many xp' type thing and making a bigger issue out of number of rebirths on the ranking systems, to give it a more prestigious feeling, rather than just another game feature, will make people want to do it more too.

[Mike]

Those are some really good and creative ideas for rebirth! I'd like to wait a few weeks, until we start bringing in more players, before making big changes to rebirth, so we can get an idea of how a greater number of players changes the feel of the game and the incentives involved, first. So we have a little while to come up with lots of ideas and think it through. These ideas are a great step in that direction.

[Napoleon]

I went through all the posts,

I agree with a lot of what PP said, also I want to point out he did it very articulated.

Now, i like all the ideas he spit balled, I am open to whatever honestly.

I just want to throw some ideas out there, I don't care if they get taken.

Clash has a Clan Level system for XP gained from "Wars", each level has a "perk"... up to 10 levels... maybe adapting something like that to it up to 10 Rebirths would give incentive. The best perks would be obtained with more rebirths.

This also goes along the lines of Call Of Duties prestige system, in CoD you unlock a bunch of small achievements.

Maybe adding both, in a way could make it more appealing with a % boost in stats.

------------------------

Again like i mentioned in another post,

I feel resetting Alpha is unnecessary, with a few high level nations at just over level 100 you can get more out of your Alpha time with things that a few higher levels can experience. This gives you more bang for your buck.

It comes down to time, if it takes 2 months to get to level 100... how long do you intend to have Alpha open for? It would have to be longer than 2 months. This is because in order to see what high level nations, and rebirthed nations go through to get any form of feed back from all the changes you need them here and waiting 2 months just to have them on the map for a week isn't an ideal amount of time for that.

Some players may not like that it's our nations that hit that level quickly, but that's life. In the test phase, some people didn't like that you didn't reset the map when you expanded the map allowing KillEmAll at level 160 to rush to the big orbs without anyone else having a chance but.... like I said that's life right? People need to learn to deal with that, lick their wounds and fight another day.

If people truly cared, they wouldn't whine to you, they would put in the effort, build a team, get active and compete. Sometimes as a manager, creator or owner of something, you need to learn to ignore things... "nicely" i suppose. Lol.

Just my opinion, but like Steve said, this game has a lot of positives and you may become very rich... just don't forget about us little people.

[Therealplagel]

In regards to the time to level to say, 100..I'll equate this to World of Warcraft which I found after Hal died the first time around RIP.

It took a SOLID few months to get to level 60. But along the way there were discoveries of new lands, new people, quests, dungeons, monsters, tradeskills, etc, etc, etc. This game, for better or worse, doesn't have that.

I know they're not the same game obviously, but the sense of discovery around each turn is what made going to the local convenience store (+1 for Wawa), getting a bag of cheetos and a big Mt. Dew and committing to getting 3 levels to get to the next zone exciting. This game doesn't have that sense of discovery. For that reason and that reason I think leveling shouldn't be as long. Not until there's 500 active people online at a time, at least.

[Mike]

Lots of good points and ideas, thank you.

Right now I'm thinking something like this:

Each cycle would take (for dedicated nations) 2-3 weeks instead of 1-2 months. Similar to old woc, at a certain point a rb countdown would start, that could be sped up or delayed somewhat, but would ultimately force rebirth. That would give the advantage of rotating who the most powerful nations are at any given time.

Each time a nation rebirths it starts at something like level 30 or 40, to avoid repeating the low level tedium, and to keep vets out of the low level areas.

Each time a nation rebirths it would also gain a +1 level bonus. This would be similar to how each rebirth gives a +10 level bonus now. But, it would only be +1 because of the shorter cycles and forced rebirth. This bonus results in each level taking less XP to reach than it did in the previous rebirth cycle, so the nation can become a little bit more powerful with each cycle. There would be a cap of say +50 on the level bonuses, so that there is a maximum power that nations can reach by rebirthing 50 times. Having reached that max, it would take the same XP to reach level 150 as it took to reach level 100 in the first cycle. In this sense, each rebirth is itself a sort of level up, but with a long term progression that would take even dedicated nations at least a couple of years to complete (at 2+ weeks per rb cycle).

[Napoleon]

Not a bad idea Mike.

I like it!

[Zero]

Mike I like to add a few lines. Make the experience earning tactics liberal. There should be no 2-3 weeks period. My point is you play more, you rebirth faster. This is a war game. Let the server be bombarded with nations attack requests. I like the idea of capping rebirth bonus to +50. If you keep players bound to 2-3 week period, imagine the difficulties of a new player who joins the game 2 or 3 years from today. He/she will need to play 2 or 3 years to be at par with players who started from day 1 of server.

A new player who tries his/her hands at a new game wants to see progress. He/she would definitely like to hold orbs, but it will be very difficult when there will be tons of players clicking. He/she would like to see progress made at least on levels. What do you think when you start to play a new game? Gain levels and become powerful, right?

Make rebirth start ticking at level 101 like in the old version. Right now, there is no fights in bigland, why? Nations are finding it hard to level. You make leveling up easier, it would definitely help to populate the map faster. Which will mean more fights. More fights means more experience for your nation. Which means you rebirth faster.

Just my thoughts.