Opinion - [The New Age] PBE: Changes

In my article Basics - [The New Age] PBE: Changes I introduced the changes to game mechanics as introduced in PBE [The New Age]. To get a full picture on what I'm talking about in below article, I strongly recommend to read that article first. This holds true especially for readers who do not have access to the PBE test server where these changes are introduced by the game team and tested by a limited amount of players.

Recap

To reiterate in short, the changes introduced in PBE [The New Age] are: 

• complete gear rework, 
• major commander skill tree changes, 
• new battle mechanics 
• Energy pool instead of Stamina/AP

as main changes and the introduction of 

• multiple conscription queues for same troop type, 
• exp leveling past 40 only via PvP, 
• unique item as separate slot 

as the smaller ones. 

Many Discussions

Now, the past three or four days the discussions went wild. From first spontaneous statements like "I'm quitting" about 2 hours after PBE got launched (even by players who don't have access to the test environment) to some more in depth discussions - you can find pretty much everything. The main argument that I see is that these changes are messing too much with the individual investment into the game and that people are afraid of losing value on their game safe.

While I can see how some "value" in terms of time and effort spent on optimizing the account for the current Meta might be rendered as "useless" or "wasted", I cannot agree with the notion that the actual monetary value spent gets reduced by these changes (barring the lost skill points from Impart Wisdom, which I mentioned in the article).

Requested Changes

Many players are unhappy with the idea of the current special effects being scratched completely. However, for many months numerous players, including those now unhappy ones, have been remarking on some of these effects being "broken" or "OP" and the necessity to nerf them. Personally, I don't see the huge issue with losing the special effects we have known for that long - aside from the fact that we are simply used to them and know what they do without having to scratch our head anymore to find a good solution for a fight we can win.

Realistically, this change affects literally every single player, which makes it for once a decently fair adjustment in my opinion. In contrast to that, every prior change to gear items or commander skills has been "unfair" as it always only hit a few people who had focused on this commander or gear piece and then suddenly couldn't use it feasibly anymore (e.g. Haldir's unique as many might remember).

If Frenzy would be taken out for example, we'd have a lot of unhappy Khaldoon players (and others of course). We would have people at a major disadvantage who worked for this for months maybe and hunted down every single Gigantic Hammer they could lay their hands on. Meanwhile the rest of the community could laugh and rub their hands because they haven't been affected. I can think of no way of "nerfing" that item which would have resulted in the owners of the item being happy in the end. Whether it be a direct or indirect nerf. And this holds true for so many items in the game.

By changing the whole setup of items, the problem gets ripped out at the root: special effects that are only available for some items and not for others, especially the gold gear ones. One might get the idea that the uproar against these changes could also stem in the fear of not being at a big enough advantage over others anymore. With every effect available to every gear item and thus to every player at every spending level, the special effects of gold gear are not something that only one spending type has available anymore. 

However, while this change to the special effects evens out the chances for good special effects throughout every layer of player type, gold gear still brings enough advantage in order to have decidedly higher value than purple items or lower. Personally, I would think that should make everyone happy - aside from the required effort needed for a short time of adjusting to the new "rules".

The Level of Upset

So, why are people so extremely upset about it? Mind you, the anger is about a bunch of changes of which we do not know at this point how many of these will actually make their way into the game or in what way, nor do we have any idea on a timeline in which they will be implemented into the game. Are people just upset because of change in general? 

I can see the argument about having to get used to the new mechanics. It will require a little bit of effort to get to know the new mechanics (unless you want to play mediocre and wait for the smart guys to come up with ready made solutions for you) and some players might have a certain fatigue related to the game and not want to put that amount of effort in it - fair enough. 

You have to try and test etc., but wait - isn't that exactly what a vast amount of people like so much about the game? Countless players theorycraft for hours on end, test commanders, swap troops, gear, recharge, test again, rinse & repeat. 

"Loss of Investment"

All that being said (and I have hinted at the following already), the argument that I am struggling with the most is the notion that you lose your investment. For one, we don't lose anything. If these mechanics get implemented into the game, we will still have the same shiny toys in our game safes. Just with different names and features, but the same value (in terms of quality/rarity) and number (you get all used pieces back as basic).

Yes, in some cases having known about such changes ahead of time might have caused you to hold on to some pieces instead of scrapping them for that one special effect you wanted to strengthen, but it is still not a loss because the value is on your account - nothing changed in that regard. (*Secret Tip: before it gets implemented, use an elven hammer to get that one piece out that you really want to get back)

More importantly though - why are we so fixated on the term "investment"? Investment is the process of using money with the aim to profit (=financially). Never have I played a game, paid for it (big or small amounts) and in the end gotten any money back. At that moment when you pull your credit card your money is gone. Of course you want good quality service for the money you spent - and I believe a game team who attempts to make the game enjoyable across the player base (not just for some of them) is good quality service. But thinking of it as an "investment" is too far fetched in my personal opinion. 

Perceived Value

So, what is it that we believe we gain when we pay money for (or "invest" into) a game like this? We make the transaction to buy a digital service in order to enhance the experience which we otherwise can enjoy for free as well. We buy ourselves an advantage over other players who either don't want to or who cannot spend (that amount of money). 

For some it might maybe carry the impression of "prestige" within the community or even power, but realistically we buy to get that instant gratification from progressing just a little bit faster and on top of that the satisfaction of being "stronger" than others.

Real Value

We established, what you get for spending on the game is extra service in terms of digital goods. The basic service provided by the game developers is that we can use their assets and enjoy your free time while doing so. This is for free. And here we come to, what I believe is (and in my opinion always should be) the real value we should consider as exchange for money spent: the opportunity to spend our time doing something we enjoy - you could call it a hobby. On top of this we are enabled to meet numerous people across the globe who have the same interests as we do, the option to find friends among them and at the very least the shared time while playing together and having fun. 

Can we gain these values otherwise than by spending on a mobile game? Of course. No doubt about that. However, we chose to play a mobile game. We chose to play this game specifically. We chose to stay in the community that came along with the game. In fact, we choose to do so every single day and every single time we log into the game - over and over again. And once we do not enjoy the process anymore - once we cannot get this value out of our "hobby" anymore -, it is probably time to find something else we enjoy better. Nothing wrong about that. That's how things go.

If that happens to be the case, we cannot blame anyone. There is no one to blame. And unless the game team changes the graphics into obnoxiously poor quality or anything the like, they are still providing us with the same service that we chose in the beginning. 

For me this PBE server and the changes implemented into it show that the game team still cares about the game. There is still the needed passion to make things better along the road. To value this effort and passion I do not have to agree with all of their ideas. I have always the option to give positive feedback (which may very well be criticism) and bring sound arguments why I think it is a bad idea to bring idea x, y, z into the live servers.

Conclusion

Personally I believe it is not worth to get upset about these changes. Do I like them all? Certainly not. Do I hate them all? Certainly not that either. For the time being, let's just give it a try and if the game is really terrible after these changes were made and pushed into the live servers and we played it for a while, then we can maybe get upset. Or, instead we could also just see if we can find something else to occupy our minds with and maybe we can do it even with some of the friends we met in RtW. But for now, let's just keep playing and see where things go - or like younger folks than me might put it: "chillaaaaaxxxx". 

* Disclaimer:
This article is my personal opinion based on the impending changes to the game as implemented in the test environment PBE server [The New Age]. Unless stated otherwise, these features are not available in live servers at the time of publication.

Article - Balanced Servers

When playing the game we all want to have fun. This is the ultimate goal for everyone - or for most everyone. 

Players'  Expectations

One part of having fun includes the ability to play throughout the whole season. While different players have different play styles and expectations to what they consider "fun" in the game, what is common to almost all players, is that they do not simply want to log in and do - nothing. Doing nothing is boring. Farmers want to be able to farm. Theory crafters and build testers want to craft and test builds. Fighters want to fight. Prestige farmers want to farm prestige. These may be different types of goals, but the common ground is: do something and not just sit around.

In order to be able to do something, you need to have access to the basic requirements. in all cases - whether it is farming, testing builds, PvP (fun or war) - you need access to one basic thing in the game: troops. And to have access to troops you need - resources!

Now, to accomplish the common goal, most people agree on one thing: the server should be as balanced as possible. And there we hit the problem. The question "what is a balanced server?" usually brings up huge discussions and often starts fights and the ever proclaimed "toxicity". 

Contributing Factors

There are so many different factors at play that it seems difficult to find a common ground on how to achieve a "balanced server":

- number of players
- strength of players
- experience of players
- activity of players
- server setup
- type of campaign
- (dis)advantages of factions
- availability of resources
- available commanders/troops per faction/alignment
- ... and so on.

How do you measure all these different factors? Which factors are (most) deciding? Which can be neglected? Opinions go in vastly different directions.

Excurse - Server Experiences

I started playing this game when it first got officially released after the Beta testing - on September 23, 2021. Currently I am on my 9th season with my main good side account. Besides this account I have several others, some bigger than others. Among these is one bigger evil account with also 8 seasons and another decent good side account with a total of 7 seasons under the belt. All in all I have seen about 30+ different servers across most seasons and campaigns.

With all this experience you would think there had to be a few balanced servers among the list. However, I have yet to see that one truly balanced server. There is also the reality that people perceive the same server very differently. Just as an example, there was this one server that I perceived as immensely stressful from day 4 when war started until roughly 4-5 hours before the countdown ended. At the same time another group found the server extremely boring. Given these very different perceptions about that particular server you guessed it already - the server certainly was not balanced.

Solutions?

Players tend to ask developers to do something in order to balance the game. The requests go from asking for separate servers for "whales" vs "F2P" to controlling the numbers of registrations per faction/alignment or experience of these players and whatnot.

We all can see that the developers try to tackle the problems at hand by implementing different systems and algorithms that are aimed to help the balance problem. We have seen them cut down numbers per factions, capping the registrations per alignment (good/evil), capping the amount of players per team and more recently in some registrations (campaign S4 - The War of the Ring) requiring a minimum ring level in the previous server to be eligible to register for the campaign. And last not least the newest feature that will be implemented with this week's patch: the creation of registrations for players who never won the "Ring". All this in order to try and attempt balanced servers and enhance player experience.

Most people want servers to be populated. More server population = more competition = more activity = more fun. This is the idea and in the majority of the cases this is certainly true. However, how do you get servers populated? The game team can hardly force groups into registering for a certain campaign against their will. Some groups wait for friends who are still stuck in servers and want to join them, so they wait. This makes it very difficult for the game team to really influence players' choices in a grand scheme.

So, what net? We end up on a server with differently populated factions. This is the basic reality. Within these differently populated factions we have different strengths. One faction may have higher numbers than the other, but still be weaker because of lower activity, higher percentage of F2P vs whales, etc.

We could start counting the numbers of players. Do we count all players in all listed fellowships/warbands? Or do we stop after the top 15? Top 20? Or do we count only groups with X amount of players? Do we consider how many "alts" or secondary accounts they have, which may not be played as much as their main accounts?

Utopia - The Perfect Scenario

Let's assume we have a "perfect" server with 4 factions that each have 2 full fellowships/warbands - 200 people per faction. For the sake of this example we will say the other factions are completely empty. Further, let's assume the four full factions are equally active and all have the same amount of seasons under their belts. All this should allow for a perfectly balanced server, right? Simply two factions vs two factions = perfect balance.

Hold a second! How do we factor the status of the individual players' developments? We will not have a homogenous group of people who are all on the same level of commander/gear progress. Even if all those players had spent equal amounts of money, they would not have equal amounts of luck with their chest pulls - those pulls are RNG based (as so many other factors in the game).

So, how do we measure the strength of the players?

- Do we measure it by how much they farm in the first week? We have seen great farmers who don't fight much, though.
- Or do we count how many commanders at R10 they have? Commanders have different strengths and different gear set ups etc.
- Does one "kraken" outweigh 3 (or 5 or 10) whales? How do you measure this?

We'd have this perfectly "balanced" server and again we'd struggle. Simply because of the difference in strength of players. Let's now add to this the different strength of commanders/builds/troops in the alignments good vs evil. Some builds work better against good, others work better against evil. People are set up one way or another - depending on what they played so far and even with the Elven Craftsman's Hammer we cannot dismantle whatever and whenever we want to. Those items are limited.

Conclusion

In my personal opinion and according to my experience it is impossible to achieve a balanced server. What is balanced for one (e.g. equal numbers of players) is not balanced for another because they consider something else balanced (e.g. number of factions per side). The "headache" of trying to make a server balanced is taking a lot of time from the actual fun in the game - playing it, i.e. grow your commanders, manage your resources, troops, etc. and then go fight and try to win or have another favourable outcome that you worked for.

Disclaimer:

All expressed thoughts are based on my personal experiences, views and opinions. They may not be shared by other players in this or a similar way. I do not claim to have the one right opinion or view on things, but merely share my take on things based on my own, personal experiences in the game.