Sovereign
Inhouse Community Manager
Dear Kings and Queens,
Empires have been built and kingdoms have risen, while you and your neighbors have helped one another with motivation, and hindered each other with post-battle plundering. Sometimes neighborhoods shrunk in size and were merged into larger, more robust localities to spice up the local competition. But sometimes there was no good fit for a new neighborhood, and so merges could in some cases be few and far between.
It was your player feedback that let us know the neighborhood merging system should be rethought and improved. So, in response to requests from you - our players - today the city crier is heralding a new change which will improve the way neighborhood merges take place in the future and provide more balance to the game in terms of both neighborhoods' size, and the strength of their cities.
The Beta server will be updated today, and from now on, when a merge takes place, instead of attempting to merge two entire neighborhoods into one (which led to some small neighborhoods waiting a long time to become small enough for a merge), neighborhoods will be broken into smaller parts, or "chunks". These chunks will then be merged with parts of other neighborhoods at a similar level of advancement within the tech tree. There will still be enough variance within these chunks to provide healthy competition, but with this method you will see more balanced neighborhoods and - because of the usage of chunks as opposed to entire neighborhoods - players will no longer find themselves "trapped" in small neighborhoods.
Neighborhood merging will also be reduced in frequency, to once every two weeks. In practice, however, the new method for merges will result in more frequent merges taking place than previously.
If you are interesting in how the neighborhood "chunks" are made, please see the additional section below.
The first neighborhood merge using the new merge method takes place today, shortly after the update.
Click here to view our feedback thread, and earn yourself some diamonds!
May your quests be victorious, your plunders be fruitful and your guild members loyal!
Sincerely,
The Beta Team
How neighborhoods are split
Neighborhood chunks will not usually be split at any predefined rank, but will be variable depending on the current shape of a neighborhood. For example, if a few players form a natural chunk at the top of the neighborhood ranking, with a big gap afterwards, this big gap would be used to split off that chunk from the rest of the neighborhood. If a chunk is very large however, this may be split without requiring a large points gap.
Empires have been built and kingdoms have risen, while you and your neighbors have helped one another with motivation, and hindered each other with post-battle plundering. Sometimes neighborhoods shrunk in size and were merged into larger, more robust localities to spice up the local competition. But sometimes there was no good fit for a new neighborhood, and so merges could in some cases be few and far between.
It was your player feedback that let us know the neighborhood merging system should be rethought and improved. So, in response to requests from you - our players - today the city crier is heralding a new change which will improve the way neighborhood merges take place in the future and provide more balance to the game in terms of both neighborhoods' size, and the strength of their cities.
The Beta server will be updated today, and from now on, when a merge takes place, instead of attempting to merge two entire neighborhoods into one (which led to some small neighborhoods waiting a long time to become small enough for a merge), neighborhoods will be broken into smaller parts, or "chunks". These chunks will then be merged with parts of other neighborhoods at a similar level of advancement within the tech tree. There will still be enough variance within these chunks to provide healthy competition, but with this method you will see more balanced neighborhoods and - because of the usage of chunks as opposed to entire neighborhoods - players will no longer find themselves "trapped" in small neighborhoods.
Neighborhood merging will also be reduced in frequency, to once every two weeks. In practice, however, the new method for merges will result in more frequent merges taking place than previously.
If you are interesting in how the neighborhood "chunks" are made, please see the additional section below.
The first neighborhood merge using the new merge method takes place today, shortly after the update.
Click here to view our feedback thread, and earn yourself some diamonds!
May your quests be victorious, your plunders be fruitful and your guild members loyal!
Sincerely,
The Beta Team
How neighborhoods are split
Neighborhood chunks will not usually be split at any predefined rank, but will be variable depending on the current shape of a neighborhood. For example, if a few players form a natural chunk at the top of the neighborhood ranking, with a big gap afterwards, this big gap would be used to split off that chunk from the rest of the neighborhood. If a chunk is very large however, this may be split without requiring a large points gap.