Event Easter Event 2016

[DeletedUser]

Greetings Beta,

The Easter Event 2016 has been activated on Beta.
This year the event does not work the same as it has in previous years. We understand that this will be different than before, but please help us identify any issues with the event if you can.

As always, we're running a mission for reporting bugs in this event that can be found here!
Please leave any general feedback about the event here.

Thanks for your continued efforts,
Team Beta

 

[Sovereign]

Hey guys,

Just for a little clarity, on Beta we're currently just testing the quest aspect of the event. There will be a further chance to find eggs at random in your city, but this is still in pre-beta and will be added hopefully in a few days, giving you all more of a chance to earn Eggs than the current daily quests and collections are allowing.

 

[Sovereign]

Hi guys,

All active accounts have been credited 1000 Diamonds to aid with the testing of the event, thanks for your patience.

 

[DeletedUser16]

Hi Beta players,

Thanks for your feedback so far! It looks like there has been some surprise, confusion and disappointment about what our reasoning was for certain changes and to give you all some insight into the development process, we've prepared an overview - you can take a look at it below. To improve for next time, we'll aim to provide information about significant changes at the time of release on Beta so there's not so much need to speculate.

As a side note: we've also been making some tweaks to the Easter balancing over the last couple of days.


Overview of the changes

Removed hiding actions and hide quests
This looks like one of the most discussed items - the removal of the social hiding actions.

For anyone who wasn't around for last year's event: you got some "hiding actions" that you could spend by hiding eggs in someone else's city. These would be placed on a decoration, in pretty much the same way that you can place a "polish" on a decoration. This would also limit your possibilities of performing motivations or polishing on that player for the usual 24 hour cycle. Picking up eggs that other players left in your city is how you got eggs to spend in the Easter shop. The amount of eggs you got from hidden eggs could vary quite a bit. The hiding actions worked a bit like Forge Points - you had a certain amount that you could have stored up, they regenerated per hour, and if they reached the maximum, you couldn't get any more until you used some. Basically, the amount of eggs you had to spend on the event depended heavily on how much you could encourage your neighbors, friends and guildmates to spend their hiding actions on you, and on your luck in what amounts of eggs were hidden.

We saw that there were a few problems with that mechanic when making the plans for this year's event.

· The Easter event had the lowest percentage of players actively participating in the event. Generally, that happens when something about an event is too complicated to participate in. We didn't have to look too far to find the reason: if the amount of eggs you can spend on the event is determined by how much you bug your neighbors, those who aren't as successful at that will suffer. Maybe someone just started and hasn't had a chance to make a lot of friends yet. Maybe they're a bit shy about sending mass mails to their guild a couple times a day. We wanted to see what would happen if we opened up the event to be enjoyed by more types of players.

· Several points of feedback from the community were also factored into this decision (we realize that not everyone shares the following opinions! There would have been other ways to solve some of these points, but combined with the point above, we figured that it was worth trying out how removing the hiding actions would work out).

· It wasn't always appreciated that you needed to especially build decorations for the event to ensure there were enough spots for eggs to be "hidden".​

· It was also not always appreciated that players would miss out on motivations and polishing because someone hid eggs in their city instead.​

· Hitting the button to hide eggs in someone else's city over and over was kind of boring.​

To sum up: we wanted to make it simpler to participate in the event.


Added new quests
We weren't too excited about the quests of the previous Easter events quests - they were simply "hide 5 eggs", "hide 7 eggs", etc. Not as interesting as the usual quests attached to events. Getting rid of the hiding actions mechanic allowed us to replace those, and quests have now replaced the hiding actions as the main source of eggs for the event. (By the way, you will also get some eggs when you collect your town hall production.)
There are now two quest givers, and there's also a deeper level to this year's quests. If you're fast with completing a day's quest, you can get an additional quest (so a shot at more eggs!) to reward you for your efforts instead of being forced to wait around for the next day's quest.


Added eggs to find outside the city
One thing we regretted about removing the hiding actions mechanic from the event is that we wouldn't have the cool egg finding mechanic, so we came up with an alternative. Certain actions that you do during the event will cause eggs to be hidden in the wilderness around your city. If you keep an eye out, from time to time you'll be able to pick up some extra eggs from out there! Quests remain the main source of eggs - this is intended as a very small additional mechanic to reward keeping an eye out.

This small feature wasn't completely ready for launching on Beta when the event started (though it was already mentioned in the event info screen), but will be hopefully deployed soon!


Adjusted egg shop to have more element of chance
Another discussion point seems to be the changes to the shop. With some of the changes above we removed chance elements (like the amount of eggs received) and introduced them in the shop instead. You won't be able to directly choose which prize you want to trade your eggs in for, but instead have a choice between 3 chests of varying quality and pricing. As you've noticed, this makes the Easter shop mechanic more similar to other events. That was intentional, because according to the data we have (like also the aforementioned participation rate) these types of mechanics seem to have been more exciting. We'll see how it works out for Easter 2016.


Additional note about balancing
Something else that we saw from previous Easter events is that it was really difficult to get the grand prize. It was pretty tricky to get the price balancing of it right because of the really big difference in egg income that players would end up having based on the engagement of their social circle. That's also something we've changed in the balancing for this year - everyone has an equal chance of getting the grand prize, and it's actually easier to reach than in previous years.
One of the upcoming deployments that will bring the eggs outside the city that we mentioned above will also bring with it some more balancing changes...


Other changes

· Added more grand prizes: Since it's easier to get this year's grand prize, we didn't want to bore anyone who earn their's quickly. There are several different grand prizes that you can earn.

· Added daily prizes: Last year's shop always stayed the same. We wanted there to be more variety in what prizes come past, so we added daily specials similar to what you could have seen in the Winter event. You'll have to spend your eggs wisely - more expensive chests have a higher chance of granting the daily prize, but you won't be able to open as many of them.

· Added guidance arrow: A smaller change is that we used up the spots taken for the event link in the quest menu with more quests, so we've only got the orange event HUD at the top of the screen. We know that in previous years people didn't actually know that they could click on that to get to the event, so we added the arrow to introduce people to the event screen. The arrows won't show anymore once you've traded in your eggs for a chest once.

· New buildings and units: We've got a new unit and some new buildings. Others have already gone into more detail about that, so here's a link:
https://forum.beta.forgeofempires.com/index.php?threads/special-buildings.4408/page-2#post-21356. We're also going to give the drummer a buff: he'll get a form of the Color Guard's "rally" ability! It gives an attack and defense boost.


To sum up: we hope that you see our reasons better now. We'll do our best to provide more explanations like this one in the future when we do larger changes. The old event is still there in the code. We'll see how the new version works out and decide from there what 2017 looks like.


Thank you for playing, testing and sharing your thoughts so far. We'll keep reading!
Yours,
Forge of Empires Team

 

[thephantom]

Hey folks,

We've been looking through your feedback and did some adjustments to the event. See the list below:

• You can now find off-grid eggs. They are triggered by certain actions, like e.g. completing an Easter quest or opening a chest. The eggs will be located in the wilderness outside your city so no decorations (or other buildings) are needed for them.
  
• Some fixes to the Easter quests were done.
• You can now click on the "?" on each chest's banner to see its content with more details. You'll see a window listing all possible prizes in that chest, and you can hover over them to find out even more information (e.g. you can find out the properties of the Foeberge Shop).
• We did some rebalancing. For example, it is now easier to get the initial grand prizes. Also, the smallest amounts of eggs you can get from the chests equal the cost of the chests (so you can't directly lose eggs through buying a chest).

Stay tuned, we have more balancing coming in the coming days. Thank you all for the feedback and please keep it coming!

Yours,
Forge of Empires Team

 

[thephantom]

Hello Beta,

As mentioned in the previous post, we have been working on some additional balancing for the Easter Event. Here is an overview of the changes made with the update today:

• The win probability (%) for all chest rewards was updated.
• The daily rewards have been rearranged, and the eggs quantity (daily prize) have been updated.
• The rewards for Bronze and Silver chests have been updated (a Medium FP package was added to the Bronze, and a Watchfire to the Silver chest).
• Prices and points in general have been adjusted. For example the grand prize requirements have been lowered, the gold chest price and tulip points were lowered, and the diamonds/eggs pricing was changed.
• The amount of clicking for collecting Eggs outside one's city was reduced by merging multiple eggs together in certain situations. Meaning, in most cases you will see less to collect, but upon collecting you will receive more eggs (example if a chest gives you five eggs, you will now see be able to collect one egg that gives +5 eggs, instead of collecting five eggs one by one).
  
• The different Grand Prizes have been reinstated to the Event. The Shrine of Inspiration is no longer the only Grand Prize.

If you have any questions or comments, please do let us know. Thank you for your continued feedback!

Yours,
Forge of Empires Team