Discussion Inno's strategy vs actual FoE revenues

[Atosha]

I'll make a wild guest and take for granted Inno's not happy with results. Again. "Year over year" to quote themselves.



Which may be the right time for Inno to wonder: do we have the right strategy? Trying more and more (some would say almost desperatly) to make people spend - and spend mostly for negative reasons : fear of missing out, or as an answer to Inno raising the bar hoping some will spend / making things tricky...
Plus going with impressive powercreep that makes a city lifetime only a few months. Plus not listening community to focus where it seems to matter. Etc.

Time for the what ifs maybe?
What if Inno's going back to a strategy that was making better results previously? What if Inno's concentrating on making the game more fun to play? Offer better tools for it to be a strategy game again? Would it be worse or would it open opportunities for better results mid-term? Would that incentivize players to spend? And spend for positive reasons?

 

[shad2389]

I'll make a wild guest and take for granted Inno's not happy with results. Again. "Year over year" to quote themselves.

View attachment 13846

Which may be the right time for Inno to wonder: do we have the right strategy? Trying more and more (some would say almost desperatly) to make people spend - and spend mostly for negative reasons : fear of missing out, or as an answer to Inno raising the bar hoping some will spend / making things tricky...
Plus going with impressive powercreep that makes a city lifetime only a few months. Plus not listening community to focus where it seems to matter. Etc.

Time for the what ifs maybe?
What if Inno's going back to a strategy that was making better results previously? What if Inno's concentrating on making the game more fun to play? Offer better tools for it to be a strategy game again? Would it be worse or would it open opportunities for better results mid-term? Would that incentivize players to spend? And spend for positive reasons?

well for sure they'll need to make beter decisions if they want me to re-invest in this game stoped paying real money on it about a year ago

 

[planetofthehumans2]

inb4 FOE turns into a gacha game with all of the historical waifus

If you think the halloween axe throwing was rigged....

 

[Thunderdome]

Okay, I can understand that Inno (under MTG) is a business, and they need to get profits but they are doing it for all the wrong reasons.

• Reason 1: Keeping up with the Joneses. Just because the Asian developers are coming up with ways of "milking" players out of their money, doesn't mean that Inno (or even MTG) had to do it as well. The "monkey see what monkey do" parrot mimic gets old, even for seasoned players. Inno was never anything like that with FoE in the first years. I had left many games in the past (2012 and 2013) that I played FoE because it was "different".

• Reason 2: Ignoring the players' feedback. Countless number of us had warned Inno about the consequences of certain things. Instead, they ignored the majority, claiming that skewed analytics dictate the direction of the game. Skewed analytics relied on just a click to register. They don't care if a player spends time on a feature or what they do with it. The clicking is the only thing that mattered... a person's vocal feedback doesn't.

• Reason 3: Coming up with a "dead duck" in the face of investors. The players that spend for FoE are the investors. They are the ones who paid for a product that was supposed to "wow" them. I was one of those investors as I would spend thousands monthly on a promise that I would get a good quality product. Instead, all I got was dreck after dreck in the form of failed, yet rushed, or abandoned updates and features; and sometimes things I didn't ask for or wanted in the first place. Along with #2, I had stopped spending since the Fellowship event of 2024.

I am sorry to say this but MTG has got to go if they are dictating to Inno on a road to closure/shutdown for a game players used to love. They can take their "gacha" ideology and put it into another game but leave it out of FoE as we are building to win, not gamble in a casino. If we wanted that kind of jackassery, we would download a casino based app instead.

 

[TanteTrude]

Obviously, Inno still believes they can make more money by making their offers more and more unattractive.
And by offering more pay to win options for obscene prices, while at the same time ever reducing the possibilities where you can actually use the stuff you are supposed to pay for - aka gaming time.
Curious, when this game will be taken out of support by Inno for not being profitable anymore.

 

[Emberguard]

I am sorry to say this but MTG has got to go if they are dictating to Inno on a road to closure/shutdown for a game players used to love.

You got the money to buy them out?

 

[Thunderdome]

You got the money to buy them out?

Now, that's an interesting question. Had I had the money in doing so, I will be needing some really good advisors; ones who will be the liaison between the players and the company in really listening to player feedback and keeping an open line of communication; but also ones that knew the game inside and out. The development team has to be top-notch in where they have to be proactive in the development cycles of the game, rather than diddling in the early parts of it and then try to rush at the very end in releasing a feature or update. In saying that, I am hoping, and imploring, that they utilize a backup regimen, so in the event something isn't going good like a game changing bug, they can revert back to the last known good configuration to be used while investigating the cause (possibly in code amendment), to fix said cause, and then retested to be released again. It will also have a group of testers across many ages (not just the highest one) to see how a feature works through them (this was something Inno/MTG fail to realize when they made updates as they were thinking of SASH). Events will be closely monitored where a player not only clicks to engage said event, but to see if they purchase anything, to gather verbal feedback if the majority feels something is "expensive", and to make any changes that will favor majority of the player base while retaining an edge in gathering profits from such an event; repeat purchases at a decent price is way more than setting a high price to only get a small amount of players to purchase.

I know, wishful thinking to be thinking against the "norm" of a "monkey see what monkey do" kind of world.

 

[Coach Zuck]

• Reason 2: Ignoring the players' feedback. Countless number of us had warned Inno about the consequences of certain things. Instead, they ignored the majority, claiming that skewed analytics dictate the direction of the game. Skewed analytics relied on just a click to register. They don't care if a player spends time on a feature or what they do with it. The clicking is the only thing that mattered... a person's vocal feedback doesn't

Similar to this point, I don't think they realize how willing everyone is to try things even if they seem bad at first glance, so I'm betting initial engagement appears great on a lot of the doomed features, especially on beta, and then the long term reality turns out to be much different.

That being said, I'm happy with the GBG changes - still would have been better with-out the store, but the trial system works great for switching between different trial levels depending on how many hits there are for your guild to share. In fact I'd love it to go up to trial 100.

GE store? HORRIBLE. Why bother doing higher trials when you can buy out the whole store weekly at low trials.
QI store? HORRIBLE. Way, way, way fewer rewards. Most people I know are struggling to build one Solara emporium per QI and not having leftover coins for anything else. Yes the Solara Emporium is really good but that's 1 damn reward per QI... me on the other hand, my coins are capping and I'm buying useless stuff I'll never use when before I'd be getting more of everything that I do use.
Pirates? Well i'm biased against this and think it has no place. Also I like roads and hate things that take skill out of the game..not like road placement was much of a skill issue to begin with but the whole idea of settlements is to build efficient cities to get it done on time so that takes a big element out. Also I think pirates are stupid but I get I'm not supposed to love everything.
SASH? A rare win, after many eras in a row of nerfs.

What else was done in the past year...other than removing some of the unique events and doubling the frequency of all of the ones they deem to be the money makers.. reduction of diamond rewards and deals... this stupid upcoming black friday store... yeah well, at least I like the new GBG and SASH.

 

[Thunderdome]

That being said, I'm happy with the GBG changes - still would have been better with-out the store, but the trial system works great for switching between different trial levels depending on how many hits there are for your guild to share. In fact I'd love it to go up to trial 100.

Only way I see that happening is for people to go into smaller guilds so it will spread out evenly. Larger guilds will have folks gunning each other for a fight that can be gone in a blink of an eye, only to be switched over (if other guilds can do so) and then coming back. Basically, an 8 hour (at minimum) wait before you or someone else in the guild can get fights before reset.

Currently, I am in a small guild of 5 people and we had more than enough to go around. We hardly dimed anything as there isn't a point if attacks can be coordinated with others to take in sectors equally (if a sector is 50, you either can have 5 people taking in 10 fights at 100% or if more than 5, like 10, you can have them to take in 5 fights each until that sector is gone); rinse and repeat on others until maxed attrition. Then it's pretty much waiting to see if other guilds are going to take sectors as well or being "intimidated" because a guild took many sectors on opening day that they won't. People can still get it after 4 hours has gone by if they really wanted - and I would endorse such play as it is part of the game.

I had learned to cope with the changes to GBg as the only reward gained is currency that can be used to buy the items in said stores. The only two things I wanted now with this is for diamonds to be not capped in the championship store (just like the season store) as waiting for a reset to purchase takes a long time (6 seasons is way too long to wait once purchased fully) -AND- the possibility of placing diamonds (non-capped) to be purchased with platinum coins in that same store. Hardly anything is appealing in the championship store other than diamonds. I get 8k FP a day (possibly more) that I am now dumping into my Galata (if I completed the FP tasks in Heroic Endeavors). I get a good amount of goods of the same age, next age, and previous age. And, units, I worry not on those since I get a good amount as well from Event buildings (either same age or HAU).

 

[shad2389]

Only way I see that happening is for people to go into smaller guilds so it will spread out evenly. Larger guilds will have folks gunning each other for a fight that can be gone in a blink of an eye, only to be switched over (if other guilds can do so) and then coming back. Basically, an 8 hour (at minimum) wait before you or someone else in the guild can get fights before reset.

Currently, I am in a small guild of 5 people and we had more than enough to go around. We hardly dimed anything as there isn't a point if attacks can be coordinated with others to take in sectors equally (if a sector is 50, you either can have 5 people taking in 10 fights at 100% or if more than 5, like 10, you can have them to take in 5 fights each until that sector is gone); rinse and repeat on others until maxed attrition. Then it's pretty much waiting to see if other guilds are going to take sectors as well or being "intimidated" because a guild took many sectors on opening day that they won't. People can still get it after 4 hours has gone by if they really wanted - and I would endorse such play as it is part of the game.

I had learned to cope with the changes to GBg as the only reward gained is currency that can be used to buy the items in said stores. The only two things I wanted now with this is for diamonds to be not capped in the championship store (just like the season store) as waiting for a reset to purchase takes a long time (6 seasons is way too long to wait once purchased fully) -AND- the possibility of placing diamonds (non-capped) to be purchased with platinum coins in that same store. Hardly anything is appealing in the championship store other than diamonds. I get 8k FP a day (possibly more) that I am now dumping into my Galata (if I completed the FP tasks in Heroic Endeavors). I get a good amount of goods of the same age, next age, and previous age. And, units, I worry not on those since I get a good amount as well from Event buildings (either same age or HAU).

Am in a big guild on V world en server we fill sectors but dont take so other guilds take so we dont need to wait 8 h before getting fights most days i get to my full att done this gives us more fights by not taking all sectors

 

[Coach Zuck]

Only way I see that happening is for people to go into smaller guilds so it will spread out evenly. Larger guilds will have folks gunning each other for a fight that can be gone in a blink of an eye, only to be switched over (if other guilds can do so) and then coming back. Basically, an 8 hour (at minimum) wait before you or someone else in the guild can get fights before reset.

That's why we need trial 100. I am in the #1 guild on my server and it's hard to cap out our attrition on trial 50.

 

[Thunderdome]

That's why we need trial 100. I am in the #1 guild on my server and it's hard to cap out our attrition on trial 50.

If getting trial 100 means you can cap attrition in a few fights, then I don't see why not. But, you had to be one of those that would get in sectors to fight before everyone else, or you can be sitting in the same position as you are.

 

[DeletedUser]

That's why we need trial 100. I am in the #1 guild on my server and it's hard to cap out our attrition on trial 50.

How about lowering the max number of members of guilds? When guilds were introduced the aid and free trade were important so bigger guilds were good, gave more advantage.
When it comes to fighting this system is terrible. In my main world a while ago, when I last checked and having 1 billion ranking points wasn't that common, more than 40% of the players over 1 billion points were in the top 2 guilds. I'm not kidding, more than 40% in just 2 guilds. How the hell should other guillds compete in this environment?
With guilds of max 20 people that's immediately 8 guilds instead of 2.

Sadly this could never happen since there's no way to break up current guilds. The only fair solution would be to delete all guilds but players won't approve that, ever.

Edit:
Now
- 6 out of the top 10
- 11 out of the top 20
- 15 out of the top 30
- 21 out of the top 40
- 24 out of the top 50

- 43 out of the top 100 players (including even inactive accounts) are from that two guilds. This is extremely bad for competition. If there's actual competition, people would be able to fight more obviously since a guild of 80 would not face 3 guilds of 1 in each round.

 

[Tamari]

I'll make a wild guest and take for granted Inno's not happy with results. Again. "Year over year" to quote themselves.

Which may be the right time for Inno to wonder: do we have the right strategy?

It's well past the right time to begin wondering. I'd hazard a guess that nearly every last one of us could have predicted a poor 3rd Quarter.

Why are they banking so hard on the Events? They strung 3 mediocre ones together and the 4th Quarter looks similarly dismal as even the Winter Event is a bare notch above mediocre instead of seeing us out on a good note as in prior years. What made them mediocre? Let's start with the stores and what they replaced - not augmented.

A store for everything, hey let's make it 2 stores and multiple currencies! Wrong stock, wrong pricing, wrong balance, etc.

All but established cities depend on consumables and they have disappeared from encounter rewards for the most part and sometimes appear in the Paid Pass Lanes. Even with modestly mature cities I still have use for Mass Self Aid, Finish Supplies, Finish Special Productions and such to complete Quests in a manner equal to the time I have to play. Sure some buildings produce them at the rate of FRAGS/day. Inno is effectively locking new players out of getting a city up & running and annoying many others. Oops, there goes a new crop of potential investors.

When will the plug get pulled on Ascended Upgrades now that we have a taste for them? The ones without base buildings (oops, new player issue)..

Listen, really listen and not pretend you heard us. We have our and your interests at heart Inno.

 

[planetofthehumans2]

How about lowering the max number of members of guilds? When guilds were introduced the aid and free trade were important so bigger guilds were good, gave more advantage.
When it comes to fighting this system is terrible. In my main world a while ago, when I last checked and having 1 billion ranking points wasn't that common, more than 40% of the players over 1 billion points were in the top 2 guilds. I'm not kidding, more than 40% in just 2 guilds. How the hell should other guillds compete in this environment?
With guilds of max 20 people that's immediately 8 guilds instead of 2.

Sadly this could never happen since there's no way to break up current guilds. The only fair solution would be to delete all guilds but players won't approve that, ever.

Edit:
Now
- 6 out of the top 10
- 11 out of the top 20
- 15 out of the top 30
- 21 out of the top 40
- 24 out of the top 50

- 43 out of the top 100 players (including even inactive accounts) are from that two guilds. This is extremely bad for competition. If there's actual competition, people would be able to fight more obviously since a guild of 80 would not face 3 guilds of 1 in each round.

Theoretically, they could introduce a cap and leave guilds as they are. People leave guilds all the time, but they won't be able to add more members unless they're under the threshold. It could be phased in over time, like the cap would start at 70 guild members, then in 3 months would lower to 60, then in 6 months lower to 50.

Being in a guild with 20 members is rough, even with very good players people still gotta sleep and go to work/school. 40 might be the most reasonable top number considering how many players the game has shrunk, to keep it an active top guild.

In my live world, drama breaks up the top guilds all the time it's crazy. We've had some guilds dominate for many years up until the past 5, but now it's just passing the buck between many hands.

 

[Tamari]

Theoretically, they could introduce a cap and leave guilds as they are. People leave guilds all the time, but they won't be able to add more members unless they're under the threshold. It could be phased in over time, like the cap would start at 70 guild members, then in 3 months would lower to 60, then in 6 months lower to 50.

Being in a guild with 20 members is rough, even with very good players people still gotta sleep and go to work/school. 40 might be the most reasonable top number considering how many players the game has shrunk, to keep it an active top guild.

In my live world, drama breaks up the top guilds all the time it's crazy. We've had some guilds dominate for many years up until the past 5, but now it's just passing the buck between many hands.

This would work at reducing guild size. Capping has been a discussion that's been debated extensively as a work-around for poor matching.

Top players will still congregate in top guilds - there will just be a few more of them. This might relieve the "dead map" syndrome a little. Sixty seems reasonable as it'll provide decent time zone coverage and ease some of the in-guild competition for battles.

Should be easy to implement without spawning a cascade of bugs so won't happen.

 

[drakenridder]

Okay, I can understand that Inno (under MTG) is a business, and they need to get profits but they are doing it for all the wrong reasons.

• Reason 1: Keeping up with the Joneses. Just because the Asian developers are coming up with ways of "milking" players out of their money, doesn't mean that Inno (or even MTG) had to do it as well. The "monkey see what monkey do" parrot mimic gets old, even for seasoned players. Inno was never anything like that with FoE in the first years. I had left many games in the past (2012 and 2013) that I played FoE because it was "different".

• Reason 2: Ignoring the players' feedback. Countless number of us had warned Inno about the consequences of certain things. Instead, they ignored the majority, claiming that skewed analytics dictate the direction of the game. Skewed analytics relied on just a click to register. They don't care if a player spends time on a feature or what they do with it. The clicking is the only thing that mattered... a person's vocal feedback doesn't.

• Reason 3: Coming up with a "dead duck" in the face of investors. The players that spend for FoE are the investors. They are the ones who paid for a product that was supposed to "wow" them. I was one of those investors as I would spend thousands monthly on a promise that I would get a good quality product. Instead, all I got was dreck after dreck in the form of failed, yet rushed, or abandoned updates and features; and sometimes things I didn't ask for or wanted in the first place. Along with #2, I had stopped spending since the Fellowship event of 2024.

I am sorry to say this but MTG has got to go if they are dictating to Inno on a road to closure/shutdown for a game players used to love. They can take their "gacha" ideology and put it into another game but leave it out of FoE as we are building to win, not gamble in a casino. If we wanted that kind of jackassery, we would download a casino based app instead.

This and itll become more "fun" when the GB update undoes the work of many years on GB's. Under the assumption they keep their briljant idea to make tiered levels (bronze 0-100, silver 101-200, gold 301-400, etc) and hard pushing existing lvl100+ GB's down to lvl100. I'm even amazed someone is so deep in a bubble of a pink cloud, to think a mass exodus won't happen, people just should be grateful for the fun they had with their lvl100+ GB and seeing a bunch of diamonds for compensation as a solid deal. Like GB's should be treated as purchases in an online game that's about to be shut down. Where purchases too far in the past won't getting refunded cause players had their fun with it. Just forgetting that GB's unlike purchases, are the fruits of years upon years of grinding, planning and building.
Good thing they did listen to player's pushback and postponed the GB update. I fully understand why whales holding their money in the pocket. What's the point of spending big, if an decent EB now is eclipsed in 2-3 events and QI buildings already overshadowing existing EB's and foreshadowing new base lines of run away power creep. They mildly managed to give the power creep a place through trials but even at lvl50 in GbG it isn't unusual in Titan to surpass 60 attrition. In optimal ages going well past 100 attrition at trial 50. Just blindly adding more trials won't fix ramped power creep magically.

As for the solution. The game is now in such a bad shape. I'm not sure what can be done. Power creep is out of control. Feature creep burns out guild members, power creep holds back purchase appeal, most GB's are next to useless making fps slowly an unwanted byproduct in post scarce cities.

 

[Thunderdome]

Hmm, thinking about the GB rework, I probably can come up with something that will probably benefit all, including those that pushed them beyond 100.

You can still incorporate the tier system (bronze, silver, gold). For those that worked on getting their GBs past 100, they will keep those levels, but will have to collect the appropriate amount of BPs to level their GB from 101 to the level they are at (up to 200). They will have the primary stats retained (from bronze), but their silver stats (secondary in this phase) will go up as they clear each level. No forge points will be lost up to that point. So if I had a 130 Arc, I would keep the primary stats for the Arc at the bronze level but won't have any silver yet because I haven't started on leveling up for it. I find a few sets of silver bps for the building and start to level it up, applying each level until I get to 130. I will still have the bronze stats but my silver stats will go up with each level until 130 without any FP loss. Now, if I wanted to do 131, I will have to find a new set of silver based BPs, unlock said level, and wait until FP is given for the level so it can be 131. Once 131, stats for both bronze and silver tiers will level up (increase). This can also work with the gold tier system.

I don't know, I just thought of that through my sleep.

 

[UBERhelp1]

This would work at reducing guild size. Capping has been a discussion that's been debated extensively as a work-around for poor matching.

Top players will still congregate in top guilds - there will just be a few more of them. This might relieve the "dead map" syndrome a little. Sixty seems reasonable as it'll provide decent time zone coverage and ease some of the in-guild competition for battles.

Should be easy to implement without spawning a cascade of bugs so won't happen.

In the past, they have stated that they don't want to decrease guild size, unfortunately.

Comment: The challenges of the matchmaking combined with the Guild Battlegrounds being world-based and the limited selection of Guilds create a situation where some worlds/servers do not have enough players to compete with.

Answer: An obvious approach to improving matchmaking would be increasing the number of Guilds available, which can be aided by decreasing the maximum allowed Guild size and/or making GBG available on a cross-world basis. We encounter both suggestions often and would like to clarify that neither of those changes is planned for now.

The decrease of the max. Guild size would pose multiple technical challenges, such as changed player states, and many Guilds being well over the limit already. At this point, such an undertaking falls outside of our scope. A similar thing can be said about the cross-world GBG: it is, unfortunately, not possible within an acceptable scope from a technical perspective.

From https://support.innogames.com/kb/ForgeOfEmpires/en_DK/4191

Of course, that is from September '24, so quite a while ago. Personally I think guild size reduction is the way to go in a lot of cases.

 

[Big boss]

In the past, they have stated that they don't want to decrease guild size, unfortunately

I think and not writing only to you UBERhelp1 (I subscribe your chanel and found it by diamond video) in guilds should be everyone If someone end go to guild I end or end or game over or something like this Game should be big and active (I posted in GbG feedback about our fight with top1 guild and that I fought alone on their A5D)

I think guild size reduction is the way to go in a lot of cases

I think making GbG cross world (like GEX) will be better (but I don't want see fight with only my guilds all same names)