Markus Stormrider
Emperor
and to be fair: it's quite rare for a game to last 15 years, let alone even longer. most games shut down between their 5th and 10th year. people just want something new after a while, that's life 
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Discussion Inno's strategy vs actual FoE revenues
- Thread starter Atosha
- Start date
planetofthehumans2
Overlord
I feel like if it's gone past the 10th year mark it's just going to keep going on forever. Neopets is still around isn't it?? That website is like 30 years old!and to be fair: it's quite rare for a game to last 15 years, let alone even longer. most games shut down between their 5th and 10th year. people just want something new after a while, that's life
Tallulah
Merchant
That's how life works. People gather with those who are like them. Here, the strong stick with the strong and active ones. If people are active, they score points. It's rather the natural order of things in this situation. But even with 80 members, there are always some who are stronger and more active than others. Reducing guilds would be incredibly troublesome. In a guild of 80, there can also be 3 or 4 active or semi-active members. In a guild of 20, that results in 1 or 2 active members. FoE players are generally not very active. If people participate in all the mini-games every day, like IQ, GE, GBG, and events, they're considered active players, yet this kind of player is not very common among the total player base, even though it's not exceptional in itself.
Limiting guilds would only cause trouble.
Emberguard
Overlord
Yeah, somehow I don’t think limiting or reducing Guild size would have the outcome of better Guild matchups for the same reasons you’ve outlined.
That and who here would genuinely stick around if they’re forced to start again from scratch? Because that’s the logical outcome. The only way to create more Guilds is to force people to start their Guilds from Level 0 with no Treasury Goods.
Any game in that sort of situation is risking people just leave instead of restarting, which would do nothing for improving matchmaking. I’ve never seen a hard reset end in anything more than mildly successful if it doesn’t involve voluntarily participating
EDIT: Also we don’t need the code to change if all we want to do is shuffle players around and limit player Guild size.
There‘s nothing stopping anyone from contacting the top 20(?), 50(?), however many Guilds, writing down a spreadsheet of everyones fight totals and ages, and getting everyone to agree to shuffle around the Guilds to have a even spread of good to bad fighters
If you can’t get people to agree to that without InnoGames changing the game mechanics, then I have no hope for it succeeding with InnoGames interference. Because with InnoGames changing game mechanics you would STILL require everyone to manually co-ordinate all that in the game if you don't want the exact same situation we already have; people deciding to go to the spot that best benefits themselves.
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Tallulah
Merchant
Les gens s'approche par affinité , et ne le font pas par calcul . Donc on ne peut pas mettre sa en place en fait .
Emberguard
Overlord
That’s precisely why I’m of the belief reducing Guild size through changing game mechanics wouldn’t have the desired outcome.
Dessire
Emperor
FoE has multiple bad features which make players eventually leave, even before reaching contemporarty era.
To name one, GBG. This feature has at the same time multiple bad characteristics which, instead of appeal majority of players, create feelings of stress, boredom, monotonous, toxicity, non healthy competition (even among guild mates), etc.:
GbG problems:
1. If the guild is big and almost all members try to fight, players who can play from PC and also have high attack % can do tons of fights at high speed, not even allowing the rest of guild mates participate to conquer a sector. Usually, people who play using cellphones/tablets, can do like 1 fight evert 3 to 5 seconds, while a pc player can do 1 every 1 second in average! If that player also plays at level 1 difficulty, with 22K of attack power in average, can do almost infinite fights, which means, as I mentioned, other guild mates not being able to participate as much as they could.
2.it requires players connecting multiple times to help conquering sectors. A very busy person, who can connect only 1 time per day, will never be able to reach max. Attrition unless that person plays in a high difficulty level, which means an insignificant help to his guild. Playing in a love level or mid level of difficulty would mean more silver coins for diamonds but also more fights to help, but due limited free time per day, that is almost impossible for such type of players.
3. Point 1 and 2 can create, again, problems within guilds, toxicity. "Hey! I can only connect one time per day but you always have everything conquered! Can you think more about the rest of us?! We are part of the same guild!".
4. Toxic competitivity. Top guilds Not allowing the rest of the guilds not even conquer a single sector. Most top guilds are pure trash in this sense, those guilds do not know empathy and are miserable! Allowing atleast 3 sectors to exchange them evert 4 hours will not mean in a decesive lose of 1st place during a season of GBG!
This and other characteristics do not help to make most players feel a real desire to play FoE, only in most competitive players, which is, for sure, less than 10% of all players in each world or even in the whole game.
A way to help with this would be a token system. 10 tokens at the begining of the day, 1 token per hour is generated, 1 token means 1 fight or negotiation. And attack power should not mean only be able to achive a higher attrition, should also mean more victory points for the conquered sector.
A player with 1000% of attack power should increase in 10points the victory points per token spent, a player with 40K% of attack power should mean 400 extra victory points, and if a sector is conquered and then another guild, the victory points are according to the attack power of players helping there + tokens spent per player.
Most players will then be able to spend all their tokens, even within players of the same guild + good by to toxic sprints to conquer a sector + even non top guilds will be always able to spend all their tokens or most of them +, the attack power they have will have a higher impact.
Oh and also, the points to conquer a sector should never be reduced to half if another guild takes a sector that your guild is trying to capture!
Thunderdome
Overlord
Not a real fan of the time limited token usage. If I play a game, I play it for its full (possibly unlimited) content. I don't want to sit and wait for an hour just to get another fight. Games like that tend to find the shelf much faster than games that allow for uninhibited play. Then there's the guild number factor in all of this. If a guild has 5 active members, that would mean 50 (10 each) progress points for the duration until it recharges. Whereas if a guild has 60 members that are active, then it would mean that they have 600 progress coming to them until they have to wait for a recharge. This is why I don't take fancy to GE since I have to wait until I get all attempts in or have to spend medals or dimes to get them, and those can get costly.
Tallulah
Merchant
Yes, players are hungry and give it their all, struggling to leave any ground to others.
Games are generally played without inhibitions.
Too many restrictions are detrimental to gaming.
Competition can be toxic, but it can also push players to be better.
Without things that generate passion, we don't progress in the game.
It's true that many players leave before reaching the contemporary era, even though it's not that complicated to participate in events, gain power, and access more content.
But everyone can do it at their own level.
However, players struggle to establish routines, and some adopt routines that gradually lead to boredom.
There is the problem of abuse of game mechanics.
Strangely, on Foe, by spending large sums of money, some people do crazy things and push the limits of the system, whereas in other games, you often hit a wall even if you go faster.
However, in the game itself, this doesn't give them that much of an advantage. So even if the whale aspect is present, the advantages for the team game as a whole remain limited, even if you have an impressive city.
I'm thinking of GBs with high levels, the eco sanctuary city.
planetofthehumans2
Overlord
Its better than QI, at least you get the same chance of all the coins no matter what sector you're hitting. I was in a guild where some goon took both bosses every single day before I even woke up and with the sailor moon coin nerf I never got my next bazaar that season even though I spent all my QA every single day.
Thunderdome
Overlord
@planetofthehumans2 I feel your pain, mate. I was in a few guilds like that where all the good stuffs taken and I had nothing to go about for QI in the past, until I decided to build my boosts so I can try and take the heavy fights (as most of the time I was left with them; especially in the wrong zone). It was a pain to wait until that node clears so the favorable can be open, but off I go to sleep, and next day it was cleared as well as the favorable one.
A few mates and I founded our own guild where we share the spoils with each other by allowing the ones who needed the small stuff to keep progress going. We've exchanged a bunch of tips between us as well as guides shared to us to make the best of QI. Going solid, I have been getting like 5500 to 6k progress per QI season. The nerf did impact some game play, but if wanted, I can get the 8 full kits of the bazaar base levels building. The Silver/Gold are what kept me at bay for the moment since they give out very small each season (guess they didn't want too many silver/gold buildings around). I am also eyeballing some stuff I can say I can put in my city as well. I had stopped with getting more Neo-Checkmates since I am getting a good amount of Koi Ponds that I will put down soon enough. For now, I am just happy to have like 15 production buildings set up to take care of those supply production quests.
Once I age up to SAM, I will keep some of the buildings at a previous age to be put away so I can have them in case we get another Rival that asks for previous supply productions.
A few mates and I founded our own guild where we share the spoils with each other by allowing the ones who needed the small stuff to keep progress going. We've exchanged a bunch of tips between us as well as guides shared to us to make the best of QI. Going solid, I have been getting like 5500 to 6k progress per QI season. The nerf did impact some game play, but if wanted, I can get the 8 full kits of the bazaar base levels building. The Silver/Gold are what kept me at bay for the moment since they give out very small each season (guess they didn't want too many silver/gold buildings around). I am also eyeballing some stuff I can say I can put in my city as well. I had stopped with getting more Neo-Checkmates since I am getting a good amount of Koi Ponds that I will put down soon enough. For now, I am just happy to have like 15 production buildings set up to take care of those supply production quests.
Once I age up to SAM, I will keep some of the buildings at a previous age to be put away so I can have them in case we get another Rival that asks for previous supply productions.
planetofthehumans2
Overlord
SASH has been around for a solid year and a half, I'm not even sure if we even had tasks in events that required past age anything because everything in my city got reno'ed when the age got released. The troops is one thing because I got the warship and the cider gartens, but there ain't nothing that can be done for the production buildings if you aged up and never expected inno to pull the rug out from under you. Plus they're worse for the city and don't make any sense in the first place ??
I'd be great if the rival only focused on tasks that are done in the event minigame rather than the city. It's just added daily tasks. We used to only get ONE task per day, then it became 2, now it's 3x31 days of an event!!
As for QI, I just had to leave that guild because clearly we didn't have enough players to bump up our number to the next challenge level. Boss didn't want to recruit two more guys and I didn't want to implement who gets which boss per day because I'm not a communist. Now I'm in a big guild and I'm satisfied because it takes so long for the guild to conquer every sector haha. Now if they got good at QI that'd be a big problem again!!
Atosha
Marquis
To come back to the initial topic, here's the Q4 report ... and ... surprise:
So Q4 outcome is similar to Q3, even with 3 events that were mostly random-based and therefore keen to spending by P2W players. Even with Inno going full power with their strategy, making random even more important on those last 3.
Seems like we players were maybe not only grumbling about some evolutions, and that some of our feedback [often labelled as "not relevant", Inno's data showing the game better than it] was clearly on target.
Well, it also seems a conclusion has already been made on the next steps (and the low quality of StPat in Beta may already be a consequence on that, with basic bugs that are not the standard of 2024/2025 beta events), but I'll say it again here :
"It 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?"
Source: https://mb.cision.com/Main/56/4302935/3918470.pdf
So Q4 outcome is similar to Q3, even with 3 events that were mostly random-based and therefore keen to spending by P2W players. Even with Inno going full power with their strategy, making random even more important on those last 3.
Seems like we players were maybe not only grumbling about some evolutions, and that some of our feedback [often labelled as "not relevant", Inno's data showing the game better than it] was clearly on target.
Well, it also seems a conclusion has already been made on the next steps (and the low quality of StPat in Beta may already be a consequence on that, with basic bugs that are not the standard of 2024/2025 beta events), but I'll say it again here :
"It 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?"
Source: https://mb.cision.com/Main/56/4302935/3918470.pdf
planetofthehumans2
Overlord
Number still goes up, a mere 3% compared to last year.we are not making a billion anymore
just 860 million
I'm betting a new age is something a lot of players would be interested in and the gb update. Clearly dangling event buildings only had a negative effect and the event wasn't deemed "fun" by players. Hell they didn't even get the halloween event date correct and put it in the wrong month, people said it wouldn't affect earnings but the numbers dont lie! 10% loss of 100 million is still 10 million $ not in some ceo's pocket!
Thunderdome
Overlord
Neh, they just placed in inane things like this event's rival which became a mess for the average player (PDNI, Inno, EVER) thinking players are going to flock to it like flies.
Atosha
Marquis
Nope, MTG has other game in "strategy and simulation".Number still goes up, a mere 3% compared to last year.
FoE revenues have decreased in Q2, Q3 and Q4 at least (apparently Q1 was still okayish).
But the fact that other "strategy and simulation" aren't performing well may be a clue to Inno / MTG that their well-thought strat may not be the best whatever the game.