Long, constructive feedback and some suggestions

[undeadr]

Opened for CA-Sam

[casamheart]

Dear Devs and Community,

this is a feedback thread containing my opinion on the state of Castle Age: Heart of Darkness. I've been playing a lot of online games, browser games and i consider myself as someone who can be quite objective, but let's just see how it goes...


First of:
CA:HoD is a great game, it has not yet the complexity of regular CA, maybe it will in the future, or maybe this isn't even intended. For now though, the game is fun and there's lots of stuff to do. The graphics are nice, the screens are not too intuitive at all places, but all in all it is pretty solid and well to play.


Story and Quest Design

The Story of CA:HoD is nice. There's way more to it than with regular CA and it is a darker theme which is favored by many people. With the introduction of CA:HoD there have been 5 worlds which got cleared pretty fast. You however offered to finish all Quests up to level 5, which really was a great thing to do! This occupied people for a long time and even to date there are people who haven't finished all of them.

With the introduction of the Abandoned Mine you gave players a good ROI-Quest to gather some crafting materials. Though i must admit, the only reasonable way to gather embers is to do level 2 over and over. Finishing the mine should be 250-325 Energy each time and not more. That's just.. not good per design (personal opinion).


Monsters and Rewards

To name one thing first, the monster screens look awesome. I really like the work with light and darker colors and how you interact with them. Good work! The monsters itself have a reasonable amount of HP and most of the monsters can be downed pretty easily. Though i feel Thanatos is too big of a monster at this point in time. Even with a guild its impossible to down thanatos in a fair amount of time to make all players satisfied.

By the time people were still struggling with Faust you even introduced the 2nd Thanatos of Fire. So another very, very high HP Monster that people are barely able to beat.
BUT: That fire/ice Thanatos idea is a GREAT Idea to unite both games. I never expected such a thing and i'd love to see more of this in the future. Not exclusively, but some should be like this.

Now for the rewards. They are ... fine. I guess itemization is a very tricky thing to do, but as a player starting CA:HoD early and thus being able to do PvP Rank 9 fast, the rewards were pretty much **** for a long time. Taking into account that a simply "click me 1 time 10 days in a row" button provided the best weapon in game for until thanatos was released, then rewards from monsters - all in all - were simply not good!

For the future i'd love for rewards from monsters to be more on pair with what you can get via PvP at each given time. Though i suspect this is mainly a problem occuring in early times of the game, so this may balance out soon.

What i really liked is the idea of having one item drop and then make it an even better item via alchemy! And i'm not talking about those "scale slicer and heart" drops that make a strong weapon, i'm more like talking about the armor of the depths that you'd make armor of the burning depths. Even the main armor was a good thing, but the alchemy version was/is awesome.
Please do more of that, have just one item drop and make it better solely via alchemy!

I understand there's alchemy recipes that are made of drops only like the scale slicer sword. Players need to get occupied and farming is one way - just please don't let us farm only in the future! :)


The Oracle Tab

Long story short, it's nice to have demi gods to pray for, but if you limit it at 1000 for such a long time you really should have given players only 10 Reputation per Blessing. That would have made people occupied longer and the too strong reward (the sword) would have been lasted longer to farm.

Please improve this feature soon, as this is one daily activity that should have sense - right now it is for stats pushing only, and that is boring!


PvP

Good feature, well implemented. However the battle list doesn't refresh well enough. People that you can't attack should not be listed. That's not usable - no way to argue around.


Guild battles

OK, first off all: i have never played regular CA. But what i see in here is something that i like. The battle formation has some sense and battle timers and stuff work fine. I am not going to argue about all the bugs that have been in place for a way too long time (duh! i did it anyways). So far guild battles are working good.

BUT: There is one really bad thing and this is that battle status doesn't refresh as it should. With people being able to spam the attack button the battle status needs to either refresh manually every ~5 seconds or so or it at least needs a button to manually refresh the screen. When you initiate the search you see a refresh button (which is more than useless btw - has no real use), but to refresh an ongoing battle you need to switch from some random tab back to the guild battle. Once again, not a very handy and simply put bad design!
This holds true for Arena battles, too.

Rewards from battles: Yeah well ermm... make XP and money level base please. If some time im level 1337 i really don't care about those 13xp and 237 Gold...


GB/Arena Classes

This is a point which i like about this game. You can skill 4 classes and the time required to skill a class is pretty acceptable. Only being able to equip three skills is a limitation that right now appears to get lifted in some way "soon"(?), but for now it is working good. While at first it wasn't all too intuitive how skills are equipped i guess by now people are aware of how it works.

About the skills, while lot of them are good, there's some that are not. To name it, there's "Might" and "Divine Armor" (i can only speak for Templars over here). Since all of them are equippable skills I'd love to see them as something powerful. NO ONE will equip either of those, NO ONE. Divina Armor should be something like "+25 Defense" (not +5), this makes it a usable thing to equip and is not TOO overpowered. Might should be +15/+15 and not +3/+3, again, this is a skill to equip and not something that is passively there!

Now im just a templar and i can only look at others skills, but in my humble opinion those skills for all classes should be changed. Everything you can equip should be meaningful and +3atk/def is NOT. Please take another look at the skills of classes.


Arena Points / Guild Battle Points

Now this is a thing that i - as a templar - am absolutely subjective about. Gaining of Points is totally out of order.

1) Level based attack,
I realize there is a need for points to be gained in a way that makes strong players attack strong players and weakers to encourage trying stronger ones. Though i feel that the difference from 100 (loss) to 240 (big win) is way too big. I would feel it more fair for everyone for point gains to be evaluated from 100(loss) to 150(easy win) - 175(win) - 200(big win).

2) Skills and points
A polymorph gives 200 points, a poison gives 200 points what whirlwind does i dont know but i see thos barbarians on top a lot, so i guess it's the same. Templars get 135 for a heal, we get 135 for a fortitude and my guess is that we get 135 for a revive, too. Why is that? Rearrange those points, i understand that HEAL is a baseline attack, so it should count as "easy win" (150 in MY example - 160 real world).


Class Design Understandings

Now this is the part where it starts getting 100% subjective.

A healer should be the weakest offensive player. This is true for all games and as someone who plays a healer in most mmos, im used to being weak. BUT, a group NEEDS me to succeed. And when the group succeeds, everyone gets the same rewards. Currently in CA:HoD this is not the case.

A healer is supposed to build a DEFENSIVE built so he doesn't die. All others are supposed to build an OFFENSIVE built so they can kill others. So by design templars are supposed to survive against others. And this is mostly due to using their spells to make an advantage in the battle. This doesn't work with attacking templars only. Attacking templars are needed, too, but it is not "the way to go". Since however specials don't give nearly enough credits for the templars we are at a huge disadvantage and i don't understand why it is this way.

Once again i repeat myself, i don't want my heal to give me 200 credit. That's too much! But it should be JUST THE SAME as an easy win. Specials like Fortitude and Revive should be cound as "WIN" - once again, not strong win, i don't wanna get 240 for something that i can cast without risk.


You really need to overlook this. It can't be that players who are fighting for the team are at so much of a disadvantage. Please take a look at it once more.

[casamheart]

Real Money influence

Now i don't wanna rant about that you charge too much or whatever. You are a company and you want to make money with the product you provide. But lately i feel like you are putting non payment players at too much of a disadvantage. This is regarding arena - obviously. It is okay to charge, but 5 battles a day for 22 consecutive days is 22 * 5 * 5 = 550 tokens that you HAVE TO spent to make it to the alpha status (if youre templar) - maybe some classes might be good without, i dont know. 550 Tokens equals roughly 60 USD, so in fact you're selling one item for 60 USD - that's no good. That's no competition thats just a greedy philosophy. Thats your choice, but i think that im speaking for a lot of players if i tell you that this is not fair and is not seen as a good move you did.

Same with the newly introduced general that does additional damage in guild battles. Two months you give us nothing and now you provide a general that can make a huge difference in arena and guild battles. So that's another 30 tokens a player has to spent - 105 when buying all items, too. Clever move indeed - from a customers point of view that likes a fair game however this is ****ed up. Provide this general a month earlier and it would have been seen differently, providing him just when arena started -> greedy money making action.

Oh and for the record, im a well playing customer myself ;) The opinion doesn't change though.

Conclusion

I somehow got lost in writing and i guess ill just stop here. CA:HoD is a great game and it is fun to play. The couple of bugs introduced really hurt the game and to date i don't understand why some bug users didn't get banned, you are improving the game. You do introduce new fetures and we all value it.

But it would be nice if sometimes you would listen a little more to the community.


Thank you for reading,
hoping some things get into developers attention

CA-Sam Heart

[undeadr]

Real good explanation. No more words are needed. Hope it will make devs to think...

[Padaxan]

Thanks for the feedback.

[casamheart]

Thanks Padaxan for a short reply.


To give one more suggestion, i would ask you to do a little feedback feedback every once in a while. It is apparent that there's some objects that the community feels pretty much the same about. Some others have very unique opinions and stuff.

It would be nice to hear from developers view (or companies view) how they see the feedback they get. Like:

"About Battle/Arena Points:
No, we feel point gains for templars are ok the way they are. This is because: ....."
or "Yes, we share your concearns about point gains for templars. We don't have final numbers yet but we're planning to readjust the points for templars special abilities"

Something like this would help the community a lot. As in: No need for us to rant longer if you're already thinking about the problem :)

[Haelse]

About the skills, while lot of them are good, there's some that are not. To name it, there's "Might" and "Divine Armor" (i can only speak for Templars over here). Since all of them are equippable skills I'd love to see them as something powerful. NO ONE will equip either of those, NO ONE.



Real Money influence

It is okay to charge, but 5 battles a day for 22 consecutive days is 22 * 5 * 5 = 550 tokens that you HAVE TO spent to make it to the alpha status (if youre templar) - maybe some classes might be good without, i dont know.



Every rule has an exception, and I don't think I'm the only one. But every Templar pretty much should be equipping Divine Armor. It's a relatively cheap skill to get after Heal and Resistance while waiting to save points for Fortitude (which completely sucks, no Templar should equip THIS IMO) or Cleanse. And Might may not be a huge boon at 3/3 for max level, but like Resistance every class has it, and it's the same for all. Making it 15/15 would just do so for all classes. So it's balanced the way it is. Optimism - they can optionally add higher levels for it and Divine Armor in the future.

Participation, not FP, makes Alpha status. The FP is really there for people who don't have the time to make 5 battles a day, the people who have more money than they can better spend, and people obsessed with winning. I myself am in Rank 7, have Might and Divine Armor both equipped since the first day of Arena, spent no FP, and still have yet to do any of my 5 battles today.

All the rewards will be outdated in a couple months, so all that money is really for a tiny little Trophy Graphic that says 'Alpha Vanguard'. Not a big deal.

I do like the rest of the points you've made though. Keep with the constructive criticism, the Devs should definitely be taking some of that on board.

[bigpelara]

can someone plz tell me whether u are supposed to put 'active' or 'passive' abilities in the class skill boxes?

[Berue]

I completely second CASam's post and suggestions!

can someone plz tell me whether u are supposed to put 'active' or 'passive' abilities in the class skill boxes?

both; the only thing you don't put in the skill boxes are your base ability. Active skills need to be cast and passive do not... adds strategy you see.

[tpgames]

I SO agree! I quit Smeet because the game was set up so the developers can become billionaires. It took 1000 boost just to open a "gift" sent to you from a friend. You have no real game play because you never had enough boost. And, who wants to open boost gifts for 20 days just to open one other gift?

In HoD - we need to be able to make money outside of battling and quests. Some of us can NOT buy FB points period! This makes the Arena a banned area for us. Not cool! Not everyone is blessed with wealth. Some of us, may be unemployed too and still looking for work - or, trying to get a business off the ground.