[LCN] Addressing Player Concerns

I totally Agree! Love how you stated this!

 

Alright, brace yourself, big reply incoming here. There's been a lot of threads lately about this type of stuff and I know it's been a long time since I went through and addressed everyone's points - I apologize for the wait. I can't touch on everything that's been mentioned here but I'll share as much as I can or know about at present.

Ok, so Main Takeaways (there's more in-depth replies to specific people below this)
1. You can expect a change to Daily Rewards very soon to give everyone more after day 7.
2. We are working on giving a reward for competing daily GP, but that might turn into some other form of stamina, not sure yet.
3. Location and boss drops should be updated to be stronger by the time the next location comes out in LCN.
4. The Pawn Shop should see an update this quarter to make it more useful and incentivize trading in your older Limiteds.

@BigPaul - I haven't done the math on this personally but I believe it'd take years for a new player to reach the new locations, even spending continuously on refills. I know the location drops aren't really valuable enough for you guys right now, and that is a major priority for us to fix going into the next quarter (Q3). The tough part about this is trying to fix the stat scaling and match it to Limiteds, so we'll have to run some projections to figure out what the stats should be. I'll get back to you guys when I have more on this, but it should be handled before the next location comes out.

In terms of stamina refills, we have been working on this reward you'd get for completing daily GP. Again the hold-up here is making sure the feature is balanced and won't have any crazy effects on the game, and I also would like to look closer at the difference between something like this and changing stam on levelup since we wouldn't have to build that new. It is a riskier change since it would affect each levelup, so it'll need more research into how it'll affect leveling curves. @JADES I am happy to announce that we should have a change to the daily rewards happening very soon, potentially within the next week or two. What we'll likely do is run it for a week or so to make sure it doesn't break anything, so it might get reversed if something bad happens.

@S E T H I'd definitely like to see more people in the forums, especially more of a mix of players, so this would be cool to bring back. We've got some more staff coming on soon hopefully so maybe Mitch will have more time to commit to a project like this.

@jahrista Lots of things to touch on here. For raids, basically from day 1 the raids were intended to be tough to beat, that's what justified the XP and drops. Already we've got some people upset about how quickly they allow newer players to level, and I think if we removed the risk and improved the rewards it would cause more inflation in the game. I know sometimes it sucks to spend FP on refills etc. for the raid and miss a payout, but we don't think the game would be fun if it just gave you stuff with no challenge.

Re: old Limiteds, lots of people have brought this up too — this is another major focus for me in Q3, I really want to revamp the Pawn Shop to give people the option to trade in old Limiteds for some benefit. Main issue is making sure people don't weaken their accounts a ton by trading in a bunch of OK items for a few really good items — even if that unlocked a discount or granted you some new Limiteds, we might have to limit it in some way to avoid issues.

On banking, this isn't a legit bank, remember — you have to keep it out of the hands of your enemies, but that doesn't mean it's all clean cash that the cops wouldn't seize if you put it in a real bank So we don't offer interest and there is a fee for keeping it safe.

Talking about the value of raid drops vs. money spent, or the value of crates vs. buying regular items... We definitely look at this stuff to try and make the events and crates good value. I don't know if I agree that the payouts are out of whack, but I will certainly make a note of it and we'll run the numbers again to see.

On people riding the hitlist while being chained and attacking, if people are doing more total actions than humanly possible, or doing multiple things at the exact same time, that would show up pretty quickly in our system. We're definitely interested in hearing reports of players who people suspect are able to dodge our detections, though.

Re: Battle Arena. I know lots of folks are disappointed with the way BA was changed. Very few people were playing it before the switch, which is why we wanted to change it up, but I don't think it's improved much since then. We're definitely open to revamping this if you guys have ideas for how we could make it fun for more people.

New achievements, we have rolled out some new achievements lately, specifically War Achievements which people have been asking for for a bit. I think it makes sense to keep continuing these as people continue to level past the scope of the original ones, we do need to keep them difficult though to avoid dumping a bunch of rewards into the game when we roll them out. In terms of the payouts being too low, I dunno, awarding XP for a GP achievement is giving you XP on top of your XP, and I think it could be made too strong. We will look at the payouts though and evaluate them. I think part of the urge to do these is the satisfaction, not the payout necessarily; making payouts better just puts a further gap between people who have them and those who don't.

@Gazember So Skill Points invested in Attack and Defence are basically multipliers on your item power. So if you and a new player had the exact same items, a higher level would be way stronger. The issue right now I think is that the boss and location drops haven't kept up with the strength of Limiteds, and that many older players haven't bought new Limiteds because they still have their old ones. If we can improve the stats and the Pawn Shop to help address this, I think it'll resolve the issue.

@Bocce We can look at giving out more Loyalty for length of time in-game, but would more access to Loyalty Items really be a big win? Is this something you guys all want over other changes we could make?

@Rhenkle1 Mel did a lot of work to make our content schedule more efficient and organized, and I think you'll see things come out on schedule more often coming up. I know this reflects poorly on us not delivering right when we say we will; it's tough because we don't want to disappoint you guys by not delivering, but we also don't want to say nothing because then it seems like we're stalling.

@Xipe Totec Already covered the hired sales, hope that made sense to you. The idea of special items that are boosted based on A/D is cool. Like I said, items are already multiplied by your A/D though, so I think if we can give older players ways to get better items then that'll help address the difference. Re: stam based on leaderboard, I think the problem (maybe already mentioned?) is that sometimes the leaderboard shows people who play in a different way besides levelling, and if people are already super strong and on top of the board, this would push them further ahead. We'd have to look into how awarding things this way would affect the curves in the game, but we can compare this to a level curve for sure.

Hope that helps clear some stuff up, guys. I'd like to fix everything, I can't do it all at once but at least we can plan for what to do next. Always open to hearing more feedback, promise I'll respond faster this time!

 

@ Scoughman yes I see the syn wars achievements. I mean let's be fair isn't battle arena a part of the game and the stats listed? Syn wars, war and gamer points have trophies so what gives on battle arena trophies being treated like a red headed step child?

 

Battle Arena's played very little across the player base, which I'm sure many of you guys know. In general we try and focus on things that'll have the biggest impact since we've got limited dev time. Do you think achievements would make people flock to BA? I think we might need to change the feature to make it more fun/engaging before spending time building achievements for it, I dunno.

 

people stopped playing ba when there was no skills required just who spends most on refills.

 

I do think that their should be changes to the BA and for once I am actually going to support the newer and lower level players here. At the moment the newer and lower levels players have absolutely no chance of competing in the arena due to lack of Health, stamina etc. So how about introducing different Arenas depending upon level and or skills.

 

sol..... a question please.... pawn shop ? wth ? we have a pawn shop ???

 

Sol,
I said much more. You took one item
1) craft useless items for skill points.
In each city take job drops, boss drops, challenge drops, and allow people to use items to craft skill points.
a combination of common items results in 1, combination of rare items get 3 and so on.
2) Loyalty points accumulated quicker the higher level one achieves
Time = loyalty. A person playing 2400 days should earn loyalty points at a quicker rate then one playing 100 days. Not just doing simple daily's and spending.
3) Figure out away people can increase mob size. I am not saying give mob, but finishing a task now allows a person to add made men for favor points.

 

I was going to say the same. Where?

 

and i stopped playing BA when you changed the format, haven't touched it in well over 2+ years.

 

i just want to say thank you, sol. this took alot of work to form this response, and it's very appreciated. you took note of alot of what we asked of you, and you've tried very hard to address as much as possible in your message.

is it perfect ? nope.... but we see the effort.... and THAT is what we're asking for... a little effort to make this game all it can be.

have a good weekend, sol... you earned it !!!! ♥ ♥ ♥

 

@Scoughman One other thing I'd like to know is about the prices of favor points. I understand that kano is a business but in saying that, if you were able to lower the prices of the top fp packs, by even $50, I tend to think that could entice more players to spend, in return, making more sales and creating a better turn around, I'm in Australia so what others pay $200 for, I'm paying $260-$270 and I'm sure people from countries outside of the U.S pay a little extra also, especially with the British leaving the EU so I think they'd be feeling it a bit more too. It's just a thought. It may work, it may not, it might be able to be done, this I don't know but it makes sense in my mind to do something like this.

 

Sol, many thanks for the response. that being said its a pity that concerns raised over time have not been addressed as thoroughly...but understood that it would be too much to deal with. a regular interaction like this would help address many of the past issues.
Turning to some specifics.... on the hired gang, since this was a package for new players i wouldnt personally know what the exact package was other than what i have been told by lower players; I fully accept the info i got was wrong. that being said when older players started there was no such package for hired gang. fair enough you want to encourage new players but then why not acknowledge the contribution of older players and give a reward based on time with the game and give some sort of reward for this as an incentive to remain with you? Favour Points cost you nothing (neither in development time nor money) but are probably the best incentive available to players.
on a side note SETH makes a point on the cost of Favour Points; US200 cost me around R3500K!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! thats not your fault admittedly lol
On FP weapons, if like you say in your response to Gazember it is correct that "So Skill Points invested in Attack and Defence are basically multipliers on your item power. So if you and a new player had the exact same items, a higher level would be way stronger" then something is off on your algorithms. I allocate high on my attack and def (not as high as some but well enough) of late i get beat by players well over 5000 levels lower than me. I know several player higher than me facing the same thing. when i look at the details of the players that beat me, their skill points are lower... and they barely have any of the top city (cities) boss drops but have so many godfather weapons and raid weapons they beat me easily. i dont see how this could be if a higher level would be way stronger based on skill points. this is not an isolated issue of the odd player being so strong as it was in the past. its more and more common. like Gods People said in the other thread that you referred back to this one, whats the point of leveling up if whatever benefit you gain is undermined by another player simply buying more fp weapons? i agree with you; "Talking about the value of raid drops vs. money spent, or the value of crates vs. buying regular items... We definitely look at this stuff to try and make the events and crates good value. I don't know if I agree that the payouts are out of whack, but I will certainly make a note of it and we'll run the numbers again to see." i dont think the figures are totally out of whack, but because they are fixed in their stats large purchases of these create the imbalance.... the idea of % weapons would address this and remain relevant throughout a players progress in the game. glad to see you like the idea (can i get some free FP??? ha ha ha ha)
BA is a tough one, the original format was great, but then as now lower levels simply could not compete as well. though i think the older format still worked better across the board. there was a thread where this was discussed extensively (i cant find it now) however. Defence mode in BA doesnt mean much for strategy anymore and it ought to. the idea behind BA was fun, it should not have become anonymous. by making it anonymous it ceased to be an integral part of player v player and became a mere leveling tool. it was fun focusing on huge players to bring them down..... isnt that what a real mafia would do? searching for key players created part of the enjoyment, removing this altered a key component of BA. being able to search for players also leveled the playing field somewhat, it allowed players to mobilize friends to hunt down mob together. i recall the results were more spread across the levels under the original format. maybe introduce a cut off on the number of deaths a player can have, eg once you die say 3 times you are out. couple this with bringing back the search option for players and maybe a life bonus for every 5 or 10 mob killed in BA eg one starts of with 3 "lives" and for every 10 kills you get an extra one life. but yep, BA format is tough one that really needs looking into.
finally; your comment "@BigPaul - I haven't done the math on this personally but I believe it'd take years for a new player to reach the new locations, even spending continuously on refills." Sorry Sol but a quick look through your leader board will show you this is incorrect, levels that took players in the past years to achieve are now being done in months and days, not years. there never used to be BA, Raids, Calendars, xp for Bounty Blitz etc ... the current availability of xp is astonishing compared to when some of us started playing. whilst these developments are nice some cause frustration, Raids for example. new players will build up massive reserves of stam and energy for raids, and not lose out on strength as a result of the weapon drops. no older player no matter their level can adjust to that. there are many older players that are mid level that simply cant adapt to raids, just as their are higher levels who cant adapt too. Raids are simply too frequent. they ought to be a random event like the Blitz, in my view.

Once again Sol thanks for the response... enjoy your long weekend

 

The pawn shop, will be/is for those who do not use a GF item on def or attack in pvp. So basically you have to be fully loaded and spent thousands to maybe trade it in for a couple of GFs. This is NOT what people who bought GFs have been asking for, this is what players asked for to get rid of old crappy boss/job drops. I find it insulting.

 

This is me. Coffee grinder level 10803. Joined 2392 days ago. Getting Hammered by a level 5040 joined 81 days ago. Does anything seem strange there. Because this is why people are not happy with you Kano. So as you can see what is the point leveling anymore.

 

I am from Kong just to clarify, so it may not apply to other platforms.

There definitely need to b sum changes, you stopped fiddler from healing...which was a start, but really everything is attack based here...BA..SW..attacking on the list and leveling...all fiddler based aspects of the game.....take lvling..fiddler can do what takes me 50 minutes to do in 20 minutes...and that's 4k attacks for me...5k for fiddler.... so no effort and big payoff if you have fiddler, makes anyone who plays by the TOS feel like why bother..... I like to think cheaters never win, but when the lvls you do daily means so much and cant b duplicated unless you have fiddler what is the point? they dont even have to be there to lvl....just set the perimeters and go get breakfast, lunch dinner..etc so I would like to see you fix the attacks as well. Leveling is work and not for everyone...its time consuming and to do it daily takes a lot of diligence!

BA, I quit playing when you changed it, before it was skill based, now it just who spends the most coins, and defense (which is a skill) doesn't even come into play. Seems like if someone has to kill you in defense mode they should give up points to the winner of the attack...which a lot of attacks can be won in def mode....I have been taken down in defense mode in 2 minutes w/120k health in PC ....I used defense mode to my advantage, so when a high lvl was attacking me I would go in def and pop out when it was clear and take someone down...it was a strategy, now it means nothing...just and fyi..if fiddler/BOT is attacking you in BA go in def and hope they don't see sucks all there health if yer close in lvl

SW's well that's another fiddler arena, you stopped the healing, plz stop the attacks from fiddler!

Then there's the bounty...smh don't! really need to elaborate on that.... attack based....but there are the few who have the heal bots, but I find more so "Mobster is already being attacked" meaning fiddler is blocking anyone else from attacking... I hunt daily and see it daily!

Unless you actually play the game daily its hard to know the actual cheats that are going on, and it not fair to anyone who plays buy the rules! And support your app monetarily, many have quit because nothing is being done, despite the many tickets being sent in....all you get as a response is "We'll look into it"

I like the idea of a pawn shop, everything loses value as time goes on..just drive a new car off the lot but being able to trade them in is awesome! Stam as long as it doesn't throw the game outta whack would b a welcome addition as well...but as someone said earlier stam and energy are not a skill....I would like to see the game get back to skills meaning something, not just mindless lvl from the Raids, there is no strategy anymore imo

just as a reference 2 days ago I was attacked 117 times in 9 seconds? the offender said he had a gaming mouse...I didn't bother with a ticket....seems like a waste of time

 

WELL SAID CARLOS perfectly put

 

jumping from 20 to 50 is really a big jump i used to buy the i think it was $35 might have been 40, like right now if i was to buy any i wouldnt i cant do the 50 and buying 20 just dont last,

 

@ Sol you're entirely missing the dam point. You have trophies for everything else under the sun that people could give 2 xhits less about but none for battle arena. Smoke, mirrors and bs.

 

You might want to read my post again. It mentions talking about LOWERING the price of fps.