I see my mistake now. Yes you're correct, you need to be VIP to invest gems.Originally Posted by Klepto
Are there many grand investments being made on the newer servers?
I also firmly believe Tynon needs to merge servers together if they plan to continue this business for more than a year.
There simply comes a "tipping point" in which new players would wisen up or simply decide not to spend that much money anymore.
This is what I think it the issue, the fact that many of the old servers are not spending money any more.
SO ucool is focused on newer sevrers when people do spend cash.
Now I dont agree that all they are trying to do is a quick money grab. I think they see things differently then us players.
Servers die. That's a fact of life in this style of game. Now in that other game with lots of servers, that dawnseeker is the admin of their forum as well. They had a very good solution to the issue of keeping old servers going. And people would still spend money on old servers. There would be holiday promos double coin events etc.
I think ucool is trying to find their way to keep older servers going and do not want to take our advice. I am sure they have reasons for ignoring all of our wonderful suggestions. The cross server championship I think is step 1 for keeping people spending money on old servers. Its a hope to get servers 1-10 to spend some money to make sure they dominate. Or get the top 2-5 player son each of those servers to spend more, since those are the top spenders so far in this game, so they can have bragging rights.
I have to say its not a bad thought. It may or may not work.
The biggest issue I think is how fast we have all progressed in the game. It is much faster then ucool ever anticipated. I think they figured 5 years till end game, based on my observation of spirit drop rates and how many tokens it would take to acquire all spirit plans. I personally want to see 1 to 2 year max end game scenario. but at the rate I am going through everything, if they released all the heroes today. I could probably finish all quests have all plans except spirits and have nothing to do but daily events in the next 6 months or less. Now I haven't done all the calculations but I could probably also have all the talents finished and most if not all of the equipment maxed or near maxed in that 6 months as well. I think there are others who could be done in much less time then that.
SO ucool is stuck at this point. They have a great game, but parts of it are too easy and parts are too hard. Theres not enough to do to keep the type of players they have attracted interested enough to keep spending money. But with out money they cant pay the bills and design the new content thats needed to keep people interested enough to spend more money. SO they open new servers to get more cash in the bank to keep the lights on.
I think if all of ucool's ideas could come to fruition immediately this would probably be an awesome game and alot of us would start dumping money into their bank account. Some of us might even start a second or third or fourth server and dump even more money into their bank acct.
We are experiencing ucool's growing pains and it SUCKS BIG FAT SWEATY HAIRY MONKEY TESTICLES. Some of us might stick around long enough to see the promised land. I think many will not. ANd i Think there will be a group of players that join up just at the right time and find this to be the best game they ever played
The reason this game isn't lasting is because the very currency that fuels the game's development is also the currency that causes players to chew through content at breakneck speed.
The only currencies that have been implemented well are Tokens (best implementation, though I have gripes with rewards in Lab when it comes to plans), Fragments, and Spirits. All the rest have some rather large flaws. As you progress in power, only the top players actually gain decent levels of Coins or Credits. Noble Lady becomes less valuable. You have to save for larger portions of the week as you progress to prepare for Thursday because costs are increasing week-by-week but income does not increase. Gems can buy just about anything but by using them you warp the entire server around your progress.
Honestly this game would have been much better off providing less direct perks for cash, such as vanity mounts, changes in appearance, that sort of thing. Mounts for cash could have also granted speed improvements to improve Noble Lady chances.
Also, this game could encourage further cash investment, honestly, by reducing costs in certain areas. Chips cost too many gems once they cost gems, even in the Fair. Removing level 4 chips is too expensive. Summoning the runekeeper is too expensive. Honestly, if something is going to cost $10 or even $20 in real life cash, I expect to get something pretty darn awesome out of it. Unfortunately there isn't a single worthwhile investment gem-wise that I can think of that's really WORTH spending the cash for. There's no awesome vanity mount that's a reasonable price or that improves travel speed. I can't spend $5 or $10 to shuffle a current hero's Saint attributes. I can't spend $1-3 to summon the Runekeeper. I can't tweak the appearance of my main hero so I look different than every other player out there.
Additionally, things like opening additional queues exacerbates a lot of the game's problems. With current income I have trouble keeping up with 2 of each queue. If I had 3 queues for equipment and talents I'd be broke all the time. This is partially due to the (welcome) change of reducing cooldown times, but it presents some problems as well, because game income wasn't also adjusted to compensate for the reduced cooldown times.
Further, on servers 10+, with generally one dominating guild across all realms, only one guild on the server gets the benefit of level 4 cities that improve income, and that leaves others in the dust, discourages competition, and creates a widening disparity that only grows larger daily.
This game has WONDERFUL potential but is squandering it by forgetting that a sustainable game is a balanced game, and if you offer benefits to players for paying cash, you have to remember that those benefits cannot significantly create disparity between the haves and have-nots, otherwise the game becomes like Monopoly, where it drags on and on with only one player raking in the dough, and eventually everyone who isn't winning slams the game board into the winner's face and walks away to do something else.
Here is some thing that i need to state, we are all expressing ideas, giving suggestions, Reporting issues, reporting bugs, but who is listening to us. Besides from the Mods who now and then show up to keep the threads in order, is there a real purpose of this forums ? are we being heard at all ? I mean if some one is hearing to us then they would be saying some thing. I have never seen a company ignore their clients this good. If its all money that matters to Ucool or the Evony management, come on guys you made enough out of the bot ruled Evony. Ucool you better get a different source to grab money than being this pathetic at providing answers or service to those who are paying to play your game.
I am almost getting to a point of quitting. Think i really was not aware of this whole mess when i became a VIP 6 player, but now i am wise enough. May god(Cash investing dumb players) bless this irresponsible company.
I've read through some of the comments here and yeah they are pretty standard for the player base. Whereas it's agreed new servers tend to be on the err quiet side but as Matt pointed out uCool and the Tynon team in particular see it in an entirely different way and therefore there has to be some profit in it some where. Servers are expensive things to run so we all might argue all these servers are dead and no fun wharsoever, Tynon must have it covered in their own way. They have a business plan and from their point of view it's working.
As for coining, players will continue to coin whatever you may think. I have yet to come across a MMO that suddenly has no money coming in. There aren't any packages available because lets face it you can get free gems pretty easily without spending, through the Arena, Lab, Quest (if your're lucky) and sailing on a Saturday. The only way you can get free game cents in Evony is through the Wheel of Despair and those that have played that game will tell you to remain competitive you need to coin. At least here, there is less of a need to.
I tend to think we've all progressed further and faster than intended. However, have we reached endgame yet? I don't think so. I think there is a lot more to come if we are patient enough, even as slow as it has been. A lot of the frustration comes from reaching certain roadblocks which can't be quickly passed. You either have it too easy and finish the game within 3 months or you occasionally make quick progress to reingnite your game passion before you hit the next difficult boss and lengthen the life of the game.
Forum Moderators are volunteers and are unable to fix in game problems
My main issue with these road blocks is i hit pursuer at 11m ish power
Im now 19.5m power and still cant beat it. That is too big of a road block imo and that is where my impatient kicks in and demand my new heroes.
This is a very constructive comment, and it echoes a lot of my own concerns. I hope devs read it and take it to heart.
Just came back to see how things were doing. I have played on quite a few servers and been in the top 3 in pretty much every one of them. I quit playing about 3 weeks ago and have not looked back as it is obvious Tynon is unable to run this game correctly. Now I can sleep and go outside and it is really wonderful. Quit this game while you can. Trust me, after a day or 2 cold turkey you will be much happier.
Servers aren't expensive to run, just to be clear. I'm not sure what sort of mythical thing people may think servers are, but I have a rack of them in my garage that add maybe $25 to my electric bill each month. Total. They are happy to sit and chug and churn and serve without an army of people fussing over them. Yes, we do upgrades. Yes, we do backups. Yes, on occasion we even go out there and clear off the dust bunnies that invade. If anyone would like to pay me a month's worth of what people likely spend on one server for Tynon for these tasks, please let me know. I would be happy to do nice things with this money.
(And yes, there are designers (art and code) and tech support (well, a canned list of tech support messages and probably one poor guy who does gem refunds) so I am aware that bottom line, it does cost more than an electric bill to run Tynon.)
Servers are cheap to run, however licensing for certain things can be expensive, especially if they're annual/monthly costs. Internet bandwidth can also get quite expensive for companies. If you need server-grade SSD drives or RAIDs, depending on your setup that can run a pretty penny too. There are other factors, but it really boils down to: Licensing, storage, and bandwidth are expensive. Software that allows you to scale out with more machines is cheap.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Tynon's setup consists of about a hundred VMs (one for each "server" to maintain game state) with a load-balanced internal data access cluster of VMs that can run calculations the actual server doesn't require (such as battles), as well as saving/retrieving required data from their database.
Essentially, I'm guessing optimally there is a 4-tier architecture in place. Game UI, Game Server, Calculation/Data Retrieval Service, Data Storage (be it database or disk). Managing something like that is more complex than you'd believe if you haven't dealt with something that complex before.
Posting Permissions
