[Discussion, Rant?] The lack of Quality of life improvements in 3 years shows Devs do not care about F2P / C2P or multiple Classic heroes or trade but they care only about the latest shiny hero

[Gryphonknight]

Job duties

@TheDayHasCome

doing a good job of?

Their actual job duties, neither of which is head game designer.

Notes

Click for notes

@zephyr1

Please post questions you’d like to ask about the Community and Player Support. The moderators and Small Giant Staff will select questions to be answered during our chat.

Please note that while we all have a ton of questions about game design, mechanics, and future development — the members of the Small Giant Staff who will be participating in this session don’t have a role in game design.

@littleKAF

This AMA focused on Community and Player Support.

The following were able to participate in the discussion (ordered by length in noted position):

• @Petri - SGG Community Manager

• @KiraSG - SGG Player Support/ Community

• @Rook - Moderator

• @zephyr1 - Moderator

• @littleKAF - Moderator

@mhalttu helps with the

https://support.smallgiantgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001566714-Alliance-Wars-Change-Log

Rumor says @mhalttu stopped participating on the forum as much, because of all the @ sent his way ( not @mhalttu 's job but @Petri 's job - see above for more about “Patience of a Saint” @Petri ).

But rumor @mhalttu still contacts players impacted by certain upcoming changes for feedback before and after the change.

@mhalttu

There are a lot of alliances who have reached both ends of the spectrum. I’ve now increased the limit to 20 wins or losses.

We’ll monitor the situation, and feel free to comment on this thread if you think it made things worse and not better. I reserve the right to bring the limit back to 10.

@Another discussion

Staff

@Another player

Dear @Petri as the regular voice of Small Giant please could we have some form of response as to why our ideas and feedback to these buildings appear to not be listened to?

While I am just as frustrated as you, @Petri is like the clerk at the Target store return counter. @mhalttu is like the mechanic at the Goodyear car repair center. Neither is a manager, director, vice president, president or chief.

Both are really good at their jobs, but constantly yelling at them will not change CEO Tim’s mind.

Money talks

A better strategy is to find a competitor 's product and convince as many people as you can that Empires is the inferior product.

When a company loses money, that is when they start paying attention.

Adds up

According to Domino’s Pizza, their pizza became bad because each supplier was told to cut costs. Individually the cost cuts did not hurt the product, but once every supplier cut costs, the effect added up to bad pizza.

It is not that too many Classic heroes, Path of Valor, Costume chamber, Tavern of Legends summons, Alchemy lab, Hero academy, etc. will hurt the game experience, it is the effect adding up that hurts the game experience.

But until people stopped buying Domino’s Pizza, Domino’s did not care.

But as long as users still play Empires, there is no incentive for SGG to change.

Notes

Click for notes

At Domino’s Farms, executives had already admitted to themselves a more persistent long-term threat: The pizza wasn’t very good. “When we did consumer tests, if they knew the pizza was Domino’s, they actually liked it less than if they just thought it was a random unbranded pizza,” Doyle says. “We had somehow created a situation where people liked our pizza less if they knew it was from us. So yeah, that was a problem.” Some of the more memorable comments: “The crust tastes like cardboard. The sauce tastes like ketchup.” And: “This is an imitation of pizza.”

(https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017-dominos-pizza-empire/)

Even if delivery was the essential part of its business, the pizza mattered too—and the pizza was bad. Soon after he took over, the company launched an ad campaign that has become legendary for its boldness, sharing comments from focus groups about what people thought of the product: “worst pizza I ever had”; “the sauce tastes like ketchup”; “the crust tastes like cardboard.” Doyle appeared in the ads, accepted the withering criticism, and promised to “work days, nights, and weekends” to get better.

He and his colleagues worked to spice up the company’s image as well as its products. Once the pizza got better, Doyle announced plans to open a Domino’s in Italy—a move that was nothing if not daring.

. . . . .

Two of the great ills of executive life are what he calls, borrowing from behavioral economics, “omission bias” and “loss aversion.” Omission bias is the tendency to worry more about doing something than not doing something, because everyone sees the results of a move gone bad, and few see the costs of moves not made. Loss aversion describes the tendency to play not to lose rather than play to win. “The pain of loss is double the pleasure of winning,” he argues, so the natural inclination is to be cautious, even in situations that demand creativity.

Leaders who want to shake things up have to be comfortable with the idea that “failure is an option,” Doyle concludes. In a world of hyper-competition and nonstop disruption, playing it safe is the riskiest course of all. That’s a recipe for reinvention that makes for good pizza and big change.

(How Domino’s Pizza Reinvented Itself)

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