Great point!! Both of those have been around for well over 10 years and are as popular as ever. My kids play those and they weren’t even born when those games were released.
So, that silly claim that we don’t play games that are 10-20 years old is ludicrous.
One that I still play and buy and pay for is FIFA. That game has been around for 30 years now. There’s plenty more games like that.
They neither encourage nor dissuade me. I buy what i buy and i enjoy it. As for the rare quests, ive never counted them. Yes, a few more would be nice, but i can’t consider it an important issue. You want to look at important issues, look no further than what’s going on in the Gaza strip. Picking on every little issue that isn’t perfect in Empires, is just petty. The point seems to be to rile up folks…and…and nothing. Really nothing more then than an exercise in pettiness.
Adverts are not really made to make you buy things you dont want or need. They are made to raise brand awareness, so that if you are ever looking for a particular product, you are more likely to select the known brand above others.
Obviously, whether it works or not depends on lots of other factors.Its just one technique amongst many. But it does work, hence why advertising is such a money spinner.
Maybe they weren’t made for that purpose and definitely doesn’t work that way in a sense in Europe, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to get people to buy things in the US. It’s an ultra-consumer country for a reason where the average house-hold debt is just bonkers.
Nah…
Household debt is higher in the UK than US
While there is a large global portion of people that think food comes from a store and consume beyond their means.
There is another global portion that care about their neighbors and realize that if you play stupid games, then you win stupid prizes.
Im sure it varies by product too. Car adverts generally aimed at getting you to buy that particular car when its time for a new car.
Eh. Close enough. But then again, UK is just US Junior. They’ve a completely different culture compared to the rest of Europe in many aspects of every day life. Vast majority of Europe carries much lower household debt to gdp.
Drinking and moaning, mostly.
Lots of that going on over on this side of the pond 
Drinking makes the moaning more fun!
You’re absolutely right! When done properly. But here, drinking brings out a lot of whiny moaning unfortunately
This is why Porthos is the greatest in the game, better than Edwin with his Hemlock tea
Counterpoint: I know this is a very small issue, and have said so before, but it is emblematic of a larger issue in the game — SG’s communication with, and attitude toward, its players.
I’m not beating a drum on “every little” issue, I’ve chosen one little issue, because it’s one that could benefit everyone — players and SG — and should be incredibly easy to implement to boot. It’s sort of a test case of “can or will SG actually listen to even very small, very easy player feedback and take it on board as constructive criticism in a way to improve the product for its customers.*
It took months of drum-beating to finally get SG’s attention, and when then finally did decide to act? They gave us less of the very thing we asked for more of, seemingly because we asked for more.
Honestly, that is just petty.
And it kinda seems to signal “if we are going to deliberately mishear your feedback on this tiny easy issue, guess what how we are going to react to any other player feedback ever.”
My goal is to keep beating this drum incessantly until, maybe, just maybe, SG decides that offering players even the glimpse of hope that we might be listened to might be worth something to them — even if it is a President-Snow-style, cynically calculated concession:
I mean, there’s a reason that SG seems to keep leaning into more PvP, right? I mean, firstly that it requires little or new content (beyond an ever-spiraling number of new and exponentially stronger heroes).
But point of PvP (raids, wars, tourneys, W3K, and don’t get me started on Hero League) has always been significantly to bombard players with “look at all these heroes that are newer/stronger/faster/better/more leveled and re-leveled and re-re-re-leveled more than yours” as a way to try to get players to Keep Up With The Joneses.
I mean… I don’t mind some competitive play, obviously, but at some point there’s only so many times I want to try to clever and/or luck my way through David v. Goliath, Charge of the Light Brigade, Thermopylae or Alamo sorts of situations.
At some point, anyone who’s not a high spender (or has consistently extraordinary summoning luck) is just left behind, no matter their current heroes or past play history.
This!
This proposal of #52RareQuestsAYear isn’t even releasing the bottleneck as much as “gee, maybe not tightening it further.” Heck, I actually tried my hand at calculating what actually “not tightening the bottleneck” might look like, i.e. if Rare quests actually increased proportionally to the rate of hero release, and came up with 200 Rare quests a year. (And I didn’t include there the demand for ascension mats due to LB2.)
So I’m not even asking to release the bottleneck, just to very slightly slow the rate of increasing squeeze on it in relative terms.
Instead, we got increased squeeze in absolute terms.
I mean, seriously, sheesh.
So, again, I’m fighting this issue on its own merits, but also because this is a greater issue.
Can and will SG listen to us in any positive sense?
If they can and do, even “just” on little things sometimes, it might go a ways to helping players decide to stick around longer and/or spend more or even once in a while. If they don’t…
Bob, this is not the first time you were going on about something equally insignificant: the last was SE being delayed by a couple of days.
And this here is in the same vein. I wouldnt even notice one more or quest a year. I’ve long accepted that it is necessary to occasionally buy 3 mats and one more quest wouldn’t change that. And SG communicated that quite well and in a timely manner. SG doesn’t have to do what we want. They offer us a game to play with certain rules. We can either accept it or stop playing. Shouting ‘not fair’ doesn’t change anything.
I requested most of my comments be removed due to ranting about stuff like this, so I will NOT do what I did before and let certain people in this post get to me with their views, however, I agree @BobTheSnark, except that my views are more extreme with this s̶e̶l̶f̶-̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶e̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶r̶e̶e̶d̶y company.
Oh for goodness’ sakes, this is exactly the kind of false dichotomy I am against
because insisting “accept it or stop” can lead to people stopping playing. And I think that’s unfortunate, not least when it’s great folks who were active on these forums, members of my alliance, or even “just” generally, knowing that it is quite likely contributing toward the eventual end of this game needlessly.
In particular,
Actually?
The announcement of “Rare Quest” Day seemed to actually respond to my and many other players’ request.
That’s the rub.
We seemed to actually, finally get SG’s attention.
They just, seemingly, decided that it was an excuse to cynically give us more the opposite what we asked for, and couched it in terms of “doing us a favor” and spinning the Rare frequency change in vague terms that made it sound like it wasn’t the reduction compared to the last year or two that it actually is.
If SG can actually hear us, then maybe we should be trying to use that for some constructive minor gain, instead of just “shut up.”
Sure, SG makes the rules of their game, but they also change the rules, so why shouldn’t we ask that they change them in a way that benefits us and them (rather than them at the expense of us)?
I have to wonder why, if and when SG takes an act that makes the game even “just” little bit longer/more difficult/more expensive, that that could be considered “insignificant” and something to just be accepted/ignored…
…but if some stranger on an internet forum is spruiking for a better alternative and trying to drum up support and action, that that is what draws your oppobrium.
I’m treading a line between “don’t feed… a flamewar” and letting apologists for something like “SG should be able to do whatever it wants” go unanswered.
I’m trying really hard to be polite, I just get really tired of being told variously that either some parts of the game are too big to expect any change on (e.g. “SG is a big successful company and you’re not, why are you telling them how to run big portions of the game”) or too small to make any difference (e.g. “why are you carrying on about THIS”).
I choose this because it’s small but would be helpful in a small way but be a significant gesture, and because it would be easy.
If SG won’t do something easy for us as players and for themselves to boot……
Plenty of people will always have different opinions than I do, and … I don’t want to jump to conclusions about people or call them names, especially when I don’t understand where they’re coming from…
…but…
I do wonder, why, when
Event A: company changes game to make it more annoying/longer/difficult/expensive
Event B: random person on internet forum protests Event A, presents alternative intended to be easy and reasonable and mutually beneficial, beats drum about it
that Event A somehow seems to merit a pass/no comment and Event B instead seems to merit “I must spend time on the Internet attacking THAT, because… possibly somehow random internet person’s forum posts have more of an effect on me than a change in the game I spend my time and money on?”
The alternative, i assume, is to shout nothing. Just take it on the chin.
That seems incredibly pessimistic.
I’d rather people shouted. At least then there is a chance of change for the better. If everyone believes there is no point in trying, we may as well wrap things up now.
Edit: This reminds me of the fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes.
We all get to choose : see the problem but pretend everything is fine, or stand up tall and call it out, to hell with the consequence.
BobTheSnark, i have been really polite in my reply to you, but it seems to me that you are only interested in the opinion of people who agree with you. And frankly, that’s what we all do. I disagree with you, but issues such as are not something i get excited about. There are more, much more important issues that i consider important and will demonstrate for or against it, bit they have nothing to do with SG
Yes, i would like SG to be a bit more generous, but it is not on my list of important issues. And SG is not greedier than any other game provider, in fact there are many that are a lot worse. Okay, that’s it. I wanted to add my view and that i have done. And more would just be repetitive.
Some people just don’t care.
They have their fun. And that is enough.
Change comes, and maybe they don’t notice
Or maybe they do and just shrug it off,
And continue not caring.
Unless…
Someone else does care!
Then the careless people are suddenly riled.
They have to take time from their day to come talk about how much they don’t care.
