Alliances
7. What have you considered, and where do you stand, regarding alliance-wide participation statistics on titan and war hits?
Sounds cool.
We talk often about Quality of Life [QOL] improvements for the game. These are super valuable for the community. The flip side is there are a lot of big things we want to add to the game. We are a bigger team than we were at launch, but we are still a small team (and the teams for Empires & Puzzle and Puzzle Combat are different), so most people are constantly tied up on new features, new heroes.
It’s unfortunately often very difficult to prioritize QOL improvements over new features.
Hero classes took nearly a year to do, and alliance wars nearly a year before that. So there are a lot of QOL improvements that we’re like, yeah, absolutely nothing against them, but they’re in the [lower priority] list of QOL improvements. One of my favorites is to have a better hero roster with tabs or pages, to organize heroes. Everyone says we should have it, but it just hasn’t risen to the top.
8. Are there plans to add more teamwork-based features beyond Titans and War?
Yes. Sneak peek later this year.
9. Are there any plans to improve alliance recruitment?
Very high on the QOL bucket.
Petri: We just had a discussion a few hours ago about when we will do something about this.
Tim: The priority is very high, so hopefully someone will get this done. Very high priority on the QOL list, but it’s not a new feature [and so lower priority]. Discussed many many times, so definitely plans. When can we get to them is the question.
Petri: We understand the concept from the community, also the issues with in-game chat. Sometimes we’ve had to ban players [from chat] if they are too disruptive there, even though they think they’re doing good.
Kira: And that’s a problem, because there is a channel for recruiting but it becomes unusable if there’s a flood of text. Finding the balance is something we’ve been pushing for.
Petri: And of course there are other channels for alliance recruiting, like the Forums, Facebook and Reddit.
10. Is there any plan for returning to the old alliance search? Several months ago people were able to find members very easily, but suddenly there was a big SNAFU and we’ve had troubles with alliance recruitment ever since.
This would be a better question for @mhalttu.
This is one of the cases that it maybe got broke because we tried to improve it. It wouldn’t be the first time in the twenty years I have been in game development that when you try to improve something you accidentally break it for a while.
Kira: Alliance search is hurt if there are special characters, etc. in the alliance name.
Is it being considered to have a higher gem cost to create an alliance?
Not really. There has been some discussion about shortening the time when an inactive alliance is dissolved.
We don’t really make money from the gem fee; the fee is to prevent spamming, but if there’s some other way to prevent spamming, that would be okay.
11. I think many enjoyed the Valentines special that allowed for buying yourself and your alliance gems. Is there a chance this could become a holiday special roughly once a month? It was nice to help each other out.
Players loved it, and we want to do something with it. We were surprised about how well it was received, so we totally want to do something with it. We are looking at options, but I don’t know what. It would be a shame to wait 12 months to have something like it again.
zephyr1: This was the one thing we’ve ever seen on the Forum that had nearly universally positive feedback. There were some concerns expressed about the lack of option for anonymity, and social pressure. But I didn’t see anyone who had outright negative feedback.
Petri: That’s one of the great things about this game, the community, the alliances, your team.
Tim: As a designer we have to think about offers like this being too often. In the worst case it could feel like almost a requirement, and that would be not great. We don’t want to wait until next year for something like it, but an always-active feature could have some unintentional effects.
How do ideas for new offers like this come up in development? Do they come from the developers? Marketing?
Not marketing. Way back when we didn’t have marketing, but as soon as we had a marketing team, that was one of the decisions we made, that marketing and development are completely separate. Marketing does what they do best, developers design the game. This is different than in many companies.
Ideas come from different avenues: community feedback, designers, analytics; ideas come from anyone on the team as well as the community. At the moment we have a handful of people who bounce around ideas for offers. The team is super busy — the upcoming features and Heroes of the Month take up a lot of our time, so we have less time to chat about new offers.
There’s an interesting insight in that answer that there is no SGG department is focused on offers. There’s a lot of player perception is that the game is all about the offers, but it appears they’re in fact a secondary consideration.
Actually, in the very beginning, we didn’t even have offers. And later, some people were complaining that there weren’t enough offers.
From the beginning, we planned for and have a lot of offers, but we’ve been very efficient in developing them. Many other companies, once they get the game up and operational, focus on offers — the development department is the offers department. That’s a big way that we differ. We have one guy looking after them, occasionally we add a bunch of new offers, as well as tweak the old ones. Offers are not top-of-mind, it’s very different than at other companies. Most of the team thinks about them very, very rarely. As the feature design team, most of our time goes into the future of the game, as well as bug reports.