Summons & Ascension Items
2. Are there plans to add heroes (maybe Season 2 heroes once Season 3 has begun?) to TC13/TC20? Some elements have so few.
So lots of things at once in this question.
Something that’s going to happen, one of the big things we’re working on that’s related to this. There is going to be before Christmas, what we’re calling a Stronghold Upgrade. Some new buildings will be added this year, hopefully in beta sooner rather than later. There will be a new Training Camp or upgrade to TC; I’m pretty sure that once it goes to beta we’ll get so much feedback about what you get out of the training camp, but the upgrade is intended to address some of the original question. Some earlier Heroes of the Month could be theoretically possible to get through the new training camp options; that’s more likely than us doing anything with Season 2 heroes [in the TC]. We’ll be adding some options along the way, so you’ll be able to train a bit more than you can today.
A lot could change in beta. I can promise that there will be a new building for training, a new option for training, and we definitely will work through what new options will be included.
At the moment, you can currently get troops through there as well. It’s pretty cool, this training part of the new training building. At the moment there’s interesting things coming from there. I want to get this into beta; at the moment we’re calling it the “Advanced Training Camp”. Hoping for release in beta in the next few months — probably before summer — and we’ll see from that just how far we can go.
3. Do you think Summoning is the best possible game design approach to acquiring heroes, or would you consider other approaches like converting existing heroes into a new one, collecting shards for a hero, or earning increased or guaranteed odds for a good hero?
Summoning has covered a lot of the bases so far, but let’s again go to the massive building upgrades.
The TC might actually do something like this; can’t really go into specific but for example converting existing heroes into new heroes. That might be part of the new Training Camp. The new TC will be in beta in a couple of months, and just at the moment the last option is converting, or having a chance of converting, heroes.
Shards are really cool idea, but no plans for that in current design but that’s not out of the question for the future, because that would tie really nicely into some feature really far in the future.
4. Why is the game designed to make it so difficult to get ascension mats? What would make you think that the drop rate was too low or too high?
We had this question last year. [Petri: we have it every day!]
Big thing is to make sure that the game doesn’t end too quickly. This is a pretty heavy-handed way of making sure the game doesn’t end too quickly, so we’ll continue adding new way to get materials, but adding more mats into the game without breaking the essential experience for new players. But the pace is a bit slower than we’d like. Doing well in the new Raid Tournaments [formerly called weekly raid challenges] is one of the new avenues for new mats.
We haven’t changed the odds of ascension material drops.
We haven’t made anything worse, but if you have a dry spell, I know how that feels. The odds are very very low for some items, so it’s not surprising that you see dry spells. Working on new features that have more way to get rare mats. The newest way are the Raid Tournaments, which hopefully goes full live in about a month. The third build just went to beta yesterday, and we hope that’s the last test build.
Is there a variable controlling how mats drop? Like this month they might be less frequent and next month more frequent? Is there a wave of how they drop?
As far as I know, no.
This is like the question of whether boards are random.
There are fixed percentages for titans, for rare titans, and so on. It’s very unlikely that we have changed them; we usually haven’t changed the probabilities since the feature has launched. For example, rare titans and chest, as far as I know these have had the same odds since the beginning, and they shouldn’t be affected by the position of the moon or anything. [Laughter] The odds of pulling 4* items are so low it’s hard to see any patterns, but we haven’t changed anything.
Petri: And we all play the game here, and we all have the same frustration.
Kira: So someone here (not naming names) has fewer yellow heroes and like 30 magic orbs, and that’s all she gets. But for me it’s, “I need your orbs, please!”
Tim: There is no hidden “fail safe” which is how you can get players who have some weird streak, some unbelievable run, but we decided from the beginning not to go that route. There are a lot of issues trying to make such a system good for everyone, so if you get a 4* mat you just get whatever random mat comes up [without reference to what you need or have in inventory]. So players get some really interesting [runs].
So to get the super explicit statement that we can quote over and over again on the Forum: there is no way in which the game adapts to the heroes you have, the ascension materials you have, the things that you need, your spending habits, or any other criteria being used to filter the randomness?
Tim: Yeah, in my alliance, for example (and I haven’t actually ever said that I work for SGG, and have been playing with them from the beginning) — there’s a belief that if you do summons one by one, you’ll get better heroes. I haven’t commented. It just doesn’t affect anything — but…what can you say.
Kira: What can you say? A lot of it is people it may be not really understanding the way statistics actually work. The analogy we would like to use to explain when players write to us, is if you’ve flipped a coin 10 times, and 9 times it was tails, it doesn’t mean that tenth time has to be heads. It just doesn’t work that way.