See it is this kind of thinking which leads to the idea in for adding costumes for event/ hotm/ S2 heroes.
There is no way at all that Lepus is weak or unusable. Complete nonsense.
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Remember “The million dollar homepage”? 
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Wish I had thought of it first.
Wish I had thought of a lot of things first.
Believe it or not, some inventions that actually exist today, I did think of before they became reality. Told my dad about them, seeking his advice because he usually knows what he’s talking about when it comes to financial stuff, and he told me they were non-starters.
sigh
Believe me or not I had the idea at the basis of Facebook in the nineties.
And spammed it on Fortunecity, if anyone remembers it at all 
Ah, the good old days when we could still believe in free software and free ideas on the internet 
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I absolutely do believe you. Facebook was never something I would have thought of myself, because I didn’t think there was a way to monetize it without charging a fee to use it.
Durrr… Zuckerberg said “I’ll just sell all of the user’s personal information to advertisers!” Now why didn’t I think of that? Maybe because I’m not that evil. 
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Money
It all comes down to money
There was a clone of Angry Birds that fixed all the problems, but it died because there was no incentive to spend AND you could complete the game in days
I severely dislike the 5* HotM Business model, but it pays for the rest of the game ( see notes )
Only a single event makes me actively wonder about the bosses at SGG ( looking at you Tavern of Legends )
Fun
In the end, Empires is no more ethically questionable than any successful business.
And it is fun.
But so are local mom and pop businesses and indie games, and they can afford to be more ethical
Notes
Click for notes
5* HotM Business Model
Tavern of Legends
Ethical
Gacha games
FIN
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Unfortunately, what is “ethical” will always be open for debate. Some would argue that everything is ethical so long as it is legal. “Whatever the market will bear” ; “any commodity is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it” etc.
So is it then ethical to charge $1000 for a bottle of water to a dehydrated man in the desert? He’ll die if he doesn’t drink it, surely he’s willing to pay the price. But is it ethical?
“Oh TGW, this is a video game, it’s not a bottle of water in a desert, stop comparing apples to oranges. Nobody needs to buy heroes in a video game.”
True. And nobody needs to buy a beer or a pack of cigarettes. So I guess whatever those manufacturers do is completely ethical and therefore should be completely unregulated.
Apples to oranges again?
Technically it could be argued that nobody needs electricity. Human beings survived for thousands of years without it. Why is it that electric companies are regulated?
Curious to me how people seemingly arbitrarily decide what is necessary and what is not. Everything from food to entertainment to health care. Different rules in different places for different things.
Guess I have my own ethical compass that says if a company is charging more than twice the cost of production for a product, that company is being unethical.
Doubly so if they also aren’t paying their employees a suitable wage relative to the profits they’re receiving, but that’s a different matter, as I have no idea how well compensated SG employees are (or aren’t)
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The fact that this is “forbidden” to talk about other games here says a lot about SG… Fear ?
How long you gonna ignore the situation that many whales already moved on to another developing matching game?
If you can’t keep up and improve your game, you get left behind. Acting like other games don’t exist will lead you nowhere.
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It has always been against the rules here to discuss directly competing games. Fear on their parts? Yes, probably mostly that. But also because they want us to talk about this game.
The only other games I mention on here by name are games that do not compete directly with this one. They are all PC and/or console titles. In the mobile game world? I don’t know who is king, and I don’t really care. If most or all of them are based on “free to download” followed by microtransaction lootbox crap after that? Pfffft let E&P rule them all. This game was my first and will also be my last dalliance into the great world of “gacha” games. Got me once, shame on you (SG). Getch me again, well then that’s just my own fault.
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Play fair. They kindly allow us this space to discuss their game. You want to talk about other games, take it outside so to speak.
They allow a lot of stuff in here that amazes me. There’s threads hundreds long slagging SGG off. They haven’t removed them, they are there for all to see.
But there is a line where the staff/mods will step in and take action.
Naming other games is Most Wanted number 1 of them and tbh it’s a fair request as far as I’m concerned.
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I agree with this.
They mostly let me criticize them up and down. Mostly.
I will go so far as to advise people not to invest money into this game unless they don’t mind watching their money burn in exchange for many Dawas. But I will not go so far as to direct them to spend their money on some other clone that is likely much of the same thing, even if offered at a lower price point.
If I had found another game that was “like this one, but better”… I would not be here at all.
Such a game probably does exist somewhere, but one gacha in one lifetime is more than enough for me.
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Legal
We have been watching The Good Place on Netflix. Fun show. Lots of ethics.
The main problem with “Legal= Ethical” we have a huge justice system world wide and people still disagree with individual cases
So how do you define “Legal”?
We will skip the finer points of frivolous versus chilling speech versus chilling actions versus enforcement versus punishment versus rehabilitation versus restitution and just say
actions have consequences and officers of the court are no more virtuous, or flawed, than any other human being
So “Legal= Ethical” is a system more accurately translates to “Ethical if I do not suffer legal consequences from my actions”
So if you DO suffer legal consequences, does that retroactively make it unethical?
If you can afford a good legal defense but your customers cannot, are you allowed to take advantage of your customers?
It seems like “Legal= Ethical” replaces " Might makes right" with “Lawyers make right”
Noted
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I personally do not adhere to the idea that “whatever is legal is therefore ethical”, but that is how most U.S. based businesses at least tend to operate. The idea behind it being, “if it was wrong, there would be a law against it; since there is no law against it, it is not wrong”.
But of course, as you point out, when the companies themselves are funding the politicians that pass the laws… it’s impossible for the “average Joe” to get fair representation under such a system.
ADDED: also, by the same token, I would actually argue that some actions that might be considered illegal in certain jurisdictions are not actually unethical… but I would also clarify that as my own personal opinion, and dependent on the act in question. My idea of “right vs. wrong” probably does not match up perfectly with everyone else’s ideas of “right vs. wrong”. I can’t mention specific instances without delving into controversial subjects, though.
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Cerevan,
I agree with your very first post.
The company must show respect to its customers. This must be taken for granted. There are many ideas for improvements and I do not think they do not know how to do them or that they need someone in this forum to point them out. New and similar games exist with many new features and interesting changes from Empires & Puzzles. I’m sure they have it all in mind. The point is to implement them in the game that we love to play so much. No one needs to stop it. But at some point, if nothing happens , it’s getting frustrating.
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If I was SG, my thoughts would be: Why would I care?
SG has enjoyed first dibs when it officially launched the game in 2017 (though other players claimed they’ve played it far ahead) and has been basked by millions of downloads from various users and players. The same can’t be said by these so-called competitors who try to imitate the success of the game, hoping to earn them hundreds of thousands of bucks, if not millions.
Me? I don’t have the stomach of doing another match 3 game like this anymore as building up your heroes, base and whatnot would spell another 2+ years of my life.
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That’s a strange statement in a game environment: you should play for the pleasure of playing not according to time considerations.
Time wise every single game is a waste 
Huh? Really? Well, looking back, I’ve never played games of the same theme. Before my stint in E&P (which began in May 2018), the mobile game I was hooked on was Pokémon Go, playing it since 2016 (still being run by me sometimes and an officemate most of the time till now). Before PoGo, I was focused on Clash of Clans for over 2 years but left the game primarily because when the other players raid your base, they took a huge chunk of your resources, rendering it impossible to upgrade the necessary structures.
I don’t think I will be playing games like CoC, PoGo and E&P. I want to do another PC or other console games, but I fear I don’t have the time doing so since I am at the office most of the time.
It may be strange for you. But that is how things are in my case. So far. I still find enjoyment in the game. Don’t spend much anymore except my time and effort. Still happy I am able to get decent heroes using free pulls via Censure Method. Just recently pulled Sir Roostley and Malicna yesterday in just a little over a dozen EHTs. I still have a dozen more but will hold on to them till next month, hoping to get Killhare and Jack O’Hare (the 2 I am still missing from SpringVale), and maybe a 2nd Woolerton and the April HOTM.
Maybe you should try to compete with some of their features and freebies to players, then you don’t need to worry.
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Wait, you a fan of Censure method?
As for the rest… It’s one thing to say that you wanna play a different game, but it’s totally different from time considerations
I have “wasted” tens of thousands of hours probably playing video games over several decades. I don’t consider most of that time to be a waste, because most of the games rewarded me for my time spent. Not so much in terms of actual physical rewards, but the grinding was mostly fun, and the rewards I got for grinding gave me a sense of accomplishment.
This game has a very high demand vs. low reward ratio in terms of both time and money. I’m still grinding trying to reach that sense of accomplishment, whatever it is, but I can only play it for so long each day before I just completely lose all interest. Fill up my training camps and whatever, say screw it, I’ll come back tomorrow and see if anything good shows up. Every day that goes by where I don’t get anything of value in my loot or TC20 or summons, or every war I participate in where the opponents are all overpowered monsters that half of my team can’t take down, I lose a little bit more motivation to log in the next day at all. Time invested should have a reward. I don’t understand how being stingy with rewards is supposed to make a game more fun… but then, some people have different ideas of fun than I do.
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