Why I'm leaving Empires & Puzzles

General Discussion
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The point of this thread is to give everyone a single place to tell all the wonderful and amazing people in this forum just why we are either

  1. Drastically reducing gameplay
  2. Done spending (Edited in - thanks @LordStrohker!)
  3. Taking a break
  4. Outright quitting

I ask that you only post in here if you are in one of those four categories. Please don’t turn this into a discussion about why you don’t think people should leave, instead let us voice our reasoning for leaving what was once a great game that many thousands have loved.

@Coppersky & @Rook I don’t know if you can do anything to keep things on track in here, but it would be amazing if you can.

My reasons are echoes of what has been voiced in here so very many times: the game has declined into a shadow of what it once was.

I am taking the high road and giving SG one last chance: if the upcoming 1.14 release and Season 2 do not fix at least some of the massive problems in the game, then I will either leave my alliances to go rogue or quit the game entirely. In either circumstance, there will be absolutely no money from my pocket going to SG.

  1. It is no longer “F2P” even though you can play it at a very low level without spending money. It has actually gone beyond P2W, as was voiced as a concern by @Avicious here:
    Are we heading to Pay2Win? Plus, other concerns. It is my opinion that it has moved into the “Pay to Pay” realm, where even those paying money are getting little to nothing in return, no return on investment to speak of: “Paying for the privilege of paying”

  2. The most basic element of the game is the match-3 board. We use this in all battles. Lately, boards in the titan battles are horrendous. When I color stack, I can count on few if any of the color strong against the titan. It isn’t just once in a while, it’s the rule with a marginally decent board only coming up infrequently. Titans are hard by nature and I welcome a challenge, but when the tool used for that challenge is broken, what do you do? When there is consistently a drastically higher number of combos and opportunities to create bombs and diamonds when doing all the other battles than in a titan battle, it becomes obvious that something’s up. This is the current state noticed by a great many players.

  3. Titans and defense teams in raids and wars sometimes are inexplicably exempt from the core rules of the game. When a 9* ice titan can one-shot a fully maxed Zeline, the titan is NOT following the rules of the elements. When a mid-4th tier Cyprian receives only 71 points damage from a fully maxed Marjana’s special, and there are no buffs or nerfs in place, something’s wrong. When a mid-4th tier Zeline can nearly one-shot an entire team of higher-level 5* heroes in a raid, including fully maxed Fire heroes, there’s a problem

  4. Summons have become less productive. Point blank, SG has made the strong heroes too hard to get. The only event hero I got in the Avalon event was Lancelot. I made 6 or 7 10x summons and got 3 or 4 Lancelots. I have Lance, Merlin, and King Arthur from the previous Avalon event, why am I not getting Guinevere or Morgan? Why only Lancelot? I have him, I like him, I don’t need multiples though.

  5. A few days before @Avicious posted his concerns Are we heading to Pay2Win?.., I opened a ticket for how bad my titan boards had become (and many others in my alliances). The first response was acceptable and accommodating. I sent a video showing how bad the board was in a battle and received a response saying there were no aberrations in the game play and that “technical issues severely affecting gameplay are not limited to a single account but if broken, would affect a significant amount of accounts”. By then, @Avicious had posted his concerns, so I replied to the e-mail pointing out all the topic and how many people were complaining about the issue and was told I need to complain in the forum instead of in a ticket. They wouldn’t even acknowledge the glaring fact that a great many others are complaining of the exact same thing.
    I’m left to wonder if SG cares even a little for the people playing their game.

Today, for the umpteenth time, a 9* ice titan one-shotted 3 high-level 5* nature heroes, plus Wu Kong, one right after the other. I did what I’ve never done before: I fled the battle. I fled because I am just too sick of these problems and SG is not acknowledging them.

So, I am giving SG until a few days after the release of the 1.14 code. If titan boards continue to be terrible, if titans and defense teams continue to not be bound by the rules of elements and have superhuman powers, I will follow the lead of so very many players before me and either play only when bored, or outright quit the game.

@AnjaValkyrie is one of the calmest, most positive, and most beautiful voices in this game/forum, and she’s no longer playing at a competitive level:

She’s still playing, but has had to make adjustments to her outlook in order to justify continuing. I wager she will play a tiny fraction of the time she used to.
That’s not where you want players to be.

SG, I’m afraid you shot the golden goose. I’m concerned greed has blinded you. I’m afraid you’ve somehow lost touch with the fact that a game has to be fun and challenging, not broken. I fear you are impossibly out of touch even though the same complaints have been surfacing here in the forum for many, many months.

E&P is the last game made by SG that I will play, and I may not be playing it for much longer.

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You should add one more category…still playing but stopping all spending. I agree with all your points… especially the randomness of boards on Titans and when color stacking. I can land 3 or 4 combos every time i play 8-7 and usually tens of dragon bombs and power shards…every Titan it’s one set of three, one set of three, one set of three etc.

I won’t quit playing…love my alliance and friends in the game…but my last 10 pull had only 3* feeders and heroes i already had…so I’m done spending.

Their loss.

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So far I survived disappointment over summons, over lack of ascension mats, but titans one shooting my heroes and damages 1/3 rd below normal got to me. Only reason I Like this is fighting titans, only reason I level up my heroes. So am also considering quiting

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Thanks for the civil replies! Let’s hope this one stays like that.

Titan battles are what broke this camel’s back. They used to be my favorite part of the game and I haven’t missed a single titan since I joined my first alliance last September. Now they are hated because of how bad the boards are, and because of the complete breach of core rules of the game.

Let’s hope v1.14 and Season 2 bring the game back.

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I agree. I can understand all the drop rates in summons pulls etc …but any tileboard should ALWAYS be random. That’s the one thing that should hold true… But stacking colors lowers chances of getting the color you need and Titan boards are always worse than farming boards…and raiding boards for that matter too!

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Wonderful detailed post. Thank you.
At first I thought “How Long?” but the more I read, the more I agreed.

It’s getting ridiculous now, it’s beyond a joke.
I got my best friend to start playing & already he’s saying he wants to quit. His biggest comment is,

“What is this? You get nothing for what you do!
it’s the worst rewarding game I’ve seen.”

We’ve been playing games since the Atari days. We love hard challenging games, but this? for a phone app game has become a ridiculous joke.

It also seems to me the company just does not care about it’s account holders & their concerns.

Very sad indeed.

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I just want to chime in and point out that a common fallacy of a lot of these Titan unfairness posts is that ONLY the titan special is an elemental attack so thus is affected by strong vs weak element. The titan auto attack is just like the auto attacks in raids and just like hero specials. Like normal auto attacks and hero specials, unless an elemental debuffer is in play, it is a NEUTRAL attack that doesn’t matter about elements.

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Yes agreed^^ point 3 in the original post is the only thing i disagree with as well…the defending team doesn’t use tiles (or Titan, or event boss) so no elemental damage (or weakness). I can attack a red Titan with all green heroes…I will give less damage but I will NOT take more damage from the Titan because it’s red.

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I’m not at the point of any of the above options with this game yet, but I am with another one that went from mostly skill-based to gambling/chance and blatant P2W. At one time you could grind for specific game assets – no chance or luck involved, just time to earn the required currencies, or pay a few dollars to speed that process up. The spend didn’t give players a huge, disproportionate advantage, it just sped up what they inevitably would have earned over time. The change was obviously a money-grab by the game’s new owners that turned me and a lot if other older players off. I confess I’ve considered it a few times in E&P after strings of particularly horrible raid luck, but I get over the grief. Though I can see this one eventually having a limited shelf life, too.

I’ve put a few $$$ in – I’m on my second monthly VIP, and dropped a few more on the 99¢ gem offers just to speed up acquisitions, but that’s as far as I go. When those few $$$ here and there no longer contribute to the enjoyment of the game, that will probably signal that the end is near.

It seems to be a common theme with these ‘free to play’ games, where the devs get greedy for short-term gains and price themselves right out of any possibility of longevity. im fairly new to this one, but from what I’m reading it seems to fit that mold. We’re all victims of the new capitalism, I guess.

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I, sadly, have already made the decision to quit my alliance and go solo. The monotonous grind for crafting materials to be used against 8*/9* Titan was the biggest reason. Arrows/Axe/Banners/Mana Pots/Time Stop/Tornado…all need crafting repeatedly, only to be used/wasted while achieving paltry hits.
I’m lucky that I maintain contact wirh my friends via Line, but I do not miss the chore of being in an alliance.
Eventually I’ll quit altogether but, for now, not being bound by the daily requirements of alliance life is quite invigorating :grinning:

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That’s where I’m heading @SocialPariah.
I don’t mind the grind, but the game is dropping less of what you need even when in the levels it’s supposed to be most plentiful.

If SG doesn’t clean up this mess, I will likely drop from my alliance and farm to get mats to craft with, recruits to feed my heroes, and focus on the special events.

And spend no money at all.

I’m willing to spend only if it gives a return on investment, which E&P no longer does. It’s fixable, but SG’s lack of any sort of communication makes it seem highly unlikely

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I have dramatically lower my spending.

At this point, I feel exploited. That is NOT what you want your “loyal customers” (aka spending players) do feel like. I know it’s a human trait to obsess over things you can’t control and that starts a dangerous and addictive cicle of “punching yourself in the face”. I’ve seen it, I lived it and I’m done with it. After a year playing, I noticed some of the patterns that the thread author mentioned and I agree with most of them.

I wanted to add just how HORRIBLE the reward system has become. You know, there are some tasks that you can do daily like monster and raid chests. Sometimes, if you manage it okay - you might do 2 per day. So credit where credit is due: there is better loot now in these than when I started playing. Nevertheless, what the hell happened to ELEMENTAL CHESTS? The feeling I used to have when getting those was almost as good as pulling a 5* hero. But now it’s like MEH… is it worth the effort? To get scabbards and other easily farmable items? I don’t think so.

Id also like to talk about Alliance Wars loot. What is that all about?? You strategize, you work as team, you work through horrible boards to get some food, iron and farmable things? Nah-ah, I don’t think so! That loot needs to get a remake and fast! It’s a 24 hour effort 2 times a week, so it doesn’t make any sense that the loot is worse than the titans.

Believe me, I understand the business model. You have the privilege to ignore old customers because the creative team keeps bringing new ones. The game is going to continue being profitable even when all of us leave because there are several new players coming in everyday. They will P2W, love it for a year or so until they are here in the forum talking about the same things.

If anyone in SG ever reads this, I hope you understand we are looking for ways to help you build a better game. I love EP so much that I play it during a bunch of boring meetings and weddings (unfortunately we still can’t play it on a plane). But you know what sucks? I can’t encourage anyone I know to play it because it’s hardcore P2W and I would be embarrassed if someone asked how I build my team and the obscene amount of money I had to put in. Think about that for a second.

I could go over and over and over with ideas and suggestions but I really need to get to work. Sorry if I got sidetracked during my rant, but I really needed to put these things out there.

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Titan boards are completely random, sometimes very bad and sometimes very good. There’s no difference in titan boards with non-titan boards. Sometimes I go mono color and had amazing boards, and I even got 100k+ damage on a 8* titan recently. A week later, I got only 8K damage on a 7* titan. I’ve seen this sort of good or bad luck in raids, wars, events, etc.

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a red titan, 7 *, just killed me Wu, complete, at 5 seconds of a single shot. It is not normal.

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I’d like to add, that as an active loot tracker, the last 26 Titan in my former alliance (7*/8*/9*) have yielded precisely 0 ascension items. 5 days of causal mercing have given me a sturdy shield (4* titan), a Damascus Blade (6*), and today a hidden blade (5*).
Coincidence? More than likely, but to all those who say low level Titan are a waste of time, I’d invite you to guess again.
It’s also very rewarding being able to pass on tips to lower level players. I’m starting to wish I’d gone solo earlier.

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Thanks for this thread. I actually aimed to do the same thing in a thread of my own but flagged it for removal since yours is much more thought out and well put together. Hope devs wake up

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I’ve heard regular raid attacks are elemental

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To 1. What do you consider very low level of play ?

To 2: My Titan boards havent changed but view is to restricted to count. Soloing 1* Titans.

To 3: Havent noticed this but didnt look for it.

To 4: Thats the problem of the lottery sytem. The more you have the less new things you get. This was true from the beginning and I dont believe it changed.

To 5: Try to see it through their eyes. Someone sends you a screenshot of a bad titan board. Unfortunately this has absolutely 0 information value about a possible bug.
Example: I had a raid today where I had around 15 green tiles in the center of the board with some other tiles between them. I had a yellow doublestack team against purple healer tank. Luckyly Little John saved the day. This one 4* hero ( I believe almost all other green 4* heroes in his place would have lost it.) made the difference.

You need a lot of datapoints for a meaningfull statistic ( 1 Million+ would be good so most examples in this Forum fall short.
Of course you can approximate an avarage with a lot less datapoints but then it is unfortunately an avarage and you have no guarantee that your experience will be close to this average.

So about the high/low damage problem ( which probabely will be difficult to document ) take the time of the ocurrence as precise as possible and file a bug report.
The techies can then check whats going on.

I dont think SG changed any probabilities concerning the board ( Why should they ) and think you are either the victim of the rng or on the off chance of a bug.
But this is even more difficult to document and would take about 1000 screenshots.
There exists a thread somewhere where one player did that and the result was the board didnt change.

I have now played for 4 month ftp and dont know how long the game can hold my interest.
Sofar it has been an interesting ride and I have still many things to do.

Best regards.

E.

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I’m with ya there @jmk_96
It’s an often-repeated story, which isn’t to diminish your point, but which adds an exclamation mark to it.

Cheers mate!

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Not wanting this to be a debate thread, but I’ve recorded literally dozens of battles of all sorts. Conclusively my titan boards are markedly worse than all others. It’s not a minor difference, nor is it merely over a few games. I’ve been monitoring over a few months.

SG claims all boards are the same - mine and clearly a great many others prove otherwise.

Cheers!

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