Real Thoughts On The Recent Events

Hey Everyone,

We've been getting asked quite a lot the last few days to post on all the drama, but we had our reasons for waiting.

Being in a position of high authority in the community of gow players, we need to choose our words wisely. Instead of immediately jumping on the rage wagon we wanted to see how things played out a little. Rather than just posting images of what Stay was saying and what Stay said MZ was saying, we wanted to wait for MZ to respond directly. We had no doubt they would say something, and we knew the important thing was to cover their response to the community of players.

We've been closely involved with the community for the last year and half, we've spent a lot of time doing what we can to make the players' experience even better. GoW players as a whole truly are one of the greatest communities in any game we've ever played.

At Real Tips, we always focus on constructive criticism towards the game. Our priorities have always been to: enrich the community, maintain the highest level of integrity, and improve the competition among all players.

Our Thoughts On MZ's Responses to the Community

Second Response

Let's start from the beginning

Lag/ Glitches: We have recently made a major change... a more robust crash logging service [that gives more insight on crashes]... we have detected the top "crash" offender... we are addressing this issue now and will be releasing the fix today...we are also releasing a major scout optimization the speed up scout response time on highly contested targets. Lastly, we have increase the speed of the game with the newly released Suspend & Resume feature; this feature has made logging back into the game A LOT quicker. We still have more work to do. Slowness is a complex issue...

This is one of the most common issues players discuss. The good news is from MZ’s detailed response they are taking some significant actions. I don't know if any of us will ever understand what it takes to reduce lag in real-time game with millions of people, but certainly MZ has the resources. I expect we will see more results soon..

Comment below with your specific lag issues cause I’m pretty sure MZ will be reading this.

Super Wonder: Along with the scouting optimization that is going live today we will have several MZ employees in the Super Wonder October 1st to profile and fix any slowdown occurring.

Again, this is a very noticeable goal, so I'm looking forward to how this plays out. It's seems like MZ can fix specific lag issues pretty quick now, so I expect the last day or two of SW to be less laggy the first couple days.

Events: Currently we are doing 2x payouts for our most difficult inferno events! Along with the 5x troop training queue, 5x monster tile size, 3x hit and death drop rates for monsters, 2x gold tile size, 10% speed up boost, and allowing players to complete events by Any Power Gained making them easier to complete.

This is certainly a quick fix to players' requests for longer term achievable inferno events. By all means take advantage of it now; but we would like to more achievable events in the near term and long term future. One suggestion is that anyone can complete Tier 1 rewards relatively easy, if someone were to focus hard for the full hour they could complete Tier 2 rewards, and if someone were to spend quite a few resources speed ups they could reach Tier 3 rewards.

Tournament Boosts: ...future events moving forward will not award troop attack...

Some of us think high level players could be bias by supporting this, since it was likely a feature to support medium tier players, but it's still probably a better idea that MZ removes the attack boosts altogether like they have.

CS (Customer Support): We just completed a multi month migration to a new industry-leading CRM solution. Our first response time is currently averaging at 22 hours... our average solution time is 50% shorter since June...the biggest thing we need is more representatives.

The reality is how long it takes for MZ to respond and the quality of the response hasn’t been too impressive. It's important that they hire enough employees to directly respond to players without using the macro responses everyone dislikes.

Event Start Times: ...[They will work to pair kingdoms together who have the same peak activity time. Although it is a hard task]

This definitely seems like the logical action to take. Certainly there are some algorithms that could be put in place to handle this.

Fast track fix for alliance gift popups. Basically the alliance gifts popping up were slowing the log in time for players, so they will be removing them.

*Hands Clapping*

We THANK YOU all for your continued feedback in making Game of War what it is today.

And we THANK YOU for addressing our concerns / complaints. Ha. Everything is not all fine and dandy yet, but they look to be sorting out.

Concluding Thoughts

Really the last thing we all want is to stop playing GoW. It's a fantastic game, but we want it to run as fast as possible. It's pretty crazy what kind family the community of players are after seeing the lengths they will go through to be heard by Machine Zone. Throughout all the drama I've kept in touch with many of the top players and alliances who all want to continue playing the game, they just want it to be more playable.

To be continued...

Please share ALL your thoughts and emotions in the comments section.

First Response

I want to point out a few things that I thought were particularly significant with their response to the community.

It takes some balls for a company as large as them to admit there have been some issues. To me, their response was refreshing because now I can truly see the personality of the company.

This message sounds like there are high level people there who really do care about the players. Also, this tells me they have been caring for longer than we've thought because they have made the preparation for kingdom merging, added the technological capabilities to reduce lag (to be determined), and have put a massive amount of resources into customer support.

It's time for MZ to deliver on these public statements and think I can speak for the entire community when I say we are all eager to see the results.

They Addressed Major Issues and Minor Issues

I was impressed that they were able to address some larger issues that must a have taken a lot of time to prepare for: lag, customer service, kingdom merging.

The minor issues of: drop rates, infernos, and special boosts have been solved temporarily. I think what the community is really looking for is consistently better drop rates, infernos, and special boosts.

The Kingdom Merging Approach Is Epic

Just like a true "game of war" should behave, the way kingdoms will begin merging is: whichever kingdom wins in a kvk will swallow up the other one. This is a better solution than any other I've thought of and is way better than forcing players to pay a large sum of gold for a teleport like many people desperately suggested. On the other hand, it's important that MZ merges enough of the inactive kingdoms so that all kingdoms are at nearly the same level of activity.

Let's talk in the comments.

Enjoy!

Navi