Central feedback thread

[€1000]

Dear players and developers,

Last week (week 45/2017) I started a thread on this forum containing some personal feedback to the developers. I opened that thread because I don't see a lot of feedback from players to the developers and I thought it could be helpful. I figured that a central thread (maybe a sticky even) for feedback may increase the amount of it and also enables the community to regularly reflect back on it. Also, developers will be able to address and announce development matters through this thread a little easier, staying transparent and interactive with the playerbase.

The idea is that players give feedback to the developers through this thread by simply replying to it. Every once in a while I can center and categorize all feedback given by players in this first reply by simply editing it every month (also including the date of editing). Feedback that has been addressed will be complemented with the changes made in green. I have divided the feedback into general feedback and bug fixes. I wanted to add content suggestions as well but realized there might be a specific forum section for this and it may be too much subjective. Feel free to make suggestions in order to increase effectiveness of the thread, and obviously feel free to provide feedback. Hope it helps, good luck to the devs!

Last feedback update was on 19/11/2017






1) General feedback

Roadmap for the game
Communicate future game developments to the playerbase by presenting an annual game roadmap. Such a roadmap could include new developments, old developments still in progress, content expansions, content upgrades, event implementations et cetera. This greatly increases transparency with the community and allows players to give better feedback in connection to their expectations.

Game navigation system
The game navigation system seems rusty and old compared to other mobile app games and needs to be modernized. This could include drag functions (seating lieutenants, sidekicks, equipping insignia's), swipe functions (swipe-to-navigate system), hyperlink functions (selecting is followed by an automated jump to another game menu or page) et cetera. This could make the game much less time-consuming to play and navigate through. A good example reference for inspiration: Clash Royale. It would also be great if menus could be a little more well-compressed in order to avoid over complicatedness for new players. This will help attract and retain more players.

Game Content
- Some content features seem to have very little (strategical) extent whereas new content is still being created. For example the money feature (becomes useless late-game), the faction reputation feature (becomes useless after acquiring 6,000 points, the empire pvp function. The standard pvp function has been already greatly improved by introducing new rank leagues, also rewarding stat points and league boosts. How about the empire pvp feature? This feature is currently very limited by pushing empire messages when people are killed by or killing other empire members. This feature can be expanded. The empire upgrades feature. I believe players have been waiting for ages for the mysterious "Empire Drop" to .. actually drop somewhere. The leaderboard and achievement features. These could be greatly improved by for example enabling players to inspect each others' achievements and by providing more details within various leaderboards. Adding extent to these contents will help the game not to become over complicated yet more interesting, scaring less new players away.

Game Design
- The game sections Leaderboard, Hunting Range and Allies require a better design alltogether. These game sections currently look somewhat unprofessional and might scare players away.





2) Bug fixes

iOs:
- Button: Return button sometimes fails to reply. Especially annoying during an Empire War because it requires you a player to renavigate in order to access main menu again and be able to switch characters.
- Battle: Not all player ranks reset properly after end of the month.
- Empire War: Sometimes does not auto-collect before a new war starts.
- Empire War: A bug may sometimes occur (it is some kind of lag) allowing players to spam attacks faster than intended (up to 3 attacks per second or so).
- Chat: Some messages do not show in messages menu after sending them (requiring you to find the player again, uncertain if message is actually sent).
- Chat: Messages have no clear expiration date. Some disappear fast, others stay for a long time.
- News feed: When no category is selected, newsfeed is chronological but many reports seem to randomly disappear from this feed.
- News feed: When selecting battle category some battle statistics seem to randomly disappear from the newsfeed.
- News feed: When selecting social category a random selection of reports shows up (some from 1d ago, others 500d ago).

Android: Not sure what applies here since I use iOS myself.

[Quaranj]

Re: Central feedback thread

I want to come back and revist this at some point as I see potential in this.

What I did want to chime in about in the immediate sense was paying respect. It's not useless past 6k. Stat points aside, there are bonuses that come with that respect - here's the list of them that I copied down a long time ago:

Cartel: +20 Attack, +1% Critical
Syndicate: +10 Attack, +2% Critical
Mafia: +30 Attack, +15 Defense
Street: +15 Attack, +30 Defense

So keeping the above in mind, it can be strategic to keep paying respect to the faction that benefits your class best.

---

In top of the above I am an android player so I'll likely fill in some counterpoint in regards to the UI refresh and whatnot. (They'd need to overhaul the speed of the app or androids would mis-drag a lot due to stutters in lists...then likely force close to add insult to injury)

[Quaranj]

Re: Central feedback thread

This took me a bit longer than anticipated but I appear to be unable to access the forums on my desktop again so I had to juggle it to my mobile first -

1) General feedback

Roadmap for the game

^ I couldn't agree more - let us know while things are in development. Much easier to change something before release than after if it isn't in-line with the community wish-lists.

Game navigation system*

^ A refresh of the UI would be nice. It would likely have to be a ground-up reworking in order to keep android from crashing whenever something scrolled. Android tends to stutter too, it's the biggest issue I have on Hybrid EvE mode. Try to scroll through defenders, UI stutters and hits one of them wherever your scroll point is.

Game Content

^ This one I already wrote a reply to regarding respect. As for other parts, some could be argued as still necessary - for example - in-game cash at higher levels - boosting all your purchasable items so that the strongest that you can buy is the weakest thing in your war/invade screen takes a long time. The big shop achievements take even longer. We are also overdue some new properties to boost newer game areas.

There are no "empire drops" - they are placeholders. When new upgrades are offered by the game these are replaced with the actual drop items. I know the argument once was that they were released in spurts to keep the upgrades from being too far away for newer empires to catch up to but that ship has sailed already. It can take years to catch up to the current top upgrades. For as many years as the game has been out now (5 years since beta now) you'd think they would all be unlockable and we'd have some sort of option for the warehouse. A shadow broker upgrade would be nice if it dropped multiple items. Gold/Platinum shadow tokens as well as laundered money 4/5 would be nice too to boost these along.

Game Design

^Some things do look dated. I'd like to see more robust design here as well as a "lite" mode for those who just want a fast no-nonsense interface. (Especially for those on older devices)





2) Bug fixes

iOs:
- Button: Return button sometimes fails to reply. Especially annoying during an Empire War because it requires you a player to renavigate in order to access main menu again and be able to switch characters.

^Not isolated to IOS, same deal. A timeout on this and a retry takes you right to the main home screen.

- Battle: Not all player ranks reset properly after end of the month.

^I have not seen this at all - could you describe this? IE: Do they stay at BR30 or wherever they are instead of dropping to 24?

- Empire War: Sometimes does not auto-collect before a new war starts.

^Not isolated to IOS either - had previous collect populate mid-match on random home screen navigation.

- Empire War: A bug may sometimes occur (it is some kind of lag) allowing players to spam attacks faster than intended (up to 3 attacks per second or so).

^Haha! Certainly not isolated to IOS. I remember a time when IOS could demo and android defender's building before you could even go into the hospital and heal. That was before the home screen buttons. I still regularly see 4-6 demo hits un the war log on a separate device while waiting for the game to register the heal. I also once had an android device that would spam out tokens as fast as you could tap. I suspect this is partially device, partially OS, and partially connection related. Someone on wifi attached to FIOS with a fast device can likely wreck things before someone on a slow mobile provider even notices they're down.


- Chat: Some messages do not show in messages menu after sending them (requiring you to find the player again, uncertain if message is actually sent).
- Chat: Messages have no clear expiration date. Some disappear fast, others stay for a long time.

^Message system has been broken like this for as long as I have been here on both platforms. Some have wall posts that go back a long time and some have them disappear within a day or few. I don't have an understanding how the message queues work but some have better "luck" than others.

- News feed: When no category is selected, newsfeed is chronological but many reports seem to randomly disappear from this feed.
- News feed: When selecting battle category some battle statistics seem to randomly disappear from the newsfeed.*
- News feed: When selecting social category a random selection of reports shows up (some from 1d ago, others 500d ago).

^Happens on Droid too.. have refreshed my list countless times searching for that one call for help on a boss.

Android: Not sure what applies here since I use iOS myself.

Scroll crashes and stalls stated above seem to be the biggest issues right now. Some have unicode display problems with emoji or foreign characters. A changelog between versions would be a welcome thing so we would know what was expected to have been fixed so we could test them better.

[frsh]

Re: Central feedback thread

- Empire War: A bug may sometimes occur (it is some kind of lag) allowing players to spam attacks faster than intended (up to 3 attacks per second or so).

^Haha! Certainly not isolated to IOS. I remember a time when IOS could demo and android defender's building before you could even go into the hospital and heal. That was before the home screen buttons. I still regularly see 4-6 demo hits un the war log on a separate device while waiting for the game to register the heal. I also once had an android device that would spam out tokens as fast as you could tap. I suspect this is partially device, partially OS, and partially connection related. Someone on wifi attached to FIOS with a fast device can likely wreck things before someone on a slow mobile provider even notices they're down.

Also worth noting that you used to (i.e.: I used to, don't anymore so unsure if it's still possible) be able to access the same toon on multiple devices. So one toon, one device in each hand: spam city.

For some buttons you were able to also press them multiple times before the first was registered. Before Brainiac this was how I used to create multiple items in tech lab for events. This is much harder to do these days so a patch may have been released to address it.

[Quaranj]

Re: Central feedback thread

Also worth noting that you used to (i.e.: I used to, don't anymore so unsure if it's still possible) be able to access the same toon on multiple devices. So one toon, one device in each hand: spam city.

Still works - I often have 3 devices in war. In crunch defending I often set two to my Titan so I can both attack and heal/armor if necessary. Players are wise to the lag of backing out of an attack to the main screen and will often wait for you to hit to pounce upon you knowing that you're going to have a circle spin or few before you can do anything.

I can tell those who employ this tactic most when you're in a cap range and left alone. The moment you hit, the cap comes and demo is on the ready. 2 devices with the same toon logged in can be the only saving defense against it.

[Mobile Mob]

Re: Central feedback thread

Game Design

^Some things do look dated. I'd like to see more robust design here as well as a "lite" mode for those who just want a fast no-nonsense interface. (Especially for those on older devices)

This is a Text Base Massive Multi Online Role Playing Game. I would like to see an option in settings to turn of graphics for old out of date devices.
Option to turn of moving graphics in MMB and Boss. MMB event is unplayable on old devices with it's moving graphics.
I quit last MMB and did not make many hats because it was terrible, unplayable.
Every time there is a new update UWE client version 4.0 and 5.0 the game crash on new devices like IOS X and android 7.
Test it first on new and old Android and new and old Apple devices before releasing.
Players who hear of this game on Facebook and try and "test" it and the game crashes will delete it immediately. Look elsewhere. They will be gone for good.

[frsh]

Re: Central feedback thread

This is a Text Base Massive Multi Online Role Playing Game. I would like to see an option in settings to turn of graphics for old out of date devices.
Option to turn of moving graphics in MMB and Boss. MMB event is unplayable on old devices with it's moving graphics.
I quit last MMB and did not make many hats because it was terrible, unplayable.
Every time there is a new update UWE client version 4.0 and 5.0 the game crash on new devices like IOS X and android 7.
Test it first on new and old Android and new and old Apple devices before releasing.
Players who hear of this game on Facebook and try and "test" it and the game crashes will delete it immediately. Look elsewhere. They will be gone for good.

THIS!
Even though I don't have many issues (iPhone6S iOS11) if dumbing down/turning off 'flash' graphics meant improving performance I would do it every time.

[Pop59]

Re: Central feedback thread

Game is getting slow during EVE. Really noticed it in last 30 min of war. Ended up not being able to spend tokens b/c of waiting for game to respond. Frustrating.

[DFish]

Re: Central feedback thread

One feature that would be nice is a refresh button in the war log. Depending on lag, the log will stop. You have click out and click back in. If I am defending I like to see who is hitting, if a new toon joins, etc.

[frsh]

Re: Central feedback thread

One feature that would be nice is a refresh button in the war log. Depending on lag, the log will stop. You have click out and click back in. If I am defending I like to see who is hitting, if a new toon joins, etc.

Are you iOS or Android?

The one thing that has been consistently stable for me is the war log (iOS here).

[DFish]

Re: Central feedback thread

Android- the log used to be stable but can really be hit it miss last year. Only time I know it's working is if I hit someone with another toon.

I use two or three devices depending on circumstances to defend, attack, and watch log.

[Quaranj]

Re: Central feedback thread

Droid here and can comfirm that the war log loses synch on a major level at times.

AKA: Where did my building go?

With everything new released, perhaps aside from some LTs, I'd like to see a feature-freeze and a major release of the game that has been nothing but bug bashing and performance optimization.

Master list of outstanding bugs should be maintained by staff (or moderator) affecting either platform. Devs working off that list to improve as much there as possible. I know some here could likely provide some very detailed logs or video captures of game-breakers in action.

As I see it, Android has been a crippled platform for over a year now and the greatest compensation we could hope for is a solid, fast and stable release so we can quickly put this period behind us and get on with the looking back and laughing with what we put up with just to keep playing.

[Xcali1985]

Re: Central feedback thread

There should be two stickies in the tech section one for each platform where people can post issues. Mod can consolidate the posts by maintaining a list on the first post.

They can be listed as reports, confirmed, fixed, etc

There needs to be a detailed change log when updates are released.