Suggestions

Makes sense.

Yeah, I think pretty much anything to make these games more accessible would be a huge help.

Haha yes, I didn’t mean to imply that they’d last forever. X afks in N months or something.

Thank you!

That might work, though i think it may be too easy to ignore. if you only afk 1 in every 3 games and don’t care much about new cards (or already have most of what you want) then losing a coin wouldn’t really mean much.
It might also annoy people who just spent all their coins and can only join 1-2 games again.
If someone doesn’t have coins we can probably give them 1 game for free. If you afk in your only game you can’t play anyway.

One of the issues with thinking out countermeasures is that we don’t really know who goes AFK. Do these people start 1-2 games, then immediately abandon them? Do they join a lot of games but only play a few of them? Do they join games early, then receive their notice several days later and just never start playing? How often do people repeat AFK? is it a small number who AFK a lot, or a lot of new players who bail again early? Do they do it intentional, or just forget?

Yeah, by far, most AKF players are just people who signed up, joined MP, but decided MP was not for them.

Ah, i see.
It’s kind of hard to stop them from leaving then :confused:
On the plus side, it means that the number of AFK’s should start dropping once the playerbase begins to stabilize.

Here are my thoughts on the inactive stuff suggested.

Suggestion: Advertise on the site when a player is inactive or leaves.

The map could advertised in a new category on the Multiplayer screen so people can check which maps need someone to fill in or not. Sometimes some people don’t want another player filling in because it’s near the end or they will manage with just themselves so maybe there can be a vote to advertise or not and if 1 player says “No” to the vote, the map isn’t advertised.

Another Suggestion: See how inactive some people have been in a game.

Basically, each player has a “Last Login” or “Date of last action inputted” on their player screen (This menu https://i.imgur.com/5zUhLSJ.png) where it shows when was the last time they checked the map or did something. So you can get a fair idea if a player hasn’t checked the map for like 2 days.

That could be kinda useful. It might also be useful if we could see how many games (in % I think) someone goes AFK. Then we can anticipate them a bit ahead of time :slight_smile:

Actually thinking back on this, maybe this isn’t needed. There’s nothing stopping someone posting a link to the forums if someone wants a position filled even if 1 other player in the game doesn’t want it advertised so don’t see why this should be added in for a new feature.

Maybe it should be the other way around, if 1 player votes “Yes”, it’s advertised

Not sure if it’s even necessary to be honest. I doubt most people would mind if someone just joined in at the last moment. Most probably wouldn’t even notice.

What do you guys think about some Premium Player only MP slots, so there are just some games a Free player can’t join? Should reduce dropouts.

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Its certainly a partial solution. Won’t help the Free players of course, but the Premium players would be far less likely to drop out. They’re probably also more fun to play with due to generally higher enthusiasm, so it might be a nice idea regardless.

Though we should probably be careful not to flood the MP page with too much content :slight_smile:

Hello, new player here. I didn’t expect for the game to have so much thinking involved, but so far it’s been a blast :slight_smile:
If the below has been mentioned already, then I’m sorry for not noticing (I did search).
There’s already move completion time when you select a unit/stack, but could it made visible globally, e.g. in the Armies tab? I know it’s only convenience, but being able to see movement times (or maybe the unit, which move order ends the soonest) on a single screen without checking every unit/stack individually would help to plan a schedule between play sessions.
Of course, it’s based on my personal experience and may not be a priority, but I think it would be helpful.

Thanks @Joshus, welcome to the forums and thanks very much for the suggestion!

I think it’s a pretty good idea, I’ll add it to my list of todos!

Ah, the famous “we-like-this-and-hopefully-we’ll-actually-get-around-to-doing-it-at-some-point” list :smile:

Not complaining or anything, it just reminds me of my own ever-so-long To Do list :wink:

oh yes, it’s very long.

I’ve joined a bunch of public games recently to help coach/encourage the influx of new players, and unsurprisingly there has been a lot of abandonment. From what some of the other players in these games are telling me, the high AFK rate is definitely hurting our player retention: it’s hard to strike the right fun/difficulty balance when half the players don’t even give orders. And if high-profile free-to-play games have taught us anything, it’s that this problem is not going to go away.

We really need a mechanism where players can kick AFKs out of public games. Maybe as a stopgap while the community is still pretty small, certain trusted players could be designated as Admins in any public game they join, so they can sort of moderate the public games to improve the experience of new players? Might be easier than trying to figure out a system that’s both fair and effective for auto-kicking.

Might be valuable, but I think this is less important than giving some front-page space to active public games with open positions. If there’s one major theme of most of the negative reviews I’ve seen, it’s that premium access comes across as too critical/expensive. Further promoting premium memberships seems like it would exacerbate that perception.

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I have some suggestions to make, mostly to the multiplayer aspect of the game.

  1. 2-4 Players weekly tournament! With random maps and timer that goes on at ticks of 6 hours. (this could be a good incentive to create guilds/legions so that players could come together and talk about different strats)

  2. Add new game mod, Fog of War. Fog of war conceals enemy troops that aren’t in the line of sight of allied troops. This would vastly change game-style, making it more defensive and attentive. Each unit and town would have a different area of vision, beyond which you are still able to see the landscape, but can’t see enemy troops locations. It would also be a good way to give less used heroes some needed buffs (by giving them a longer vision range).

  3. Rare units cards should have a gold cost reduced of 25% if played from your hand. Currently i see no reason to bring rare units cards in any game due to the forced location spawn.

  4. Add legendary tier hero cards. Legendary cards would be hero only, and have a 1 copy only limitation on the “game board”. Of course they should have some very strong and interesting powers.

Eg. The King gold 500
Can only be deployed in a Human Fortress.

Powers:
-Human Leadership
All humans in the army of the King fight with +10 Strength

-Taxes
Gain 50 gold for each human settlement with at least 1 villager. (15 mana cost, 21h cd)

Attack Power 1x20

  1. Add some random blight events to multiplayer games. Currently the games are pretty linear. If you manage to contain, or keep up with the initial enemy powercreep you end up winning. For example make some extra blight troops appear randomly from a border of the map after X days have passed.

all for now, will post more if get some new ideas… :smile:

I definitely get the necessity for having default cards for games, but I wouldn’t mind having the option to remove them so long as I have a minimum amount of cards selected. It’d make it easier to shape the deck the way I want it.

I’m liking these, fog of war on/off would instantly make for a different game and decrease the overpowering cards like high elf and Blind Justice. Limited-use legendaries would also be a good option, maybe limit it to one of all races as well. And the sudden migration would keep people on their toes, punish those who leave entire lands unguarded and rely on chokholds only.

This one not so much, rare cards should be more difficult to use than the common ones to prevent people just using tons of elite cards. That’s why they’re rare cards, after all

I think he’s talking specifically about each race’s monster cards–Ents, Dragons, etc. At present, it’s almost never worthwhile to bring these cards in a deck, because they offer so little advantage over just training the monsters the usual way. This is something that’s been brought up often, and the devs have agreed that they’re not compelling enough. A price reduction when playing them from your hand might be a very straightforward way to make the card versions of these units valuable (at least for the expensive ones–a 25% reduction on the cost of an Ent would be pretty unimpressive, haha).

Ah, like that. Fair point, although the special rare units like the hydra lord would be more useful regardless, I can see the lack of needing to use such cards. On the other hand, is there any reason you’d need to make those common rare cards more appealing? Seems like you either have to summon them momentarily for defense or to summon two mystical beings within 6hours, or you could indeed just train them the regular way. Is there any need to make them more advantages than that?