Do you seriously think that more than a handful of players use bought Diamonds for impediment removal in Cultural Settlements?!? Why would anyone do that? Except for very early on, when the timed rewards were considered worthwhile, there has never been a rush to finish a Settlement. And being in a rush is the only justification for using even earned Diamonds for that, let alone bought ones.
This is just me speculating… Yes, impediment removal costs diamonds. But since impediments are a genuine pain to most users and the cost is minimal, BAM - spend to remove at least one per settlement. I know I certainly did. Think of it like 10 Diamonds for another chance at a negotiation. For 50 Diamonds I do not have to screw with this stupid impediment. For many of us, that is money well spent. I do not want the challenge, I want the thing done so I can get the building.
The settlements also take a lot of time. For a minimal expenditure of diamonds they can be sped along at certain points. BAM - A few more diamonds spent. Back when the secondary buildings were a valuable commodity, the more runs that a user did, the tighter it was to get those full rewards. BAM – A few more diamonds to rush steps in those last ones.
All that ads up. 10 pennies make a dime, 10 dimes make a dollar.
We can see this in Mughal settlement, the last one created to that point. This was the accumulation of knowledge gained from the previous ones. The beginning is extremely tedious… BAM – a few diamonds spent and you can rush those first steps. It takes a lot of Diplomacy which takes a lot of expansions. BAM - A few diamonds for an expansion or two. There are impediments all over in all those needed expansions. BAM - A few diamonds to remove a few impediments. I see everything that made the previous settlements tedious (spelled profitable) put into Mughal. I did all the other settlements in all my cities and received all the time rewards. Mughal I did 2 Play throughs and called it quits. And no, the new and improved benefits are not going to get me to go back and do it.
Giving advanced notice Settlement buildings will get very nice buffs is the companies way of getting more users to spend a few Diamonds on them. Get the interest back up in them. There is no development cost to them now.
And yes. I know folks are going to chime in and say they can be completed without the use of diamonds. And I agree. However, we are talking a subset of players who will do that. The game is not built around letting players complete things without using diamonds, it is built in ways that make it so players will feel using diamonds is their best option. Think of it this way. If the first settlement was not profitable, there would never have been a second one, or a third…
For Returning the sold settlements buildings? Cost effective. It would cost more to have programmers go back into old code and rewrite it so that a user could do settlements to ‘win’ more than one Level 1 and to check that each user will only have one, level 1. Returning the sold buildings has minimal cost involved. One programmer writes a quick DBI to check who did the settlements and what levels they had finished. Support only has to run the DBI against the users account and place the level(s) the user completed back into their inventory. BAM - Done
And why return them at all? With all the new and improved different military stats, the more a user has, the more they need. That is the reason buildings are given more variety now. If it was difficult to get military boosts for a certain part of the game, users would just not participate in that part of the game. If they are given small amounts of boost, they will feel they need just a little more to be effective. I believe there are many players who have not participated in some of the new parts of the game as they lacked the boosts for it. They are not participating in the events. Spend some time looking at others cities, outside of the spenders that is. By upgrading something as old as the Settlement Rewards, which many players still have, they will get just a taste, and hopefully be willing to try and get more of certain boosts. How is the saying.. The first one is always free?
There is a second reason for just giving back settlement rewards over making users replay them. We see from using old, old code (2012) and trying to modify it for a new instance of the game (Quantum Incursions) all the issues it caused. I am no Programmer, but understand how things used to be written. That Iron Age code has been stepped on for so many years, there are tentacles of it in way too many places now. No one is around who had anything to do with writing it and I can imagine the lack of documentation in that code. The software has also likely been changed/upgraded several times. Small tweaks over the years (Undocumented, of course) to fix “bugs” from upgrades, makes it even more difficult to correct issues. Take a look at the seemingly “simple” issues there have been in Quantum Incursions. Can’t sell a building? Happiness?? They are the most basic of transactions yet took.. How many days to correct and what other issues arose as they were correcting them?
