I do not know where to begin with this -- but let's take a stab at it one item at a time.
1. I am thrilled to see Innogames paying any attention at all to GvG. This has been a big missing piece of the equation for a long time. So thank you for looking into doing something - ANYTHING - to this part of the game.
2. Reading between the lines, it is clear the basic problem Innogames faces is coding. This is why we have not had GvG and chat on mobile to this point - I am certain. What most people do not recognize is that making various features portable to many different platforms (iPad, Android, multiple operating systems) is not as simple as it seems. (I was a computer programmer for a time). So I understand the difficulty involved and again -- I applaud the effort.
3. The core issue I see here is that Inno is burying its head in the sand about one basic thing -- the diamond buyers of this game seem to fall into two groups. One group is the new people they push to entice in with these events and other "shiny objects" which cause them to buy diamonds. They do so and often drop the game -- this is a transitory group. The other are older players,many of whom are married to GvG, therefore they buy consistently and tend to be more loyal. Innogames is a for-profit company and they need both of these groups -- so I am not surprised at the big bold RED statement "we have no plans to kill GvG". Of course you don't. A big piece of your revenue base is there ("credit card bullies", etc). So again, I applaud your decision. GOOD. However "Less than 5% of players use GvG" is not a cause -- it is an effect. Lack of mobile access, limited audience making top guilds unbeatable in many ages ... there are any number of factors that made this reality. Just try to remember that GvG people BUY DIAMONDS. A LOT. You cannot afford to alienate them. Therefore proceed with caution here please. Alienate this group and you will lose a lot of experienced, long-term loyal players -- and their money with them.
4. On the same issues above, there is one other factor that would make things easier to actually measure the success (profitability, etc) of any of these things. Innogames you need to do a mass purging of dead accounts and guilds across all servers. If you look at any single server (I used US9 "Jaims" as an example in our own discussions) -- 84,000+ accounts listed. According to the databases 6700 are active and 18,000 "inactive". To be fair and conservative let's take that at face value and say that out of 84,000 listed accounts 24,700 are active. Guess what? That means that 70% OF THE ACCOUNTS ON THE SERVER ARE DEAD. My question then becomes simple -- how do you accurately measure the performance of your features if 70% of the "players" are now zombie accounts? Before you start throwing 5% - this or "Less than x" of that at us, Innogames you need to clean house. Any inactive guild or account on the server for over a year should be purged. TODAY. Use good data for decision making. Clean it up.
All this said -- I offer these suggestions and points to ponder with love for the game and sincerest best wishes for Innogames. I find your work impressive, your game fun and your attention to issues stimulating. You get it wrong from time to time, but like most of us here I feel you get it right more often than not. Otherwise I would not be here, right?
Tread carefully with GvG. Know who your benefactors are. Clean up your house and make sure you are not using skewed numbers (yes I know it looks better to say "84,000 accounts" but that is simply not true and should not be used as a basis for anything). And most importantly of all get the HTML5 version debugged before Flash support terminates. Do these things and I for one will stick with you.
MikeJ916 - Founder, MSG Family of Guilds in FOE
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