My Arc suddenly dropped from level 52 to 28???

[DeletedUser31392]

But as I outlined in one of my replies above, sometimes it's not immediately apparent that something is ultimately too powerful and needs to be toned down. I think the Arc is another example of that and I personally hope that it's only a matter of time before it receives the rebalancing it deserves, like so many other unbalanced things before it.

Wasn’t the Arc previously toned down already? I feel like I read that somewhere digging through old posts to find other answers. I can’t recall for certain, but anyway it’s possible this is how the Devs intended the game to be in the end.

I’ll agree it is frustrating to have points sniped, and even more so from high Arc users. But it appears that’s how the game functions now, so if you can’t beat them join them. Anyone with determination can attain one and power level it to 80. If a player doesn’t know how, they can simply ask and someone is bound to explain how to process works.

 

[Salsuero]

It's never 'too late' to address an imbalance in gameplay. A lot of times, imbalances don't even make themselves known until far along down the road - for example, Rail Guns were an extremely powerful unit for over a year and it took until over halfway through Arctic Future to fully realize just how powerful they were for them to be toned down a bit. On that note, Hover Tanks are now somewhat in that position and could perhaps use some tweaking to take them out of prominence as well. From a design perspective, it doesn't really make sense when military units stay relevant and effective for 2 whole ages after they've been researched. You could say that it's because Inno didn't make new units strong enough, but...

Yes, but how hard was it to build a rail gun? How much time did it take to acquire for those who were already in the age of tech? There is a difference in nerfing something that can be purchased and sold without much effort, versus something that takes months+ to build up.

...it's also a lot easier to tweak one extreme example than it is to tweak everything else around it to compensate.

Then why did Inno decide to nerf the Oracle of Delphi for all users by increasing level costs instead of lowering the rewards, which would have only impacted a small subset of players... none of which were on the US server (yet)? And why did the company decide to unilaterally and without simple research just penalize all players with high leveling activity instead of doing nothing since no one in the server actually did anything? It doesn't appear that it is easier to tweak an extreme in these cases... seemed easier to just tweak EVERYONE.

Anyway, that got off-topic. Regardless of what the Arc is theoretically nerfed down to (and let's be honest, it's probably not going to happen), by having one you're still getting larger GB rewards. Doesn't matter if it's 90%, 50% or even 10%. That's an extra % boost you don't have without it. Just seems to be like it's pretty excessive compared to other GBs. Military GBs scale much slower per level, the Orangery and Seed Vault also have very low increases, and the Kraken is one other that reaches a high percentage but can only work x number of times per day. Imagine if Zeus (and the two others), Orangery, or the Seed Vault had a 90% effect at level 80 like the Arc does. Think that might be a little more game-changing or even unbalanced? These things would be to our benefit, but regarding balance I think those are bad moves just like I do with the Arc's current design. Some of the attitudes expressed here are another problem that's pretty closely tied to the Arc: Greed. The Arc enables so much walking all over players who don't have one or are in FP swap groups that it's not even funny, and these players revel in essentially robbing players with very little FP/FP generation of rewards in order to add even the smallest amounts to their ever-growing FP wallets.

Are you in favor of tweaking the Château because people can get larger quest rewards? Do you realize that getting a Kraken anywhere near level 80, almost guarantees an attacker a free kill while it's active? Do you think that's an imbalance that should now be nerfed? How about the fact that diamonds can be shared across worlds (the only resource) because they are bought with real currency... which allows people the ability of creating diamond farm worlds? Should diamonds be restricted to the world in which they are awarded? All of these seem to be "unfair" advantages, among others I haven't mentioned. I'm not even going to talk about GvG. My point is... we all play here for different reasons and you are advocating for my reason to be crippled just because you (and some others) don't think it's fair and I think what you are suggesting is unfair to those of us who disagree with you.

And then to add in 'well they should have locked in their spot then' as an attempt to justify your actions really speaks to how selfish a lot of people really are.

This game isn't an experiment in generosity or friendship. It's a competitive game. The objectives are different for everyone, but to say it's selfish to try to "win" is ludicrous.

 

[qaccy]

Wasn’t the Arc previously toned down already? I feel like I read that somewhere digging through old posts to find other answers. I can’t recall for certain, but anyway it’s possible this is how the Devs intended the game to be in the end.

I’ll agree it is frustrating to have points sniped, and even more so from high Arc users. But it appears that’s how the game functions now, so if you can’t beat them join them. Anyone with determination can attain one and power level it to 80. If a player doesn’t know how, they can simply ask and someone is bound to explain how to process works.

It is certainly possible for anyone to obtain an Arc, and sniping is going to exist as it always has regardless of how or even whether the Arc's bonus is a factor. However, being available to anyone and everyone shouldn't (and usually doesn't) stand in the way of rebalancing. It's still merely an opinion, but I think the Arc's done more harm to the game overall than good, as it's had an almost irreversible effect on etiquette when it comes to GB donations (especially high level GBs) and the mentality it's given some people is downright sickening to me.

I personally strive to use my Arc bonus to its fullest potential whenever I take a spot on a GB, and I avoid sniping because I know how it feels to be sniped on a GB I've been donating to for days or potentially even weeks, by someone who not only underpaid relative to their Arc bonus but ended up walking away with more FP than I did at the same time.

@Salsuero
You're still going to have your Arc even if it gets nerfed, and it's still going to provide an effect that you can only have by owning one. I could argue that it takes months to build up research to reach the advanced units similar to the time necessary to build up a GB, but I personally don't believe it's the same comparison.

The Oracle itself was the extreme example in this instance (relative to all other GBs), and it did indeed get rebalanced. I think you made a poor argument here. It's already been established that employing the fix for the exploit was basically a mistake here on the US servers, but penalizing players for taking advantage of an exploit is, in essence, common practice in games (as it should be) and has nothing to do with the examples I provided in my post. Again, the Oracle was the Rail Gun in this scenario and it was adjusted accordingly, like the Rail Gun was.

Regarding tweaking the GB bonuses you mentioned, it's important to keep in mind that I mentioned most of those GBs myself, to offer comparison to the Arc. None of them have an effect that's even an order of magnitude close to what the Arc is capable of. If the Chateau instead multiplied quest rewards by 5000% at level 80, yes, I would be in favor of rebalancing that. The point I'm stressing here is that, point for point, the Arc's effect is simply much better than other GBs at the same level. What GB at level 80 has more of an impact than the Arc does? In my opinion, a level 40 Arc is already better than most GBs at level 80 or even 100. The effect needs to be toned down to be more on par with other GBs, rather than blowing them out of the water like is currently the case.

P.S. The Kraken is limited uses per day, so no, it's not 'overpowered'.

 

[ITown]

P.S. The Kraken is limited uses per day, so no, it's not 'overpowered'.

Would you say the Arc would be more balanced if it only had 100 users per day?

 

[Salsuero]

You're still going to have your Arc even if it gets nerfed, and it's still going to provide an effect that you can only have by owning one. I could argue that it takes months to build up research to reach the advanced units similar to the time necessary to build up a GB, but I personally don't believe it's the same comparison.

Not the bonus I was sold on. I don't agree with taking something away that I worked very hard to obtain. My entire strategy is based on a very specific game premise and goals therein. If you alter those things, my strategy becomes very different and you effectively ruin the hard work I put in. Your opinion is different, but I won't just agree to let someone suggest they should ruin the plan I've been working for the better part of a year. Yes, "ruin" is indeed my opinion... I know it's not yours.

The Oracle itself was the extreme example in this instance (relative to all other GBs), and it did indeed get rebalanced. I think you made a poor argument here. It's already been established that employing the fix for the exploit was basically a mistake here on the US servers, but penalizing players for taking advantage of an exploit is, in essence, common practice in games (as it should be) and has nothing to do with the examples I provided in my post. Again, the Oracle was the Rail Gun in this scenario and it was adjusted accordingly, like the Rail Gun was.

I think you misunderstand what I meant by penalty. I was working on leveling my Oracle to level 10 when suddenly the cost per level skyrocketed. It was originally economical in my opinion to work up to level 10 for the output and size. But what they did made it practically useless to me midway through the process. There was nothing wrong with the cost per level on a low-output "training" GB. The problem was in the reward payout. I wasn't leveling it to exploit it. But they decided everyone needed to be penalized instead of just adjusting the rewards and preventing the problem they feared (the one they assumed was already happening on the US servers, even though a bit of minimal effort would have shown it wasn't).

Regarding tweaking the GB bonuses you mentioned, it's important to keep in mind that I mentioned most of those GBs myself, to offer comparison to the Arc. None of them have an effect that's even an order of magnitude close to what the Arc is capable of. If the Chateau instead multiplied quest rewards by 5000% at level 80, yes, I would be in favor of rebalancing that. The point I'm stressing here is that, point for point, the Arc's effect is simply much better than other GBs at the same level. What GB at level 80 has more of an impact than the Arc does? In my opinion, a level 40 Arc is already better than most GBs at level 80 or even 100. The effect needs to be toned down to be more on par with other GBs, rather than blowing them out of the water like is currently the case.

Potato, potahto. I disagree. The Château does an enormously wonderful thing when you couple it with recurring quests. I regularly donate to top spots in high-level GBs, and not just Arcs either... and when I can use the recurring quests, I get loads of goods and FP packs, some medals, and of course coins and supplies that I don't really need for doing so. Mine is only at level 5, but I find it very useful. But one of my guildmates has a level 56 Château and he gets 380% and almost half a million in coins from it. I would say that's more than very useful. The Arc gives me medals and forge points. That's great. But at a certain point, medals do become mostly useless... once you've exhausted those expansion options. So then all we're talking about is a few extra forge points when you find the right opportunities. I'm not counting the treasury goods because they do nothing for me and our guild doesn't do GvG.

P.S. The Kraken is limited uses per day, so no, it's not 'overpowered'.

And the way I see it, anyone who gets a virtually automatic kill in attempting to breach my defense has a major unfair advantage. But I'm not advocating for anything to be adjusted. Instead... I built one. You use it on me, I'll use it on you. That's how I feel about the Arc. I don't have an issue with being sniped because it's part of the game. I make sure I lock a spot I want and I risk a spot that I am willing to lose. Risk vs. reward... that's just another part of strategy.

So you are certainly welcome to your opinion, but it would not be fair to simply say, well this GB seems really overpowered to me, so screw those people who worked hard on it. You see it your way and I see it mine.

 

[DeletedUser27889]

I agree with the statement they released that restoring the missing levels was the most important task. Even if we have to wait longer for a complete fix rushing out this one instead of waiting for completeness was the right thing to do.

However I hope this does not mean they are not intending to 'backburner' the issues that are still there. The thousands of missing FP from current levels, missing FP from buildings that leveled while arcs were decimated, the missing reward positions making it harder to see prior levels rewards.

Also, this has hilighted a huge vulnerability. It would seem there really is no backup. I had heard rumors to that fact before but now were seeing they really had no way to restore the game to it's pre-patch condition or a backup to reference making their task of restoring buildings as easy as a cross reference. This problem came from them but if a hacker found their way into their game what would happen? This amazes me, I back up my files to make sure if my computer kicks it or something happens I don't lose everything. Is this multi million dollar company really not doing the same?

I disagree that arcs are over powered or they were to blame. The common complaints I see against arcs are usually from those who have never worked to level one and vastly overestimate the benefits and underestimate the amount of work required. I don't disagree that arcs have changed the game. So has traz, chateau and military GBs. Unlike those other GBs, arcs have brought about an entire dimension in cooperative playing that didn't exist before.

 

[DeletedUser29541]

I can't imagine a game this large does not have db backups and doesnt regularly employ them each night. That would be a cardinal sin and something no game developer (even small time one) would make. My thoughts are that because they wanted to get a fix to the GB levels out as soon as possible, the fastest way would be to restore the levels of each user directly without the history. Depending on how their databases and systems are setup, it is probably a lot trickier for them to restore all of the previous level history and therefore take more time to respond to a crisis that needed immediate resolution.

 

[rickssavage]

Never even seen an Oracle. Honestly I didnt even been aware of it..

this is the stupidest thing done yet to effect everyone in the game for a GB that hardly no one has and was so easy to build for new comers, and is quit useless otherwise, nice going inno.

 

[qaccy]

@Salsuero
The thing is, I've obtained and 'worked' to level an Arc myself. That doesn't mean I can't see it as being more powerful than it rightfully needs to be...again, compare to other GBs. Given the choice between levelling an Arc or levelling, say, the Chateau, who's going to pick the Chateau first? Who's going to pick any GB before the Arc to take to levels well beyond 10? When you can look at the top GB rankings on any established server and see that well over half of all GBs at level 80+ are Arcs...that's a big red flag to me that something's wrong. What's 'wrong' is that the Arc ends up generating so much FP (and FP is king to a large majority of late-game/advanced players), that the only correct solution is always to level it first as an enabler to level up any and all other GBs. When something is that significant in a system that's supposed to provide choices, the terms 'broken' and starts to come into play. Regarding the Oracle, its original design may have had disastrous consequences, but the ironic thing is that even that was only possible because of the Arc. Starting to see the pattern here? You're trying to defend keeping it as is because it's 'your goal', but so what? At the end of the day, you're still going to have your Arc, and if it does get nerfed it's going to affect everybody, not just you. If it's no longer worth levelling to you after this hypothetical nerf, you simply do what you would have done anyway when it got around level 80 and focus on levelling another GB instead.

@Manda the first
Most of your post resonates with my thoughts, but of course I have to argue the last bit. Technically, nobody would have been gaining FP from the Oracle exploit without the Arc, but the Oracle was still the root cause of this debacle. I'm actually one of the only people I see complaining about the Arc's effects on the game and I'm someone who's had one over level 80 for more than a year now. The Arc is not hard to level, unless you're talking about one of the first Arcs on the server, and I don't even think it's possible to overstate the benefits provided by one...again, this is why so many people strive to make this their first GB they level well beyond level 10, because its impact is THAT significant. Also, while it's true to an extent what you mentioned about 'a new dimension of cooperative play', that pretty much only applies to the 'Arc country clubs' which feature groups of people who refuse to accept anything less than 190% of the FP reward on each of their GBs, not so much them using their bonuses to help people (which is something I personally pride myself on doing). I didn't level my Arc to walk on little guys, and I think it's despicable that some people level theirs to do exactly that (and is a big part of my belief that the Arc needs a nerf).

 

[DeletedUser]

I strongly believe that this thread is not a thread to compare GB, but to protest against the stupidity of the developers that
a) inserted the oracle with a clear fault in rewards vs budget planning
b) after discovering how stupid they were, instead to apologize and fix the fault decided to punish everybody that were active during a period of time, not those that used the loophole but those that could be among the users.
c) not separated those that used the loophole from those genuinely playing the game

More to that - we play the game according to the developers rules. If they messed and misjudged the rule - it's not for us to avoid using it, we can use it until they remove it
Plain stupidity for the developers!
And there is no assurance that they won't be doing it again...because, lets face it, they ARE STUPID

 

[DeletedUser13838]

Nearly all the problems with FoE (and maybe other Inno games) are due to Inno not bothering to thoroughly test things on beta. They may ask the players there to find bugs but don't pay any attention to any game balance issues. I've thought about joining beta but I just don't think it's worth the effort considering how little input the players there have.

 

[DeletedUser26131]

Nearly all the problems with FoE (and maybe other Inno games) are due to Inno not bothering to thoroughly test things on beta. They may ask the players there to find bugs but don't pay any attention to any game balance issues. I've thought about joining beta but I just don't think it's worth the effort considering how little input the players there have.

the most important part is that the beta server is due to bugs in th epast and maybe also mistakes, very unbalanced.
So testing balance in an unbalanced server make no sense. The best beta would be a copy of a live server, but this can't be done because we have to much live servers. The only thing could be a new beta server and give everybody a big welcome package with diamonds (multiple K) so ppl could jump into Ce,Fe etc. Or could buy an Arc etc. then after that period new starters get (the welcome package) and can jump in and test a balanced game, the package is only provided ones to jump start.
But I think as you mentioned Inno looks like not interested in this concept at all.

 

[DeletedUser8420]

So once again, devs incompetence has been demonstrated. Even when imbalance is found on beta the devs ignore it....so...They create, with out fully testing and/or don't listen to players that find imbalance or problems....to see if there is any "exploit" possible...bring it live...then "OOPs" we are sorry but we have to "revise" and punish players.

This is suppose to be a game of strategy...if someone has used a item as designed... thereby give a player a leg up....it is not an exploit but a strategy...because it was used as designed...therefore..it is the designers fault not the players. Consequently, designer should be faulted and players.

AND NO I DIDNT HAVE AN ORACLE. NOR HAVE ANY OF MY GBS BEEN AFFECTED. But I feel for the those that have been affected. Again, it just demonstrates the incompetence of the devs at Inno.

Of course once again, a few individuals here will battle tooth and nail to defend the devs....and I still believe that they are somehow paid/connected to Inno in more then just being players...they are just too enthusiastic in their defense of the company not to be "company people".

 

[BruteForceAttack]

Off topic
Hope most of you are testing and providing feedback for https://forum.beta.forgeofempires.c...nagement-performance-improvements.8227/page-2

 

[DeletedUser]

Well, all my worlds are shut down now for "updating", so maybe you all will be getting the fix you've been looking for.

 

[BruteForceAttack]

Well Inno leveled my gb's current level, and gave one free level. Maybe tomorrow they will wipe out the gb again saying that they gave away one extra level.

 

[DeletedUser27184]

Yape, I just got a level too.

I guess they said that instead of trying to add the FP I lost, they will give a full level extra which is assuredly more then you had before.

Its nice that they do the extra mile, and just level the GB one full level. So, me as the Arc holder will not lose anything.

 

[ITown]

That is great, but unless they plan to refund all of the deleted contributions, I'm still out thousands of FPs

 

[DeletedUser25166]

So people not affected don’t get the extra level? That’s not cool

 

[BruteForceAttack]

That is great, but unless they plan to refund all of the deleted contributions, I'm still out thousands of FPs

"Dear Players,



Once again, we would like to thank you for your patience as we worked on solving Great Building-related issues that some of you experienced.


Today, we continued our efforts and focused on granting you back the Forge Points which were contributed to the in-progress levels, when the unwanted downgrade took place on Wednesday. We are now happy to confirm that we have restored the Forge Points that may have been lost as a result of the aforementioned downgrade. You will find them in your inventories. You can donate them to Great Buildings again, invest in research, or just keep in your inventory, if you wish.

As the restoration is now completed, we believe that nothing is missing anymore and pretty much all initially lost progress as well as Forge Points are back on all affected accounts.

On top of that, we have decided to express our appreciation for your patience and dedication in a more practical way, and instantly level up all affected Great Buildings by two levels. All contributions were of course retained, and rewards were also instantly granted to all the players who contributed in them.

If you believe that there is still something wrong with your account, we would like to ask you to contact our support team where every potential problem will be taken care of individually.



We appreciate your time and commitment to the game, your support and feedback. We apologize for all the inconvenience this unfortunate event may have caused to you. We would like to assure you that we are already taking steps to prevent such issues in the future.



Sincerely Yours,
The Forge of Empires Community Management and Development Teams"