I've lost the desire to play because cyclical nerfs

[ebon kettle]

I feel like I’ve lost the desire to play this game after the Gargoyle update and Thrones of Blood.

Ritualist didn’t get any better. Architects are no longer appealing to me. Mystics and summoners: very boring and meaningless now. And I don’t believe vampires or the dark culture will avoid getting heavily nerfed between January and March with the next release, so why play them now, embrace it to just feel very bad afterwards.

I really hate this recurring feeling of being temporarily hyped, only to end up as a victim of cyclical “con artist” changes — where great features are replaced with over-nerfed, mediocre versions later on. It feels manipulative and exhausting.

This adds to my frustration of seeing everything I wanted dismissed or nerfed.
I wanted many animal forms — what did the devs do? They said it’s not worth adding animal head forms or animal forms at all. This season has only one new form planned, and it’s not even animal — just another humanoid roc form recycled from previous AoW games.

The game still lacks any deep army customization for racial units. Cultures still to rigid aesthetically. The pantheon characters doesn’t feel alive, its character progression is extremely low-capped, meaningless hall of fame, too static factioms for the ascended and feels generic. You can't control pantheon characters in a race of power and ally/love/nemesis relationships. Also why not more ways to play like empire mode, and adventure mode, builder mode, and story maker mode.

There are plenty of very good suggestions, a few are highly voted in discord that the devs mostly have ignored (including all of mine, for example). Is like they make the skirmish medium map game devs like, and not the power roleplay sandbox with endless pantheon campaign that people want.

Maybe at the end of season I finally find I can trust to continue enjoying later, I'll see, I have already paid it and at the moment I am not happy.

[hallow cradle]

We've lost the lead community kitsune designer. Our life will never be the same after this loss.

||finally||

[hollow vigil]

Did... did he give himself 5 different reacts on his own post?

[dapper condor]

Heartbreaking.

[ruby creek]

The Cycle of Life.

[left sorrel]

Ritualist didn't get any better? Almost like it's the best class in the game. Wild stuff.

[wind pewter]

I've lost the desire to play because multiplayer hasn't worked in over 2 years.

[split pagoda]

People are making fun of this post, but it has a little bit of a point. The nerfs have been misdirected.

[heavy tapir]

It wouldn't be an issue if we now had to deal with the nerfed culture in the state it is for a long while.

With month update cycles small tweaks are king rather than a hammer to every nail, nerfs were needed yes, but, specially with entire cultures, you can't risk making them a chore to play.

Planetfall comes to mind as we still have resonance weapons been mediocre...

[hallow cradle]

well, any point is lost, when the message has "the devs didn't include my suggestions into the game, weep-weep".

[dapper condor]

I agree that the nerfs were clumsy and definitely not ideal. The problem is, as Alplod points out, that the way to go about announcing displeasure with the nerfs is just completely wrong and immature.

There is certainly a discussion to be had about what the idea behind the nerfs was and how they went overboard, but posts like this that just go "Well now I'm gonna stop playing the game 😤" while also pointing at factors outside of nerfs just undermine the point. It's the right message, just very poorly conveyed.

[hallow cradle]

This exactly. The OP has a history of reasonable points\suggestions buried under the layers of bllsht

[split pagoda]

Well, I mean.

Yeah.

[astral fractal]

nerfs were necessary

[hollow vigil]

Architects were pretty insane with no caps

Really hated playing against them

[ebon kettle]

not good, shrinking features cyclycally is not good for player retention

just an example:

much older strategy game with less all time-peak players still has three times more 24 hour peak player count

This shows that, beautiful artwork aside, AoW4 is failing to deliver in its mechanics, its reworked patches and balance, and ultimately falls short of the enjoyment it promised. Since mage class split is getting worse. I guess the same guy/s in charge of mage class split rework is the same doing the nerfs and misdirected "balancing".

Vampires should had come with pantheon evolving love/hate relationships system, the first steps for a story maker mode. The problem is not just the nerfs, is the lack of ambition on adding new systens.

[hallow cradle]

@ebon kettle , don't try playing Data Analysis, you are making conclusions from nothing. There are reasons this is an actual job requiring learning and critical thinking both of which you apparently lack.

To elaborate:

• The shape of AoW4 plot is not only similar to others, but also shows a steady increase visible even at this scale - it's healthy.
• The ratio between the max peak and the 24h peak has some relation to retention rate (since the max peak is at the day 1) although it is obviously NOT a retention rate by definition. A person able to think rationally will definitely be able to understand that at day 1 all the players interested in the game will turn it on simultaneosly, while later each of them has a different schedule of playtime. That doesn't allow to identify which part of the playerbase is totally lost and which part of the playerbase has life (a blasphemy!) and do not play 24/7.
• And even if that IS a retention rate, the drop from max peak values happened during the time even before the first DLC which means (even if it IS a retention rate) it is not in any way connected to "nerfs".

so, long story short, the conclusions are stupid

[ebon kettle]

Real stupid people will finger the smart one (me) to distract fron real context that I demonstrated, what you did is called arguing with insults and the use of Ad Hominem phallacy. And I have seen this lots of times with your attacks. All your arguing is no sense filled with hate and rage, is solely antagonizing me at any cost. leaving your fake positive analysis in my shared data is not going to mask reality.

[dapper condor]

(calling someone stupid is also an ad hominem, just saying.)

[ebon kettle]

Is not an ad hominem, is my thread with my feedback, being accused of being stupid leaves me free to put a mirror on the personal attacker, he not just attacked my feedback, do you understand he always does this? my answer is not an ad hominen.

[split pagoda]

Not sure if I would compare to Age of Empires 2. That game is one that draws people in via nostalgia, and retains people through a strong competitive scene. It's also a genre that's more accessible.

[ebon kettle]

just because he is playing the shill role makes him feel more confident to attack me more agressively.

[split pagoda]

Okay, "shill?" Come on.

[ebon kettle]

now I did ask if AoW 4 has low retention of players in a google search and google AI says the same

[split pagoda]

Google AI likes to say some very wild stuff. I really would not count on it.

I also think it's rather queer that it says "barely over 1k players just a few months after launch" when I'm looking at steam charts and seeing 4,127 in game right now.

Yeah, according to steam charts, at its lowest point it was 1,850 average users in a 24-hour period.

[idle heart]

oh no

[agile totem]

It doesn't really have the needed world context to talk about it. The 'player count dropping significantly after its release' is pretty common across a lot of games, including across games in the same genre (Look at TW:WH3)

[idle heart]

its almost like its biased to what you ask

[prisma crypt]

Trying the make claims about Player Retention when using incomplete Data or knowing what matters for us in terms of continued development is a exercise in futility.

[hallow cradle]

@ebon kettle , no, I didn't call you stupid. You are 100% smart, what's stupid is your conclusions.

And the fact that your stupid conclusions show lack of critical thinking and expertise in Data Analysis is well, a fact.

But you are smart.

EDIT. And if you think that me claiming your analysis is stupid makes you stupid, well, it's your claim and not mine.
Is a smart person defined as a person who never ever says anything stupid? Well, that's definitely not a definition I consider to be true.

[hallow cradle]

it's also a game of a different genre, but who cares?

[hallow cradle]

I'm not playing a "shill" role, I'm just a Senior Staff Data Scientist in some big company, and your clumsy use of logics and analytical instruments offends many things I deem important and my reaction is totally sincere

[split pagoda]

They are?

Hell. Thay explains why I can't research Loom when I play feudal.

[hallow cradle]

Aren't they an RTS rather than TBS or am I mistaken?

[agile totem]

Yeah they are RTS games

[ember sage]

I wouldn't be so sure the AI is actually capable of viewing the steamdb charts at all. It's just distilling and repeating what other people have said, mostly on the steam forums.

[hallow cradle]

I just can't help it, I want to reply.

I've provided a reasoning and criticism based on facts, logics and common sense to demosntrate why the analysis is stupid. It's not ad hominem. Ad Hominen would be like "Ah, it's Gumiho, we all know him, there's no reason to listen". And while I tend to react like that as well, this specific criticism had an argument base, a counter-proof if you wish.

You, in turn, provided no rational defense of your statement, instead your reply was "I'm smart, you are stupid, stupid people hate smart people". This way you were not only the first person to shift to ad hominem, but also have shown yourself incapable of rationally defending your statements - once again. Your arguments like "haters hate, but I'm smart" don't address the criticism, neither they provide any value in the discussion.

What I think of your dumbness or the lack of it is irrelevant when we are discussing interpretations of facts.

[sharp crypt]

Does no one remember how Battlesaint's resurrection was stolen and removed from base game to be put behind a paywall? Three months later, they've nerfed the culture from the same DLC that introduced the battlesaint. Aren't both of these shady practices enough to open our eyes? It absolutely screams scam.

[dapper condor]

From a game design perspective, it is better to release something in a potentially overpowered state than an underpowered one. It is more difficult to motivate players to try something that they have already written off as garbage than it is to bring something too powerful in line after sufficient testing from the playerbase.

Again, I think the nerfs went too far, and there is a discussion to be had about that, but to scream about this being a scam or it killing the game is just absolutely misguided and makes the very notion of discussing the nerfs seem unreasonable.

[hallow cradle]

For now I just think it was a mistake.

I hate how the Architects ended up, but there is such a thing as a presumption of innocence. If I can find an explanation other than an intentionally harmful behaviour - I usually follow it, and that's what is considered to be civil.

Btw, I can find more than 1 in this specific case.

[ember sage]

I wasn't paying attention to the Architects culture at all, what changed?

[hallow cradle]

@ebon kettle , specially for you, as a fan of AI, an analysis of your (and mine) speech . Formulated the question two times in temporary chat with history turned off (so it wouldn't be biased towards my preferences).

1

2

[hallow cradle]

A hard cap on the amount of Affinity Incarnate stacks. Being 5.

And I liked my supports one-shotting dragons during turn 120

EDIT. If you haven't been following the culture at all - each incarnate stack was basically +1 dmg

[ember sage]

that seems slightly op

[hallow cradle]

just a little bit

well, I'm overestimating it, but trust me - it was something, and it definitely was an OP endgame. Something had to be done with that, but hard cap of 5...goes against culture's motivation to produce many monuments (which provided affinity incarnates infinitely before)

[lethal drift]

Well, let’s be clear; from a practical perspective, keeping 5 still means arch match the best culture enchants, while even just 1 initially is a big deal early on.

Instead, monument costs, or rather non-throne costs, need a revisit. Since practically the first and damage boosting one will be on the throne.

[desert kraken]

I think for architect, with the nerf to overall stacks of incarnate, we should be able to spend either wonderstone or gold to rush the monument instead of waiting turn after turn. I'd like to play them with a focus on gold instead of production for once, or something similar. I like variety when I play 🙂

[mortal salmon]

This, absolutely this. Although the monuments do still provide the rest of the bonuses they used to, they are no longer an impending doom for anyone who lets them scale. Leave the cost as is, just don’t increase it per city.

[elfin shard]

Architect felt like a power trip. I was playing an electricity astral build with storm giant when I discovered my neighbor was using the same strategy. I added his monuments to mine and ended up with 12 astral affinity incarnate. With arcane focus, my evokers were doing 27-28 damage to 3 opponents before applying the -12 astral resistance from guardians. My watchers stun attack was approaching 80 damage with the upgraded stun attack. It’s fun seeing umbral stacks with tier 3-5 units melt away to 3 evokers and 3 guardians.

[elfin shard]

The problem with LLMs is they are optimized for most probable sequence of tokens given a prompt and context. I find they are often too sensitive to both prompts and context. I’ve frequently had it tell me nonsense. That was one of googles criticisms of it. Fear of the hallucinations causing issues. I believe it’s also why Yann LeCunn was pushing the world models. I’m basing this on memory. I’m lazy. I should probably confirm this with an AI.

That said. It’s possible cyclical nerfs could influence retentions. I wouldn’t completely disregard it as a hypothesis. I don’t think the analysis provided is rigorous enough to confirm that. The analysis feels very much like it falls for post hoc ergo proctor hoc fallacy. There might be some confirmation bias going on. Both common issues. You’d want to conduct an experiment or do a more rigorous analysis to reach that conclusion.

I also don’t think that invalidates the OPs feelings on the subject. It’s totally reasonable to not like changes to the game and protest about them. I think it’s reasonable to vent in a forum where triumph can see it. It’s just user experience feedback. That said I wouldn’t extrapolate one persons experience with say all users. Maybe the communication style is worth a critique.

[graceful anchor]

I mean it's Gumiho. He seems to be a very young person.

[dapper condor]

Possibly, but I'm also not sure if it's relevant. Young or old, both deserve to get at least some workable feedback on why a post gets pushback.

[elfin shard]

Agreed. I think people’s response to a post is also valid feedback. We aren’t obligated to like an opinion or how it’s communicated.

Yeah. I’m not sure what a good nerf would look like. It would be hard to play against an architect faction where a watcher can one-shot dragons regularly.

Though I’ll add, I enjoy that the architect buff applies to battlemage AoEs. A lot of enchantments only work on base attacks etc.

[hallow cradle]

That's exactly my issue with the message.

I'm totally OK with someone's dissatisfaction, I am able to even, you know, show empathy in general.

What's I'm not OK with is when someone tries to present his unbased opinion as an objective truth. And OP has a history of such posts where they show the lack of abitility to discriminate opinions and feelings from truth and show inability to process criticism.

Everyone has their red flag. Mine is claiming that an opinion is objective truth without a proper proof. And I think this red flag is objective

Maybe I am not showing myself as the nicest human being during those conversations, but community definitely knows that I have such a problem only with Gumiho

(i am a damned matematician after all)

[elfin shard]

100% agree. As you mentioned, you are a staff data scientist. So your marginal probability of caring about objective truth, proper data analysis and making sure not to fall into causality traps is much higher than say the average person. You can’t really expect non-statistically trained folks to have the same level of precision. Me arguing from conditional probability perspective. That’s like my car mechanic lecturing me about combustion engines 😄 and getting angry when I don’t understand the intricacies of it.

That said, I feel you. I also have a sweet spot for great data analysis.

[hallow cradle]

Well, I would at least expect an average person to be able to have common sense and be able to ratoinally follow the discussion which doesn't involve any scientific terminology. To be able to see flaws in their reasoning when faced with counterexamples and such. Then they can show me the flaws in my reasoning. That's a dialogue.

I think those qualities are supposed to be present in all human beings and do not require special education 🙂

[lethal drift]

You would think that, but as the weight of history presents itself...

[mortal salmon]

Perhaps anecdotal, but that’s not actually how it often is. At least online, where people tend to get confrontational and get offended on others’ behalf easily. Or is it anecdotal? I do think I read something about research backing that up. But anyway, that is faaaar off topic.

[elfin shard]

I think psychology research shows that changing people’s mind is actually difficult. The aforementioned confirmation bias being a great example of it. People often get into polemics when arguing with other people. Even science history shows this behavior. For example, Copernicus faced resistance when positing his model to the church. Many of his contemporaries had continuously refined their models by adding extra orbits to celestial objects to retain their beliefs and match observational data. In the end of the day, occam’s razor: an elliptical orbit beats out complicated models with orbits within orbits etc. That said I’m getting dragged into my undergraduate vector calculus. Man I feel old now :D.

[graceful anchor]

It's far off-topic, but still more worthwile discussion than original tantrum.

[elfin shard]

There is also evidence of people not changing their mind when studies get retracted. People will cling to the conclusions of refuted studies. People often go against scientific consensus with strong theoretical underpinnings by finding their own data and theories. A good example is imervectin being a covid cure and some retracted vaccine studies.

You can also check evolutionary biology on theories around why human communication evolved. Most theories don’t list objective truth as the primary motive. This is especially true in the pre-modern era. A lot of the research points to consensus building, manipulation and cooperation etc. It’s a worthy field to read on. I’d suggest asking an AI about it.

Copernicus just showing his contemporary models. It mentions that the models matched the data pretty well. Science is tough: https://www.keplersdiscovery.com/threeModels.html

[elfin shard]

I’ll also add behavioral economics research specifically deviations from neoclassical model as worthy reading on this topic. The field exists partially to critique homo economicus aspect of neoclassical theory. That is people have preferences, try to maximize their preferences and always act optimally (which even neoclassical economists say is a simplification). Lots of these behavioral economic studies cover irrational behavior and people instinctually not understanding probabilities. For example, there are lots of studies that show people overestimate the possibility of highly unlikely events like winning the lotto. People overreact to negative information and usually overweigh it relative to positive gains. This happens even if statistically they would come out ahead (negative event prevents person even if the expectation is positive).

This is not to say people can’t act rationally. There are just lots of studies confirming that they don’t always act rationally, logically or optimally.

[boreal imp]

I think this does have a point. I, too, disliked the stealing of the revive

Ah, i see I have entered a psychological discussion thread

[hallow cradle]

It's dangerous to go alone, take this:

[boreal imp]

Im growing to be a therapist. I live for threads like these

[tropic linden]

I mostly think battlesaint probably should have been added in the update instead of AP

[boreal imp]

fair, not like AP was lacking content

[hallow cradle]

And I have a gut feeling that battlesaint hardly was a major selling point for anyone

[boreal imp]

Crusades and Vigil were prob the big sellers if i had to guess XD

[light mirage]

Resonans.. you mean sonic? Right, disabling all mods, or stacking aoe damage after throwing 3 grenades, or shredding armor, or reducing damage resistance to entire kinetic channel… Totally mediocre! Give me my cool biological weapons that aren’t even having 30% damage mods.

[elfin shard]

It wasn’t a major selling point for me. I did enjoy the left side abilities going down the cleric line. Battlefield restoration was great for keeping an army combative after it was weakened by a few skirmishes. It’s feels like a weaker form of oathsworn harmony passive in some respects. My original play-through of battle saints didn’t feel as inspiring and I think it’s due to going down the paladin line.

[mortal salmon]

Cleric route is so comfy, I like it so much. Right now I generally like to go for Cleric BS as my first hero to reach that AoE faster. I also appreciate that heal and cleanse are on a separate ability, to make it differentiate from Ritualist. It’s not stronger, just different.

I should probably give the Ritualist a better look though, cuz I mostly used the right healing tree and paid little mind to the left summoning tree.

[elfin shard]

Ritualist has some pretty fun skills atm. Definitely good class for sustainability. Really nice heal and interesting forest generation abilities. I liked it the few times I’ve played.

[heavy tapir]

No the main weapon of the shkran, it's a split damage weapon and as such it makes most mods reliant on damage mediocre, so while it's great to apply effects your raiders will never compare to other t1 units.

Which is why Shkran players just avoided raiders overall and still do to this day, not too different from people in Aow4 now just not playing architects.

I still firmly believe that heavy handed nerfs to cultures rather than tomes are a great way to ruin the enjoyment of players, small tweaks to cultures would be a better approach.

[light mirage]

🤣 Dude Raiders are exclusive thing what I use as shakarn.
They have super ability that can disable (concussion) multiple enemies, up to t3; They are amphibious 40 movespeed unit, they move on the map super fast; they had both laser and sonic damage, so if you find automaton faction, they can strip 2 armor per hit; if you play heritor, siphoner giving extra turn to raider allowed you to just melt even t3 units in one turn in point blank range, because their damage is absurd. I’ve played over 300 hours as shakarn and I don’t avoid raiders, they are my favorite unit.

Raiders are best t1 unit and that’s exactly the issue - people have too narrow view, that’s why they think Raiders are bad or that architects are bad. I could understand multiplayer person complaining about raiders, because raiders are prone to die, but in SP that’s best t1 unit, so is Architectors are still the strongest faction overall in AoW4. And Feudals are totally fine too imagine that, I say it as huge Monarchy fan that also plays it in multiplayer.

There are no “HEAVY HANDED” nerfs to cultures. Even Mystic Summoners still have some niche

[heavy tapir]

As you clearly stated, 'the narrow view' of multiplayer balance are what makes raiders a waste of resources, split damage also scales horribly with crit and as said, every other faction has a meatshield t1 unit, while raiders are extremely fragile...with meh range and no overwatch. Similarly Architects as they stand currently can be the strongest faction, yes that hasn't changed (although their power level height is lower compared to pre-patch and now has some contenders), but the time it takes to scale them currently and the point they start in, makes them, for now the easiest faction to rush, which means that as they stand in any more serious multiplayer setting they are binary, either the ruleset allows for rushing and they aren't picked or it disallows it and has them mostly picked. This really stinks.

The changes have made the scaling even slower (and weaker overall) which means that, unlike the past where you would spike at about midgame, you now spike late game. Which is why it is considered 'heavy handed' when they could instead slowly tweak values not completely nuke the scaling. Barbarians and mystic sum builds starting on storm summons can rush them as they stand and easily knock them out of the way, without talking about more serious rushers like super sunderers or mounted stuns.

You can't compare the recent changes to Architect to the tweaks of mystic summoners.