[Discussion] Legends on Tour 2019 Summit!

Real questions are:

1. how to we make it competitive again

2. how do we reduce the Pay 2 win factor

3. how do we combat the numerous tactical inequalities that come now with new balance changes

4. when will personal farms, garages and tech accounts stop being a thing for present days.

5. when will there be more predictability on how and when game develops/ servers start

6. when will the voice of community will be really heard - hint - since we are the ones that bring the money through gold purchase, ad placements and so on - game would have better income with a wider community again.

7. when will there be a better communication be implemented between Moderators (of any sort) and the players - really, a better bonus scheme would help for them - not just the gold they get monthly to play on servers. - at least make basic work contracts - so their experience can really go to their CVs and get perhaps better jobs in real life too

8. of course, all points written down by wishmaster3 , and others, need to be addressed - for the proper improvement of the game

regards

C.

wishmaster3 wrote:

Emerik :

I'd like your thoughts on some of the recent balance changes, for reference, we had a discussion of them here:

Balance changes discussion thread

I will quote some of the specific posts too for each point.

Trade office buff:

This was a great addition for the annual special servers with regions, where clusters and villages will be far apart as a natural result of the need to spread out in multiple regions.

However, for ordinary legends servers...

As is well known, your meta pulled off a massive WW defense on last years finals. On the recent com1 we saw some very large WW defenses from both sides too, and of course have occasionally seen the 20m+ on x1 servers (Wild and SNAPFU). Now, all of these were exceptional, and a testimony to the setups and hard work of the metas involved. These massive WW defenses meant that WWKs did little or no damage, except at early levels, or for the very top tier WWKs.

The Trade Office was massively buffed. This should make it significantly easier to pull off the massive defenses at WWs, even for less coordinated teams. This will skew the game towards WWKs having less impact (and increasing the desire for tech/garage abusing WWKs (I know this is normal on tourney, but it's not as normal on ordinary x1 servers)).

What are your thoughts on this?

Also, on a smaller note, it makes the commerce alliance bonus more or less obsolete (even though it was buffed).

Tournament square buff:

It is well known that tourney servers have a lot of local skirmishing, due to the crowded nature of the server, which means DCing works differently than on ordinary servers. Tourney also have the most active and dedicated players and leaders.

For ordinary legends servers, there is usually less local skirmishing (at least after quads have been consolidated), leaders and players aren't willing to sacrifice their real life as much and so on. This leads to some concerns from a DC perspective - i.e. it's a very strong buff to the offensive side of travian, and a strong nerf for DCs. It also gives an even bigger advantage to pre-formed/aggresive/experienced teams, who will now dismantle new players even faster (driving away less-experienced, non-preformed players and metas).

Here are some quotes:

Brewery buff for teutons:

Teutons were already the strongest off/time of all tribes (even without brewery, and even more so with brewery, even at level 10). Adding another 10% on top if obviously a huge buff. From TG's perspective, they're buffing teutons because they're not as played as the other tribes. But playrate does not equal balance. Typically the less experienced, less active and less gold spending players will pick other tribes - this doesn't mean that the tribe is underpowered.

I'll again pull some quotes:

I know there's a lot to read - I look forward to hear your thoughts when you have time. I hope others feel free to join the discussion too - Blaze ?

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Wolkenengel wrote:

When the MH starts doing their job properly. It's not that hard to see when a certain someone is only being farmed by a certain someone or when an account has only foreign troops on itself, while having none of his own.

The MH just needs to take action in this case, not ''I don't wanna deal with this'', there are domains where the MH does take action, which sadly isn't the case on .com, so the only way to solve this is to remind the MH what his job is. Or just replace him if he doesn't really feel like doing his job.

I slightly feel bad about trashing the MH, but then again... this wouldn't be necessary if actions were taken when they should be, opposed to certain situations, albeit rare.

This is no issue of good or bad MH. I recall two representants of TG (feanor and templar knight iirc) state that being a friendly farm was a way of 'playing for your team' and was perfectly fine with the rules of the game.

As long as this is said by CMs.... what actions should MHs take?

would be nice if CMs actually cared for the game and not the money but one can just wish

Hear_No_Evil [CWL][GOATs] wrote:

Again, it is something CWL & Goats does to most enemies it encounters - we are 80-90% Off alliance - we exist to have fun and attack

I'm sure plenty out there, including Emerik ; Marduk_COM ; fnx ; ELE ; Shammybear ; wishmaster3 ; @[ cwl ] Brezzok ; Raelag ; La Mala Ice or Galaxysong_COM can confirm my words.

Hear_No_Evil [CWL][GOATs] wrote:

Real questions are:

1. how to we make it competitive again

2. how do we reduce the Pay 2 win factor

First off - the reason that the server was easy was not because there was no competition - but due to the fact that Goats beat them with active Leadership + experience. Good players pop on all quadrants - every server there's some new talent. They require some leadership. SGR has started in com1 with as few as 10 core players and played against some big names - just by relying at the recruits - we managed to give enemies a fine fight where the game ended at our losing ww of 94. And that's only due to a lot of mistakes happening by our players' lack of experience (from the wwk hitting before rammer due to uk time to the unique arti lost to enemies when our player forgot to equip the horn). We'd have still lost though but with an with an even smaller gap.

As of right now - leadership + quality players can easily win over any sort quantity. Leadership and experience were the factors lacking on the other sides of com4 Goats server. Teams these days are too much worried about spies joining them - and so many new enthusiastic players miss the chance of learning by getting declined to join big alliances. And on the other hand - due to getting bullied out of the server, they will not want to play this game again.

There's three ways of grooming imo. One is big metas being a little more open with recruitment - and then being a little more open with telling their players what's going on - so that they can learn it and if someday they play their own rounds, they could use those strategies. (eg of an alliance who does this, SGR)

Second is - new metas should form. This is more like player based contribution - some experienced players could go into another server, start a new alliance and start grooming a new leadership (eg. Se7en and TEN I believe)

Third is - if Travian sponsors 1-2 players every server with some gold, and assigning those players an igm tag of advisors (to redirect messages to those sponsored players) - and in return those players will have to provide the right advice to the players.

It all lies in grooming new players. Advisors can also link them to some forum guides which are getting outdated every day. I will try to get arsed enough to drop a guide or two Which I believe is the job of this cry-baby community who keeps asking the TG to do their side of job which overlooking their own contributions. (me included xD I been procrastinating on writing guides for a long while now)

I have to add one important thing here

TRAVIAN IS NOT PAY TO WIN

Xy examples for this

I saw accounts in comx spending 20-40k gold and doing NOTHING

I saw accounts in comx spending up to 2k gold, and being usefull in a manner that they can decide the server

This game can’t be played if you don’t insvest ton of time into it, thinking days upfront, knowing how timeline of the server works, where are the limits, how to reach the limits, how to pass the limits, and most importantly, skill in this game is built with time, no free gold, no tutorials, no balancing, no nothing, go start 10 servers, 9 of them you will fail, but after you pass a line in that last one, then you became a good player. Start the server, end the server, dont start 7 servers while it lasts, and it will be fine. Game is still perfectly balanced in all manners.

Hear_No_Evil [CWL][GOATs] wrote:

Next up - if we ignored com4, was com3, which currently in 118 looks equally bad.

Not sure if you mean current com3.. But afaik, there are 2 or 3 pre-made teams there atm - and it started while com1 was already running (and this with 4 (kinda 5) premades on com1). I think there have been plenty of pre-mades showing up the last couple of years - not the old guard no, but national teams pop up (Russians, some other Eastern Europeans), new teams do form.. But yes, you can't join any server and expect to see a pre-made, that's true.

Tricky Martin wrote:

I have to add one important thing here

TRAVIAN IS NOT PAY TO WIN

Xy examples for this

I saw accounts in comx spending 20-40k gold and doing NOTHING

I saw accounts in comx spending up to 2k gold, and being usefull in a manner that they can decide the server

This game can’t be played if you don’t insvest ton of time into it, thinking days upfront, knowing how timeline of the server works, where are the limits, how to reach the limits, how to pass the limits, and most importantly, skill in this game is built with time, no free gold, no tutorials, no balancing, no nothing, go start 10 servers, 9 of them you will fail, but after you pass a line in that last one, then you became a good player. Start the server, end the server, dont start 7 servers while it lasts, and it will be fine. Game is still perfectly balanced in all manners.

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Can't agree fully with that.

Sure there are bot-like players whaling the s out of the game doing nothing but farming. But you are comparing two different type of players, with two different budgets which is proving nothing.

Let's compare type B of a player (which is game-changing type of player) with different budget.

Give that man:

1. 500 gold per month

2. 1200 gold per month

3. 10.000 gold per month

You will find that with more gold this player will perform better. Which is pretty obvious to us all. And very natural to this type of game. What I personally would love to see, as a player, is this gap fully closed (idealistic) or atleast TG aiming at closing it as much as they can. Why? Becouse we are players, we should care about game where most variables are skill based not gold based. And in TG hands is to balance it.

tl;dr You are correct that there are newbish players whaling. I'm pointing out that active player with more gold can do much more, and we should pressure to close the gap. TG should care about balancing.

Being one of their main sources of income, I would not expect them to ever even think about that.

Gumi wrote:

tl;dr You are correct that there are newbish players whaling. I'm pointing out that active player with more gold can do much more, and we should pressure to close the gap. TG should care about balancing.

I agree. But imo that is what we are for.

I hope Emerik will ignore this event after situation on finals server.

Admins can do notning again, bug with died troop we have every 4 last server in a row (every years they said "We fix, in future all be ok"). Admin do rollback again, Again aftrer many hours of active server (why they dont shutdown server as soon as possible?). TG ignoring players and dont have any normal answer on igm to mh. Players can "play" more than 30 hours after bug was found, they do many activity and spent time for nothing.

I would say that's all the more reasons that Emerik should attend this event

fnx wrote:

I would say that's all the more reasons that Emerik should attend this event

For what? He can saw another round of lie and ignoring from TG team? Good point.

Alternative is giving up on the game. You don't require a representative to quit the game. As a representative of .com, he should be representing entire .com community and not only finals with the issues and problems we are facing - that's the responsibility he signed up for. If you (finals players ) don't want a representative, make sure you all tell him to exclude finals from discussion. On behalf of 1x server though, we'd like Emerik to still represent us. We want the changes from special servers (not ROA's mergence) to be introduced within normal servers too (5 Tribes, anti-spiking confeds as we call it <- 1x players don't care about limitations of confeds, and chiefing maintains the village tribe status). If final players care about confeds too - they could ask them to make confeds proportional to the server size with a base of 3 or 4.

bearenok wrote:

Admins can do notning again, bug with died troop we have every 4 last server in a row (every years they said "We fix, in future all be ok"). Admin do rollback again, Again aftrer many hours of active server (why they dont shutdown server as soon as possible?). TG ignoring players and dont have any normal answer on igm to mh. Players can "play" more than 30 hours after bug was found, they do many activity and spent time for nothing.

When same similar bug happens 4 years in a row , there is nobody needed to represent finals to talk about that...

it just means, 4 years nothing changed.... And still same again?....

So who needs to represent players if bugs are not fixed??

Think we could send in a pig, squirrel or any kind of species with more then 2 brain cells (sorry for non pregnant blondes!) and have same result for next year?

Like we send their equivalent if it has not more then 2 brain cells per living being.

if that still persists, maybe it is a sign that finals players should return to regular speed x1 / x2 / x3 and collaborate with us others in .COM and national servers too

Hear_No_Evil [CWL][GOATs] wrote:

if that still persists, maybe it is a sign that finals players should return to regular speed x1 / x2 / x3 and collaborate with us others in .COM and national servers too

Reason tournament is fun, because you play against the best of other nationalities. What's the fun in it if people return to their own national servers, that's why there is a tournament server which has a bigger server capacity and support for other languages in-game.

Though, I don't have really bad experiences with qualifications servers, which are very fun to play at. It's just Finals which gets messed up every time with bugs.

Strategic wrote:

Reason tournament is fun, because you play against the best of other nationalities. What's the fun in it if people return to their own national servers, that's why there is a tournament server which has a bigger server capacity and support for other languages in-game.

Though, I don't have really bad experiences with qualifications servers, which are very fun to play at. It's just Finals which gets messed up every time with bugs.

sry, i have to disagree. Tournament is sooo packed - I doubt there's any strategy possible there. You cannot make enemies think that your attacks are fakes - when they might be defending a fake from another of the thousand+ active player.

Join a local server, wit 4 other metas and you'll know what's fun. You don't have to go to your local servers, you can go to someone else's local server - or better yet, come to international .com servers. Start a cross-domain forum post and prepare enemies. Honestly, if no finals - all the teams will return to .com domains. We had mightyRU, huns team - and so many other fun teams. Now it's us few metas fighting off in com1 server every year.