Guild Quest
Bundle Issues! SOLVED
We started getting reports that something was going wrong with purchases of bundles in the store, and could repro it 100% of the time. Nothing other than currencies were being awarded in bundles.
We've pulled the bundles for now while we look into the issue. We didn't push an update to anything over the weekend (and certainly not on Sunday night!) so we're definitely confused, but are trying to track down the issue.
Sorry for that!
If you've made a purchase and didn't get your stuff we'll get you compensated with what you bought, but first wer're trying to figure out why this is happening in the first place. We're working on it! Apologies.
Armageddon (New Prestige and HP Cards)
New Prestige!
This is a really big one.
<*>You now need to defeat bosses to unlock the next difficulty.
<*>Quest-requirements reset per difficulty, so you also can't just buy the first quest level and then move on.
<*>BOSSES WILL NOW RESET WHEN YOU FIRST UNLOCK A DIFFICULTY which means you don't have to wait around for them to respawn after you reach a new difficulty. This will allow for later players to zip back ahead, and collect all the chests along the way while they do it.
<*>Brand new prestige difficulty per island. Before everyone was sharing the same prestige stats, which meant the early islands couldn't get hard enough or payout enough to be relevant, and the later islands could suffer in opposite ways.
<*>You are collecting starpoints for every prestige difficulty you defeat, which you can't do anything with yet, but will be able to spend in the future.
<*>We have put the prestige selection into the map screen properly, instead of brand new screens.
<*>We have removed the scary BEWARE screen when you confirm a prestige wipe.
<*>There are recommended levels per prestige difficulty per island.
<*>We've given some clearer goals on how to unlock prestige in the first place. (Check your map if you haven't unlocked it yet!)
Why are we doing it? We kept hearing that the original prestige system wasn't great. It was kind of confusing that you could jump to the last difficulty on an island as your first prestige, which would mess some people's games up, but also wasn't feeling very rewarding. So it was a prestige system that didn't feel like you earned or unlocked anything, which isn't at all the feelings we want!
Why is your prestige progress being reset? Because we had to implement a new way of saving information about bosses in order to unlock difficulties, and that means if you don't start from the first difficulty then you may mess up your progress.
HP Cards!
There's a new batch of cards to collect, and they're all about HP. Additive cards in all rarities, as well as epic cards that do x2 HP per guildian.
They can all be found in treasure chests, as well as forged using existing recipes.
Quality of Life
Better stability in the Forge!
<*>The server could fail, and while you wouldn't lose your cards, it would look like you did. Hopefully we'll have less failures now, and when you do get a failure, you should see better information.
Lowered XP from 401-450.
<*>Just a bit, anyway.
Added numbers to the Fast Travel signs.
Changed the "Exploration" stat to "Adventuring" in the equip screen.
<*>Exploration was the old name for Adventure quests and we forgot to update that info!
What's Coming?
Lots of big plans in the works, but more immediately is going to be a smoother XP curve! And most likely some more XP cards.
Full Notes
A Prestige Warning!
The first step to New Prestige(tm) is coming out this week, but with it is going to be a bit of a shocking change that I wanted to warn about. Because we're going to be changing how you unlock a new prestige difficulty (so you can't just jump STRAIGHT to the final difficulty for your first time), we're going to have to reset everyone's prestige progress.
What this means is when the update comes out all of your islands will be reset to Normal and you're going to have to unlock the next difficulty.
<*>You won't lose any money (BUT if you want to maximize your offline progress you're going to want to log into the game before the next update and collect your offline progress on higher difficulties).
<*>You won't lose any islands. They're all still unlocked.
<*>You won't lose any XP or levels (but see the money point above).
<*>You won't lose any achievements (but we will rename the Mighty 2 ones).
This does mean your overall progress is getting reset a bit as you try to work your way through the difficulties again, but if you're an existing user you should be getting back up to speed without much trouble (just waiting). We're going to try to get a feature out that will automatically reset all your boss timers when we launch so you at least won't get stuck waiting to reach Stalwart for the first time.
What we're doing with this redone prestige system is trying to make things more rewarding and challenging. Give more goals to reach and things to unlock, which is something a lot of you were missing with the current system.
And even though you can't do anything with it at launch, you will be earning a fancy new currency when you complete a difficulty on an island....
(Updating with a preview!)
Fast Travel All the Way to Icevale
It's a brand new island! You can find the path to it through Whiteburn at the top-right of the world map, and it's our biggest island yet.
<*> 26 total quests!
<*> 3 bosses.
<*> 5 towns.
<*> (Hopefully) really really hard!
It's a packed island with criss-crossing paths, multiple bosses, and a whole lot of guildian slots.
Fast Travel
Here comes a big quality of life update to make all your lives more quality. Special shout-out to @sivi for posting the idea in the first place! We ended up loving the idea of fast travel and rolled with it, so now you can move from island to island with ease. Thank you, sivi.
Now you'll be able to see which paths are available from an island, and see what you still have to unlock. This has also meant that we've revamped the tutorial some, so players don't have to go through all the steps of opening the map early in the game.
New Level Cap
Level 450. Annnnd cranking some XP values, since now that we fixed that offline progress bug, y'all are making way more XP than anticipated (whoops!).
More Quality of Lifes!
<*>We now call out when you forge a duplicate card, so you don't get excited about your new Thief x2 DMG card only to realize you had it already.
<*>There's now a tutorial prompt where Doceo will tell you about offline progress, since a lot of first-time players don't know this is an idle game.
Coming Next?
We have ideas. Hoo boy do we have ideas. Our immediate goal is a revamp of the prestige system. I don't want to say what we have planned, because we can change details pretty fast around here, but we're taking a lot of the feedback very seriously.
Right now prestige doesn't feel like an accomplishment, and the way you can jump back and forth around takes away a sense of progression. Those are some core things we're hoping to address, which is going to mean clamping down the difficulties so you can't jump straight to the end, as well as requiring you to accomplish certain things to unlock the next difficulty. We're also aiming to put a new reward system in with prestige, but that's maybe too many details....
HOT FIXES
<*>Fixed where you get the key for Icevale at the proper boss node.
<*>Fixed an issue with "Mighty 1" not showing up in the prestige screen.
<*>Fixed an issue where a quest was missing a lot of base values in Icevale.
Forge Your Dupes Away
You can find the Forge from the HUD. Every recipe requires 4 duplicate cards, and it consumes those 4 cards, but ONLY on a successful recipe. There's a coin cost as well, which also only costs on a successful recipe.
There are 15 recipes to find right now, and none of them start as visible. But here's something to get you started.
The patch notes:
New level cap of 400! Hooray!
Emerald Island Tweaks means some lower level caps on quests. We were hoping that Bunny Island was enough to ease players into how the game works but that's definitely not what's happening. We're trying out some tweaks to see if more players can get the chance to understand how the game properly works.
If it helps out, maybe we'll have more of that kind of flow on other islands. I've kept every quest on an island to the same max level, but there's no real reason for it. Quests on an island could start low and then get higher than ever before by the end. IF that ends up feeling like a good flow, that is.
We've also added text to the quest upgrade button to help new players with understanding what that button does.
All of this has also all meant that there are 4 new achievements to get!
Good luck with your forging!
What's coming?
<*>Fast Travel between islands.
<*>New island!
<*>Prestige tweaks! We've been hearing about issues with the current prestige system and we want to address them. Just giving more difficulty levels doesn't seem to be very satisfying right now. This isn't a next week fix, though.
UPDATE
Pushed an update that should solve the crashing that was happening when you would try to forge a brand new card that you just finished forging.
UPDATE 2
We've pushed a forced-update out that's going to require everyone to download the new version before starting the game again. On the back-end we've made some adjustments to the servers so hopefully all the issues with chests/store/forging will calm down, as well as changing some of the server calls structure in the game itself to help as well.
Apologies for the issues! We're really hoping things will go smoother over the weekend.
Better Boss Drops and Other Remedies
BETTER BOSS DROPS
The big new feature this week is better boss drops! The rewards for bosses start changing as you up the Prestige difficulty of an island.
Stalwart - More gold/XP from bosses (as in last week).
Hardy - Double the chests from bosses.
Brawny - More gold/XP (and the previous double chests).
Mighty 1 - Back to single chests, but raised the rarity of all chests.
Mighty 2 - More gold/XP (and the previous raised rarity).
EPIC CHESTS
With this change to the chest drops and upping the rarity of drops, we came to a crossroads with our Store Chest, which held epic cards and was generally the next level of cards we needed to award players. Instead of trying to figure out lesser cards to give, or giving a whole new round of cards to the Store Chest to keep it raised above everything else, we decided to fold the Store Chest into the regular rotation.
So the Store Chests have become Epic Chests. Epic cards are now available in the regular game, and Epic Chests start dropping on the last couple islands at Mighty difficulties.
<*>New cards have been added to the Epic Chests (x25 quest cards, more guildian boost cards, and even guildians themselves).
<*>Epic Chests CAN be melted down, if you so desire.
<*>Epic Chests are still sold in the store, and with the wider range of cards (and now the chance for guildian cards) they're generally better than they were before.
Not to brag, but this is what I got out of my first Epic Chest:
(Okay, so I'm PARTIALLY bragging.)
QUALITY OF LIFE
<*>
<*>More information from the map screen. Now you'll be able to see your gold and xp per minute per zone. We calculate how much you made during the last minute, which means those values can fluctuate based on your guildians' performance.
<*>More information in the Equip screen! Now you can see much more relevant information while equipping cards. Tired of having to check whether the boss is on quest 9 or 10? Well now you don't have to!
<*>Chest drop info on the boss quest screen.
<*>New HUD art!
<*>New offline progress screen, now with more information.
<*>Fixed an issue with offline progress for XP where some people wouldn't get more XP after leveling up during offline progress.
<*>And a level 350 level cap.
BUG FIXES
We update the game pretty regularly, but don't toss up notes when we do quick bug fixes. Some of the things we've done this week that haven't been mentioned:
<*>Some of the achievements introduced last week weren't firing properly. People were getting achievements for Mighty 2 and Mighty 1, and the level 300 achievement wasn't working.
<*>Amazon Web Services went down Tuesday which created all sorts of issues for all sorts of different services, including one we used. We pushed an update that will award new players some early items (like the key to Bunny Island) so they're actually able to play the game just in case the server drops like that again.
COMING NEXT?
Next week should bring you TRANSMUTATION! Although we're probably going to call it THE FORGE and it's where you'll be able to use your duplicate cards to create other cards. (Now that we're melting chests for gems we didn't think also melting cards for gems would actually be all that exciting or worthwhile.)
As well as more prestige levels, islands, and level caps coming probably not next week but whenever those happen to show up!
Dark Knights and Melting Chests and a New Island, Oh My!
Dark Knights are here! You can get two of them by unlocking the two paths to the new island, and they've been added to the drop tables for Uncommon and Rare chests. They're also now a part of the Guildian Chest in the store.
Of special interest to the forum is probably going to be a better organization of chests, as well as the ability to MELT DOWN STACKS OF CHESTS.
What we were hoping early in was to show that you get different drop tables from different islands, which is why you would end up with so many different stacks of chests. I don't think that was ever really understood, or even cared about, frankly! So we've streamlined the chests to use the same drop tables (for example, all common chests will have the same common drop table), and now they can stack up together, leading to less clutter in the Vault.
ON TOP OF THAT, and as a first step towards a transmutation system, we're allowing you to melt down entire stacks of chests you don't want anymore. And you'll get gems for the effort.
You can access the chest melting system from the Vault with this icon:
Which will bring up this screen for melting:
There's also a brand NEW ISLAND to conquer, which can be found here:
As well as some Prestige tweaks. Things like upping some payouts, nudging down some difficulty here and there, bumping up some bosses here and there.
Here are the notes from in-game (so big I had to double the size):
There's been shuffle with some of the boss drops, so we have a better range of chests, as well as for a planned future update for how we're going to handle prestige rewards. That means we dropped Emerald Isle down to common only, and Bayport got hit hard what with its three chests, but Bunny Island now gets a proper common chest, and Whiteburn gets two rares.
Next week we should have the updated reward system in so you won't have to wait too long to see.
Oh, and the level cap has been bumped up to 300, which means you can now reach Mighty 2 prestige difficulty. Make sure to bring some Dark Knights with you.
(Hey there's a toggle for "Patch Notes" under my post and I should probably start using that for the patch notes huh?)
The Buy Multiple button is IN!!
Here it is, in all its glory.
This is probably the MOST REQUESTED FEATURE right now, so we made sure to drop what we were doing and get it into the game.
<*>Toggle that button to switch from x1, x10, and x50 purchases.
<*>Holding down a purchase button will still auto-buy, even with a multiplier active.
<*>And this works when updating quests or guildhalls.
Now it's back to the next update: DARK KNIGHTS.
The Prestige Update
However, unlike most idle games, we're not doing the typical prestige thing. What'll happen here is you get to CHOOSE the difficulty you want. Want to push an early island as far as you can? Take it to Mighty 1! But you're going to have to play it more conservatively the further the islands get.
The really interesting thing that's made us excited is that there's a lot of experimentation and exploration and DEFEAT happening.
Prestiging is free, you unlock it by defeating all the bosses on an island, and then different prestige difficulties are locked behind your level. You can prestige an island as many times as you want, but it will wipe out all the quests/city upgrades you've currently got built there and you'll need to rebuild. But you won't have to re-unlock quests.
UPDATE--
EXISTING PLAYERS: You'll need to make sure to re-defeat the first boss NINTH QUEST in Westacre with the new update. The next time you go to your map you'll be taken to the prestige tutorial.
There are going to be islands and difficulties that are going to be outside of what you can accomplish for now. We'll keep upping the Level cap and introducing more cards/loot as we go, but this system needed to happen first.
Here are the notes:
+ New store bundle (not the same as the Starter Bundle, but permanent).
+ New HUD element that shows Island name/difficulty. (A personal favourite.)
What's Coming Soon?
<*> Better loot drops for higher difficulties.
<*> Chest re-organization and the option to meltdown existing chests towards gems (the first steps towards a transmutation system).
<*> Higher level caps.
<*> Dark Knights.
<*> A new island.
State of the Guild Feb 7th
Woof! This was a big update.
First of all, apologies for not being around the forums as much. There are way more of you than we had expected, and we soon realized that well...we needed to work on the GAME since there are a whole bunch of issues.
+ Some higher Guildian base stats.
+ Slightly higher drop rates of Guildians from Uncommon and Rare chests.
A new city screen and flow!
This was a big one that was causing a BUNCH of issues for users. My apologies for that! People would think they had broken the game when in actuality, we had merely failed to describe what you're supposed to do in the city screen.
So we completely redid it for hopefully a much smoother user flow. This should make a lot more sense for equipping and un-equipping your Guildian cards. Also you get to see the cards again finally! (For those that have been around since the alpha build, it marks the return of our tavern music!)
Balance changes.
There's been a sweep of rebalancing for the entire game. If you're later in the game it might seem pretty shocking, but you'll probably settle into it pretty quick. Payouts on EVERYTHING are pretty much higher, but costs are also higher. In general it should feel a lot better and start feeling like progress, which is something the game lacked after Emerald Island.
If you're at end game and have hundreds of billions of coins, there's not much we can do for you....yet. We've got a pretty great idea for how we want to handle progress and islands that we'll hopefully show you sometime soon.
And so...
Thanks to everyone who's been playing (and reading this!). We're hoping this update helps a lot of people.
We're starting work on the next update literally as I'm typing this and being late to a design meeting. That should be bringing in new content to play with, maybe even a new system, and hopefully some more quality of life updates (we hear you about opening/organizing chests and are trying to figure out some smart solutions. Sadly an 'open all' button isn't going to be possible without us blowing up our servers but we're going to try to figure out some better options.)