Regarding recent feedback - discussion thread

[DeletedUser96867]

Now idk if anything major has changed in staff since year or 2 ago. Maybe then they would have scapped this idea, maybe not. But instead of reworking the GvG, they decided to rework rest of the game to fit the new GvG just slightly better, really making people angry.

It doesn't even matter that these changes they made actually make sense and balance the game...

The saddest part is that the gvg design could likely have been altered to work with very minimal effort, but that had to be done before it was introduced on all the other servers. There were many many many player suggestions on the test server months ago which would have greatly improved gvg, basically none of them were implements other, certainly none of the major ones. Now they are in so deep i don't know how they will ever make the changes needed to make gvg a valued functional part of the game.


You'll have to explain to me how those GB changes make sense and how they balance the game, i certainly don't see it.

 

[DeletedUser3157]

You'll have to explain to me how those GB changes make sense and how they balance the game, i certainly don't see it.

They make sense because attacking and offensive GBs were ridiculously overpowered compared to defensive ones, and overpowered in general. This situation where a major long excisting feature gets finally balanced and it actually makes everyone angry not happy, is in my mind actually a symptom of another, bigger problem, It's that the game is overly repeatitive, boring, and in many instances comes with performance issues. GvG was supposed to solve that, or so was the hope.

 

[DeletedUser4879]

A good idea mate but I doubt it will happen. Also what use are diamonds to us now? can't really do anything with them that's worth doing now

Does this mean we're going to save our money and Inno going broke??

 

[DeletedUser99649]

My 2 cents.

1. Battles are harder now, therefore newer players will take a LOT LONGER to reach point totals of old players. LOL have fun new players, none of you will catch me!

2. Defense GB's should also be given vouchers.

3. Armies that are donated to GVG should have the player name beside them so the guild knows who is helping. I won't do GVG when half a guild can be doing nothing and there is no way to tell.

4. I'm sick of producing colonial resources for no use! I don't need them for anything, unless I want to fight GVG on the colonial map, and I don't unless #3 is fixed on my list, and the amount of goods and troops needed is reduced significantly.

5. VOUCHERS? LOL this is a joke. They take away something and than come back acting like they're heroes for giving a bit of it back! hahahahahaha! This had to be the plan all along.

6. Modern era players get messed up as they built their whole cities in modern era and have to tear down to enjoy GVG from the beginning.

7. I can keep going if needed. Endless annoyances of this game!

I think people stick around because they remember how good it was, and hope it will be again. Keep your fingers crossed.

 

[DeletedUser]

Let me get this straight... "Old" military GBs where so badly imbalanced that it was necessary to castrate them in half. For the good of the game, of course.
But soon the GB level cap will be removed and we will be able to get our "old" bonuses back, maybe even more. And this is fine, it's also for the good of the game.
Why do I have a feeling that someone is making fool of me?

 

[DeletedUser98159]

so sorry for the length, my dear friends ...

we waited months for (ready??) Guild Wars. no wonder you changed the title. it appears it is now the Guilds vs Inno ... and no one is winning.

sometimes it isnt about the money, the guild ranking, the losses of defense and attack strength of GBs. it isnt always about trying to be creative with a poor game design or taking away what i have earned or purchased and then telling me i can buy part of it back ... maybe. until you inevitably change it all again ... ya ya as important as this is, it isnt the MOST important thing for me

for me, it is about the friends i have made here. the time i have taken to get to build alliances and enemies. the conversations that have led to people of all levels in multiple guilds leveling up my GBs ... NOT because im the greatest warrior but because we have developed some sort of relationship. its about chatting with some of the biggest players and sending congratulatory messages when they reach 1mil and more and sending congrats to a guild leader bcuz her top warrior is kicking EVERYONE in my hood and she needs to know how awesome he is ... it is learning how to say 'paldies' when someone continues to help everyone in your guild at their own expense. it is defo about the people who i have decided to form a guild with and play for fun and enjoyment. it is watching some ppl offer charity trades over and over for the good of the Guild ... only to lose out bcuz the rules change. it is the hours over months of getting to know about people and who does what best ... not so we can be the best in rank, but so we can try to become a well oiled fun group that plays off of each other's strengths. so that we can have our top warriors in several provinces and our newer players contribute how they can ... until they see that it is futile ...

trying to be a Founder and a leader when everything is in a constant state of flux ... when the rules keep changing ... when we lose interaction with lovely players who sacrifice for our Guild so they go off and are invested in beta for 4 months, only to have beta be 'subsubsubsub-beta' and almost everything they learned in beta did not apply to the ever changing 'real' GvG, regardless the amount of suggestions they made ...

so for me, at this point it makes more sense to do absolutely nothing than to try to move ahead. bcuz today's 'ahead' is tomorrow's 'behind' ... and defo not bcuz we have done somethings 'wrong' in our Guild, but bcuz there is no consistency or foundation to this game design. and you keep ripping the rug out from under us over and over and over ...

ive done my part. ive played for fun and taught and chatted in the Guild and Global chats, conferred and connived in whispers. ive contributed and written thousands of informational and encouraging words and helped others start guilds. i have tossed fps here and there to the tune of the next fp i buy costs me 5 figures and the first is a 5 ... and i have watched friends and those i respect leave out of frustration bcuz there is no stability, reliability or validity to this game. there is absolutely positively NOTHING we can count on. bcuz when you tell me that THIS is the GBs BONUS and i get leveled up and see that no, that is NO LONGER THE GB BONUS ... and when you tell me HOW to figure Defence Bonus for my Guild and my top warrior and i stay up and compute the guild's DEAL and BASIL levels to plug in to some formula to determine where we need to place 20 fps a day in order to have a worthy defence ... and less than a week later (with no information from Inno, mind you) i can no longer explain to my Guild (let alone myself) why we have **** defense as in 75 in HQ and 13 in 3 sectors and all the rest are big fat zeros (when we have more levels of DEAL and ST BASIL than most) ... and i watch the Guild my leaders have worked so hard to build start to crumble ... and the once constant players are not visible ... and ppl are no longer playing (as evidenced by their red dots and stagnant scores and silence) ... what should i do now, Inno???

bcuz i HAVE done my part. ive been a great gamer and played hours and planned more hours than ive played. ive spent money - not coin but cold hard american dollars - and NOW i cant tell my guild what to do, i cant advise my friends what to do, and i sure as sheila cant figure out what i should do ...

so Inno, advise me. what in the world would you suggest at this point that would get me to continue on?

my humble and honest suggestion to you is this - ask for volunteers to sit down with you. listen to what we have to say. implement our ideas. create the game we are ASKING you for! you have a tremendous fan base, but it is shrinking daily. and if you dont offer this to us, then i guess my best bet is to look for a new game and see if some in my guild will follow ...

i remain hopeful. QS

 

[DeletedUser96867]

They make sense because attacking and offensive GBs were ridiculously overpowered compared to defensive ones, and overpowered in general. This situation where a major long excisting feature gets finally balanced and it actually makes everyone angry not happy, is in my mind actually a symptom of another, bigger problem, It's that the game is overly repeatitive, boring, and in many instances comes with performance issues. GvG was supposed to solve that, or so was the hope.

It may have had effect for those player at the end of the tree, all with maxed out GB's i do not know as i'm not there. For the majority of players it unbalanced the game by making boosted continent sectors even harder or impossible for most players. My 60% attack against 100%+ defense sectors became 36%. Balanced? Not in any sense of the word.

Does it have any positive rebalancing effect for the 35k point player stuck at the bottom of a hood month after month and month with players who have 300K or more points? Not that i can see.

In terms of the gvg other than those guilds with players at the end of the tree, most guilds don't even have enough defensive GB power to fill the 75% defense boost of their HQ sector let alone any other sector. Remember we were told the rebalance was for gvg. I just just did the math for a guild fighting in HMA gvg. Currently they have a 20% boost in their HQ sector. To reach the 75% boost in their HQ sector they will need to have 37 levelings of a deal castle or basil. To manage a 75% boost in their HQ, and just a 25% in the 4 adjoining sectors they will have to increase 104 defense GB levels. To have the 75% boost in the HQ, and 50% in the 7 other sectors they hold they will have to increase 270 GB levels(max out 27new GB's to level 10). Until then their sectors with a 0% boost are subject to a higher ranking player coming along and auto battling through them with his 90% attack boost in a very short time. Balance? Not in any sense of the word.


@QueenStacy

Not too long, just well said.

 

[DeletedUser100555]

so sorry for the length, my dear friends ... <snip><snip> ... ya ya as important as this is, it isnt the MOST important thing for me .... for me, it is about the friends i have made here... QS

Totally agreed, not only has the game gone off in an entirely different direction, it has destroyed the old social dynamics of the game. A guild now only means something in terms of GvG. Before we could at least pretend our guild was getting better by seeing our points and position go up. For a certain class of player like kids, old folk and newbies they are now relegated to ZERO guilds and do not feel part of the wider game. For most guilds it has meant internal turmoil for those that want to play, those that want to play only if the others help out in exchange for GvG rewards, and those that plain just have no interest in GvG, possibly because its too complicated.

So all told the social dynamics are so fubared that the old friendly guild stuff has gone. Inno had such an opportunity to build on the community aspect of the game, but instead did the opposite. One example, could be to interact with cultural buildings and have little social activities go on like dice games in the tavern etc. Not to mention the ability to spend diamonds on some cool goodies - upgrade your xmas tree for 200 diamonds to configure the lights and other such nonsense that some users would love to spend cash on.

 

[DeletedUser96901]

2. Defense GB's should also be given vouchers.

WHY?
because you didn't realize that they are now stronger than before :confused:

 

[DeletedUser3157]

It may have had effect for those player at the end of the tree, all with maxed out GB's i do not know as i'm not there. For the majority of players it unbalanced the game by making boosted continent sectors even harder or impossible for most players. My 60% attack against 100%+ defense sectors became 36%. Balanced? Not in any sense of the word.

There is only 1 area that I know of where defense boosts go to such extremes. It's the InA bonus content, the most advanced bonus content we got. Those top fights there are even harder than ME fights. Yet they are still defeateble with ZERO offensive boost PE units. Those fights there don't stop you from progressing on map(but they can lock up ur 3rd quest slot for a while yes). Matter of fact, out of my 8 ME towns I bothered to completely conquer those areas only in 2. You can not speak about the weakening of offensive GBs making some map progress impossible when it's possible to defeat the entire map without a single offensive GB in first place. Also if some fights are problem, there has always been the option to negotiate sector.

When I was speaking of overpowered offensive GBs vs defensive ones, I was speaking about PvP. Yes the "problem" there became bigger with each level your GBs gained, because the effects of the offensive boost were growing exponentially while the effects of defensive GBs were growing linear. So the inbalance was the worst if you had the highest of bonuses. That was changed, now both defensive and offensive are identical. I called making one no more vastly superior to other "balancing", what else should I say it is. Very high offensive bonus players who regularly fight very high defensive bonus players lost all their massive advantage. Very low offensive bonus players who regulalry fight very low defensive bonus players saw almost no change with the change, their fights were already pretty even before the change and even more so after it. Now what they messed up was they either forgot or more likely didn't understand watchfires. So now with watchfires, you can just have a lot of unbreakeble defenses even if you have decient offensive boosts.

Does it have any positive rebalancing effect for the 35k point player stuck at the bottom of a hood month after month and month with players who have 300K or more points? Not that i can see.

How is this change supposed to have any kind of effect on that player, positive or negative? I guess only effect would be that he can build up very difficult to break defense in the new system, while in old one there was no way for him to stop the attackers. And he might get attacked less, because people have less units due to tougher fights and overall less PvP activity in game. Alternative could be, that he gets attacked more than others in the hood, if he is less advanced or an easy target. But then again that would be no different to what was before the change. I just fail to see any direct connetcion between this example and GB bonuses change. If he is actually less advanced than everyone else, then it sounds like a hood merge system problem.

In terms of the gvg other than those guilds with players at the end of the tree, most guilds don't even have enough defensive GB power to fill the 75% defense boost of their HQ sector let alone any other sector. Remember we were told the rebalance was for gvg. I just just did the math for a guild fighting in HMA gvg. Currently they have a 20% boost in their HQ sector. To reach the 75% boost in their HQ sector they will need to have 37 levelings of a deal castle or basil. To manage a 75% boost in their HQ, and just a 25% in the 4 adjoining sectors they will have to increase 104 defense GB levels. To have the 75% boost in the HQ, and 50% in the 7 other sectors they hold they will have to increase 270 GB levels(max out 27new GB's to level 10). Until then their sectors with a 0% boost are subject to a higher ranking player coming along and auto battling through them with his 90% attack boost in a very short time. Balance? Not in any sense of the word.

I was speaking about GB bonuses here. How they spread around some support whatever in GvG is another issue. They could change it by adding any kinds of numbers to that formula how it's added up and spreads, and it would spread completely different. Yet it would change nothing about GB bonuses or have any effect on them.

PS: After re-reading my post, I would like to clearify the context that it was about the recient GB balancing (or "balancing" for others) change, not this new upcoming endless GB non-sense I don't even have words for.

 

[DeletedUser13082]

so sorry for the length, my dear friends ...

we waited months for (ready??) Guild Wars. no wonder you changed the title. it appears it is now the Guilds vs Inno ... and no one is winning.

sometimes it isnt about the money, the guild ranking, the losses of defense and attack strength of GBs. it isnt always about trying to be creative with a poor game design or taking away what i have earned or purchased and then telling me i can buy part of it back ... maybe. until you inevitably change it all again ... ya ya as important as this is, it isnt the MOST important thing for me

for me, it is about the friends i have made here. the time i have taken to get to build alliances and enemies. the conversations that have led to people of all levels in multiple guilds leveling up my GBs ... NOT because im the greatest warrior but because we have developed some sort of relationship. its about chatting with some of the biggest players and sending congratulatory messages when they reach 1mil and more and sending congrats to a guild leader bcuz her top warrior is kicking EVERYONE in my hood and she needs to know how awesome he is ... it is learning how to say 'paldies' when someone continues to help everyone in your guild at their own expense. it is defo about the people who i have decided to form a guild with and play for fun and enjoyment. it is watching some ppl offer charity trades over and over for the good of the Guild ... only to lose out bcuz the rules change. it is the hours over months of getting to know about people and who does what best ... not so we can be the best in rank, but so we can try to become a well oiled fun group that plays off of each other's strengths. so that we can have our top warriors in several provinces and our newer players contribute how they can ... until they see that it is futile ...

trying to be a Founder and a leader when everything is in a constant state of flux ... when the rules keep changing ... when we lose interaction with lovely players who sacrifice for our Guild so they go off and are invested in beta for 4 months, only to have beta be 'subsubsubsub-beta' and almost everything they learned in beta did not apply to the ever changing 'real' GvG, regardless the amount of suggestions they made ...

so for me, at this point it makes more sense to do absolutely nothing than to try to move ahead. bcuz today's 'ahead' is tomorrow's 'behind' ... and defo not bcuz we have done somethings 'wrong' in our Guild, but bcuz there is no consistency or foundation to this game design. and you keep ripping the rug out from under us over and over and over ...

ive done my part. ive played for fun and taught and chatted in the Guild and Global chats, conferred and connived in whispers. ive contributed and written thousands of informational and encouraging words and helped others start guilds. i have tossed fps here and there to the tune of the next fp i buy costs me 5 figures and the first is a 5 ... and i have watched friends and those i respect leave out of frustration bcuz there is no stability, reliability or validity to this game. there is absolutely positively NOTHING we can count on. bcuz when you tell me that THIS is the GBs BONUS and i get leveled up and see that no, that is NO LONGER THE GB BONUS ... and when you tell me HOW to figure Defence Bonus for my Guild and my top warrior and i stay up and compute the guild's DEAL and BASIL levels to plug in to some formula to determine where we need to place 20 fps a day in order to have a worthy defence ... and less than a week later (with no information from Inno, mind you) i can no longer explain to my Guild (let alone myself) why we have **** defense as in 75 in HQ and 13 in 3 sectors and all the rest are big fat zeros (when we have more levels of DEAL and ST BASIL than most) ... and i watch the Guild my leaders have worked so hard to build start to crumble ... and the once constant players are not visible ... and ppl are no longer playing (as evidenced by their red dots and stagnant scores and silence) ... what should i do now, Inno???

bcuz i HAVE done my part. ive been a great gamer and played hours and planned more hours than ive played. ive spent money - not coin but cold hard american dollars - and NOW i cant tell my guild what to do, i cant advise my friends what to do, and i sure as sheila cant figure out what i should do ...

so Inno, advise me. what in the world would you suggest at this point that would get me to continue on?

my humble and honest suggestion to you is this - ask for volunteers to sit down with you. listen to what we have to say. implement our ideas. create the game we are ASKING you for! you have a tremendous fan base, but it is shrinking daily. and if you dont offer this to us, then i guess my best bet is to look for a new game and see if some in my guild will follow ...

i remain hopeful. QS

Very well said. I agree with every little detail and as a guild leader I know the position you are in and it's not fun by any means, in fact, it is more stressful to play this game than it is to get up and go to work every morning. Much like yourself, I stay hopeful, but hope won't be keeping me here much longer and I'll inevitably be joining the long list of players who have stopped forging due to these updates.

Update 1.20 needs to be revoked! It should not have been implemented to begin with. You were told the opinions of your customers and you were told by many that you would lose their custom if it went ahead, you ignored the warnings and did it anyway and now you're paying it. Give us back the game we were playing before, that we all enjoyed, because at the moment you are losing more and more players with each day that goes by.

 

[DeletedUser1081]

Didn't you hear the [continental] sectors were to easy? The answer we have received is there won't be any changes to the massive boosts in the continent map sectors.

Yes, that's what we were very firmly told by several authorities. :eek:

 

[DeletedUser]

We've been getting goodbye messages from good, longterm solid players the past few days. Despite this respite, I think it came too late.

 

[DeletedUser8813]

We've been getting goodbye messages from good, longterm solid players the past few days. Despite this respite, I think it came too late.

not quite at that stage yet ...close ..(well i have started to look for a new game to waste my money on)..no matter what they call what they did to the game or why they did it..it has certainly drained any excitement i got out of the game.

 

[DeletedUser100555]

Inno TV March Episode re: GvG - "The more casual player can contribute goods to their guild's effort". Guild Tax. Not that its a bad thing, but as I said earlier, in terms of socio-dynamics its a massive shift. Try convincing american players in your guild who are not interested in GvG that there should be a guild tax. Now how could that split a guild ?

I think it would have been an interesting game design from the start for each guild to impose its own taxes just to see what taxation systems resulted in the best guilds. Guild wars seems more to be about charitable goods donations from late age players. I'm not sure how they feel about effectively subsidising newbies rather than just offering a bit of time for leadership.

 

[DeletedUser]

I'm a 100kpts Player, at the top end of my 'hoods and 15 Player Co-op Guilds, in my 3 Worlds.
There was a place for me to play the game the TV ads sold me, enjoying the Co-op Community SimCity/Civilisation City Building game, in my way, in the time I had available.
The GB balancing changes (I have read everybody's views on this) have robbed Players of years worth of effort and/or multiple £££'s, but it was great for me. My CA/LMA Def had a chance of beating a HMA Auto-battle Army from an 80 Player Fighters Guild. Still no chance of serious PvP Medals Attacking Provences only though.

BUT now with Players giving up at HMA/LMA/CA level regularly over the past week, and the realisation of a whole massive section of the game, I was really looking forward to, being shut off from me, I'm probably gonna just give up.
GvG is a disaster for mid-level Players, there is no point in even thinking about it; so why play on for a year or more, to get rewards you're not gonna need when you get there (FP's, cheaper builds etc...), while everyone at the high-end either leaves or moves onto a Level you'll never reach?

InnoGames - you should have added Lower Age Def GB's and corrected the existing ones to level the field, not 'balanced' the Offensive GB's. And GvG should have been balanced like Neighbourhoods, so ALL Guilds no matter the size, would have had something to play in, against other Guilds of similar level. As for other GvG issues, I can't comment, I haven't had a chance to win an HQ yet.
Also, can I get the £18.99 I spent to get expansions, in all my Cities, to build a GvG Army, back? Kinda don't need them now......

 

[DeletedUser]

Nice to see a respectable treasury being implemented. I can't say I like the fact GBs are losing their cap.

Innogames could have SO easily fixed the problems associated with 150% attack/etc. All they had to do was add a new GB that increased unit BONUSES to counteract the absurdity of snipers picking off tanks.

 

[DeletedUser96867]

@ Hint

As far as i know it's the end of IndA continent which is the only place with those insane boosts, and that is exactly where i am now, stuck. So i'm supposed stop all map progress for 6+ weeks until i have researched to higher age military units, and then likely still really struggle fighting boosts 70% higher than i have? It was hard enough before they certainly didn't need to make it harder. Wouldn't it make sense to you that these sector boosts also be reduced? Explain to me why that wouldn't be done? I have a very good guess why it wasn't done, it never even occurred to them.

My point with the variation in the hoods, is that the only balancing these changes might accomplish are those several hundred players at the end of the research tree. The changes don't help rebalance pvp for the vast majority of players while at the same time unbalance the game for the many newer players advancing on the continent map.

How the GB effect the defenses in gvg is the issue as that is the reason we told the GB re-balancing was being done in the first place. How it helps gvg in any positive way is beyond me, every way i look at it made things worse and they were already bad.

So the GB balancing: unbalanced the continent map in a negative way for the upcoming players, did nothing to balance pvp for 95% of players, and in terms of gvg (the reason behind the change)just makes no sense whatsoever. So yes perhaps it leveled pvp for a few hundred people but certainly there was another way to do that with out messing up other aspects of the game.

Certainly looks to me like the changes were made so that with the uncapping of GB's they hoped players would spend more money, and that they did not take into consideration how the changes effected the game play for the vast majority of players. If i knew someone who was about to start playing this game, i would have to advise them not to waste their time/money solely due to what Inno has done in the last few weeks, and how they have gone about it.

The only reason i'm still here are the friends i have made. As someone suggested if we could find another game where we'd move to together that would now certainly be higher on my list of options than staying here to witness Inno continue to take things backwards with every decision.

 

[DeletedUser]

A lot of negative campaigning here... I think most of the community would not be angry if the "balancing" was done by increasing both bonuses accordingly which would yield to same net effect, instead of decreasing them. But thats just human nature. We will always perceive the cuts/decreases as a negative thing.

I think most of the changes Inno is introducing here are positive and they pay even too much attention on the forum feedback. I'm pretty sure that most of their game enhancements are not exclusively based on player feedback but on actual data they gather about player activity, feature usage etc so what seems as a bad change for an individual player could be a very good change for the game overall.

In any case, if Inno really wants to pursue the utopia of satisfying both "old-resistant-to-change" players and new players who will experience the game differently than FoE veterans, maybe they should start managing the versioning of the game by world and apply the new game updates only in new worlds they open.

 

[DeletedUser99218]

I confess I find the oracles of the Countess more than a little Delphic. One statement in her initial announcement that has stirred up quite a reaction in this thread stated:

For example, we will add a Great Buildings enhancement in which the level cap will be removed. Please understand that this will not be added to the game in the very near future, however it will be implemented later this year.

This does indeed conjure up the image of the proud owner of a Level 334 Castel del Monte (by then churning out 10 FPs every 42 minutes, enabling it to be leveled up all the faster) being able to annihilate the defenses of everyone in his/her neighbourhood with a single spearfighter. However, we are subsequently told:

Thank you for your comments. While I know there will be a lot of speculation over the Great Building enhancements and what might happen in the future, please remember that speculation is exactly what it is at this point in time, and no additional information has so far been released. There will be new levels, however this does not mean they will be the same or even necessarily work in the same way, as current levels.

"There will be new levels" doesn't say necessarily say the same thing as "there will be no cap on levels" (so perhaps removal of cap actually meant raising the cap, as I believe a previous poster suggested), and we're warned that it is (mere) speculation to assume that these new levels will work in the same way as existing ones (although we're not told that they won't, either). So, perhaps the superdecagrade GBs won't just be more of the same. Perhaps they'll give out nerf points which instead of enhancing their own benefits will nerf the effectiveness of everyone else's GBs of the same type, until a level 20 CdM reduces all other CdMs to total impotence. Or perhaps 'nerf points' was simply a misunderstanding for 'neuf points', meaning that superdecagrade (I just made that word up mean 'above level ten') GBs will give nine brownie points per additional level. Or perhaps the additional levels will give out Nectar Points. Nothing is excluded, and nothing, apparently, is actually revealed.

To you has been given the secret of the Forge of Empires, but to those outside everything comes in riddles, so that seeing we may see and not perceive, and hearing we may hear and not understand [with apologies to the patron saint of a certain goods-producing and coin-boosting building].

[/SATIRICAL MODE]

Okay, seriously, tongue removed from cheek, the notion of limitless GBs is potentially quite alarming, but it's not entirely clear from the Collected Oracles of the Countess that this is exactly what it is intended. Maybe she was just flying a kite to gauge reaction. Maybe she said more than she was meant to in the original announcement and tried to row back in the second. It's probably no bad thing that people have pointed out the potential pitfalls of theoretically infinitely improvable GBs - to those who have more more will be given while from those who have nothing will be taken away even what they have (with further apologies to the same patron saint), i.e. it would make the already most powerful even more unassailably powerful - but we are just speculating here, and I'm left unsure whether the Countess's second pronouncement clarifies more than it obfuscates.