Hi all,
In terms of your request, it isn't the job of the developers to directly respond to the players, that would be the job of Community Management. Fundamentally, our role is to articulate, as best we can, mood and wishes of our respective communities to the project teams.
However, that being said, it isn't correct that no developers/PMs/GDs read the forums or ideas section. On the contrary, they do quite a bit. But, as has been touched on, the team isn't structured how you seem to think it is. The Developers aren't directly who decides on new game content, those decisions are made by a wide mixture of people from Game Designers, Project Managers and Owners, as well as having involvement from other areas such as marketing and Art. However, you need to understand that Forge of Empires is product, and monetisation is important for the continued growth of both this project, as well as the other projects in InnoGames' portfolio.
To your assertion that nothing new has been released, I'd disagree. To name but a few, this year we've had a number of events, with changes to their mechanics, or balancing changes to try and make them more accessible to more players (e.g. standalone negotiations and battles, better multi choice quest options, moving away from forcing players to do overly difficult tasks on quests). We've also seen the introduction of Reconstruction Mode, something which took a good amount of manpower and planning. We also saw HTML5 conversion, which whilst you don't necessarily see the impact (thats the point) takes a lot of man power, and time. I'd argue that QOL changes have been made this last year, more even than previous years. Yes, events are often quite similar to previous years, but for the most part that's because if it isn't broke, you don't need to fix it
Lastly to your concerns relating to the Ideas section, you yourself state that many players don't visit the forums, and as such, the forums aren't really a representative overview of community mood or opinion. That's not to say that the ideas don't carry any weight, only that if the ideas section is made up of 10-20 active posters, that's 10-20 posters giving their opinion on something which would impact millions of players. Even if we then multiply that by the number of communities, we really are only scratching the surface of the player base with the active forum users. The project teams use the forums as a measure for community mood, alongside many other metrics and analytics which can be pretty easily gleamed from within the game itself.
We'll look at reviewing the requirements for the Ideas section, thats valid, but you need to then also understand that an idea which gets the votes to be pushed up to the team doesn't mean that idea will be implemented. There are many considerations to be made before implementing changes ingame.
This thread will be cleaned up a little bit shortly, to put it somewhat back on topic. Also, in case it isn't fairly clear from other responses and my opening paragraph, a developer or other won't be responding here, I'm afraid.
Thanks, Richard
Thanks for your very detailed answer.
As I see you're the right person to contact with.
FoE is a product (game) for thr costumers (players), therefore it must always improved and grow.
And the best way to know what should be improved is from the players, because they play the game and feel it.
So:
1. Forum need more active players. I think and it's my opinion that less than 5% of FoE players enter the forum.
2. FoE TEAM need sometimes take a look at the forum as this is the place where players tell their opinion about the game.
3. Ideas Forum need to be changed.
There are *2* types of ideas.
Those that add / change something in the game.
And those that fix / improve minor things. For example, I have a lot of UX fixes, but unfortunately no-no cares. And that makes me very satisfied from this game.
As we know that the forum is inactive, but everyone play FoE. So, players in forum MAY effect the game and makes changes for all players.
If FoE team need to know what all players think about some idea or another feature. They can post global message in the message center in the game (the one that used for events) and get feedback [yes / no] for the idea.
The results of the poll won't determine if the idea will be implemented or not, but they will give to the team wider view.
Example:
Would you like to increase forge point bar maximum from 100FPs to bigger amount?
Yes. / No.
Opinion (optional):
(Some opinions for example)
* yes, because daily collection is higher than 100FPs.
* yes, if it will cost diamonds.
* No, there is autp collect for 5 diamonds.
(this poll will last 3 days)
Then an algorithm could count all votes and take some opinions from each Server and world. and this data displayed for the Team
Balancing and changes for events isn't something new.
New era isn't something new.
New GB isn't sometimes new.
I know events are always different and not exactly the same, and I appreciate the work of FoE for the stuff they do.
When I said something new, I meant for something that we never saw before, something uniqe.
Reconstruction it's a feature
By 2020 Google will force all move to HTML5 and Flash will no longer works (security issues)
So it's good that FoE moved to HTML before that date, but Web version is so laggy and need alot of improves. For me, both HTML5 and Flash works bad and slow. If you wonder which PC I have, I can run PUBG on Very High resolutions, and Visual Studio works for me like a charm. For sure it's not my PC (I think, as I'm also use to to hacking many online games, that FoE send TONS of requests to the servers. Just my assumption).
The way that FoE gains profit / money is by players that buy diamonds.
One problem, This system is UNBALANCED.
I do buy stuff in games, one more game I play is Clash of Clans and I spent about 200-300$.
How much I spent in FoE?
- NaN, Nothing, Zero, 0
And it's not that I want to spend my money. But you can see the difference.
All the stuff I bought in CoC is from Special one-time offers that really worth it.
FoE never was close to that.
The packs offers aren't Special، and seems to look very fake.
5$ for Troops / Goods / Building that I can get for free in one day from GE.
That's it.
I would like to keep contact with you, as I have a lot of suggestion and the forum won't promote them ot move them forward.
Thanks for listening.