From a Day 1 Player: Please adjust or this game is dying

Dear Legacy of the Beast team,

I am typing this message as a right handed man with a broken right wrist and yet it is somehow less painful than playing the game...

I think it is clear by now that your player base is made of grown ups adults with jobs and lives united by one thing only, their love and devotion to Iron Maiden, we are not Among Us or Clash of Clans Addicted teenagers...

The ever growing grinding requirements are nothing but a fun killer and a way to create angst and force some of us to leave the game to focus on our real lives. Moreover, the more we need to grind, the higher the load on the servers and the worse the user experience... After all, where is the fun in letting a device on auto all day/night to collect currency...

This game should be about creating and maintaining a community of blood brothers not disgruntled digital blue collars fighting for a second virtual salary as of the lives depended on it.

You have achieved tremendous things for Iron Maiden already, a whole world tour inspired by your creation and a best seller live album. Surf on this, not trying to cunningly extract a few bucks from your fans by forcing them to buy in game to reduce the grinding effort, it will only result in anger and ultimately churn.

I urge you to please rethink your approach to the game. Fixing the events requirements is easy and requires no coding. Some mechanisms such as amulets also have to be rethought, it is absolute madness that the first round of this Gauntlet season has to go to a 400+ fights to find its winner, it has never been about fun or skills merely on someone’s ability to grind his way out of hell...

Please take this feedback into account it comes from hundreds of blood brothers across the world with only one common objective: to make Iron Maiden and the game successful.

Kind Regards,

Patrice-1201

Very well said I feel like its worth adding that if you expect people to buy ironite based content then the price of ironite packs need to be adjusted

Heres an idea, how about replace the useless grind with in world achevs. No im not saying to use alll magus 50 times. I am thinking more on the lines of temp skull quests. In a new dungeon you can add skull quests,win with full health,use ten power moves etc. If you complete them all within the time frame,you will recieve the new char and a new tali set.
This way we feel like we are actually playing a game.
I never understood the grind thing,ive just accepted it.

It would also solve your server problems

My only suggestion, instead of sarcastic humor and complaining (that's clearly not helping) is incorporating divisions in the arena and gauntlet.

For example one division (or league if you will) for the ones that still have money and one division for the ones that are completely out of money but have paid considerably throughout, so that they can keep competing and win and ultimately buy their way back into other divisions. It's just a suggestion.

Thoughts from someone who has been on the other side of the issue:

I do not envy the team. They're facing a ton of complaints, some legitimate and some not. Even I've been vocal about my disdain for certain aspects.

Right now I do think the game design is on point. We've got fun new characters, interesting new talismans and even some old content is getting some love.

Unfortunately the game(not the team, not the players but all the hardware/software) can't handle what all parties are expecting of it. With that in mind there are four (but really 3) paths to solve that.

1. We as players can make changes that allow the game to still demand what it does but without impacting the servers. This would mean taking turns, finding off times and in general just not trying to grind as much. (This is that one path that just isn't feasible)
2. We adjust our expectations. We accept that the servers can not handle our expectations and just live with the game as is.
3. The team makes changes hardware/software side that allows for the same demands but now has an architecture that can handle everything. Unfortunately this is really expensive whether on tech or manpower.
4. The game design changes so that their expectations can match the games demands. Easiest method would be tweaking events so that they either have more breathing room (an extra day or two or less requirements). However, with events sounding like the primary source of IAPs I would understand why this would cause hesitation.

And unlike the [4] paths in Mr. Frost's forest, together we can simultaneously go down all 4 paths at the same time and any distance on any of those paths will help the game as a whole

On the arena note: personally, I'd rather see a full redesign/rework or just have the whole thing scuttled. While there is more variety in teams as of late, it just doesn't feel worth it anymore as all the rewards can be earned faster and more reliably in other places in the game except for eternal frags which is long gone on the list of things I want/need.
Gauntlet has completely replaced that competitive itch and the fun puzzle aspect of facing a team that I didn't build.

Not sure what's the solution, some interesting things have been said here and on Discord as well, about the pros and cons of changing the gameplaying to make it more manageable server-side and funnier player-side.

I'm starting to believe that we went into a spiral that impossible to solve in a simple way. If we got heavy grinding is not fun and we start complaining about this as a "second job". If suddenly we got fewer events, less grinding or easy things to do, as result we start complaining about getting bored and that there is "nothing to do"...

I for sure know that doing 1200 runs on a dungeon isn't fun. But it is fun to find the best, or faster, or more practical way to beat a dungeon combining toons and talis. The puzzle game-idea of this game is awesome. But once you beat that puzzle (aka new dungeon) doing "X" amount of times in a row isn't super attractive... maybe we could find a way to tie both worlds? What if after we "show" that we beat a dungeon in auto 15 amounts of times we enable a new way of playing or different options... I'm still not sure how... but for instance I really liked this second part of greetings from... event. There were several options for completing the event, cosmos, frontier, arena... it is grinding but, I feel it opened the door for doing something slightly different any time. On the other hand... it was terrible for the servers... so maybe not an option in the future...

Still, not sure what's the solution...

Purchase content instantly rather than bogging down server and melting phone running same battle 8zillion times for days on end. Excellent thoughts troopers, save the game!

Thank you Patricie, well said!

I would like to see an un-timed aspect of the game. After the introduce a new event or character, then perhaps in a month or so, they can reintroduce the event where you can complete the same challenges to earn the character, but don't have a time limit. People can work towards earning the character without all the stress. People who really want the character when it first comes out will play hard, or make purchases. For the un-timed portion, you can still keep purchase options.

1. shutdown the whole game
2. recode the game
3. buy more server

Great post, Patrice. It really is the best of times and worst of times for the game. The content is excellent - new characters, dungeons, game modes. But, the time demands have really gotten out of hand. Between arena, gauntlet, raids, grinding, managing inventories, managing all the new limited time currencies, and strategizing around each event . . . It really requires too much time and focus day in and day out.

I remember the good ole days of trying to find every spare moment to play LotB just for the fun of it. These days, it's a struggle just to ensure I've completed everything in the game necessary for the day. Once that's done, the last thing I want to do is play the game some more (casually for fun), especially in these crazy times when real life demands are so high.

Best would be to eliminate time frames on events. Release all the mega event challenges all at once. Let players decide which one and when they want to accomplish them. Bring back missions for longer term rewards, keep achievements the way they are. All the time frames do is stress out players. Eliminate them, players would be less upset if there’s downtime of a few hours. Some random pop up events would be fun, but right now, the time structure isn’t doing anything positive.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by RobG-9641

Best would be to eliminate time frames on events. Release all the mega event challenges all at once. Let players decide which one and when they want to accomplish them. Bring back missions for longer term rewards, keep achievements the way they are. All the time frames do is stress out players. Eliminate them, players would be less upset if there’s downtime of a few hours. Some random pop up events would be fun, but right now, the time structure isn’t doing anything positive.

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Brilliant for so many reasons.

The game runs on the FOMO model, and it works in bringing cash, so limited time events are here to stay.

What is FOMO? Fear Of Missing Out. If a game is constantly updated with events and the like, this is the model they will use. It consists of exactly what says on the tin, If you don't get X NOW you may NEVER AGAIN get it.

It forces players to constantly log on and play (or let the phone overheat on the side in the case of Legacy) and drives up "package" sales in order to secure whatever event thing is going on (talisman set, character). Sure, the new Eddie could later on be added as part of a dungeon, but then you will only have one not two, and you need to complete a long grindy achievement series. Sure, it could be added to a store, but that means hoarding Iron coins/Frontier coins/Trooper frags instead of spending them on things that give you a longer term benefit or inmediate reward.

When will the Mongol Empress/Genghis Khan make a comeback? Maybe a heroic rotation once a year? Never? Secure them now for 5k ironite!
Didn't get the event toon or talisman? Buy the store pack! <

There are enough whales (I almost became one, got tired of the constant unplayable state of the game) and kids with their parents credit cards to sustain the game and the model. A new event will come and any outrage over past events will fade, or complaining players will just move on to another game. Social media accounts that only give praises are easy to have.

The game will continue to decline until it collapses unless they upgrade the servers and fix the bugs. No amount of new content will change this fact. With passives now reading like short stories further impacting the code and the continued release of new shiny objects, it just continues to make things worse and worse. No need to pay attention to the issues, just look over here at the new shiny objects, you know you want them. Meanwhile nothing is done to actually help the player base.

The biggest problem is the Server/s, they clearly can not cope with the bandwidth of millions of people playing the game at any one time. Now NF are either running this from a domestic fibre connection and expecting it to work it's not going to work well because domestic broadband is not designed for extremely high bandwidth or they are not running enough servers (are they even dedicated servers and not some high end pc expecting it to do the same tasks as a real server) to spread the bandwidth across multiple servers.
Same as anything internet related the more people accessing a site or files it's going to slow down cus the more bandwidth there is the cpu is going to be put under more load increasing thermals. the problems we are seeing will be due to one of the above.
So what's the real solution ? cut back on events, cut back on the grinding we have to do, cut back on how long we play the game for. Why should we do any of those.

There is only one real solution, increase the amount of servers running it

does anyone actually know how many servers they are running ?