Game Update - September 29th, 2021

[Aloizius]

Good afternoon. Probably good.

Dear developers, you are probably familiar with the statement that the game should be fun. However, your product has brought only hemorrhoids for the second month already. In early September, you nerfed rewards from Baphomet-10. The gaming community was outraged, and the awards were returned, albeit in a slightly smaller amount. But by the end of September, Baphomet's awards were again cut, and Amaterasu-10 was significantly strengthened. And just yesterday, Amaterasu became completely impenetrable. The rewards from Baphomet remain such that the resources spent on the sands of blood cannot even reach zero. How should all this be understood? If you want to get players to pay, you write about it directly, without the veiled phrases of "ecosystem change". Because players already have a cosmic butthurt from all these changes. Do you really want to leave a dozen or so highly-stubborn and well-earning geeks in the game who are ready to change teams for bosses every hour? And so it will be. The players are already leaving, and the experienced players. Because you're doing incredible s**t. But in this way you shoot yourself in the leg (and it would be better in the head).

Reminder to Earn Respect - Aloizius-1685

[BillLion]

Having given up on Amaterasu after the hot fix I resigned myself back to Baphomet. Did a couple runs and the rewards were total garbage. Definitely not worth acquiring any SOB unless it’s free and especially not worth my time.

You win, I give up on Raid Boss.

[Aloizius]

Of course, for 15 months to accustom players to freebies, and then abruptly start to wean them from it ... A very wise and far-sighted step (sarcasm)

Actually, I suggest everyone stop playing for a week or two. Let's see how the Frogs will croak. In the end, the players (that is, you and me) must have honor and dignity.

[Saigrim]

Clans killed the community right out of the gate. Created a bunch of little groups that became inclusive, killed the forums, and created this us vs them mentality that completely flies in the face of Maiden fan camaraderie.

Now they are sucking any value out of the whole crappy Clan system. So maybe we can scrap the whole system and go back to an actual universal community that shares a love of Maiden.

[Saigrim]

Note to the Nav Frogs. Not sure if you have any way in house of telling paying customers from non paying, but if you can and check the paying history, you’ll find mine stopped about the same time you started sucking the rewards out of game. ��

[zzzoron]

Clans killed the community right out of the gate. Created a bunch of little groups that became inclusive, killed the forums, and created this us vs them mentality that completely flies in the face of Maiden fan camaraderie.

Now they are sucking any value out of the whole crappy Clan system. So maybe we can scrap the whole system and go back to an actual universal community that shares a love of Maiden.

Hell yeah to that!

[AlexDeLarge666]

Great job ruining the whole raid feature. Shit loot and impossible bosses. At least it's one less thing to spend time on...

[Saigrim]

Great job ruining the whole raid feature. Shit loot and impossible bosses. At least it's one less thing to spend time on...

My thoughts exactly. Don’t even care at this point if our members quit altogether contributing. Doubt anyone needs a shit set of talismans for the umpteenth time at the end of every cycle.

[Sponholz]

My 2 cents about the matter...

First and foremost, for those that don't know/remember me, I was a hardcore, hardcore player of this game back until 2018, then I took a brake and didn't really played it for a long time, and recently I got back playing on a daily basis, much more light headed I must say, there is a ton of things to catch up still.

So...

About this issue, the main and most brutal mistake made was just a simple one:

Lack of communication.

Simple as that, with such a impactful change like this, at least a post telling the reason behind the change would be welcome.

For all that are saying that any change wasn't needed, I will honestly tell you this... Heads up, this may be a controversy opinion.

The name of the game mode is Raid which in all honesty is meant to be raided by more them just one character. Just like a, well, raid...

So, I can see why they changed, but the problem is that they went overboard with it, and with the lack of communication to make things worst.

I get it, no game is supposed to have a raid boss that can be constantly beaten by one char alone.

And to all the people saying that we should keep the strat/setup/talis/characters/whatever-more a secret. All I can say is, there is something called logs, they don't need a youtube video or keep checking the posts and discord servers for all the shenanigans, they probably know the number of moves made against Amaterasu, the time spent on all the fights, the talis setup, the buffs and debuffs applied, the chars used and a lot of other information.

Said that...

Lets stay calm and civil, we are all very passionate about the band and this game that have insanely good art style and a unique charm. A game that we all love to love and love to hate sometimes.

Bruce well said that there is a thin line between love and hate. You can call it the LotB line if you wish.

And as a final note, like Mariner, Tsuketa and others well said earlier, LotB is a game that when compared to the other collection games or "gacha" if you will, is indeed fair to the players, with a lot to do in the game, there is just a few games that are exception to this predatory gaming world, and LotB is one of them for sure.

Up the Irons!!!

[Tsuketa]

Well said, Sponholz.

Lack of Communication is definitely a problem here (and I'm not talking about the Ratt song). If I knew why they were making the changes they're making, I could probably better understand what's in bounds and out. And, knowing that would go a long way toward not living in fear of another hot fix that destroys everything.

Clans are still listed as "beta" which implies that they're still changing them. But they've been a thing for over a year now, so it's hard to take the "beta" tag at face value anymore.

As for it being a "Raid," I joined my first clan right after they introduced Odin. At that point, it felt like the way you're describing a "Raid." We all struggled to do even a little bit of damage, all working together to kill Odin once. I remember the first time we ever got all the way to Odin 10 and killed him. My son and I were strategizing on Monday afternoon how we could squeak out a few more points of damage before the reset. But, even at that point, working together to take Odin 10 down once got us a grade of F.

This has never been a "Work together with your team to take down the raid boss once." In the current incarnation, to "win" the raid, you have to take down the biggest of the bosses 500 times a week. (Literally.) If you have a full clan of heavy hitters, that's 17 times a week for each of them. If you allow even a few (6-7) new/growing people into your clan, it pushes the amount everyone needs to do over the amount of free Blood you get. And that's assuming you can kill Amat 10 in one go, every time, 20+ times a week. If you do anything less (ie Baph 10 instead of Amat 10, etc), the amount of Blood you have to purchase goes up.

To the degree that any of this is designed, they've clearly designed it around large numbers of people killing Amat 10 large numbers of times per week. So, it's confusing that they seem to be apposed to strategies that allow us to kill the bosses large numbers of times per week. And, it's clearly designed around us spending large amounts of ironite on Blood every week, but they keep breaking our source of that ironite.

It would be great if the devs and the players could have a discussion around how they want these raids to work, and how they expect us to go about participating in them.

To fight Baph 10, I've literally got 35 Crusaders, 30 Red Allied soldiers, 24 Yetis, and a bunch of Russian sisters. And, as a result, every battle, I've got to move at least 12 talismans and scroll most of the way through a 600+ character roster twice. Is that the intent? (Seems to be, since they haven't broken the "Bleed, 6 hit, revenge block" strategy yet.) Man is it ever a chore, though. Is it that they expect the raid to be a daily chore?

The biggest disappointment with the Amat changes is that we had found strategies that didn't require 5 minutes set up for 30 seconds of battle, duplicated 3-6 times a day. I was really enjoying having a relatively small number of characters (that were expensive to acquire, but worth it for removing the drudgery) that didn't take a lot of scrolling nor too much tali swapping.

Without the communication that Sponholz is requesting, we can't tell what's intended, what's a bug, and where we should spend our resources.