Biggest update ever

[Apollo]

Introduction

I've been playing this game for more than 8 years and saw every single update getting implemented into the game. Because of that, I became one of the most passionate players in the international community of Shakes & Fidget, always working for new ideas that could solve some problems in the game or, simply, by just adding new content.

A few days ago I started working on a new idea that could solve two problems at a time. I will try to explain the best I can, with the help of visual graphics and every other element I believe is necessary for you guys to understand the full concept.

Current problems of this game

I'd like to start this thread by giving you guys some context about the current state of S&F.
We just got the version 3.0 that, according to the devs team, is going to allow Playa Games to implement even more and better new content into the game. Many people in the international community don't believe them (I can't blame them to be honest, the last few updates haven't been nothing special and the good ones usually come with some problems, in particular the Underworld HoF). However, since I'm such a passionate player, I saw this as an invitation for new and well-thought ideas so that PG can take them into consideration and, who knows, implement them in the game.

Moving on, after this brief introduction, these are the current problems the game is facing:

• Pets and Underworld Hall of Fame's are broken.
• Takes too long to do 320 alu every day.
• Huge monotony in high-end accounts due to the lack of content.
• Lack of good updates, which compromised the community's trust in the devs team.
• Way too many servers.

I'm not here to discuss the first two nor the last point of what I just said since

1. already did it.
2. this is not the place for it.

One of the greatest online games I've ever played (besides SFGame, of course ) is ...(I don't want to make any kind of publicity to it but if Leander sees it as an infraction, please delete the game's name). Is just like Shakes & Fidget: you create your account, you never lose it (in some strategy games you lose your account because you've been 'conquered' by other player or something like it), you just keep playing it each day, slowly grinding and unlocking new and more challenging content.
Does it take more and more time as you achieve high-end content? Of course it does! But here's the main difference between FoE and SFGame: in the first one, the more time and effort you've put into your account, the more content you unlock. That's not what happens here.

Okay, maybe it does: until level 250, when you unlock the final dungeon if I'm not mistaken. I'm currently playing on w27 and I reached that level after 2 months (and I'm not that big of a shroomer!) Can you, PLEASE, stop everything you're doing right now and just think about it? This is a long-term designed game, supposed to last years and years and years, and you unlock the final piece of content after 2 god damn months?!?!

Do you understand now why so many people quit and so many people prefer to start in new servers every single time one of them opens? After level 350, this game gets so fu***** boring! And that bring us another problem that we're facing right now: thirst time.

The main thing that attracts people in every game is the desire and ambition to unlock new content, to be the first to reach something, to be the first to finish something. However, we're missing this point.

After two months (or 6, if you never buy mushrooms), you unlock the final content this game has to offer you. You're supposed to play for 3, 4, maybe 5 years this game, and you unlock the final content in two months. What after it? Sure, you can tell me "yeah you unlocked the last content but you still have many things to finish." Of course you have! But that's really fast

• You finish tower at level ~340
• You finish portal at level ~400
• You finish dungeon 14 at level ~400
• You finish twister at level ~450

The only things worth to fight for at high levels are the twister and the shadow version of dungeons 14 and 15. And isn't that enough? OF COURSE NOT!!!!

You literally take 1 year to go from 420 to 450 playing 320 alu. One year. Let that sink for a bit. And, in 1 year, do you know how much of the remaining content you'll finish? One. You finish twister after months and months and months being stuck in one god damn monster.

Now imagine this: for 6 months, all you do is spend some money monthly to keep up with your griffin, potions and 320 alu/day, and try once or twice a day the dungeon you're stuck in. Ok? That's all you have to do. Maybe build one or another level of your fortress' building and feed your pets, but that's it. That's a damn monotonous routine. And the worst part of that is that you still have to spend money on it. That's why so many people leave servers and start on new ones, that's why there are so many servers. People don't like to play in high-end accounts. Why? Because there's nothing to do!

But, you may be asking yourself, how can we solve this problem then? That's why I'm here for. We can't just keep implementing one piece of content for levels 300, then 1 year later another piece of content for levels 350 that's going to last another 6 months. And don't even think about "well, what if the new content we release for levels +350 isn't supposed to last 6 months but, instead, 1 year?" No man, that won't solve any of this problem. That's only going to worse the montony already existent. No, here's how you do it:

OR you change the xp curve drastically so that level +400 players can level up really fast until levels 550/600, OR you release one huge update directed for high level accounts ONLY that's supposed to last for more than 2 years. And here's my idea for that.

Concept

In my honest and personal opinion, this are my three favorite types of content:

• Pets: not because you feed them until you reach a certain level where you can defeat the dungeon, no. But because you have an external mechanic involved in it, also known as "you can only unlock this pet after you achieve Y".
• Dungeons: the main goal of this game in its early months was just to upgrade your character in order to beat the upcoming dungeons. I believe this should remain the main goal of the game.
• Fortress: by far my favorite update, where you have more shiny and good looking buildings each time you upgrade them. The perfect example where you can see progress over time.

I already talked a lot about new fortresses in another threads, so I'll give it a break in here. I also talked recently about a new dungeon concept and I want to mix it with the final piece of content that I love: pets.

In here, you can see my timeline dungeon suggestion where I talk about a new world of dungeons, each one following a certain theme with new monsters and awesome rewards.

But why is this any better than just one dungeon? Because in here you can have, let's imagine, the 5th monster of the 4th (i mean, 19th lol) dungeon opened, while you also have the 1st monster of the 5th (oops, 20th) dungeon available. That allow people to be able to choose what dungeon to fight, which give another level of flexibility we only see in the first 9 dungeons of the game (this concept completely ends after it, even in the shadow world).

This also opens the doors to an huge variety of new things:

• you can earn more XP, which will boost your grind
• you can ear more money which will, once again, boost your grind
• you can even use this to use abandoned content like underworld soldiers to fight with you
• you can create new monsters with the new classes, assassin and battlemage
• you can unlock new and exclusive epic items by completing a certain number of levels, just like in the twister

I'm here for this last point: being able to unlock new content after achieving something in those dungeons. In particular, be able to unlock new pets.

Wait what, new pets?!

That's right. The external mechanic involved in the pets content I previously mentioned truly caught me, and I want to use it once again in the game. But how's this supposed to work?

First of all, the dungeons. You currently have the 'light world' and the 'shadow world'. The timeline dungeon would, of course, have to fit in the dungeons tab, in this way:

(open to view)

I re-used the pointers we have in the tower-companions menu (sorry for the left one, I'm a lazy person lol) and put them in the dungeons menu. As you may think, you click the left pointer to go to the shadow dungeon, and the right one to the timeline dungeon (since that new dungeon is supposed to be harder than the light world, I believe we have a good order here. Shadow is in the left side because, well, shadow -> darkness -> below = left side). Of course, if you decided to open the shadow dungeon, here's what you'd get:

(open to view)

I believe that by now you can imagine how the timeline dungeon pointer should look like...

However, I want to make this clear: high-end account's owners should feel rewarded for their effort over the years. So, for the love of God, the new 'timeline dungeon world' HAVE to be something completely new! Don't present us with the old-dungeons world with some new colors or something like that. Completely new graphics. You already did that with the new items on the 3.0 version (which, by the way, are completely awesome, congratulations!), so you showed us that WHEN YOU WANT, you can do a GREAT JOB!

BUT, how is this any involved with new pets?

Finally, the pets part

At this very moment, you have 20 pets for each element, giving us a total of 100 pets. Each element has 3 'class' of pets: common, rare and epic, and you can see that there are two different backgrounds for each element (I'll show you below the shadow one).

(open to view)

The 19th pet of the shadow habitat (and the 20th pet) have a different background, more worked and with more details on it. I believe this is supposed to represent a different level of difficulty and at the same time give the player a sense of proud for achieving such level. Sure, this would also work if every pet had the exact same background, but I think this was really well done.

Now that you know this, listen to my idea. After the 3 old classes I just mentioned, you would have two new classes: "legendary" and "ultimate".

My idea consists in 10 new pets for each habitat. The first 7 represent the 'legendary' class and, of course, the last three, the 'ultimate' class. Each class would have their own background following the same logic used so far: the more difficult, the best graphics.

How would this fit into the pets tab?

Just like we have in the new '3 dungeons worlds'!! POINTERS!!

(open to view)

In the habitat's "tab", we would have one pointer to the right where the new pet's menu would be displayed, where the 5 habitats would make their presence, each one with 10 new pets.

How would each pet be unlocked?

This is the main part of this whole thread: through the timeline dungeon!
The rare pets require the player to achieve a certain milestone of the game in order to unlock it. These 10 pets would require even harder milestones, where the timeline dungeon would do its job (but, of course, these milestones are not only related to this new dungeon. More next).


How would the new pets requirements and the timeline dungeon work together?

We have 10 new dungeons for 50 (10 in each element) new pets. My idea was to implement the hardest requirements in the two last habitats (shadow and fire), since they represent the two least important stats (of course, if you are a warrior your least important stats are dexterity and intelligence, but we can't just make different requirements for each class). You would get something like this:

• 10th pet of the shadow element: finish timeline 8th dungeon
• 10th pet of the fire element: finish timeline 7th dungeon
• 10th pet of the earth element: finish timeline 3rd dungeon
• 10th pet of the light element: finish timeline 2nd dungeon
• 10th pet of the water element: finish timeline 1st dungeon

How would other requirements work?

Here is a small list of some requirements that could be implemented in this:

• Fortress level 20
• Gem mine level 25
• Underworld level 15
• Underworld's keeper level 600
• Finish twister
• Finish 14th shadow dungeon (really tough one)
• Finish 15th light dungeon
• Finish guild portal
• Finish 80 guild raids
• Have, at least, 10 other pets at level 200
• Be above level 425

Bonus for each pet?

In the current pet system, if I'm not mistaken, you get +1% for each pet (of one element), +0,5% for each level-100 pet, 0.75% for level-150 pet and +1% for level-200 pet. Since these new pets are way harder to get and they will take so long to acquire, I'd like to suggest more bonuses:

• +2% for each pet
• +1% for each level-100 pet
• +1.5% for each level-150 pet
• +2% for each level-200 pet

Are these bonus high? Yeah. But please don't forget that this content will only be available for +350 accounts, which need every help in their stats as possible in order to defeat the upcoming tough dungeons. Besides that, these 10 pets are supposed to take ~2 years, AT LEAST, to unlock each one of them (water, light and earth habitat. Fire and shadow will take longer because of the 10th pet).

You may think "alright, but this may contribute to overpower warriors over scouts and mages, since warriors will get their last pet faster than other classes". That makes sense, but the main goal is for the first 3 timeline dungeons to have a similar level of difficulty - they will be hard compared to the previous dungeons, but between them they will be really close).

I think I don't have to say that the new pets are supposed to be completely new, this is the only way for high-end players to be rewarded for achieving such level.

_____________________________

As usual, would like to hear everyone's feedback in order to improve this suggestion. Hope y'all liked this and let's make this a great game!

[Gully]

Very nice!

But why should a company like playa spend money in order to give us end game content when "old players", as you said, spend money on new servers?
Every new server is a gold mine for Playa, that's why they open a new one every 2 months and never give us good end game content.


PS. this part:

How would other requirements work?

Here is a small list of some requirements that could be implemented in this:
Fortress level 20
Gem mine level 25
Underworld level 15
Underworld's keeper level 600
Finish twister
Finish 14th shadow dungeon (really tough one)
Finish 15th light dungeon
Finish guild portal
Finish 80 guild raids
Have, at least, 10 other pets at level 200
Be above level 425

Too easy in my opinion, i'm level 444 and already have 9/10achievements...

[Shnitel]

Your idea is pretty interesting, I had another concept in mind about pets, you can find it here : https://forum-int.sfgame.net/showthread.php?t=7658

But, overall, we really need something new next year, when 3.0 arrive on iOS and Android and change the entire game for everybody.

[katastrofeas]

Originally Posted by Shnitel

we really need something new next year

There is also an update coming this December, tomorrow we will have news about it.

[Apollo]

Originally Posted by Gully

Very nice!

Every new server is a gold mine for Playa, that's why they open a new one every 2 months and never give us good end game content.

Okay, but now try to think why that happens. Why so many people level up their accounts until level 300 and then delete the account to restart once again on a new server? There have been players since 2009 that only play for the ranking (and every time a new server opens, they want to be there so that they can achieve their desired rank once again), but the majority of the community plays for content. They don't care (or maybe they care) about the ranking, but the main thing that attracts them to this game is the desire and ambition of finishing high-end content. However, if there's no high-end content, then that desire and ambition disappears: the game became monotonous and they simply start again, that's why new servers are always filled. (in the beginning)

Originally Posted by Gully

Too easy in my opinion, i'm level 444 and already have 9/10achievements...

The hardest part about creating new content isn't the concept itself, instead is the "hidden" mechanics involved, in this case the requirements. The problem here is that this content is supposed to begin at levels 350, and be "achievable" at levels 380, slowly increasing its difficulty until levels 475-500. I believe SOME of these requirements are OK for the early stages of that content, but what do you think about late stages? What do you suggest?

[Gully]

Apollo, i totally agree with your point of view.

The only problem is that firms work for money.
They dont care about why someone is playing or how he/she feels about the game as long as they are playing.
Shrooms spent on a new server are way more than shrooms you would spend on some end game content.

I play also on w27, we all saw how much the top players spent!
You can not create any piece of content for 400+ that will make spend the same amount of money to a such large player base.


Therefore, the only new updates we are gonna see in the future, (if playa is rational) will be new classes (ie. a mix between mage and scout) or things you can do in the first 2/3 month of playing the game.

Revenues from new servers are huge, immagine now that the company that acquiring playa will expand the playerbase to their other games...

Levels 400+ will only get gem mine 30, golden pit liv 25, pet liv 300 and maybe a new dungeons every year.

Is this sad? YES
Things are gonna change? Probably NO


I really hope to be wrong...

[Arturu]

Exactly as above stated.

Playa aims for people to start over on new servers, because thats where the main competition (and money!) is.
So the best thing for them is to create a sub system (like Fortress) that starts at early levels but goes on for a year or two. This way high level players have something to do for some time.

It is in their best interest to NOT create great content for ONLY high level players.
The sweet spot is to give enough to high level players so they won't quit and make the early game as amazing as possible so that people will want to reroll.

[Acclamator]

I agree with most of what you guys said, but I'm not shure that playa makes the most money with how things are. I know many players that stoped playing on old accounts to start new ones that wouldn't have done so if playing on old accounts weren't so borring. Also I know loads of players that spend 1000s of shrooms in old accounts that stopped playing at all because they felt the game was getting borring and had no faight that someting is changing. From what I know quite some high spending players are on the brink of doing so too (me included).

I lead a top 1 guild and have good connections to the other guilds and players on the server so I guess I have quite a good view of the situation there.

customer loyalty is key for most branches, to hold an existing customer is quite more easy than persuading a new one in saturated markets, so most companys concentrate on it in first line, but playa sucks at holding customers. I'm pretty shure that this is not the business optimum.

[Apollo]

Originally Posted by Arturu

So the best thing for them is to create a sub system (like Fortress) that starts at early levels but goes on for a year or two. This way high level players have something to do for some time.

I believe this makes some sense, to be honest. The problem here is that it would only allow room for "external" updates - like fortress and underworld. "Internal" content (dungeons for example) would have an hard time in this game since you just can't create a dungeon that goes through early and high levels. At least, a single dungeon - timeline dungeon could be a solution for this. But there are so many variables that need some deep thoughts: what's the current definition of 'early levels'? How long should this type of content exist? And how would it benefit high-end accounts?

Because we can't just give new content to early levels where they can get gold/xp rewards, that would only decrease the gap between old and new accounts.