Announcement Posts, Sneak Peek Posts, Monthly Videos… they’re all the same to me. They’ve got just enough information so that people won’t say that they’re lacking in information, but IMO they’re basically sales-pitch drivel.
I play a bunch of other freemium games that all give regular updates about balance changes and upcoming features - in this case, regular ranges between weekly and monthly. One game in particular, has devs communicating directly with players through their forums and recently launched an “in-game currency for bugs” initiative, where players who reported bugs are reward with a small donation of the premium in-game currency. This same game just recently released a large balance update for ~25 cards/heroes/whatevers at the same time. These changes includes nerfs & buffs and were communicated about 6-8 weeks in advance. In that time, feedback from players resulted in changes to some of those nerfs before the update landed (planned nerfs were too severe, and they were reduced). What’s more, the game offers a 100% “sell” rate for the next 2 weeks following this change AND offered players the ability to “buy back” any cards they had ~ever~ sold which were on the buff list - all they had to do was raise a support ticket and CS was able to run a search to see which cards you had sold and how many and players bought back for 100% of what they had originally sold those cards for. They advised that tickets would be resolved slowly due to an increased demand for CS due to this buy back offer. I raised a ticket over the weekend which was still resolved in less than 48 hours.
The comparison to MPQ is just worlds apart., but I’ll let you guess which of the two games I spent money on last month.
Demiurge and D3 specifically obscure information from players as much as possible. It’s a technique designed to keep the player’s environment “unstable” - which is used to encourage spending. That’s not speculation, that’s something discussed in Al’s famous venturebeat articles.
I’d love “long-range” feature announcements. Perhaps not specifically “we’re definitely going to do ~thing~ in the next 6 months” type of forecasting, but a monthly “State of the Puzzle Quest” type discussion which covered dev feedback & thoughts on current meta and some small-scale forecasting would be good. Something like:
AP acceleration is still a really hot meta for the 3*-4* transition tier, particularly with Iron Fist able to quickly accelerate Black for characters like XF Wolverine and HB Iron Man. Iron Fist’s fragility definitely helps restrict this team into the full 4* tier, so it’s not too much of a concern, however it is restricting team composition. We’re currently tossing around two different reductions to Iron Fist’s power - one is to reduce the damage from his Passive attack tile, and the other is to increase the cost of his Purple from 5 to 6. As a third option, we’re also considering a buff to AP steal in the 3* tier. Tell us what you think?
This shows an awareness of the game that’s being played, and an understanding that even small changes can effect the meta significantly. In any case, this sort of regular discussion is worthless if they’re not also providing frequent and small balance tweaks along with them. It’s been, what, 6-8 months since the last mega balance changes? How much has changed since then? And worse, what was expected to change as a result, but didn’t?