Situation of the Game

kuro90

Well-Known Member
Just to be clear, every feedback from your discussions or tickets is already reported weekly to whom in charge of the game development.
Even if you don't receive any answer here in the forum, it doesn't mean that we don't read your proposal; as a matter of fact, I report them every time to whom is in charge of taking decisions.
Sending new emails won't speed up any process of implementation of new features.
I understand that it's difficult for everyone to accept my statement as this is one of your most widespread complaints, but we, as support team, are already doing as much as it is in our hands to push forward your ideas to the developing team.
I'm counting on everyone to understand our position.

K
 

RaiderTr

Well-Known Member
Well, it's not that we doubt you Kuro, it's just trying to do more than what we do here, if we can.
I mean I don't know how many "Feedback tickets" are there but Forums are kinda dead thanks to years of ignorance, or whatever you wanna call it.
So I don't know if Devs/Decision makers would take us as "Majority"

That being said, people/lurkers mostly react when they don't agree :-D
 

Harsha..

Well-Known Member
For my part, I'm aware that many in the support team do play this game and like it, and the issues mostly lie with whoever has the final say in making decisions and directing the game development matters.

It's a maxim in corporate capitalism that the bigger a company becomes, the more soulless it becomes. I have read of many major corporations which have done considerable harm to people and the environment, but do nothing about it, because it doesn't make a difference to their balance sheets. We're talking about a browser game here - my feeling is that literally everything is going against any incentive to change - reducing player numbers, year on year drop in profits, more interesting things to invest in, the general dying out of the MMORPG genre. It's a fairly safe bet that the people we're trying to reach to in this company have not really played this game. If one of us were in charge of another "dying" game, for example, Grepolis, we would look at things from a purely economic & practical point of view, since we haven't really spent years playing it and we don't have a connection to that game.

Following up on that thought, innogames developing so many other games is part of the problem as well. A company with just 2-3 games will pay more attention to each game than one with many.

I have no regrets, though - this game was pretty good at it's peak, and no one can take that away. In this forum, I've got a total of 996 posts - spread over a decade - I've talked about all sorts of things in that time. As many others have pointed out here, this forum has effectively died out, and has pretty much became an echo chamber. So, after this post, I'll probably not bother commenting again on the game issues or give any more feedback on new features. It's much better to save our outrage for things that can actually change.
 

RaiderTr

Well-Known Member
Well I'm sure we all are aware it being (almost) all about profit at this point. But they are actually hurting their profit like this.
(I doubt they'd make an OP 'coming from future' set like Union Officer madness otherwise)

It's sad that seeing the wasted potential of the only proper (browser-based) West game.
Doesn't mean it can't shine again but.. There are things to be done..

Mobile version would be a good step for example.. It is a must at this point, imo.
They finally got rid of Flash and made HTML5 battles. Well it was a matter of life or death thing but still.

Then "proper" advertisement..
I mean at least get rid of that ancient video which doesn't even have anything related to Fort Battles or the other content of the game other than Duels.

Maybe then they'd have enough "incentive" towards other issues :roll:
 
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DeletedUser15368

Mfw inno release a fort battle balance patch
giphy.gif


An app would be cool but if you have a new enough phone, everything works fine on chrome thanks to diggo, so definitely more important to rebalance pvp first.
 
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DeletedUser15368

Battles, chat, scrolling around the map, pointer events all work as intended, on chrome at least. But you're right, you'll probably only hear about it from another player.
 

asdf124

Well-Known Member
Battles, chat, scrolling around the map, pointer events all work as intended, on chrome at least. But you're right, you'll probably only hear about it from another player.
Just legalize multi accounts. At this rate, premium gear is like having multi accounts :p
 

Slygoxx

Well-Known Member
Following up on that thought, innogames developing so many other games is part of the problem as well. A company with just 2-3 games will pay more attention to each game than one with many.
The following is my personal view and not that of InnoGames.

A bad company would. Diversifying profits is a great way to keep a company alive, putting all eggs in one basket is not. At some point, a game is just done. Not enough players to keep it alive and then it might be time to shut it down. A company that has other profitable projects will be able to stay and redistribute their employees and keep making games. A company might even be able to use some of those profits to keep the dying game alive a little longer.
A company with 2 or 3 games on the other hand might not have that luxury, unless those games are especially profitable like Fortnite, but even Epic has multiple sources of revenue. Maybe those other projects barely break even or aren't profitable enough to keep the developers of the other projects on board and they'll have to be let go.

Starting new projects too early could indeed be an issue, but I don't think that's what happened to InnoGames or The West. Besides that, even when Forge of Empires was in active development, so was The West. Forge of Empires has been around for more than 7 years by now, 7 years ago we received version 2.0.
 

Harsha..

Well-Known Member
Yes, that's a good point - diversity is important for a company's survival.

But, let me further clarify my point - there was a time when the primary parties in charge of this game's development cared about the game's long term survival. So, they made decisions and added features with that express objective in mind, keeping player longevity in mind while also keeping the game profitable. It's a balancing act and if a company is able to pull it off through long periods of time, they will be rewarded by strong player loyality and a constant revenue stream.

However, the general impression we (the player community) has gathered is that this is no longer the case. Innogames is basically focusing their energy on the other eggs in the basket, while this particular egg (The West) is left to rot with very little thought given to actually managing things properly. The reason I deduce for this happening is that first, Inno became a bigger company and then was absorbed into an even bigger company. We all know the inherit issues in a major, large organization - the leadership is unable to keep track of all of the projects effectively. As a consquence of this company becoming "too big", some sub-aspects, like this game have been left in charge of incompetent management, and this incompetence has bred further incompetence in the long term.

It's completely possible that with the right people in charge, some decisions could have been made to ensure the game is a lot of fun. is balanced, retains more players while still making massive profits. That needs intelligent leadership - and one of the problems of this company becoming "too big" is that the upper management hasn't really been paying attention to the mistakes of the individuals in charge of this game.
 

DeletedUser39467

well, I actually think that there is one major problem you are all ignoring, Adventures!
When I last played the game, adventures were lots of fun and were constantly being developed, however now no-one wants to play them and they are not going anywhere, its kinda similar to what raider has to say, the only players that play them now, (apart from the odd lvl 40-90) is lvl 150 nuggeteers that have lucile's lasso upgraded, deputy cheff's stuff, and the union officer's rifle. the main lead cause of new players not really playing adventures is becuase it is possible for two lvl 40 players and one lvl 90 player to be on a team against a team that is all lvl 150. this really needs to change. another problem is that inno relies to much on nugget purchases and it makes the game really unfair and unbalanced. I would be fine if inno found other ways to make money (eg. giving non-customized ingame advertisements for tech products)
i hope my opinion helps everyone.
thanks.
 

DeletedUser39467

Yes, that's a good point - diversity is important for a company's survival.

But, let me further clarify my point - there was a time when the primary parties in charge of this game's development cared about the game's long term survival. So, they made decisions and added features with that express objective in mind, keeping player longevity in mind while also keeping the game profitable. It's a balancing act and if a company is able to pull it off through long periods of time, they will be rewarded by strong player loyality and a constant revenue stream.

I 100% agree, its about Treating all of their games equally and not descriminating against players that cannot afford nuggets purchases.
 

RaiderTr

Well-Known Member
Well yes, Adventures is the most imbalanced part of the game.
I used to do and (kinda) like adventures but they are just becoming worse and worse thanks to more and more (upgraded) OP Premium gear, apart from the sucky matchmaking.

i.e You will often see some guy hitting barely 500 (if doesn't miss) and the other hitting 2k constantly
Let alone the immense Hp difference..
 
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Slygoxx

Well-Known Member
It's a chicken and egg problem, as I see it. What came first, the reduction of players or the reduction of development. I think it's the former, but some might see it as the latter.

It's not that we don't want the game to have longevity, but that major active development is not in the cards for now. For that we'd need more players, but maybe those will only come with more development. Other games are already larger, so we do indeed focus development on keeping those numbers large.
 

asdf124

Well-Known Member
It's a chicken and egg problem, as I see it. What came first, the reduction of players or the reduction of development. I think it's the former, but some might see it as the latter.

It's not that we don't want the game to have longevity, but that major active development is not in the cards for now. For that we'd need more players, but maybe those will only come with more development. Other games are already larger, so we do indeed focus development on keeping those numbers large.
Development isn't everything the game has as a problem to get players. It is more likely advertisement. Why is the-west not advertised in the other inno games? While every other game is advertised in the-west.
 

Slygoxx

Well-Known Member
Development isn't everything the game has as a problem to get players. It is more likely advertisement. Why is the-west not advertised in the other inno games? While every other game is advertised in the-west.
It is likely not worth the investment to advertise for the game.
 

RaiderTr

Well-Known Member
That depends on the extend of the advertisement though.

I mean, for example, how much of a "investment" making a video or two (and replacing the old ones with them) would take compared to what you can gain from 'em, especially when there is a new server on horizon?
 

DeletedUser15368

It is definitely not worth advertising the game in its current state, it would simply annoy people if they decided to try this out. Improve fort battles, maybe move everyone onto one or two worlds so there's enough players for PVP, and then we can talk about minor advertising.

It's a chicken and egg problem, as I see it. What came first, the reduction of players or the reduction of development. I think it's the former, but some might see it as the latter.
Most of my mates who left the game over the last 10 years did so because of issues relating directly to the gameplay - tombola madness and pvp imbalance. It is silly if you don't think there's a natural player bleed over time, but for this game, almost everyone cited the out of control tombolas, and most were quite sad to leave the community in the end. That's what The West does better than any browser game I ever played - the community. The players are incredibly loyal and love this game, all we're trying to say for the last couple of years is that it's becoming unplayable, please pay some god damn attention to PVP balance when you turn on the gambling simulators and P2W flash sales.

I also don't understand when development resources are being allocated, why we work on a crafting update instead of fixing broken core gameplay, but whatever, I don't actually know what the devs are working on because theres no published plan.
 
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