Church building has made an absolute mockery of the ranking system for the last few years since the church was given unlimited levels. When you could gain in excess of one million town points from building alone, any points gained via forts and/or duelling were worth nothing in comparison, completely eliminating the need to participate in either of these activities from a town perspective. Given that said activities are the two major PvP elements of the game and therefore actually have an impact on more than one player at a time, I'd say it's far more conducive to game activity to encourage towns to focus more on duelling and fort fighting than spamming hour after hour of a useless job which benefits nobody other than the individual gaining experience points from doing so.
Most of what I wanted to say has been covered eloquently by Fafer, jaro and bosurker, but there are a few points I'd still like to comment on.
Let's be real, fort fighting is boring and a weak part of the game, with minimal rewards. Its time consuming and nearly pointless unless you are online for the battle. But Inno has basically made it the single most important part of the game in terms of "value".
I find it hard to believe that you aren't being sarcastic by saying this. That's how completely backwards it is. It's almost as though you've tried to describe building, but then replaced all references to building with fort fights instead.
Boring? Fort fighting is the only part of the game where you get to actually control your character in real-time, interacting with dozens of other players as you do so (I'm not including adventures since what little amount of enjoyment you could ever gain from them has been ruined by the toxic community).
Minimal rewards? Fair statement compared to the massive amounts of exp you can gain from building and duelling (if you choose to duel that way), but this kind of goes against the rest of your admittedly poor argument where you're trying to claim that fort fighting is now the only thing worth doing.
Time consuming? A full medium battle lasts about an hour and a half if it goes the distance. Travel time is negligible in today's game with the plethora of speed buffs available and tombola gear allowing you to cross the map in about twenty minutes. That's about two hours out of your day dedicated to the battle, compared to queuing nine hours of construction and waiting for them to finish.
Pointless unless you're online for the battle? I guess you could say that. Personally I haven't been a regular onliner in years and I don't exactly find my offline battles very fun. I still travel to each day's battle overnight though, since at least that way I might be able to help my team accomplish something, as opposed to if I spent that time building which would earn experience for myself and provide absolutely no benefit to anyone else. You tell me which is more pointless.
Only part of the game in terms of value? You're acting like being in the top ranked town is the only measure of success or "value" in the entire game. Even if that were the case, this update has done quite the opposite. It has taken church building, the influence of which on the town rankings was so ridiculously disproportionate compared to the other factors that it might as well have been the only criteria, and brought it down to a comparable level. With towns now separated by such small margins, even
member points have the potential to have an impact on the rankings, which hasn't been the case in many years. I fail to see how diversity in the rankings is a bad thing.
Building for a few players is kind of a passion. It requires a fair amount of dedication. For people who think it's setting 9 hours and logging off have never built. There are no cash or gear rewards. In no basically is saying "stop building". For people that really enjoy building it's a huge f you.
I've done many hundreds of hours of construction on many different worlds. My first two characters back in 2009 were builders and I was actively building as recently as two years ago. It literally is setting nine hours and logging off. Sure, now you can buff your energy and motivation to build around the clock, but that doesn't mean it takes any careful thought or forward planning. There are no cash or gear rewards, but it's the best exp rate in the game and that's the only reason anybody ever chooses to build their church.
Since exp hasn't been nerfed I fail to see how they've told anyone to stop building. In fact, the top ranked town on Colorado - which I see has been mentioned a couple of times already - is still the town with the most construction points on that world. However, where it would have been impossible for anyone to ever overtake that town under the old system, the new update has put the top 10 towns within 150k points of one another. Competitiveness is generally healthy, especially with the game in its current state where competitiveness has been all but eliminated by the ability to buy your way to the top in most other areas.
But don't come out and penalize a town for having a L300 church for this is exactly what has been done. It's taken 5 toons over 10,000 hours to get it there.
And when that starts counting for less or becoming a "penalty" relative to owning a fort and doing nothing with it or click click clicking to duel others, it's a real kick in the nuts.
In no way are towns being penalised for having a higher level church than others. They're just not being disproportionately rewarded like they were before. There's a huge difference between being penalised and having a reward reduced, so don't twist the facts to suit your argument which in all likelihood you're probably only making because your town dropped on the rankings.
Inno has just told us that putting in 3000 hours to build a church is less valuable to their game then setting a job for 3000 times that contribute 0 to a town being built. There used to be pride and value in building something, but Inno is sending a clear message it now means a lot less and maybe next to nothing. Wrong message to be sending.
I'm trying not to spend as much time replying to your posts as I did with white's. His opinion, though I don't agree with it, was at least presented with some reasonable arguments. This analogy, on the other hand, is utter rubbish. Jobs have absolutely nothing to do with the town ranking system and therefore this update. I don't know what logic you've applied to reach the conclusion that church building is now less valuable than jobbing because it now provides less town points than it did previously, despite jobs continuing to provide zero. There is still pride in building something, if you're really going to act like that's what's bothering you about it. The highest level church will still be the highest level church, and the town with the highest level church will still have the highest amount of town construction points. You can still see it in the rankings, you just aren't guaranteed the top spot overall anymore.
The rest of your posts continue trying to present the same flawed argument in a progressively more nonsensical fashion, so I'll ignore those.
Any mods even care about this continued abuse of hard working players in favor or the drive to generate more money?
Why not just put the game on facebook and be done with it?
What has happened in the past year?
1. Switch fort fighting skills from toughness and hiding to hiding and setting traps.
2. Include crafting and fort fighting rankings.
3. Release halloween tombola. $$$
4. Release xmas tombola. $$$
5. Release Valentine's day tombola. $$$
6. Release Easter tombola. $$$
7. Release 4th of July tombola. $$$
8. Release Oktoberfest tombola. $$$
9. Release Football gear (nugget set) $$$
10. Release Wright Bros. Set (nugget set) $$$
11. Release Prison Bros. Set (nugget set) $$$
12. Release 4 new questlines.
Disproportionate amount of time spent developing stuff to sell as opposed to developing the game.
A while ago it would've offended me to be accused of not caring about the direction this game has taken over the last three or four years, but I'm starting to reach the point where I don't have the energy to care. If you have a look at my recent posts you'll find that almost all of them are anti-tombola rants, or at least expressing some kind of anti-tombola sentiment. Unfortunately it's clear that there's nothing we can do to stop the tombolas now, but believe me when I say that long ago when we thought there was still a chance to turn things around I was one of the most vocal tombola opponents internally as well. It's even harder for those of us who have given thousands of hours to Inno as volunteers to see our pleas fall on deaf ears than it is for you as players.
Mods, do the devs even tell you this stuff ahead of time? Or just tell you to release the details of the update? Was this idea vetted or discussed?
Yes, they do. In fact, the players get to find out about these things in advance as well. There's something known as the Beta server, where this update was live long before it came to the real worlds. If you'd like to have your opinion heard before an update is released, you're more than welcome to register there and help with the testing. And, for the record, every mod and almost every reasonable player I've seen comment on the update in question has agreed wholeheartedly that it's a positive change.
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