How to save Wartune, aka undo the nerfs

The player community is united in their opinion that patch 5.1, the "optimized" nerf-fest, where "R2 always puts players first", actually ruined Wartune. The situation is, all the critical problems could be solved really easily. You would say, yes, but they won't listen, so why bother. But there are some facts:

• They still spend a lot of time developing the game. A ton of new changes arrive with each major patch.
• They do have the capacity to react and correct things fast. Good example are: advanced sepu awarded instead of normal sepu in sylph enchant event; wild shop exploit; jewel hunt exploit; shadow soul exploit. When these became public, they corrected them in a matter of hours.
• They do have some people who possess significant intelligence. When I wrote a ticket about not getting reward for making resist crystals, a GM replied me, telling that they are checking the logs, and they will send everything I miss. The reply had everything I wanted to hear, so whoever wrote it, is a person with a potential to listen to the players.
• There is no human on Earth who is an enemy of his own wallet. True, stupidity is a widespread hobby these days, but just one highly ranked manager with some intelligence can be enough to turn the tide.

I know, lately a lot of people have quit, but I still believe there is a hope. I also believe there is at least one person from Wartune staff who reads my blog (if not, I will link it for them). So I will do a listing now what they need to fix to make the game playable again.

Tower of Kings
This was a good, challenging event with good rewards. Now it's completely unplayable, takes an hour to finish, and eudaemons are bugged like hell. Whenever I do it, I ask myself, why do I play this game? 
Solution: Remove the eudaemons from the opposing party. Simple, and easy to do.

Sylph Arena

A good rewarding event, nerfed into something insanely frustrating. Getting random opponents is one thing, but LOSING points for playing, and robbed of the previous reward is very frustrating.
Solution: Simply restore the old sylph arena module! With opponent selection, daily rewards, advanced sepulcrum reward. If thats not possible, at least put back adv.sepu reward, and give some +points for even losing.



Undo hot event nerfs

When the devs raised minimum reward from lvl 3 to 5 for cloth events and all the various gem events, they effectively finished off all players who started in the past 6-10 months, as well those who returned or had a pause. I don't know if there are any, but the goal of the game is to have some, right? Buffed up with some additional nerfs (cloth event awards reward only for current level, not previous ones; gem event gives each gem only once per day) these events are dead fish. The particularly bad thing is that the events were around for so long in their previous form, veteran players could use them for a long time. Nerfing these events were totally pointless.
Solution: Restore reward for lvl 3 and lvl 4 synths in hot events. Restore the unlimited gem reward for gem synthesis events. Restore giving rewards for previous levels in cloth, or increase the reward, because right now you lose more than you gain.

Recovery system
Simple, give back the old recovery system. Right now, the time required to play the game is a reason to quit. Recovery did one important thing: it saved players 20 minutes each day (ie. Dragon Invasion recovery). Now its either you play +20 minutes, or lose 12M gold.
Solution: Restore previous recovery system.

Gold for Atoll Boss
I don't mind the current Atoll Boss change, because AB simply took too much time. That I have to do it only once per day is better. But I do lack the gold reward. Together with the recovery nerf, and the gold requirement of mythic upgrades and holy forge, we have too much gold problem.
Solution: Reward gold for killing the sylphs and the boss. Previous AB gave 6-15M gold, per run. 200k per sylph, 2M per boss would be still much less, but it would be more than nothing.

Bound balens

The methods to gather bound balens in the game have been consistlently removed. The only thing we have remaining is the ultra-rare balen mine. Dimensions had so many nerfs, its not undone even with the last detect change (although it was a big positive step).
Solution: Either make balen mines more common, or make them visible objects.

Ancient beast shard
This might seem a small issue to the Wartune devs, but as time passes, this gets more annoying. Ancient beast shard is an item which you could get only for balens, or as bonus to recharge. And then, one day, the option to use it disappeared, replaced by Mount shop. So this is a kind of situation where you sell something to customers and then tell them it's not useable. This is a reason itself to stop cashing.
Solution: Add an exchange (or permanent synth) where players can exchange 1 ancient beast shard to 3 beast souls.

Soul crystal event

This is a thousand year issue, but it's still around. Like 2 years ago, there was a monthly event where players could exchange soul crystals to mount whips and runestones. Back them, players could make a high level stable this way. This is not availble ever since, so later players have no chance to catch up.
Solution: Restore SC event where you can get mount whips and other goodies. Even so, add more such exchange, or just add it as a blacksmith synthesis, where players can synth useless stuff into useful one. 10 sepulcrum to 1 advanced, 10 mahra to 1 advanced etc.

Lag in general

If you have a strong hardware, you can get rid of the lag in many areas, but not where it would be the most important, team pvp. Because its a server lag, a combat with 16 participants is impossible to handle it seems. The problem is, these are also the most challenging events: arena, titan war, chaos war, guild battle, cross-server guild battle. All these events are completely unplayable. Whenever I enter one, I think about quitting the game. (And ofc you can't skip all, these give the best rewards and the goal of playing).
Solution: Remove eudaemons from all team PVP battles. This seems harsh, but this is the ONLY solution. Seriously. Eudaemons will be still useful in 1 vs 1 pvp and in pve, but when it's the survival of the game or seeing eudaemons everywhere, I vote the first.

Final sylph evolution

This is an odd issue in this list, but I think it is equally important. The strong part of Wartune is that it always gives goals. Requiring 600 USD for reaching a goal made it impossible for 99,9% of your players, which is insanely frustrating. Issuing a direct cash value to this advancement instead of using items was a dire mistake. If I can't reach my goals, then I better quit. So this must be addressed. A solution is needed where players who made the purchase don't get frustrated (although there are not many).
Solution: there are many good solutions. Allow bound balens for the purchase. Give balen reward to those who already have it (via Sylph Tamer), and reduce the price afterwards. Replace the balen cost with an item. I know that their "solution" will be probably a free Loki seal for an 500 or 1000 USD recharge, but I don't think it's a good solution.

I'm sure the list can go on, but if they do "just" these things, that would be a great Christmas gift in Wartune, and would keep me playing, and even spending. I'm sure these things can be implemented relatively quick.

First impression of Wartune patch 4.0

When a patch bring a lot of new things, I am always excited and afraid at the same time. Excited since I like to explore, afraid since patch is most of the time more lag, bugs, and lately, massive nerfs. So here is my first impression after 1 day:

Good features

• Elemental forest mpd. This is a real challenge, with good rewards, I like it. Nirvana was a disappointment when it came out, we beat nm easily on the first day. We beat this as well, but it was hard (Please note that the buff from electro boss CAN be dispelled!)
• Farm. Farm looks like fun! More things to do, but does not require significantly more time. I only regret that energizing other players tree is more clumbersome.
• World boss. You can hide other players, a little help with the lag. Another, probably unintended feature... the 2^nd WB couldn't kill anyone. Was fun to survive again :) Same with guild boss.
• Improved login and guild wheel rewards, free mount in arena shop. It's cool :)
• Reduced tank time. Winner team needs only +5k points, so it ends easier (but it's easier to miss a kill and lose the chest).
• Item stacking. I have seen mount hoof can be stacked now to 9999, maybe there are other items too. Still don't understand why they couldn't do this to ALL items. An 5^th page is also handy, but it gets harder to oversee all my items.
• Necro and Purgatory maze now free. Great! Just be careful to unclick the crypt key box each time, because otherwise you lose 3 keys. Too bad these are not in the devotion list, that list is a good checklist to see what did I do and what not.
• Increased gold capacity. Another great change, now I can save up more gold for events like holy forge (if they ever add vulcan's hammer), and can still gain gold via town/gold mines.
• ToK chests give Eudaemon items as well. Loot upgrade for old events is always good, too bad they didn't do this for other events like sylph arena, gods descent, duel arena etc.

Bad features

• Dimension nerf. Dimensions now give much less resist bonus. I understand this was necessary so people spend balen on upgrading resist crystals further. Still, after the first nerf the bonus getting nerfed again is a proof of the designer's inability to do his job. I wouldn't be surprised that after people spend a truckload of balens getting lvl 10-12 resist crystals, resist itself will be nerfed. And a set of lvl 12 resist crystals giving the SAME bonus as a set of lvl 7 now.
• Dimension plunder. Now you can attack and steal other players dimensions. I did not try this feature yet, but it can generate a lot of hatred.
• Sacrifice. Something went very wrong here. I opened 50 dimension chests I saved up, and I did not get a single offering. I also wandered around in 3 entire dimensions, and did not find a single „Dragon Den” which is supposed to drop these offerings. So these are either super-rare (then why the daily offering limit?) or it's not in the game, and they will sell them for balens later.
• Sylph arena nerf. Now you get 20-50 points per win, instead of 200-250. But the point limits to reach the next category did not change. So reaching diamond is impossible now. Either points will not reset at the end of the week, or something went very wrong here.
• God's descent reward nerf. They should have upgraded the reward for God's descent since a long. Instead, they reduce it! What a twisted thinking...
• Eudaemons. Eudaemons brought even more lag to the game, and this is something we do not desire. A million new way to spend balens, while not making the game more enjoyable or fun, I dislike this addition.
• Goodies link. While I could enjoy this mini-game, the lack of reward makes it completely worthless. If you pay attention, you don't need the bombs (they just find a pair for you), and you don't really need the shuffle either (the table shuffles automatically if there are no matches left), still, time is a limiting factor. If you want to go anywhere, you have to keep buying stamina for balens. I got the 3^rd chest by spending 200 bound balens (the first chest which contain something what looks remotely useful), but it was really just a waste of time, I won't play this minigame again unless I have a lot of free time.
• Minigames (jewel hunt, fishing, goodies link, underground palace) alternating every week. One of the most fun things I still enjoy in Wartune is jewel hunt. I do not find fishing such a fun, but still, it can provide fashion cores, so I would hate to lose that. I see they are trying to reduce playtime for us, but this wasn't a good idea.
• Blood Inferno. I heard it became harder, boss stunning people for rounds etc... I couldn't check it, we are not doing BI because the reward sucks. So if it got harder, with the same loot, it's just a reason to continue avoiding it.

Also I am missing some things which I expected from a large patch like this. Namely, a way to finally get vulcan hammers, empire truncheons, advanced mahra and sepulcrum. Also, some way to exchange the useless items for something useful. Looks like we have to wait longer...

All in all, I do not have positive impression about this patch. The good things are shadowed by the nerfs, unnecessary changes, and poorly designed new features. I wish the developers would sometimes communicate with their players via votes and questionnaires. This way they could make a much better game.

Dimensions nerfed

Looks like Wartune can always outdo itself in making the game worse. This week we get the worst patch in Wartune's history.

First, they added a new fate system which is not using fate stones, but a different resource, "bead of influence". Obviously, we have 2 big problems with this addition. We have been collecting fate stones for many months, waiting for a new system, and now can't use them? Also, the "influence" stat suggests stun is gonna change. So you spent many months collecting XP to max out your holy seal talent? No problem, a casher can still stun you...

Second, they added a honor medal which can be upgraded. There is only one problem with this addition. It requires "Empire Truncheon", an undoubtedly super-expensive balen resource (which is not in the game yet). We already have enough resources which we can't use (dragon souls, mount hoofs, fate stones, soul crystals etc. etc) don't need something new that needs tens of thousands of balens.




The third "addition" is a HUGE nerf. Dimension resist bonuses are reduced severely, and the treasure chests are nerfed beyond recognition. It is a well known for experienced game publishers that nerfs (and big chances) are the best and easiest way is to get rid of your customers. I never see any nerf in Doomlord. There, if something needs to be changed, they balanced it by ADDING things, not by removing.
If resist was too much, they should have just added extra resist reduce, or a cap on resist.
I would say Wartune just lost at least 50% of it's income with this change. Personally, I will keep posting on the forum to reverse the nerf - at least about the chests.

And the worst thing is that this whole nerf was pointless.

• Probably some people complained that players of lesser BR could beat them due to their high resistances. But, the way resist and resist reduce works (people have high resist reduce) you can build high resistance only vs one element. So this added a strategy aspect to the game (finally). Either go with the masses, and keep using Hercules or Hades - which are far the best sylphs - and suffer in pvp, or use another sylph to beat the "resist turtles".
• Advanced dimensions take 4 more time to explore than an intermediate - and they have the same number of treasure inside. That is, you get 4 times less loot for your energy spent. The only reason why it was still okay to do advanced dimensions is the final resist. It's no more. I don't even want to mention expert dimensons which take 3 times more to complete than advanced...
• The nerf did not attain it's goal. Since they not only decrease the resist, they also decrease the resist reduce bonus as well. So people's resist will be still higher than the opponent's reduce (although the difference will be a little less, but not much).

But, you know what? The resist nerf is the lesser bad. But nerfing the chests was pure evil.

The amount of sepulcrum and mahra have been reduced. Glint of Magic and Magical Moonlight is no longer in the chests (this is the worst, imho!), Also no more star sand and shards (this can be bad for some beginner players, but with latest free hot events giving out evolved sylphs, prolly not so big deal). And the added soul crystal, fate stone etc. does not compensate for this.