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.

Wartune Patch 5.0 analysis

I wanted to wait with comments of the new Wartune patch until I see it with my own eyes. Yes, there is some good stuff - but for some unknown reason, the developers main hobby is still nerfing. So, let's see what are the good changes, are what are the bad ones.

The good changes

Tara temple
An easy new weekly dungeon, with very nice reward. Everyone loves this addition.

Hell mode

A new challenge is always cool, and the way reward is given is really great, you can choose which item you need, and do that hell dungeon. We tried hell eternal forest, and could do it on 1st try, but the first boss was really hard, we could barely beat it. (Two people with 2.7M BR, two with 2.2M).
Update: The 2nd day was not so cool, we got ALL 3 boss at final stage... Laughed, cursed a bit then left. New patch = new bugs.

Atoll boss time displayed
A great help, now we can see when the AB will spawn. A needed addition.

Eudaemon arena
A new event with decent loot, I like it, although it has 2 drawbacks: increasing game time again, and it's a fixed time during the day, easy to miss.

Patch notes
Now you can read the patch notes ingame, a very useful addition to see the summary of changes.

Fast sylph change

Changing sylph assigned to player/eudaemon is now more easier, a very convenient thing.


Sylph skills

Now you can forget a sylph skill - finally! Too bad it costs 300 balens, but at least it is possible. Also, now there is a Learn skill button which can learn you a skill for free. Too good to be true? Yeah. Because you learn a RANDOM skill this way. Ie. this feature is totally useless; unless you try to learn the 15000 balen skill for your Odin, in which case forgetting the wrong skill multiple times is still cheaper. The developers managed to mess up even a good feature. Shameful creatures.




New fate ability
New things to improve are always cool. So we have a new fate skill to improve, via weekly pvp chests. But why we can't use fate stones there? Or at least allow us to exchange it for something useful? I got 25000 of them...

Equipment refinement

Now, after refinement, you can't get worse stats. It can change - like you can get a charisma10 from a block10 - but level will not decrease. An awesome change, but it might bring grief to those who already upgraded multiple equipment to mythic with level 6-9 refinement stats; or used all their purify crystals / refinement crystals / elite refinement crystals earlier. Wartune is like the stock exchange, you never know what comes, raising you to the heaven, or throwing you down to hell...


The bad changes

Sylph arena

This event has been nerfed horribly. You can no longer choose your opponent - it's totally random. Ok, not totally: it seems there is a higher chance that you get a particularly strong opponent. My sylph team has a total BR of some 420K, still, 1/3 of the time I get an opponent with similar or higher BR, what a coincidence :) They also joined the groups. There is only one group now for Kabam, R2Games etc... So 99,99% of the people have no chance to rank anywhere. Also they removed the daily reward (why???), and it looks like no more advanced sepulcrum in weekly reward... Just this change alone is trashing all the good changes. Their patch message is particularly funny:
"Greatly improved matching and rewards."

Recovery nerf
In Wartune's history, this nerf is the one which I have the most difficulty to understand. Recovery was a good invention: each day, you could choose an event you skipped, and you could claim at least some of the rewards. Dragon Invasion was a super-boring event after a while, with useless rewards. The only thing we did it for was the 10M gold: about 25% of our daily gold income. With recovery, I could claim this 10M gold. Now I can choose, spend 20 more minutes each day, or lose this 10M. A completely senseless nerf, it's only goal is to get rid of players.

Sky trail

There are so much to do in Wartune, it's just beyond me why they need to "fix" something that doesn't need to be fixed. Sky trial was just a good progression event. The only problem with it was the obsolete reward - and this is the only thing they didn't change. You still get sepulcrum, star tear, star sand etc. the same crap as before. With previous sky trial, once you went far enough, it took you just one click to get a handful of rewards each day. Not any more. This change is a FAIL.

No more crypt keys
Crypt key was a rare drop in dungeon blitzes for your skeleton key. In fact, since we maxed out XP since an eternity, this was the only point of using up the stamina, getting crypt key. An earlier patch has nerfed this, but luckily, there was one dungeon remaining which still had the crypt keys: Buradoth's Grave. It is no more. So effectively, besides losing the 10M gold each day from recovery, we lose 75 bound balen each as well. On a side note, you can't get any more refinement crystals either from these blitzes. So if you didn't refine your equipment to max, bad luck. You can't do it anymore.

Purgatory maze reward changes

Now in purgatory maze we get only vulcan hammers and vulcan stoves instead of the previous loot (moon dust, divine stones, resist crystals etc). Actually, on the short term, these are positive changes, since everyone needs a lot of these hammers/stoves. But. Narrenda/Tara already gives enough of these. Even if only those dungeons would give them, people would still max out holy forge in a few months. But with Purgatory reward change, everyone will have max holy forge in no time. Being better in Narrenda and killing 3 boss instead of 1 will have no meaning. And when everyone maxed out holy forge, and trying to build Odin, Freya etc. which requires thousands of moon dusts, then you will understand why this is a bad change.
Please also note that Purgatory got more difficult: so if you couldn't do it to level 30 pre-patch, now you won't do it for a while.

Resist changes
The resist numbers has changed totally. I'm pretty sure this hides a nerf too, but the time was too short, I couldn't figure out how. We shall know soon enough, though :) I suspect caps has changed (max damage bonus reduced from 20% to 10%, maybe reduction is capped too, no clue yet). if you have info, let me know!

Kitten club

Advertised as a new feature which can make players rich, this feature is a huge disappointment. After buying the 5 furniture, and getting cats 2 times for them, I had a netto 80k gold profit per day for a lot of clicks. Nowhere near to compensate for the 10M lost from recovery. And this is not the only problem. Tanks, surfboards and now this kitten crap is very alien to a fantasy game. It's not even funny. It's just disgusting :(


Lag
Don't be fooled by the patch message. Both the game's CPU and memory usage has INCREASED. 2 days after the patch, I still see swirling mists, more graphics, less cached. A good test was doing some arena runs. Previously, when I had 4 vs 4 in arena, the game became slow-motion, but when I was 1 vs 4, it was okay. Now, with 1 vs 4, it became more laggy than before, even so, I saw a new bug: the cursor started blinking around, I had to use hotkeys because the mouse is no longer working when many players cast spells. Today was Titan Wars. 4 vs 4, completely unplayable, while it was just slow before. So the lag got WORSE.
And the big "black screen after refresh" error they added with last patch? Yes we still got it! And wont go away, ever.
The biggest fail here, showing the complete incompetence of developers is what they did with the damage numbers. The game really died with the introduction of eudaemons. In 4 vs 4 battles, everyone AoEing, they displayed 200 numbers at once, freezing the browser. And their answer? Changing the font, instead of removing them entirely or adding an option to turn them off.

Conclusion. This patch is just another nail into the game's coffin. Again, they increased the lag, again, they increased the time needed to play the game, again, they nerfed rewards. Yes, they did a few good things too. But remember: washing the dishes for your mom will not undo a crime of murdering someone.

Improvement suggestions to Wartune

I wanted to make this post about Wartune since a long time. Again I see a patch message with many new things (some of them we wont see for a long time, though), but it seems the developers don't focus on things the players really need. Reducing the lag, reducing the required game time, and fixing the reward system. Please let me know if I missed something important!

Simple but vital additions:

- Allow players to delete sylph skills.

- Allow players to delete eudaemons.

Reduce lag:

- Decrease the size of sylph sprites to that of the players. Big looks nice but causes a lot of lag.

- Remember a player's preference of not showing players in cloud city, atoll boss, world boss. Also add this option to guild boss.

- Add a settings where players can turn off / reduce animations during battles.

- Add a settings where players can turn off mount graphics in guild battles and battleground.

- Allow players to turn off display of eudaemon damage.

- Remove eudaemons from 4 vs 4 battles.

Reward / inventory issues:

- Add blacksmith synthesis: item: 10 fate stone to 1 bead of influence.

- Add blacksmith synthesis: item: 10 soul crystal to 1 mount training whip.

- Add blacksmith synthesis: item: 50 soul crystal to 1 soul seal.

- Add blacksmith synthesis: item: 10 mount hoofs to 1 vulcan hammer.

- Add blacksmith synthesis: item: 10 dragon souls to 1 vulcan hammer.

- Add blacksmith synthesis: item: 10 soul seal to 1 empire truncheon.

- Allow mount cards which the player already possess to be synthed for beast shards.

- Allow level 1 cloth to be stacked.

- When using heaven horn: if the player already have 3 evolved sylph, replace star sand and star tear with moon rock and moon dust, and the rare star sand with divine stone. If the player already have 3 orange sylph, replace sepulcrum and mahra with advanced sepulcrum and mahra.

- Allow sylph to use more xp via sylph xp scrolls. Use it as „talents” which increase sylph damage / healing by a small amount.

- Improve reward in sylph expedition: replace sylph xp scroll and sylph equipment shards with advanced sepulcrum, advanced mahra, belssing of god and gift fo god at later bosses.

- Improve reward in goodies link, at least at stages which can be accessed only with balens.

- Improve reward in sylph arena, advanced sepulcrum, advanced mahra, blessing of god, gift of god for top players.

- Improve reward in Bloody Inferno and add this event to the recovery exp tab.

- Guild boss reward system modification: give players fears of fang for the daru they donate. (1 fang for 50.000 daru donated).

Make VIP (and exp) useful again:

- Revise current talents, make them more useful, and increase max level to 100 for each.

Game time reduction:

- Allow sylph expedition to be blitzed to max level – 5, not max level – 10.

- Allow players with a level 50+ tank to claim a victory chest and silver rune box under recovery exp if they didn't do tank the previous day. Give gold to level 65+, diamond to level 80+ tanks.

- Allow players with a purple artifact and halidom claim 5 divine energy and 10 pure refinement crystals claim under recover exp if they didn't do mpd the previous day.

- Allow players to purchase basic dimension essence for 300, intermediate for 600, advanced for 900, and extended for 1200 energy.

- Allow dimension battles (normal monster and reaper) skipped and completed for VIP players.

- Reduce the daily arena matches to 10.

- Allow players to energize all trees of one page.