Since the feedback regarding the Island Quests has been collected on all game worlds, we thought this is a good opportunity to share the results and insights on this topic. 😉
I’m sure you are eager to get to know what we will change due to your feedback. By the way, thank you for taking your time to rate the feature! Nearly 150.000 players have participated and shared their opinion.
Let’s start with the first rated statement:
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Statement
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Average result
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| In general, I think the Island Quests are a good addition to Grepolis. |  (4.28 / 5.00) |
The result is satisfyingly positive and we are happy about this. Nevertheless, there is always room for improvements. Since the Island Quests will become more meaningful with the release of the heroes, we hope the Island Quests will then be perceived even better.
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Statement
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Average result
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| The challenges of the Island Quests are too easy. |  (3.14 / 5.00) |
So, according to you, the Island Quests are slightly too easy to complete. However, the opinions were pretty mixed and this might be due to some Quests having a proper challenge in relation to the given reward, while others are plain too easy. We will make adjustments to individual Island Quests in the future. When releasing new Quests, we will compare them to existing Quests to get a proper relation between rewards and challenges right after introducing them.
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Statement
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Average result
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| The rewards are useful and interesting to me. |  (4.06 / 5.00) |
While we are happy that you generally like the effects of the rewards, we know that some rewards have been too powerful. That’s why “Improved Attack” and “Improved Defense” are drastically toned down with update 2.41. Due to a detailed analysis, we have noticed that “Improved favor production” is the most favored reward. This goes for early-, mid-, and endgame! We might slightly decrease its effect in the future (to have it more in line with the other rewards), but we will watch the progression of all rewards a bit longer before making further adjustments.
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Statement
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Average result
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| The spawn rate of the Island Quests should be less frequent. |  (2.37 / 5.00) |
Since the spawn rates heavily differ between early-, mid-, and endgame, this result has to be taken with care. We know that people generally enjoy the current spawn rate of 2 hours in early-game, but mostly end-game players complained that the frequent respawns of Island Quests distracts them from their common game. Due to this, the spawn-rates in early-game will stay unchanged, whereas the midgame spawn rate will be changed from 3 hours to 4 hours. The endgame spawn rates are adjusted from 4 hours to 8 hours. These changes will be applied with version 2.41.
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Statement
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Average result
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| I like the stories of the Island Quests. |  (3.72 / 5.00) |
Although the result is rather positive, my guess is that a) many people simply don’t like to read that much text and just aim for the rewards ;), and b) The stories are recurring, and thus, might become boring at some point. We know that we started the feature with a rather low amount of different Island Quests (21 to be exact). Quests will repeat a lot less as we will increase the number of different quests in the future.
We can hopefully add some epic quests as well which will involve mythical units, gods, and other cool stuff.
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Statement
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Average result
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| The Island Quest feature is easy to understand and use. |  (4.38 / 5.00) |
Good to know that there seems to be no major issues with the usability of this feature. 😉
However, there are minor adjustments to be made to make the feature easier to understand and use. For instance, the little quest icons in the town list are nice, but could provide some extra information (unaccepted quests, accepted quests etc.). Many players were also afraid that when sending units as support to an Island Quest that they will loose all of their units. In that regard, the “Rally troops” challenge is unclear and we need to make this more intuitive.
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Statement
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Average result
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| I’d like to have more variety regarding the Island Quests. |
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Rest assured that we will soon release another bunch of new Island Quests, and we will do that on a regular basis. However, we also need to think about new types of rewards and challenges. We have some ideas (like a challenge where you have to successfully attack other players X times), but we will also welcome your own ideas (Hey, look! There is a comment section below! ^^).
Well, that’s it with this DevBlog entry. 🙂 As a conclusion, we are proud on how the Island Quests turned out and it makes us happy that the feature is perceived so well. With your help and your feedback, we will know on where to put our focus … and how to improve the game!
No Comment for this Result.. Absence only still the heroes..and Grepolis is at the end.. 🙁
German player
I Think too 🙁
I agree with pretty much everything said above. I don’t think this feature as a whole is a great addition to Grepolis, but the improvements that I’m seeing planned make it at least convenient when using.
The rewards are the best part about it for me. I simply don’t have the time to read each quest (I think I’ve read a total of 4 or 5 maybe). The rewards are therefore what I look into. I think expanding the rewards should be taken a little more seriously than making more quest stories. I assume that the rewards are much more difficult to think up, design, test, and balance than the stories which only take a bit of creativity.
Hopefully we see more rewards coming soon. My thoughts would be to increase the frequency of some (because I don’t see a couple hardly ever) and decrease others such as the favor reward. Some ideas to consider would be auto militia reset (not that defense needs to be favored more…), raising market capacity, and unit speed increase for x amount of hours.
Hope to see improvements in this area. Good luck guys.
The spawn rate of the Island Quests should be less frequent. (2.37 / 5.00)
This was less than half(2stars), yet it got implemented. Shows there is no point in these polls.
We have more early-game players than late-game players. The early-gamers tend to like the spawn rate, but many hardcore players don’t, that’s why the spawn rate in mid and late game have been adjusted.
Being a hardcore player, i don’t agree. Most hardcore players have problems with the quests as whole not their spawn rates.
Also when you implement heroes, each island quest will give 6 coins. This means, if i get the quest for sending 180 units in a ls city, i lose 6 coins. Hardcore players will face additional disadvantages as their cities are more organised than early starters.
Add in it, the island overlords won’t have these problems, and they will be the first to get heroes, and with 2 def heroes in a town, they will end up as strong turtles.
You always have two options for each Island Quest, so you don’t have to pick the option where you send units to the Quest if you don’t own any land units in that town.
Island quest are a neat little thing.
It would be nice if there was an option to dismiss the quest that didn’t cost gold.
Some of the quest objectives are rather costless. “Weaker attack” doesn’t matter in your defensive city. Same goes for “weaker defense” which rarely matters unless you are under assault. The “waiting” quest is completely costless. The quest where you need to build something often cost so little that there is no incentive to not do the quest.
But the winner of the quest is the one where you attack a small army. That quest is abusive. Not only do you gain up to 100 BP at the cost 10~20 units (cheap) you also loot the shit out of the defender. I have looted 15k resources from just a single attack against fewer than 80 offensive units without a wall.
A few rewards you can add:
Gold, Culture Points, Mythic Units, Reduced cost of units, Increased Battlepoint gain.
The problem with Gold as a reward for Island Quests would be the option to exploit it. In this case, you could just create a city on every game world in order to get Island Quests with Gold as a reward.
In the future, we would like to offer slightly more premium options to non-paying players as well, but the Island Quests are not really suited for that.
The issue with culture points would be the starting phase of a world in conjunction with Island Quest rotation. This way, players could generate culture levels starting at day 1 of a game world. So if we would like to offer culture points, there needs to be a point limit before getting quests with that kind of reward. 😉
Mythic units and increased battlepoint gain are pretty likely though. 😉
“….but mostly end-game players complained that the frequent respawns of Island Quests distracts them from their common game.” This is a very common occurrence in all forms of gaming. Many players get to the end game, become legends in their own minds, believe themselves to marketing experts and proceed to whine loudly about any sort of change that makes them actually think or may threaten their dominance. Guys like MDGeist74 as a matter of fact.
You guys (the devs, I mean,) should listen to suggestions and constructive criticisms and ignore those not intelligent enough to adjust to improvements. Strategic options and the crushing of cookie-cutter solutions are always positive things in a RTS such as this one. “Me have more mens, me click attack, me wins!” is what this class of player is looking for. No thought beyond the old, tired, tried and true ways of doing things. That makes for a very boring game. You’ll attract a far more loyal fanbase if you offer something that requires a little problem-solving ability. Why do you think puzzle games like Tetris knock-offs are so popular?
You’re doing just fine. The addition of the Heroes will add another interesting dimension to the game. I don’t agree with all your changes (especially BUFFING manticores for the love of all that’s good and right…whoever thought that was a good idea needs to stop taking those trips to Amsterdam,) but I duly reported my criticisms where they belong; on the survey.
Don’t listen to the whiners, nothing you do is going to make them happy anyway.
I got distracted with my rant and forgot the main thing I wanted to say. If the Island Quests “distracts them from their common game,” then why in the world are they doing them? They can ignore them as easily as not looking at an ad on a webpage. How much more simple can you make it than that? Don’t like them? Don’t do them!
We can suggest you new quests?
Sure, if you wish to do so, just leave a comment. 🙂