Grepolis United: Beta Focus Group was launched
The Beta Focus Group received their first test missions to help the team with the overall quality of the latest update. We are also starting the first discussions about future changes with the members of the group.
In case you don’t know what the Beta Focus Group is: each market will be represented by up to 2 very active players to get in touch with the development team. They will give us player-based feedback on the latest changes and they will greatly help us to improve the quality of new updates.
Test the heroes feature!
Now it’s your time to head over to Beta and sign up to play on “Sandbox 2” to test the latest changes of the heroes feature and give feedback. “Sandbox 2” is a common game world in a testing environment and there are currently no plans to close this world any time soon. You will start the game with 5 towns on this game world.
The whole feature itself will be officially introduced in February, but only on a few markets and only on new game worlds (your current game world will stay unaffected). The remaining markets will follow a few weeks later.
Current progress
The current sprint is dedicated to implement the “fullscreen town overview”. The development of this feature is planned to take around 4 weeks. The “fullscreen town overview” will display your towns in more detail and not in a window anymore. We will also introduce a new intuitive and enhanced construction mode. But don’t worry, the senate window will still remain in the game with its current functionalities.
Weekly Stats
The following stats are for activity between January 23rd and January 29th:
Bugs
- 30 bug reports have been created this week
- 12 bugs have been resolved this week
- 5 bug reports have either been a duplicate or invalid
- 28 bug reports are currently unresolved
Bugs hot-fixed during the week
- N/A
Support activity
- 5836 tickets opened
- 6242 tickets answered
- 4.21 hours average first response time
- 202 tickets rated
- 3.88 rate average (of 5)
“The whole feature itself will be officially introduced in February, but only on a few markets and only on new game worlds (your current game world will stay unaffected). The remaining markets will follow a few weeks later.”
does this mean the heroes won’t be implemented in already existing worlds? Or does this imply that they will be added to existing worlds when the ‘remaining markets’ are updated?
With the current plans we will not enable the feature on existing worlds, as most players didn’t want to have their running worlds affected, as it seems.
So this was a decision due to community feedback.
Oh well i’m disappointed in the community now, especially since i noticed most people complain without even trying them out.. (on NL market)
will the rebalancing be limited to the new worlds as well?
Probably yes. However, we are not sure yet about the rebalancing (which worlds it will affect). There are also some complicated technical dependencies.
When I warned CZ players on this fact, they were angry…in my humble opinion, maybe will be better, if you launch surveys on each of worlds… or make surveys on game forum and administrator will send results to you.
I support this, I think that each existing world should have a choice/survey.
Being a big fan of this feature I have been waiting for it’s arrival on the official servers ever since it was introduced here.
Does this mean that Sandbox 2 will close as normal worlds do?
Yup! 🙂
Thanks!
🙂
What will happen with Hiperborea world, won’t be receiving the Heroes. Will it be a equivalent Hiperborea for the Heroes?
Honestly, this is a pretty good question! 🙂
We do not plan to enable the heroes-feature on current (hyperborea) worlds. But I guess there will be new hyperborea worlds somewhen with the heroes enabled. Although you will probably have to be a little patient for this to happen, sorry.
Can not be possible translate the actual Hiperborea worlds to the new ones? I’ve been playing in one of this world for more than a year and wouldn’t like to have to start anew.
Also I don’t know if you have any plan for the Hiperboreas in order to make them a bit more competitive. As a player that can not be “committed” 100% of the time to grepolis this worlds with no conquest are good. I played the normal ones but ended loosing all my cities because I couldn’t play 24/7. But maybe yo can introduce to the Hiperboreas something to make it more competitive. Something like the missions we have in the islands, but with abandoned city. Maybe give some bonus to the player/alliance that conquer the city, for example with an extra culture level, or production bonus for several weeks like the ones you had for the Christmas event.
Somewhen in the next months we will be redesigning the world wonders (or replace them with something new and exciting) to improve the competitive spirit of Grepolis. 🙂
About the heroes feature: Technically, it is possible to turn it on for existing worlds. But that doesn’t mean that all players would welcome such a major impact on their current game world.
Can you current time say if you have other features planned and how many if possible, before redesigning the world wonders?
Before we will revamp the world wonders, we will release the fullscreen town overview, a new tutorial and some smaller features like the alliance finder.
There is no exact date for the world wonder revamp though.
Thanks for your answer.
Just another question, the rebalancing when it comes, will be for all the worlds or just the new ones.
We do not have final plans whether the rebalancing will only affect new worlds or not. This is a highly technical question as well.
There is also no date so far, but we can hopefully tackle the topic at the beginning of Q2.
Greetings to the Developers!
I’m very sad to know that the heroes will only be available in the upcoming worlds (servers).
Many players became upset about this in many worlds.
Would you please consoder to open a debate in all existing worlds about this? I think it would make your work easier,too,having the heroes in all worlds.
That would be more simple for you, as far as I know, people don’t want to sign in in to new servers/worlds and leave the old behind becuse of this.
Thank you for answer in advance,
Luh214
We will keep this in mind, rest assured. But we cannot make any promises at this point.
I do not agree, i do not like hero, they are another present for farmer, they give another big advantage to defender and little advantage to attacker, they can change the rules. Should be better to introduce hero only in new world, so who start playing know the rules.