Summary of the second Player Council call (January 12, 2018)

Agenda: Introduction, End Game Idea, Mobile App Development, Other Commentary.

End Game:
– Spoke about the specifics of a dominance-based end game idea to follow up on initial proposals and ideas from the first call.

General points of the idea:
– Alliances will have to control a certain ‘percent’ of the total worlds’ cities for a period of time in order to win.
– Wonders could become a setting to the world, on/off, and would be available to be built immediately if activated. The base requirements would remain the same.
– Alliances would get bonuses for completing wonders, and for obtaining certain levels of dominance.
– Crown rotation would not be possible – only one alliance may win.
– When one alliance holds dominance for a certain period of time, the alliance will become the winner, and the world will immediately start the closing countdown.
– When the numbers/analytics are done, the full idea will be shared with players via DevBlog prior to implementation, to get more feedback on it.

Developers expect to make a DevBlog post consisting of the full idea when the development possibilities have been fully confirmed.

Mobile App Development:
– The mobile app will never be equivalent to the browser in terms of events and premium functionality – there is simply too much information that wouldn’t fit into the mobile version. However, it’s possible that ‘slimmed down versions’ of these could be implemented into the app.
– The developers are aware of potential problems that are causing app alarm issues, and have been working on ways to fix said issues on their end. A support post will be made on DevBlog, Support or forums that will go into detail about what you yourself can do to ensure your phone is working properly. Outside of that, they are actively working on a fix for the attack horn sound.
– Live conquests in the app are definitely a possibility, and developers are preparing to work on implementing it.

Other:

Spoke briefly about casual worlds, and whether we’d like to see more of them.

At the moment, developers are focused on concepts for a new end game idea. This is a big project and a priority at this time. However, we’re also looking forward to the next two main topics we’d like to take up with developers after the new end game has been implemented:

Spam attacks: There are two sides to spamming: people who are annoyed by it, and people who use it to physically freeze someone’s computer.
At the moment, there are a lot of situations where spamming is used as a tactic. There are limited technical solutions to spamming – but there might be additional gameplay solutions that we can play with that would naturally limit the amount of spamming that there is.
The problem is, these gameplay solutions might impact the way the game is actually played, and the amount of spam that can be used for attacks.

Events: This project will take a longer time to change, and not a lot of changes are likely to happen within the next few months as concepts and analyses need to be finished first. Developers are looking into a new strategy to balance the frequency/impact of events: the possibility of making some of their existing events shorter, so that there is less total event time and more gameplay time.