Summary of the first Player Council term 2 event (July 13th, 2018)

Dear Grepolis Players,

We are happy to report you about our work as Inner Player Council members and the first official event – a video conference – we had with the following participants:

Innogames: Thorsten Schankin (Product Manager), Bernard Graham (Game Designer), Anna Sieprawska (Lead Community Manager)
Inner Player Council: AnWePe (GER), Dark-shadow35 (FRA), firebloem (NL), morg (US)
Council Advisory Board: florian799 (FRA)

First, we learned a bit about the Grepolis team, the role of the members and the workflow of game development. This was very educational and much needed to understand how our community feedback plays a huge role in the future of Grepolis.

All ideas go through a rating process, where they are rated by Community Management and Game Design teams – their combined rating determines a priority order. Additionally, there are many other factors that influence which ideas get implemented – some changes require special research or affect other game elements. Ideas which have a big impact and are easy to implement (quick wins) are favorable. The final call depends on the difficulty of the idea vs. its benefits. If all goes well, the planning can start and about 4 weeks after the developers start working on the new feature, it can reach the live markets (including testing on beta).

After the Introduction we discussed various specific topics, for example the recent changes of Battle Points calculation, the increasing number of alliance switches and possible further directions to improve the concept. A part of discussion was also focused on Events. After sharing our concerns, we learned that the Events are being constantly adjusted to the new challenges, based on our feedback and analytics of market results, as tests outside of live markets cannot always point out all issues (for example that a community goal is unreachable on many servers). As for the number of Events and their impact on the worlds balance which many Players worry about, InnoGames puts effort on decreasing the individual bonuses and the power of tokens. In general it is very important to mention that the focus of game development is reaching real solutions and if there is one in which Player Council is involved then we will get approval and can share it.

Since Term 2 start Grepolis Player Councils have collected 80+ suggestions from different language versions and within Inner Council we rated these ideas from 1 to 5, to select the best ideas that we will discuss in more details. We also brought up a few of these topics during this call (by the way I have to make it clear that not all markets experience the same problems).

Selected main topics and suggestions:
– app (travel time check, culture overview, show number of incoming attacks, city search option)
– events (exclude new worlds, spacing out events)
– special buildings (War Council as alternative of Tower with +5% attack power)
– misc. (change title of own thread in forum, search function for reports and messages, improve heroes in simulator, turn on/off award notifications)
– morale (disable morale when the era of World Wonders start, remove morale effect from sieges)
– community (polls for world settings as default, generalized rules for game and forum, approval for GPC / community chats)
– premium (show sieges on own cities in command overview, remove deselection of filters when reloading overview)
– start phase (free world selection for new players, Christopholus as starter hero, Tutorial Overview for beginners, extend trial period of premium functions, new quests that encourage communication and interaction between players)
– unit rebalance (reconsider event myths’ cost and power)
– vacation mode (allow attacks until activation, 24 hours before activation Colony Ship couldn’t be sent nor land like peacetime dynamics)

Until the next Call / Event we keep working on these priority topics on Inner Council forum that Devs follow and on adding the newer Community suggestions to the bunch. We are going to continue forum discussions from now on about same topic with all markets to be able to provide a varied and fresh feedback for actual issues. Thank you all who participated and helped us so far with your feedback and suggestions!

Grepolis Player Council