Council News

DeletedUser4460

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This thread is for updates and announcements from the Player Council, please post your feedback / questions in Council Discussions!

After the initial phase /2 weeks/ I can say we finally figured out what our duties are and how we can approach these issues. Both the Council Advisory Board (selected members of last term) and US CMs were very helpful during this period. The new Council forum section opened to help players in presenting new ideas / concerns. We share a summary of your forum posts with all members on Council chat, then if any topic needs more attention they ask for feedback on their local markets too. At the end all the important feedback end up on Inner council forum where Devs / Lead CM can access and respond to them. Our first topic about Morale / Low morale exploits is being discussed on more local markets and we already presented some concerns for Inner council / Innogames, but it is still an open discussion - don't hesitate to add more feedback!

As for the Council experience, it is fun to be part of this international scene of Grepolis, in this 2nd Term 8 markets are represented (DE, EN, FR, NL, IT, PL, RO, US - hopefully I didn't miss anyone from the list). I would not think before, so it came as a surprise that we have so many differences between markets, forum rules, application of rules, accepted game strategies... could be an endless list, it will be very challenging to find common ground in some questions (morale is definitely a good example).

The next priority discussion topic Spam is now open!
 
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DeletedUser4460

Guest
This last week of IC didn't offer too much news to share, most our discussions were still about morale and spam. I can say there is a consensus that spam is destructive, but it varies by market how accepted low morale tactics are.

We started brainstorming how to prevent BP generation and such alternative usage of resources instead of festivals that result in BP / cultural levels without actual battles. Fighter rankings completely lost their meaning due to these methods and the Heightened/Divine Senses tokens. It is hard to find an idea that works but would not interfere with normal playstyle + more issues are interconnected, so as soon as we reviewed these I will post more about this...

The challenge of the current week is to collect and sort all ideas that have been posted until now in order to prioritize them and decide which are relevant for all markets. I think these will be heavy conversations as we tend to disagree on many things... not only the markets, but different player types are well-represented in Council, so I'm sure the results will reflect what the community needs. :cool:

New [Discussion] Mobile App is now open for US market!
Sorry for the nostalgic intro, I had to do some research, because I still consider myself an app-newb.
 

DeletedUser4460

Guest
Good news: the first Innogames & Player Council event date is set!
In mid-July we are going to have a conference call with the Product Manager, the Game Designer, the Lead Community Manager of Grepolis and a few representatives of Inner Player Council. ;)

We have collected close to 100 suggestions from all over the markets and started to discuss them in details. I will for sure share a list of the top-rated ideas once we processed all this information and a few ideas from other markets before that if I'm unsure what US community response would be or their proposals are just very interesting in some way for us too.

We are in the middle of The Greek Cup / Grepolympics, so I thought this is perfect timing for a general event discussion. Please share your feedback / ideas regarding any type of event in this new topic [Discussion] Event!
 

DeletedUser4460

Guest
New [Discussion] Battle Points is open!
We got a hint how the Developers would like to continue the improvements of the Battle Point System, please take a peek and comment - your feedback can have a huge impact on this!

As for the recent Player Council issues this week's major topic was Rules in general. We shared our experiences and some discrepancies between markets came to surface. There is a general concern about the lack of transparency and the increasing number of false bans, meanwhile there are community suggestions that would potentially help in preventing losses due to false bans or make cheating less attractive.
Player Council's scope is limited, we don't get more information about the punishments for breach of rules than regular players, we should not discuss specific support cases, offer or ask for feedback in regards to Support Team, but any general Game / Rules feedback is much appreciated and in hope we can keep a discussion free of such ban discussion and getting personal this might as well be the next priority topic.
 

DeletedUser4460

Guest
The last week was quite eventful. We worked very hard to finally rate and select the best ideas from all the 80+ community suggestions (!) to be able to continue with the most interesting topics and bring up some of those during the first call with Innogames... The report of this event is waiting for approval, so to spend our time with something both useful and fun while waiting, please visit the new thread:
[Discussion] Special Buildings
 

DeletedUser4460

Guest
Summary of the first Player Council term 2 event

(July 13th, 2018)

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

Please post your feedback in 1st US Player Council Discussion Thread!
 
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DeletedUser4460

Guest
Thank you for your feedback in [Discussion] Research - except for splitting researches most markets liked the proposal, hopefully the popular changes will be implemented in the near future.

In the light of the revamped Pandora's box it looks like community request to decrease the pressure of events was taken into consideration and the rebalance of rewards can continue in the future thanks for the mainly positive feedback.

We have an ongoing debate in Inner Council about gold trade and I'm waiting for feedback in order to create a proper discussion here on US market too... stay tuned!

In June DK, HU, NL newest worlds were announced without endgame as first test version of Domination on live markets. This means these worlds don't have any endgame set yet therefore players became worried whether World Wonders can be a possibility or not. Developers are still working on Domination, but assured us that there's nothing to worry about because these worlds are going to get the new endgame!

In the next [Discussion] Endgame we would like to learn about your expectations of the new Domination endgame and your opinion about the last changes of World Wonders, how would you improve any endgame versions?
 
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DeletedUser4460

Guest
Sorry for the longer break, we have had issues in IC without much closure (lack of response) and I didn't know how to post about that, but I'm a player first and foremost, so I owe you with sharing negative experience too:

We discovered differences and major inequality between markets. At the beginning of GPC Term 2 I asked for approval to post on forum a community chat invite link that could have helped us with Player Council to breathe life into community which was probably on its lowest activity level due to the false bans. This is an exclusive forum rule on US only (missing on EN, however most forum users think they have the same restrictions):
Posting links, join codes, and/or any form of invitation to either a chat room (discord, skype, etc..) or outside communication application is forbidden.
upload_2018-8-18_20-3-4.png
We didn't get approval and were asked to preferably keep all discussions on forum, meanwhile most other markets are allowed to open community / premade / world chats and post invite links on their Grepolis external forum. (I hope linking the German Player Council forum that contains invite link to their community chat is not forbidden here: https://de.forum.grepolis.com/index.php?threads/die-gpc-newsshow.35805/ - right now they have 23 online and 173 offline members).
Since then we did our best to work with our limited possibilities, but it can't continue like this, while German community can hold conference calls with their CM's participation on the chat that Player Council hosts to discuss spam issues we are underdogs here with the few players who can be reached on forum (no offense your dedication and feedback is appreciated). In a game like Grepolis in which activity and real-time response is so important initiatives that aim to enrich community life should be encouraged.

EN market forum has a so called DNS (Do Not Suggest) list, that includes heroes, while other community could design and vote about a new Hero (Eurybia).
Gold trade has market limits - players who offer more resources for gold as gift and advertise that on their profile may be punished on EN, may get their profile deleted on DE and are free to practice these tactics on US.

Some live markets (DK, HU, NL) are being used to test domination endgame instead of beta market.

Of course many of these problems only came to surface because of GPC - by time the differences can be fixed, but it is hard to justify why chats aren't allowed in a game that doesn't have built-in chat function and doesn't forbid chats on some other markets or similar games of same company.

The next [Discussion] Community chat will be about what we players think our community deserves and how these equality problems should be fixed. Would you like to have more polls? Design a Hero or play other forum games? Decide about world settings? Post invitation links to Grepolis related chats? Please join this discussion and tell us about it!

Other news:

US community request to make it possible to shorten Hero travel time has been posted for Inner Council. The general response is good however the premium options (instant assignment and time cut for gold) are not supported by GPC as majority opinion was it would be too powerful.

You can read a summary of Devs responses about the future of Events here. (soon)
 

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DeletedUser4460

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The issues about market equality really brought us together in Inner Council and I'm glad to inform you there are some positive changes (more details in [Discussion] Community chat)!

The new endgame is again in GPC focus since Sandbox 10 - the first English language version domination test world started - Devs have been very busy with it until now and other issues got less attention.

A summary of (future) event changes is posted in [Discussion] Event.
The last Warfare package offers disappointed many players - the amount of purchasable Heightened Senses provide too big advantage, meanwhile the event rewards are weaker than before. Devs are looking into this problem however didn't promise a quick resolution. Unlike events in which balancing can be fast the packages are much harder to modify. In general it takes 4 weeks until a plan can become a change and reach the live markets, but sales are planned long ahead that's why it takes longer time - the goal is not to remove the Warfare packages, only to adjust them to the new event balancing.

NL market shared concerns about security: an account can be deleted or restarted right after e-mail change - we discussed possible solutions how to prevent these abuses.

EN & US GPC set up a community chat on discord, I'm waiting for approval to advertise it for US market..., until then a new forum [Discussion] Start phase is open for suggestions!
 
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DeletedUser4460

Guest
It's been a month since I wrote my last update, I hope to be able to post more frequently in the future.
We received plentiful ideas and suggestions since the GPC chat launched and it took quite long time to organize all that to be able to share them with the rest of the community and devs, but you can read the result soon ;) It's been a bless to discuss all these Grepolis related topics together, thank you all who participated so far!

News from the Inner Council:
  • webservices / worlddata:
    there is a large number of volunteers who create Grepolis statistic websites based on public data (players, alliances, towns, islands, BP, ABP, DBP, conquers...) - they could create better sites if there was a good documentation and expansion of the current api's and more data would be public (grepolisscore, world wonder stats, domination, victor / master of world, world open / closed, profile pictures, crowns, player loot)
  • warfare packages:
    as result of our debates some changes has been made:
    lower number of 'Heightened senses' tokens but more Great Arming tokens
    previous epic package: 50x Tyche's boost, 18x Heightened senses, 3x Great Arming
    current epic package: 50x Tyche's boost, 10x Heightened senses, 5x Great Arming
  • domination:
    the domination era has begun on the Beta test world
    upload_2018-10-7_16-28-6.png
    the valid islands are marked with stars and there are already concerns that the new endgame won't generate as much battles as expected...
  • equality between markets:
    have you known that some markets (NL, SK, SE) get multiple updates for each game version, one about a day before the rest of the markets and another same time? After Beta tests every game version is released on these markets first which gives Innogames enough time to react until they roll out the new version on the rest of the live markets. This process helps to fix problems before all players would be affected because despite the efforts not all bugs can be found on Beta. We are searching for a solution how this pressure could be taken off the NL, SK, SE players as we all know how distracting updates can be.
  • events:
    the gathered data from surveys suggest that players like events, but there were a few promises we got: events in the future should be less harmful to the overall gameplay, bit shorter, too powerful events won't follow each other. They are working on how to create more space between event and new world start. Decreasing all event rewards is not priority right now - they want to keep rewards interesting and balanced.
  • alert delay
    a proposal was posted about increasing the travel time to be able to provide an optional alert delay feature thus prevent alerts of flash attacks and cancelled attempts
  • turning on/off award notifications
    I left the best to the end :)
    this community suggestion seems to be a quick win and Devs are already investigating how to implement it:
    players could choose which notifications should appear on the bottom right corner:
    • Awards
    • Spy reports
    • Combat reports
    • Combat support reports
    • Returning supports
    • Incoming supports
    • Supports withdrawing
    • Spell cast
Events on GPC Chat:
  • Rate the Ideas!
    next week we are going to start a new channel for selected ideas from all over the community, discord, Inner GPC, other markets... all you need to do is thumbs up / down to make sure we represent your opinion the best as possible on IC meetings!
As before please post your Concerns and Ideas that you would like to be shared with the international representatives of Player Council or join our Chat!
 
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