Innogames ruining grepolis: gold abuse & events, etc.

DeletedUser15426

Guest
Okay, I understand that Innogames is running a business and is trying to make money, but the game that is advertised as free to play and once required skill and could be played even without spending much money now requires a lot of money to keep up with the top players. Advisors were one thing, but innogames has been pushing the threshold of their 'freemium' model, giving more and more powerful boosts for players that spend gold, including:
-gold trading (some argue this helps pal get free gold, but it still gives advantage to those with gold)
-instabuilding
-starter packages
-insane events with flyer tokens

The latter, especially, has made the game a completely different beast and essentially unplayable. Cities are being staked like we cities, with > 100k dlu and are being shredded, with the flyers being rebuilt 4h with absurd 48 Manticore tokens (actium).

Innogames, I think you know what you are doing, targeting the customers with big wallets who are spending $100's each month, but I think you understand you risk pushing out many other customers as well. Perhaps your gamble is and will continue to pay off, but I know many skilled veterans are fed up with these trends and you will lose many players. I'm not sure if you care or if you plan to slow down your runaway train of gold abuse, but I feel like this issue can't stay unspoken about and wonder if inno even cares about these concerns.

Additionally, I feel like I've seen some pretty sketchy things happen with moderators and attack able bans/pumishments. I find it interesting that the grepolis justice system has a prosecution and a judge, but punishments are doled out before hearing out the defendant. I've seen people permanently banned for dropping an f bomb in a pm after being egged on by enemies, and after he blocked then at the suggestion of the mods, and I've seen people attackable banned for accused bot usage only to be instantly overturned after an appeal where they talked to him. There is so very limited transparency as to why the bans are happening. Operate more like a court of law. Let the defendants speak. Stop being so dang secretive. You shouldn't be operating harsher than our justice system.

Okay, two separate issues here, but I'm fed up with inno right now and many others are too. Please reply to this thread to air your grievances and let's see if inno actually cares about its players as much as it cares about their wallets.

-Demacia

I've been protesting every step of the way for years. But it just hasn't stopped the game from getting ruined.

I play EN servers, but over there most of them seem to be too dense to have seen it as it was happening.
 

DeletedUser15077

Guest
I've been playing since en gamma. I changed name in Troy. The playability of this game has been ruined with mass gold use. I don't mind spending some money but I see people spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars. They get upset if the alliance they joined doesn't do what they want. Leave and spend more money than the entire alliance of 60 players totaled. Use this money to rape the best cities and build them. this person has 10 cities and the largest member in the alliance he left only had 4 and 3 were of low development. This completely ruins the game. I have decided to quit because of this. There is no fun in spending your families wealth on a game. Soon you will be getting hammered like the casinos did for not controlling your customers spending habits. Fortunately you don't take mortgages for payment. Silly me you will probably start with car titles first so you can stay off the radar for a little while.
 

DeletedUser11706

Guest
Okay, I understand that Innogames is running a business and is trying to make money, but the game that is advertised as free to play and once required skill and could be played even without spending much money now requires a lot of money to keep up with the top players. Advisors were one thing, but innogames has been pushing the threshold of their 'freemium' model, giving more and more powerful boosts for players that spend gold, including:
-gold trading (some argue this helps pal get free gold, but it still gives advantage to those with gold)
-instabuilding
-starter packages
-insane events with flyer tokens

The latter, especially, has made the game a completely different beast and essentially unplayable. Cities are being staked like we cities, with > 100k dlu and are being shredded, with the flyers being rebuilt 4h with absurd 48 Manticore tokens (actium).

Innogames, I think you know what you are doing, targeting the customers with big wallets who are spending $100's each month, but I think you understand you risk pushing out many other customers as well. Perhaps your gamble is and will continue to pay off, but I know many skilled veterans are fed up with these trends and you will lose many players. I'm not sure if you care or if you plan to slow down your runaway train of gold abuse, but I feel like this issue can't stay unspoken about and wonder if inno even cares about these concerns.

Additionally, I feel like I've seen some pretty sketchy things happen with moderators and attack able bans/pumishments. I find it interesting that the grepolis justice system has a prosecution and a judge, but punishments are doled out before hearing out the defendant. I've seen people permanently banned for dropping an f bomb in a pm after being egged on by enemies, and after he blocked then at the suggestion of the mods, and I've seen people attackable banned for accused bot usage only to be instantly overturned after an appeal where they talked to him. There is so very limited transparency as to why the bans are happening. Operate more like a court of law. Let the defendants speak. Stop being so dang secretive. You shouldn't be operating harsher than our justice system.

Okay, two separate issues here, but I'm fed up with inno right now and many others are too. Please reply to this thread to air your grievances and let's see if inno actually cares about its players as much as it cares about their wallets.

-Demacia
i agree with you completely
 

DeletedUser

Guest
This thread was started 2-1/2 years ago, wanted to bump it up and see if anything has changed.

I stopped playing in June of 2016 because of these same complaints that y'all have expressed. I also log onto the forum every 3-4 months to see if it would be worth my time to start anew. Hence my question...has anything been done to address ANY of these concerns? Has Innogames changed their business model to accommodate those of us that don't want to spend 100's or even 1,000's of dollars to play each month (referring to being competitive and not a simmer)? Have they changed the events or increased/decreased the frequency of them? Have they changed the World Wonders end game? I have a feeling once a reply is made, I will continue to stay on the sideline. This once great game has been spiraling downward for many years and I doubt I will ever see a correction that almost all players want.

I'm probably doing exactly what Spartans189 said...'just keep screaming into the void'...

Oldfart aka Flaxon-Waxon
 

DeletedUser15962

Guest
Today was the best example of inno games' greed. They put out two "packages" $99 each. Are you kidding me? They don't even hide their shame anymore. And of course, there will be players that spend that money without even blinking an eye. So guess what? Inno games has turned this game into RICH vs. POOR!!!

SHAME ON YOU!!!

good bye forever.
 
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This thread was started 2-1/2 years ago, wanted to bump it up and see if anything has changed.

I stopped playing in June of 2016 because of these same complaints that y'all have expressed. I also log onto the forum every 3-4 months to see if it would be worth my time to start anew. Hence my question...has anything been done to address ANY of these concerns? Has Innogames changed their business model to accommodate those of us that don't want to spend 100's or even 1,000's of dollars to play each month (referring to being competitive and not a simmer)? Have they changed the events or increased/decreased the frequency of them? Have they changed the World Wonders end game? I have a feeling once a reply is made, I will continue to stay on the sideline. This once great game has been spiraling downward for many years and I doubt I will ever see a correction that almost all players want.

I'm probably doing exactly what Spartans189 said...'just keep screaming into the void'...

Oldfart aka Flaxon-Waxon

Besides the 2k resources for 50 gold on the marketplace, no, nothing has really been done for users.
Events were running fairly often towards the end of last year, to the point that event tokens from one event were still around during the next event, which was a week or two later. The only changes I've seen really is that gold is extremely useful in them and it's pretty much reskinned versions of old events.
As far as I can tell, WW is still the same. HOWEVER, Inno is currently working on a new End Game called Domination, where if an alliance owns X% (Currently at 50%, still being debated) of all cities in the world, then a 14 day countdown starts where they need to keep 50% for those 14 days or the counter will reset when they get back to 50%
 

DeletedUser

Guest
Thank you Luigi and Steve for the replies.

Really...

The end game has been asked to be redone and has been worked on for how long, at least 4-5 yrs and this is the best the game designers has come up with...Domination...oh hell, this is perfect for Innogames...

Shall we go down this path a little bit, let's say an alliance has accomplished the 50% (or whatever percentage they deem worthy), the countdown has started and there is, let's say 7 days left before the server starts it's final countdown to closing. Alliance #2 goes all out on one of the 'low hanging fruits' of Alliance #1...gets a CS in and is waiting for the city to be taken. Now, think about how much money will be spent on knocking that CS out/and or defending it...it's amazing how Innogames keeps pushing the envelope on how to get your money. I tip my hat to you Innogames...too bad you have taken this game down this rabbit hole. I am sorry to say I will never play another one of your games, and I know of many many many players that have the same sentiments as I do, as evidence of the lack of participation in your forums and the dying of US servers...

Ya'll obviously just don't get it, and never will...it's about the players aka your customers and not about you or the money. Keep players happy and you will reap the rewards!
 

DeletedUser15974

Guest
Apparently the debate on gold does not exist in France, not really surprised, amused we say.
smiley_emoticons_lol.gif


Really amused to see such a lot of foolishness, have France our players spend have the advantages they have seen, which does not prevent players truly motivated and surpassed some. If you want an example, you have it in front of you, myself and my friends.
smiley_emoticons_viking.gif


As far as domination is concerned, besides being a system that may be more sophisticated, I think it is more suited to the philosophy of the game than a farming of wonder.
By cons there or possibly could point the finger at the work of the devellopeurs, it is when the fact that the end that they leave us are largely copied from Tribal War
smiley_emoticons_confusednew.gif
 

DeletedUser4951

Guest
I'm going to toss this out here and I'm not sure I'll put it the best way. But gold matters a lot more here on the US than it does on EN. There isn't much a world here, it's at the point where I've handed off my US cities and am going to stick to EN for my remaining time in the game.

Gold doesn't impact things as much because there's more players and more spenders or hyper active minimal spenders. This makes the experience better because a one branch alliance at full capacity can take on the #1 group in the world and be winning despite having the worst average of the top 12. Or they can enlist the help of rim groups to fight back and still win.

If you guys want my advice, give the game a go back on EN before calling it quits. At the very least, you'll have more fun.
 

DeletedUser15919

Guest
Remember the gaming world decades back before whales? Such a different time. What they should do - to try & appease the growing segment of anti-gold players - perhaps is to rotate in a world where gold is not present? One world w/o gold will not cost them anything in the long run & it is a good experiment to try & draw out players on a more equated level by removing whales from 1% of the game world. Similar to the group of WOW players that demanded Classic, were told Classic would never happen, had private Classic shutdown & Classic announced by Blizzard...1 server will not break the world & it might just teach some people something ^^
 

DeletedUser15986

Guest
Many other game companies have a format that they charge a one time "game fee" to play one game. There are no other ways to gain advantages in the game by additional monies being put into the game. As an example, the average players per world, in INNO, is fifteen thousand players. At 20 USD per player per game, that computes to a per game revenue of 300,000 USD. US server count is now 70 worlds or a total revenue of 21 million USD over 8 years to date, just on US servers. In addition, the other game developers have games that are shorter in duration, namely six to eight weeks. Most worlds are down to about 1,000 players in less then 3 months.

Cost per week to play one game, less then five USD per week....the cost of an American McDonald's dinner for one or a pizza.

Inno has not learned the benefits of listening to players.
 
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DeletedUser15567

Guest
In the long run the game will die down, more players will quit and less new players will join. Inno will try to sell anything at an outrageous price. I don't mind the packages but make them affordable for most. Cut the gold price (or give more gold) and cut package prices down.
 

DeletedUser8870

Guest
Many other game companies have a format that they charge a one time "game fee" to play one game. There are no other ways to gain advantages in the game by additional monies being put into the game. As an example, the average players per world, in INNO, is fifteen thousand players. At 20 USD per player per game, that computes to a per game revenue of 300,000 USD. US server count is now 70 worlds or a total revenue of 21 million USD over 8 years to date, just on US servers. In addition, the other game developers have games that are shorter in duration, namely six to eight weeks. Most worlds are down to about 1,000 players in less then 3 months.

Cost per week to play one game, less then five USD per week....the cost of an American McDonald's dinner for one or a pizza.

Inno has not learned the benefits of listening to players.
i'd love to see a world with 15k players... average world is maybe 500 tops, and most of them all have played in other worlds , you barely EVER see any new players to the game at all anymore
 

DeletedUser15986

Guest
i'd love to see a world with 15k players... average world is maybe 500 tops, and most of them all have played in other worlds , you barely EVER see any new players to the game at all anymore

I really hate to spend my time disproving people who do not do their research before they attempt to post their alternative facts...the players still remaining in these last two worlds. I did not waste my time researching how many started the world nor if these thousands of players were new or not.

Eubea
2018-01-22
10032 Players

Cythera
2017-10-26
1088 Players
 

DeletedUser8870

Guest
that maybe the total who signed into the world, active whole other ball game and out of those 10k in eubea maybe 500 active left, get your facts straight beginning world population i would estimate about 40-50% sign in just to gold trade and then bounce servers are dead and the trend will continue
 

DeletedUser15986

Guest
that maybe the total who signed into the world, active whole other ball game and out of those 10k in eubea maybe 500 active left, get your facts straight beginning world population i would estimate about 40-50% sign in just to gold trade and then bounce servers are dead and the trend will continue

My facts are straight from the Inno site. Those numbers reflect the amount of players in that world, active or inactive, as of this moment in time. There were more that entered the world earlier and left. As to why they went into the world, gold or a crown image, is moot...they entered the world. The point of the discussion is the use of the gold in the game and my point was that an option would be to have one initial fee to play as some other companies do.

Please get an understanding of the discussion prior to your commenting and then stop estimating or guessing and as I said earlier, research before you open one of your orifices.
 
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