Valor review and commentary
Posted: Thu May 24, 2012 9:32 am
Over-all, Valor is a great game when compared to other games in its market. Being essentially a hand-held based MMO provides endless entertainment in minutes you have to spare throughout any day. I have played now on 8 worlds, been in #1 guilds, and have been in the top 50 players a few times. I have enjoyed the diplomacy and the cooperation with others. In general, I highly recommend it to anyone. However… it is a long way from being what it could be.
Complaints with the game and suggestions for improvement:
1. By far my biggest complaint is the gold purchasing system. To me, this is a gargantuan business fubar by PlayMesh. I fundamentally cannot fathom what they are thinking on this one. If your target audience is Bill Gates and Warrant Buffet, the picture would be sound. However since your audience is largely people that already dump most of their money into cable TV, internet, cell phone bill, and beer, there is little left over for very slight improvements to game play for way too much money. Are you SERIOUS???: One speed up costs me $2.50??? You live in an echo system where people hesitate to pay a buck for an app! You need to adapt. The benefits of paying: a slight improvement to how fast I produce something, or a slight improvement to the results of play. Most games in the app store cost $1 with nothing else ever to pay, and can provide many hours of entertainment. Many free games provide hours of entertainment. Why in the world would I ever be able to justify this cost? For $50 you can get about 22 improvements. Over all the difference in play is marginal. Sure, you might then leap to the top of a world faster than others, and the compounding benefits are obvious, but when I can spend that $50 and get 50 good games that would occupy me for years, or buy Diablo III, how could I ever justify this cost? The world is moving to the concept of micro-transactions. The thought is to basically make such an improvement in game play so affordable that people cannot resist paying it. Make it so cheap it becomes a no-brainer. When it becomes this cheap, everyone starts doing it. Since everyone is doing it, even those that may not ever spend money on such things, eh, sure I will pay a buck or so a week to keep up with others, I can afford that. So, what would be reasonable is something like $.10 for a speedup. 10 speed-ups for a buck sounds fairly reasonable to me, and to so many others who don’t spend a dime. So, what you have now is 10 speed-ups for the price of another app. Honestly on second thought, I am not sure that is worth it either, but SO much better than this garbage. Whereas this is still logically expensive, it is cheap enough that everyone will do it. As it stands today, myself (and I make 6 figures, but I cannot justify this cost!), you will never get a single dime out of me, or most of the people that play this game. I enjoy it way to much without paying to ever consider paying that much. I will just wait the extra hour! I will get on more often instead of the huge waste of money to increase only one queue! This game is about waiting to begin with. Do the math! 100,000 people paying .10 a day is 10k! 100 people paying 2.50 a day is 2.5 k. Plus you make it more pleasurable for all playing. Also the fact that you offer temporary fixes for that price absolutely kills the value. Whereas it would be unfair to others, the cost just kills the formula.
2. Overall game play is too cumbersome. What I have found is that you basically get to a point where you are so big, and you are spending so much time managing your cities with seemingly way too much to do to keep things moving. On world 45, things have started to stagnate as people have realized that they are basically getting nowhere. The world is so big and immense and you start to realize you are just a pin-point on a massive world even as the #1 player in the world. The solution to this seems to be to reduce the size of the world and better manage how the game is played. Continued improvements in play efficiency is key. Also I believe that having an “end” to any game might be ideal. This maybe through a guild reaching a certain point total, or possible an end time. This way we feel there is a reachable objective to be considered a winner.
3. Add a player profile. It would be nice to be able to look at the profile of a player and see their accomplishments. Couple this with the game end suggestion above, and people could see where they ranked at the end, what guild they were in, if they were crown in the top guilds, etc. Average rank would be good, etc. It sort of provides pride and would help make the game mean more as we try to show the world how good we are.
4. A staggered start bonus. It seems that the people that get in early have a huge advantage. This can be mitigated in several ways: first, reducing the size of the world and number of players on it would help as it reduces the window of time that people can join. Second, a increasing handicap adjustment would be good. This might be a slow increase in the number of starting resources, and possibly starting with more buildings the later you are in the game. The ideal goal would be to close entry into the world, and have all people that put in the same level of effort in the time the world was forming should be in the same general ball-park in game play. Maybe the last joiners would have about the mean of points and buildings of all players roughly. Now things seem fair.
5. Speed up suggestions: as you get up there in cities, you spend most of your time waiting on your servers. This is no good. I understand the problem with the internet (I am a seasoned developer), and with the platform. What I would begin to do is more of a caching system where instead of having to contact the server for every transaction, let the game go on locally, then sync it with the server as server time permits. Of course this presents hurdles with dealing with out of sync clients, you simply mitigate that by dealing with the unpleasantries of players “knowing that they did something, but it didn’t take effect”. I am SO willing to deal with that rarely to gain the ability to play without delay! I am SURE others would too.
6. Guilds: guilds are the heart of the game of course. Guild management is a nightmare. People think they “have” to use Kakao to play. Bull. I hate Kakao. Two apps to play, no history of discussion, no way to organize attacks and record them permanently, dealing with way too much jibber-jabber… yuck. Let’s get the forum and chat improved to remove that. I understand the bandwidth problem with too many records, but why not reserve a couple meg of flash and cache it there? You should also cache the map if possible, and update it as it is explored again. Other items are attack coordination is non-existent. I would like to see on the map who in my guild is attacking what, avoiding the double attack problem. Also, it would be good to “mark” a city as claimed so we know on the map what not to attack. Possibly even a way to assign a claim to another player as a guild leader. Another huge problem is navigation of the map. There is no zoom yet, and it takes forever to navigate. Bookmarks are a nice addition, but that is just a start. Next, I would suggest a mini map of the whole world to quickly get to a particular sector. Also the ability to quick bookmark any city without having to enter coordinates. That would be from the map, or any city I am in or looking at. It would also be nice to add a “my cities” tab to the bookmarks. They should automatically be in. Also, sort the bookmarks by name. I have a lot of ideas, but let’s start small.
7. Bugs: you have come a ways with fixing bugs.
1. There is still the bug in the forge where as soon as you do anything with any forge, it reports 0/0 slots used.
2. Also, I often have a city where no upgrade options or anything appears in the list in the forget. It seems nothing gets rid of the bug. Is this a server side problem?
3. The back button from the map goes to the city that is active, and NOT the place on the map I was last looking. This makes casual map surfing very difficult!
4. Often the names in the bookmarks do not update to what you renamed it. I still have names in my bookmarks of things I renamed many weeks ago.
5. Not a bug, but the twitter bar is too close to the collect reward button. Sometimes I accidentally lose my tweet option.
Complaints with the game and suggestions for improvement:
1. By far my biggest complaint is the gold purchasing system. To me, this is a gargantuan business fubar by PlayMesh. I fundamentally cannot fathom what they are thinking on this one. If your target audience is Bill Gates and Warrant Buffet, the picture would be sound. However since your audience is largely people that already dump most of their money into cable TV, internet, cell phone bill, and beer, there is little left over for very slight improvements to game play for way too much money. Are you SERIOUS???: One speed up costs me $2.50??? You live in an echo system where people hesitate to pay a buck for an app! You need to adapt. The benefits of paying: a slight improvement to how fast I produce something, or a slight improvement to the results of play. Most games in the app store cost $1 with nothing else ever to pay, and can provide many hours of entertainment. Many free games provide hours of entertainment. Why in the world would I ever be able to justify this cost? For $50 you can get about 22 improvements. Over all the difference in play is marginal. Sure, you might then leap to the top of a world faster than others, and the compounding benefits are obvious, but when I can spend that $50 and get 50 good games that would occupy me for years, or buy Diablo III, how could I ever justify this cost? The world is moving to the concept of micro-transactions. The thought is to basically make such an improvement in game play so affordable that people cannot resist paying it. Make it so cheap it becomes a no-brainer. When it becomes this cheap, everyone starts doing it. Since everyone is doing it, even those that may not ever spend money on such things, eh, sure I will pay a buck or so a week to keep up with others, I can afford that. So, what would be reasonable is something like $.10 for a speedup. 10 speed-ups for a buck sounds fairly reasonable to me, and to so many others who don’t spend a dime. So, what you have now is 10 speed-ups for the price of another app. Honestly on second thought, I am not sure that is worth it either, but SO much better than this garbage. Whereas this is still logically expensive, it is cheap enough that everyone will do it. As it stands today, myself (and I make 6 figures, but I cannot justify this cost!), you will never get a single dime out of me, or most of the people that play this game. I enjoy it way to much without paying to ever consider paying that much. I will just wait the extra hour! I will get on more often instead of the huge waste of money to increase only one queue! This game is about waiting to begin with. Do the math! 100,000 people paying .10 a day is 10k! 100 people paying 2.50 a day is 2.5 k. Plus you make it more pleasurable for all playing. Also the fact that you offer temporary fixes for that price absolutely kills the value. Whereas it would be unfair to others, the cost just kills the formula.
2. Overall game play is too cumbersome. What I have found is that you basically get to a point where you are so big, and you are spending so much time managing your cities with seemingly way too much to do to keep things moving. On world 45, things have started to stagnate as people have realized that they are basically getting nowhere. The world is so big and immense and you start to realize you are just a pin-point on a massive world even as the #1 player in the world. The solution to this seems to be to reduce the size of the world and better manage how the game is played. Continued improvements in play efficiency is key. Also I believe that having an “end” to any game might be ideal. This maybe through a guild reaching a certain point total, or possible an end time. This way we feel there is a reachable objective to be considered a winner.
3. Add a player profile. It would be nice to be able to look at the profile of a player and see their accomplishments. Couple this with the game end suggestion above, and people could see where they ranked at the end, what guild they were in, if they were crown in the top guilds, etc. Average rank would be good, etc. It sort of provides pride and would help make the game mean more as we try to show the world how good we are.
4. A staggered start bonus. It seems that the people that get in early have a huge advantage. This can be mitigated in several ways: first, reducing the size of the world and number of players on it would help as it reduces the window of time that people can join. Second, a increasing handicap adjustment would be good. This might be a slow increase in the number of starting resources, and possibly starting with more buildings the later you are in the game. The ideal goal would be to close entry into the world, and have all people that put in the same level of effort in the time the world was forming should be in the same general ball-park in game play. Maybe the last joiners would have about the mean of points and buildings of all players roughly. Now things seem fair.
5. Speed up suggestions: as you get up there in cities, you spend most of your time waiting on your servers. This is no good. I understand the problem with the internet (I am a seasoned developer), and with the platform. What I would begin to do is more of a caching system where instead of having to contact the server for every transaction, let the game go on locally, then sync it with the server as server time permits. Of course this presents hurdles with dealing with out of sync clients, you simply mitigate that by dealing with the unpleasantries of players “knowing that they did something, but it didn’t take effect”. I am SO willing to deal with that rarely to gain the ability to play without delay! I am SURE others would too.
6. Guilds: guilds are the heart of the game of course. Guild management is a nightmare. People think they “have” to use Kakao to play. Bull. I hate Kakao. Two apps to play, no history of discussion, no way to organize attacks and record them permanently, dealing with way too much jibber-jabber… yuck. Let’s get the forum and chat improved to remove that. I understand the bandwidth problem with too many records, but why not reserve a couple meg of flash and cache it there? You should also cache the map if possible, and update it as it is explored again. Other items are attack coordination is non-existent. I would like to see on the map who in my guild is attacking what, avoiding the double attack problem. Also, it would be good to “mark” a city as claimed so we know on the map what not to attack. Possibly even a way to assign a claim to another player as a guild leader. Another huge problem is navigation of the map. There is no zoom yet, and it takes forever to navigate. Bookmarks are a nice addition, but that is just a start. Next, I would suggest a mini map of the whole world to quickly get to a particular sector. Also the ability to quick bookmark any city without having to enter coordinates. That would be from the map, or any city I am in or looking at. It would also be nice to add a “my cities” tab to the bookmarks. They should automatically be in. Also, sort the bookmarks by name. I have a lot of ideas, but let’s start small.
7. Bugs: you have come a ways with fixing bugs.
1. There is still the bug in the forge where as soon as you do anything with any forge, it reports 0/0 slots used.
2. Also, I often have a city where no upgrade options or anything appears in the list in the forget. It seems nothing gets rid of the bug. Is this a server side problem?
3. The back button from the map goes to the city that is active, and NOT the place on the map I was last looking. This makes casual map surfing very difficult!
4. Often the names in the bookmarks do not update to what you renamed it. I still have names in my bookmarks of things I renamed many weeks ago.
5. Not a bug, but the twitter bar is too close to the collect reward button. Sometimes I accidentally lose my tweet option.