From fearless leader Sirrian, to you! Here are his thoughts about the new Epic Guikld tasks, and what went behind their re-design. Unfortunately, Sirrian won’t be responding to questions in this thread, but we thought it was a good idea to shed some further light on the changes, and how we approached them.

Take it away, Sirrian!

Re-designing the Epic Task System over the last week has been quite a challenging project! Thank you to all the community members who provided feedback to help make sure no segment of the player-base was missing out in any way. Although we have LOTS of data about current Guild Tasks and Legendary Tasks, that doesn’t always convey the emotional attachment people have to certain rewards and systems in the game, but that’s what direct feedback is for, and why we opened up the data on the new system to the wider community, not locking it into the Community Beta like we do with many other new features.

First and foremost, the Epic Task system was meant to be about giving more things to players when they need them. As always, we’re in the business of making fun, not taking it away. Making fun things is how developers and games thrive, and why we’re still growing Gems of War after 5 years! The first system fell short in this regard, but as always, we’re eager to listen and make changes.

Still, we can’t just pump more things into an economy without balancing it out. After reviewing a LOT of data, we believe there was just TOO MUCH value tied up in the LT’s chance of Legendary/Mythic troops… and we could release that value and substitute it for Deeds, Ingots, Tokens, Chaos Shards & Pet Food. Basically, mid-game players seldom see troops from LTs, but they ARE the ones asking for those other currencies. End-Game players on the other hand mostly get troops from LTs that they already have… so that is often low value to them too. Despite the feedback that Gems is a Card Collection game, and the chance at those troops is important for Guilds, you DO get the chance at those troops from all the keys we give, so we still feel that we’re offering more value now when and where it is most needed. There was a similar issue with all the Glory given out in LTs… we thought it would be nice to lower that and translate it into other requested resources.

So… With the redesign in the last week, we defined 3 core goals that we wanted to achieve:

All Epic Tasks had to return the same Value as a LT or better. In other words, if I complete 100k + 200k + 250k + 350k tasks… that should give an equivalent reward to about 80% of an old LT. We’ve slightly exceeded that now, especially with early rewards.

We would not increase the overall cost of the new Epic Tasks past 31.5 million.

If any guild completed all the new ETs, they had to be sure to receive ALL the rewards they would have previously gotten on average from 31.5 LTs (minus some glory & the chances at the troops). Of course they also get some new Skill Bonuses too!

We felt that the pass at the end of last week was almost there, but feedback identified a few shortfalls in the new rewards, as follows:

Low Tier ETs were a little hard to get into for some low-to-mid-rank guilds - so we’ve dropped the cost of Tier 1 and increased its value a bit (Tier 12 has seen a slight cost increase to compensate). The Jewel amounts in Tier 4 were underwhelming. That was an oversight on our part, and has been corrected. We’ve also stolen the Gem Key from Tier 1 and popped it in here, which has allowed us to fill Tier 1 with even more stuff. The Token rewards in the Red ET Tree didn’t feel rewarding ENOUGH. So we’ve increased the rarity of Tokens in there. In general, Tiers 9-12 felt like they needed just a tiny bit more in them, so we’ve slightly increased rewards in there too.

An interesting point was made in last week’s feedback that keys were now TOO spread out. We did investigate that, but came to the conclusion that they were ALSO spread out in the old LTs too, so nothing would really be lost in this new system. ETs were more about targeting a secondary currency like Writs or Tokens, while still receiving all the mish-mash of Keys that LTs would have given.

Finally… We’re quite happy with Epic Tasks now. No player should be receiving less deterministic rewards than they did from LTs, and all players should benefit from at least some of the new currencies we can distribute each week!

As always though, send us your feedback. Gems of War will continually be a work-in-progress!

Final Changes

We have made further tweaks, which boil down to this:

Task 1 now costs 100k (down 50k), to be a bit more accessible to mid-game players.

Task 12 now costs 850k (up 50k), to compensate for above, as this tier should be for end-game players.

Changed task 1 Rewards: Removed the Gem Key, but added more unique resources to help mid-game players (these resources are extra and were not deducted from other tiers).

Changed task 4 Rewards: Now has 50 Jewels, and also the Gem Key from task 1.

Revisited tiers 8-12 in some reward trees to give a little more of the unique resources associated with that tree.

The Red Epic Tasks now have much better Tokens in them.

Below are the re-worked tasks.