Uber Chief
Be the first to learn about new developments (News, Updates and Contests Forum) turns out to be plarium nonsense. Anyway the (unanounced) new development - whether permanent or temporary - is the appearance of Uber Chiefs (currently "Pict Chief"). They appear from time to time and are present, it seems, for three hours. The first appeared at midnight on 8 October.
The Chief has two differences from regular Ubers. They are FAR more durable, millions of units of energy hardly scratch them. But meanwhile, if you are on a shopping trip, you can spend your money on lots of big hits at full 600% power and get very large quantities of material.
This will be of interest to those who like to spend their time buying stuff, I doubt it is of much interest to those who play the game itself and don't buy progress. But maybe I am wrong. Hero's Key is a bottleneck for me at present so I may try getting up to 600% and making a couple of big energy hits to see if the return in Hero's Key justifies it.
Obviously hitting the Chief is (currently) a losing game if you want to score points in a competition.
Apparently this came about because the big spending Russian players that the developer talks to directly complained that regular Ubers don't yield enough materials. Whether it is wise for plarium to give notice of new developments only to a small clique and whether it is wise for the direction in which the game moves to be influenced heavily by that same clique I don't know.