Nameless Namesake WoH said:

Hello Lords and Ladies

I was away from the game  and when I came back.......... oh myyy, the beacons are dead. Can some one please explain me , once fought  fiercely,  how does  those beacons are all  at level 1 and almost deserted ??

thanks in advance

Regards

NN

The simple answer? Plarium happen.....

Dear  Sir Dan Saul Knight

Thank you so much for your kind and elaborate explanation . Yup,  my league also dropped all the beacons and now defending lvl 20 fortress .

Thank you once gain

Sincerely
NN

For the first year or more the game was VERY expensive. 

People coined but what was bought didn't outweigh what was being in produced in game. The game remained somewhat balanced. On Dark Plains Roanne spent a fortune and KT survived the second server war but it didn't buy a win. 

3 Months later changes happened that made the game 10 times cheaper. Constant offers (previously coiners were buying full bank prices). 75% healer offers.

Then update after update added pay to win boosts to troop power. A 2.5k dragon  now can be worth well in excess of 10k power, before champions it was over 8k so conceivable with them 16k (i haven't done the maths for a while to be accurate).

It's now over 40/50 times cheaper to buy an army than it was at the start of the game.

So the coining now completely unbalances the game. Single people have armies that are bigger than entire leagues (leagues that have been going 3yrs+ or more). Where Roanna was buying 100m, people buy offence in billion chunks now. What is bought now completely overshadows what is produced in game.

As you probably know overwhelming offence can under siege mechanic kill defence with little to no losses. With hammers in the billions people couldn't hold beacons. They either lost their defence or gave up their beacons. In KoK we start the "Balur Worship" roleplay of dropping all our beacons and trying to keep our area of the map in Balur's hands, to highlight to Plarium how messed up the game was. They paid no attention of course.

The beacon map slowly became more and more empty.

As Plarium are geniuses, in the midst of the impending disaster of the loss of beacon game, the loss of league play and therefore the loss of any meaningful meta game they introduced a tournament where you could revive 90% of your losses from beacon attacks. That finished off beacons completely (although it was happening over time anyway).

A little side note to the story is fortresses. They give significant off and def bonuses for holding what is effectively one mega beacon. The fortress is also protected by force limits so much easier to defend. People took the logical approach of using what defence they had on their fortress giving bonuses rather than beacons giving nothing more than dark essence.

And so the game died as a meaningful strategy game with any activity or content.

Strategy wise when the beacons were all level 5 owned by large alliances there was very little in the way of actual wars and mostly all diplomacy which was a headache for me as I was 1 of the main diplos for my league and also a diplo for the large alliance I was in

My league used to be a large border holding beacon league but once beacon massacres happened, you lose a few here and there in beacons, always take them back, upgrading all the time, always chasing after beacons and then there was always the drama over de usage as well so we made the decision to give away all of our beacons and go offense, this has worked a treat for us, yes we have leagues we can go to for de so no need to hold beacons there, yes we have almost all of our badges at level 10 and this is from killing beacons not keeping them and we have no drama, league is relatively stress free where we get to play at times we want to and actually enjoy the game now 

the empty beacon fields make it possible now for many leagues to obtain their conquerors badge which used to be 1 of the toughest ones to obtain if you wer'nt friendly with the top 20 ranked leagues and choosing the right time of day to do it is a must 

Christine Hare said:

we have an empty inner beacon map and the facebook server has just over 8k beacons on them, thats what damage the Beacon massacre done but the massacres have been stopped so I will wait and see what happens 

You forgot the most important point

Facebook beacons have Force Limit protection, but none of the Plarium.com servers have ever had any protection for their Beacons .... Plarium.com is a cash cow

Agreed Snowgoon with the forcelimit difference between the 2 servers, but that didn't stop the massive armies of 100k dragons sometimes even more, I have seen some massive armies on the facebook server 1 dark plains completely obliterate the inner beaconfield and how they done it was with their alliance

See even with forcelimit, it did not stop the powerful armies with all of the extra upgrades that can be done to offense troops.  I've seen players be able to send just over 50k of dragons to a beacon with the 150 mill forcelimt and destroy that beacon with little losses killing 20-30k griff beacons because they show their kills on the public facebook pages, forts its much larger and they wipe out all beacons from 1 league sometimes, my own offense doesn't have enough forcelimit on it yet to max at the 150mill for a beacon yet there are some leagues on the map that hold level 5 beacons with around 10k griff and 10k occult in them because just 1 test hit tells me whats inside and I drop those on my own when I'm after pvp if the good tourneys are on  as I suffer very small losses because of the high rank my offense troops are at and all of the extra offense points upgrades I have done to them as well as the champion and the Hero

I don't know what you all consider a well defended fort or beacon to be, but for me a beacon needs 100k griff and occult minimum, fort at least close to 1 million griff and occult to stop the massive killers

The game at the moment is an offense players dream and even though I play offense I really hope the beacon improvements update on the road map bring some real positives for the defenders out there who still like to defend

Christine Hare said:

Agreed Snowgoon with the forcelimit difference between the 2 servers, but that didn't stop the massive armies of 100k dragons sometimes even more, I have seen some massive armies on the facebook server 1 dark plains completely obliterate the inner beaconfield and how they done it was with their alliance

See even with forcelimit, it did not stop the powerful armies with all of the extra upgrades that can be done to offense troops.  I've seen players be able to send just over 50k of dragons to a beacon with the 150 mill forcelimt and destroy that beacon with little losses killing 20-30k griff beacons because they show their kills on the public facebook pages, forts its much larger and they wipe out all beacons from 1 league sometimes, my own offense doesn't have enough forcelimit on it yet to max at the 150mill for a beacon yet there are some leagues on the map that hold level 5 beacons with around 10k griff and 10k occult in them because just 1 test hit tells me whats inside and I drop those on my own when I'm after pvp if the good tourneys are on  as I suffer very small losses because of the high rank my offense troops are at and all of the extra offense points upgrades I have done to them as well as the champion and the Hero

I don't know what you all consider a well defended fort or beacon to be, but for me a beacon needs 100k griff and occult minimum, fort at least close to 1 million griff and occult to stop the massive killers

The game at the moment is an offense players dream and even though I play offense I really hope the beacon improvements update on the road map bring some real positives for the defenders out there who still like to defend

Could you give me a link (pref non Facebook, don't trust that thing) to that roadmap they mention beacons? All I know about is this one: https://plarium.com/forum/en/stormfall-age-of-war/entertainment-community/107122_the-roadmap-for-our-future-updates/

Sir Dan Saul Knight said:

I don't feel like you have appreciate the game "proper". It may be that it's too much hassle for you and interrupts farmville too much and isn't your style but I suspect if you had been fully involved early on in a server you would have enjoyed it a lot more.

The game is without any meaningful league based activity and therefore a meta game and as a result is devoid content, killing the servers.

There were 3 major server wars Dark Plains PC server, before the coining update (of permanent offers and 75% healer).

War 1 was Russians vs everybody else. KoC, KoK, Destiny, KT, and Davidicus's league which I forget the name of (initial were similar to KoC, might have been KoC as well actually). The Russians lost and the nature of the server was changed forever. It would be a completely different set of players playing if that war had gone differently. Literally the entire fate of the server decided by a player led war.

Those 5 winning leagues allied with each other and were the major beacon holding leagues. They met regularly in Teamspeak and ran the server for a while. But like all great empires they fell to infighting. 

Destiny were kicked out of the alliance due to dislike of their leadership, a feeling they didn't pull their weight in the fighting and some personal stuff that filtered through from TD (TD came first and a lot of the successful Stormfall players came from TD).

I can't say for sure as I was only just getting into leadership side of things at the time but my take is this left KT somewhat isolated as KoK, KoC, Davidicus's league had closer relationships, Destiny was KT's closest relationship. There was back and forth about Destiny rejoining and I seem to remember them coming back for a few days but were rebooted. KT also had less useful middle beacon territory while KoC (I and II - there were two of them) both had corner beacon areas. This may also have been an issue that would brew major problems.

The bigger leagues cultivated smaller ones. Gave them beacons, nurtured them brought them on. A phase of growing yourself dedicated allies. KoC did this the most but somewhat arrogant attitudes from some meant they didn't build great relationships with the smaller leagues, in fact despite helping them they build negative relationships in some cases.

KT plotted in secret to overthrow KoC as the number 1 ranked league.

KoK and Destiny clashed, sharing a beacon border. The leagues warred fighting for territory. KT promised to support Destiny, KoC to support KoK. But yet neither league delivered on their promises while making whispers to stoke the war. KoK and Destiny ended their war with some mutual respect for each other and a nagging feeling that on both sides their allies had been driving them towards war to weaken themselves (to the benefit of their allies).

A KT spy infitrated KOC II and even managed to become the marshal of the league. He sowed discontent and discord in people's ears. KT also began the first propaganda war. They would "save the server", "be the friend of little leagues". "open up the beacon map" if people who ally with them and help in a war again KoC. None of it was true but it proved to be a highly effective narrative.

And so the trigger was pulled. Two major hammer players were persuaded to switch sides to KT. Several key KoC captains moved also. Two big players who were in the process of being recruited to KoC went with them to KT. Was the balancing tipping to KT over KoC?

With KoC weakened, it was D-day, the attacks on KoC beacons came from over 10 leagues. Was the server balance about to shift forever.....

KoK told KT that if they wanted to be no1 then they needed to war KoC 1 on 1, the best league would win and take the crown of the server. KoK would join the war on KoC's side otherwise (the weakened relationship from the suspicions of the Destiny war a barrier to jumping straight into the war). KT thought it had a winning hand, the whole server was against KoC. KoC had lost big players but more importantly lost the diplomacy war and KT's propaganda had turned everyone of significance against them, except KoK who were still neutral in the war. 

So KT refused to fight 1 on 1 "for the rights to be kings of the server" and KoK made good on their promise and joined the war on KoC's side. Probably unexpected as it looked a lost cause,  2 Leagues effectively against the rest of the server.

KoK was smaller than KT / KoC. But it brought with it deep knowledge of the game mechanics (mostly learnt from TD). Strength tests (hitting a beacon with small forces and accurately determining the defence from the battle report) being chief among them. Could it be enough?

KT and KoC beacons went down. In the first week KoC still pressured by over 10 leagues. And the smaller leagues went in and took over the dead beacons, some involved in the war some just taking advantage. No one had the defence to take and hold their enemies beacons but putting another league in those beacons provided the defence to prevent them being retaken by the original owners. This is where the bad blood between KoC and Knights started btw (which would eventually be the catalyst for Unforgivens vs Coalition 2 yrs later).

But as time went on. KT's allies turned out to be fare weather. All but Destiny dropped out of the fighting. 

One fateful day a massive offensive was planned KoC took down x3 KT beacons within an hour - (I was in all of those - losing 3 properly defended beacons was a big deal in those days)  KT's beacon game wobbled and survived with Friction coining massive amounts of defense to keep KT alive. Rumors were approx £50k (was he rich, a rumor about him spending an inheritance... and something about a dungeon....).

The sides were fighting themselves to a stalemate. They were eroding themselves allowing others to catch up. So it came that a peace was arranged, both sides able to take a breath and rebuild. And the second server war came to an end.

In the third server war Destiny would fight with KoC and KoK. Roanna would spend six figure sums. Test would goad Friction into attacking the one remaining Destiny beacon, the others having been so easy to take and KT would lose their entire hammer, all the Destiny defence was alive and sitting in one trap beacon. It seemed that loss was a step too far for Roanne, the spending stopped and the 3rd server war to could to a truce. But the full story of that war is another story.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

OK long post ...... but I wanted to give you a flavor of the rich tapestry that the game was back then. The meta game thrived. Diplomacy, allies, spying, intrigue, greed, backstabbing, manipulation. TS meeting every week with allies and friend alike, double digits people in TS at any time for most leagues. A need to recruit and train you members. Every little advantage meant something (as coining didn't dominate like today). People theory crafted and test how siege mechanics and BG's worked. Leagues had their own websites and forums. THE GAME WAS ALIVE.

Fast forward 3 years and the story of 2018 would be...... tumble weeds, empty beacon map, some individual players castle fights being the biggest thing going on. The whole story would struggle to make a paragraph (and the above is just a fraction of what went on in the early days).

The game is maybe 1% of what it used to be. Raiding / BG's / castle PvP just isn't interesting or varied gameplay. Diplomacy, league wars, alliance made and broken a constant fight for the Iron Throne of Stormfall, to be no1. We had our own Game of Thrones going on. The meta game, the interaction between players, that is where a game comes alive. Because the interaction between players are infinite and can be infinitely varied, there is very little limitation and even a simple game like Stormfall can spawn a very healthy meta game.

But it all depended on one simple thing:

- people cared (passionately) about their leagues and the standing of their league e.g THE RANKINGS

- as a result beacons were the, defacto end game content (you did your own thing for a few months and then got interested in helping your league be successful)

Without beacons the entire meta game collapsed to nothing, no one really cares about anything now. There is very little to strive to, outside of growing your troop count. A few people play farmville. A few people attack each others castles for shit and giggles. Most people just don't play anymore, on to better things.

PS this post ALL the devs should be forced to read. Because I really don't think they understand what the game had and what it doesn't have now (and it's way beyond the simplistic conversation of "please don't add coining content" - "no - we want to make money"). Meta game is the essence of strategy war game, it's not an effectively single player (maybe some team raiding) RPG.

You have plenty of info there, Unfortunately you seem to be blindly loyal to certain propaganda rhetoric, OR you need to wipe your chin to remove the Shyte.  i was involved in all but the Russian fighting.

Futrikelv, the post on the facebook community page is exactly the same with the same details as the 1 in your link as I just opened and read it, I would have to find 1 that is a link from U Tube as its also there as a video

Zardas said:

The beacon game was killed by Plarium introducing the Beacon Massacre event where you could revive 90% of what you lost during that massacre for free. At the same time two of the major leagues was fighting each other, one of those leagues decided to go and kill all the beacons on the map, since they could not hold any no one should.

That doesn't make sense. Because if you "can't" hold a beacon, then why should you anyway? Beacons, and forts, is pvp grounds. Just its so horrible unbalanced and a swipe of a credit card count for a lot more than the combined effort of many players. There this saying, money talks and bullshit walks. but in our case, its gameplay that took a walk...

If someone just want to watch everything burn and is able to do so, that is their choice. Flaws of game mechanics come into play when there is no effective way to combat it.... Or here is another thought. The game evolved to a degree (artificially bloated by spending). So what it took to defend a beacon reached such a level, so if you was stretching yourself to thin, you ended up not able to hold any. 

tbh brutally honest, if you can't hold it you don't deserve it. Been playing EVE since the start back in 2003... Seen empires rise and fall in a sandbox so waste stormfall seems like a small speck of grain in comparison. Where some fights was not just about gain systems and riches, but to deny others of it. Yeah, Plarium screwed the pouch in how mechanics work i n this game, but when it come to the nature of pvp. All games with a pvp aspect is the same. Players do things because they can, and their motive for do so is no more wrong than your own motives for playing and what drive you. Some players like to build sand castles, others like to knock them over, because for them your salty jelly tears taste delicious. 

Sir Dan Saul Knight said:

So KT refused to fight 1 on 1 "for the rights to be kings of the server" and KoK made good on their promise and joined the war on KoC's side. Probably unexpected as it looked a lost cause,  2 Leagues effectively against the rest of the server.

KoK was smaller than KT / KoC. But it brought with it deep knowledge of the game mechanics (mostly learnt from TD). Strength tests (hitting a beacon with small forces and accurately determining the defence from the battle report) being chief among them. Could it be enough?

KT and KoC beacons went down. In the first week KoC still pressured by over 10 leagues. And the smaller leagues went in and took over the dead beacons, some involved in the war some just taking advantage. 

what you are saying is, coalitions ruined that game.   

Sir Dan Saul Knight said:

So KT refused to fight 1 on 1 "for the rights to be kings of the server" and KoK made good on their promise and joined the war on KoC's side. Probably unexpected as it looked a lost cause,  2 Leagues effectively against the rest of the server.

KoK was smaller than KT / KoC. But it brought with it deep knowledge of the game mechanics (mostly learnt from TD). Strength tests (hitting a beacon with small forces and accurately determining the defence from the battle report) being chief among them. Could it be enough?

KT and KoC beacons went down. In the first week KoC still pressured by over 10 leagues. And the smaller leagues went in and took over the dead beacons, some involved in the war some just taking advantage. 

what you are saying is, coalitions ruined that game.   

so....why did plarium ad them as an official feature?

Sir Dan Saul Knight said:

 Davidicus's league which I forget the name of (initial were similar to KoC, might have been KoC as well actually).

I may be wrong, but are you referring to AOC?  I was too new to the game to know what was going on in the first big war, but I recall hearing that AOC were #1 on the server until they took big losses during one of the earlier server wars.

I find metagame interesting, but it gets way too nasty for me to want to participate.  It goes way past friendly rivalry into pure hatred and malice.  Players talking about destroying other people and forcing them from the game.  This may be a war game, but the idea is to have fun, and to me, that's not fun, just sickening.

IronApex said:

Sir Dan Saul Knight said:

So KT refused to fight 1 on 1 "for the rights to be kings of the server" and KoK made good on their promise and joined the war on KoC's side. Probably unexpected as it looked a lost cause,  2 Leagues effectively against the rest of the server.

KoK was smaller than KT / KoC. But it brought with it deep knowledge of the game mechanics (mostly learnt from TD). Strength tests (hitting a beacon with small forces and accurately determining the defence from the battle report) being chief among them. Could it be enough?

KT and KoC beacons went down. In the first week KoC still pressured by over 10 leagues. And the smaller leagues went in and took over the dead beacons, some involved in the war some just taking advantage. 

what you are saying is, coalitions ruined that game.   

so....why did plarium ad them as an official feature?

Coalitions didn't really ruin the game...at least, not by themselves.  The #1 thing that's killed most meaningful gameplay is simply how much power you can buy and how quickly you can obtain it. That's more of an individual thing rather than a league or coalition thing.  Its true that those who have bought huge amounts of power tend to band together, but with metagame and the hatreds between leagues, I think most power shifts these days will happen due to old players quitting and maybe new players rising.

Its kind of ironic, in a way, that as the game dies out, metagame has gotten even nastier since (based on forums posts) players have resorted to account hijacking to sabotage leagues just so they can downgrade the fort and hose a few people they hate.  But fear not!  Plarium has decisively denied all responsibility in these matters while giving us no new ways to protect our accounts against these tactics!

And BTW I do love reading about all that history but it dont have anything to do with why the beacon game is dead. As the beacon game died like 6 months ago.  

BiohazarD said:

Gadheras said:

Tbh would be very interesting to hear a honest view from Plarium on this. Or if they even got a hindsight how they screwed over their own game to get it into the state it is today. And if they have any idea of how to fix or remedy it. 

Most of the original devs probably aren't around anymore.  I'd guess since the company was bought out by Aristocrat there's been some employee turnover. 

Doesn't change the fact or excuse anything. Someone, somewhere, is sitting with the collective responsibility ... (and ow us a explenation).

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds"

Agreed Snowgoon with the forcelimit difference between the 2 servers, but that didn't stop the massive armies of 100k dragons sometimes even more, I have seen some massive armies on the facebook server 1 dark plains completely obliterate the inner beaconfield and how they done it was with their alliance

See even with forcelimit, it did not stop the powerful armies with all of the extra upgrades that can be done to offense troops.  I've seen players be able to send just over 50k of dragons to a beacon with the 150 mill forcelimt and destroy that beacon with little losses killing 20-30k griff beacons because they show their kills on the public facebook pages, forts its much larger and they wipe out all beacons from 1 league sometimes, my own offense doesn't have enough forcelimit on it yet to max at the 150mill for a beacon yet there are some leagues on the map that hold level 5 beacons with around 10k griff and 10k occult in them because just 1 test hit tells me whats inside and I drop those on my own when I'm after pvp if the good tourneys are on  as I suffer very small losses because of the high rank my offense troops are at and all of the extra offense points upgrades I have done to them as well as the champion and the Hero

I don't know what you all consider a well defended fort or beacon to be, but for me a beacon needs 100k griff and occult minimum, fort at least close to 1 million griff and occult to stop the massive killers

The game at the moment is an offense players dream and even though I play offense I really hope the beacon improvements update on the road map bring some real positives for the defenders out there who still like to defend