Years ago, you gave us the Divine Spirits and after many many players spent endless hours and many spent endless saphs,,, they by your instruction were the first line of defense for a players castle. Then you came up with the brawl and made the Divine Spitits worth points and gave no option to players but to bubble up...Then in your wisdom and compassion for players we came up with the Sorcery Spell protection using the upgraded Beast Riders,, and of course you had to upgrade the base unit to level 20 and the chance to level 20 and the percentage to level 20 AND after all of that,,, you Plarium say oh no this is out of balance,,,we must take away from many many players THAT that they spent endless hours and effort to achieve.....I think you are quite cheap and dishonest,,, this is motivated by your love of more more more money,,,,,,,,,,,,You guys are sad,,,,,,, I feel for the thousands of players who have to endure your NONSENSE...Put it back the way it was

I definitely don't like this move but how does it make it harder for free players specifically?  To me it seems like a lot of it is just intended to make fireballs useful again against players with high sorcery shield chance.  Maybe it makes the prophetess more important too.

How about details on the change, so we do not have to go and check everything.

It could be a good time to move on from Plarium. 

Please, give us more details about this issue.

Dear all, please note that this was a necessary bug fix, which brought more balance to the game. I'm sure you will adjust your strategy and restore your high rates of protection using another approach. 😉

This game is nothing but a P2P

Please don't troll us.

It wasn't necessary it was a choice. There are several significantly better ways to fix the original problem than the braindead approach you chose, which renders SH troops useless now.

There is no way to adjust and restore protection because you chosen fix completely breaks the mechanic. 

And nor should people have "adjust" to compensate for incredibly bad Plarium choices, you should be listening to your customers and "fixing" the game when you break it.

I'll explain what the better solutions are in a following post but why I have to teach you I don't know, you are the game developers....

PROBLEM:

Plarium is ever increasing champ ranks.

The Augur (used to) straight multiply the protection equation by the % bonus of the Augur. 

As champ ranks increased the multiplication by bigger and bigger % bonuses, lead to the point that 1 unit would cover an infinite sized army with 100% activiation chance

PLARIUM SOLUTION:

To take the first part of the protection calculation out of the Augur bonus and apply the Augur bonus only to the second part of the calculation (the troop ratio part).

NEW PROBLEM CREATED:

This so nerfs the protection calculation that even with maxed arts and maxed rank 8 champ you can now only achieve coverage of about 4 to 1 with the SH troops. e.g. 

SH troops were overnight rendered utterly useless as they simply can no longer cover a big enough army to be useful.

SOME SOLUTIONS (MUCH BETTER APPROACHES PLARIUM COULD EASILY HAVE APPLIED FROM THE BEGINNING):

Option 1: Adjust Augur % Bonuses

- Put the Augur on it's own % bonus schedule that balances the protection calculation

- Not all champs have the same bonuses (undead boss, FBs etc). There is no need for the Augur % bonus to be the same as say a beacon of hamlet champ.

- If you halved it, you would get something sensible that addresses your problem, without destroying the SH unit mechanics

Option 2: Adjust the troop ratio part of the protection equation

- Recognise that only applying the Augur bonus to the troop ratio part of the protection equation will render coverage levels that makes the troops impossible to use

- And add a constant to the ratio part of the eqauation that increases the coverage ratio back to levels that applied before Rank 8 champs

Option 3: Apply a new factor to the end of the Equation to reduce protection

- Leave the equation the same but apply a final factor to bring the output of the calculation back to levels that applied before the Rank 8 champ update 

- As the new ranks add approx 50% more % bonus to each level, factoring down by 1.5 would leave the output pretty much the same as before the update.

I guess there is an option 4 - do nothing but compensate everyone for the money spent on sketches increase SH lost arts that you now rendered utterly useless (but we all know you won't do that).... 

and option 5 - do nothing and roll the dice that this isn't the final straw the pushes a load of people to stop playing or spending in the game. 

Given I have given you 3 (and there are more) solutions to balancing the problem without destroying the SH troops and alientating your entire customer base - I really don't see why you would want to play Russian Roulette with the game's futurue viability for no reason.

If you really gave the smallest of concern about customer experience and loyalty, this apology and forum discussion would not be required. Keep making greedy changes that are not in best interest of your customer and your retention and resulting revenue will continue to drop such as it has been trending downward. 

This is genuinely tone deaf. 

You've made a change that is universally disliked. Even the leader of the #1 league on the server commented here saying this change is horrible. You have captains from upper mid tier leagues saying this change is horrible. You have dozens of other people here saying this change is horrible, and I can only assume they have a mixed perspective on the game.

This 'fix' just created a much bigger problem, and it caused stoneheart units to become far less useful. 

And your response to all this is the same as I'd expect on some random forum board for dark souls, 'git gud'. You didn't at all address any criticism, you just told people to accept it and get better. I'm not even going to read into why you put a winking face at the end but when the comment already comes off as apathetic and almost sarcastic, it looks bad. 

Your job as a community manager is to build and maintain a community, to promote the brand. When you ignore all criticism and instead respond with 'too bad, deal with it', how does that make the community feel heard or respected in any way, shape or form?

The problem for me is that comments like this that are tone deaf, and completely ignore the point, alongside the apathy, make me feel like the Community Managers don't care, it's just a job and when it's just a job, and when someone looks at something as just a job, the bare minimum work is going to be put in. Which in this case, means that nothing said here, will ever matter, or be taken seriously.

You can prove me wrong of course, this is just my perspective, but the game is already declining a lot, I'm sure there's 1 player keeping your daily user analytics up, but 3 years ago, there were like 70 competitive clans, now there is like 25 at most. 

And I'm assuming a moderator is going to remove this for flaming/hate speech. If you do, just know that if you do, it directly proves my point about the inability to take criticism.

Due to this miserable nerf myself and 3 friends have removed their credit cards so that no further purchases can be made. We worked far too long and paid far too much money to allow this change to be accepted. 

Ahoy there community manager

The change to SH unit's ability is absolutely the worst case of inflationary change I've ever seen

The 8* champ now is even worse than the 7* champ was before; and that silly argument about game balance or taking back from what you gave us with the 8* champs? Baloney: you gave us nothing but a chance to get a little better through either blood, sweat and tears (i.e. months of hard work) or heaps of real coin.... all nullified by a funtastic management decision

One more like this and I'm out forever, as apparently swarms of other players decided this already was the last straw

DGO wishes all gamers the best and management a grain of wisdom

Hi.I have only one question ;can we reach back again 100% FB protection?? i mean Augur champ rank 8 combined with Prophetess champ rank 8 ?? please confirm or not  .Thank you!

There is certainly a way to reach 100% Augur protection again. You need to calculate your troops' power and Augur bonuses as well, and you will find the perfect combination that will work again.

Dear all, thank you for sharing your opinion with us. We have forwarded your feedback and suggestions directly to the team, as it was extremely important for us to receive them from the community. I can assure you that we will inform you about significant game balance changes beforehand and that such upsetting situations will never happen again. For now, I can tell you that the Augur bonus will be based on the new fixed formula, and I hope you find your way to establish its highest rate as soon as possible. 

Thanks for your suggestions, my Lord. We will hand them to the team.

We are sorry for all the frustration caused. Unfortunately, the change was crucial. 

Lords and ladies! 

We deeply apologize for the whole situation with the changes in Stoneheart Unit’s Ability. Since there was a bug in the calculation, and we had to fix it as it was affecting the game balance for a while, we should have definitely warned you beforehand. The fact that we didn't is just a human factor. We have learned our lesson and will do our best to avoid similar miscommunication cases in the future. 

We certainly understand that the problem caused distress and rightful indignation. However, we simply couldn't have avoided fixing this one. 

Last week, compensation for these inconveniences was sent to your accounts, as a token of apology and appreciation. We hope that each of you received it.🙂

Duncan, I don't think a refund is applicable to this situation. However, I invite you to contact our tech support team by following this link  to find out more details.

You claim that this was a BUG,  but we know it was not.  It was a massive miscalculation by your devs due to a total lack of testing since this game was created.

You claim that the problem was caused by Stoneheart Unit’s Ability, but this is also untrue.

The problem was caused by your greedily adding 8 star Champions,  yet you nerf our abilities instead of reducing the insane effects from maxed out Augurs.

But this will not be the end of this sorry tale  ...  What happens when you decide to add 9 star and 10 star Champions,  which you are certain to do in the near future to further boost your profits? 

Will you then be making even more devastating changes (nerfs) to all Stoneheart Units?

How about a nice game of chess, Professor Falken?