hellion do yu think his position here is "to help us"?

he answer by PLARIUM standards,  

"Thank you for such detailed feedback" (translated to plarium language "we don't care what you think")

 It's only up to players to decide which in-game activity for playing to choose". (translated to plarium language "we don't care what you think")

Firstly, I admire you Boris for not giving into the desire to tell us all to get stuffed. You are keeping your cool

and that is commendable. What is not commendable is the lack of real help and answers that you offer. On top

of that, if you only talk to the devs once a month, that is  terrible. They have cut themselves off from the lifes

blood of the game, the players. They don't seem to respect the p[layers enough to keep in real time contact

with them. This is sad.

Firstly, I admire you Boris for not giving into the desire to tell us all to get stuffed. You are keeping your cool

and that is commendable. What is not commendable is the lack of real help and answers that you offer. On top

of that, if you only talk to the devs once a month, that is  terrible. They have cut themselves off from the lifes

blood of the game, the players. They don't seem to respect the p[layers enough to keep in real time contact

with them. This is sad.

Despite that, the last tournament was actually the best one I have experienced here. I guess anything can happen!!

Boris Shevchenko said:

Johan said:

Copying, pasting and editing from a reply I posted elsewhere: Complaints have been made that the rewards from Elysian positions are broken. It is the same core calculation system behind the rewards. What has changed instead (compared to the Persians) is the resource to offense/defense ratios compared to regular units. In other words, the inputs to the system have changed, not so much the system (or mechanics) themselves. For Elysian units, these have been set in such a way where most positions strategies will struggle much more (compared to Persians) to break even on offense/defense. Similarly, tournament rewards have obviously been downgraded heavily. From the very beginning, the intention of the Persians has never been to be a source of growing your army. It turned out to be a great source of growing army power (even without reviving units) if the Persian system was exploited a little. Potentially, Plarium implemented the Elysian positions to be as they always intended positions to be. Again, I am not saying this makes sense from a game design perspective (because it really doesn't - the concept of knowing your players play to lose is very strange, unless you could hit a jackpot like in a casino).

I actually want to compare this with gambling:

1: Sending units to positions is not as exciting as watching a spinning wheel on a casino floor. When you play the strategy game you want to play to make your army stronger - this is the primary objective.

2: In both those cases (spinning wheel in casino and positions), you know you will lose in the long-term. However, you could walk away from that spinning wheel with a lucky fortune, so people still pay-to-lose. You can only ever get back what you lost with positions, and your primary objective with a strategy game is to play-to-win.

3: The point is that the play-to-lose concept with Elysian positions doesn't work because you've not designed it to be attractive. Play-to-lose works great in casinos because there is a potential large upside. You can never have enough of the high rank Elysian units anyway to make their abilities trigger with reasonable probability in full scale battles. Therefore, converting lower rank Elysian troops to higher rank Elysian troops, for an overall SIGNIFICANT loss of offense/defense, is not attractive either.

There needs to be something that is attractive about Elysian Positions … what is it? 

There are such simple things you can do to fix things around Elysian units (not just positions), for example, make the probability of the Elysian units' ability triggering dependent on the power of Elysian units in your versus your opponent's army. Currently those abilities are worthless in full scale battles. This will immediately make the units a lot more attractive and fit well with large existing armies of regular units. Such a change MAY even make it worthwhile to get those Dimacha from positions for large loss in offense/defense.

Thank you for such detailed feedback. As it was mentioned before, Elysian Positions, as well as regular ones are core features in this game. They work as expected. The basic principle is that the rewards are almost the same with losses (in resource equivalent)

So, we can't fix this feature since there is no any bug there. It's only up to players to decide which in-game activity for playing to choose. 

Boris,

I am quite sure you typed out a response to another post and accidentally posted it as a reply to mine. However, after reading a bit more on the forums, I am not so sure of this anymore.

If the response was deliberate, please see my response below:

When there is a real issue with the game and a good suggestion (I believe) on how to address it, how can the response be: "it works as expected" and "players can choose which in game activities they want to take part in"? I said the system works as Plarium expects and is not a bug (I said so indirectly, but clearly, in my original post). I know I can choose what I want to play.

I gave you good suggestions on how to change a feature of your game for the benefit of Plarium and its players. Why should I continue to try and help the game when you provide responses like the above? Based on some of the decisions Plarium made and features implemented, it is 100% clear that you desperately need player input or other outside help. Have you noticed how your player base is decreasing? I'd like to help, but you are giving me every reason to not post something useful again in this forum, because it actually took valuable time to type my post out. Even if you disagree with me, at least provide a constructive reason. Or, if it is the case, just be honest and tell me that you/Plarium don't care about x and y or that you don't have time to look into x and y - at least I can understand things then. If you are not allowed to make such statements, then please get someone in here to clear things up, because this is close to the most useless setup I have seen in my life. And your a business ... not a government entity of an unfortunate, run-down, 3rd world country. Seriously, get this act together man.

I am not expecting you to be a miracle worker, but your reply is making, absolutely, zero, sense, from any angle whatsoever.

Regards

Johan