Plarium, please provide responses and answers to the questions raised.

Please do not respond as follows:

1: "The Elysian city and units works as expected"

2: "Players can choose which in-game activities they want to take part in".

3: "Thank you for your opinion"

Johan said:

Hi there,

Can somebody from Plarium please explain to me what the thinking was behind the Elysian city? Clearly it is a significant new feature to the game, which took time to implement. The city, the units and positions, make basically no sense - not even to players who are willing to spend lots of money on the game. Players are way better off spending the money on the regular city. Considering myself, for example, I do buy some packages here and there, revive units, etc. I also study the numbers quite carefully. I don't see any reason why I should rather spend something on the Elysian city as opposed to the regular city. The exception is fortifications, which are worth getting. If players have not discovered this yet, I'm sure they will. You could have given additional useful things (to make money from) MUCH easier and with MUCH less hassle/development time. From a design perspective, the cost/benefit impact here is probably way worse than you hoped.

If a company spends resources to develop something like this, it tells me you don't have the proper staff or processes in place to develop and review what has been done. Have you considered to hire (part-time, ad-hoc basis) consultants that are also part of your player base? I own and run a successful company with about 40-50 employees that are data science and business development focussed - would love to help you - have been a player for a few years as well. I am not complaining here. We received something new that has some use - thank you. The ideas with the Elysian city are fine, the problem is the numbers/parameters/calibration of the formulae behind the features/units of the Elysian city are way off and not consistent with the rest of your game - you can still turn it around.

Regards

Johan

Hello, Johan. Thank you for offering your help. Unfortunately, I'm not a game designer and I can't influence the decisions our game team make. However, it's in my power to gather and pass players' feedback to devs' team. 

Community managers gather players' feedback from forums and our official communities. After a certain period of time, we pass all the suggestions and feedback to our developers. Then there is always a meeting with our community + VIP team and developers where we discuss all the suggestions/explain how the players see them.

After that our devs have a certain list of suggestions and then they start working on it. Some of the features are implemented in the game in full, some become parts of other features, some are declined. As a result, lots of features and improvements that we launched, were based exactly on our players' feedback.