I am taking an extended unlimited time off the game. I may return to it one day if things really change but that seems unlikely.
Before anyone goes: "Oh we don't care, why are you posting this, etc" I am posting this because maybe, just maybe, someone in charge might see it and read what reasons can make a player finally decide it's time to let go and perhaps do something to prevent it. I am also going to post what in my opinion could have been possible solutions. If you are not interested you can just skip this thread ^_^

I started playing in 2014, took time off then started over fresh, last year. I've been there since the early beginning, and witnessed most of the major changes over time. So, I am a loyal player, and very patient, this is not "rage quit"

I have spent 440$ on this game in the time I have been playing since last year. Never have I spent that much on a game. So, I am not "just ftp and should just take what I get", I invested in this game. Looking back now, I regret I have.

Reasons:

1) Wars are no longer fun:

-Matchmaking:
The most fun aspect in the game for many of us has been wars!
strategizing, working together with 29 other people to defeat the other team was great fun :D
However, war matchmaking has been broken for far too long: We either get a top 10 team that wipes us, with no chance for us whatsoever, or we get a weak team that we wipe. You can know the result of the war from the first look.
The close, nail bitters are so extremely rare. But that's what makes it fun!
I want close matches! I want to not know the result from first look.

We made a thread with plenty of suggestions how to fix that, and there has been no news or feedback whatsoever on this issue, all we keep getting is more events and more monsters and more additions. I can't fathom why such a huge part of the game that is the most fun for most people, gets so little attention.

solution: this thread is full of solutions: https://forums.socialpointgames.com/topic/1593/war-matchmaking-discussion-and-suggested-solutions/1

-War Rules:
The library was supposed to bring more variety to wars, it has done the absolute opposite. I am so sick and tired of Spirit, Dragons, Female, Sea, Winged over and over.
I am only using 10% of my monsters: Thetys, Learnen, Tempest, Ingvar.

I have a 120 Uther (good legions, exclusive) that I haven't used in months, I have a 120 Mercurius (superheroes), a Frostbite (?), a Krampus (Evil legions). Where are they? Why can't I use the monsters I worked hard on and which I love using?? I keep getting forced to use Thetys and Tempest and Ingvar. This is in no way shape or form fun .. or varied. It is boring. I can't stand looking at Learnean or Tempest anymore, from all the dragon and spirit rules, eventhough, they were among my favorites before.

solution: add the new books to the rules, alternate with element, element, book, or rarity, element, book, and for the love of all that is holly, enough with the double same book rules.

2) Illogical Progress to Reward ratio

As our level increases everything becomes harder, but a level 100 player still gets same rewards as a level 20 player.

Gold and Food dungeons for example: their difficulty increases as our monsters are stronger, but the rewards don't increase. 20k (or whatever food it is) are nothing to a lvl 100 player with 120 monsters.

72 hour challenge: the difficulty for higher level players goes through the roof, but we still get the same level 100 legendary that has no use till it's ranked to 115 at least in our wars.

solution: Increase difficulty but also increase reward!
72 hr challenge, for example: make the legendary unranked if player is 1 to 50
1 star ranked if you are level 51 to 75
2 star ranked if you are level 76 to 95
3 star ranked if higher
or whatever ranges, just make it worth the effort! reward progress don't just punish it!
Why should I level up? I have been avoiding doing adventure map because I know once my level increases everything becomes harder with no up side.

3) Running out of reasons\motivation to play

Even though there are more events and dungeons than ever, we technically have less and less to do. Example:

Breeding events: Most breeding events require obscure rare legendaries, while the jokers can cover for common monsters which are often breedable or given in a monster dungeon at the same time! what's the point of the jokers then! I really feel scammed for buying Galante and Violet. The %s are too low, it's a joke, and the addition of random epics and legends has made it worse. So I don't even bother anymore. I rather keep breeding my Ultrabot and Laomu..

Wars: in addition to becoming not fun due to the reasons mentioned above about matchmaking and rules, the reward to effort ratio is just not worth it anymore.
For me, to get one thetys, we have to get 8 wining wars with 350 coins minimum, and what does one thetys do when you need 17 copies to fully rank her?
I used to save up war coins to get high single runes from team shop, that was ripped away with no warning, never to return.

I made a suggestion here to at least add some gems or elementium as rewards for the winning team, so we have some form of motivation. https://forums.socialpointgames.com/topic/1211/suggestion-to-make-wars-more-rewarding

PVP: renewing the pvp system at first seemed like a step in the right direction, but it soon turned to another aspect of the game we are better off ignoring.
I go to play pvp, all I see are 130s with X runes in my legendary 4 league, and I can't even refresh now to change them.
I will lose if I play against them, so I am better off just not attacking at all, at least then I won't drop. In what kind of game is NOT playing more rewarding than playing? PVP is just now sitting there, just like it was before the revamp.

Adventure Map though adventure map is still some fun, it comes at the high price of adding lot of lvl XP forcing you to level up which makes everything harder with no upside.

Dungeons Book dungeons and survivor are okay. But, Rune, Food and Gold dungeons are near useless. Spending the time and the stamina to get a lvl 4 rune at my level is a waste of time. Why not increase the runes with player level? don't we buy enough runes already? pretty sure adding a lvl 6 or 7 rune at the end for higher level players won't bankrupt you.
The statues of Premiere monsters: useless decoration, why not make them do something, like slightly increase gold production of habitats placed near it.

No motivation to get new monsters The lab has been imo the biggest mistake in the game. Unranked monsters are useless vs ranked ones no matter how good they are. So why should I bother getting a lvl 100 "Living forest" or "Psilotus" when it will not replace my 115 Sara, or be able to fight a 130 Laomu and Alces?

The effort and dedication required for progressive islands and mazes is not worth the reward. The only monsters many of us care about now are older ones so we get a copy to extract and help rank them.

I miss the old days when a good new monster would come along and all you had to do was swap runes for it.

I would have gotten Crissandre and given her my Malair's runes. But not when he is 120 and she is 100.

I would have gotten Darmith's bodyguard, if I didn't need at least 8 copies to make him usable.

solution: As mentioned above, increase the rank of the monsters given in mazes, 72 hr challenges, and progressive islands, according to player's level to make us want to bother with them. They are useless for us at 100, so most of us don't even bother anymore.

When the lab came out, you promised us ranking will be easier. "Second rounds" in events, but instead what we got was making the first round even harder and harder. Seriously, who here has ever seen the 2nd round in a maze or progressive island?

Another possible solution for mazes and 72 hr challenge in particular, allow a 2nd round without having to finish all event. Example in the maze if you get Hasai, his path resets and you can play it again and get another copy instead of having to finish it all to get to get him again. Same in 72 hr, reset that one monster puzzle after you get him, instead of having to finish all 3 puzzles to get to 2nd round.

4) So many unnecessary frustrations
-I go to play a dungeon, want to use my Uther, but nope! it's locked in my pvp defense, I have to go switch it then come back instead of just doing the dungeons. Why? why is this necessary. It doesn't make me want to get another Uther or whatever the purpose is, it only makes me curse.

-I want to trade cells with my teammates, I can only donate legendary every 24 hrs. 100 L cells take us 20 days to trade. Why? why can't we just trade as much as we want, or at least double the amount like in the "sharing is caring event" (where has that gone?). The lab has been out for over a year, and it is still as hard to rank and trade as when it started.

-My teammate struggles to get enough food to rank while I am sitting on 22 million with nothing to feed, but all I can do is send him 250 food? Make this a % instead of an amount. Since 2014 the gifts have not changed, what use does anyone have of a firesaur and 250 food and 2500 gold. Come on, why not improve these a bit, it's been years.

-Half time breeding and hatching events: if you added the egg like 10 mins before it started it doesn't get the reduced time, but if it runs out before you remove the egg, even if the egg is done hatching, but you haven't placed it in a habitat it restarts and gets the original time. Why? these little things really add up.

5) Too much additions too quickly all the time!

The lab came out, we barely had time to rank our monsters and we are still ranking them, then the library jumped in, making almost all of our effort obsolete.
We ranked rares and epics and uncommons, then suddenly they became obsolete. I literally had just max ranked my Salyentaur who is one of my favorite rares (unbreedable and not up for gold) when the library came out, I never got to use him.

I had 2 high level players on my team that been with us since the start, quit the game because of this. They invested their money to get 130s and X runes, suddenly all their progress meant nothing because they didn't have a "spirit" or an "undead" and the monsters they invested in were not in books.

Keeping things active is good, making new goals to prevent the game from becoming static is good, but not so quickly that the players feel they are not making progress at all because every time they are half way through, the goal moves, and all their progress is washed away. That is not motivating, that is disheartening.

Please stop taking the top few as the measurement of progress, these are your lowest % of players. Just because they had 120 and 130 doesn't mean others did. The library could have waited a few more months instead of throwing it out half baked. We were still working on the lab, on ranking, there was no need for it yet.

let things settle. Instead of producing new monsters every week that are so much alike, that we can't even keep up with, give us time to appreciate and enjoy what we have gained. Give us more chances to rank, more chances to use our monsters, to compete. A tough monster dungeon that really gives us a good legendary monster for example.
Give us more breaks between events to really enjoy them instead of making them feel like a chore .

and Finally as lead of a team I am tired of having to recruit to replace our good players and teammates who quit the game due to the same frustrations.
We have lost 7 high level long terms players from our team since the library came out with the main reason being "the game is not fun anymore."

so please @Fox @Carlos please try to get this feedback across before you lose more and more long term players.

One final note:
The good things
To give credit where credit is due, and to not only complain: the things that I have enjoyed the most are: monsters designs and stories. The monsters have a variety of cute, pretty, and scary and are well made artistically for the most part (I pretend guava juice, D-evice, and chocolove, don't exist).

Updated player profiles were a great addition.

Despite the bad rep support gets, there were times when certain representatives were really helpful and went out of their way to help me with game issues I was having.

This is a thoughtful post with a lot of excellent points. Hopefully the feedback will reach and affect ears that can make a difference.

I feel you Sam, i really do.
Even though we haven't always seen eye to eye i am sorry to see you go.
I am not far off, i ignore most elements of the game to the point that i just do dungeons lately and call it quits.
For how long this will be enough for me and everybody else on this boat only time will tell.
I thought i would be alright with my lvl 130 Thetys and a handful 130s more, but with the newest nemesis all my monsters are just a joke. I wouldn't normally care, but i have to go against them on every pvp fight and what seems to be every war now.
ML went from awesome strategic turn base rpg to another run of the mill pay-to-win money sink.
To top everything off, the forum has become a place where you are not supposed to talk about any elephants in the room and SP representatives of all kinds shoot dust in your eyes.

So long Sam, hope we meet on another game perhaps.
Let me know if you find something worth-while.

Pretty sad how most of SPs additions to this game have been motivated by greed, finding new ways to milk long time players, instead of making the game a more satisfying and rewarding experience.

For the record, SP makes boat loads of money, they made over 90,000,000$ in 2013, and their profits have only gone up.
They charge up to 99$ for mediocre components to a mediocre mobile game. Some gem packs cost more than brand new AAA games, even small rune packs cost more than many award winning indie games.

Yet the game is still laden with bugs, many monsters have glitchy or poor animations, matchmaking is all but broken. It's pretty clear that the actual game is an afterthought for these guys, the most important thing for them is finding ways to milk more $$$ from people, adding new stuff before fixing the old just to keep people playing catch-up.

It's clear that there are some talented folks working with them, the overall monster designs have improved, and the new tier based PVP was decent for a while, till they screwed it by removing reroll option.

About to just ditch the game myself.

I agree with most of what you said.
But I can't agree with the following:
1.) Donating cells to team mates ... if they make it so you can donate as much as you want, players will create blackmarket and will be selling cells for money.
2.) Same goes with food donation to your friends. While 250 food is absolutely nothing, it would be a problem if they don't limite it somehow. Again, higher level players who have 100M food, would then start selling food.
And it wouldn't be much fun if any of my friends would just gift me 10M food when I started playing this game. I like it, that I need to work my way up, without anyone feeding me.

About cells ... make it 5-10 legendary cells per day. This will be nice increase, but still won't attract players to start abusing it and selling those cells for money. At least I think so.
And gifting anything to friends ... that shuld be just removed.

@Simon771 said in So long, and thanks for all the fish!:

I agree with most of what you said.
But I can't agree with the following:
1.) Donating cells to team mates ... if they make it so you can donate as much as you want, players will create blackmarket and will be selling cells for money.

There will not be a need for blackmarket this way , what most players will do is making extra account and donate from it to main account

for example this month we will get 100 layth cell free , so if you have 17 account extra and you log to each once daily at the end of the month you can get 1700 cell . hooray ranked 130 layth

there are many plugins that make switching between accounts very easy so yes limitation is really important , one my first game i played we have a flaw like this and some players had 50 extra accounts !!

@Haka-Taka That's also another problem with unlimited donations of cells.
main account + 29 others and you have yourself a whole team lol

People already have "black market" for gems. If they wanted to add more cells they wouldn't be waiting for this feature to do it. The hassle of 17 accounts and logging in daily is too much.

Limitations are fine but not like this. Not to this extent and as I said at least double it.

No one said give you 10 million. I said make it a certain %. For them to give you 10 million amd say it's 1% they'd have to have 100 million food. Those who have that are usually on teams where no one needs 10 mill food.

My point is gifts have not changed since I started playing in 2014. I am pretty sure they can modify them without breaking the game.

I agree with @Sam , the dungeons are now pointless for mid to high level players. The rewards are embarrassing.

I think a new island on the Adventure Map each week would be a better option, and just do away with dungeons altogether, apart from the Survival Dungeon and Premiere Dungeons (maybe Premier Dungeons for older monsters each day for the chance to earn cells of that monster?)

A couple years ago, the moderately successful company I worked for was purchased by a man who promised improvements. At first he did, but soon after his initial investment he changed tactics and sought to milk customers for all they were worth. We would be in a brainstorming session, and instead of thinking of ways to attract customers or make our current ones more satisfied (and more likely to repeat), we were encouraged to find innovative ways to milk new and current customers for more money. That's exactly the path SP has taken since TT bought them. What happened to the company I work for? At first sales surged, but they eventually failed miserably.

Sam's entire post will fall on deaf ears. SP's greed is killing the game. I know it's become fashionable to say it, but that doesn't make it any less true.

If SP is now owned by TT, they probably have no say on anything. When a company no longer has a say in how their business runs, they stop caring.

Good post, @Sam

@Bruce-Hamilton said in So long, and thanks for all the fish!:

When a company no longer has a say in how their business runs, they stop caring.

That has been apparent for many many months now with ML :(

It's really a shame that you're post and the points you make will continue to be ignored by SP. I am done spending any money on two different accounts not because of any boycott but because it feels like throwing money down a rat hole. I'm not an expert with mobile games but the direction this game is headed doesn't seem sustainable for all the reasons listed and the fact that they just won't seem to listen to player feedback and make the appropriate changes.

Nice post! People forget social point still made money hand over fist back when you could finish a progressive island for 300gems, you could get any one monster in a maze, even the last one if you planned it right without spending money. You could get runes from teamshop instead of spending money. It didn't take years to rank a general to 130.
New owners just want to squeeze as much money out of a loyal base as they can and kill off the game. Then they will move on to another successful game, buy that and kill it off while squeezing as much money as they can that game. It's a business model.

@Carlos when everyone on this thread is saying it is a shame that SP will keep ignoring those points. Maybe you'd like to prove them wrong. I am out of the game, this isn't about me anymore.

The team is aware of this post.
I would love to do the official communication between players and the company, but I'm busy with the combat and monster production :)

You have very good points listed there.

@Carlos said in So long, and thanks for all the fish!:

The team is aware of this post.
I would love to do the official communication between players and the company, but I'm busy with the combat and monster production :)

Maybe the person who is in charge of communication between players and the company should step in and communicate. I think SP would be very surprised to find out the actual number of players that same frustrations as @Sam.

@Sam

As Carlos said, feedback was forwarded and they read your post.
We do not ignore players feedback at all, but we cannot manage whole game just solely on players feedback. Why? Because every player has a different opinion, some are similar some are totally opposite. Therefore, we rely on players feedback AND careful data analysis AND analysis of the market.

But just to answer some of the points:

1. TW
   Matchmaking is an ongoing issue. We are aware of possible solutions but all of them take really long development time and unfortunately we are all currently pretty busy with already planned releases. BUT it is on our radar and will tackle it as soon as possible.

Some of the books weren't included in wars restrictions. This will change next month after they will be evaluated if they fit. Rarities should come back as well.

2. Progress to reward ratio
   That's on our list as well. We will do first steps in this direction pretty soon.

3. Motivation
   All I can say that the team read your feedback. But I personally don't know how they gonna deal with each feature you mentioned.

4. and 5. feedback was forwarded to the team.

Really appreciate the list, I think it brought some perspective to members of the team.
Thank you for that Sam and I am very sorry to see you go.

Whatever anyone thinks of Sam, you can't deny his passion for the game and he will be sorely missed. Yes he's made enemies and filled many of our screens with walls of text, but take away any personal feelings you may have towards him, and you have a very intelligent player who still cares about the game he used to love.

I really hope SP take note and act on Sam's excellent specific feedback as when a game loses such players, it is in serious danger of imploding!

As another long time player here and the OP is absolutely correct!! I for one 100% agree that "Monster Lab" ruined the game, and now you compound that with the EXTREME prices in the team shop?? So many friends of mine have quit the game because it just isn't fun anymore, and the continued cash grab that everything has become makes me question why I'm here. I stopped spending my $$$ on this game many months ago, left the team I was on because we couldn't win, and now I just play on newbie teams where ALL my monsters can be used and I can feel like I'm accomplishing things.

With the absolutely stupid increased cost of the team shop, it would take a average player to be on a super active team that can get in 14 to 15 wars a month, win every one, average 200 coins per war (2800) just to buy 1 General from the shop, and you would need to do this for 17 straight months just to rank that 1 General to 130, then multiply that by 9 Generals......LMFAO!!!!

No monster in the Team Shop should ever cost more than 1000 WC, except for newly added monster to the game, and those should be 2000 WC max. Team Shop is completely useless now to the average play base.

Who thought it was a great idea to decide that the $20+ VIP and $20+ Nemesis monsters were BEST in the game? and had to make those appear in your player profile by default?. FYI.....Your BEST monsters are ALWAYS your HIGHEST ranked monsters!!!! PERIOD!!!

Totally agree Sam

Hello, everyone!

Unfortunately, I have to do this again. I am really happy to discuss gameplay and game itself with you but, please, keep in mind that this is an official forum. Some posts just don't belong here.

I would normally close this topic but I believe Sam deserves a little bit more. Therefore, I did delete a few comments instead. Please, keep this thread on topic and discuss the game itself otherwise I would be forced to close it.

Thank you!

@Fox Stating that you cannot make changes based solely on player feedback because everyone has a different opinion is, to me, a cop out. I remember a time when a very, very slim percentage of the player base complained about matchmaking times being too long. This was because their pool of suitable opponents was very small, so long matchmaking times for these teams were not unreasonable. But instead of communicating this SP caved and made their match times shorter which negatively impacted a huge percentage of the player base. So SP does make changes based on feedback from very few players.

But besides that there’s some changes we have been begging for that a large majority of players all agree with. Here’s one of the many examples: We all have complained about how locking up defensive PVP monsters is nothing but a huge nuisance. Let me know when you find even one person who doesn’t want that changed. Take all the time you need.

If you think that most of the complaints listed by Sam only bother him or a small percentage of players then you are totally out of touch with the player base. I’m not going to say that the resistance of SP to making these changes is arrogance or, “you won’t tell us how to run this game” but either way, ignoring your customers’ wishes is not an approach that any long-term successful business would recommend following.

@Sam It seems that your 72 hour challenge feedback really gave a good result. SP are offering a Lv 110 Baba Yaga!!!

@Max-Pinheiro said in So long, and thanks for all the fish!:

@Sam It seems that your 72 hour challenge feedback really gave a good result. SP are offering a Lv 110 Baba Yaga!!!

heh :P lvl 110 for over lvl 100 lvl 105 for lower than 100. not bad ^_^

I am done with this game. There is nothing enjoyable about it and SP refuses to anything about the long growing list of issues other than keep adding it. Three years of playing and $100s spent on it and now it is done.

@Keith-Romberg If you leave I will miss you:(

@Keith-Romberg I have never known a game that has SO LITTLE to do considering we spend real money on the Monsters.

Anyway, I have just started playing Castle Clash, and already I have spent £50 today. ;D

I've been away from the game for over two weeks (away from civilisation) and I have to say that all I really missed was my team mates and the interactions we have. And the team wars to some degree, but everything else did not create any longing to return to it. I logged in a few times since I'm back and done the Book Dungeon and crafted a few runes. Can't say that I was keen to do anything else. Just saw the Vault discussion and can't say that I am surprised at the cost. I will rejoin my team in the next few days and just be there for team wars and team interaction and see how I go. I am not ready to leave (yet) but I can very much understand why so many do. It's definitely looking grim for this game.... :(

Lets do a quick analysis of the current game play:

Events - most events are rather disappointing, as even if you do your best at collection, the more attractive monsters are DESIGNED to be unreachable without spending an excessive amount of gems. The ones that are obtainable, are absolute garbage. At least have some decency and offer 305 GPM monsters.

Breeding Events - OMG the dismal success rate. Heck even breeding a regular Laomu take like 20 tries if you are lucky. These just generate a warm fuzzy feeling of murderous intent every time I participate.

PVP - 99% destroyed by SP. They are still working on the last 1% so even if you have Lvl 130s and Lvl X runes it is unplayable, but just haven't got it quite right yet.

Dungeons - so boring for so little reward. Is more like select the right team, then auto combat while you do something else.

Adventure Map - want to get penalized for being high level in 72 hour challenges? Well this is the best mode for you.

Team Wars - basically they are telling you not to use war coins to rank monsters anymore by raising the price of Team Shop monsters to the extreme. Makes sense, cause otherwise these players won't spend gems on monsters. I don't even want to know the time it takes to rank a general to 130 from scratch nowadays.

So what exactly is left to play again? Oh right, collecting monsters and watch them walk around on habitats. They have a remedy for that too. Lets make tons of new monsters with no new island expansions allowed, so they will pay through the nose for Monster Vault. That will teach these collectors a good lesson.

If they did such a good enough job to wear out even Sam, oh just think what it does to the average player.

@Portgas-D.-Ace said in So long, and thanks for all the fish!:

Team Wars - basically they are telling you not to use war coins to rank monsters anymore by raising the price of Team Shop monsters to the extreme. Makes sense, cause otherwise these players won't spend gems on monsters. I don't even want to know the time it takes to rank a general to 130 from scratch nowadays.

15 months at 3000 coins/month, assuming the price for a general is 2500. That means 11 years just to rank up the generals, not counting pets and bodyguards.

Spectacular design.