dabookman
Well-Known Member
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Dear players,
There seems to be quite a bit of speculation about our reasons for (recent) changes, so we've decided to reach out and clarify our intentions in the hopes of making things a bit more understandable.
Our stance on various topics
Tediousness
Tediousness shouldn't be a way to balance the attacker/defender relationship. Making someone quit because they don't want to deal with the hours of work your fakes represent isn't how we think the game should be played. If that person wants to spend hours on it to deal with them the best they can, that's something different, but a basic, convenient solution should exist. We are currently looking into new ways to make late-game wars less time-draining.
Old doesn't mean good
There's a lot of stuff that is clear to advanced players that isn't clear to new players. There's no reason they should need to struggle to understand stuff just because we did when we started.
We realise that you're used to the way certain things are (we are too!), but that doesn't make them the best ways, or the most easily understood. We go into specifics a bit more about this in the examples later.
Scripts and other external tools
It's great that various technically gifted players use their skills to offer extra convenience or customization in the form of scripts and tools to other players.
While such tools can offer improvements for some, we think the game should be playable without these externally-created tools. We believe this strongly for several reasons:
This is why recently we've been trying to resolve the issues above by integrating popular and useful functionality directly into the game: so it's more reliable, easy, accessible for all, and safe.
Some confusing changes
With the above in mind, here are some of the changes we made in the last months that were greeted with confusion.
Map Button Relocation
The map button used to be next to the village link, a bit below the main menu. It had been there since the very earliest versions of Tribal Wars. Naturally, when we relocated it to the main menu, this took some getting used to. So why did we do it?
We noticed that people were having trouble finding the map link. It was inconvenient when the map link moved because we all knew where the map link was due to repetition and the expectation that it will be in the same place that it always is.
Naturally, players unfamiliar with Tribal Wars don't have the benefit of repetition to know where something is - all they have is expectation. Their expectation turned out to be something fairly logical: all the important areas in the game seem to be accessible in the big eye-grabbing main menu, so if they're looking for something like a map, in the main menu is where it would be. No important game area was to be expected to be just another bit of partially re-coloured text. We moved the map to the main menu so that the overall navigation is that much more intuitive.
Incidentally, this assumption that the main menu is for all important navigation is also why in update 8.22 we made the "Overviews" link take you to your village if you just have 1 (and don't have a Premium Account). We observed new players would often click there when trying to get (back) to their village.
Rally Point Searching
We added searching in the Rally Point because "x" and "y" are foreign concepts to many and coordinates are not something easily remembered. We combined it with showing information about the target before going to the confirmation screen - something we felt for a long time was lacking. We know the searching is mainly only useful for the early to mid stages of the game, which is why made sure to keep the old coordinates-targeting system for players who want the extra precision, or players using scripts.
Priorities
So, why do so many of our changes seem to be geared towards newer players? It's because we care a whole lot about new players, and you should too! You: the players, are the most important part of any online multiplayer game. Without you, there would be no Tribal Wars. It's an unfortunate fact that no one will play a game forever. Without a constant stream of new players getting to know and enjoy the game like you have, there would very soon be no Tribal Wars. Several of the changes we went into details about above were to make the integration of a new player into the game a better experience, resulting in them being slightly more likely to stick around and become a full member of the community.
None of this means that you existing players aren't important - quite the contrary. All kinds of players are important to Tribal Wars: as friends, tribe-mates, enemies or targets - everyone contributes towards the strong community in one of the web's longest-standing browser games. Though it might not always be obvious, we do hear the feedback you share in your forum posts and support tickets. One of the most important tasks of the Community Managers in each language-version is to keep us up to date about your mood, wants and needs.
However, acting on this feedback is not our only way of making decisions. A wide variety of factors can come into our decisions. Some examples are: community feedback, how easy something is to use, security, performance, experience with past cases, impact on premium usage, impact on player satisfaction and what our numbers say about how much something is used.
We try our best to use all information at our disposal to decide the best for Tribal Wars overall: as a game, business and community. We realise that this might not always be as clear as it should be, so we're going to continue to be more open about our reasons, goals and what considerations went into decisions.
We hope this has been enlightening, and thanks for reading until the end. Please never stop telling us what you think, love and hate!
Leave feedback Here
The Tribal Wars (development) team
There seems to be quite a bit of speculation about our reasons for (recent) changes, so we've decided to reach out and clarify our intentions in the hopes of making things a bit more understandable.
Our stance on various topics
Tediousness
Tediousness shouldn't be a way to balance the attacker/defender relationship. Making someone quit because they don't want to deal with the hours of work your fakes represent isn't how we think the game should be played. If that person wants to spend hours on it to deal with them the best they can, that's something different, but a basic, convenient solution should exist. We are currently looking into new ways to make late-game wars less time-draining.
Old doesn't mean good
There's a lot of stuff that is clear to advanced players that isn't clear to new players. There's no reason they should need to struggle to understand stuff just because we did when we started.
We realise that you're used to the way certain things are (we are too!), but that doesn't make them the best ways, or the most easily understood. We go into specifics a bit more about this in the examples later.
Scripts and other external tools
It's great that various technically gifted players use their skills to offer extra convenience or customization in the form of scripts and tools to other players.
While such tools can offer improvements for some, we think the game should be playable without these externally-created tools. We believe this strongly for several reasons:
- They'll break due to an update sooner or later, due to how they and the game interact. We try to avoid this when feasible, and the script authors work hard at updating their scripts to always be compatible, but it's often a losing battle. Because we change parts of the game, scripts will need to be updated at some point or another in their lifetime. This is bad for everyone involved: authors need to update, players need to grab a new version, and people get annoyed about updates because their scripts don't work for a while.
- Setting up a tool can be a pretty complicated process, and not something that everyone feels comfortable with.
- Tools are only available to certain circles of players. If you happen to have a technical wiz in your tribe, you can count yourself lucky. Most don't - indeed, many tribal wars players are not even aware of the existence of scripts.
- While most don't, tools can present a security risk. If you run a script on your account, that's letting the script author make any changes to your account that he wants, and you only have someone's word for it that the tool is only performing the intended task. All it takes is one person with less-than-honorable intentions to mess up your game.
This is why recently we've been trying to resolve the issues above by integrating popular and useful functionality directly into the game: so it's more reliable, easy, accessible for all, and safe.
Some confusing changes
With the above in mind, here are some of the changes we made in the last months that were greeted with confusion.
Map Button Relocation
The map button used to be next to the village link, a bit below the main menu. It had been there since the very earliest versions of Tribal Wars. Naturally, when we relocated it to the main menu, this took some getting used to. So why did we do it?
We noticed that people were having trouble finding the map link. It was inconvenient when the map link moved because we all knew where the map link was due to repetition and the expectation that it will be in the same place that it always is.
Naturally, players unfamiliar with Tribal Wars don't have the benefit of repetition to know where something is - all they have is expectation. Their expectation turned out to be something fairly logical: all the important areas in the game seem to be accessible in the big eye-grabbing main menu, so if they're looking for something like a map, in the main menu is where it would be. No important game area was to be expected to be just another bit of partially re-coloured text. We moved the map to the main menu so that the overall navigation is that much more intuitive.
Incidentally, this assumption that the main menu is for all important navigation is also why in update 8.22 we made the "Overviews" link take you to your village if you just have 1 (and don't have a Premium Account). We observed new players would often click there when trying to get (back) to their village.
Rally Point Searching
We added searching in the Rally Point because "x" and "y" are foreign concepts to many and coordinates are not something easily remembered. We combined it with showing information about the target before going to the confirmation screen - something we felt for a long time was lacking. We know the searching is mainly only useful for the early to mid stages of the game, which is why made sure to keep the old coordinates-targeting system for players who want the extra precision, or players using scripts.
Priorities
So, why do so many of our changes seem to be geared towards newer players? It's because we care a whole lot about new players, and you should too! You: the players, are the most important part of any online multiplayer game. Without you, there would be no Tribal Wars. It's an unfortunate fact that no one will play a game forever. Without a constant stream of new players getting to know and enjoy the game like you have, there would very soon be no Tribal Wars. Several of the changes we went into details about above were to make the integration of a new player into the game a better experience, resulting in them being slightly more likely to stick around and become a full member of the community.
None of this means that you existing players aren't important - quite the contrary. All kinds of players are important to Tribal Wars: as friends, tribe-mates, enemies or targets - everyone contributes towards the strong community in one of the web's longest-standing browser games. Though it might not always be obvious, we do hear the feedback you share in your forum posts and support tickets. One of the most important tasks of the Community Managers in each language-version is to keep us up to date about your mood, wants and needs.
However, acting on this feedback is not our only way of making decisions. A wide variety of factors can come into our decisions. Some examples are: community feedback, how easy something is to use, security, performance, experience with past cases, impact on premium usage, impact on player satisfaction and what our numbers say about how much something is used.
We try our best to use all information at our disposal to decide the best for Tribal Wars overall: as a game, business and community. We realise that this might not always be as clear as it should be, so we're going to continue to be more open about our reasons, goals and what considerations went into decisions.
We hope this has been enlightening, and thanks for reading until the end. Please never stop telling us what you think, love and hate!
Leave feedback Here
The Tribal Wars (development) team
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