Daily grind => Progress?

#1

This post is to detail the grind of E2P players (does not include the atlas elite). This also came out to be longer than expected, I italicized the main point at the end of each category if you don’t feel like reading it all.

When I first started playing this game, usually about an hour of game-play per day allowed me to grow at a steady pace, and to stay competitive, at least E2P “competitive”. Now War Dragons has become an endless grind that literally makes me feel like an hour of game-play per day is simply not enough. PG is changing war dragons from “casual phone game” to a game that requires more dedication
than your actual life.

Lets look at all the daily tasks I would need to do to make steady “progress” these days (also keep in mind even if you actually do this everyday, the progress you make is still slow).

1. Egg tokens: even with the discount changes to plat, saph, garnet and emerald tiers, egg tokens are still a resource that’s hard to come by and you need a ton of it. Doing about 10 egg runs per day will get you maybe 1500 daily tokens give or take, and lets average each run to about 2 minutes. (average runs counts the time in between as well, such as loading time etc…)

A 4 weeks period will yield your 42k Tokens at 11-12 hours total (give or take). Think about how much progress you just got for 12 hours of game-play over a 4 week period… This wont get you half a dragon past sapphire.

2. Gold runs: This depends a lot on your team but, lets use my team for example and lets also ignore taxes. Lets say you are aiming for a minimum of 1600 troop a day, this is actually meh, but it will get you some atlas progress. At 230kg per run, you will need about 8-10 runs per day, it also depends if you need 930k gold for revival or 800k gold for a new bash. Atlas has long bases, some dragons are faster than others but you cant always use them cause you need XP on other drags as well, average run is about 3 minutes.

Lets average it to about 25 minutes per day. 4 weeks time gets you about 45k troops.

3. Quests: The most utterly useless feature to get a slightly higher amount of rewards per event for an unjustified amount of work from each team member. I cant stress enough how dumb this feature is. First of all is more mindless grinding.

Revenge 5 times… just re-attack the same person for no reason with ember over and over again. Fun!.

Super-shots, defense quests => ask in league chat if anyone is bored enough to attack you and swap dragons a few times so you can randomly keep using SS.

Join your teammates 12/9 times using a specific class/type dragon (pray is hunter or fire so you can use ember and don’t have to swap to another red tier dragon) => run Ms.Mersey mindlessly swapping dragons.

Even doing the quests at the fastest mindless rate takes another good 10-20 minutes of my daily game-play.

At least make quests somewhat interesting, not another mindless grind, we dont need more of that in this game…

4. PvP’s: Out of this least, I think Pvp is the one I find the least boring, but i gotta add it cause is still a big time consuming daily grind. During PvP events If you are E2P you gotta use those Packs and Inner’s as efficient as possible. During 24 hour reset pvps I use 30 energy per day and do 10 supers, in addition to that I do maybe another 5 runs of normal attacks with the energy that gets naturally refilled. Since I’m not the highest level it takes me 2/3 dragons to defeat a base, which can take up to 4-5 mins per run but lets just average it to 3 mins per run.

15 daily runs is about 45 mins, I spend 30 energy packs per day and 45 inner’s, and I still wont get the 450 sigil prize.

In pvp like fight pits you’d want to spend 10 energy every 6 hours, that increases the amount of runs to 25+ per day. (this however will get you the 450 sigil prize).

In conclusion, you could spend 2 hours of daily mindless grind per day, and still make shitty progress at the end of the day. Keep in mind this just includes grinding tasks it does not include any time to socialize, glory runs, or any other fun activities the game offers.

Solution 1, make grinding a viable thing to do. If quests require every teammate to dedicate 20-30 mins of their day just for that, why the hell are you not offering bigger rewards for it? An entire team is working together in order to archive something, but we get shit at the end of it. 300 sigils at 16 events per season is less than 5k sigils is not even 17% of a branch. On top of that branches keep getting more and more expensive while overall rewards stay the same.

Solution 2, make it fun to grind, make it a challenge, give me something that I actually need to pay attention to rather than mindlessly doing while watching TV.

War Dragons 2019 Quality of Life discussion
#2

PvP and Wars used to be the main non-grind activities in the game. Wars are dead and Atlas is pure grind. We’ve replaced the act of figuring out how to defeat bases our peers have created with rote runs against the boring Invaders. No wonder we’re bored.

#3

Finally… WD is boring, boring, boring. Thank you.

#4

Agreed we need to get back to the heart of the game and that is Wars…it’s really the only fun part for me…perhaps chasing down people in NML will be more fun now but I haven’t put aside the time to do that yet to know for sure yet.

Need to find a way incentivize wars again. Most people don’t want to war too much if they are happy in that league or just know their team isn’t ready to move on. Perhaps have two different kinds of wars, ones for team points and others for more tokens or something. Maybe rubies or timers, embers etc… I get we have events for some of that stuff but really you’re just attacking the same base over and over again accruing points. It’s not so much trying to challenge yourself because you don’t want to waste energy and not get points, as with a war you are more inclined to challenge yourself.

#5

And yet, people were so upset with how all those LAZY players wanted to put troops on their trappers and get hit (for less glory than an attacker mind you; it was a very inefficient way to get glory)! If Thou Dost Not Grind All The Things Thou Shalt Be Eaten By Amarok Until Dead (or forced to grind to appease those who couldn’t stand the idea of just one thing not being a mindless grind in this game)!

Note: yes, the fixing of the more recent crappy Atlas changes does address this to some extent, but given how ridiculously grindy this game is, that argument still has me questioning if people just have some sort of weird Stockholm-type Syndrome as a result of years of captivity grinding for crappy rewards in this game. /s

I think the problem is that wars suck, even if you win.

PvP was always a bit of a grind, at least since I started playing, but it was a more rewarding grind with the raid button and the bonus meter. Too bad some enterprising genius thought megacoins were the way to go. :unamused:

#6

Now dragons cost more, we still get the same amount of sigil per prize tier and is harder to get there without the bonus meter. Is like three L’s thrown at us without a single W.

#7

Find a new game, one that you don’t find boring and tedious.

#8

totally agreed… in the end wars are the ONE thing where being competitive matters.

What´s sad to see is that since years the PG dev time dedication and ressource allocation move to another direction.

Before WD I was playing another game… started with wars from FRI till SUN. Then wars were changed to 24h. Then to 12h.

Later on there were different types of wars:

  • diffent duration: 24h/12h/1h
  • different size: 10 players / 20 players / 50 players / 100 players on each team
  • different basic prinicple: clan vs. clan / MVP wars (top 10k players could join clans specially created for those wars to war each other a la last man standing) / random wars (you were jugged into a team with random team members and had to fight another random mixed team)

all those things were a lot of fun! Some wars were merely for fun, others for reputation, others for gear or any sort of reward worth chasing…

How much I wish PG would have done that instead of Atlas… maybe it´s not too late?!

Coming back to OP --> I agree: lifetime which needs to be invested in this game (apart from money) is increasing to a non-family-friendly amount

#9

25 minutes a day, average player🤔 I think the average player plays 2 hours per day. If you want to progress, you have to work for it. Im doing an average of 50k token per week+ what events prieces give. So the average player should have no problem grinding 250k tokens per month🤨 With 250% boost i managed 370k token since last breeding, and im not a hard grinder😉

#10

It’s one of the main problems indeed. I think the idea of grinding hours with ember is utterly boring and imo takes the fun out of the game.

And the problem is the bloody healing potions I think. If you get to fly and don’t lose much heath you should be rewarded with a much smaller healing time, if any at all providing you fly an excellent run. Grinding with ALL your dragons would be fun… And skill rewarding :wink:

#11

Go hit normal bases go grind some people always want the easy way out!always give me eggs i dont got time to grind

#12

Easy way out? There’s no such suggestion, players are suggesting more efficient ways to grind.

Using MasterCard is a time saver, you get further spending less time and more money. No problems with that. But players who spend more hours should be able to get some gratification too.

If you spend and this does make you feel injusticed just continue spending and grind. You’ll be a monster 🤷

#13

Good idea how did I not think of that? oops nvm I did…

Now the idea that a new game will null my attachment to WD, is ignorant at best…

hmm… The punctuation here makes it a bit hard to understand what you are trying to say, I’m gonna just assume is a fail attempt at sarcasm. I suggest actually reading a thread before you comment on it.

#14

I don’t think you read my post very well, “25 minutes a day, average player🤔”. No one said that, i know the line you are referring to and you should probably go back and re-read it.

Also you are talking about a single grind “egg tokens”, sure if i could dedicate my entire daily playtime to farm egg tokens it would be easy to get 50k per week, but I don’t and i can’t. There are plenty of other things that need grinding, refer to my post for them.

Now to suggestion that the average player spends 2 hours on daily grind is absolutely idiotic, even more if you are suggesting they should spend that time on token missions alone. Even if the avg player does spend 2 hours of daily game-play, that time-window is divided between several other factors, the biggest of them is the social aspect of the game.

This line is a joke all by itself, if the avg player got 250k per month just from grinding, PG would’ve never had to rework the tiers.

#15

O well :smirk:

#16

As someone that considers themselves an average player😂 I thank you for this post and agree with you that there isn’t very many paths to accelerate my progress as most content is paid for. I can not realistically play over two hours a day but regularly get on and to fight wars and back my team up. While I do not expect end game content for free I would like to see an accelerated track for those that put in the time to grind. I also regularly take care of my quests and ensure that I do the best during my events that I can without spending money. I know personally that is disheartening for many grind players to not see a clear track forward that doesn’t involve spending as many believe that they are as a big apart of why this game is successful as the spenders.

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#17

There’s a school of thought in game design that grind isn’t a description of a state of gameplay; it’s a state of mind. The argument goes that grinding is characterized by two traits: it isn’t fun, and it is something done in the hope of making the game fun again. The component behaviors of grinding might have been fun once. They aren’t fun for the duration of the times the player feels obligated to do it, but it might be optimal for getting ahead in the game, and in doing so (possibly) make the game fun again.

Main ways to escape this feeling are (1) repeatedly enjoyable audiovisual effects that trick your brain into thinking you aren’t playing a shit game, (2) making the game hard or variable enough that repetitive actions still require thought, and (3) offering meaningful incremental rewards. WD does an ok job of the first (their art team is pretty great; audio elements suck though), an exceptionally bad job of the second (terrible/nonexistent rewards for challenging yourself make unchallenging behavior optimal), and doesn’t even try to do the last.