With the recent additional of the temple, it looked like Lilith was adding some long term content to add some more customization to the game. Now... most of us realized that this was going to be a whale cash grab, but we had a few hopeful days of what appeared to be equal means to gain rune stones. Regardless, we now face the imminent reality that whales will have all army stats boosted by 50 to 100% while we are still trying to get our first +3...

This game really does a fantastic job at making the typical patron / occasional spender believe that they will be able to close the gap and catch up to the whales, but reality routinely suggests otherwise. Lilith consistently adds content to keep any semblance of equality out of reach. Now... I don't have an issue with spenders being more powerful than other players, but Lilith has positioned them to be virtually unstoppable. The entire 17-33 merge realm revolves around the whim of a few spenders, in spite of a vast majority of the players being heavily researched level 40s. Stat gaps, chest whoring, research rush, and now runestones make the whales unstoppable even in the face of a full wall of rank 13 golds.

Bottom line - Lilith doesn't give a shit about game balance or retaining low spenders. Their in game content routinely plays out as a cash grab targeted directly at the whales. This is clear because the spend required to see any significant results is completely insane. Like if you drop a few thousand USD on chests, you will get a huge rune stone advantage. 20 or 30 USD, what a normal person would probably feel like shit to spend, but might do it, basically gets you nowhere. The average player is here to entertain the big spenders until this game dies. And it will die. Lilith has taken the "milk it till its dead" route with this game, which is a shame since it had potential to thrive as a balanced lower spend game (small gap between F2P and Lord Creditcardicus).

Anyway, as it is, we will continue to see stale game play that is completely dominated by the whims of a few players. Rune stones really put the nail in the coffin with allowing spenders to achieve a massive, insurmountable advantage... but don't worry, nothing spoils a game quite like having no challenge at all. The spenders will get bored and quit, but not before a vast majority of the player base already has left as well.

Yeah, there is nothing positive to be said about them monetizing runestones to this degree. The gap has become a chasm, it will be like Legend27 when he hit 40 two months in and farmed all the level 24s for months. Lilith didn’t care, they were just glad to get their payday.

You are right though, they do just enough to leave a glimmer of hope that maybe the content is meant to actually make the game better overall, but they consistently turn that into a blatant and conspicuous cash grab. It will hurt the people who have invested hundreds to the low thousands the most because there is no catching up at that spend point, and the Temple will negate any modicum of advantage gained by spending any money at all. Lilith has no interest in the low to moderate spender, so they will get bored, get massacred, or just get tired of the favoritism, and they will quit. And then the whales won’t have anything to do other than win events, and we will see how long that holds their attention.

Terrific concept that has gone so terribly pay to win that I have a hard time feeling any hope about the long term future. And it really is too bad, the game has such promise.

As you know, we most likely don't get an official response here.

What I did was leaving a 1 star rating on the Apple AppStore, with the reasons I pointed out on my goodbye post.
Very similar to this topic.

For AppStore ratings you get almost always a response. This was mine:

"Hey commander,sorry for that. The original intention of designing temple is for the sake of lowpower players. Temple has enormous buff on research, which will accelerate the pace of low power players to catch up with high power players. We're trying to improve our games according to your description，open more ways to get free stone in temple and we really appreciate your support and love."

+1 on everything, but it doesn't matter what we post or discuss here anyway. So back to level 15 rezzing xD

sunbow wrote:

"Hey commander,sorry for that. The original intention of designing temple is for the sake of lowpower players. Temple has enormous buff on research, which will accelerate the pace of low power players to catch up with high power players. We're trying to improve our games according to your description，open more ways to get free stone in temple and we really appreciate your support and love."

It is very funny and makes me smile . Maybe some naive 10-years children will believe this shit.

There is no point in supporting this app as it will never improve in graphics, strategies, balance , new units , etc.

PrinceCharming wrote:

sunbow wrote:

"Hey commander,sorry for that. The original intention of designing temple is for the sake of lowpower players. Temple has enormous buff on research, which will accelerate the pace of low power players to catch up with high power players. We're trying to improve our games according to your description，open more ways to get free stone in temple and we really appreciate your support and love."

It is very funny and makes me smile . Maybe some naive 10-years children will believe this shit.

This statement was completely contradicted the moment they released runes for linar. So sad that it is kind of funny i guess.

Hmm can we have a pretty eloquent guy write a short explanation for users why we as long term players give the app a 1 star rating also explaining why we all use the same text - this might show the interested person that this game isnt worth his/her time and money.

that way its easy for everyone to make a quick 1 star rating without having to find his/her own way to describe it ... or is that a bad idea?

we could then spamm ratings to make an impact ???!!

I mean practically the damage is done and cant really be reverted in a fair way aside from reimbursing the whales for their expenses and redo the design of the temple ... but in the end we could help other players to not fall for the same lies also ...

Summarising the biggest complains sounds like a good idea to give feedback to the devs.

What we do know about the temple so far is, that there are 46 slots for runes in total.
1 rune initially
2 runes for +1 (92 in total)
5 runes for +2 (230 in total)
16 runes for +3 (736 in total)
41 runes for +4 (1886 in total)

so, getting to +4 means 2990 runes.

you get 2 a day if you complete activity quests, 1 for patron, 16 for the last weekend event, so let's say 5 a day max (4 for free).
since we do exclude money here, let us use 4. 2990 / 4 = 747 days = 2 years.

the rest is just a wild guess, but if we assume the amount of needed runes goes up by around a factor of 3:

120 runes for +5 (5520 in total) / 4 = 1380 days = 3.78 years
360 runes for +6 (16560 in total) / 4 = 4140 days = 11.34 years
1080 runes for +7 (49680 in total) / 4 = 12420 days = 34.03 years

and this goes up to +12...

so even if every(!) dungeon would give one rune, this is by far not enough.

the only solution i can think of is a new honor shop, where you can buy unlimited amounts for a cheap price.

keep in mind that every rune you put into a slot or +x enhancement of them gives a 1% buff to troops or heroes.
i was told that higher levels give more than 1% (don't know the details).
but yes, you will enter a god mode once you buy enough.

regarding the cash grab:
+7 would be close to 80000 runes.
one rune costs 100 linari (more if you draw chests)
80000 * 100 = 8000000 linari = 8000k linari = 8M linari.

go into your shop and figure out how many USD this means.

if this is not the purest definition of greed, i don't know what is.
one player could most likely hire a big dev team for years to create a better game than this one if he wants to max out the temple.

i am out of words here.

An honor store = store for a dwarf / human.

Buy 8M of linari to have 15% more damage on the rockets. It is a good business.