Alliance: Heroes of the Spire

I'm a Senior Game Engineer on the team. Most of what I do is building the tech that the designers and product managers use to decide things like drop rates, stats, etc.

Most of what I control has more to do with game client performance, server architecture, tools - Most of the kinds of stuff that's largely invisible to players.

I'm not entirely sure which piece you're asking if I really mean. I do not have control over drop rates. Sure - I could go into an excel file and change it, hotfix the server, and push it out to everybody. But I wouldn't keep my job very long =)

Natural 4-star monsters (monsters that start at 4 star when they are summoned) are moderately rare and they are exciting moments. Which one did you get?

I can tell you that I literally turned around and told our lead designer what was written, and he said "Okay. Thank you!"

How likely is he to do something about it? Well - generally feedback builds up until a discussion happens among the leadership on the team, and then someone takes the results of that conversation and either does something or doesn't. Any single instance of feedback is unlikely to stir up enough for a conversation (depending on how dire the situation is). But usually we find threads of consistency among the many sources of feedback (reddit, forums, discord, internal playtesting), and then someone acts on them. A great example of this is Hero Crafting. We had it on the backlog, and we knew we wanted to do it at some point. Since the release of the game, a ton of people have expressed a lot of frustration about not having a path to get a natural 5 star monster. Some of the most consistent feedback that we got was that people wanted something to take the edge off of the randomness of pulling heroes from cores. We continued to monitor this feedback until we eventually had discussions about what our best options were, and ultimately we landed on bumping the priority of hero crafting. A few weeks later, people are crafting their Gaius'.

The reason I deflect about a lot of the game economy / game design discussion is that I don't want to say things that are wrong or make promises that I can't follow through on since I'm mostly just another voice of feedback with respect to those things.

Diana is a great pull. She's a wonderful healer that will last a long time. She's also really popular in the arena because her leader skill helps teams survive burst damage from a lot of arena team strategy. Congrats on your Diana =)

What have you read? What are the specifics? What changes would you like to see made?

I talked a little bit about in app purchases in a previous post. As a disclaimer, I don't design the in app purchases and all I can really do is deliver feedback about them. Specifics about what you like and don't like would be the most helpful, but with in app purchases (like with most merchandising) the best thing you can do is vote with your wallet. If it's not worth it, don't buy it. If it's worth it to you, go for it. Every single person is going to have different thresholds for risk and value, and everyone's budget is dramatically different.

The Operating System controls whether or not the app is allowed to keep the games' resources available when you switch to another app. If we lose network resources, we have to reconnect (usually the game does this with the "Connection Lost" banner at the top of the screen). If we are terminated, we have to completely reload the next time you launch us. The OS might terminate the app due to keeping memory in use when other things you're doing need that memory instead.

Request sent as Kelmane.

Also sent a request. Drew914 in game.

Drew said:

Also sent a request. Drew914 in game.

Click to expand...

Drew, I declined your request before checking the forums...my bad. Just saw a level 4 requesting to join. We're currently full but if you can resubmit your request we can accept when a spot opens up or when Aevry has a chance to cull an inactive member.

Thanks.

I don't hate the game.

Initial thoughts while playing the tutorial sections:
• Could use a little world building or intro paragraph before being tossed into the first mission. "We're under attack!" when you start the game means nothing without context.
• Transitions could be smoother. Character portraits fade/slide in at the start of dialogue but disappear immediately instead of sliding back out.

My biggest problem right now is the lack of resources. If I could 5* more characters I wouldn't care about leveling up some shitty 3* POS, but there's not enough available to do this without ultimately screwing yourself when you do get lucky down the road (as I found out the hard way).

That and O/C chars are soooooo rare.