@Hutch_Tim I would (and many others) have happily given our time to provide feedback before the release of clubs. We could have told you all about these issues with a few hours of testing. We were once accepted into a special group for testing projects but that didn't materialise.
And i will say this with all the respect i have for all developers and companies out there and being a manager in IT for decades that deals with a lot of customers. You don't understand your customer. Just look at the poll, you satisfied 5% of the people that do not want daily events and gave them club events as a solution, a feature that is not ready for prime time yet and has a lot of logistic issues on its own. If you took a poll from that 5% of players and ask them if they are happy with club events, what do you think the satisfaction % would be? Even at 50% satisfaction you still made around 97-98% of you total customer base unhappy one way or another.
Even Steve Jobs was wrong about bigger displays on phones. Boy, did he get that wrong.
Take my feedback as you like but i hope at least something sticks out of all my posts (and others) and you become better. History in the last 1.5 years hasn't showed that, but it is never too late to change.
Good luck Hutch. You have a good idea, you can do better.
and about social part of clubs. I hate all my clubmates. I hate those who lose much, I hate those who win much. I just want to get some easy money, some want to get a lot of money. So we all are just working on our earnings. I'm pretty sure no one cares about their club, only cash. And clubmates are actually club rivals
I hope bots problem will be fixed and those monkey won't be getting easy 30 wins against bots
I just love how everyone from hutch is just completely ignoring all this criticism and the paragraphs full of good arguments against clubs and instead they post one liner, regarding the club size.
Ok, I’ve given clubs the same amount of time that it took me to get hooked on Top Drives in the first place and I still don’t get it.
Why would I want to race 10 tickets against Hutch bots for almost no reward? Is it supposed to be a boredom endurance challenge?
The one thing I have learned is that Hutch Rob is an extremely handsome chap. That must be how he gets away with running fords & Vauxhalls in an Italian event.
I don’t want to be overly melodramatic, but my gut feel is that Clubs should probably be switched off and reworked into something more appealing before even more damage is done.
I feel for the devs because they’ve obviously put a huge amount of effort into it and the criticism must be crushing, but I really don’t think ploughing on like this is the best strategy.
To reduce volatility, we are increasing the length of Club events and the thresholds needed to win by 100%
To maintain the current level of Club Event rewards, the rewards awarded at the end of each event will all increase by 100%, too
We are also increasing rewards by 30% at the top end. This will mainly help higher RQ players.
Despite events being 100% longer, the Participation thresholds will only increase by 50%, making higher rewards easier to obtain
Max size of events has been reduced 150 to 75 players per side to encourage better distribution of players
New, more open criteria have been added to the pool of criteria that events are seeded from
When a Club is dominating, the opposing Club’s score reduces at 3x speed. We are reducing this to 2.5x speed.
These changes will take place in Season 2. It may take some time for these changes to roll out across all Club Events. We will aim to make to make this changes Wednesday morning UK time.
End of Event Rewards
We’ve heard your feedback for greater rewards. As this is an ‘unlimited’ play mode, rewards are intended to be smaller on a per race basis than other modes. We are actively monitoring how much cash users earn from Club Events and will use this to inform any balance decisions.
We are making three changes for now:
Redistributing rewards. We want players to contribute to their Club’s efforts, not snipe events in their final minutes, so more emphasis has been put on racing more and maintaining a strong leaderboard position. This also implicitly means larger rewards for higher RQ players, so over time levelling up will increase your rewards.
As a result of the redistribution of rewards, there is a moderate increase in rewards of around 30%, that will mainly benefit late game players.
On top of that, we are also doubling rewards in line with event length to keep that ratio the same
The aim is for Club Events to provide a similar distribution of rewards to Daily Events (once end of season rewards are taken into account), but based around actively participating and winning races.
Reward Redistribution
Slightly increasing rewards from Number of Races
Decreasing rewards from Club Victory relative to other categories to reduce the benefit of joining events in the final minutes
Although event length is doubling, the required races is only increasing by 50%, so it is easier to earn the higher Participation rewards
Greatly increasing rewards from leaderboard position
For transparency here are the requirements, and previous and new rewards:
End of Season rewards
For transparency here are the criteria, and current rewards:
Daily Events
As previously stated, Club Events are the new iteration of Daily Events, which have become stagnant and had few incentives for playing legitimately. Daily Events will end as Season 2 begins.
Eight Events a Week
We have been trialing an eighth standard event in the week that starts on Thursdays and ends on Saturdays. If you’re of the position that you prefer normal events, know that we have added a new designed event to the weekly schedule.
Known issues
Players are matching against bots rather than opposing players too frequently. This is unintended. We will investigate and make a fix. Server engineers are currently focused on reducing overall server errors in the game as a priority.
FAQ
Why can’t I join a particular area that has an event in?
You can only target areas that haven’t been cut-off. You can enter events only if you can travel from your HQ to the event, without travelling through a rival Club's sector or a sector with an active event in it.
Legacy is caged in because the events are too long and the opposition attacks our sector (which we just won) before we can advance, cutting off sectors we need to defend. I wonder if this is intended to be in the “spirit of the game”.
Btw I just played 1 1/2 hours straight, battled in 3 sectors for less then 10k cash and raced 40+ times. I’ve not helped my club in any way because we’re stuck in the mire of Hutch incompetence. Oh sorry that was a bit rude. Fix your freaking game Hutch 😡
@Hutch_Robin A big issue here for me is that you earn less per race/minute the more you do. I've run 3 clubs races at varying participation. These were all bot hands so quickly spammable. The reward per minute play obviously would reduce drastically against real players where you have to consider placement...but at least it might be interesting.
Win, Platinum participation, MVP performance, Rookie rank 50 races in 25 minutes with 5800 reward or 232 per minute
Win, Gold participation, Gold performance, Rookie rank 15 races in 7.5 minutes with 3800 reward or 507 per minute
Win, Silver participation, Silver performance, Rookie rank 5 races in 2.5 minutes with 1800 reward or 720 per minute
It should be more rewarding for putting in the extra effort. I have no incentive to put in an MVP performance if I'm earning 1/3rd cash income (for time spent playing) of just putting in 5 races and getting on with my day.
Many things have been said here in this thread, including most of my thoughts as well. I'm not sure if anyone (who has the power to change things) is listening, but I'll still try to share my point of view.
First of all, the problem is not with the clubs feature by itself. It is a new feature, and we desperately needed something, but right now it's a half-baked beta version of something that can be good fun, but right now is just bugged and boring. It has potential, but needs time, probably months, to make it what is should have been from the start. But hey, we're used that. That's always how things were in TopDrives.
The problem is that Hutch thought that it is ready to replace something that has been for more than a year a not so interesting but very-very important part of the TopDrives ecosystem.
I know that here on the forum we're all assuming that everyone is a good smurfer, and was capable of making 30-40k cash by smurfing the dear departed daily events. That's probably not true. But those who were, Hutch, are the most devoted fans of Top Drives. Those are the players who are now disappointed, and this could hurt the game in the long run. Yes there are players who thought the dailies are pointless, because no matter how hard they tried, couldn't get higher than tier 4. They are probably happy with clubs replacing the daily events. But are these really the players you want to satisfy? They won't be around for long.
If I had not found this forum and learned about smufring, and thus become able to open many Ceramics, I would have quit the game by now for sure. Progress is painfully slow even with 3-4 Ceramics per day, but it kept many of us going regardless. Any less than that would prbably kill all the fun in the game. You had a good balance. A balance that kept the F2P going, but gave something to the P2W for their money, and guaranteed that everyone can enjoy this game for years. Don't ruin this please.
I know that pleasing everyone is impossible, but this is just as bad for new players as for us veterans. I can't imagine how hard it would be now to start a garage from scratch. Acquiring and updgrading all those super useful C/D/E/F cars. To get to the level where I am right now would probably take years. Most new players will just quit after finishing the campaign, once they realize how hard it is to progress.
I'm not saying the dailies should stay forever, but getting rid of them without a replacement that can provide just as much resources (cash, gold AND cars) for the same effort, will slow the progress beyond bearable. It was already tiptoeing on the edge before clubs. Please re-think this.
I'm sorry to continue with the negativity, but our wishes for fixing go to a man who said that a leaderboard does not need to be real-time... That explains a lot to me.
Legacy is caged in because the events are too long and the opposition attacks our sector (which we just won) before we can advance, cutting off sectors we need to defend. I wonder if this is intended to be in the “spirit of the game”.
Btw I just played 1 1/2 hours straight, battled in 3 sectors for less then 10k cash and raced 40+ times. I’ve not helped my club in any way because we’re stuck in the mire of Hutch incompetence. Oh sorry that was a bit rude. Fix your freaking game Hutch 😡
Why do you even play mate? Let it run it's own course and you'll see that we are going to win season 2 as well, it's all part of the program
As part of the overall objection to smurfing, part of the question is how much value should you get for quite a low effort strategy that involves playing in a way that wasn't intended. What should determine the cash players earn each week in these lower stakes events?
Just a quick look at Blue2moro's numbers. I'll propose a few corrections, perhaps there are more.
- 224k a week is assuming 7 fewer events, but there are only 6 fewer events due to an additional Thursday event, so that's 192k difference. Tier 4 of a 48h event rewards 2.5k extra cash more than Tier 4 of a 24h event, so lets say 189.5k cash. - If you assume at least Rookie rank, as it takes just two days to get to, that adds $1.5k (1k event, 0.5k season) - Spend 499 gold on the doubler, and you're at -59 gold, but up 129.5k.
There may be more maths we can do, and we'll keep an eye on the actual earnings, but then we're talking about 259k a week. That's +35k and -59 gold. Much closer than it sounded with the example you gave.
Same events whole day - Waaaay more boring than dailies.
I understand a lot of your objections, but come on. There is more variety in Club Events than Dailies.
The problem is not in total income only. It is also in time spent/ income ratio. Which is way lower for smurfing. Variety? What kind of variety are you talking? Have you guys played yourselves clubs before releasing them? Or you really find permanent beating bots and being unable to join events is a variety?
x5 ultra rare 98 RQ bring your Variety in 19Rq cars in your garage. Oh you dont have much? PAY FOR SERVICE. x5 FWD X5 USA x3 Dodge X5 Italian X5 FR X5 USA X5 ultra rare x3 German etc. all Drags / Rain / Offroad
At what point can hutch keep ignoring the whole base of players playing this game? It’s clear at least 95% of people want daily’s back. What issues do you have with bringing it back? @Hutch_Robin@Hutch_Robin
Legacy is caged in because the events are too long and the opposition attacks our sector (which we just won) before we can advance, cutting off sectors we need to defend. I wonder if this is intended to be in the “spirit of the game”.
Btw I just played 1 1/2 hours straight, battled in 3 sectors for less then 10k cash and raced 40+ times. I’ve not helped my club in any way because we’re stuck in the mire of Hutch incompetence. Oh sorry that was a bit rude. Fix your freaking game Hutch 😡
Why do you even play mate? Let it run it's own course and you'll see that we are going to win season 2 as well, it's all part of the program
Yeah I’m done playing clubs. It feels more like a job than a game
There is no excitment in this events... I enter only events that we are gonna win to get few Club xp, and as soon as i hit 50xp i am done till next day.
Funny thing, or sad depending how you look at it... i spend more time in front of my computer typing in the forums instead of playing the game in the last 2 days! The social aspect was definitely improved with the clubs update
There is no excitment in this events... I enter only events that we are gonna win to get few Club xp, and as soon as i hit 50xp i am done till next day.
@Hutch_Robin A big issue here for me is that you earn less per race/minute the more you do. I've run 3 clubs races at varying participation. These were all bot hands so quickly spammable. The reward per minute play obviously would reduce drastically against real players where you have to consider placement...but at least it might be interesting.
Win, Platinum participation, MVP performance, Rookie rank 50 races in 25 minutes with 5800 reward or 232 per minute
Win, Gold participation, Gold performance, Rookie rank 15 races in 7.5 minutes with 3800 reward or 507 per minute
Win, Silver participation, Silver performance, Rookie rank 5 races in 2.5 minutes with 1800 reward or 720 per minute
It should be more rewarding for putting in the extra effort. I have no incentive to put in an MVP performance if I'm earning 1/3rd cash income (for time spent playing) of just putting in 5 races and getting on with my day.
Depends, they probably see it as income per hour or such. Right now, with the super long club events, if you do have 25 minutes to lose, it's much better to spam hutch bots for 25 minutes and try to get MVP. What suck is when you invest those 25-30 minutes and do not get MVP - you get about 1000 less cash, which is worse. And we're talking about competition against your own team.
So yeah, in terms purely of income, it's "ok" I guess if you have an algorithm calculating income per hour median and such (which seems to be what Hutch is doing) - since you can't play more than 1 event, if you have more time, you better spam it to get more cash per hour.
For us tho, not very fun - I'd rather not gamble on getting MVP, just get 5 races and log back later. I am surely not the only one, and that defeats the "limited ticket sucks" argument from Hutch - this is pretty much the equivalent of the daily, minus the challenge and with delayed rewards at the end of week.
I understand what they are trying to do (standardize mean income for everyone and not have smurfers get much higher income than everyone) but they've missed so many side effect and impacts and completely lost the player's perspective.
Look, I am ok with curbing smurfing - it's ok, it's not intended behavior, a loophole, but they've mixed up the need for some new gameplay with this and tickets limits and stale dailies and ended up with something that did not address any of those issues specifically and made everything worse.
Many things have been said here in this thread, including most of my thoughts as well. I'm not sure if anyone (who has the power to change things) is listening, but I'll still try to share my point of view.
First of all, the problem is not with the clubs feature by itself. It is a new feature, and we desperately needed something, but right now it's a half-baked beta version of something that can be good fun, but right now is just bugged and boring. It has potential, but needs time, probably months, to make it what is should have been from the start. But hey, we're used that. That's always how things were in TopDrives.
The problem is that Hutch thought that it is ready to replace something that has been for more than a year a not so interesting but very-very important part of the TopDrives ecosystem.
I know that here on the forum we're all assuming that everyone is a good smurfer, and was capable of making 30-40k cash by smurfing the dear departed daily events. That's probably not true. But those who were, Hutch, are the most devoted fans of Top Drives. Those are the players who are now disappointed, and this could hurt the game in the long run. Yes there are players who thought the dailies are pointless, because no matter how hard they tried, couldn't get higher than tier 4. They are probably happy with clubs replacing the daily events. But are these really the players you want to satisfy? They won't be around for long.
If I had not found this forum and learned about smufring, and thus become able to open many Ceramics, I would have quit the game by now for sure. Progress is painfully slow even with 3-4 Ceramics per day, but it kept many of us going regardless. Any less than that would prbably kill all the fun in the game. You had a good balance. A balance that kept the F2P going, but gave something to the P2W for their money, and guaranteed that everyone can enjoy this game for years. Don't ruin this please.
I know that pleasing everyone is impossible, but this is just as bad for new players as for us veterans. I can't imagine how hard it would be now to start a garage from scratch. Acquiring and updgrading all those super useful C/D/E/F cars. To get to the level where I am right now would probably take years. Most new players will just quit after finishing the campaign, once they realize how hard it is to progress.
I'm not saying the dailies should stay forever, but getting rid of them without a replacement that can provide just as much resources (cash, gold AND cars) for the same effort, will slow the progress beyond bearable. It was already tiptoeing on the edge before clubs. Please re-think this.
I completely agree with Ozzman
Hey Hutch, talk to me.
I do not understand why remove options within the game. Forcing players to do only one thing is very bad. Let more variety of things to do, will please more players.
In DAILIES, it's the best option for players, especially the new ones (who just finished the campaign) to get resources to evolve their cars and the game mode that most motivates us to play. In the Clubs, they are forcing us to play more to get less rewards and some people are not willing to play that much time and whoever wants to play more has an option.
The only way I see clubs working - divide players like in current events. Only 90 players on one map for example and only 20k trophies for example. Then same for 15k, 10k, etc. If we get rid of bots - it might become an interesting mode to play, but. It still seems to be a hard stupid time-eating job to get some dollars.
Comments
I would (and many others) have happily given our time to provide feedback before the release of clubs. We could have told you all about these issues with a few hours of testing.
We were once accepted into a special group for testing projects but that didn't materialise.
And i will say this with all the respect i have for all developers and companies out there and being a manager in IT for decades that deals with a lot of customers. You don't understand your customer.
Just look at the poll, you satisfied 5% of the people that do not want daily events and gave them club events as a solution, a feature that is not ready for prime time yet and has a lot of logistic issues on its own. If you took a poll from that 5% of players and ask them if they are happy with club events, what do you think the satisfaction % would be? Even at 50% satisfaction you still made around 97-98% of you total customer base unhappy one way or another.
Even Steve Jobs was wrong about bigger displays on phones. Boy, did he get that wrong.
Take my feedback as you like but i hope at least something sticks out of all my posts (and others) and you become better. History in the last 1.5 years hasn't showed that, but it is never too late to change.
Good luck Hutch. You have a good idea, you can do better.
I hope bots problem will be fixed and those monkey won't be getting easy 30 wins against bots
911 GT3 RS 4.0 for nearly 100 plastics is quite a deal...
Why would I want to race 10 tickets against Hutch bots for almost no reward? Is it supposed to be a boredom endurance challenge?
The one thing I have learned is that Hutch Rob is an extremely handsome chap. That must be how he gets away with running fords & Vauxhalls in an Italian event.
I don’t want to be overly melodramatic, but my gut feel is that Clubs should probably be switched off and reworked into something more appealing before even more damage is done.
I feel for the devs because they’ve obviously put a huge amount of effort into it and the criticism must be crushing, but I really don’t think ploughing on like this is the best strategy.
I sent you an email and you didn't even give me a reply.
Btw I just played 1 1/2 hours straight, battled in 3 sectors for less then 10k cash and raced 40+ times. I’ve not helped my club in any way because we’re stuck in the mire of Hutch incompetence. Oh sorry that was a bit rude. Fix your freaking game Hutch 😡
NOW!!!
Win, Platinum participation, MVP performance, Rookie rank
50 races in 25 minutes with 5800 reward or 232 per minute
Win, Gold participation, Gold performance, Rookie rank
15 races in 7.5 minutes with 3800 reward or 507 per minute
Win, Silver participation, Silver performance, Rookie rank
5 races in 2.5 minutes with 1800 reward or 720 per minute
It should be more rewarding for putting in the extra effort. I have no incentive to put in an MVP performance if I'm earning 1/3rd cash income (for time spent playing) of just putting in 5 races and getting on with my day.
Variety? What kind of variety are you talking? Have you guys played yourselves clubs before releasing them? Or you really find permanent beating bots and being unable to join events is a variety?
x5 FWD
X5 USA x3 Dodge
X5 Italian
X5 FR
X5 USA
X5 ultra rare x3 German
etc.
all Drags / Rain / Offroad
Variety? - I assume yes.
Fun? - HELL NO.
The social aspect was definitely improved with the clubs update
So yeah, in terms purely of income, it's "ok" I guess if you have an algorithm calculating income per hour median and such (which seems to be what Hutch is doing) - since you can't play more than 1 event, if you have more time, you better spam it to get more cash per hour.
For us tho, not very fun - I'd rather not gamble on getting MVP, just get 5 races and log back later. I am surely not the only one, and that defeats the "limited ticket sucks" argument from Hutch - this is pretty much the equivalent of the daily, minus the challenge and with delayed rewards at the end of week.
I understand what they are trying to do (standardize mean income for everyone and not have smurfers get much higher income than everyone) but they've missed so many side effect and impacts and completely lost the player's perspective.
Look, I am ok with curbing smurfing - it's ok, it's not intended behavior, a loophole, but they've mixed up the need for some new gameplay with this and tickets limits and stale dailies and ended up with something that did not address any of those issues specifically and made everything worse.
If we get rid of bots - it might become an interesting mode to play, but. It still seems to be a hard stupid time-eating job to get some dollars.