New Season, new Totems! A complete rebalance of Totems
CATANdominik
Administrator, Community Manager Posts: 142 Community Manager, Global
Greetings Explorers!
tl;dr: The Totem rewards and costs were completely overhauled this Season! The balancing may be changed again in future Seasons. You can collect 40 Totem Tokens in your In-Game Mailbox now!
We have been listening to your feedback in the forum over the last few months and want to follow up on a topic that we have seen come up again and again: Spending a Totem Token to move doesn’t feel rewarding. That’s why we have adjusted how Totem Tokens are spent and collected. Later this Season players will receive significantly more Totem Tokens for Daily Quests and In-App Purchases. As a result, we have also adjusted how many Totem Tokens it costs to take an action with your Totem.
While we can’t promise that this is going to stay, we want to test out how gameplay would be affected if moving Totems is more cost efficient. Also we want to make it more attractive to harvest with your Totem in contrast to visiting settlements.
These changes to Totems are coming this Season:
- Moving your Totem is now much cheaper! It still costs 1 Token to move, but you will receive significantly more Totem Tokens overall.
- The cost to access a Settlement is now 15 Totem Tokens.
- The cost to access a Resource Center is now 5 Totem Tokens.
- Daily Quest Totem Token rewards quantities have been increased:
- Free Reward: 10 Totem Tokens
- Easy Quest: 15 Totem Tokens
- Hard Quest: 30 Totem Tokens
- There are new Shop Bundles for purchasing Totem Tokens in larger quantities.
You can also now collect 40 Totem Tokens in your In-Game Mailbox! Get out there and start exploring.
It’s important to us to highlight that this is a test. We care deeply about the fact that Niantic games are about movement and light exercise, and making visiting locations in the real world a core part of our gameplay. So a feature like Totems should always accompany and enrich gameplay, not replace it. We believe that – with the other balancing changes to Totems – this will still be the case. But only your experience of playing the game will show if we got the balance right! Additional balancing changes might be needed in the future.
Please let us know what you think about this test so we can make CATAN – World Explorers the best it can be. Let us know how cheaper Totem movement has improved or negatively impacted your gameplay experience by sharing your experiences in this thread. If you have feedback, we’re listening!
Yours
Dominik and the CATAN – World Explorers team
Comments
@CATANdominik interesting changes to Totem Tokens.
I'll be watching my cells to see if it is more balanced than before across all factions
Though I still heavily disagree with allowing scoring of VP on a Settlement though the use of Totems
Seems that totem is slightly less effective now. A good move altogether. It was maybe a bit too easy to do some quests with just simple totem harvest earlier.
I hate this. I use to be able to use the totem 6 times a day with my daily reward now it's only 2 times and the biggest glaring issue still exists in that if you mess something up and want to jump out to delete cards or do the minigames you want instead of the minigames the game thinks you want you'll now have to pay 15 tokens again not 1.
Should have been 0/1 tokens to move, 1 token for resource centres, 2 tokens for settlements and you get 5 minutes at that settlement to leave and rejoin at no cost.
You've just nuked the token market with this update now too. You've made a fantastic feature useless.
This change makes me sad. I'm not sure who gave feedback about totems previously, or when, but it wasn't me. I thought they were great as they were.
Living somewhere without large number of PoIs in easy walking distance the totem was really useful. This change breaks it and I'm not sure what it achieves.
Oh well, I guess that's the purpose of Beta, to keep testing and changing.
:-(
I can see the need to rebalance it as a settlement should cost more than a resource centre or relocating a totem, but I think you still need to balance the costs and daily rewards. So infinetly glad we aren't in lockdown currently or the totem would be completely useless.
Also please look into the cost of discovering with a totem, it doesn't make sense to me that discovering a settlement should cost so much more than discovering a resource centre. Especially when the penalty for those is in the accessing of them. I would have thought discovery should be a flat cost regardless.
Sorry, i don't like the change at all. 15 tokens to enter a settlement is a bit extreme. I would have gone for 5 tokens to enter.
But in saying that, there's always the choice of actually getting out for a walk. But I'm waiting for a knee replacement so the tokens were coming in handy.
Lose *15* tokens every time the game crashes and I get kicked of of a settlement? Hahahaha no thanks. It was frustrating enough to lose 1!
The main problem is that the Totems, unbalanced the game to a very large degree in many places.
Even heavily mentioned here, that players cannot use the Totem as often as they used to. And that was my biggest problem since Totems were announced, complacency with Spoo fing.
Which has been proven with every season.
The alternative? Actually go outside, to a park.
Arrange with your faction within your cell(s) to maximize (safely) by actually being physically at the settlement(s).
Rural players are also disadvantaged when there is perhaps just 1 or 2 wayspots in their cell, getting overwhelmed by a city player who uses Totems to win cells.
Overall good change. But might still not be enough.
Time will tell
Argh, what a shocker. Rebalance = fair enough, but you completely nuked it!
This will put all the advantage back to players who frequent city centres... bringing home cards, dice, resources to spent in their home regions... now the suburban based players have no chance to resource up!
Not a fan at all.
Also. After the first week of a season, most of us have discovered all the resources/settlements near us. So the ONLY was to complete those catanian quests is by the totem. By the new costs, a 'Find 10 Settlements' quest, would take more than 5 days of hard quest completion...
You should multiply our stock totem tokens in our inventory before this change by 15. For those who spent real money buying totems, the value essentially depreciated by 15x. Even Covid19 did not cause the stock market to crash to this extent
This change was not ok.
I felt the balance was right before. Enough free tokens so you didn't have to trek out to every settlement to build on it, not so many that you could play entirely from your couch. (Except during lockdown - I was very happy that I had enough tokens stashed!)
But hey, do whatever you want to the game, it's your choice. It's my choice whether to play and spend (currently no and **** no).
Suggestion 1:
- daily hard quest reward: 4 or 9 tokens
- move the totem: free
- enter in a settlement: 3 tokens
Enter in a ressource center: 1 token
Suggeation 2:
- daily hard quest reward: 3 tokens
- move the totem: free
- enter in a settlement/ressource center: 1 token
I only seriously used tokens the last couple of days of the season. Dice games, big resources, cards, deliver; - rinse, wash repeat.
If it's going to be so expensive to enter, I need to be able to select the mini game I want, once in a settlement.
Also as per octarine - we need not to be kicked out of a settlement. And the missing settlements need to be resolved. I gave up on my local settlement yesterday as it was missing again for most of the day :/
PS: Just checked and that missing settlement from last season is a missing RC currently. Obviously there are issues with some POIs.
@Grogyan could you explain why you thought the introduction of the totem and tokens unbalanced things? To me, they provided flexibility and options for the disabled, the rural and anyone living in an area of low PoI density. I viewed this is a really good thing in terms of accessibility for all players and for the long term viability of the game since the more people that are able to play the better
I'm in Australia so I've only been playing since part way through Beta and don't know what the game was like before that. I'm wondering if you're comparing the 'now' to a 'before' that I'm not familiar with.
I'm genuinely trying to understand why you see this change as a good thing.
15 tokens is a bit extreme. Especially when the game hangs so often when upgrading a settlement.
@Serendip
In a nutshell Spoo fing
Ie, falsifying your location to give yourself an unfair advantage.
First, check out Niantic's blog
https://nianticlabs.com/blog/cheatingupdate-022321/
I love strategy games, even ones that I am not great at, like chess and Magic the Gathering.
Understanding the balance of the game's economy as a piece of a bigger puzzle.
Totems were introduced to augment the game's economy, because of the nature of Random Number Generators meant that a player may not have enough of specific resources in order to compete.
The low price for Totem Tokens, along with gaining VP with them, meant they were open to abuse. Something that I raised as a massive problem when the Totem was announced.
Every chat I am in, even here in the forums, further proves that my concerns were not my imagination.
Also, we can't be naive, Pokémon GO players have developed tools for falsifying your location with the RWP, which is an ongoing battle for Niantic it costs them thousands of dollars every year. It costs Ingress players equally as much money when bad actors destroy work that players spent with their own money to achieve.
When I was in the early beta for Pokémon GO, which New Zealand was the first to use it. I openly warned the developers that due to the overwhelming amount of Spoo fing in Ingress, the design direction pokemon go had at that the time, meant that it was ripe for the unscrupulous denizens of the interwebs to gain an unfair advantage.
Upon release of the game, it was proven just how unfathomably bad it was, that the entire game design direction changed.
These same tools that bad Pokémon GO players developed, are also used with Wizard's Unite. A game that does not make a whole lot of sense to Spoo f with. But they did, and again, the game design direction changed, and I lost interest in what it had become.
This season, with the costs of the Totems, on the surface, appears to be quite aggre ssive. And helps to solve the issue of cheating. Keeping in mind that there are bad actors who use 3rd party software to gain an unfair advantage. Some middle ground had to be carefully considered.
My opinion is that it still doesn't prevent players from gaining lots of VP with the Totems. So I am skeptical about how it will play out this season, whether the high cost of Spoo fing with the Totem will become a good enough deterrent for bad actors, and how the strategy of managing one's economy will work out.
For a start, this thread alone shows that it definitely has hit a spot with those who used Totems explicitly to win cells. Spending more money to keep on winning.
Pay-to-Spoo f with Totems is, still an unfair advantage to those who do not have a lot of money to spend, even though it is a feature. To me was obvious that it wasn't fully thought out about the implications of it.
I think this game is in decline and these changes are likely to make it worse.
Unfortunately I find lots of aspects of the game as it now is not that motivating. Why try to win when do never get winnings? Why do the daily dice when it suddenly disappears and breaks your streak with no comment from the product managers? Why save up a rare resource for a future project when it can just be devalued by 15:1.
The first season I payed there was a battle for my region and the 3 adjoining regions. Last season the adjoining regions were totally inactive. Players are stoping paying. Quite a few stopped when the daily rewards disappeared for a few days. Some more stopped when their daily walk in the park became a tappathon to get any resources. More stopped when the daily dice stopped. I suspect mroe will stop with this change.
It is not the devaluation, it is the message it is sending. It is a message about the priorities of the game and game devs.
There are some serious bugs in the game. The critical bugs that were there 4 or 5 seasons ago when I started are still there. These are all listed in the bug list:
With all of these issues the game devs and product managers focus on redoing the backpack, redoing the quests UI, doubling engagement radius, and now devaluing an in game currently by 15:1. Normally I don't use tokens at all. But I save up the tokens for when I am away to access my golden settlement. Yesterday I had around 160 token saved up good enough for about a week of access. Today enough for 10 accesses or about 2 days. That is pretty demotivating. It would have been worse if I had actually paid for them.
Do the product managers genuinely believe with backup data that the biggest issue facing the game right now is players remotely accessing a settlement 3-6 times per day?
And I suspect some payers will interpret payers stopping paying and the "spoofers going away". When the game stated in Australia about 25 of the 30 in the local pogo group started playing. Now there is two of us left. I suspect we will not see out this season.
I was thinking of my last season being my last as I was getting genuinely board. My season is spending the first few days building out the settlements I want and then just **** for the rest of the season just finishing quests. In the last week I would be opening the game at most twice a day. I currently have 100k+ in RP, 160 in tokens and really only play the game building out settlements about 3 days a season.
I think this set of changes are showing the priorities of the game developers and product managers are not that aligned with the the general player base, at least the ones I know. I will be building out the local "walking distance" settlements over the next few days but I think that will be it for me. Whichout some serious changes come the next seasons start I would have lost all interest.
I'm another that dislikes this change. I've long felt the token to move within the circle of sight(lack of better term) is silly. To move over significant distance is fair.
Maybe 5 to move outside the search area (ie a km in the real world or more) nost for RCs in the range, 1 to enter a settlement in that area with a 5 min cool down (as mentioned above). Yes, if one is smart and plays strategically they can move around this but should we not reward that style of play?
I could cover chunks of my region by sneaky moves but not totally dominate.
I understand the means to balance things...but the cost is too much.
This change is great. Just a little more balancing and itll be fine
i pretty much only use it early season to set up my home settlements from heavy building farming
be able to harvest is a luxury bonus which i would have to readjust my playing plan therefore only in emergency situation as i will have the totem in range of my two settements. Still wont use any on RCs.
just needs to be more conservative and not be lazy lol
I have never falsified my location ever.
Would not know how.
Use of totems is not spoo fing. Catan knows my location.
Knows that i have a limited pool of portals in small number of suburbs and appointments in town at the kids hospital.
I'm sick of elitest players who take stands about things.
Always male always no dependants or with wives to look after the kidlets.
They want the game for themselves and can't think outside the box to include other playstyles. The world is already set up to make access to games easier for these folks.
This is likely my last season until they get roads into the game and i'll have a look then.
I'm going to make a splash of it (Translation: they had the good sense to make the portal closest to me a settlement. )
I am totally missing the point of the argument here. For the record I rarely use tokens unless I am accessing my gold settlement from the while traveling overnight.
These same tools that bad Pokémon GO players developed, are also used with Wizard's Unite. A game that does not make a whole lot of sense to Spoo f with. But they did, and again, the game design direction changed, and I lost interest in what it had becomei.e Bad actors are using tools not available to all players to gain an unfair advantage. We all agree without hesitation that is is bad and should be stooped.
This season, with the costs of the Totems, on the surface, appears to be quite aggre ssive. And helps to solve the issue of cheating. Keeping in mind that there are bad actors who use 3rd party software to gain an unfair advantage. Some middle ground had to be carefully considered.Using totems is not cheating. You have equal access to totems as evey one else. Equating using a game mechanic as it is intended is not even remotely cheating. If you think it is you are just very very wrong.
Therefore reducing the use of tokens is not reducing cheating.
If some one is using a game feature as intended to win they are just playing the game better than you. Otherwise I really should complain about players using brick harvested from the region next to me when brick is a rare resource here.
The low price for Totem Tokens, along with gaining VP with them, meant they were open to abuse. Something that I raised as a massive problem when the Totem was announced.What is stopping you gaining VP with tokens? This is fair and intended game play. I know you play ingress. This is bit like complaining when some uses intel to plan a field it is unfair on people who don't want to use intel. Or people who refuse to glyph becuase it is a "new" feature.
Pay-to-Spoo f with Totems is, still an unfair advantage to those who do not have a lot of money to spend, even though it is a feature. To me was obvious that it wasn't fully thought out about the implications of it.So using a specific game feature is now spoofing because you do not know how to use them effectively as them. 🙄
Looks like I’ll be writing in to support to refund my totem tokens each time I have to spend the extra 15 to re-enter the settlement when the game hangs/crashes or when the resources don’t update properly and hence I can’t build/trade properly and require an app restart. And this happens O.F.T.E.N.
@Grogyan I still, genuinely, don't understand your concerns.
First up, I was also early access for PoGo and I was a Beta player for HP:WU and I very well remember the issues that spoofers caused early on in PoGO. I think that's now been resolved to a large extent - partly due to the introduction of the remote raid passes which legitimises anyone hopping in to any gym that a friend invites them to and removes any advantage spoofers may have had there.
I suspect we're coming from different philosophical viewpoints. I think games like these should be made as accessible as possible for as many as possible (urban, rural, remote, disabled, caring responsibilities, income limited - whatever) because I think that encouraging a diversity in the player base keeps the game vibrant and viable for longer. When the game is built to suit only one type of person you only get one type of interactions and it becomes boring quickly. And when players start to leave the game due to finding it difficult to play it then impacts those who are left - have a look at how the upper levels of the Knight Bus in HP:WU have become a hollow echo chamber in recent months due to the decline in the player base.
I don't understand why you consider players using a legitimate in-game function is spoofing. Or are you saying that there is also spoofing occurring and they're combining the use of the totems/tokens with it?
Even if players are spoofing to somehow gain extra VP why would I care? The game isn't currently set up in such a way that I need to compare myself to anyone else's progress - just to my own progress from the previous season. VP doesn't roll over from season to season and there is no PvP, no raids, no player battle league, no in-game friendship system, no guilds, no teams - just the broad affiliation with bears/wolves/eagles. These features may come and if they do and if actual spoofing is occurring then, yes, at that point it would be an issue. But the CWE devs have time to work out how to deal with that.
I was actually always impressed when I saw they'd built in the totem/token functionality. I saw it as a really positive tool for accessibility and diversity. It gives someone stuck at home - due to disability, Covid, or extreme weather events (like is currently happening in Texas) - the chance to keep the game ticking over in a small way.
And if someone chooses to spend actual $$$ to buy extra tokens why would that concern me? Instead, I'd give them a big thumbs up, and my thanks, for supporting the devs and for helping sustain the game.
I haven't spent any money to buy totem tokens but I've definitely used the ones I've earned (thru the Gilda quests etc) as much as I possibly can each season to build up whatever settlement I've decided to focus on for that season. Not sure how that helps me 'win a cell' or how it gives me an 'unfair advantage' but then neither of those things were goals for me.
Finally, to be totally clear I have never spoofed/location cheated in any of the Niantic games I've played, nor would I have the faintest clue how to.
If there are cheaters spoofing, they can access all settlements WITHOUT using a single totem token. I really don't get the logic why totem cost (low or high) has anything to do with cheating/spoofing, which @Grogyan has always been complaining about.
The really bad update here is the depreciation of tokens that we have saved up over the last few seasons from the hard quests.
I don’t see any connection with totem and spoofing. Totem actually may decrease spoofing. That whole argument is just silly without any proof. I wish to not see that pointless thing again and again. 🤷♂️
But you remember that originally you got only 3 free totem tokens a day. That was the base state. 6 tokens was just a test just like this. This always happens that when you overtune something, people get upset with the nerf, people always think about their own convenience and not balance of the game, @CATANdominik . 😅
I wouldn’t recommend anyone playing geolocation game basing all their gameplay just on a feature that let’s one to play from the couch. It’s the exact opposite of the games idea. I think that players who can regularly play at good spots do have should have some advantage to those who just resort to sit in home.
Pay-to-Spoo f with Totems is, still an unfair advantage to those who do not have a lot of money to spend, even though it is a feature. To me was obvious that it wasn't fully thought out about the implications of it.So using a specific game feature is now spoofing because you do not know how to use them effectively as them. 🙄
You know very well though Ingress, just how bad spoofing has been. Please stop to think what would happen if in Ingress, the Drone would be used to score Mind Units. Scoring (potentially unlimited) VP with the Totem, is the very same example, but actually it is in use.
It would utterly destroy it. Ingress would cease to be a strategy game.
Certainly, I would stop playing.
Totem actually may decrease spoofing
@Serendip I honestly don't know how many strategy games you've played. So it is difficult for me to describe just how bad spoofing can be to strategy games until you been attacked by them, repeatedly.
The game balance as a whole, has been on a steady decline since it was released as a beta.
The really bad update here is the depreciation of tokens that we have saved up over the last few seasons from the hard quests
I hope things will be better. But a fair game it hasn't ever been!
Last season I had a really fun battle with a yellow player, I lost, I saw minimal usage of his Totem throughout the season.
Much the same as I had with a local player near me before the Totems were introduced.
My initial suggestions for changing the Totem
@Grogyan thank you for taking the time to reply. This will be my last comment as I think there is no point having a argument over this.
Quite the opposite, I Know how to fully maximize them, was the whole reason I raised it as a massive problem.How do you feel about the gold settlement? I have spent real money to have that upgraded when I started. If I pay more I can upgrade it fully to give me one 4-dice cards per resource every 4 hours. That is a lot more useful than a handful of tokens which I understand you can only buy once a day.
Or how about extra back pack capacity? If you max it out you can craft a full load of high VP build cards and come and swamp any competing regions in one trip. 61 Archive cards and 61 Festival Hall cards played in one go in a settlement is going to have a lot more of an impact than some one flying in 3 times a day.
You know very well though Ingress, just how bad spoofing has been. Please stop to think what would happen if in Ingress,Actually I don't agree. But this is not about spoofers. It is about the actual feature in the game. I think it is very very disingenuous to tar some one as a cheater because you do not like some one using a game feature as intended.
Please stop to think what would happen if in Ingress, the Drone would be used to score Mind Units.Where d you think my attack gear comes from for the last year? I have used this gear to take down many many fields. And other gear to build others fields. Only thing I cant get is a key If you think a drone has no impact on game play you better look again. For example a direct impact of the drone is hunting farms is now pretty useless. Park the drone and farm totally invisibly.
It would utterly destroy it. Ingress would cease to be a strategy game.It changed and we adopted.
So no I don't accept either of these hypotheses. Pre-drone I had a real gear drought. Not any more. There are plenty of RES or ENL R8s around that I am have always been at capacity for the last 12 months.
I also disagree that the totem has a substantial impact on the game say compared to the ingress drone, but I also don't use totems often.
But my point that you accusing everyone who is using the totem as cheats is uncalled for and disingenuous. They are using a game feature that it avaible to all including you. You not deciding to use it does not make them cheats. I think the people who were called cheats for using the totem deserve an unreserved apology.
Also... increasing the cost of genuine players using the totem IN NO WAY stops anyone who's actually spoofing from continuing to do so... so this change literally doesn't impact cheaters...
Now, if the developers want us to value totem points more, and get us to buy them (after seeing from our game play that we all use them heaps) then I can totally understand that point of view... this is their business. But how do you claim that totem = cheating... when EVERY single player can get the same amount daily?
Totem use doesn't equal spoofing because everyone has access to it. Its therefore not an unfair advantage... its a universal advantage, to be used by the most strategic players!!!
I could just as ridiculously claim that anyone who uses a mini game is cheating... mini games ruin CWE! Real players only swipe resource centres... same stupid logic.
Thinking more about this I think something more like below would be more reasonable and keeping other things equal.
If possible see if personal and gold settlements could be cheaper, say 5 totems. The use of these is limited and the investment especially for the gold settlement is significant so having a cheaper cost to access those investments might be an option
@Grogyan Out of curiosity, how on earth can you tell if someone is using a totem in a region? I haven't seen anything in game to distinguish this, do you have a tool to help you do this? I travel around a number of different regions and wouldn't have a clue if someone is using a totem or not. How can you tell the difference between my visits through a region dumping VP like crazy or sending a totem. This almost seems to border on privacy concerns if you can tell peoples movements like that, or is it just a hunch?
From my experience I drop far more VP in a region from actually visiting it then I do with a totem. The totem for me is about resource gathering and managing my caps on resources/buildings/mini games.