so I'm in emberlight today and there's only one gate that's even open from here
it's not really worth my time to go up to moorcroft or haven and adventure from there since the rate of crowns and heat up there won't do a lot for me*
is this going to be a normal, commonplace event where gate selections are brutally limited from subtowns?
making matters worse i went to the bottom of diamond falcon yesterday and while YEAH FIRESTORM CITADEL!! the levels above that** are not particularly exciting and so i'm not enthused about playing them again
*i'm assuming that this is true even with the relative difficulty increase from wearing gear with a bunch of stars
**except the aurora isles ones, those are pretty fun too -- in general i enjoy static levels more than randomly-generated ones it seems
While I can say nothing about the goals of the developers, the approach of "gates always construct from the top down" means that deep gates will tend to be rarer.
If my conclusion of "Adding more blocks at once is harder" (my original idea that only one block can be added per tray has been disproven, but adding blocks seems to get harder as you put more in the tray) is accurate, then you need to build up gates over time.
In any event, the following seems to be reasonable guesses:
1. The minimum number of minerals to build blocks is too high (it worked fine with higher play volume, and is starting to fail as the apparent volume of players is declining).
2. The difficulty of building down is harder than expected
3. If you want to have deep gates, you need to do your share -- and while you say you prefer the "prebuilt" levels over the random ones, the randoms seem more likely to have minerals.
How many minerals did you pick on your " YEAH FIRESTORM CITADEL!! " run?
If you had done 7 levels with minerals, with a party, that would have been 20+ each (and apparently you get bigger mineral pickups with more than one mineral per down there), so you and your friends would have contributed significantly to digging deeper.
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> is this going to be a normal, commonplace event where gate selections are brutally limited from subtowns?
Ultimately, I think we need to wait for the next preview event to get a better idea of how this will work.
This initial (second?) preview event, as I understand it, is more about seeing if the technical setup is working, and if the server is functioning, and initial game play / energy system feedback to the developers.
I'm expecting to see a lot more stuff before any hint of a release -- I want to see some sort of functioning economy, and we've had one comment implying some sort of blocking / front line combat system is coming. There's going to be a lot more items, obviously, and hopefully more recipes. I certainly don't expect the core to be so easy to reach as just a 25th level. I'm not expected the current behavior to be considered "balanced" or "fine tuned".
And I do think that multiple arcades, not connected to each other -- so that the deeper players build their deeper depths -- has to be involved in the final solution. Yes, that means that the middle gets hurt -- I don't know the solution.