State of the Game – Spiritwish (02/18/2020)

Main Issues

• Guild Clash is at 1am EST / World Boss times are 11:30pm/12:30pm/3:30am EST
• The game is too inaccessible to players without premium
• Game is constantly riddled with bugs that aren’t fixed in a timely manner
• New content is uninteresting and old content is useless for progression
• Lack of viability in character choices

I think this is a good starting point to talk about. To begin, the game is too inconvenient and inaccessible to players without premium. Many people only play with a phone and cannot get an emulator to work. If they do play without premium, they will progress a lot slower compared to premium players. The pace of the game and the hassle makes the game not worth playing without premium.

What has irked me and a lot of players about this game is the number of bugs as well as how they are dealt. Bugs last weeks or sometimes months without seeing a fix. Instead, new content is released and the bugs pile up on top of each other. The game feels broken at times and we as players much rather see bugs gone than new content. When we pay $10 a month, we expect to be paying for something enjoyable that works.

The content in the game lacks excitement. It’s the same thing over and over again which is okay BUT what makes it not okay is the rewards. The rewards are very lackluster and even when added up, they do not provide value or require too much investment to feel as if they were worth it. I’ll be going in-depth about this later in the post.

 Also, choices made do not feel rewarding in the game. There’s only one way to do things and if you don’t do it then you can’t have much fun. There doesn’t seem to be much room for creativity. In terms of PvP, if you have Monk and Rune Rod then you will reach the top ranks with relative ease. Without either of the two, you will be unable to reach diamond. Not only for PvP but for PvE you have to have a Runesinger Archer and a Dual Wielder. Without the two you won’t be able to top DPS any bosses.

Many characters in the game are absolutely useless and don’t even fill a niche. Archer M and Archer F should be good at mobbing and PvE but they’re not. Monofufu should counter Runerod and Monk but it’s not reliable and doesn’t have a big impact currently. Things feel bland. Everyone has to choose the same characters and be the same. This lack of individuality and creativity causes lack of interest. We need variety and viability when doing so.

Problems with Onkalo

Onkalo was just “fixed” but as you can see is “broken”. When content can be finished in 2 seconds and there’s a ranking system to do with it then that poses a problem.

How can something that can be done in 2 seconds be competitive and have a ranking system? There are multiple people who can clear it in 2 seconds so in the end it comes down to who did it first. This is a system that needs a complete re-design.

Let’s take a second to take a look at the rewards as well.

The reward system doesn’t make much sense. Each item needs 30 legendary upgrade stones to upgrade. So to max out an item we need to upgrade it twice. If one gets first place then they will be able to max out an accessory in 2 weeks. If we’re a normal player, say we get Platinum 1. It will take us 20 weeks to max out one accessory. That’s 5 months. Does this make sense in a design perspective?

Also, 30 masterpiece stones can be turned into 3 legendary stones. Getting Gold 1 yields better rewards than getting Platinum 2 AND Platinum 3. The Onkalo system is currently broken even though it has just been “fixed” and needs a complete re-haul in how it works as well as the reward system.

Problems with Daily Missions

Daily missions do not give anything worthwhile. I know these have already been re-vamped but they still don’t make an impact. They become something done out of habit and is a big chore. Let’s talk about each mission specifically.

The experience dungeon is great but when you are maxed, it means nothing. Is there a reason to build other units and use this dungeon when only certain units are viable in this game? The gold dungeon gives very little  gold in the grand scheme of things as techniques and re-rolling cost so much on top of other things. Getting 800k a day isn’t very much considering at higher technique levels it costs 1m to increase one level.

In terms of skill development dungeon and enhance material dungeon, everyone has an abundance of skill books from AFK farming and most people are already +50 on all their legendary gear to get anything out of either. The only good dungeon worth doing is the amulet dungeon but even then the stats gained from amulets are minuscule.

Problems with Arena of Trials

Arena of Trials gives you around 500k gold if you finish all 15 battles. Most people cannot finish all 15 as it starts getting exceedingly difficult at around Platinum. So it’s probably safe to say most people get around 300-400k gold as well as maybe 100 tokens. Does that sound worth it? The time it takes to all these battles for just 300-400k? In my opinion this is dead content and not worth the time invested.

Let’s take a second to take a look at the rewards as well.

The reward system doesn’t make much sense as well. There’s a clear lack of selection and if we get around 100 coins a day that means we can get 2 extraction stones a day. Let’s do some math. To get a Legendary Accessory Enhance Booster, we need 30 Normal Extraction Stones. If we get 2 a day, then it will take us approximately 2 weeks and 1 day to get 30 enhancement boosters. Two weeks for one attempt at enhancing our accessory, which might still fail. Doesn’t this time get sound a little intense?

Now everything else in the shop is useless for the token investment so this results in Arena of Trials being very annoying and not worth the hassle. This needs a major increase in gold/token rewards as well as a larger assortment of items to buy in the shop.

Problem with Adventures

Adventures are expensive and not maintainable to do every single day. That is – unless you do the base 500k adventure every day. The reward is very little and will take months to get enough to combine for a single legendary pet. There is too much gold sink compared to gold gain at the moment. This results in people not doing adventures at all. You can make a poll or look at game logs – I can guarantee people don’t do adventures daily.

Also, to do additional adventures there is an added gold cost. This seems a little ridiculous given that great success is RNG based. Personally I think the gold cost needs to be re-evaluated or there needs to be added ways to acquire gold in the game. Things such as giving daily gold dungeon a greater gold reward or re-vamping Arena of Trials to be worth the time.

Problem with New Content

This is something very important I want to touch on as well. The problem with new content is that it doesn’t offer anything unique to the game. On top of this, it’s being gate-kept by story line completion to a certain point. In terms of drops, the new maps do not offer anything special. It comes off as a requirement to be at later on just because of the level cap increase. Since players do not want to get an experience penalty from being higher level than the area, this becomes something we are forced to do rather than want to do.

As player numbers are falling, I can confidently say that gate-keeping an area based on story-line completion is a bad idea. Just like the concept with premium – we are causing too much friction for the player to enjoy the game.

Even if we do reach the new area, the new world boss offers nothing worth killing it. This causes players to hack away at a boss for 20 minutes only to get rewards they already have – or better yet, a single masterpiece accessory. If we want legendary essences we can farm them at a map overnight. If we want accessories then we can do other world bosses that won’t take so long.

Problem with Coliseum

Coliseum is something we are forced to do to complete daily and weekly quests. It isn’t exciting and it occurs in a time slot which starts quite late for EST. Depending on how we do we get anywhere from 300k-800k+ from selling accessories. The gold gain isn’t bad but given that the content is time slot based makes it hard to attend.

Coliseum was also re-vamped to add better drops but since doing it I haven’t gotten a single legendary accessory. The drop rate is still so abysmal that it isn’t worth doing if the intention is to get legendary accessories. Once again, there is a lot of friction with this content in terms of user experience. Effort vs. gain is not balanced correctly but at the very least it is in a better state than Arena of Trials or Onkalo is in.

Problem with Guild Clash

This is something that I want heard. Despite all the short-comings listed above, everyone looked forward to this. The main problem is that the time slot is impossible to make. 1am EST is NOT a reasonable time. Therefore, the only ones able to attend this content are people in PST or people who decide to sacrifice sleep and health for Spiritwish.

I’m certain this isn’t what you guys intended and I as well as likely everyone else, urge you to change this to take place a lot sooner. On top of this, these buffs cannot be bought. I’ve tried buying these for my guild but am not able to. When clicking the level up button, nothing happens.

The base rewards for victory and participation are also not worth it.

For participating, everything given is useless except amulet pieces. Even then, as mentioned before, the stat gain from amulets are minuscule.

The same applies for victory rewards. Sure it’s great getting a lot of this, but a lot of nothing worth value is still nothing worth value.

What’s important is the season rewards. To my understanding, there are accessories which can only be gained from these season rewards. This is great but once again, the time slot is so bad players feel like they are losing the chance at these thanks to the time chosen. Please fix the guild buffs not being able to level up as well as move the guild clash time to something friendly to NA time zones (NA Ukko).

Closing Notes

This message comes with mainly negative connotations so I want to take a second to turn things around. Despite all the bad, things have been getting better over time. Bugs have been getting fixed and effort is being put in to helping things improve.

We got auto sell and we got base legendary accessories being able to be polished via crafting. We got guild effects, sampo reward changes, guild league signup changes and so much more. If we can continue down this path I think things will be great, but I’m afraid it might be too late by then.

Given the rate of player drop-off I don’t think this game will see another 4 months. At the very least I know for sure NA Ukko won’t. If anything I want this post to be a small nudge and possibly a push in the right direction. I love Spiritwish so it hurts to see it in the state that it’s in now.

With the new level cap, people have forgotten about things but after the coming weekend things will be back to the way they were. Constantly boring, collecting heroes and leveling them. If you’ve read this far thank you so much for taking the time.

As of Feb. 18th, 2020 I cannot recommend this game to new players.