Limitations to Finish Special/All Productions items

We would like to confirm that the following previously announced change will be implemented on August 19th around 14:00 CEST: 

Finish Special Productions and Finish All Special Productions items can no longer be applied to selected Guild Battlegrounds and Quantum Incursions buildings. The existing limitation of those items on time-limited buildings and Ascended Cultural Settlement buildings also remains. All buildings where Finish Special Productions and Finish All Special Productions items cannot be applied will receive an updated tooltip about this limitation. 

After the original announcement on August 12, you shared numerous feedback and suggestions on our Discord server, forums, social media, and support tickets. We appreciate you taking the time to offer us valuable insight into your perception of the situation, and we assure you that we reviewed what you shared and considered it when making this decision.

Therefore, we want to re-iterate the reasoning behind the change in more detail and, in doing so, explain why the suggestions we received will not be implemented. Continue reading this article for more information. 

The list of affected buildings 

Below, please find the list of the GBG and QI buildings where the limitations will be applied and the tooltip added:

1. Wyverntide Spire of Victory lvl 1-2
2. Thunderdrake Citadel lvl 1-2
3. Glimmdrake Tower lvl 1-2
4. Royal Tower of Champions lvl 1-2
5. Neo Colossus lvl 8-10

The following time-limited buildings and Ascended Cultural Settlement buildings where the limitation already exists will receive the corresponding tooltip:

1. Ascended Earth's Eden
2. Ascended Green Guardians Market
3. Ascended Yggdrasil
4. Ascended Shinto Temple
5. Ascended Royal Bathhouse
6. Ascended Sun Temple
7. Ascended Mughal's Temple
8. Ascended Hut of the Sacred Instruments
9. Ascended Vagabond Library
10. Ascended Harvest Hub
11. Ascended Jolly Oink Pigsty
12. Ascended Royal Carriage
13. Haunted Tree - active
14. Lilac Garden lv.2 - active
15. Ethereal Fountain lv.2 - active
16. Fromage Pavilion lv.2 - active
17. Cobalt Blue Lagoon - active
18. Ascended Golden Dragon Gong
19. Ascended Zheng's Golden Bell
20. Wish Fountain - active
21. Golden Panda Statue
    
22. The Forgotten Temple - active

*Please note that some of the buildings may not yet be available in the game.

The F(A)SP items will continue to be applicable on buildings that do not have the tooltip indicating this limitation, which include powerful Event and other types of buildings that can significantly boost your City. We will continue to apply this new policy to the final rewards in GBG, QI, GEX, and Cultural Settlements until and if it is proven unnecessary. 

Reasoning behind the change 

We originally introduced Finish Special/All Productions to expand the reward pool and further incentivize your actions in the game. Before every new addition, we analyze the game balancing in all areas it could affect, and adjust until there is no conflict or potential exploits. While we do our best to avoid oversights, they do happen. As a mature title, Forge of Empires is based on intricately connected complex systems, so it is possible to overlook a side effect, even such that may seem obvious to some. We acknowledge this oversight and assure you that it was in no way intended to make our players dependable on those items.

Nevertheless, the use of those items on buildings where we now limit them has created a new strategy that, while within the game capacities, is harmful to the overall game balancing, the health of its economy, and its future development. With the F(A)SP items readily available in the game, and the possibility to tailor one's City entirely to their production, it is possible to accelerate the production of specific GBG and QI rewards. This contradicts the pace originally intended for those features. The affected GBG and QI buildings produce Fragments of Selection and Upgrade Kits that would normally be acquired ONLY by playing those features. In our original announcement, we have oversimplified this reason for the sake of conciseness, and we understand that many players use F(A)SP items in addition to their active involvement on GBG and QI. Unfortunately, the aid those items provide noticeably affects the pace and method to acquire rewards that would otherwise be unavailable to players, partially or completely.

We understand that the F(A)SP items provide many of our players with significant aid on top or instead of investing into premium. So we would like to clarify our reasoning in this context. The F(A)SP items' ability to dominate other game strategies indeed is harmful to the game balancing overall, which includes monetization. In free-to-play games like Forge of Empires monetization is the foundation that makes its development possible, and it also works in synergy with overall game balancing and economy. Therefore, if we want to continue developing the game for you for decades to come, we have to ensure that monetization exists within a healthy game economy even when it means restricting, altering, or removing disruptive game mechanics. 

With the limitation to F(A)SP items, we are limiting only one way of acquiring a specific selection of rewards due to its exploitative nature. At the same time, we keep those items accessible for boosting buildings that are not a part of the GBG and QI economy but can nevertheless actively support your City productions and help you maintain its efficiency.

To summarize: the use of F(A)SP items creates infinite loops that sustain each other. F(A)SP-producing buildings sustain the reward buildings that, in turn, produce more rewards, growing exponentially. It was this exponential growth and the general popularity of this strategy that pushed us to address this issue as quickly as possible. 

In the next section, we'd like to answer the specific suggestions you shared with us. 

Answers to suggestions

Suggestion1: To limit F(A)SP items only on buildings we will introduce in the future and not on the existing ones.
Answer: The existing GBG and QI buildings already include some of the most powerful rewards we've ever introduced to the game. Limiting the use only on future buildings would force us to significantly increase their stats to make them attractive for competitive players and, in doing so, reinforce the power creep that is already a well-known concern.

Suggestion2: To introduce a cooldown on the Fragments production specifically, to rebalance the buildings to provide a different number of Fragments, to re-distribute production of Fragments to different buildings or their levels.
Answer: With rebalancing, rearrangement, and cooldown we could delay the collection of rewards, but the F(A)SP would remain another way to acquire rewards that were otherwise intended for a different in-game system. Additionally, we believe that in doing so, we would further strengthen the advantage of the strategy we're trying to limit by rebalancing key game features around its effects. 

Suggestion3: To limit the use of F(A)SP only on specific buildings among GBG and QI buildings.
Answer: We understand that some buildings on this list require much more effort than others and F(A)SP can only aid so much in getting them. We also see your comments that Glimmdrake Tower lv.2 doesn't belong on this list since it doesn't produce Fragments. While we recognize your desire to limit the impact on your existing strategy, what we aim to do is to apply a policy that is easier to manage. At this point, Forge already has multiple inconsistencies and exceptions from rules which further complicate the decision-making and increase the risk of errors. We want the newly introduced limitations to be as cohesive as possible, and as clean to communicate in the game as possible. When we can, we retrospectively adjust some aspects of the game for unification, like we did with limitations to consumable boosts such as attack boost items.  

Suggestion4: The game already has imbalanced aspects like the use of Higher Age Units, Diamond/Wishing Well Farms, etc. The F(A)SP items cannot be rebalanced without those issues being fixed.
Answer: While we understand this comparison, the majority of those issues are much older than the F(A)SP farming strategy, and our approach to their analysis is different. For instance, while we do not condone the use of Diamond farms, we are limited by the technical setup and the fact that they are so deeply integrated into the game at this point that limiting their use would do more harm than good. As another example, the use of Higher Age Units is a functionality we learned to work with, and not against, while balancing the game. However, when faced with the newest exploitative strategy, we wanted to address it as soon as we could, instead of perpetuating another harmful game mechanic.

Conclusion

For us, the main driver behind the change was to limit a game strategy that can negatively affect game development in the long-term perspective. While we understood how impactful this change was going to be for your game strategy, we decided to move forward with it. We believe that introducing this change will help us support an efficient game economy, which in turn will ensure that Forge of Empires remains available to all players who wish to play it.

Sincerely,
Your Forge of Empires Team

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