Originally posted by Croq360

Really looking forward to the new dungeon season! Excited to see it on the radar for release this week!

Originally posted by Abject-Army-657

Thanks for the chest. I appreciate the time between dungeons to finally do a little catch up. I sincerely hope that the DPS expectations for dungeons have not progressed so far that those of us who just managed to get through to 25 still have a chance.

Originally posted by DarcDragn

Hi Erika, thank you for doing the Q&A. I haven't been playing long, I played a bit many years ago, and recently returned... but I have been playing Idle Champions. While it is not without its bugs, IC feels more responsive and less like a browser game when interacting with the GUI.

Are there any plans by the CotLI team to beef up/refurbish it to feel like it was made to be played in an application, and not as a web game in an .exe wrapper?

Also... any way to get a "skip" button added to the screen after resetting?

Originally posted by BenL7

Thank you for the Runic chest.

I've recently noticed something weird about redeeming chests. When you click the Redeem button, it switches to the Chest screen and the new chests are already displayed on the left, before the animation of the gift wrapped chest starts.

Originally posted by Kagushino

Thank you for resetting my two missions for the Steam Achievement

Originally posted by AllShallBeWell

Looking forward to Dungeons!

Anything you're ready to spoil, about how idols rewards will work in the new season?

Originally posted by DoctorNovakaine

Hi, Erika. Thanks for the code. Can you provide us some insight into your current task priority outside of the dungeon launch and events? Like the four or five items you want to get done soonest that aren't part of the regular schedule. I know there's The List^TM but I'm just interested in what might actually be imminent, not just to be considered.

Originally posted by dimitrius5naj

Erica, hello!

Should we expect new events this year or next?

Thanks for the code!

PS. I wanted to know what kind of Tengu appeared in the description of Mindy Mime, but here they immediately answered.

Originally posted by OglintheDestroyer

Hi Erica, I experienced the glitch, took a picture with my phone, and posted in the thread about the bug however I did not file a ticket as before now I was unsure how to. Is there no way for me to receive credit for the mission as well?

Originally posted by kittymug

Hi Erika,

Hearing that development priorities beyond scheduled releases and bugfixes are up to the discretion of your daily mood is concerning. I'm fairly certain that part of your response is mean to be tongue-in-cheek, but none the less it goes to suggest that the list not rigorously maintained and I hope that we can agree that a development backlog should be maintained rigorously.

Let's take as an example the request to be able to open more chests per click - it has come up regularly over the last few years as the rate of chest generation has gone up. I find it very hard to believe that this is not one of the most popular requests coming from the active player base at this time and I have seen you "add a vote" to that item (I am assuming that there is only one 'chest opening enhancement' item to vote on in the list) several times but yet there is no indication that we will ever get a changed chest opening mechanic. As others have pointed out, improving the chest opening process can be taken as an opportunity to decrease server-side load hence helping out both CNE and the player base.

I do not think that the current methodology for logging feature requests and prioritizing them is effective.

Would you consider making a subset of the list public and open for players to vote on so as to impact your priorities beyond bugfixes and scheduled content? I think it would be great for both CNE and the player base to be able to visualize clearly what features are important to the players. Personally I would like to see a better chest opening mechanic before rune merging is simplified, but your recent feedbacks here and on the weekly streams come across to me as if rune merging is higher on the radar lately and I wonder how much of that comes down to a recency bias rather than accurately representing the desires of the player base.

Originally posted by AllenMS828

I'm a little confused as to why the chest opening screen is still considered to be such a big deal. I can open a couple thousand chests in a matter of seconds. It's just a few clicks. Rune merging is way more tedious, with having to drag and drop the runes you want to merge instead of just clicking a button.

Honestly, my big complaint regarding the chest opening screen is having to go back to the store screen every time you want to redeem a new code, instead of just having a redeem button on the opening screen itself. That's super tedious, especially if you have a dozen or so codes saved up from the newsletter. (And opening those one at a time is very tedious too, of course.) I just don't understand their refusal to move or supplement the redeem button, when it's been requested a lot too.

Originally posted by DoctorNovakaine

That response is...somewhat disconcerting. It implies that there is no prioritization going on for irregular tasks, which doesn't leave a good feeling. This is where I was most interested, as things like dungeon seasons and events and anniversaries are regular and expected. It's those one-off things like challenge adjustment, rune merging improvements, mission screen overhaul, etc. which have been highly requested but only vaguely acknowledged where it would be helpful for players to know where they stand. Not that getting Garnet's 5th finished or fixing bugs is a bad thing (Sjin is an absolute wreck right now, actually breaking the game), but a priorities list could at least let us know what's being planned and in what order...and the response doesn't make it sound like there IS a plan.

Originally posted by kittymug

We are also dealing with orders of magnitude more chests than runes per week which meaningfully changes how a player interacts with both systems. I agree that the rune merging is tedious and can/should be enhanced and at the same time I feel that chest opening is more tedious and much more due for improvement.

The suggestion for enhancing chest opening does continue to pop up in the Q&As/streams and seems as if it is not an important enhancement. Given that runes are a fairly new mechanic and many players are tired of asking for better chest opening it should not be a surprise that it is a popular request most recently.

I totally understand why you would not want to make the entire list publicly visible (a bunch of it likely makes 0 sense without some insights to the development history) and take no issue with that. I do find it strange however that you are not willing to collect direct feedback from the players on which requests matter to them. Please consider creating a process to enable players to vote on and influence which new low priority features are prioritized highest.

If that does not make sense on your side, I have one last request - Can you provide some information on how many votes the chest opening enhancement has vs. the rune merging mechanic?

Thank you.

Originally posted by Inappropriate_Comma

You can add my vote for the skip button too! Thank you for taking care of the recipe mission issue and thank you for the item credit and resetting all of those missions!

Originally posted by BenL7

For Rune merging, could pressing "Y" on the keyboard be added as an alternative to clicking on the "Yes" button? That could be an easy way to speed up the process a little bit.

Originally posted by isawbones

Going to agree with Kittymug and DoctorNC here. It seems that the team does not have a clear path forward which is super concerning. It seems that outside of the main content releases (events and seasons) there is no plan at all. If I asked what things you would like to have completed in 6 months outside of seasons/events, would you have an answer?
Was going to ask about some specific features but instead, I would much rather y'all have a clear plan going forward. That plan does not need to be fully shared with the community (some insight would be nice) but having some goals is vitally important.

Originally posted by Kagushino

I'm currently running "Polkamans Go!" and there's 150 stages left. I'll respond once it's done :)

Edit: It worked out, indeed! :)

Originally posted by VerbingWeirdsLang

Thank you for the Runic chest! I appreciate the break between Dungeons and events. It gave me time to work on other objectives and I finally emerged victorious in Evil Scheme!

I really like the design of The convivial Alluring Viragallant and I keep imagining her as a projectile Crusader thanks to those hand-buds. They remind me of Lillymon's Flower Cannon from Digimon. I can see her fire pollen projectiles without warning and then it's Plants vs. Zombies all over again. XD

Originally posted by gragatrim

Since you mentioned rune merging vs chest opening, let's take a bit of a closer look at how much actual time is needed. On a weekly basis we get 8 runic chests through the in game options, the average rune drop is 9.864 runes per chest, let's just round that up to 10 to make the math a bit easier. So that's 80 runes of lvl 1, let's just assume that we somehow get all lvl 1 runes of the same type(I know this is impossible, but using this assumption just helps show how much more time is spent opening chests vs quicker rune merging). Now let's assume we want to merge all 80 of those level 1 runes into the highest possible combination of runes, that's going to be 40 clicks to get lvl 2 runes, then 20 clicks to get lvl 3 runes, then 10 clicks to get lvl 4 runes, then 5 clicks to get lvl 5 runes, then 2 clicks to get lvl 6 runes and then 1 final click for a lvl 7 rune. That is 40+20+10+5+2+1 = 78 clicks in the absolute "worst" case for merging of runes.

Now let's take a look at chests, between dungeon seasons most players at the end game spend time just sprinting over and over again as there is no way to gain any amount of impactful idols. For those players, they are sprinting 5000 areas, which is 1000 bosses, assuming Ana in form and with a GL clover, that's a 65% chance for a chest to drop. Let's assume a 50 minute sprint(a bit on the high side, but I'd rather be a bit generous in how long it takes to sprint than assume too quick of a sprint). Assuming they are around and resetting fairly frequently we can assume 18 resets per day as that is roughly 15h, and then let's assume a run to 10k for their overnight. Each sprint gives 650 chests, and the run to 10k would give 1300 chests, that's 13000 chests per day. Even with an open 100 chest button, that's 13000/100 = 130 clicks, per day, not per week. The amount of clicks needed for opening chests and the load in causes on your servers is much greater with chest opening than with rune merging. If we assume the dungeon season is on, I was doing 2 runs to 15k, and then a 3rd run to around 12k. Using that data I was getting 15000/5*.65*2+12000/5*.65 = 5460 chests per day, which is roughly 55 clicks per day to open them all.

Just to sum up, for the semi-active chest runner, that's going to be ~910 clicks per week opening chests, and for active dungeon play that's 385 clicks per week. For runic chests we're looking at 78 clicks per week if we somehow got nothing put level 1 runes and all of them in exactly the same type(which is impossible, but hopefully really stresses how little time we spend merging runes vs opening chests).

I hope I've made the math clear enough that while there are no fast ways to merge runes, we are getting them so infrequently and getting normal chests so frequently that optimizing chest opening should be your higher priority.

Originally posted by draco9881

Greetings one and all.

What are your thoughts on adding "take-back crystals" for micro managing the talents?

I envision them being obtained via missions, coming in three flavours

Weak: Remove 1 level per use, capped at 250 reserve.

Medium: Remove either 5 levels per use with a cap of 100 or 10 bevels per use and a cap of 50.

Strong: Reclaim a full talent stack with a crystal cap of 25.

It would need 3 extra buttons on the talent screen, one for each strength. The player would click on the appropriate button to toggle active status on or off. With the crystal active the player then clicks on the required talent to apply. Multiple clicks should be possible for weak and medium crystals.

Tier 1 talents would consume one crystal per use, tier 2 talents two crystals up to tier 8 which would consume eight crystals per use.

Originally posted by Gourou666

Hello Erika,

Thanks for the chest, and hope you and the team are safe. In the break between the dungeons seasons, I have mostly been doing some chests runs. In three weeks, I collected 2 million materials, roughly 250.000 chests opened. And that is a lot of clicks to open chests. Any option to speed-up this process would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, I have opened 0 runic chests and combined 2 runes.

On another topic, I am wondering if it would be possible to have more missions slots. This could come from a talent or a 11th objective reward. I finally got the "The One Ring" mission after several months of weaning. With more and more crusaders available, it would be interesting to have slightly more missions, or to reduce the cool-down of some missions with higher rarity.

Gold missions are the least useful, EP missions are fun, but once all your crusaders (or most of them) have reached a certain threshold, the benefits of EP is rather limited. Missions for rubies are giving 10-40 rubies which are not enough to buy the weekly runic chests. Maybe increasing the reward or frequency of those missions would be considered.

For the Idols missions, they are the main source of idols for veteran players while the dungeons are closed. The rewards of those missions could be upgraded slightly, as they are way less appealing than a dungeon run, which can be done on a daily basis when the dungeons are open.

Originally posted by cannivalmarshmellow

Can you implement a way to lock the difficulty of the dungeons in 1? i already forgot 2 times to change it back before starting a new objective :C

Originally posted by tstevs

Just wanted to say thanks for all the work. Resetting the recipe missions with the bonus epic recipe really helped me. I see a lot of negative comments here so wanted to post this to say there's plenty of us who are very happy with the game

Originally posted by JuJuBee2006

Hello Erika, with the release of the 4th season a few questions presented themselves to me:

1. Does the 25% point bonus award retroactively when buying the pass, or is it only for future points earned?
2. Is my understanding correct that higher dungeon difficulties don't show additional rewards at low areas cleared (sprint runs to ~ area 5k)?
3. Can you share the difficulty scaling changes for the higher difficulties? about e^3000 was enough for the base level, does level 2 need e^6000?

Originally posted by isawbones

Late to the party on this one but given that pride month just started, are they any plans to have pride-related content in the game this month?