Hoard or use?

Chinese browser games including Wartune has a unique feature, they reward people who do not use resources, but hoard them. I have seen the same in an older game, Business Tycoon online too. Probably the original concept was to combine an event where you get reward for using a resource with a sale, where people can buy the resource – and sales will skyrocket.

However, the idea does not seem to work in practice. Players (or at least, some of them) are smart. They hoard the resources they get for free, and use them only when they get rewarded. Sales could be still a great idea, but not when you collect 1000 resources for free, and can buy 10 more for 50 USD.

Personally, I don't think that the hoard concept is so great, since:

• It forces players NOT to use ANY resources to develop characters, but save up these for weeks, maybe months. We love to use stuff the moment we get them. Holding back, is like holding back your... you know.
• It increases the gap between players – especially since in Wartune, you hoard and reward the same 3-4 resources around, so the benefits increase exponentially. Players who started later, or with less, or are on holiday during such an event, or just used some without reward are falling behind more.
• When it ends – and it will, when you are maxed and can't use more – it will feel quite desperate. When you spend thousands of SC, gems, whips each week and get a huge BR boost every time, you get used to the euphoria. When it's over, it's bad.

Still, I agree that these „treasure showers” are great for the community morale, we are even willing to overlook lags, bugs, lack of CS as long as we get tons of treasure.

Anyway, we know that we have to hoard soul crystals, mount training whips, gems, sepulcrum, mahra, resist crystals, bounty scrolls, since we know there is a regular „hoard-and-use” event for these. But what about the other resources? Should I save mount hoofs? Dragon souls? Runestones? Etc. I would say, think what you win if you use these resources. If it nets good weekly reward, use some or maybe all. If it doesn't help you that much, save it. But let's see each.

Fate stones. Maxing out fate stone abilies was pretty easy, even for non-cashers. For this reason, we didn't expect any significant hoard event: and recently, they added one with great rewards. So now I say, if you didn't maxed fate yet, don't. Leave it at 20/18 and 20/19, just in case.

Lvl 8 gems. Question is, should I make lvl 9 or 10 gems? Or wait for an event which gives reward for these? Personally I decided to make the lvl 10 atk gems, and my team members did the same. This way now we can easily do 7 boss in DI every day, so win +20 hoof +20 dragon soul and some gold with it. It also made possible for me to do sky trial 3-5. I also made lvl 10 HP gems so I can survive World Boss 1 too. Which I could, but then WB got nerfed – so maybe this wasn't such a great idea. But with Hall of Fame coming up, almost everyone will make as much lvl 9 and 10 they can anyway.

Mount hoofs. It is possible that they will add a hoard-and-use event for mount hoofs. But also, hoofs are a real badass BR-boost. So I did the following: pumped up all my mounts to 2 star. It's a lot of BR, really. 3 star costs 200 hoofs, things slow down here, so I save up them now. But hoof are only available to lvl 80 class advanced players, so it is less likely that there will be a spender event on this.

Runestones. I don't expect a spender event for these, but of course I have the basic caution of always saving up like 1-2000 of these and use only when I can gain immediately a new level for a runestone.

Dragon souls. Some people might have maxed this out already, or maxing it out soon, and it is open only to lvl 80 class advancement players anyway, so I think dragon souls are safe to spend.

Daru. Although you can spend any amount of wild shop, I recommend that you save up 600-800M for the next troops.

Gold. You can always save up gold for gem synthetiser and cloth identify events: leave the world boss prize2 in your mail, do not use gold chests, store luckstones and vip tokens.

There are many other stuffs too: refinement crystals, vulcan hammers/stoves, heaven horns, amethyst etc. which they can use for a „hoard-and-use” event anytime in Wartune. I always save up some of these – just in case – but use the majority of them.

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Socialization and loyalty

Today I would like to write about a topic which is not related to optimize your character or gain more BR. But it is equal importance if you want to have fun in the game (in fact, in any game). It is socialization, your connection to other players.

In Wartune, there are many events which require teamplay. And this is a good thing, since it creates a community, and keeps players playing (since you don't want to quit and abandon your friends, right?) Still, I see it causes a problem for the majority of players to find partners for their daily multi-player dungeon, spire, arena etc.

You can do 2 things to find partners:

1.) Yell each day on guild or world chat, that you need additional players for spire, lych lair etc. The game even has built-in „LFG” tools to help this. Actually, when you start playing, this is your only way to find partners. But, after a while, this gets tiresome. You spend a lot of time yelling; sometimes no one wants to help; sometimes the people who join up are lame, and you fail early, or even worse, they quit / dc in the middle. This can really take away the fun in the long term, and can be the main reason of quitting.

2.) You must find 3 other players of similar playtime and skills like you, and always do team activities together with them. Every day. Sounds like impossible? Be assured, all good players do it this way. This is the only way on the long term. Let's face it: most people who play Wartune, play it like 4-6 hours a day. Then you can surely find an hour when all of you are online. Of course it can still happen that one player quits or you think too differently. In that case it's usually hard to find a replacement. In desperate situations, you can even play 2 character at once, and you friend can do the same, and then you need only one friend. But 3-4 is better of course.

When I see in guildchat: „No one is helping me! This is a bad guild, I go to somewhere else.” I always try to explain this concept, but not all players are smart enough to do it. Also, in some cases a players starts on a server with 6-10 months delay (or returns from many months of afk), have no balens and is not willing to buy any, for them it is indeed hard to find a permanent team. For players like this, I recommend that they restart on a new server. It's more fun, in an old server you can never catch up with the rest and you have to beg for help for the remainder of your life.

Besides making a team, loyalty / friendship is very important. After you are together for a while, and the team seems to work, think of your best real-life friend, or the family members which you feel closest to yourself. And give the exact same respect, loyalty and trust to those who you team with. This is the only way. Never blame them, never backstab them, always do what is best for your team. Because they are your family. You don't want to lose them.

I will write a similar article about guild socialization too.

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Wartune: Hall of Fame 3

People were waiting since long for the „Hall of Fame” event in Wartune, where you can just claim awesome rewards just based on your BR. Last HoF's rewards included the golden Apollo Wings (wasn't very difficult to reach) and Darknite Panter (a mount only a ver heavy casher could reach). The HoF 3 is finally announced, but players are very disappointed.

400k required for the mount - a condition which is very difficult for even the top whales who spent 100k+ USD.

Additional item rewards for 250/300/350k BR: Even the 300k is not easy for medium cashers.

There is no Apollo Wings or Darknite Panther, but there is a new set of clothes and wing - available only to one player per server.

Moderator Greenfireflygirl was kind enough to ask some info for the players from the developers:

Potions/Scroll not working, we are used to that since long, but blessing wheel not working either, thats new (and not making much sense). Most of us live with 200% Academy blessing most of the time, so we don't even know how much is our BR without it :)

To be honest, I do not trust entirely the developers giving us correct information. This blog is about giving advices, so I give you guys the following advices regarding this Hall of Fame event:

1.) Do not spend balen JUST to increase your BR for the sake of this event. Do spend keeping the limits you set for yourself, to reach your goals, and only on excellent deals. If in the last day you see you just miss a tiny bit, then you can use up something you stocked up, but thats all.

2.) On the day before the patch, before you log off, pump up your BR, do everything I suggest here in thisarticle. I recommend that you even log off in a dungeon so map bonus apply, and you can fire up a warrior's call as well, just in case. Also do the same the next day, 10 minutes before the patch when you log off. Academy, map bonus etc. might count or might not, but better be prepared for any case.

Btw, my personal opinion is that they do this event the perfectly wrong way. People are in a complete stress when the BR is taken. There are many ways to make mistake here, which is very difficult to correct (last HoF gave the customer service and programmers work for 3 MONTHS!) So this is what they should do instead:

Make a Hot event with keys „Claim 250K reward”, „Claim 300K reward” etc. And in any moment when the player has that BR, let him claim the prize. Put this button only on the main page so players can't player around with dungeon, map and other bonuses. I do remember they already did one BR event that way. I don't understand why they can't do it that way again. Also, I wouldn't fumble around with giving the cloth set only to the top, just add it to the 350K reward.

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November big spender analysis

We have plenty of big spender events in Wartune, and most of them are very bad. Now there is a variation, which deserves an analysis:

You need to spend 10.000 balens to claim the whole package. The best value sale is the sepulcrum pack II. It's still very expensive, selling sepulcrum at 20 balen apiece, where a sepulcrum worth only 10-12 balens, but maybe it's an okay deal combined with the above bonus and the option to get +5 sepu whenever you use 20. Let's see what we get for 10k balens:
700 sepulcrum   value: 7000 (8400 if you have evolved Hades / Apollo)
gives +170 sepulcrum during event: +1700 (+2040)
100 mahra         value: 500
gives +25 mahra during event: +75
14 pumpkin       value: 420
200 soul crystal value: 100
50 mount whip  value: 100
gold / daru: we get so much for free so it doesn't represent a value (but if you insist, the 1.9M gold+daru is approx 76 balens), Same for the gem packs, total worth is like 8 balens.

So we get a total value of 9.895-11635 balens, if we spend 10.000. So, if you have an evolved Hades / Apollo which gives increased BR for your sepulcrum, even then you get only 16% bonus. We have seen much better events lately, with 30-50% bonus. 

As usual, if you are impatient, you can buy for money what you can get for free in a month anyway. It's your decision, I gave you the numbers :)

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The perfect VIP wheel

Getting lvl 7 gems from the rigged VIP wheel is quite impossible, but still, there are better value wheels than others. Here is what I think the perfect VIP wheel is:

What you need to look for is the 500k gold, two mount whip x 5 (it is important that you get two! if you get only one, that will not be rolled) and mount whip x 2. If you have these 4 items, you can roll, it is a very good value wheel. An additional whip, and 20k, 60k gold can augment it even further. So after the roll, it looks like this:

So 560K gold (worh 11 balens) and 8 mount whips (worth 16 balens).

Long ago, I was happy with skeleton keys x 5 too, but since I got like 1200 skel keys in an event, I'm good with those for a year or so. If you low on skel keys, you can go for skel key x 5, 2 x whip5, 1x whip2 too.

Another good value board is 500k gold and extreme stamina potion. You see, the extreme stamina potion's 2.5 blitz gives 2.5 chance to convert your skeleton key into a crypt key. But thats a very, very rare board, you have to roll for a very long time, so I suggest better go for the above.

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Recent events and changes

Dear Readers, today I write a quick summary of recent events and changes in Wartune.

1.) Big Spender. The same as previous big spenders, it's less and less appealing. It mostly gives stuff which is useless / can get a lot for free / almost maxed. For me, nothing interesting there besides sepulcrum and mahra. And they also fail to combine it with some good sale. So without detailed analysis, big spender is a NO BUY imho.

2.) Cloth synthesis. We accumulated a lot of free fashion cores and luck charms from wild shop in the past months, it's time to spend them! Don't forget, that you can claim the lvl 3 and lvl 4 reward too if you make a lvl 5 cloth. So best strat is not to use all ingredients and make a lvl 6 cloth now, just make a lvl 4 or 5, make one a month later etc. You earn more rewards this way. See more on cloth synthesis here.

3.) World boss final attack cannot be survived anymore. The worst part about this is that it came "unannounced". What did they think, that we wont notice? I remember when I played some Final Fantasy episode, which had some nice challenges even after I won the game. Some 1-million HP super boss which was a good opponent still. In Wartune, surviving the boss, then surviving it multiple times was a goal we could work to achieve. Building guardian rune, making high level HP gems etc. They take it away because they hope we shall now spend balen on WB revive now. Well, I won't, I never did. WB was fun, now it's damn boring again.

4.) Mars will working correctly now. Again not a word about this. As you all knew, Mars will was supposed to spread damage equally between members of the team. It shouldn't have done much with an AoE. Well, it was bugged, and reduced AoE damages (and heals) by 75% so it was really great help in Tower of Kings, and helped knights survive WB. Well, this bug is no more. We knew it will be gone eventually.

The game is changing constantly. Things get nerfed, and sometimes we get unexpected awesome rewards (like gem synthesis). The Wartune game designer's concept is that surprise is a good element. To some extent, I agree, but we had too much surprise lately....

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Golden Road

Wartune has a new temporal event, Golden Road. Do not be mistaken by the look, thinking that this is some kind of a mini game. It's just another pay-and-win gamble machine like Magic Pot, Prosperity Wheel or Underground Palace and all the chest events. I have 2 main problem with these:

1.) You don't know what you get when you pay.

2.) It's horribly expensive - ie. the expected value is very low.

In Magic Pot, you get a random item for 65 balens, here, for 50 balens, but no other real difference, except for the pool of items. Actually, you can't even know for sure that the dice is not rigged. For example, when you would need a roll of 5 to get to the rare item, maybe that 5 happens less often than the other numbers :)

The squares have 4 categories:

Skull squares: didn't win anything.

Useless junk: bounty scrolls, legend stones, crystalloids, exploration artifact, insignia, mount whip, runestone, gem pack, fate stone. These are the items which you can get in large number for cheap, so you shouldn't pay for them.

Useful low-value items (worth less than 50 balens, like 20 in average): sepulcrum, mahra, xp scroll, horn, lvl 4 refinement crystal, 

Useful high-value items (worth more than 50 balens, let's say 200 on average): wings, good luck charm, lvl 10 transposer, lvl 6 potion, 999 roses, vulcan's hammer, 

To be able to make a precise calculation, I would need a lot of data, which I don't have at the moment. So my conclusion is: there are just too much junk on that board, and valuable items are part of a second gamble system (chests), as long as we don't know the chances, it is a scam by default. If you did one or more moves, please tell me what you win, I try to collect data, and maybe we know more.

Btw I think the developers made a mistake with this event. If it would cost only 10-20 balen per dice roll, a lot of players would try it. A gamble where you get a lot of junk besides useful items is always lower value, so it must be cheaper.

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