We're super grateful for your amazing suggestions on how to make Storm of Wars an even better game. However, some ideas that kept coming up have already been discussed and ruled out by the team for the time being. We put together a list of these for the sake of clarity, here they are:
Merging or Splitting armies
We unfortunately are not able to support merging or splitting armies. In Storm of Wars, we created a unique army marching system which made it possible for the armies to walk around on the world view freely and allow players to see the real-time actions of all armies in the entire world, across all kingdoms. This system allows us to track exactly where each army is located (among all players), their current status, origination, and destination, but it also limited what we can do with the armies, including splitting and merging.
Kingdom or Faction chat
We had a long debate on this feature and even implemented it for the beta testing, however, during the short period of time, many players got harassed
. After evaluating all pros and cons, we don't think it brings enough value for the extra problems it causes. The problems are primarily bullying/harassment/racist, requiring a word blacklist that can be easily circumvented and all of the extra tickets for our player support team.
Builder queuing
This would effectively create a second Vault, as it would allow resources to be safely hidden in the build queue. It would also encourage a more passive playstyle - a way of playing the game without playing the game!
Resource donating/trading
This would probably only benefit players who want to boost their lower level friends, seeing as players of equal level are generally missing the same resource. Moreover, this feature may be used to protect resources when there is an incoming attack (aka, ghost storage). Therefore it would add an undesirable and potentially abusable element to the game.
Allow the army to go back its original spot after raiding a city
If we allow an army to go back to its original spot after raiding a city, a high level player may march their armies to the homeland of an enemy faction and raid lots of small players on the way. This restriction effectively protects players who are still developing cities in their homeland.
Allow the whole faction to reinforce a temple
With the current design, the temple has clear ownership and the guild who owns it has clear responsibility to defend it. If the temple is owned by a faction, it will cause a lot of confusion to the temple ownership & responsibility, there will be no easy way to declare a king of the kingdom and small guilds will never have a chance to have their names heard or recognized in major battles. After considering all pros and cons, we have ruled it out at the time being.
Builder queuing
This would effectively create a second Vault, as it would allow resources to be safely hidden in the build queue. It would also encourage a more passive playstyle - a way of playing the game without playing the game!
Resource donating/trading
This would probably only benefit players who want to boost their lower level friends, seeing as players of equal level are generally missing the same resource. Moreover, this feature may be used to protect resources when there is an incoming attack (aka, ghost storage). Therefore it would add an undesirable and potentially abusable element to the game.
Allow the army to go back its original spot after raiding a city
If we allow an army to go back to its original spot after raiding a city, a high level player may march their armies to the homeland of an enemy faction and raid lots of small players on the way. This restriction effectively protects players who are still developing cities in their homeland.
Allow the whole faction to reinforce a temple
With the current design, the temple has clear ownership and the guild who owns it has clear responsibility to defend it. If the temple is owned by a faction, it will cause a lot of confusion to the temple ownership & responsibility, there will be no easy way to declare a king of the kingdom and small guilds will never have a chance to have their names heard or recognized in major battles. After considering all pros and cons, we have ruled it out at the time being.