Temple Shielding

[Arci]

Hello Beta,

This is just a short announcement to update you on the status of a feature we've been testing here on Beta for a few months. In our initial announcement on Olympus' rebalancing, we said:

...One of the things which was noticed in our analysis, as well as Community feedback, was that by adding significantly more PvE elements to the game, without adjusting the PvP aspects, we ended up with too much going on in a world, and the worlds feel less focused overall on common goals. We wanted to make sure that conquering temples remains a big part of the gameplay, but not the only thing players focus on during the Small Temples phase. We also want to create a tempo on the world where players can rebuild, and not have to make a decision between defending a newly conquered temple and expanding by conquest of enemy cities. To combat this pacing issue, we came up with 'Temple Shielding'. We also wanted to encourage players to utilize the buffs gained from small temples to take out their enemies, and not only capture a temple to contribute towards the endgame.

In short, Temple Shielding has not (even without considering the bugs we encountered) achieved what we hoped it would on ZZ21. With this in mind, we've decided to not release Temple Shielding on live at all. This is regrettable, as we did spend some time on the development, and at first wanted to try and return to the drawing board and use some of the design and development elements we'd invested time in making, but unfortunately, nothing really fits, and we don't want to introduce a reworked mechanic just for the sake of it.

So what's next for Olympus? As you've most likely noticed, we've not released any Olympus worlds on live for some time, and of course, this is intended. The reason is we've been working on our next batch of changes, which we're sure you won't be revolted by . The design work for these changes is mostly done, and we'll start the development work soon! Once done, we'll be releasing a new Olympus world here on Beta to ensure we do due diligence before releasing these changes to live, so watch this space!

As for ZZ21, we will leave Temple Shielding enabled on this world, as it does not make sense at this stage in that world to make adjustments to the world's settings. ZZ21 should be finished by the time we're ready for a new Olympus world here on Beta, so those who want to give the new changes a try should be able to jump in pretty quickly!

Once more, thank you all again for your valuable input and feedback. It is through your comments that we came to the conclusion that Temple Shielding wasn't the right direction for us to take Olympus in.
In case you have something else to add, feel free to share it in this thread.

Your Grepolis Team