*Embargo until Dec 17th, 2024
Starting on December 19th on BETA server which is the beginning of the 5th QI championship. The changes are big and mostly for the better.
Remember the old days of QI? The days were your QI leaders chose an incursion path. Do you want Obsidian Peaks, Tempest Spires or Onxy Crater? Well really it depends on what rewards you wanted. Well now all the rewards will be in one selection kit so you can accumulate fragments and make whatever you want. Why is this happening? Because all those former incursion paths are gone and replaced with the new one.
The Gauntlet still has 12 maps as before but now there are no more decision nodes. No waiting for a QI officer to pick a path. You know what else there is no more of? Waiting for red fighters, or blue fighters or donators to clear a node so you can do your thing again. That was considered a pain point or quit point or in simple terms a barrier for people to have fun or play QI.
There are three separate paths leading to the first boss. One all red fighting, one all blue fighting, and one with each type of donation node. While all 12 maps look slightly different they all have this same pathing system.
The map above is map one; the map below is map 12.
So seven red, seven blue and three donation nodes to get to first boss on all of them. That seems like a good change.
Remember the old day when grandpa used to have to wait for the fighters on the last levels to clear the bosses so people can donate? That was back when radio dramas where popular and movies were silent I think. Well anyways it seems Inno has figured out that a large portion of the player base is not fighting in QI and maybe it would be a good idea to keep them involved.
The problem for people now who don't fight will be there is no place to hide. When QI is finished we can see the progress each member has made just like we can in GbG now. The information used to vanish when QI ended so unless someone recorded who did what it was gone forever well now it's there. So if someone is in a support role and they don't do say 2000 incursion progress a season then are they really working towards guild goals? It has never been easier for super casual players or players on diamond worlds to just farm QI.
The other bonus is donation nodes no longer block access to the boss meaning if you had a guild of 80 fighters you could ignore donation nodes completely.
So what else is new? Well the gauntlet will feature new buildings that we wrote about previously and offer "Quantum Incursions Summer 2024 Epic Selection Kit" fragments for all the previous prizes so onto the new buildings.
Neo Checkmate Square
- lv1
- 3x3 requires road
- 34-47% red and blue attack and attack defense
- 47-66% red and blue attack and attack defense GbG
- It's a production building and thus you can use hurry supply boosts for Rival Quests
- lv 2
- 3x3 no road required
- 45-63% red and blue attack and attack defense
- 61-85% red and blue attack and attack defense GbG
- It's a production building and thus you can use hurry supply boosts for Rival Quests
The garrisons are making a return. Each map will have two total garrisons one red one blue. Each will reward all guild members with 50% red and blue attack and attack defense for that map level.
| Required Progress Points | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Normal Node | Advanced Node | Boss Node | Farming Node | |
1 - 20 members | 170 | 220 | 260 | 237.500 |
21 - 40 members | 340 | 440 | 540 | 487.500 |
41 - 60 members | 520 | 660 | 810 | 737.500 |
61 - 80 members | 700 | 900 | 1.100 | 1.000.000 |
The fighting difficulty in early maps have been changed so it's an easier enemy composition. Translation? A lot less cav/archer enemy waves.
Quantum Actions:
The movement cost between nodes has been reduced from 500 to 100 which is great. We'd like to see those costs eliminated entirely.
The QI cost per action in a node remains the same and we'd like to see that reduced or eliminated but it won't be. As long as people purchase quantum actions with diamonds they will always create a problem; sell the solution.
Summary:
There are a lot of people still not playing QI despite the awesome rewards. The best QI rewards are based on guild success just like GbG. Players that don't play QI will be relegated to farming/casual guilds.
The have/have not disparity in QI players continues to grow. People who have QI boosts in their city can auto-battle Map 7 with little or no loss without building any decorations. That allows us to build out the settlement and get 900-1200 attack boosts on the last few days.
Players that don't have QI boosts in their city will need decorations by map 3-4 and quickly discover they are able to perform more quantum actions in a support/donation role.
The previous QI made life difficult for support people/donators. There weren't a lot of nodes prior to the infinite nodes after the bosses. The nodes that were there were blocked by fighting nodes so people had to time when they could be on and hope one of the donation nodes would be open.
Now everything is easy so the only reason someone isn't participating is because they don't want to. That may be fine in casual guilds but if your guild is at all competitive there will be problems. Either the non-QI players get relegated to farming guilds or the people who are competitive and want the better prizes move-on to guilds that better support their play-style.
Conclusion:
No guild, even the super guilds will have 80 players that excel in all aspects of the game. Some will rock GbG and casually play QI or the inverse.
The cost of purchasing QA is not changing so while some guilds will have super spenders there is a limit to their actions. So even the super guilds will have a hard ceiling for players in terms of how much QI they can do. What separates guilds is not the ceiling but the floor. The top players kind of cancel each other out. What makes the difference is how much the bottom players do. The guilds that clear the boss nodes and have all their casual players use their QA on the infinite donation nodes will come out ahead.
I suspect that guilds might recognize this new reality when recruiting. A player that can login right before reset and use all their QA on the infinite donation nodes every day is more valuable to a guild than a middle of the road GbG fighter.