I first want to say that I very much appreciate your long-term support of the game and your suggestions. That being said, I think you vastly underestimate the difficulty of some of the things you are proposing and also vastly overestimate the actual impact your suggested changes would have. For example, you start off with:
Here is a non-exhaustive list of ideas that could potentially improve the game, and which are not difficult to implement
And then proceed to suggest building an entire achievement system in the game, with minimal actual details. That is a BIG project to implement. Even just designing out the entire thing (including the economics) is a big project, not including the art and design work and then the actual development work.
Additionally, even if we did all of that work and implemented an achievement system right now, at best it might improve the metrics you identified like burning and combining cards slightly, but in reality it would just be giving out a whole bunch of additional stuff to the existing player base for doing what they already do, which would continue to decrease the value of the assets.
Then there's this one:
As for the bots problem, it is very easy for you to block the fighting APIs to external or non-white listed developers, you can also choose to put fees if the fights are not launched from the game.
I have no idea where this idea came from, but this is just flat out wrong. You cannot just "block the fighting APIs" for certain people. It is not possible to tell if "fights are launched from the game" or not. As I've said many times on town hall calls, the only way to ban bots is to have someone who does their best to determine which accounts are bots or not and bans those accounts. Since it is very hard to accurately determine that, it would likely mean that many regular players also get banned and many bots get missed. On top of that, bots can very easily just transfer their assets to a new account, unless we are freezing their assets which would just be insane in my opinion.
The only suggestion from your list which I think is actually relatively easy to do and makes sense is changing how ECR works and is displayed to users, which I will consider and see where we might be able to add it into the roadmap.
That all being said - we now have a community proposals system which would allow you to actually propose changes you would like to see to the community to vote on. This would require you to fully think through and design out your ideas to present, and going through that process I believe will help to show how these types of changes are far more difficult than many people understand.
First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to read this post, and even more for responding!
Indeed I probably underestimate the work required to integrate these different features !
As for the achievement system, I'm still convinced it's a good idea, if you look at most addictive games, most of them have a similar system, and often it even serves as a tutorial/guide for new players. Having a clear goal in a game is very important for player conservation.
I can imagine that it's a big job, but I believe that it would be a big improvement for the game.
I'm really enjoying reading this! I even think that just this first step might make me play again instead of the bot.
My English is unfortunately not good enough to listen to the town hall, I only read the recap.
Regarding the APIs I was thinking of a system with API keys, and maybe encrypted if needed with the system already available on hive with the memo key. But I'm not as good as you in DEV, maybe it's impossible, or maybe this would slow down the game too much.
Indeed, banning bots by hand is just not possible and counterproductive.
Concerning the animated cards in exchange of vouchers, is it so complicated to set up? (of course if you forget the time to do the animations) I was thinking of doing it the same way as for gold cards. You already have a number of them in stock, releasing the animated cards little by little is not so bad, and it would be a good way to burn voucher or dec.
I will see about using the new proposal system. Thanks again for reading, Deadzy