Info about The Merchant's Guide to the Kingdom:

Official game description:
  
**Create Your Guild**  
Create and manage your own guild of heroes. Choose your class and specialization for a set of loyal guild officers you create who will follow your every command, no matter the danger. With a realm full of eager potential heroes making their own logical AI driven decisions, recruit those which stand out to you into your guild and provide for them. In return, you will earn their loyalty as they assist your guild officers in the group dungeons and raids with party sizes of up to 40 heroes. Deploy your might to help restore peace to the world and provide aid to protecting the ancient and powerful Earthstone.  
**Grow Your Realm**  
It’s not just your guild that needs help. Engage in trade routes between the smaller towns and larger cities outside of your own. Create an economy of powerful gear and crafting materials to aid the world heroes on their own quests and adventures, while posting quests that the heroes will take upon themselves to complete for you. Engage in deep strategy by posting the right quests at the right times to help push the world heroes in the right direction of obtaining more experience and gear to grow along with your own officers. Upgrade gathering nodes and your quest log, rank up the dungeons of the world to better reward any hero powerful enough to come out alive.  
**Empower Your Heroes**  
Collect various materials you can use to forge powerful gear for the heroes of the realm. Hunt monsters in the world or delve deep into the perilous dungeons. Emerge victorious and claim the spoils of each new battle you face. Beware, as death is permanent in this Realm. Each death has consequences within the Realm, but the deeds of the fallen aid in empowering the realm and will serve to benefit the future heroes to come so long as you do your part.

Release date: 20 Jun, 2023

Categories: Guild Management, Management Simulation, Trading Simulation, Crafting, Dungeon Crawler, Single-player, Resource Management, Character Progression


- Hardware Profile: No data
Feature extractions:
- Community Price: No data
- Playtime Metrics: No data
- Time-to-fun: No data
- Player Archetypes: No data


Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category.
Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews.
What players like:
- Unique concept, high potential (weight 0.99): Players consistently praise the game's unique concept, deep gameplay, and overall enjoyment. Many see significant potential for future development, highlighting its innovative blend of genres and engaging mechanics. The game's current state is already fun, with specific appreciation for guild management, exploration, and the rewarding progression system.
- Responsive and active developers (weight 0.45): The development team is highly praised for their exceptional responsiveness, frequent updates, and active engagement with the community, particularly on Discord. Players appreciate their dedication to fixing bugs, implementing quality-of-life improvements, and being open to feedback.
- Improved performance and UI (weight 0.2): Significant improvements have been made to inventory management, making it much more user-friendly. Performance issues, including FPS drops and crafting-related slowdowns, have been largely addressed, leading to a smoother overall experience. The UI has also seen positive reworks for better clarity.
- Diverse activities and QoL (weight 0.16): The game offers a wide array of activities including exploration, champion raising, trading, crafting, and fishing. Recent updates have introduced numerous quality-of-life features, clearer research information, and balancing passes, enhancing the overall gameplay experience.

Common complaints:
- Severe Performance and Stability Issues (weight 0.61): Players report significant performance issues including low frame rates, frequent crashes, freezes, and high resource usage, making the game unplayable for many. This indicates a lack of optimization and polish, suggesting the game is not in a finished state and is overpriced for its current quality.
- Confusing and Unintuitive UI (weight 0.47): The user interface is consistently described as chaotic, unintuitive, and poorly designed, lacking essential features like filtering, sorting, and scaling options. This leads to a frustrating user experience, making basic interactions difficult and unclear.
- Ineffective and Confusing Tutorial (weight 0.34): The tutorial is widely criticized for being overly long, confusing, misleading, and failing to adequately explain game mechanics or UI elements. Players often get stuck or give up due to unclear instructions and progression blockers.
- Flawed Core Gameplay Systems (weight 0.28): Many core gameplay systems, including item management, crafting, quests, city interactions, and character progression, are described as poorly implemented, unrewarding, or lacking essential features. This makes various activities feel pointless, tedious, or broken.
- Unengaging Activities (weight 0.05): Specific activities like fishing are criticized for being pointless or constantly interrupted, highlighting a lack of engaging design in certain gameplay loops.

Gameplay feedback:
- Single-player MMO guild management (weight 0.17): The core gameplay loop revolves around managing a guild and a shop in a world that feels like a single-player MMO. Players send heroes on quests, manage resources, and engage in trading and crafting.
- Multiple game modes and difficulties (weight 0.07): The game offers a non-permadeath mode and has evolved its difficulty settings. There are also plans for an additional mode that will provide a more idle-game-like experience.
- Varied mission types (weight 0.04): The game features a wide array of missions, including dungeon crawling, resource gathering, fishing, and monster hunting, which heroes are sent to complete.
- Diverse warrior classes and races (weight 0.04): Players can choose from various warrior races and classes, each with sub-classes and specializations like tank, damage, or support, allowing for diverse team compositions.
- Officer progression and squad assembly (weight 0.04): Officers within the guild are crucial for assembling squads for dungeons and raids, and they automatically level up, gaining stats and the ability to equip better gear.
- NPC interaction and tasks (weight 0.04): NPCs, including non-guild members, play a role by performing tasks and interacting with the player's guild for rewards or special assignments.
- Indirect adventurer control (weight 0.04): Players do not directly control or interact with individual adventurers or infantry; instead, these characters are generally NPCs running quests outside of direct player control.
- Player influence on realm (weight 0.02): Players have the ability to influence the game world by encouraging specific actions, such as building quests and assigning various activities to their guild members.
- Shift to regular engagement (weight 0.02): Recent changes to the game seem to be moving towards a more engaging experience with less focus on extensive travel and task management.
- Mobile game potential (weight 0.02): The game's design, with its emphasis on UI interaction, suggests it could be easily adapted for a mobile platform.

Performance notes:
- Game performance and stability issues (weight 0.05): Players are experiencing frequent game freezes and general performance issues. This indicates a strong need for optimization to improve stability and playability.

Recommendations:
- Recommend waiting for improvements (weight 0.36): Many players are hesitant to recommend the game in its current Early Access state due to significant issues like frequent crashes, unplayability, and lack of polish. They often suggest waiting for future updates, bug fixes, or full release before purchasing or re-engaging with the game, with some even refunding or uninstalling it.
- Game is recommended (weight 0.18): A significant portion of players recommend the game, especially to those who enjoy specific genres like trading, crafting, idle, or city-building games. They often find the current price fair, particularly when on sale, and believe the game offers a worthwhile experience despite its early access status.
- Support game development (weight 0.06): Some players recommend purchasing the game specifically to support its ongoing development, viewing it as a good example of an Early Access title. They are willing to be part of the growth process and contribute to the game's future.

Other player notes:
- Early Access state noted (weight 0.12): Players acknowledge the game is in Early Access, which explains the current state of development. They note that while mostly polished, there's still work needed, particularly regarding UI and content.
- Unique genre blend (weight 0.05): The game is described as a unique blend of MMO and management genres, specifically appealing to players who enjoy the strategic depth without excessive micromanagement. It's compared to MMORPG Tycoon 2 but with a guild-centric focus.
- UI consolidation suggested (weight 0.03): A specific suggestion for UI improvement is to consolidate various functions, like crafting progress, into a single interface with tabs and sub-tabs for better organization and user experience.

Emotions:
- Frustration (weight 0.22): Players experienced significant frustration due to a combination of poor UI/UX design, including confusing and messy interfaces, unclear tutorials, and small, hard-to-read text. This was compounded by numerous game-breaking bugs, frequent crashes, and severe performance issues like high resource usage and lack of optimization, making the game unplayable for many.
- Satisfaction (weight 0.2): Satisfaction stemmed primarily from the developers' active engagement and responsiveness to feedback, including frequent updates, bug fixes, and quality-of-life improvements. Players also appreciated the game's unique concept, effective tutorial, and engaging simulation/management gameplay, along with its visuals and music.
- Disappointment (weight 0.15): Disappointment arose from the game's failure to live up to its perceived potential, largely due to foundational issues with performance, UI, and overall user experience. Players felt misled by initial impressions or positive reviews, finding the game's current state buggy, unpolished, and lacking depth, leading some to seek refunds.
- Excitement (weight 0.11): Excitement was driven by the game's perceived potential for future development, new content, and a fleshed-out experience. Players were enthusiastic about the unique gameplay loop, the prospect of guild building, and the developers' passion and productivity in shaping the game's future.
- Hope (weight 0.1): Hope was centered on the game's potential to improve and become a hidden gem, contingent on continued developer efforts and the resolution of current issues. Players expressed optimism for future updates, UI improvements, and the game reaching its full potential.
- Enjoyment (weight 0.08): Enjoyment was derived from the game's core concept, interesting gameplay mechanics, and unique art style. Players found themselves invested in the city and hero development, appreciating the relaxing yet engaging nature of the game.
- Confusion (weight 0.05): Confusion was a direct result of the game's unclear and misleading tutorial, which often provided instructions that didn't match the UI or led to incorrect choices. Players also struggled with an unintuitive UI that felt like a maze, making it difficult to understand game mechanics.
- Joy (weight 0.02): Joy was experienced through the game's deep gameplay and strategic elements, combined with its unique concept, making it difficult for players to stop playing.
- Concern (weight 0.01): Concern was expressed regarding the difficulty of re-engaging with the game and finding specific elements after taking a break, indicating potential issues with long-term player retention or information accessibility.
- Desire (weight 0.01): Players expressed a desire for additional language localization, specifically Spanish, to improve accessibility and enjoyment for a broader audience.
- Relief (weight 0.01): Relief was felt when developers addressed and fixed critical performance issues, such as FPS problems, indicating a positive response to player feedback.
- Gratitude (weight 0.01): Gratitude was extended towards the development team for the early release of the game, acknowledging their efforts in making the game available to players.
- Amusement (weight 0.01): Amusement arose from the humorous portrayal or behavior of NPCs within the game, adding a lighthearted element to the player experience.
- Caution (weight 0.01): Caution was advised due to the game's instability, specifically frequent crashes, leading to the recommendation for players to save their progress often.
- Optimism (weight 0.01): Optimism was based on the observed activity and progress of the developers, suggesting a positive trajectory for the game's future.
- Admiration (weight 0.01): Admiration was directed towards the developers for their consistent activity and engagement with the game, indicating a strong commitment to its improvement.
- Curiosity (weight 0.01): Curiosity was sparked by the game's unique nature, prompting players to explore and understand its distinct features.
- Interest (weight 0.01): Interest was generated by the game's unique concept, drawing players in to learn more about its innovative ideas.}