The new creep surge change where you have high power teams scattered throughout every district almost is absolutely ridiculous. No matter how your team spins it is not any better than what we had before. There was no glitch. Y’all it seems just didn’t like the fact we were getting a lot of coins. Had to cut that back to make it harder to purchase. Prices have gone up for packs. I use to be able to clear multiple waves every time. Now I’m lucky to even get 1 wave cleared and my guild as a whole can’t even get to wave 10 or 12 where we use to get to max wave sometimes up in the 20s!!! You all gotta fix this…if it is hurting a player like me and I’m not even that high as some others. Then I know it is hurting lower level players and not making this game fun like it use to be.
Was about to write a specific Surge post, glad someone else also thought about it.
Our original complaints probably drowned in the general 4.6 issues.
@Samm first, welcome.
Probably so many tags for you.
But this one is very important and your previous community managers didn’t give us any feedback on what, if anything, is being done.
Surge is the main gold income for a lot of us.
And these days, it was almost cut to 0.
No gold income, no gold spending, no progression, no enjoyment of the game, no players, no game.
Please address us on the matter.
The new surge format is hurting alot of people right now, and making it harder to get gold for skill points is never a good thing
I’m sorry to hear about this frustration with the changes we made to the Creep Surge in the 4.6 update. We understand Gold is a vital resource in the game and that players use Creep Surge to obtain it. You should actually be getting as much Gold as you were earning before, but with less battles.
As with other changes we’ve made in the past, we’ll keep a close eye on things to make sure they’re working as intended, and adjust where we feel that we need to. Balancing a game is tough, and can sometimes take a few passes before things feel right for everyone.
I would be very, very, very surprised if the data showed that the majority of players are getting as much gold as before from Surge. Less battles - yes - because it’s too difficult for most of my guild 
All the feedback I’ve seen, logical conclusions and personal experience is that almost everyone is getting significantly less (or even losing gold if they use the Merc feature), if indeed they are able to participate at all 
But I have every hero unlocked. I don’t want less battles, I want to use my entire roster. And I could do that before they increased power every attack. Now it’s hire a merc or 2 (anything more than that ends up costing gold), clear a handful of tiles, use my raids, then sit on 2 billion power worth of heroes because the team comps aren’t good enough to take anything out without buying more mercs (back to costing more than it’s worth). The scale is insane. 500mil power team with yzma, rex, tia dalma, woody, and wall-e shouldn’t instagib every team I’m throwing at it.
And I have 3bil more total power than the next person in my guild so I have more options. Can’t even imagine how the lower powered people are feeling.
Edit: Also, hey Samm and welcome 
My main problem is the cost of hiring mercenaries. They are insanely expensive. They cost like 4+ times more than the gold you earn from the hardest district.
Other than that, I like the changes made. I was absolutely sick of having to face the same heroes in every single district (Zeus, Baymax, Quasimodo) cause after a while you’d run out of the heroes that countered them and it would be impossible to clear the districts.
These teams are easier to defeat. However the different areas on the map should have different power distribution. And noticeable difference, not 1 million difference. 1,2 should be the hardest and the rest should get progressively easier. Guilds have low power members too, how are they supposed to clear surge and also get gold?
Don’t be so stingy with gold, guys. People who put in the time fighting should be rewarded for it.
I strongly disagree. From personal experience, from guild members and from other forum posts.
Any updates?
We’re bleeding gold.
I’d say the plan kinda backlashed. It was supposed to topple the gold spike earned by some players, but it just effectively lowered the gold everyone earns. And… it didn’t even effectively lower the spike…
Usually Friday has a Patch Notes. Tuesday update.
I’ve tried giving the reworked surge an honest chance over the past couple of weeks, and I can now confidently say that I disagree strongly with that claim. Here’s the strongest district at the start of my main guild’s creep surge:
That’s less than half the power of what it was before the changes; it’s in the range of what districts 10-12 usually were. So anyone who had been attacking districts 1-9 will now have to attack more districts to get the same amount of gold.
And how much gold is this district worth?
Assuming we reach a high enough tier to double our surge rewards (reasonable enough, though it no longer happens every day), that means it’s worth about 40.4M gold to defeat it. So if you don’t want to lose gold, you have to hire a mercenary that costs less than that. And most of those are well under Y22 in rank, usually around Y7 to Y9, so they’re probably not going to last long enough in battle to really be useful. And that’s if you’re VIP 6 or above and get the bonus multiplier; otherwise you’re looking at around 27M in gold for beating it, and there’s virtually no mercenaries worth hiring for a fight against Y22 enemies at that price range. So there’s much fewer mercs being hired, which means fewer districts beaten, harming the final surge multiplier.
Another consequence of the lower power of higher districts: most of my heroes that are strong enough to be useful against those Y22 enemies are around 80M-120M in power, with some going all the way up to 200M in power. So now if I have a team with more than three heroes in it, I’m probably going to have more power than the team I’m facing; if I’m restricted to three heroes or fewer, then I’m not going to be able to counter other teams as effectively if there’s more than one attack or skill I need to counter. End result: I have to attack more districts than before, and don’t defeat as much power as I used to, meaning I get less gold than before the change.
Since the new surge started, I’d say on average I’m getting 50-70% as much gold as before; I can’t really judge too well on my main account, because of the gold I spent just for the current contest, but on my secondary account I’ve been losing gold at an alarming rate over the past couple of weeks. And woe to those who are one of the bottom 5 or so members of a guild, as based on the guilds I’ve seen, they’re completely locked out from participating in surge, with the weakest district being too strong for their strongest team.
I sincerely hope you take another pass at creep surge very, very soon, as the recent changes have been (and I don’t use this term lightly) disastrous, drastically reducing rewards and discouraging participation in a mode that already was seeing low participation before the changes.
At the very least, increase the spread in team power across the map, so that district 1 is once more roughly equal to the team power of the strongest member and district 27 equal to that of the weakest member; the current distribution, where there’s only a slight drop from district 1 to about district 20 and where all the teams are middling power compared to the guild, just doesn’t work for pretty much anyone. (I also think it would be good to lower merc costs and to focus more on increasing rewards for clearing waves rather than punishing people for farming weak districts, but those changes aren’t quite as urgent.)
I actually have to disagree here.
I wasn’t very convinced at first - on one side the surge enemy lineups being randomized was the best thing they’ve done in a while, but on the other I thought their power being that much lower would make it so the change would overall hurt gold income more than benefit it.
However, the power goes up with each win on that district. It took me only a couple of days to realize it really quickly gets very close to the power the lines had before. It still remains a bit lower cause no mods (which is partially but not completely compensated by the level going up to 10 past the cap), but I’m now able to do over 20 fights every day, compared to before when I’d have counters to a meta line for 2-3 fights and then it’d end there. A lot of heroes can literally solo/duo most of the lines generated by the new surge.
I’ve been getting something like 5 times the gold I was getting with the old surge, sometimes more. And the guild multiplier has also always been significantly higher since the change, so it’s not just me…
It does in a guild where everyone’s power is more evenly matched and participation is high, who can drive those lines up 
In a guild where the sum of people who will make more than 1 hit on such lines is like… 5 players, and who only get around 15 hitting surge at all, the scenario Jody describes is exactly my experience too 
I disagree with your disagreement.
I’m definitely not the strongest in my guild, but I’m not the weakest.
Our #27 starts at about 130-150m. And no, I can’t beat that without a costly merc.
So I raid it, not getting any 125% or more bonus.
And our multiplier hardly exist.
The rest go to HQ.
So all in all, no gold earnings.
I’ve made a note of everyone’s feedback about the changes, both from here and in support tickets. I’ll continue to remind our team about the feedback, but can’t promise any changes at this time.
Definitely, new surge is a lot better.
I prefer the change to surge. Well done pb
Just a suggestion to the team.
Maybe it’d be beneficial if the mercenaries costs were reduced to roughly…
Square root of (5*power) / 5 ?
As the gold given per surge district is roughly equal to…
Square root of team power.
Meaning that there can be some surplus with hiring a mercenary… unlike now where the cost is Hero Power/2.