Well the new Battlepass is up and running and like most things GU rolls out, it's x steps forward and y steps back. In this case x = 2 and y = 7 which is kind of a bummer for those of us that were spoiled by the first one.
👎Thumbs Down! Packs Nerf
I'll start with the most obvious one. Packs. There is absolutely no question that the pack rewards for S1 were way over the top, but to me this feels like a massive over-correction. For a game that is built on collecting cards, dropping the number of pack rewards from 60 in S1 to just 10 in S2 is brutal. And that's not even including the plain Core packs from the free track in S1.
A pack nerf obviously needed to happen, I just wish they could have been smarter about it. The shiny core packs are actually a great idea IMHO, but dropping the total number of pack rewards by a staggering 83.3% is just bizarre. I feel like I did okay on my first one at least, sold the Whisper Baron for 14 $GODS so I'm optimistic that the BP will pay for itself regardless.
source: game client
👎Thumbs Down! Incredibly Limited Presale Window
GU announced the first Battlepass on February 5th, with the presale running for 8 days, from February 10th until the start of the event on February 18th. Lots of time to get excited, to weigh the pros and cons, and to convince yourself to shell out 250 $GODS.
For S2, they announced the BP on March 20, with the presale starting just 4 days later on March 24 and only lasting 24 hours before the season kicked off March 25th.
No ramp, no excitement and god forbid you're away from Discord for a couple days and missed the announcement entirely.
👍Thumbs Up! Single Mana Wheel/Portrait
I think they absolutely made the right choice in only rolling out only one of the remaining three Mana Wheels and Portraits this time around. At least for me, that choice pretty much guarantees that I'll be buying the next two passes so I have the whole set.
Plus, the Mana Wheel is easily the best of the bunch for me, despite the fact that I don't play Deception outside of Sealed. Not too obtrusive, no little dangly things -- I love it! As for portraits, I'm pretty 'meh' on those in general, I don't think they really match the style of the rest of the art in the game. Going forward I'd love to have my OG portraits back as potential rewards though, I loved that simpler look.
source: game client
👎Thumbs Down! Flux is a terrible Reward
This one is admittedly pretty minor, but it still rubs me the wrong way. Flux is a rubbish reward. Anyone who has played for any length of time is sitting on hundreds of thousands of this 'resource.'
Flux in this game has one purpose: To add friction to alt accounts and bot accounts so that they can not just forge every single semi-valuable card they earn from the Tutorials and first 15-20 levels. That's it. And although it's only a small percentage of the rewards, this would have been miles (kilometers?) better if it were Stars instead -- a resource that people can actually use. Stars also have the added benefit of having their own great visual progression system, with bigger and shinier containers for the increasing levels.
I suppose there is one takeaway here though: if they're still giving out Flux, then it at least seems a minor indicator that they won't be ditching the forging system with the zkEVM rollout.
👎Thumbs Down! Inconsistent XP Requirements
I just really hate this 'shoot things at a dart board' type of progression. Level 6? 400XP. Level 7? 500XP. Level 8? 300... what, what? Level 9? 350. Ok, now I'm confused. Level 10? 300. Why on earth isn't this a linear progression, or a flat progression or literally anything that makes sense. Why is this a guessing game? How much grog were they tipping back while they pulled these numbers out of the hat?
"Ok, let's do 350 for level 1-10, 400 for 11-20, 450 for 21-30 and 500 for 31-40!"
"Nah, that's too predictable, lets just make it random."
Some systems want to be complex, but sometimes simple is best. This is a clear case of GU getting in their own way, and over-designing something that should have been dead simple.
👎Thumbs Down! Inconsistent XP Rewards
This picture just says it all:
source: game client
Clearly they're getting lots of mileage out of that dartboard. Word is they are adjusting these (or have adjusted these) to all be 150xp, but I just can't even imagine a scenario where anyone thought this would be a good idea. The grog strikes again!
Look, I know it's ultimately not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. But the fact of the matter is that this is exactly the type of 'lack of polish' that people refer to when they badmouth the game on Reddit. Stupid little things like this add up and add up, and end up losing us players. No one is going to quit over this. But when something else pisses them off, it's so easy to say "and the game is buggy af, look at the stupid xp thing." Just another super avoidable issue that never should have happened.
👍Thumbs Up! Sealed Tickets as an Extended Reward
Seeing these Sealed Tickets as bonus rewards for 45, 50, 55, 60 was a very pleasant surprise. This is great aspirational stuff; you don't feel like you have to do it but if you do you get a nice little reward.
Easily my favorite thing about the new design (even if the other prizes there are Flux). 🤷
source: game client
👎Thumbs Down! No Free Track
This is by far the most incomprehensible one to me. The free track, even if it's just plain core packs, incentivizes fence-sitters to pick up the battle pass later on. It's a big shiny ad that is almost guaranteed to generate post-launch sales.
With the incredibly limited announcement window/presale window they've already cut a huge chunk of their market. And having no free track, coupled with the uncertainty around the xp needed to progress means that after a certain point it would be impossible to finish the pass. Even if they give regular game xp, not having access to quests for however long is going to mean there's absolutely no shot to get the whole thing, so why bother? Just a terrible decision IMHO.
My guess is that they went "well, almost no one bought it after the fact so we don't need it" while completely ignoring the fact that everyone had an incredibly tiny window to buy ahead of time this go-round, and less incentive to buy in general thanks to the aforementioned pack nerfs.
👎Thumbs Down! Worse Quest Objectives
In S1, they opened up some of interesting design space, and it was easy to look forward to a deeper exploration of this. Instead we got stuff like this:
- Play with 3 gods
- Play with 6 gods
- Win 2 ranked Games
- Win 5 Ranked Games
- Win two games with 15+ vikings in your deck
- Win two games with 15+ dragons in your deck
- Win two games with 15+ amazons in your deck
- Win two games with 15+ atlanteans in your deck
- Win two games with 15+ olympians in your deck
Wow. Look, I get that they want to sell more cards that aren't typically used. But it just shows such a serious disconnect from how the game is actually played. A tribe-based deck does NOT just include creatures of that tribe. They function as well as they do (or don't) because they have corresponding spells or relics or off-tribe companion creatures that draw or buff cards from that tribe. This maybe wouldn't have been so bad if it was 10, but 15 is just way too much without going all-in on a new deck that is otherwise useless.
And then there is this:
source: game client
Yikes! Personally my feeling is that these objectives should be more inclusive, not less. There's always going to be a few objectives that you just can't do with your collection and that's a good thing. And having quests where adding a couple cards or making a few tweaks is fun! But having the bulk of your quests completely eliminate full archetypes is not cool. Being forced to build a new deck with different god from scratch for a single objective is lame. And not being able to leverage the Shinies that you already invested in (along with potentially risking rank or fragments) just feels bad man.
Especially with the incredibly murky re-roll system that gives you no indication of how re-rolls work or how many you re-rolls you actually have at any given time.
Now, I've mentioned in a few comments here and there some ideas I've had regarding cool, fun and most importantly fair quests, and of course the community has a few great ideas as well. Next week I'm going to pull apart the Match API and present some ideas for quests that are actually doable with the current system, and we shall see what we shall see!
But that's it for now, so keep up the grind and I'll see you next week. And if you disagree with everything I've written, or even just half of it, feel free to tell me off down in the comments.
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That 60 to 10 is too much.
right? I was floored when I dug up the actual numbers... I hadn't actually checked until I typed this up XD
Excellent points!
I don't understand why they iterate in big swings instead of going for conservative, common-sense settings and then adjust from there based on actual need.
A few minor things I don't quite agree completely, but overall you nailed it. I hope the devs read this.
I feel like any normal company would have looked at the presale of S1 and said, 'holy shit, we made a bundle, lets start planning the next one!', whereas these guys went with 'okay battlepass is over! lets start planning the next one!' so they were forced to rush it out.
I 100% expected to see the announcement for S2 to happen during S1, in fact i figured it would have just started march 18th lol.
I don't think they have access to the resources to do stuff that quickly.
yeah I dunno, I honestly don't see that as a valid excuse in this case. if I just sold 3000 battle passes at $25 a pop, that's like 75k just dropped in their lap. you better believe any studio or team I've ever worked with would have called an emergency meeting immediately to see what we could deprioritize for a few days to make sure this becomes an ongoing revenue stream. by not being proactive about this, I can't help but wonder how much money they lost.
the 3000 is just a rough guess based on numbers I pulled out of my bum, estimating 4000 DAU and 75% buy-in. but hell even if it was 1000 presales that's 25k. you set that up monthly and that's 300k. and if my 75k number is actually right, that's 900k. either one is more than enough to hire someone with even the tiniest bit of games industry experience full time for a year and still pull a hefty profit.
They will probably make less than $4k net with the current sales:
And they are holding about $40k in $GODS in that address, so although I haven't checked for sure, I expect they haven't cashed out any revenue from either BP.
oh wow, this is great did you make this? do you have numbers like this for the 1st one?
You need to come out to Discord more :P
Search for my handle and has: image
https://discord.com/channels/457152051239976961/457152051239976963/1345421504870879322
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Hi, I like battle passes, I hope to try this very soon, nice post my friend.👍👍👍
Excellent points.
I did choose not to buy it although I like the rewards of this pass in the visual part as well as the card they give.