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I know that star drops are supposed to compensate for the nerfs, however I think they nerfed progression a bit too much. What do you guys say?
I know that star drops are supposed to compensate for the nerfs, however I think they nerfed progression a bit too much. What do you guys say?
Jumping in to clarify some things, hope you find it useful!
I think the problem with a “quick calculation” is that the context of what is actually happening is not taken into consideration, so I’ll add some extra info and respond to some of the main concerns here:
If you compare 1 to 1, new pass vs old pass, of course there’s a nerf, which was mentioned and shown in Brawl Talk - however, these rewards that you would only be getting at the end of the pass, you are getting during your normal progression from day 1. No matter how you look at it, this makes progression FASTER, even if you get only rare drops and considering the progression during tier 1 to 70.
“But how about when we get to the end of the pass?” Then you are still collecting 3 Starr Drops a day that should actually be MORE than what you would get from the previous brawl pass tail rewards
“I don’t like that I have to play every day” This argument is something I can get behind though. We do ask for a consistent playtime now, and that’s because we needed something more engaging to compete in this environment. The short version is: there are thousands of games and entertainment fighting for attention and Brawl was always too “chill” on the playtime “demands”. And if we are forgotten, our games doesn’t perform so well, and if it doesn’t perform well, we need to do something about it or we have to kill it. Too early to tell, but we can see some nice retention numbers popping up, so at least it did move what was supposed to. Whether we are going to tweak it or not, it’s something for the future
“Am I getting less than before if you don’t play every day or don’t collect all my Starr drops?” Short answer is: probably not - we still reinforce that if you are playing the same amount you used to play, you are earning MORE, and that’s because Starr Drops combined rewards from three different places in one, and you can collect those passively when completing your quests. So whether you are casual, or ultra hardcore, Starr Drops comes almost as a bonus on top of your own playtime behavior. Whether you want to optimize your progression is up to you. But if you were happy with your balance of playtime vs rewards, not changing it should still reward you slightly more. I just added “probably” there because we could probably have cases where a player rarely wins a match and only complete damage/healing quests - if that’s the case, then yea, you are probably earning less, but I’d say that would be the least of your problems if you are in this scenario :p
“8 wins is too much” It might be, early to tell. We did include every single mode (but friendly matches) to help with that, but it’s intended that we asked for a bit more matches in exchange of more rewards. If 8 still feels too demanding, keep it at 4 and it should still be a buff for the majority of the players
“But how is it a buff if it’s random?” When you consider random progression, you have to look at the averages, so we have to assume most of the players will get mostly coins, power points and rare drops. This is hard to calculate and visualize when you have 3 drops a day and only a few since the update, but if you do project these numbers into the future, you should see and actual buff to the overall progression
“We are now losing the freedom of how we use our rewards” This is true mostly for bling and credits (if you have all Brawlers) For Bling, although the overall budget that a player would get in a year got buffed, you are now getting random assets you would probably won’t buy before, so it does influence in your freedom in how to spend it even if you get more of it (value-wise) We still consider this a good move, as most players will use Bling to get the thing they really desire - and that will stay as it is. We believe it’s a fair compromise to make the Starr Drops a lot more exciting and unexpected AND a nice way to buff the Bling-value overall. The thousands of reactions we’ve seen with people getting awesome drops and sharing on social media is exactly what we wanted. As for credits, if you have all the Brawlers, you are fine and you’ll probably be still collecting the newest Brawlers on day one or at least in the same season they are released. Storing rewards is something really damaging for the game overall as it removes the excitement from new content. And for the small percentage of players who are maxed out - this change shouldn’t change the way you unlock content even though you are not being able to save as much
“Why didn’t you just add Bling instead of Random cosmetics?” In the latest podcast we comment on how risky is to release all the content behind gems for a free currency. Adding MORE Bling we would be playing with fire :O. For more context, most of the players buy a skin for the Brawler they want and they are fine with never buying another one again, so doubling down on that could be really damaging for our economy overall. The approach of randomly distributing cosmetics most likely won’t give a player exactly what they are desiring, but should feel exciting enough still and if you really want something - then you still have Bling on top of that
“Where the 20% came from?” So first of all, we said “around” and not a exact 20% This is being calculated based on an average player - due to our player base having way more casual than active players, these “20% buff” then are more biased to casuals. As Kairos said in his first sneak peek video, casuals get a greater buff to the rewards since they are not active collecting the Brawl Pass tail rewards and CL/PL rewards. If you do all those though, you are still earning MORE than before, it’s just not as much as the casuals, but the new system should be a buff for everyone.
“Why did you add Starr Drops?” We’ve explained in Brawl Talk, so it’s pretty much what we said: the biggest complaint we got when we remove boxes was “bring boxes back” and of course it could have been just the natural reaction to a big change. But on top of this feedback being consistently written everywhere, we did see some trends on the game performance that could have been tied to this feedback. With the change, we are seeing nice results so far, but we need more time to analyze and see if it’s working for real or if needs some tweaking still We still get these comments, but at least not as much and our performance has been improving, so let’s see! This time, we reacted a lot faster to feedback and hopefully it’ll have a greater impact on the game - we react a lot to the feedback of the highly engaged players, now it was the time to also listen to the casuals. We do have a big community and different player profiles - we can’t please everyone but we should consistently do stuff that would improve the game performance as whole
If I forgot something, my apologies! But with that said, feel free to continue posting your feedback and opinions about the update! Obviously we release updates to make our game perform better, but being fun and fair are still very strong pillars of our game, so we wouldn’t have added Starr Drops the game if we didn’t believe this would be an improvement to Brawl
Genuine question
If the point was to increase play time so on and so forth, doesn't the CL, PL nerfs defeat that purpose? Wasn't one of the reasons bling was added was to increase engagement in PL? Doesn't this nerf directly take away excitement from playing in those modes and will eventually lead to their fallout? Especially club league. We've already lost half of our club members who said they don't think CL is worth all the effort anymore.
I don't mind starr drops but I do think maybe the PL and CL nerfs were a bit overkill. I'd say the nerf in those should be less than 50%, and adjust the starr drop's rewards accordingly. Because I don't think CL and PL will survive as they are now especially CL. Too much effort for much much less rewards than we used to get even before bling release
It makes sense, but not if we include our casual fan base: - PL is only played by a portion of our player base. The majority of our players don’t play it - and they are also really important for us - playing PL as you played before still rewards you MORE because you are completing Starr drops on the side. I know it’s not as clear because the 50% nerf vs something you can’t clearly see is hard to believe, but note that if you get a random cosmetic, that’s at least 1000-bling worth (4 ranks in the previous PL) - CL is on the same boat but even more niche. The rewards of CL were MASSIVE for the effort you had to put in, and even then the adoption to this mode is pretty low - this leads us to believe that the problem isn’t on the reward side, but on the design of the feature - reallocating the rewards of these 2 modes where casuals (who are the majority of our players) hardly engage felt the right call to make to achieve our goal - the summary is that, if you play these modes you are still getting more than before, not obviously from these modes themselves, but from the game in general, because the other half of these rewards are in the starr drops budget which you gain passively by playing those two other modes
With that said - you are right, it could lead to even less players playing this mode, but as we’ve said in the podcast as well, we are not super happy with neither (specially with CL/CQ). But we believe that it’s not jacking up the rewards that would make them better, it’s in the design itself. So we want to rework them at some point, or at least tweak it more
And just to add more context: we needed to get rewards from somewhere to add Starr Drops as cool as we could. This couldn’t just be a bonus rewards source on top of everything the game already offers, so this adjustment was necessary - if those numbers were the correct ones, I can’t tell now, but I’d rather risky and design Starr Drops as we envisioned to achieve our goals, than having a system with stingier drop rates and worse rewards
Thank you for replying! I'm actually starting to understand the perspective a lot more now so I'm very thankful you took your time to type all of this down for us
One last question if you ever get the time to see this, would there still be any bling challenges in the foreseeable future like last season? Would it remain with nerfed rewards maybe? Or is that off the table completely now and won't come back?
Thanks for the feedback! looking back now, I think the biggest problem IS the communication here, so it is still a problem on our side. Because it’s literally a buff for the same playtime as before, but it’s really hard to communicate that because the features themselves are not sending this message. “50% nerf” is such a powerful title it’s really hard to see beyond that :(
Regarding the Bling Challenges, they were released to promote the feature more, but it’s such a lot of Bling that I’d say it’s hard to have it again, maybe for a special event or something, but it would have to be a big thing to justify it coming back - with that said, Bling in challenge is something we always wanna have, even though it’s not much
I’d be fine with starr drops if I didn’t get token doublers every time. I’ve got 3500 tokens to double barely any power points, coins or credits.
That’s a fair concern and we are open to still tweak the system. As someone else pointed out, people are getting more doublers than what they can use, so SEEMS a bit off
I’ll bring up to the team! But don’t expect any changes in the next months, since the whole team is on a break now and in august we’ll be focusing on the content for the next update
Next update PL/CL changes? :O, btw thanks Dani for taking Ur time and replying community feedbacks
Hahaha :D Thanks! I’m always reading them though - but this time since the problem seems to be more on the communication side rather than on the actual content, I felt it would be useful to add more context for the changes
TL:DR
CL and PL are bad design wise. And since only a small portion of players even play it. We decided to nerf it for Starr drop.
U can't justify again and again that we will get more if we play the same when the effort we put in is still monumental yet the reward is getting smaller. It's like saying you divides our salary from 1k for 1 task(building a house). To 1k for 2 tasks( laying 10 bricks+ building a house, each constituting 50%). It makes no sense for an employee to be happy to get the SAME/SLIGHT amount of reward for MORE work.
CL and PL is the house, Starr drops is the wall
The effort shouldn’t be more though, since if you play the same (playing PL and CL) you should get more than before still
Is it the daily task that you feel is too much, or the 8 wins (or both)?
Even if you miss some of the days or drops, we’ve added more to the Starr Drop reward budget, so it’s not only rewards being reallocated, but we added more rewards overall
We wanted the drops to feel really good on higher drops, if we had not moved rewards from other places, either good drops would be a lot rarer or every drop would be around 1 digit rewards
If we take your analogy, I’d say that before you would get 1k to build a house, but your working time is somehow flexible, haha Now we pay you 1200 but you have to show up to work every day - and then I think it would work better, there is a benefit, but it might stresses out people who would prefer flexibility over a raise
Hi Dani, thank you for detailed answer. I have a couple of thoughts on the 8 victories starr drop.
Firstly, I think it the chore feeling of getting all progression every day will become worse. If I supposed I have a 50% winrate, which seems a fair assumption if we exclude showdown, getting the third starr drop would require on average 16 matches, which would be equal to 240 tokens. In the last few season I noticed that I rarely keep playing once I've collected those tokens (to avoid getting bored in the long term), so this change to progression would most likely require more effort on our side. This may as well be what you're trying to achieve, but most of your claims on this topic are based on the premise of playing the same amount of time as before, which does not seem to be the case, at least for me.
On the other hand, I have a counter argument: right now the last drop does not feel as worthy as the ones before, due to the tume expense (and the shortage of daily tokens I explained above). If you wanted to increase engagement you could try distributing the number of rarity upgrades between drops, e.g. the first drop only gets three while the third drop gets five upgrades. I don't know if the average rewards are the same this way (probability is wonky sometimes), but it would make the last drop more desirable. I also think this principle could be used to create new timed events.
I agree that this could become really demanding in the long term, and we are open to change if needed, but the reason we done that is actually in your message: most of the people would stop after their tokens were done or the daily quests, now there’s something more
The argument of “play the same to get more” considers that you are not collecting all 3 everyday - collecting 2 daily or missing some days should still gives you a progression buff, but not as much of course
The idea of an improved rarity the further you go is really nice and might be something we use for events (imagine an event where you get guaranteed epic or something) or double Starr drops per milestone.. we didn’t have time to implement the event parts, but it’s something we wanna play around still!
So we can't buy pl skins no more? Because we can't make 5k bling any more. So is it a waste to grind 60 wins?
You can, but it’s because Star Points were a mess and pretty much the only thing you could do was buying the PL skin Now you can buy a lot more, but if you wanna the PL skin, you would have to save your bling for this instead of something else
With that said, I think the PL skin unlock and it’s benefits might need some adjustments still, but we don’t know when we’ll tackle that yet
Hey Dani, Are the starr drop rarity chances set and independent? Or is like the old boxes with changing %s?
They are set now, there isn’t a pity system added this time
If you can't give more bling instead of random cosmetics, then why not only remove the random cosmetics all-together and relocate the bling back to PL? As of now there is no real incentive on playing the game after the 8 wins for Starr drops. Even if most casual players don't play power league, giving away half of its rewards for (almost) free would only be eye candy if anything, because everyone is essentially getting the same rewards, not any actual advantage, and sacrificing so much time and effort for a slight advantage on bling is just not worthy.
The randomness is the actual “fun” part of the rewards - I understand it might be subjective, but we believe the casual player do like this feeling of not knowing what they will get from a massive pool of items. And if we are wrong, we’ll adjust the system so it does feel exciting
There is an actual buff to the rewards also, it’s not only transferring from one system to another, but if before you were struggling to play PL just for the Bling, then the problem is not on the reward side, but because it seems you consider playing PL a struggle
If you keep the same playing time as before, you should be getting more overall, but it’s true that if you were really active and engaged, the buff is not that much more, but we want to see how it goes now and we are open to tweak rewards around if they show they are harming the game more than making it more fun
1) You mentioned that we would be technically getting the tail end rewards sooner because we get them through starr drops in day 1. On the surface this seems great, normal track reward and starr drops. But didn't you also nerf the main rewards in the pass? Meaning that technically we aren't getting the tail end rewards sooner, we are just being compensated for the rewards we would've gotten from the normal track in the old pass.
2) Are starr drops really a buff to progression. You yourself said 20% buff will be the average. Unless you have a secret pity system somewhere inside the drops, this is not going to be true for everyone is it. Somebody might be extremely unlucky and not get any buff. Heck, if we take pure progression only, any bling related drops we get are worthless, and anyone who gets a lot of bling drops are having their progression nerfed! Not to mention that the rarer drops, instead of a lot of resources, we might get something useless like RT's gadget (you know, the useless one). Even if not objectively useless, some players might not want the new random brawler or gadget they got, even if its objectively good. Also, not to mention with the removal of brawl boxes, resources were guaranteed and everyone loved it, now with starr drops people might have too much gold but lack powerpoints, or vice versa. Didn't you guys remove brawl boxes because you didn't like a gacha system like this?
3) Too much playtime required and bling "nerf" because we can't choose are ok. Bling is f2p and cosmetics don't matter, you guys should be earning a lot from cosmetics anyways so I understand this move. Too much playtime can always be easily reduced or adjusted.
4) Why should us f2p maxed be punished? Even if we shouldn't be able to unlock all content without paying (which btw I thought was the point of chroma credits), we are getting a huge nerf to our "progression". Our credit get turned into useless fame with no compensation whatsoever. You realise what this means? We grind the same amount, non maxed get credit and progression towards brawlers us maxed get fame. At the moment, fame is utterly useless, so unless you plan to do smthing useful with fame, this is unfair. We grind the same amount, we get less . Not to mention, its extremely common to have all brawlers before having them all maxed out. I have hardly ever been in a match where at least one of me enemy/teammate doesn't have fame (meaning they have all brawlers) but they don't have maxed out power 11. Instead of getting powerpoints/gold to level brawlers up, they get fame . Just give us anything but fame, why should we be nerfed in progression for no reason
1 - we did, there’s also an amount of credits that got removed, but it’s not that much and I believe it’s only in one milestone - still, you are still getting more coins and power points until the end rewards - as for the credits, you still get more in Starr Drops, either the currency itself or a Brawler It could be seen as an actual nerf to stacking credits though (since if you have all the brawlers, it goes to fame), but if you are in this scenario, you should still be able to get the newest Brawler in the same season
2 - we removed boxes because we didn’t like how the progression was all based on luck, meaning there were people with no legendary for years and such - now, even if you are in this case, there’s Starr Drops that guarantees you’ll get all the brawlers eventually We think we were too harsh on the removal of the boxes because it seems a lot of players do miss the surprises aspect of it, so we wanted to bring back this feeling I agree with you that there is an actual nerf, and it’s on the freedom you had with your credits and bling, but that’s a compromise we had to make if we believed we could make better drops by using the reward budget of other modes - hopefully it was the right call to make, but we still believe it’s a better move for the game overall. I understand how this can be seen as a negative change though and I can’t really argue with that
3 - exactly! To be honest, there were designs of Starr Drop were you had to win 10 games and not counting from map maker, so this design is already an improvement to that, haha We do want to push players a bit more beyond their daily quests though
4 - if a F2P has all the Brawlers, then it shows that the economy was a bit off before. Don’t get me wrong, long-time players should feel reward for their long time commitment, but a F2P should be somehow behind when it comes to progression otherwise there isn’t any good reason to spend on a free game other than wanting to support the game - and it’s ok if you don’t want to make a purchase, but we can’t design a sustainable free game where players feel no need to buy at least a pass once or something Since we changed the system to Starr Road, players have a lot more say on how they progress their account - specially with Mastery, so we should at least make F2P competitive viable, so they could have maxed out Brawler from different classes if they want to push further If we do something with fame, it would still be on the cosmetic part of it, so not really addressing your concern and I think that’s fine The more brawlers we release, the harder is to catch up, so I also think that it’s fine if you feel someone who started later is “getting more” because it’s not getting fame.. we should have these catching up mechanics since we deepen the progression with every update. Still, you should always have more than someone who started after you (considering same playtime)
Hey Dani, question. You said if the game was shut down or “killed”, what would happen. I really don’t want brawl stars to shut down at all it’s one of my favourite games ever. Would we all loose all our accounts and purchases? Would the game even still be playable? Like would the game download onto our devices and we would have to play bot matches forever (that would be torture) Sorry if this question is ridiculous, have a good break and keep up the good work 😊
We wouldn’t kill it from night to day, but what we would do, if the performance of the game is “unfixable” (meaning that resources added to the game don’t move the metrics as we wanted anymore) we would start by shrinking the team down, releasing less content and changing it so the people in the team could work on more impactful projects But if it does come to kill the game, I don’t think there’d a mass refund (maybe for the last month or something), and SC hasn’t killed a game yet, but in previous games I worked on we had a sunsetting event where everything in the game was free in the last days and things were really crazy, since there’s a lot of freedom on what you can do when the game has an end date… hard to tell, but hopefully Brawl is very far from this scenario now