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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
- Dani
Link to the corresponding post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Brawlstars/comments/14pe980/according_to_a_quick_calculation_bonus_rewards/
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