TO COMMUNITY MANAGERS SETH AND DREW, r/ClashRoyale AND THE CLASH ROYALE COMMUNITY,

The next Clash Royale Update Better Pull It Off.

Clash Royale is announcing that something HUGE is coming in the next update. We haven't had a game-breaking update since the Season Pass and the game is getting stale. Will this update bring Clash Royale back into the daylight, or will it give temporary hype for a few days, and then drift off into the darkness once again?

I am now officially a former Clash Royale player (since March 2020). I have played since beta, owned a clan for 2 years, and contributed to a Nova Esports Clan for one year. Ever since the Season Updates came along, the game feels staler than ever; a feeling of disgust, the "why do I need to play the same stuff" feeling. What is this all for?

Now, my intentions of posting this is not to "spark outrage and hatred" in this community or cause anyone to dislike the Clash Royale Developers. This is a game that I have loved for years. I don't think the Supercell Team will read this post, but I want to express my honest opinions on how to improve this game and hope that Clash Royale will have a better outcome.

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Topics I Will Be Covering:

• Clash Royale Season Pass Updates
• Pass Royale/ Special Events/ Emotes
• Supercell's Communication with the Community
• Progression System
• State of Clan Wars and Clans

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1. CLASH ROYALE SEASON PASS UPDATES

This huge update better be Supercell's miracle to save their game, or else Clash Royale's future will not look so good. And I guarantee that. The Clash Royale Team's development team is a lackluster when it comes to creating these updates.

Look at Brawl Stars. This game has huge updates that actually changes how the game is played. Despite the Coronavirus pandemic, the Brawl Stars development team have been working so hard to create exciting updates for their playerbase, and even made the Brawl Pass FREE to the free-to-play. They even spend time to actively listen to the community feedback and implement ideas based on them. I'm just so proud of the Brawl Stars team.

Now look at Clash Royale. Same boring updates for one whole year. Lack of communication with the playerbase (see "Supercell's Communication with the Community). The biggest update is delayed. Game is staler than ever. The "sneak peeks" are feeling more "disappointing" then exciting. The game is in a bad state.

Instead of writing huge paragraphs about this topic, I'll try to be brief and share the key-points. This will limit the reading duration to our fellow readers.

a) TV Royale Episodes

I want to summarize how I feel about how content is presented in TV Royale (Season Passes):

• After watching "Season Pass" episodes, you already know that nothing will change gameplay-wide
• Most of the episode is "filler" information. I've noticed that Seth and Drew tend to make repeated-content appealing by spending time describing cosmetics and makes it seem like important content
• Despite TV Royale being longer than 3 minutes, content feels quite minimal
• I want to wish the Supercell Team the best of luck in creating the next update, because it has been hard for them lately due to COVID-19

b) Pass Royale

Pass Royale is additional content to the pay-to-play playerbase, and definitely does not count as major content. However, I cannot argue with this because money is the key to a successful business. Reminder to everyone that Clash Royale still requires money to run their business, so let's not jump into conclusions and complain that Supercell is a "money hungry" operation.

As for the Pass Royale item, here's some feedback on it:

• The rewards are exactly the same despite how many new tiers there are
• You would typically buy this for the cosmetics, more chests, "chest strikes", unlimited retries, and season banks. This isn't a really good incentive to play Clash Royale if all you're getting is the same stuff every time.
• Buying the season pass for extra rewards won't help your progression significantly. It will give you strikes and unlimited retries. But realistically, whether you buy the pass or not, there's hardly any difference when it comes to progression.

Tower Skins and New Arenas

• Temporary arenas are cosmetic and do not count as major content. This type of content goes away in the next update, so why bother making this so important?
• Tower skins isn't bad content, but isn't major content either. They are simply cosmetics.

c) Emotes

Emotes are definitely not major content. It's purely cosmetic, and are considered "small-additions" to an update.

Why do emotes not count as major content? (!)

• You can only select 8 emotes for your "emote deck", and it's infuriating to swipe through a hundred emotes and select the emote you want.
• You can never use all of your emotes in one game unless you're flexing to the opponent
• Emotes CAN be annoying so some players mute them ingame, so what's the point in collecting them?
• The only existence of emotes in clan chats is for random emote spamming or huge blocks that fill up the chat

d) Special Events

Spawning, spawning and more spawning. Sometimes, you can even predict the spawning challenges that will appear in the next update. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict these challenges. They used to be fun, but now they're very unoriginal. We need more challenges that are unique, especially community ones.

e) New Cards

Adding new cards won't improve the state of Clash Royale, especially unoriginal ones like the Skeleton Dragon. Here's why:

• Some of the new cards have recycled mechanics or a mix-of-mechanics from multiple cards being an excuse to make a brand-new card
• No matter what card is added, the "card boosts" will often not help test out card mechanics on ladder due to a narrow variety of cards you can use (see Progression System)
• A new card will most likely decrease in usage rates after the monthly seasons end

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2. PROGRESSION SYSTEM

The progression system has been a lackluster for a long time. The real reason why you're collecting all these rewards all over the game is to upgrade your cards. They can be used for ladder (1), clan wars (2), and challenges/tournaments that require your real card levels (3). I'd personally want to see some changes made in this system.

Why is the overall progression system in a bad state?

• It takes years to max out an entire deck, never mind a single card (as a Free-to-play with full commitment)
• It's really hard to use a variety of cards on ladder due to the extremely slow progression system, which makes trophy pushing stale
• No matter how many chests you open, even huge chests such as the Mega Lightning or Legendary Kings chest won't help you max your cards, not even by a fraction. This is due to the randomization card collections, where random cards come out (not the ones you want).
• Buying the season pass for extra rewards won't help your progression significantly due to the reason above

a) Ladder and Trophy Road

Why is Ladder in a bad state?

• Current progression system restricts the variety of cards you can use on ladder
• Season Reset decreases 50% of your trophies if you're in the Leagues. This pressures players by putting them on an endless cycle of attempting to replenish their trophies every season. For high trophy clans, it's a pressure of retaining their ranks. Not pushing will result in a lower trophy count.
• Due to the tiny amount of rewards you get each season, you're forced to use the same cards time and time again. It does get a bit boring.

b) Card Boosts

This was a nice addition to the game, especially when new cards are released. You can test out the new card on ladder and find out its archetypes (aka how it works).

That's not always possible. Because it's not possible for the boosted card to fit into all decks. For meta decks, each card has its purpose to fulfill in order to succeed in matches. An unknown, boosted card could potentially jeopardize the functionalities of the entire deck and may result to a loss of trophies.

This all comes down to the variety of cards you can use on ladder. For a majority of people, not that many.

c) How to Improve Progression?

As many would have guessed, the best solution is to make progression a bit faster. Slow progression systems will increase the staleness and repetitive nature of the game, and will result to more people quitting.

Ways to speed up the progression are:

• Significantly increasing the rewards in chests or challenges
• Decrease the overall RNG when obtaining cards
• Have a system where chests will produce cards that are consistently used on ladder (Helps provide more cards for higher leveled cards)
• Decrease the number of cards required to upgrade
• For players who have maxed out multiple cards, the chests will favor cards that haven't been maxed out yet
• The shop could provide cards that are used more often

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3. SUPERCELL'S COMMUNICATION WITH THE COMMUNITY

In my opinion, the Supercell's communication with the community is fairly decent, but is definitely not something to be proud about. There hasn't been any noticeable changes with their communication since 2018. I want to go more into depth on this topic and explain their post.

Main Communication we are Currently Getting From Supercell:

• u/Supercell_Drew's responses on Reddit and clarifying questions for the public
• Community Manager interviews
• Very rare communication posts
• There used to be "Weekly Communication Topics" and "Semi-Monthly What We've Been Working on" posts, but I've heard that community backlash has caused this operation to shut down
• On the TV Royale episodes, they're now talking about how a "card" is developed, which doesn't really count as communication.

a) I'll be replying to some of the main points on this post Supercell Drew shared earlier.

Developing takes time. Developing a brand new feature takes longer than modifying existing features. Taking an existing feature, removing it and turning it into something completely new takes even longer!

Telling the community that developing takes time is something that we can all understand. But for one whole year? It shouldn't take a long time to create one single "huge" update or some changes to Clan Wars.

Look at the Brawl Stars Team. They've created so many game-breaking features such as gadgets, and is successful at doing so. I understand that Brawl Stars is a completely different game with different mechanics (etc), but Clash Royale does have lots of potential as well, and this "potential" isn't being executed in a good way.

Now look at the Clash Royale community. Lots of backlash and posts that spark outrage because of repetition. There are also lots of ideas that have the potential to improve the game. There is hardly any implementation of community ideas in Clash Royale as most of the ideas and concepts only come from (and are restricted to) the Clash Royale Developing Team (or maybe Youtubers, but that's it)

Bigger features are more complex and sometimes you have to throw stuff out and go back to the drawing board to deliver the best feature possible.

• I see this as a risky assumption to make for what the "community wants". It's quite hard to predict what the community wants if the entire community doesn't get any specific idea of what's coming. What happens if this "huge update" ends up being a total failure and a dissatisfaction to millions of players? The scene won't look so pretty. This is when the "Weekly Communication Topics" or some discussion thread comes in.
• Also, we understand that development of new content or a rework does take a long time, but should not take over a year to make. To majority of the playerbase, this is becoming a disappointment because the Team isn't meeting up to Supercell Standards. The delay and the Covid-19 situation isn't an excuse either. Again, look at Brawl Stars Team for example. The Clash Royale Team shouldn't use the excuse of consistently trashing concepts and going back to the drawing board time and time again in order to make (what they think is) the "best feature possible".
• Now I'm not asking the Supercell Team to reveal everything (this will defeat the hype obviously!). Reveal something small and get the community to provide feedback and suggestions for that topic. Use community suggestions all over r/ClashRoyale to possibly improve the development of the huge update. Now that's communication! A small dev team can't do everything on their own.

We also created an entirely new way to play Royale that we ended up liking so much we wanted to put it in alongside the originally planned features.

I don't want to sound too selfish, but I find the Clash Royale Dev Team is talking A LOT about themselves and not about what the entire player-base and community thinks about this situation (personal opinion).

And last of all - we want to make sure that what we show or reveal is going to be an accurate representation of what appears in-game. This is obviously easier closer to update completion.

For Season Pass Updates where the update content is so predictable, this statement is deemed true. However, I can prove that this statement is false. Let's take the "Introducing STAR LEVELS" teaser for example; The Supercell Development Team has been creating star levels for a few months after this update, and then it just stopped. What happened to Star Level III Mega Knight? Doesn't seem accurate at all. I understand that these Star Levels take up a lot of assets ingame, but the Supercell Team should rethink this and learn to live up to what they advertise.

It’s taking a while but we will be revealing more in the future and are hyped to share it with you.

Supercell, I advise you guys to live up to what words you are representing to the community. Usually, we are told that "This update is going to be massive!", our team is working so hard to create this update, more info will be revealed in the future, revealed soon, revealed later, please be patient. Using this repetitive cycle of communication has been going on for far too long, without any direct indication as to what will ACTUALLY be happening.

Revealing a very general topic to the community as a sneak peek "Example: we are improving Clan Wars!" is too vague of a topic. This brings confusion and frustration as the playerbase doesn't know WHAT will be changed.

The Team can't always keep the playerbase waiting for months at a time and having a teaser picture to show after 6 long months of nothing. All words, but no actions, yet.

I wish the Clash Royale Team good luck on creating this update, and I hope it IS the best feature there is.

b) Solutions on Communication

I know I may be asking for a lot, but it's time for the community to have some sort of involvement in Clash Royale Updates. Implementing community content, suggestions or ideas, is something that could significantly improve the State of Clash Royale and could include something as small as:

• New cards created and designed by the community
• Community-made emotes
• Special Events/Game modes created by the community (not restricted to Youtubers)
• QOL Changes / Suggestions
• Star Levels (Goblin Guru has his Star Level III Rocket Idea)

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4. STATE OF CLAN WARS (and Clans)

Clan Wars have been a lackluster for many months. I've been noticing that lots of Clans are shutting down and are becoming more inactive than ever. It's quite hard to be committed to the same, repetitive tasks every single day. Collection, then war, then collection, then war. Ever since the "Clan Wars Update", nothing significant has ever changed except a deck-rotation and challenges rotation change.

Why Is Clan Wars Stale?

• After reaching 3000 Clan trophies, you'll get the same rewards as a Clan with 30000 trophies
• When the season ends, even the highest reward (Legendary League 1st place chest) isn't worth the time and effort to obtain (Less valuable then Mega Lightning Chests, but even the best chests don't help progression significantly)
• No milestones as an incentive to push in Clan Wars
• Clan Wars does very little on improving your progression

State of Clans/Teams

• The amount cards you can donate helps you upgrade a single card to its maximum level very VERY slowly. In fact, it'll take several months to upgrade the card you want, and it can get infuriating sometimes
• Please implement a separate chat for trades, because a massive number of trade token offers take up majority of the chat. Why do this? 1) This will help reduce clutter on the clan chat, and 2) A separate page can also feature more trades.
• It's quite hard for clan leaders to motivate members to do the exact same tasks repetitively
• Due to Clan War's lost of interest over time and progression issues, majority of clans are getting inactive

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5. Other Features In Clash Royale

TOURNAMENTS

This is commonly used for Youtuber Emote giveaways, but that's pretty much it. The rest of the Tournaments feature is dead. Rework or remove this feature.

MATCHMAKING

Matchmaking is still very flawed, and most of us know why. Need me to say more?

SHOP OFFERS

Please remove those gems-for-cards offers. Only a fool will choose to spend 250 gems for 50 Bomb Towers!

We need more ways to get Fortune Chests!

Allow cards "that you frequently use on ladder" to appear in the shop more often instead of complete RNG

BALANCE CHANGES

Balances have improved over the months, but still needs gradual improvement. Despite having almost 100 cards, cards that are being balanced won't really change that many interactions and will definitely feel unnoticeable. This includes 1-5% HP buffs, or 0.1 sec changes in hit-speed.

Cards that desperately needs changes and are below 1% usage rates are not buffed until many months later. This is due to a lack of testing. Cards that are perfect in their current state (and doesn't need changes) instead get an entire rework and ends up being either too dominant, or useless (Eg. Tornado, Witch and Executioner).

There needs to be some changes in how cards are balanced. Saying that the game is perfectly balanced at its current state, is no excuse.

LAGGING

Suggestions on lagging:

• Before you press the battle button, there needs to be a system to "warn" you to check your wifi connection if your connection is poor
• When lagging in 1v1 battle, at least have a bot to replace you during your AFK
• When lagging in 2v2 battles, allow your 2v2 teammate to control your deck during your AFK

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Conclusion

Most of us can agree that the game is getting very stale and boring. No incentive to keep playing. CR players are dropping like flies. The game's in a really terrible state and I wonder what'll happen at the end of the line.

I personally love this game, and I believe the Supercell CR Team could turn the tides with the upcoming update and make Clash Royale great again.

Big thanks to u/Supercell-Seth and u/Supercell_Drew for creating such an amazing game that has been adored by players for years. Good luck on creating the next update!

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If my post is TLDR (too long; didn't read), if I've missed information, or if there's a typo, please feel free to comment any concerns you have regarding this post! Thank you!

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