[2020] [OFFICIAL] Casual AMA & Dev Update - What We've Been Up To!

At least one of them, for sure :)

We've been really happy with how the Barb Hut change has made it viable, we may make that a standard design for spawners. If Gob Hut gets buffed, look for something like a shortened lifetime + added Death Spawn of a couple Spear Goblins.

Initially we wanted Royal Delivery to be a defense against swarm troops and fragile things at the bridge, but its clear thats not quite enough use cases to justify a slot in your deck. We are playing around with significantly increased damage or perhaps even spawning 2 Recruits. We are playing around with more interactions but it feels clear that there needs to be more awesome trades possible with it to make it into the meta.

my current ladder deck:

poison
goblin cage
firecracker
valkyrie
skeletons
golem
zap
dart goblin

i know it's off meta trash but i'm having fun with it lol

Most of the team has been working from home offices this week on recommendation of the Finnish government, but I don't think it has impacted our productivity too much. We are very lucky to have a job that allows us to work remotely and still get stuff done. Maybe we'll go stir crazy in a month but at least this first week has gotten a lot of new stuff in the game :)

there is still a LOT of stuff to work on!

so yes, april is not when the update drops (but it will still have the new heal card and seasonal content!)

thanks for the kind words! as seth said already we are for the most part working remotely.

it took a bit of getting used to but has been fun and dare i say even more productive than usual as everyone is just super focused!

i'm rather enjoying my 10 second commute from my bed to work however

it can't - we unfortunately had to remove battle healers hover mechanic JUST before release.

in our next forced update (if i'm not wrong) we will be adding this to both Battle Healer & Royal Ghost.

We've got a fun one - instead of nerfing Wallbreakers we are going to buff a vaguely similar card that oughta fill a similar role.

nope, the current challenge doesn't give a 20-win badge.

to answer question 2:

story mode isn't ruled out but it is not something that we would be actively looking into at the moment. i couldnt find the concept that you mentioned but i dont believe that a story mode would add as much replayability as a PvP oriented mode. developing a story mode for royale would probably turn it into a separate game.

we believe the strength in clash royale, what makes it so fun, is from playing against other players and that is what we are focusing on at the moment.

thanks for the question!

we've been wondering about this ourselves as we will be hitting 100 cards at some point this year!

i have and they're amazing!

There is no serious consideration to changing rarities at this point. That ship has long sailed, those aren't the sort of changes that would benefit Royale today. We could probably change around the rarities, but what would be the point? It would cause massive short term confusion, and would not affect anyone's progress through today. If you had a max Royal Giant before, you would still have a max Royal Giant, it would just be rare now. Plus imagine all the negative scenarios, like people who had requested a Common suddenly unable to keep requesting it because its now Epic.

All that trouble just to chase some academic design ideal? Ultimately we are servicing players and causing them a bunch of trouble/confusion is something we would only do if we felt it was seriously necessary, and we don't think a few mis-raritied cards rises to that level.

We still have avid discussions about rarity for each new card, but once a card is launched, we can only take learnings from it for future content. We don't plan to change the rarity of a card once launched.

We have been playing around with a 6-cost Bowler rework we've talked about for a while. Making him as tough as he looks and a bit more a clear counterpushing win condition. But it's not a high priority - Bowler is viable, and not the sort of card that you want to be in 10% of decks. He's a spell-proof repeatable knockbacker that doesn't cost too much - it's probably good for the meta that he's not balanced on the stronger side.

We've always aimed for a more offensive metagame. It can be tough because Clash Royale has a very stronger defenders advantage for a competitive game, so we tend to make Building-targeting cards very strong for their cost. If the competitive metagame was just defensive spell-cycling because nothing could break through, that's the ultimately failure state of the meta.

CRL East Spring season is going to use Triple Draft as part of their sets! Hopefully we can see all the strengths and weaknesses of it as a competitive format. Certainly we can tweak draft tables based on that, and ideally it would become a tighly-balanced, CRL-quality format for players.

Honestly, if we do change Wizard it would be directly because of community brainstorming. There's no one on the team who has personal crusade to get Wizard to 4-cost, but there are lots of productive and intelligent discussions happening across social media that make compelling points. It's worked its way into playtests because of the collective wisdom of our best strategy posters.

Can you find where that was said? I don't think that's ever been our philosophy - on the contrary, using the same Troop/spawns/effects across multiple cards is rock solid CCG best practices.

thanks! love the work you do for the sub.

1. we see lots of negative feedback when we dont give much info (dev interviews for examples) and our dev cycles dont allow for much new info to be released week on week - so if they were to be regular it would be monthly. but i think for now we will just keep them for when they feel good!

2. i love gob giant. there was a meta last summer where giant goblin sparky was everywhere in competitive and i think he's a super fun card.

great question! believe it or not, the party button and the introduction of trophy road!

i always see a lot of people that don't count these as updates ("they're just UI changes!!!" & "we haven't had an update for 10 months" which i can totally understand) but in reality they have helped to massively advance our casual players to more levelled up decks enabling them to play the game more competitively, and increased the amount of play choices for these casual players past just 2v2.

trophy road was a real risk when we started the development as we weren't really sure if it would work out but i'm glad we went for it!

we have a plan for one either in summer or just after summer. building cards are difficult ones to balance but we are pretty happy with this one!

The Creator Program! It started as a crazy little idea but now that we have it up and running, its awesome to see how much support the creators get. Especially for these new challenges, each creator saw a spike when their challenge is run. We hope that everytime we run Legendaray's 7x Elixir Challenge, he gets a little boost of creator sales for coming up with such a fun challenge.