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Hey everyone,
The Card Evolution update is now out, and with it, the new Elite Levels.
Elite Levels and how they work have generated strong reactions from the Community, and we would like to address some of the questions and feedback we've seen these past few days.
Our goal is to provide you with more insights about the why’s and what’s.
This is a long one, so let’s get into it.
WHY WE ADD MORE LEVELS??
Vertical progression is central to Clash Royale. The game was designed more than 7 years ago around how players progress by upgrading cards and battling in the Arena. While it might not be the case for everyone, this way of progression is a key goal for many players.
We can see a significant drop in activity from casual players once they have maxed their main deck (8 cards). They quite simply, stop playing and leave the game, no matter where they play most (Trophy Road, PoL, Events), and this drop is significant enough for us to keep adding this vertical progression.
Hopefully, introducing Elite Levels and providing a more passive progression will keep those players engaged.
DIFFERENT PLAYERS = DIFFERENT NEEDS
Clash Royale has a lot of the casual players we mentioned above. When we say casual, we don't just mean 'not competitive', we mean players who play maybe just a few battles every other day. They might search one video for tips occasionally, but they won't engage with our social media or even the in-game News Royale. These make up the vast majority of our players and are not necessarily a part of what we could call the "core" community.
These players are very important to us (just like all players). They are what makes it possible for the game to have the momentum that it does, the near-instant matchmaking at most levels, of most game modes, and they form a big part of what makes the game sustainable.
Many of these players stop playing the game as often, or even entirely, when they max out a deck - regardless of what else we add to the game in the meantime. Leveling their main deck is the only goal they chase and most of them seem to have no interest in investing time in leveling or learning to play other cards.
These players are who we are trying to provide content for with Elite Level. What we hope to see is that these players will stay interested for a lot longer than they did when we added level 14, giving us the space to focus on adding to and improving other areas of the game.
To quote one of our game designers: "For most of our active community members, Clash Royale only properly begins when their deck is maxed and they don't have to worry about level differences getting in the way of balanced, skill-based gameplay. For our casual players, that's when the game ends."
Below is a graph of our Daily Active Users (players who connect to the game daily). The green line is the Champion Update, and the red line is where some players started leaving the game.
- The big jump in November 2021 was mostly re-engaged users
- Most of those players left over the following 5 - 8 months
- The only meaningful behavioral correlation of those players that left is that their decks were maxed
50K IS A LOT OF ELITE WILD CARDS
It is, and it's by design. Elite Levels are not something we expect everybody to unlock immediately. It's slower, but it no longer requires getting lucky with card progress or saving up vast amounts of Gold. You’ll get there just by playing.
The gold economy boost in Chests will greatly help upgrade all your cards to 14 and in turn, generate Elite Wild Cards faster.
If you're an active/skilled player, you should be able to have at least 8 cards at Elite Level in 6 months - which is when it will be added to Path of Legends.
To give a visual representation of what we want to achieve, here’s a rough representation of what card level distribution looks like for a "typical" player:
“Maxed” main deck, with the rest of the collection under-leveled
What we want every player to look like, is something like this:
The whole collection is at level 14 with a few key Cards at level 15
The good thing about using Elite Wild Cards as the only currency needed to max your cards is that we (the game team) have more control over it. Modifying the numbers is less risky for the game’s overall economy than touching Gold and cards, which affect all players.
IT WILL TAKE YEARS TO HAVE MY ENTIRE COLLECTION ELITE LEVEL
Having your Card Collection to Elite Level is not a reasonable short or mid-term goal for players.
We know this is a big shift compared to how progression in Clash Royale was seen before. But we don't expect players to get their whole collection at Elite Level fast - yes, we know it happened already for one player (‘The Data’. Very good 👏).
We want to encourage you to get all your collection to Level 14 and then slowly work toward getting your key cards at Elite Level - your favorite ones, win conditions, or spells for example.
SHOULD WE EXPECT MORE LEVELS AFTER THIS?
This update and how we implemented Elite Level will obviously be a big learning for us. Whichever direction we go in will be heavily informed by both data and community feedback that we observe following this update.
If we see that our assumptions are correct and that adding more vertical progression brings players back and keeps them engaged, then yes, we will add more levels. It doesn't mean we will always add them the same way, but if we see this addition as beneficial for the game, more levels will follow.
On the flip side, if our casual players just aren't interested in Elite Level, we will change it or try a new approach. If the core community is adamant that it has ruined the game for them and we can see from both data and community feedback that they're losing interest, we'll either look for a way to make it better for them or we'll figure out how to stop it from getting in the way of what they actually want.
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Thanks for reading.
We hope that these explanations will provide you with more clarity about our goals and why we’re doing all of this.
Next time we will be doing our best to share this information much earlier in our development cycle.
See you in the Arena,
The Clash Royale Team
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