[2019] Current State Of The Game

A couple of weeks since the last "Big" Update in July have passed and Season 2 just launched yesterday, so lets take a look at the current state of the game:

 

1. Update Content:

The July Update was supposed to be a huge one, and the things we got are:  

• Pass Royale:

The Pass definitely is worth 5$ and was an okay addition in terms of faster progression for the casual spender, but it's not really something which adds fresh aspects to the game which would lead to long term motivation. However, I will go into more details later on.

• Crown Chest Changes:

Pretty much connected with the Battle Pass, gives all F2Ps a few additional rewards, but adds no new aspects to the game.

• 1 New Arena & 1 New Card

In my opinion a Card and Arena can't even be considered as content (in my opinion content are fresh ways to give players long term motivation and new ways to play the game. E.g. the Clan War Update including different Game Modes for Preperation Day). After all, how many people will be capable of playing a newly released card of rarity higher than "Rare" on ladder? Even if you are a regular spender, it takes months to max out a Legendary / Epic Card unless you already saved up 30 Tokens. New Arenas are fine, but for gods sake please let us choose the Arena we want to play in after reaching Legendary Arena. The Colors of the Ship and Beach Arena is a freaking pain in my eyes when playing more than 2-3 games in a row.

• New Game Mode(s)

New Game Modes are some of the few things which can actually add variety to the game, and I really wished that there would always be an active special challenge including a new game mode. It doesn't even need to include rewards, just add them like casual games you can get your chest slots filled with. But please, let them be playable more often. You've literally hyped the Touchdown mode as one of the biggest new features in Clash Royale, only to have it active for like 3 days in a Special Challenge we couldn't even repeat, and then it simply got vanished for over a month.

Conclusion July Update and Updates in General:

Battle Pass Seasons, New Arenas, New Cards are things you can hype players for a couple of days, but after the hype has vanished people will realize that nothing changed, and the core game is still the same as Pre-Update. Take a look at the Clan War Update. Besides the multiple flaws of the whole CW system (which for some reasons still did not get addressed), it is something which motivates players to log in and participate in on a daily basis, and also results in active communication in most average clans about good decks, practice matches etc.

The same thing could be said about the April Update. We got 3 New Game Modes (Mega Deck, Dragon Hunt and Elixir Capture, out of which the last 2 are the same boring thing as Fisherman's Catch), a Trophy Road Rework which didn't solve anything (instead of facing maxed eBarb players at 4.000 trophies, now you meat the exact same players at 5.000 trophies).

The Update progression of Clash Royale is very slow in my opinion, and I really wished that Player Feedback would play a bigger role when it's coming to developing the next Update content. But instead of focusing on players priorities, resources are getting wasted on content nobody asked for.

Also, anybody remembers their "Dear Community, We Care! 🙇 post ? More than 7 months have passed, and not a single of the QoL changes for Trade Tokens have been introduced ever since. In general, when scrolling through Drews and ClashRoyales comments here on Reddit, there are so many things they've apparently been working on since 6 months+ but never make it to the game.

This kinda leads to my next point:

2. Weekly Communication Topics

As a very active Reddit user those Weekly Communication Posts actually made me a little excited for each Friday / Saturday, just to get some sort of idea what kind of content the upcoming Updates will deliver. There are a few things I'd like to adress when it's coming to these posts:

• Frequency of their Communication Topics:

The first 2 months after they've started with their "Weekly" Communication Topics went pretty good. They actually managed to drop 7-8 of these posts every Friday / Saturday and didn't miss out on a single week. With the end of February the frequency of their Communication Topics went down a little bit and we only got one of these every 2-3 weeks with less details than the earlier ones. Next week it will be exactly 2 months ago since they've posted their last Communication Topic.

I have absolutely no issues if there are less details to be shared and if they miss out on 1 or 2 weeks, but 2 months of absolute silence is a no go, especially when they themselves called it WEEKLY COMMUNICATION. They can't tell me they are busy with other stuff because judging by the lenghts of those posts it doesn't even cost them 10 minutes to write, and there are always enough details and Sneak Peeks which could be shared, especially with the introduction of Season Themes.

What's so hard on creating a post which could look like:

This Week we've been up to this:

• Should there be a more expensive Battle Pass Version for the hard grinders?

• What themes would be interesting and suitable for Clash Royale?

• Are the amount of Crowns needed to complete it doable for the average player?

• Seasonal Card Skins?

Let us know what you've been thinking about Season 1 so far and tell us your ideas for improvements!

Also, can you guess the theme of the upcoming Season? ı̴̴̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡| ̲▫̲͡ ̲̲͡▫̲̲͡͡ ̲|̡̡̡ ̡ ̴̡ı̴̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡̡._*

Not that hard, isn't it?

• Their actual Communication within these Posts

I'm kinda disappointed that they've only been using their Weekly Communication Topics to write down like 3-4 things they've been thinking about or playing around with. These topics would have been great to actually communicate with the players and respond to the comments below. Of course many of the questions are just some regular spam stuff which not really require an answer, but common at least respond to the 3 most upvoted questions within the topic. It's kinda frustrating to see questions with hundred of upvotes unanswered, meanwhile they will almost always comment on Artworks done by 4 y/o's.

In general I don't understand the abscence of communication. Supercell is a multi billion dollar company with tons of resources and I remember a couple of months ago when the official Suppercell Forum got closed because apparently you wanted to "completely focus on Reddit" lmao. There are Subreddits of Games with not even 1% of Clash Royales Player Base, but the frontpage is filled with posts with the tag "OFFICIAL REPLY". I like to think it's because of another reason, but if I had to guess it's exactly the fact that you have absolute fool-freedom due to your Net Worth and don't have to give a damn about what the 0,00001% of your player base here on Reddit thinks of you anyway.

3. Ban Policy regarding Account Sharing and Win Trading

I didn't want to bring this up at first, but since Bosshey got banned 1 day before the season ended and multiple posts about egor win trading with himself made it to the frontpage I'm gonna talk about it anyway.

Supercell stated multiple times already that everybody gets treat the same way and that no exceptions are being made, but I guess everybody in here knows that their ban policy is extremely fishy.

Account Sharing and Pushing for money has probably existed already since the start of the game, but only after the incident during the last 20-win challenge when a pro player posted doing the challenge for other players for money on Twitter they seemed to have taken action.

A couple of weeks after the ban wave people started pushing Accounts again. There are tons of public Twitter posts of people asking for Accounts to push and even posting censored Screenshots of the Season End result they got with the Account they've been pushing. I'm part of a couple of high ladder Discord / Line and Whatsapp groups, and I can still guarantee that last season every 4th or 5th Account within the Top 500 Range did get pushed.

Few seasons ago I actually made myself the effort to take some screenshots and collect names of around 10 Accounts in the Top 200 which got pushed as well as the Account names of the pusher. I've sent a support ticket to which they've actually replied "Thanks for your concern, after checking these Accounts I can definitely say that there are in deed weird activities going on!."

They've pretty much admitted that these Accounts are getting pushed, but not a single one of the Accounts I've reported got banned. Are you kidding me? My Main Account of 2 1/2 years got permanently banned for "toxic behavior" because during the course of 2 1/2 years I got banned 4 times which is less than twice per year, but I can freely push multiple Accounts in the Top 200 range, have multiple IPs from different countries log into my Account each day and absolutely nothing is going to happen? That's really great and has absolutely nothing to do with cherry picking.

Same thing goes for Egor (phatcat Account) and Anaban.

Literally everybody is aware that these players are doing some shady activities while pushing high ladder, and there are screens here on Reddit in which the support says "Win Trading is against Supercells ToS", but absolutely nothing ever happens to them, why?

Meanwhile bosshey got banned for 31 Days due to Account sharing a couple of hours before the season ended, and Drew even stated that the ban is "justified". Of course I take bossheys statement that he never let anybody else play on his Account with a grain of salt, since obviously nobody is going to admit Account Sharing, but I truely believe that this ban was unjustified and had something to do with himself playing from multiple devices / locations.

Account Sharing and Pushing might not be a big deal for most of the players, but imagine having the chance to be the first player to hit 8.000 Trophies and then somebody else simply gets it by giving himself a free win. Or instead of finishing #99 on Ladder you finish #160 because people like Egor, Anaban push multiple Accounts within the top 100 range each season. They're breaking the rules and should be baned just like everybody else.

4. Battlepass, Trophy Road & Global Tournament Changes

• Battlepass:

As stated somewhere above, the Pass was a fine addition to the game. However, there are a few things which could be complained about.

The small nerf of the S2 Battlepass was not necessary, and there is no legit reason why you would move down the Legendary Chest to an earlier stage except for nerfing the Strikes and giving the players less value.

350 Crowns per Season are fine, but I still wished they wouldn't have removed the feature of crowns being earned in private tournaments. After all it's no abuse or anything since you still get the same rewards as everybody else, just a bit faster. There are many players who only play enough matches a day to keep their chest slots filled, and for them 350 crowns are connected with additional play time.

Also, just like in most other games it would be cool if you could gain back the "5$" you've spent for the pass and invest it into the next one.

Aaaaand didn't you want to remove the "player X has bought the Season pass" from the clan chat? I really don't need anybody to know that I've bought it, and I really don't want to see the same message pop up with 30 different names from my clan spamming the clan chat the first 3 days into the new season.

There are a couple of people who've said that they are not going to buy the Battle Pass in order to get the rewards changed again, but tbh as a single player not buying the Battle Pass the only thing you do is miss out on good rewards for only 5$. Supercell probably doesn't care whether they earn 10.000.005$ or 10.000.000$ each month, but you definitely miss out on something

• Trophy Road:

Instead of 2 random Legendaries we are now forced to take the Fisher? Why not simple make it like every other Tier and let us choose between Fisher and a Random Legendary? Besides the card being absolute F-Tier I can't imagine anybody besides maxed out players to be happy to get a new Legendary more than once (for tournament standard). As somebody who currently tries to max his main deck including 5 Legendaries on a new Account this kinda hurts my progress.

• Global Tournaments:

I really liked the fact that Global Tournaments were available on a weekly basis after the release, since for 500 Gems you could get very good value out of them if you've managed to get past 12 (20 on release). Ever since they've nerfed the rewards (took gold and the Legendary Token away from the F2P stage) and we only get a Global Tourny every 3-4 weeks. Would be cool if we could still have them on a weekly basis and include 1 of the season themed Emotes as a F2P reward.

5. Star Level Skins

It's been 9 months since the Star Levels got introduced, and ever since only around 10 new Star Skins have been added to the game. Star Skins are pretty much the only thing a maxed out player can look forward to, so it would be cool if at least every card could get his T2 Skin or every Legendary his T3 one for a more fancy look. A full golden Mega Knight as shown in the Preview would look absolutely amazing, or an Electro Wizard with that Super Saiyajin look. I'm no Artwork Artist, but if I had to guess I'd say putting a golden layer on an already existing character model isn't really something which would require 1 year to pull off.

Also, please add additional ways to gain Star Points, since the current ratio to how much you gain versus how much you have to pay is unbalanced as f*ck.

 

I guess these are the most important things which should be focused on right now, so I'm gonna stop right here.

Hope this post is not too much of a mess since I'm too lazy to re-read it, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong with something.

TL;DR: The quality of the content updates seems to decrease, players seem to get more frustrated with each update, Game is missing new long term motivation additions, barely any open communication from Supercell

EDIT: I've always been the first to defend many of the weird decisions Supercell has been making the last couple of months, but right now I actually got the impression that the game is going downhill (in terms of quality), and that shiny Battle Pass advertisement above the Shop you can't hide makes the UI look like you're playing a cheap F2P game which heavily relies on Ads you have to watch every 10 minutes

External link →