An honest review of the state of Clash Royale ← click/tap

TL;DR

Clash Royale casual player base has been reduced over the last month due to the Clan Wars 2.0.

In this Google Document:

• I will tell you how my Top 100 Clan (in my region) burnt down to ashes
• I will write down the main issues that Clash Royale is facing right now
• I will try to write some solutions and ideas to 'make Clash Royale great again'

I know that I have written a lot of text (it is taking me +5 hours to write everything), but I beg you to read it, or at least take a look at it.

Also I would really appreciate that you add comments in the Google Document in order to add new ideas, you can also ask me for permissions to edit the Document if you're willing to collaborate.

It would be awesome if you mentioned Drew in the comments section in order to bring these ideas to the Clash Royale team.

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MY EXPERIENCE WITH CLASH ROYALE (WHICH NOBODY CARES ABOUT)

(Feel free to skip this part)

I knew about this game because it had become popular among my colleagues at the university in early 2017.

I started playing it without much hope, because I was always a console player and popular mobile games, like Angry Birds or Geometry Dash, bored me after a few hours. But when I played it, I started to like it, and I spent a couple of hours every day on it. I joined my friends' clan, where I knew about 20 people in real life. I kept playing for about 1 hour a day almost every day, but my friends slowly got bored and left the clan and the game.

By 2018, the clan was in the doldrums, our leader had not played for weeks, and we had many inactive members. There were few donations and exchanges. Since I knew him, I talked to him and asked his permission to do a cleanup in the clan, that's when he put me as the leader of the clan and left the game.

After this change, I became motivated and started making changes in the clan. I wrote some rules in a Google Drive document (if you are interested, check it out at tiny.cc/bataclan), started doing cleanups every few weeks, and tried to keep the clan full and with players who contributed to the clan, even though it wasn't mandatory to play Clan Wars 1.0. We became in the Top 100 clans in my region, +14k war trophies, the clan always with 50/50 members, and with about 10-15 members we reached +6k trophies in ladder every season.

One month after the disastrous update of the Clan Wars 2.0, the clan I spent so many hours with is dying at a dizzying rate. Only 36/50 members (and we have a hard time filling it up without lowering the required conditionsjijiji a lot), 2980 war trophies, no player with more than 6k trophies in ladder, and very few members left with whom I started in the clan. I have also played much less this month, normally I finished the Pass Royale in 2 weeks, and this season I have only reached the tier 13.d

I am a casual player, I have played this game more than any other in my life, and I have spent around $200 on the game. I love to play many different archetypes and that's why I've never been bored...

But the Clan Wars 2.0 update has made me feel angry, then sad, frustrated, and right now, disappointed. A mistake can be made by anyone, what bothers me the most is that the designers and developers have decided to bet on this update with everything against it and wait to see if the problems are solved by themselves. And this is not going dto happen.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The broad answer is simple: designers and developers did not listen to the player community. They have to try to set aside the balance of costs and benefits, because if dthe player base drops to 0, so does the revenue. As a software developer I understand that it is important to have healthy financial accounts, but never at the cost of losing customers (players in this case).

Breaking down the answer, I want to list some notable problems:

Quality of Life updates:

There are not enough updates. I think it would be healthy for CR if bug fixes and small updates were introduced into the game every 1-2 weeks. The hardest part of accomplishing this would be having ideas on what changes to make, but Clash Royale is fortunate to have such a large community on Reddit. Developers should check the top-rated posts frequently and, instead of thinking, "CAN WE MAKE THESE CHANGES WITHOUT IMPACTING PROFITS?" ask themselves "HOW ARE WE GOING TO MAKE THESE CHANGES WITHOUT IMPACTING PROFITS?"

Benefits strongly linked to the progress of the players:

One of the main problems in Clash Royale is that a casual player like me, who has been playing non-stop for more than 3 years, and who has spent around $200 still cannot be maxed (only 26 cards maxed out of a total of 99+2). This should not be happening this way. Maxed players have a competitive advantage over other players, they can use any deck and take advantage of the strongest cards of the season.

An example of this was when the Clash Royale team decided that 2 tokens were necessary to carry out an exchange, because obviously players were being able to obtain the necessary cards to max out their favorite decks too quickly.

I suggest that the rewards increase so that a player around 6k trophies can max 32 cards a year, and a new player can max 8 cards in the first year. This would be playing all the challenges, participating in war every day, playing ladder trying to beat the maximum of trophies, etc. "Yeah sure, and how do you pay the salaries to the Clash Royale team?". I will answer you in the Solutions and ideas section (hint: Fortnite, Dota 2).

Major updates:

I understand that major updates require a lot of time and effort to execute, therefore I would be happy to receive them approximately every 6 months. The problem that I see with the current system is that the team cannot receive feedback from the players, and I understand that due to marketing issues they always try to keep it secret and create as much hype as possible; but doing so runs the risk of wasting a lot of time and effort on an update that players are going to hate (just like Clan Wars 2.0).

New cards and content:

I think that to spice up the game and make each season unique, it is important to release 1 new card each month. I think it's the best way to keep players active and without getting bored. I'll talk about the content in the Solutions and Ideas section.

Clan Wars 2.0

In this topic I am not going to extend much, since recently many users have analyzed in depth the problems that have arisen with this update, but I will focus on the main issues:

• Huge gap between casual and hardcore players: Casual players complain about being unable to reach the goal, and very active clans complain that they reach the goal in 1 day and are bored the rest of the week. Something is wrong with this.
• Time zones affect race outcome, especially between very active clans.
• It is difficult to help the clan if you do not have 32 cards with good levels, although in my point of view this is not a problem of the war system. Below I will explain in more detail.
• Penalty for having low card levels. Imagine that a player with a deck at level 6 beats another with a deck at level 13 (I know, it's almost impossible to imagine), the level 6 player would earn 96 Fame points, and the level 13 player would earn 104 points. Instead of rewarding the heroic feat, it is penalized for having low levels.
• It is mandatory to play, otherwise you penalize your clan. For me this is the worst of all problems for casual clans. As a leader I have fired about 10 people (after the first week) simply because they did not want to play the war (although they were active in the ladder). I really regret doing it, but I was forced to do it.

SOLUTIONS AND IDEAS:

If you have read all the way along I thank you for your patience!

I want to clarify that obviously I’m not God and I don’t have all the answers of how to make this game more attractive. I’m not a game designer either, but I think that as a player and software developer I can bring some ideas.

Quality of Life updates ideas

Just a few examples:

CLANS ENHANCEMENTS:

• Allow clan name changes
• Allow permissions options for clan management (such as change icon, change clan name, invite players, kick players, send messages to all members, etc)
• Allow leaders to give some reward to the best players of the season. As a leader, I would love to give out 20k gold from my account to the best player of the clan each season, or maybe give some gems, or a free pass.
• Improve the clan description options, it’s hard to give good formats with emojis
• Remove the limit of messages a leader can send to the clan members (or maybe add a high limit), and add the option for everyone to stop receiving notifications of leader messages
• Give the option to send messages only to certain groups: co-leaders, veterans, members…

TRADE TOKEN ENHANCEMENTS

• Please, fix the amount of gold needed when you’re giving up maxed cards. If I’m asking for an epic card, and I offer 4 epic cards that I’ve maxed out, just remove 5k gold, instead of 20k gold; it’s silly to have those 15k gold stuck there instead of using it in other exchanges, or leveling up cards.
• Add the possibility of using 5 common tokens in order to boost 1 common card of your choice during 1 month (or until the end of the season), this would be good to try out some cards when you’re not sure what you want to upgrade next. Add this for all card rarities.

CHALLENGES ENHANCEMENTS:

• Add tickets/tokens for challenges! CWA have been asking for this a lot.
• Add a Squire Tournament: same as Classic and Grand Challenge but with free entries and you only have rewards at 12 wins: 100 gold and 1 Classic Challenge ticket (or 10 gems in order to participate in 1 free Classic Challenge)
• Add a leaderboard of challenge winners (that will be reseted at the start of each season) and rewards the players who have won more challenges of each type (maybe the 15k cards chest for the 1st place of Grand Challenges leaderboard?)
• Add the ability to lock the deck at the start of a challenge. If a player uses this option, he will have to play the entire challenge without changing the deck, but he will obtain x1.5 the rewards.

If I’d spent more time thinking I could write down more and more ideas, but you wouldn’t read it, so better if I stop here.

Benefits strongly linked to the progress of the players

How would I solve this issue?

• Unlink the progress of the players with the benefits. This is important because if benefits are linked to the progress of players:
  • Clash Royale team and Clash Royale players have opposite interests. While the team would benefit from slowing down players progression, the players want to progress faster. This confrontation could potentially lead to a loss of player base.
  • When a player is maxed out, Clash Royale won’t get much more benefits from this player, and the earnings will stagnate
• In order to unlink the progress, as I said, the Clash Royale team should transform the game even more in a F2P game. I love the level system and the progression, because it makes it easier for new players to introduce themselves in the game, but after 1 year of playing new players should be able to have a max deck, otherwise this progression turns into a restraint.
• Once these changes are made, the team will need other ways to make money, because new players will spend less money in leveling up the cards. Fortunately, there are several 100% F2P games that are having a lot of success in number of players, but also in revenue; that can tell us how to do it: cosmetics items. Fortnite is a 100% F2P game that does not have levels or any mechanics that give some players an advantage over others, and they are making a fortune just with cosmetics items: player skins, dances, etc.
• Clash Royale has to introduce skins and other customizations in order to make more money. A few examples: unique skins for each card, more skins for towers, the ability of customize your king and princesses, at the end of the match add different reactions for your king when you win or losses (like dancing, crying, etc), add more $$$ emotes, customize effects when entering the arena (maybe the MK could enter with a somersault), add custom emblems for players that would show up next to the clan logo during a match, etc…
• But this isn’t enough. Maxed players (that would be many more) could get bored if they are not interested in spending money and this could lower the number of players. In order to avoid this it should be introduced: rewards based on the usage of cards. Once you max out a card you would start receiving star points (current feature) in order to get the star skins, but also you would start receiving LOYALTY POINTS. The only way to get these points would be playing a lot of matches with the card that you want to obtain these loyalty points.
• For example, imagine that you need 50.000 loyalty points to max out the loyalty of any card, and you get 10 loyalty points for each match with the card in your deck plus a bonus of 15 loyalty points if you won the match. You would need 2000 wins in order to max it. Ok, but what are loyalty points for? First, you would get an awesome skin or an awesome emote of the card when you reach 50k loyalty points. But also you would unlock special challenges for the cards. For example, when you get 5k loyalty points with elite barbarians, you would unlock the challenge “Win 50 matches with rage + ebarbs in your deck” and you could get a new emote, 200 loyalty points, gold, gems…
• I think that introducing this idea of card loyalty would keep players very busy (even those who play the most) grinding loyalty points, trying out new combos, new decks, and enjoying new ways of playing. And I think it would fit both try-hard and casual players, casual players would love to play and achieve troll challenges (like the e-barbs + rage) while playing their fav cards (they would not have to focus on maxing other cards, because it’s easy now); and try-hard players would have to play +26.000 matches (with my preliminary numbers) in order to max out everything. That’s a lot. And the funny thing is that you must play ALL cards to max out everything. Currently you can max out the levels and the star levels of any card even without playing it once.
• Clash Royale could also get money from this feature. How? Well, adding “loyalty boost” perks to the shop, and you can buy it for 100 gems and get x2 loyalty points for the next 3 days (just a broad example).

Major update

This could have a few solutions, but I think they aren’t compatible with the marketing of hype:

• Create community polls and let the players to decide which features they would like to see in the game
• Allow players to install a new app called “Clash Royale Beta”, which is just Clash Royale with new features and that are linked to beta servers. Just to try out new things. The progress made in this app wouldn’t be saved, but maybe you can give all the stuff unlocked.

New cards and content

What do you want me to say? The solution is pretty obvious. Just add new cards, new cosmetics (at least 3-5 unique skins for each card, 3-5 emotes, etc), add new card challenges that can be unlocked when collecting the loyalty points, etc. Clash Royale team, just hire 20 more artists and flood the game with skins, emotes, and stuff.

Also it would be awesome if the shop was improved and all (but the exclusive ones) skins, emotes, tower skins… were always available for gems. Sometimes I feel the impulse of buying an emote (because some player BM me with it and it looked cool), but when I saw it on the shop a few weeks later this impulse was gone and I didn’t spend those 250 gems. This is bad for Clash Royale earnings, and for players (who are disappointed because they can’t fulfill their needs).

Clan Wars 2.0

Solutions for the previous issues:

• The timezones problem can be easily solved by removing the time variable. Rewards are given at the end of the day, and if several clans were able to finish the river race in the same day, the first place will go to the clan with most fame points.
• Penalty for having low levels. Easy fix: the points are computed with the levels of the overleveled player. So if a player with level 6 cards defeat a player with level 13 cards, he gets 1382, and the level 13 player gets 1381. This way when you play against overleveled players, although it is more difficult to win, you can get better rewards that you usually do.
• The problem of having 32 cards maxed isn’t a problem anymore. As we agreed before, now leveling up is easier.
• The other two issues I don’t have an easy solution right now. Maybe someone does? Add a comment if you do! :)

Thanks for reading!

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