Clash Royale Dev Tracker

When we developed Pass Royale and Trophy Road we made a few variants of the rewards. Each path has nearly identical value (when converted to a neutral economy value) but mixed up the spots where you unlock them. The reason we do this is to gauge feedback and learn. We learned a lot from the community reaction to the earlier Legendary this month, and will very likely return it to Tier 35 in future months. The only way to know is to experiment!

We are all super excited for the next card. It's a really fun design, has a unique mechanic, and challenges both players in an interesting way. Should definitely open up new deck archetypes too!

There was a very old prototype troop (Paladin) that cast Heal on himself every time he attacked! We discarded the concept for now but never say never :)

Things Barb Barrel can still do that Log can't:

- Play in the middle to pull a Baby Dragon or Mega Minion into the opposite lane

- Cycle in the back for a cheap Barb defender

- Counter Goblin Gang at the river and hit the tower for more damage

- Counter Goblin Barrel and provide a counter attacker

- Single handedly kill a distracted support Troop

Barb Barrel is still pretty versatile and strong - it can still kill Princess / Dart Goblin / Rascal Girls, you just rely on the Barbarian to finish them off and lose the ability to chip tower. Barb Barrel had over a 50% use rate in high level play for months on end, it needed a nerf for sure. Something had to be done to change at least one fundamental interaction and I think the Princess/bait type decks were the ones that suffered most from Barb Barrel's insane value. It has the same win rate as Zap and Log now, so let's see how the player base adapts to the change over the next few months.

we don't consider tweets proof. sure, we can look into players from tweets, but they're not proof.

we wouldn't ban someone for saying "player X cheated - look at this screenshot". but if enough people report it or it looks legit, we would look into it.

whether someone makes content for us etc is irrelevant when it comes to enforcing fair play. just because you only hear of one case happening doesn't mean that it isn't happening elsewhere.

it takes time to do these things correctly (which is why a lot of companies including ourselves do 'banwaves' to ban a lot of players all in one go) and we would rathwer do things correctly and slow and incorrectly and fast. obviously the goal is to do them fast and correctly, but that's what we are working on.

I go back and forth on Furnace. It's not OP (4%-49% in GCs, 8%-52% on Ladder) but it is annoying. Something I find frustrating is that even after a Fireball or Poison there's that last wave of Fire Spirits that burp out. We have discussed reducing the health so that the final wave doesn't come out, but Poison doesn't really need that buff and Furnace probably shouldn't be so easily countered by Spells. It's a design that is meant to be a little challenging to interact with, but I agree that frustrating gameplay should be addressed as much as possible.

this here is exactly why we wait a while for deciding on balance changes.

before the update everyone was 100% sure that pekka was a dead card...

turns out the range increase is potentially slightly too much, and we may be dropping it to medium range next season.

it is still too early to come to a conclusion on balances but we are keeping an eye on these two cards as we progress through the season.

We are still watching PEKKA, but yes the win rates and use rates have trended up slightly. If it holds, I think PEKKA would receive a small health or range nerf. The goal was a minor nerf and it ended up being a minor buff. For all the talk about how we don't listen to the community, the PEKKA change was reduced BECAUSE of the community. Originally it was -15% health, but we knew it would be controversial and decided to hedge a little bit because we didn't want to over-nerf it. We even warned the YouTubers about it before the balances were announced, but clearly we should have gone with our first instinct.

Mega Knight isn't that bad: 11%-46% in GCs (7%-50% in 8+ win games). There are no plans to buff him right now, but of course that could change any month. He's very popular on Ladder (top 5 played Troop from 4-5k) and Classics (20%-50% use-win) so we are putting priority on more pressing cards that need reworks.

signed

The monthly Classic Deck updates and introducing modes like Wall Breaker Party to Clan Wars has been our attempt to keep Clan Wars fresh in the meantime without contributing too much development time. Every day spent on Clan Wars now takes away from the update we would like to do, so hopefully those little changes keep it entertaining in the meantime :)

this comment was most likely about the trophy road, which has indeed changed the way that a lot of people play ladder. the same is also true for pass royale however - we try to keep things fresh and exciting with each feature we introduce

Golem has actually dropped in use/win rate since the update, as Bridge Spam has gotten more popular. You can't really drop an 8-elixir tank vs. Bridge Spam, so that's a bad matchup for the big boy. We may change the numbers of death damage vs. normal attacks on them though, I agree a lone Golem is probably too threatening. The strength of beatdown decks should come primarily from the support troops and not an unsupported tank.

thanks for the message man! it's much appreciated

RE: win trading

i've replied specifically about it before - it just isn't one of these things where we can rush in and swing the banhammer wildly. the issue is being discussed

RE: acc sharing

we are still banning for acc sharing. a CR streamer was banned the other day for this exact thing, for example

Hang tight! We have a lot of reworks in the mix, and Zappies is definitely in the discussion. I think its important the game has a variety of stun-attacking Troops available to players to minimize the swinginess of Inferno or Charging cards. The goals of a Zappies rework would be to make them better at splitting lanes and making the first attack not nearly so slow. But we want to do more than just a faster first hit :)

we heard the community's response to the less strikes issue and have spoken about it today in our friday wrap up sesh. going forwards we will be working to keep it at a consistent value.
for season 3 we are also thinking more about improving the free track somehow so that f2p players (who may have been feeling a bit left out!) will get something extra there too.

:}

This! Fisherman at the river can yeet the Balloon away and apply a Slow effect with the hook. More unique counters to Air cards is something we have been looking at, because all-Air decks can be frustrating when they dominate the metagame.

The original version of the rework was at 4 Elixir! But as we playtested and polled players, it became apparent that Executioner is played largely because of his toughness. If we made him 4 cost and lowered his health to die to Lightning, we would be betraying every existing Executioner player and that's not a good way to start off a rework. Ultimately keeping him Lightning proof at equal levels was a core pillar of the new design, along with needing to kill Barbarians with a single attack.

Ideally we have big reworks coming every month or every other month for a while. There are a lot of cards that need love but shouldn't just get a direct stats buff. Executioner has stood out for a while - he's been underperforming in competitive play, but just a 10% health buff doesn't really fix that fact that he's not particularly unique when compared to the variety of ranged splash attackers. Hopefully making him the shortest range but highest damage anti-air splash attacker creates interesting decisions of Ice Wiz vs Baby Dragon vs new Executioner

What other cards do y'all think could use a full design rework?