devtrackers.gg
Hello Slayers,
1.6.0 launched yesterday, and we’re getting a ton of feedback in our channels around the state of this patch and Dauntless as a whole.
We’ve been pouring over Reddit since the launch of 1.6.0 and reading all the feedback coming in. Yes, there is a lot of it! It’s kicked off a ton of conversations within the Dauntless team. We’re in the process of identifying the major points of friction and coming up with our plan around them.
Overall, our goal with the Reward Cache was to let all players identify which items they valued and give a clear course to earning them. We thought this would be a better experience for obtaining rewards that Slayers wanted. Right now, the rate at which you earn these items, and the current Hunt Pass offerings, still need some work and tuning. We hear that.
Minor bugs aside (which are being logged and prioritized now, and you can follow them all on our Favro board), here are the major concerns we are hearing from you:
High Priority Bugs Update
- Power Surged items now have their proper boosts, but the UI and UE scaling are still incorrect. These issues will be addressed in 1.6.1.
- Primal Debuffs now stop after the encounter
- We have removed certain challenges that were not completing correctly
The Hunt Pass has fewer cosmetics than before
This is true. This season we wanted to offer more of those cosmetics to players in a free, earnable way. While it does mean that this elite pass has fewer cosmetic items total - there are still just as many available throughout the game. We’re exploring a lot of options to address this feedback, but it’s too early in the feedback cycle to commit to an option here.
We'll keep monitoring your feedback to see the best way forward with the next Hunt Pass.
The Reward Cache demands a lot of time from players
We realize our missteps here: the underlying issue is that these daily time gates go against the player’s natural session length and frequency.
On top of this, we want to add more weeklies since we believe this is where the meat is. Dailies should be the bonus gravy on top after completing your weekly, not a mandatory activity that requires daily login.
We are considering implementing “challenge stacking” to allow players to have more challenges active across any week to help alleviate this. This would mean your active challenges that have progress would not expire until you complete them, you’d just get a new one for each completed challenge. This is still an early discussion, so we may pivot to another solution, but we want challenges to naturally work into play sessions.
We will continue to listen to feedback and balance the rate of incoming materials to make sure this is a smooth and engaging experience.
Removing crystals to reduce currencies
We're taking a look through all of our currencies — including the newest ones — and evaluating how much fun they add to the game compared to the effort it takes to track them/how they might limit gameplay.
We have started work on unifying crystals and materials into one simplified currency. We’ve heard your feedback that this currency bloated the Reward Cache. This change will launch next week, and we’ll let you know when it’s happening then.
The goal is for each activity in Dauntless to feel rewarding — and that's always a balancing act. Keep the feedback coming and we'll continue to make adjustments.
More grind across the same amount of content
1.6.0 added new mechanisms for receiving rewards — and now our attention is turned fully on new activities. Expect new island encounters, a new behemoth, and more this season. Plus - we're looking ahead at new modes and new adventures to go on next
We’re also adding an option to directly forge aethersparks into aetherhearts. That’s a different area, but it should add more options to the Reforge loop.
Where the heck is the new weapon?
We hear you. Behemoths and weapons are always the juiciest forms of content. We know this, and we plan on delivering this in the future. We can’t talk about this now, since things are still early in development, but expect new ways to beat up Behemoths in the future.
We’ve put a ton of work into this new infrastructure — Hunting Grounds, Reforging, Trials, wounding, war pike, and the Reward Cache — and now we can move forward to new activities while we balance and expand these systems.
We have a lot packed into 1.6.X and even more exciting things down the line…
We are considering many options on how to make the Reward Cache feel better for both free-to-play Slayers and spending Slayers, and the new system gives us the flexibility to make these changes. When we finalize our next steps, we will let you know the details.
For now, keep providing feedback and we’ll do our best to address the concerns as best we can.