Journey Event Scoring and Pathfinder Troop Rebalance information

Hi everyone,

Thanks for all your feedback about the Pathfinder Troop rebalances and the Journey Event scoring. We are collecting your feedback in addition to monitoring how these changes are performing by reviewing our analytics and game data.

The Pathfinder changes were in part made due to overwhelming evidence that they were ruining the PvP experience for the player base, with it being more unpleasant the lower level/newer the player is to the game. As mentioned in the blog post about the changes, the issue is with looping extra turns excessively making for a poor gaming experience for everyone, not just new players. Looping Teams can be fun, but not when the looping is uninterruptable and you’re playing against those teams.

If the start of the game or core gameplay feels unpleasant like that it affects player retention - new to midgame players uninstall. We have been adding more analytics to the game as well as doing more first time user experience testing in addition to all the other feedback and data collection we always do and Pathfinders were something that came up consistently as one of the pain points that needed to be changed for the health of the game. Our goal with the changes is to still have the Pathfinders allow for a high chance of refilling their Mana, while making it less excessive.

We’ve seen your suggestions that we give the Pathfinder Troops different Spells for pvp compared to Journey etc. But the cleaner solution at this point in time is to rebalance the Troops to be more suitable for both game modes and review the Journey difficulty and scoring inline with ongoing feedback about that and these Pathfinder Troop changes.

We’ve seen your feedback about feeling like beta testers or bug testers. While we run Quality Assurance (QA, bug testing) and playtesting in addition to automated testing before we release changes to the game, none of this will ever compare to having 10s of thousands of real players trying out changes at the same time. So while we make changes and have predicted outcomes, sometimes there is a deviation from the expected result, usually that difference is small, sometimes you all surprise us with what our more hardcore players can do with the game.

For this reason, we always monitor changes through the game data to ensure it’s having the expected effect and if it’s not, we are happy to tweak things further as necessary for the next Journey Event.

I don’t want you to feel there’s radio silence but I also don’t know what more you actually want me to talk about. I think everything was in the original post:

Feedback will be taken into consideration for the next Journey event.

These decisions were made based on retention data, analytics and qualitative feedback.

I spoke to the development team this morning, I talk to them every day, I sit within 3 meters of them at the office. I play the game, I don’t need that to be believed, it just is. I am not sharing my account info before anyone asks because it will never be good enough for everyone and criticising how I play in my spare time outside of work isn’t going to be great for my mental health and it really won’t serve any constructive purpose for anyone here either.

We know that Pathfinders and Journey scoring are just 2 pain points.

We always have several things on the go at a time in addition to a long list of things to look at next. For example currently we’re working on:

• Optimisation for the game lag
• PVP in the live game version 7.3 - there’s more things here that need attention (bugs & balancing)
• Other bug fixes
• Troop rebalances - give me a few mins to post about this, just replying here first
• Switch just received the 7.3 update so we are quite focused on everything Switch specific at the moment as well
• 7.4 development

We’d really prefer not to change the way an event is working in the middle of the event.
So we are monitoring how things are going, and I will poke the team about that from a data perspective again in our next meeting as well.

I’m talking about long time Journey feedback, current Journey feedback and how the recent Pathfinder changes are affecting Journey Scoring specifically as well every day with the team at the moment. There’s just not currently a lot I can share while it’s being discussed.

Hey everyone,

The team have been looking at the Journey event scoring, difficulty and reward tier requirements.

Currently, we will be collecting more data from next week’s Journey event (depending on how that goes we may get data from the following Journey event as well), before we will look at which tweaks to make to things to improve the Journey experience.