[2020] Free To Play Follow-Up

Hi everyone! It’s been a whirlwind few days for us at the studio, and we want to thank everyone for sharing awesome goals and tournament wins (and helping us ID some bugs as well) since our transition to free to play.

First up, we’re finalizing a hotfix for release next week, and it includes stability fixes that should address the crashing and stuttering players are experiencing on several platforms. Keep an eye on our Twitter for a release date and time.

We’ve seen a few topics gain momentum on the sub over the last few days, including questions about how much XP you can earn in matches. We decided to shift some XP gains from "passive" to "active" in the form of more Challenges because we want them to be a bigger part of your seasonal progression. Second, because the game is now Free to Play, we need to curb the incentive to bot/afk farm on alternate accounts. The amount of passive XP that was previously earned combined with our new Drops system would have made for a very appealing farming scenario. By attaching more of your XP gains to activities that require actual play, like Season Challenges, we’ve made it much less viable to try and farm XP (along with the negative effects a farming bot can have on match quality).

Even with these changes, we’ve made sure that Tier 70 is still achievable in the same time frame we've talked about historically (~50-70 hours) with the new XP values and accounting for Events, Double XP Weekends, etc. But that doesn't mean the overall balance feels right for everyone. We will discuss options and post something when we have changes to announce.

We’ve also seen a lot of questions and concerns regarding item rarity changes, with some NCVR (Non-Crate Very Rares) changing to Rare items with the September Update. Given the significant expansion of the free Trade In pool, we had to rebalance certain item categories to better distribute the content available at Rare, Very Rare, and Import qualities. We tried to minimize any negative impact to existing items, but we did reduce a few Very Rare items to Rare quality. We’ll be better about communicating these sorts of changes in the future.

We hope this helps clear up why we made some of these changes heading into free to play, and drop any questions for us in the comments. Thanks everyone, and we hope to see you this weekend for Llama-Rama!