It’s fair to say that the weekly Campaigns have proved extremely popular with players. We don’t know if this is down to the fixed, ‘battle against ever more difficult AI’ challenge, the tie-in to the Warhammer 40,000 lore, or because you can clearly see your wins pushing you up the leaderboard and ahead of other players. But we do know that as it’s our most popular feature we want to improve and expand on Campaigns.

I’ll talk about the expansion angle in a later blog post (consider it your Mission to read it – and, yes, that was a hint of Tzeentchian subtlety), but first let’s look at how we’re improving Campaigns.

Convenience

We’ve also been improving the Campaign screen to make it clearer and easier to use. We have more work going on in this area so watch this space.

The first change you might have noticed is the increase in Campaign energy from three to four ‘pips’. This change was less about allowing players to fight extra Campaign battles, and instead because we wanted to make taking part in Campaigns more convenient.

The extra energy means you can fight your allotted Campaign battles and then have a longer gap while they recharge, helping players who couldn’t commit to being in the game regularly throughout the day.

Scaling

The second change will be less noticeable, but we’ve spent some time balancing the Campaign rewards, and an upcoming patch will change the reward structure from ‘fixed’ to ‘proportional’.

What this means is that the reward tiers will start to scale with the number of players taking part in that Campaign. Our current, fixed rewards means players in leaderboard position 50 to 100 will get prize X. Proportional rewards means that players in positions 30% to 40% of the leaderboard get the same rewards. Those numbers are just examples, but basically the difference is the proportional system will scale up and down depending on the number of people taking part in that particular Campaign.

In the very short term this might impact the amount of rewards that you’re getting (sorry about that), but it’s important for when we roll out to the rest of the world and the number of people taking part in Campaigns explodes.

Difficulty

Finally, we’ve changed the points that you earn with each Campaign win to scale with the difficulty of the AI deck you just defeated. This means that at lower difficulties you’ll earn fewer points for a win than you would for beating a later, harder, AI deck.

This change means that it’s always worth trying to push ahead through the AI difficulties because each point of energy you use to fight can potentially get you more points than the last.

More

These are definitely not the only improvements we plan to make to Campaigns, with more work on the AI opponent and more variety in Campaign battles still to come. We’re also aware there are still occasional bugs and issues we can fix in the Campaigns, but that’s an ongoing task that we’re committed to.

Speaking of issues, it really does help us if you guys point out any weirdness you spot, as there are many, many more of you than even the largest QA team we can hire. You can also let us know what you think of the changes we’ve made, and send us any requests you have for improvements you’d like to see.

As ever, you can leave a comment below, email [email protected] or get in touch through our Facebook page.

Thanks,
Stu