As I mentioned last week, I like to use these posts to let players know about changes we’re making to the game and – more importantly – to try and explain why we’re making them. I think the latter part is more important because players can understandably feel worried when a game which to them seems to be working more or less fine is suddenly changed, forcing them to adapt how they play.
So…
I’ve written about the importance of Combat Cards having a healthy metagame before, by which I mean that we need players to use a wide variety of cards when battling each other to help avoid everyone agreeing that ‘deck X’ is the optimum way to play and only using those cards. We do this by balancing the cards (more on this in a post soon), but also by adjusting game systems to support this.
We recently made one of these adjustments by changing A) how you earn XP, B) how much it costs to upgrade cards, and C) how much XP you need to increase your Rank. Those are pretty big changes, so why did we make them?
Truth
It is a fundamental truth that Combat Cards is built on players wanting to collect cards. As a result we steadily release new cards, adding more deck building options and keeping up with Games Workshop’s latest miniatures. If players don’t want or need the new cards we’re releasing then everything breaks down.
Now, the ‘wanting’ part is easy – we try to include a mix of new and classic miniatures for each faction, so there’s something for every Warhammer 40,000 fan. But ‘needing’ the new cards is trickier, and that’s because of how our cards upgrade.
Pool
Y’see, as cards increase their stats when upgraded but not their points cost, it currently makes sense to just upgrade a few cards and only use those ones in battle. That’s a problem because if you don’t use a wide pool of cards then why collect them at all?
So we made two changes to this area, with a third change happening as a side effect:
- You now earn XP every time you upgrade a card. Previously you only got XP by completing daily Objectives (and you still do – more on Objectives in a later post). But now each card that you upgrade also earns you some XP.
- This shifts the optimum way to play from only upgrading a few cards a lot, to it now making more sense to upgrade as many cards as you can. This is reinforced by the cost of upgrading a card to top level being increased, but with no change to the first upgrades. This means (hopefully) players will upgrade more cards to mid-level, giving them more options when building decks (because they have multiple upgraded cards to choose from, rather than a few uber-upgraded ones).
- Because upgrading cards now earns you XP and because low-level upgrades are cheap, players can now earn a lot more XP than they used to from just completing Objectives. As a result we’ve somewhat increased the XP needed to go up Ranks, but it’s still far easier to increase your Rank than before, gaining access to new cards or deck points as you do. We’ll also add more Ranks to the top end shortly, but will be revising the whole way cards get unlocked soon (so that’s a third blog post to look forward to!).
Conclusion
I play a lot of games, so I 100% understand the suspicion that whenever a developer changes how a game works it’s only to make things more difficult for players. However – putting on my developer hat – I see that we absolutely had to make this change to the game to ensure its long-term health, but also that no matter how much we explain why we did it, players still don’t like change.
This is the eternal dilemma of game development, so if you can think of a way around it please do let me know! You can leave a comment below, email [email protected] or get in touch through our Facebook page.
Thanks,
Stu
This is great. Will the game be out in the UK this week?
Sorry about the delays, but the game is extremely close to launch – just one last bug that we’re trying to iron out before we push the big (skull shaped) button. Keep an eye on your App Store!
Hey, SO where i have been max ranked for quite a while now and been attempting to keep up with the daily quests regardless, has the XP i have accumulated since i topped out and the exp i have gained from upgrading going to Disappear when the new ranks are added?
Another question i had was what is the value of the legendary cards we get after we have max ranked them? These days they just say max rank but i had several copies of additional legendaries beyond max rank that are kind of pointless to get and disappointing. Is there going to be a way to get value from them or perhaps stop cards from being in packs once we have maxed out a card? cuz right now when we get them they are just wasted legendary draws.
One thing i thought i would Suggest is like an after action review of our campaign performance once it ends and we get our prizes, i think it would be neat to break down how many wins and losses we had as well as how much energy was used and how much we wasted by losing track of time. It could really help people improve their results to just get a page showing that kinda stuff after the fact.
Hi there, thanks for the questions:
1 – Any XP you’ve earned will still yours, not lost. That’s why we have the next level (which you can never reach) needing 40,000X XP, so any XP you do earn is banked for when we add new Ranks. Your Rank may shift with this update, but not from you losing any XP.
2 – The game now converts any cards you get when you’ve already maxed out that card into currency. Unfortunately we don’t do a very good job of communicating this yet, but we’ll make this clearer soon. So if you would get another copy of a maxed out card it gives you currency instead, plus any excess copies that you already had have now been converted to currency.
3 – Thanks for the suggestion. We’re making changes to the Campaign screen which will go live in the next couple of weeks, but it doesn’t include as much detail as your suggestion so I’ve passed it on to the guys working in this area.
Hello,
” 2 – The game now converts any cards you get when you’ve already maxed out that card into currency. Unfortunately we don’t do a very good job of communicating this yet, but we’ll make this clearer soon. So if you would get another copy of a maxed out card it gives you currency instead, plus any excess copies that you already had have now been converted to currency. ”
If this is the way its to be, dose this not make trading cards ( when/if in-game) far more difficult. As you could only trade cards in your deck which had not maxed out. Which is that not the point of collecting cards to upgrade….
Not having a go at you just curious, loved Combat Cards for years. Even more so now its an game on my phone !
That’s a fair question. We’re working on the clans feature now, but that initial release probably won’t include trading cards with friends. If / when that feature appears we can turn ‘excess cards are converted to currency’ back off, but for now we want the game to at least give players some useful currency instead of a useless (and invisible) copy of a maxed out card.