I would like to start this discussion by thanking everyone for their feedback on this update and their patience while we resolved priority issues with payments, login, and connectivity/crashes. Now that those pressing matters are under control it’s time that we take a moment and reply to the feedback you’ve given up over the last week and a half. I’ll begin by quoting some posts and addressing them as directly as possible.
With this release, we encountered an issue where Piggy Bank purchases were not being honoured, which exposed another issue where Gold Drops were in a similar situation. Our primary focus for the first days of the release was about getting players what they paid for as well as resolving issues that prevented players from logging in.
We quickly realized there were some bugs that got released. We’ve since released fixes which should prevent most, if not all of the crashes from happening. We’ve had internal discussions about how we missed these bugs and how we can prevent a situation like this from happening again. If you are still having issues with this please contact us or our support team.
In this case, we wanted to give focus to the stores. The PvP Store is now the place where you will go to get Hero Fragments and Gauntlet Store is where you will go to get gear for upgrading your Heroes. The PvP Store change was specifically so we can highlight heroes by “pinning” them and introduce greater variety to the heroes you can get by allowing some of them to change by refresh. The change was to support giving you access to a greater range of hero fragments. We’ll add more heroes available this way in following updates.
Now we’d like to address the concerns about the recent update, the changes to Hero Fragments.
We are always looking at our data to help tune and balance the game while it’s in limited release. We need to develop the game to be balanced for when we launch Hero Hunters worldwide. The recent Fragment change was made to address some issues we were seeing in the game’s balance. I’ll go through some of our observations that these changes were intended to fix.
Stars were king.
Originally the Star Rating of heroes obtained through the Hero Crate were varied, and the power disparity those stars provided was difficult to overcome. It was very tough for players to overcome the power difference between themselves and those lucky enough to get Prophet.
When it came to team loadouts it was more advantageous to take your highest star rated hero than it was to take the “correct” hero. We want to establish a balance where having the correct team composition is more important than the number of stars a hero has.
When we first designed the Star Rating system we currently have we wanted to give players a fair amount of runway for upgrading them. Prior to 0.8 what we were observing is that players were reaching 10 stars far more quickly than we had designed for. Our players were more far more dedicated than we initially predicted. Adding Elemental Fragments to the Hero Crate made this issue much worse.
We initially added Hero Fragments to Co-op Raids because we wanted to give players the ability to increase the Star Rating on inherently low star heroes, such as Nightingale. As stated above, we recently made changes to add more focus to certain areas of the game. The Gorgon Wakes Co-op Raid saw a similar pass in that we wanted it to be about getting the Grenades. To counterbalance this change we will be increasing the drop rate of Hero Fragments in the Campaign’s Hard Mode, so you will have greater access to these Hero Fragments.
Our solution.
We discussed internally how we could resolve the issues mentioned above. What we wanted to do was create a system with the following criteria:
- All heroes have a chance at being competitive and useful
- Paying doesn’t immediately dominate the competition but is still useful for getting ahead.
- Didn’t take away progression players had already made
- Team composition should matter the most
The result is where we are at right now. Initial hero stars reduced, Hero Fragments from duplicates in the Hero Crate, and removing Hero Fragments from Co-op Raids. We don’t expect this to be the last change we make to these systems, we do take our player’s feedback into consideration when we are planning future updates to Hero Hunters. We haven’t removed Elemental Fragments from the game entirely, we expect for them to come back into circulation as event rewards.
I think it important to close by saying that we made these changes to make sure that the thousands of players we have each day have a chance to enjoy the game equally. We looked at our game from the eyes of a new user and felt that these changes were needed to make the game seem more fair and approachable for everyone. New and existing users alike.