Armellians! Hi!
With the release of our latest major DLC just hours away now, I wanted to reach out to you all and share some results from the Rivals Public Beta and what to expect when the DLC ships.
First up, some NUMBERS:
- Over 40,000 games of Armello were played in just 48 hours!
- Rivals Heroes were played approximately 16,000 times.
- Over 100,000 Banes slain. We don't know if in the name of the Wyld or the Rot...?
- The King's loyal and ever so cute guards perished over 40,000 times. Not saying you're all uncouth beasts with no respect for the law, I'm just... sayin'.
- And... wait for it... almost 1,000,000 cards were played! Ho boy!
Most importantly though, this was not only the most stable DLC release we've rolled out, but the most stable update to Armello possibly ever! The number of critical errors, NMAs and crashes were so low we thought our analytics was busted!
What's Next for the Rivals...?
As we had predicted, two major points of conversation arose within the community:
- Fang's starting point of Rot.
- Hargrave firing on King's Guards.
After reading all the comments and fantastic conversations that went down it became apparent these two caveats surprised some players in a not-so-positive way. To better manager player expectations around Fang and Hargrave's powers we've edited their Hero power descriptions to provide more information and emphasis on the caveats these Heroes possess.
After the beta, we set about the task of collating and combing through the analytics from the Beta and cross-examining that alongside player feedback. The TL;DR is that these Heroes have landed right on target in regards to popularity, win-rate, number of deaths per game, difficulty curve, and other key metrics we measure when assessing and tweaking Hero balance. Fantastically, these Heroes will not only bring Armello's complete roster to 20 Heroes (and fill that long anticipated fourth Clan slot), but have proven to be serious contenders for the throne amongst long standing favourites!
To that note, the improved Hero Power descriptions will be the extent of the gameplay changes made to Rivals for launch.
For any of you still have concerns; rest assured, we will be monitoring these Heroes, Rings and Amulets very closely post-release.
In Conclusion
We're super happy with how the rollout went! Was an epic couple of days and stability, balance, popularity, and engagement all came in super strong! So awesome to see you all fire up for this little experiment of ours. We hope you had as much fun as we did.
From myself and the rest of the team here at League of Geeks, I'd like to thank all of you for your participation in the Beta. We're definitely penning this one up as a success and a large part of that is thanks to you!
I also want to pass on an additional and special thank you to our testing community whose feedback and initial couple of passes playing these Heroes helped us immensely in bringing them to you all. Cheers, folks!
<3 Trent & the LoG Crew
P.S.
If you're looking to purchase the Rivals Hero Pack at launch, I've got a hot tip for you. As you may have guessed, the Rivals Hero Pack will be added to the Armello - Collectors' Edition Bundle. If you have already purchased the bundle, once Rivals is released you can simply purchase the bundle again and score the 10% bundle discount on Rivals too!