This update brings an updated game economy to improve the pacing of the game experience, as well as several user experience (UX) improvements that overall improve the game quite a bit.
Economy Changes
One of the big challenges of game development is figuring out how to reward players. Giving too many rewards can make players lose interest, and that's something that was happening with Fairtravel Battle.
Before this update, you could collect 4 copies of the entire card collection in less a couple weeks, which is not ideal: You don't really get to experiment all that much in such a small amount of time, and when you get all the cards, it can mean the end of the journey for a lot of players.
There's many kinds of players, and as such I have to consider the best experience for everyone. I believe these changes should improve the pacing considerably, and make the game more fun even if you get less rewards.
To be clear, there's absolutely no micro-transactions involved in card booster packs, so there's no monetary goal here. These changes are also not final, and will likely be tweaked over time.
The overall changes are as follows:
- Booster Packs now have 5 commons, 3 uncommons, and 2 rare and up cards (meaning rare, epic, or legendary), for a total of 10 cards. This is a considerable reduction from the previous setup (8 commons, 5 uncommons, 4 rare and up, for a total of 17 cards).
- Daily quests have a reduced value of 60 gold (down from 75)
- Gold per win has been increased to 25 (up from 20, based on the survivor index, which means even if you lose you get rewards based on how many players were defeated before you. If 2 players were defeated before you, you gain 50 gold now)
- Removed new profile default quests that would give 5 packs each (you still get 3 quests each day and when creating a new profile)
- Removed new profile pack inventory (you no longer get 5 packs by default)
Booster Packs had very high value for each pack, with each pack having the potential to be able to craft the highest rarity in the game (Legendary) and have leftover renown, if you destroyed each card in that pack (destroying cards refunds you for half their value)
These changes overall might seem like too much but please keep in mind this is not set in stone and if needed they will be changed. They need to be playtested to see how it feels, which requires your feedback.
Thank you for your patience, and I would love to hear from you regarding these changes!
Other changes
- Added support for duplicating decks
- Added reminders to card rules text with small amount of rules
- Added missing in-game reminders to a few cards
- Adjusted User Experience (UX) for lobbies
- Reordered the game mode categories so it's easier for new players to orient themselves to the main modes
- Attacking during battles with 3 or more players moving the mouse to the slide buttons will cause the camera to move to the other side (so you no longer need to zoom out to attack)
- Added support for modding background music
- Changed Hero Attack/Armor indicators to only appear when relevant
- Added hide/show button when a game zone prompt shows up (such as during Necromancer's effect)
- New Game Profiles created in the profile list will keep the volume settings as the current profile (so if the game is silent in your preferences it won't suddenly have music and sound)
- Fixed an issue with CPU targeting cards where it would target the first card rather than the best card