Response to Recent Changes

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Hey All,

We've been listening closely to the community and heard the frustration with recent changes in the game. We understand that some of these changes weren't communicated well - that's something we're working to fix.

The recent Boost price change is a major offender. Through an honest oversight, our original patch announcement missed the Boost price change. We realize that this resulted in accidental purchases. If you purchased a Boost in error, please reach out to customer service so that they can assist you.

Along with giving notice that changes are coming, we know it is important to give insight into WHY those changes were implemented. To that end, we want to explain why we believe this change benefits the game as a whole:

Boosting is something that we want players to use. We introduced it into the game soon after launch for that precise reason. We want players to be able to selectively choose how to get past fights that they may have an otherwise hard time with. Do you *have* to use a boost? No. But it can help. What we saw happening in practice though is that players would routinely use a group of boosts in particular and at a constant rate to push themselves through content that would otherwise have been nicely challenging as intended. And not only that, but doing it in a way that the content that is there was rendered largely inconsequential. We first tried ramping up the content difficulty to account for this, resulting in fights that contained multiple level 230 enemies. Boosts though, particularly the +3 AP boosts, make it so that the player has a first turn advantage over any opponent in the game that just builds along the line. Being able to first turn bust out a few thousand damage, some Strike tiles, and 2-3 stuns for anyone surviving depending on team comp made anything but the most difficult battles simple and matters of rote gameplay, not something that takes advantage of the mutable strategy of the puzzle board. We wanted and do want players to use boosts and have them in the game for the reasons above. But by having them all be readily available for a relatively small cost meant that they instead became mandatory to succeed. We’d rather balance the game around what players can actually do through gameplay and account for extraordinary situations due to boosts than have to take those situations as the norm and balance the game at that higher level. So, we decided to raise the cost of boosts. The All AP/Damage boosts went to Hero Points instead of Iso as we wanted them to be a line of last resort. They’re the things you decide to drop on your opponents when you want to decimate them with a first turn strike or start building the snowball that will turn into an avalanche resulting in their destruction. We could have raised the Iso costs on them instead but we felt that even at 500 Iso a set of 3 boosts players would still suck it up as a required part of gameplay and just use them slightly less often, but still in force. It just wouldn’t work that way. Instead, by pushing them to Hero Points, players need to think about whether they want to put part of their harder earned resources behind an item that could well win them a match in conjunction with some other more common items. It’s true that in theory this means that some players with deep pockets could still just trounce their opponents, but in practice this just isn’t the case. Usage has simply fallen in line with more of what we expect to see out of the change.

Again, the miscommunication (or rather, lack of it) was the problem here. It should have been a change that we communicated ahead of time along with all the other upcoming Patch Note changes. That would have allowed us to see how everyone was going to react and show our intentions ahead of dropping what, for some players, was a bomb the way we did. We’ve got to get better about that, and we will. It doesn’t change what’s happened though. The change rolled out, it’s done some definite good for the player base in how players are approaching the game, and we’re still monitoring the tremors of that and all the other changes we’ve rolled out. We’ll keep making tweaks as necessary. Some may be awesome and good for (just about) everybody. Some may be painful and good only for the long term. But we’re committed to making the best game we can for our fans and keeping it running for a long time to come.

Thanks to all of you, this game has been able to grow and build on its foundations in a short period of time. The drawback to this growth has been the growing pains along the way. For those of you out there that feel recent changes have negatively impacted your experience, please reach out to customer support with your concerns or make sure to be on the lookout for responses to any requests that have already been submitted.

Thanks