What’s up, doc?
Please find here the transcript of a looney Q&A that happened on Discord. In this session, we got some recurrent questions from the community after the release of our latest update and delved a little bit deeper into them.
You’re not on Discord, you say? Well, what are you waiting for!
Haruki (community manager): So let’s start off, @gossamur: How are you planning to avoid creating crazy pinches for materials for these advanced tune-ups? Talking here about Unique Materials, Acme R&D Formulas, Secret Stuff quantities, and so on…
Gossamur: We have plans to consistently source materials and secret stuff through live events. We will be monitoring player inventories of these materials to inform the sourcing of these materials to make sure players aren’t getting too stuck.
On top of that, you may also see changes in how materials are sourced from the “core” game. We took the first step here already by releasing Tier 8 crates, to address the increased demand for regional, archetype, and dynamite mats.
That said, we don’t expect that players will be able to complete advanced tune-ups for many characters all at once immediately. Max tuning up many toons is meant to be a journey that will take a bit of time.
Haruki: Ok, another recurrent question we’ve been seen around is the following. This one is for you, @merlinham : Are you not worried that players are going to focus now their efforts on 1-2 regions max to remain competitive at the top level?
Merlin Ham: As Gossamur mentioned, tuning up many toons to max is meant to take some time. So players will have to make some strategic choices about which toons to focus their efforts on first. We believe this will make for more varied and diverse competition at top levels.
Gossamur: We are ok if people pick their top teams and focus their investment on them first. We believe that decisions like that are interesting and make RPG games fun. From that point on, it is our challenge to give you reasons to want to have multiple strong teams, for anyone that wants to go beyond.
Haruki: Now let’s talk about another hot topic, which is matchmaking. How will these changes affect matchmaking in Alliance Wars and Arena?
Gossamur: Collection Power is factored in the matchmaking algorithms for both Arena and Alliance Wars. Meaning, while acquiring Advanced Tune-Ups will increase your power, it will also be more likely to match with other players of comparable Advanced Tune-Ups, player level, and overall top toon team power.
In that sense, the objective of the system to create interesting matchups where everyone has a chance to win is preserved. If you do get matched with someone that is further ahead, that is likely because (a) they are still in the allowed range from your power and/or (b) you have been winning a lot and our matchmaking determines you are ready for tougher opponents.
As both game modes favor players that have more than one strong team, acquiring Advanced Tune-Ups for many teams will keep giving you an advantage.
Haruki: This one is for you, @merlinham. The current price for Secret Stuff in the Store (50K Gold for 50 Secret Stuff) seems way too much….. So naturally, players wanna know what other outlets are they gonna have to grind and get it.
Merlin Ham: The store offer is not meant to be the primary sourcing for secret stuff. Engaging in live events will generally be where you will find higher quantities of Secret Stuff on a regular basis.
But for some players that want a consistent daily flow or to top off, this store offer is for those players.
Haruki: Does the arrival of Secret Stuff mean we’re getting Space Jam soon?
Merlin Ham: Good catch on the origins of Secret Stuff! No additional comments on this :).
Haruki: Coolio, so now we’re gonna get some community live questions from the #event-chat. I saw one about: how long is long when it comes to the toon progression?
Gossamur: The first goal here is that progress can be felt and is frequent enough. If this goal is not met, then the game is simply not fun.
We have various progression axis in the game that are responsible for being the focus of your progression goals at different times in the player journey. Ex. in the beginning, you care more about levels than anything else. As you grow elder, the time to complete progression axis stretches.
For end-game systems, like Advanced Tune-Ups, it is tuned to be months vs days. If this wasn’t the case, players would be able to max toons before we can make them and that would be a different kind of boring (worse, since there’s nothing to do).
That said, if progress is too slow right now, it is easy to speed it up. That’s one of the reasons we operate the game with events, so we can adjust things quickly.
Haruki: Thanks! And a question that I saw from player @firefly : Are new players ever expected to be able to catch up with veterans?
Merlin Ham: Generally, no. Our veterans have spent considerable time and investment into the game and frankly, we don’t think it would be fair for new players to catch up to our experienced veterans very easily.
Haruki: Question from @ʍǟȶȶɛօ | 𝔸𝕋𝕃𝕆𝕆ℕ𝕋𝕀𝕊: New toon regions in war going to happen?
Gossamur: I would love that, but new regions are not in the mid-term plans for Alliance Wars. We have some other changes coming related to Wars that will hopefully change things up in interesting ways.
Haruki: Can you tease some of those?
Gossamur: Yes! Apart from tuning matchmaking constantly, we are first looking at War rewards. Then War duration and frequency are top in the list.
Haruki: Oki doki, and the last question for today, comes from @Baps : How do you justify taking our paid for game toon pieces and converting them to a new form of game currency that requires more currency to access? That is stealing. You stole my accomplishments and changed the line in the sand after I paid.
Gossamur: I see how it can be perceived that way. Here’s the thinking between Atoms and Secret Stuff:
– We consider overshards to be extremely valuable – in our internal calculations, they have the same value as any shard. With Advanced Tune-Ups, we absolutely intended to retain this value so we honor the spins you have been spinning for the years the game has been live. The problem with that is that since Advanced Tune-Ups was not a thing until now, people gathered huge wallets of what would be Atoms
– We introduced Secret Stuff as a way to control how quickly people can get to Advanced Tune-Up 45. This was done to prevent wild jumps on Day 0.
So, right now, it feels like Secret Stuff is the reason why you can’t progress faster. And this feeling will likely last for months for players with large overshard wallets. But after that, Atoms will again feel more valuable, as they are harder to get.
Haruki: Oki doki, thanks for taking the time to engage with us and get some questions answered.
Merlin Ham: No problem, see ya soon guys!
Gossamur: Thanks so much for joining everyone and thanks for the questions!