Halloween Event balance is not badly balanced or miscalculated, but still needs constructive criticism.
I've seen a lot of posts complaining about the balancing of this event and too many walls, employees leaving and the company not understanding the math etc. etc. And I have to say I disagree, but not because I enjoyed the event. I agree it was boring being stuck at the same walls for 2+ days, but there is a fundamental misunderstanding by other posters about the event and the objectives of the developer.
Looking at the leaderboards, top 5% hit around rank 26-27 and top 1% were monetized users hitting rank 28-30+. This is balanced against the business objectives of the event, which is to increase revenue. It was fun enough to keep me (an active but not strongly monetizing user) chasing, but not spending and hit rank 26, but for their 1-2% paying users driving probably 75% or more of their revenue, it was enough fun to keep them spending. HH can't give out historics for free when that's the only gate for progress on the main game.
The whole "they don't know the math" argument is very silly because you can't just stumble into calculations where the event hits paywalls precisely against the clock, 3 days after the start, you hit a progression wall, 7 days after the event you hit another progression wall, etc etc. This was correctly calculated, just the walls were much bigger than we have been used to due to the longer duration, and that isn't much fun. But was still properly designed and balanced. (That said I'm still convinced there is some calculation errors on the Music event at higher ranks because the walls aren't baked into the missions... SITARS looking at you!)
Now, to be somewhat constructive, part of the issue is that at my rank (71), the only objective I have that isn't watching clocks and waiting for more population is chasing Historics from events and operations. And that's boring when they are paywalled. Yes I save exp and gems, yes, I pop free capsules. Still boring. I would like to see more variety in the core mechanics. Things that wouldn't directly impact game balance but at least add more personality to the experience.
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Critical success timepods. Instead of 1 hour of population and 6 for ads, how about one in a dozen gives 24 hours. What about resources for all 5 branches? What about a roll mechanic where you hit a timepod and have a chance to spin for a legendary or rare card? Most important an animation that is different than the standard timepod to add some variety and flavor.
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Crate opening animation. Right now the open immediately is the best option because the animation on opening capsules is a long snoozefest. Give it some flair when getting a purple legendary or better. Or at least something fresh when you open a higher rank capsule. When I was playing MMOs regularly, I would play to level 4 or 5 just to see the level up animation. If it was boring or unfulfilling, I'd move on. Give us some cool intro animation when you get a quality card. And in the same vain give us some more compelling animation on level up of cards. The avatar gains more personality with rank, why can't 5 ranks of historics do the same? HH is spending money on marketing animations, why not spend some extra green on in game assets as well? I bet it would improve new user retention.
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More compelling or non-linear operation objectives. What about a weekly objective like earn more with knowledge than weapons? What about unlock Spies before Foundries? What about 1x'ing to 100K Artists? Something that moves rank ups away from unlocking Tier 8+ resource generators and following mission objectives. Something that rewards the mid game not just mindlessly dumping population into one of the three objectives. This could grant increased tier currency and refresh weekly.
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Event Rank lock. After say 24/48 hours, allow a user to 'lock in' their rank in an event and remove them from the ranking pool. Does not apply to Top 100. Ensures increased rewards for less active users and late starts, and on the bubble users at 4.9% or 9.9% rank for the last 2 hours of the event. Sometimes, I don't want to have to keep pushing in events I know I'm not going to complete, but at least I ensure my reward plateau. This would function similar to ELO rankings in games where once you progress to a certain rank you cannot fall below it. IE hitting Legendary in Hearthstone.
I make all these suggestions knowing nothing about the code and strings of the game. But hopefully this will spark some thought from the reddit community or devs themselves.
Posted Nov 3, 2021, 5:53 AM UTC
The amount of spending needed to get the final rewards was more than what they are worth, being at least as high as buying those items in the shop (assuming good RNG, would be more otherwise), plus Carbon capsules & XP are heavily overpriced in the shop, so it's still not worth it even if the cost is about the same as the reward value.
It's not just about the difficulty of completing the event. The same type(s) of missions were the most difficult the most often, being collect Waves and (to a lesser extent) collect Groves. Not to mention the large number of missions that were backwards in difficulty, such as a 112,000 Waterfalls mission (1.12 QQ Waves) right after a 7.7 XX Waves mission, and the 336,000 people needed to get those Waterfalls was almost nothing at that point.
If the devs knew what they were doing and specifically wanted to make this event (and any others for that matter) P2W and as profitable as possible, it would have been designed differently. We wouldn't see only one or two types of missions taking so long while everything else is almost always easy, and we wouldn't see missions that are out of order either. Plus the rewards would be good enough to make it worth spending so much. Same logic would apply for Music.
This isn't the first time we've experienced bad balancing, just look at the missions for the last 15 ranks and the other events except Egypt and Mexico (the balance used for those events were made by the previous dev who left the company).
Therefore, I still think the better conclusion to come to is that whoever made the missions & generator prices for this event doesn't know the math behind the game.
Unless we know the most popular gem use in events, I don't think we can dismiss it to mathematical error. It's entirely possible that HHs data shows increased spending or an increase in spend conversion regardless of what is optimal value at these walls during an event. They are after all selling progress not value with these games. The core gameplay loop is progress not optimal mathematics. There was much fewer progression walls in this event that were not mission gated compared to the music event, where the walls were waiting for enough resources to purchase the next generator.
Keep in mind they also made an event that is finishable for 0 gems, and they haven’t made the “normal” difficulty events (Egypt, Japan, Mexico) more difficult yet.
Events that have a longer duration are likely to generate more revenue for HH than normal duration events, because players not only have more time to spend money & gems, but they also may feel more inclined to do so since they see the effects of their spending for longer. Whether longer events generate more income per day on average isn't something I know.