Back when starting out I used to find Challenge Events quite exciting as with a developing roster they were at the time a genuine challenge to complete. It’s taken awhile for me to realise it but now they seem to be a bit of a yawn fest once you have a roster that can breeze through completing all tiers of each of them. Yes I still go through them for the emblem rewards but they have certainly lost their specialness and given the opportunity right now I would totally loot ticket them if I could for no points but the completion rewards having done them all before.
Now I know some would say well why don’t you try and compete in them then? Well I’ve seen the strategies for competing and they appear to me to be classic examples of a game encouraging people to “optimise the fun out of the game.” Endlessly starting a level and backing out if there isn’t a great match within 2 moves is really tedious and it’s only because the best rewards in the game are for top ranks that there are players willing to do the in-game equivalent of banging their head against a wall. Forget adding new heroes to the events as their specials won’t have any impact on these strategies, for any Challenge Event overhaul there needs to be an overhaul of how scoring works.
Personally if I were re-designing Challenge Events it would be along the lines of an endurance competition where levels keep getting more and more difficult with the aim to be how many stages people can clear. Each time you complete the ten stages of one of the Rare, Epic and Legendary tiers it would unlock a higher difficulty version of each stage (like normal and hard tiers in Atlantis but with more than 2 difficulty tiers) with each difficulty tier adding an additional mob wave, adding an additional mob to each wave and +25% health to bosses over the previous difficulty of the stage. Points being awarded for completing progressively more difficult stages and penalty points issued for each item used. With a different set of completion rewards each time you pass stage 10 of a difficulty tier people would need to decide between whether to use items to get more completion rewards or rely on just their heroes and skills to get a higher ranking. I would imagine there would still be a lot of world energy used up by top ranking players chasing the higher ranks but in this case they would be playing more (which isn’t playing the tiles you get more in the spirit of a match 3 game than fleeing until you get a good board) but you’d also have others who may not have been competing before using energy to get to 2nd, 3rd or 4th Completion tier rewards… Anyway that is just how I would do it but I do think there needs to be a more significant change than just new heroes so I’m hoping there is more that Beta hasn’t seen yet.