UPDATE (2022-12-22)
Reflections on Alliance Quest 2 - Brave Musketeers
Last week, we were forced to make the difficult decision to adjust the difficulty of the Brave Musketeers event after it had gone live. For the past few days, our efforts were mostly focused on investigating the issue and making sure that all affected players were adequately compensated. Now that the dust has settled, we’d like to offer a more detailed apology and explanation for how and why this all happened.
As with all of our events, Alliance Quest: Brave Musketeers was tested in beta before making its debut on live servers. When the event was put to beta for testing, several of our beta players voiced their concerns about the event being too difficult. After the beta we decided to tune down most of the bosses. Data from our internal simulation tool showed that the event was on par with the first Alliance Quest (Clash of Knights).
Once players on live servers began playing the event, however, we realised that our simulations had let us down in this instance. Within the first few hours of play, it became apparent that the event was much more challenging than we had intended. The stats of the event enemies, their Special Skills, the damage reduction effects, and the counterattack granted every 3 turns all combined to magnify the difficulty of the event beyond our expectations.
While a determined minority of players still somehow managed to power through the event stages in their original form, we had to accept the reality that the event was simply too challenging, and therefore no fun, for the majority of our players. Faced with the prospect of the event staying almost unplayable for another three days, we weighed our options and determined that the lesser evil was to adjust the event’s difficulty while it was live, as undesirable as that may be.
On Thursday 15th December at 15:00 UTC, we made the following changes to the Brave Musketeers event:
- Reduced all enemies’ stats a second time
- Reduced the frequency of enemy counterattack buffs from every 3 turns to every 5
- Replaced the -50% damage reduction with a standard +30% defense buff
Following this change, we carried out extensive investigation of our logs and used our analytics tools to gather as much data as possible about the resources players had used while playing the event before the adjustment was made.
Using this data, we have now completed donations to all players who participated in the event pre-adjustment. We were able to safely return most of the spent resources (save for 1-star and 2-star Battle Items — as we’ve mentioned and apologized for on Monday, our systems were not tracking and recording the use of lower-rarity Battle Items in a way that would allow us to have made the queries necessary for this occasion). The donations were processed in several batches on Friday 16th and Monday 19th December over many hours. Each item type was donated in a separate job, so affected players may have received multiple in-game messages containing returned items.
We know how upsetting and disappointing it must have been for those players who heroically powered through excruciatingly tough stages on the first day of the event, just to receive news of an emergency difficulty adjustment. We’re truly sorry for disrupting your plans mid-event and failing to meet your expectations. Please kindly understand that we chose to take these measures when we did to ensure that as many players as possible could have the opportunity to play the event at a reasonable difficulty level.
Looking to the future, we have already held internal retrospective discussions on why this happened and what we can learn from it. There is also analysis ongoing to identify how we can improve our processes and tools to more reliably produce well-balanced game content.
Finally, in the spirit of seasonal good will we are sending a gift to all players who were eligible to participate in the Brave Musketeers event to make up for not giving you the Alliance Quest experience we wanted for you. You will find this message in your in-game Inbox.
From all of us at Small Giant, we wish you happy holidays and a fun-filled 2023!
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