Q&A with Game Designers - Summer 2022 Edition (Answers): Part 2 (Heroes & Troops, Balance, Quality of Life)

[Petri]

Welcome to our Q&A with Game Designers - Summar 2022 Edition! Below you can find the answers by our game designers Tim & Joel to the questions submitted by the community here on our forum (see all submitted questions here.

This is the second part (out of 3).

SGG Staff Answering Questions:

• Tim - Head of Game Design
• Joel - Senior Game Designer

Index & Schedule

This AMA will be released in three parts, please see the schedule and content below. Please note that all questions were asked and answered in late June.

We have organized the questions into following topics (links will be added for each category, once the answers have been released):

Part I 2022-06-30T21:00:00Z

New Features & Content
General Gameplay
Events
Alliances (Wars, Titans)

Part II 2022-07-07T21:00:00Z

Heroes & Troops
Balance
Quality of Life

Part III 2022-07-14T21:00:00Z

Buildings
Resources & Items
Beta & Player Feedback
Misc / Personal

Join the Discussion

Share your feedback and discuss this Q&A on this topic:

Q&A with Game Designers - Summer 2022 Edition (Discussion for Part 2)

We have now published the second part of the answers for our Summer 2022 Q&A! Please read them here:

[Petri]

Heroes & Troops

• “Could you please tell us if you are going to add to Training Camps or Hero Academy more older Heroes such as Rare and Epic Heroes from Season 2, Springvale, Christmas, Sand Empire and Morlovia?”

  • Tim: We might — we’ve usually focused on making sure that the Legendary Heroes available from TC or HA are aligned with the current game state, and recently we haven’t really had the time to check the Rares and Epics. We might not get to it anytime soon, but we’ll look into this when our schedule permits.

• “Are you going to make new Costumes for Rare and Epic Heroes more available? Pulling them again from old portals is troublesome and for most people it will be impossible to get them.”

  • Tim: Summon Gates will most likely remain the only way to get Costumes for Rare and Epics Heroes. The Soul Exchange is going to remain exclusive for Legendaries.

• “Can you design a more commonly acceptable summon program with at least a 5s Hero for a certain number of summon, where at least HoTM if the luck of the summoner is not there during these number of summon?”

  • Joel: We’ve discussed this many times over the years, and we now have a rough approximation for how this could work. That being said, it’s quite unlikely that we will have the bandwidth this year to attempt to take this idea further. But it’s not a hard “No, it’s not going to happen” — there are some options we hope to at least test at some point in the future.

• “Why Costume chamber includes only s1 Heroes when now we have Costumes even for s3 Heroes?

  • Tim: We’ve intentionally kept the Costume Chamber themed and centered around Classic Heroes. We prefer to keep Costumes for newer Hero sets in their respective Summon Gates. Keeping the ‘Classic Heroes’ theme for the Costume Chamber allows us to explore certain possibilities, such as adding “secondary” Costumes for certain Heroes. The current plan for these secondary Costumes is to keep them contained to Classic Heroes only.

• “Power Creep in Hero stats is more and more worrying as the lifetime of this game goes. – Do you plan to address this issue anyhow in your balance updates?”

  • Joel: As the amount of new Heroes has been somewhat increased, at least when compared to the relatively “chill” early days of the game, we naturally have to make sure the newest Heroes are worthy of playtime. That being said, we also hope to have balance updates where we revisit some “historical” characters. And as mentioned earlier, we do plan to do some interesting things with the Classic Heroes this year… We’re developing a second tier of Costumes exclusively for them, and we’re thinking that a good, effective Family bonus for Classic Heroes would be needed as well.

• “What inspired the development team to create the Heroes of the month?”

  • Tim : They were made quite a long time ago! At that point we didn’t actually have any Hero events — at all — in the game, and we were looking at what would be the quickest and most effective way to get new Heroes into the game! That’s pretty much where it came from; guaranteeing that a new Hero would be added to the game each month seemed like a cool thing to do. Also, making them obtainable as a “bonus” from basically any high-value Summon seemed like a player-friendly way to ensure collectibility.

• “Making HA9 (troop conversion) produce ninja/mage troops with some moderate chance would be much appreciated. Any plans for that?“

  • Joel: Good idea. We’ll try to check these at some point and see if it indeed would make sense to align the Troop conversion with Legendary Hero retraining (which eventually gets either all or nearly all previously released Legendary Heroes added to it).

• “Considering the increasing pace of power creep AND the faster rollout of new Heroes, have you considered any ways of making older Heroes more accessible?”

  • Tim: Well, Soul Exchange is one feature pretty specifically aimed to address this, and looking at how it’s been in use, it seems to cover some of it. It’s how I finally managed to get Mother North myself! That being said, it would be super cool to add some new or extra gameplay challenges to certain older events that’d also give additional means to get summon rewards in them… So yeah, there have been a few ideas that would probably align pretty well with what you’re asking, even though we probably won’t get to look at those at least this year yet.

• “Is there a reason why we can’t have more than 15 teams on the roster?”

  • Tim: Good question — this is something that we probably haven’t really heard people asking for before? We’ll try to have a look at this at some point. It sure does look like something that would not really need to be limited to this specific number

• “Where did you get inspiration for creating Hero Thor ( his special- first with charge mechanic) and introduction of charge effect specials, which was later introduced to Ninjas, Mage Heroes and Styx ones? Are you happy with versatility that those Heroes brought or are they too unpredictable from gameplay standpoint?”

  • Joel: It was a long time ago when Thor was designed, but if I recall correctly, the initial idea was to make a Hero that had Very Fast mana speed, but needed an amount of tiles closer to that of a Very Slow Hero to fully use their Special Skill’s power. The final product was just iterating on that idea.
  • Tim: We’d like to bring in some completely new features for Heroes every year, for the sake of variety and fun. The “charge” specials are just one example of where this aspiration can lead — similar things have been seen in fighting games, for example, and it seemed like an interesting challenge to adjust the general ‘charge’ idea to work in E&P. Some of the Heroes may indeed feel quite unpredictable and complex, but each of the three mentioned Families still appears to have Heroes that are very useful. For example, I myself have been really happy with Garnet in most of my teams due to the flexibility of her debuff immunity Special Skill.

[Petri]

Balance

• “Will you consider to buff long forgotten Heroes such as boss wolf, g.owl, etc without needed to “buy” their Costume?”

  • Tim: Buffing individual old Heroes is not impossible (and to be honest we’d love to revisit them a bit more often), but it’s also very low on the priority list. I still have a soft spot for the Pirates (they were the first event Family we made) and it would be really cool to revisit them all… but I’m afraid we’re not really going to get to them anytime soon.

• “Is balance update a “monthly event” now?”

  • Joel: We aim to be more consistent with the balance updates — it would hopefully keep more buffs incoming while also reducing ‘jolts’ caused by occasional nerfs. We most likely won’t be able to do them monthly, but “reasonably often” would be better than “rarely”.

[Petri]

Quality of Life

• “Are there any plans on improving roster organization at all, for example filtering the Heroes based on color, * number, name etc? If yes, what are the plans? If no, why not?”

  • Joel: Improving the roster page is a subject we discuss from time to time, and filtering is one of the things mentioned in these discussions. It is unlikely we’ll get to work on this in the near future, but it’s something we do hope to work on at some point in the future.

• “Any plans for something better to do with duplicate 4 Heroes? 4* soul exchange? A way to turn Heroes into a “soul currency” you can use for soul exchange? Would also help with roster space, which there’s already many questions about.”*

  • Tim: The Soul Exchange will very likely continue to focus solely on Legendaries — we’re not planning to integrate Rare or Epic Heroes into that feature. And it’s quite unlikely that we’ll be able to focus on any major new feature specifically carved out for 4* Heroes. So I’d say that duplicate 4* Heroes are probably best considered as good sources of experience going into the future as well.

• “There are a ton of QoL request in the Ideas and Feature section that could put your company on the players good side again at almost no cost to you, yet you ignore it most of the time. Why?”

  • Tim: We do check QoL requests and have discussions internally every so often. We hope that some of the new features we implement (such as the Soul Exchange) also cover some issues raised in the Ideas and Features board, even if the solution provided by the feature does not always exactly match what was proposed.

• “In last year’s Q&A you acknowledged the high cost of buying new roster slots. Now that more and more Heroes are being released, have you moved forward with solutions to this?”

  • Tim: We finally, now in June, were able to add the new type of recurring offer that provides roster slots on discount alongside meaningful other goods. We’d love to have had this available earlier, but even this had its own challenges to get it finalized

• “Can we get an option to hide all offers? They are moving toward center of the base. You can’t even play normal.”

  • Tim: We absolutely do acknowledge that when we run a full assortment of offers — which we do from time to time for business reasons — the main screen gets seriously cluttered. We’re already checking whether visibility could be improved with some smaller adjustments. Something planned for the latter part of this year is a revamp of how offers are shown. Having the means to automatically move some of the featured offers, so that they’re less intrusive (=away from the main screen) but still available for players who want them, is what we’re hoping to get done in the latter part of this year.