Improving Event Rewards

I also wanted to touch on our event rewards systems, with some context on how they’ve changed over time and then a bit on what we’re thinking for the future.

First off, looking at pass grind. The graph below shows the average number of games of SR per day during an event that were required to get that event’s prestige skin and how it’s changed over time. It covers the events from Battle Academia last year to our projections for the next event after Galaxies. Galaxies has separate columns for pre and post token buffs. Around Worlds last year, we realized the event pass/prestige skin system was much grind heavier than it should have been. We’ve been reducing that over time as a result, both by making rewards in general more available and by shifting rewards towards missions, rather than sheer number of games played.

With Mecha Kingdoms especially we felt we’d gone a bit too far in reducing commitment needed, both from the perspective of how exclusive prestige skins should be and also just from a revenue perspective. Event pass and related sales help fund things like game modes, ability to give away content in free missions/loot, etc. With Galaxies we pulled back as a result, though then realized we’d put too much grind back in. As a result we pivoted partway through Galaxies, putting more tokens into missions to reduce grind.

We’ll be adding more tokens again to weekly win missions for the next upcoming event as well, as per the May 2020 column in the graph, getting to similar levels as Worlds/Night and Dawn last year.