War Dragons 2019 Development Roadmap
Dragon Lords,
We know there’s been a lot of discussions about the current state of War Dragons, and we’ve been fairly opaque about steps being taken to address concerns. Behind the scenes, a lot of discussions have been going on, and we’re happy to say we’re at the point where we can share some of the high-level thoughts going into 2019.
We just finished allocating resources around broad goals and targets. Basically, we have all agreed to dedicate this year to player-happiness initiatives / bug fixing / quality of life.
Key Focuses
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Bug-Bashing
<ul> <li> <p>This one is pretty self-explanatory. Things that are specifically broken (not working mechanically according to plan). This will also hopefully include closing exploits and cheat vectors.</p> </li> </ul> </li> <li> <p><strong>Quality of Life</strong></p> <ul> <li> <p>Things that aren’t specifically broken, but are creating pain points or functioning in an undesirable way.</p> </li> </ul> </li> <li> <p><strong>Player-Happiness Initiatives</strong></p> <ul> <li> <p>Features based on player requests, as well as opportunities we’ve been looking at to add more of what players enjoy most.</p> </li> </ul> </li>
So, what do all of these mean?
Bug-Bashing
We are in the process of going over our backlog of bugs and re-prioritizing them. This means looking at the severity of the bug as well as the time / difficulty cost of fixing it. Once we have a better idea of what bugs we will be able to successfully tackle with our allotted resources we will try to give some ideas. Just remember that these are “hope to fix” and not “definitely will fix” as sometimes projects end up being more complex than originally expected.
Quality of Life
We’re doing a lot of the same resource planning that we are with bug bashing. We are looking into resolving issues such as level 300+ progression, towers, and UI/UX pain points.
Player-happiness Initiatives
Last but not least, we have our Player-happiness initiatives. Again, still scoping things out, but some of the proposed ideas include player loyalty features, adding raid buttons back into events, and improving the new user experience.
Development Roadmap
What's the roadmap for all of this?
Right now, our roadmap is divided as follows, though some items may be moved earlier, as time allows:
The beginning of the year is going to be primarily dedicated to bug bashing. We will also be doing the design work on quality of life and player-happiness projects, as well as improving our tools to smooth out releases and event launches. The reason that bug bashing is happening first is because we recognize that a lot of improvements just simply won't matter if the game is broken for a player.
We will also be developing more tools to allow our support team to better resolve issues as they crop up and make the process much more smooth for everyone.
As we go through the year, we'll shift our focus to the new-user experience and quality of life features, though major bugs will still be a concern of ours. We're not going to just all of a sudden stop working on bugs.
The latter parts of the year will be heavily focused on the player-happiness initiatives.
There are a number of other things being discussed right now for 2019, but we wanted to share our current thoughts before the year started so we'd have time to gather feedback on this. Your thoughts are very important to us and we'd love to hear what you think!
NOTE: These objectives are subject to change. These are some of the projects currently being scoped out / planned, but as we progress we may change ideas based on time / difficulty or player desires.
Near-Term Improvements
So, what does that mean right this very moment? We're pushing some changes for early next week (Tuesday 12/18, mostly) to try to at least make some forward progress. Please understand that these changes aren't meant to be fixes so much as they are first steps towards resolving some of these larger issues that are impacting players.
With that said, here is what's going live next week:
Forge
Addition of 24 hour and 48 hour expedites to the forge, which has a max 20% relative increase in amount of time gained via forging.
Monuments
Increase the amount of overall time obtained in monument drops by 50%
Remove the 1 min expedite and add the 24 hour expedite to monument drops (remember, this is monuments and not boats/huts).
Improved chest drop rates from monuments by relative 30% during events
Daily Check-In
Receive rewards each day you check in. These rewards can be expedites, breeding tokens, or seasonal sigils (though we can adjust this as we go to make sure it's rewarding). This feature will be released to all players simultaneously.
A Couple of Caveats
These are the things we discussed with the Gameplay Faction, and they feel more should be done in the very near-term. We are unfortunately unable to do more on these subjects before the end of the month due to the holidays and App Store shutdown, but it's our hope that these efforts combined with the 2019 Roadmap are at least a starting point to make more concrete progress.
These things are all subject to change and improvement. The goal with these is to make forward progress in a way that feels very fun-first. We want to hear your thoughts on what you'd like to see focused on in 2019 and why (there's a ton of feedback out there and we are reading it all. We want to keep all of these discussions going). If we're prioritizing issues you don't think are important, say so and we'll listen.
Roadmap Feedback Forums Threads
We’d love to hear your thoughts on our 2019 development roadmap, and we’ve got plenty of places for you to do so! Click on the links below to provide your feedback on: