Introduction
There’s a lot of misunderstanding or misconceptions about what replacing crown rewards with the Journey system means for players that I wanted to take some time to clarify. It’s a long post, but hopefully, by the end of this we can have meaningful discussions on how to tweak and evolve this system in the future, so bear (roar…) with me. If nothing else, I hope this level of thought is at least interesting for some of you out there and reveals that we do spend time thinking about such things before releasing them.
Let’s start with some details we will base our math on. Some of this is probably not even realized or properly revealed yet. Now since you guys aren’t used to seeing how I prepare my data. Blue cells are static data. It’s values that I plugged in either from design or from a separate data analysis value. Green cells represent data that is calculated (often based on blue data).
TL;DR - Use sections to help you find the sections that interest you, and you can focus on conclusions if you don’t want the nitty-gritty.
Basic Stats regarding Journey’s leveling system
The table below represents base values for how progression in journey works. Note that since you technically start at level 1, your need to only level up 99 times to get all the rewards (not 100).
Conclusions:
2376 crown points is a lot, even over a period of 3 months. This also implies a heft CP per day requirement of over 28 which is also quite daunting. That is why further below we will discuss some of the systems that offset these requirements.
How many crown points do we get from a match on average?
In order to do calculations, we need this figure as statistically over time this will be the best estimation we can do as winning and losing streaks will still eventually resemble this calculation. It makes for a good basis for knowing how it works out on average and this is what it looks like:
Again, if you are good and win more than average, progress will be faster (and vice versa for losing streaks), but for the sake of this discussion let’s ignore how that feels in terms of progression for the player.
Conclusion:
On average you gain 1.18 CP per match naturally. This has not changed from the previous system.
How much CP from matches per hour can we get on average?
This calculation will give a rough indication of time commitment moving forward. Ignoring all bonuses, this can be calculated as follows and again this is an average. Matches can be faster or longer.
Also, this is likely not discussed yet, but there is a weekly limit to the # of CP a player can gain on a weekly basis of 100. It’s meant to prevent completing a journey too fast. Note that progression caps existed in the old system, however, we went away from daily caps, instead preferring to cap on a weekly basis to punish fewer players that can’t grind every day while still having a system that prevents infinite farming.
Conclusions:
Ignoring all other systems to supplement progression, this implies that it takes on average 403 hours spread over 12 weeks to reach max level, with a weekly average of almost 17 hours to reach max potential.
Also note, that with this alone, you can at max gain 50 of the 99 levels required to reach max, meaning that short of supplemental ways to get CP, you would fall short 49 levels from reaching max (eek).
How the well-rested bonus works
Every day, every player gets a well-rested bonus that gives players and additional CP for each round won regardless of whether they reached a cap (currently bugged, fix should come early next week at the latest). However, there is a daily limit of 14 that resets at the start of each day.
Ok, so this is a trickier one as mileage will vary depending on whether you are a casual player or a more aggressive player. It’s also subjective to your win rate, but we will go off Average per match for now.
Conclusions:
So if you are on a hot streak, you can consume the rested bonus in a little under an hour and a half which isn’t too bad. However, on average, it will take well over 2 hours to fully use up this system on a daily basis.
One cool aspect is it takes 2.4 hours daily on average to complete so this 14 bonus matches our previous section regarding CP gain 1:1
Another is at this point, though it requires daily dedication, it's already possible to reach level 100 without paying a cent (yay! Much better already!)
Diving into Journey Quests
But wait! There are more ways to progress. In order to help people joining later into a journey a chance to catch up, and to make it a bit less hardcore (2,4 hours, every day for 12 weeks sounds exhausting no?), we added in journey quests.
How do quests work exactly?
Players will have access to 2 quest chains, where quests will need to be completed in sequence relative to their chain. One chain of quests will be free, the other is tied to the purchase of an extended journey. Here are a few helpful facts to help understand how they behave.
- Regardless of any purchase, both quest chains are active to ALL players. This means the quests actually progress and complete. (bugs to be fixed)
- All players get rewards for the free quest chain as the quests are completed
- Quest rewards for extended quests are only granted to those that purchased extended journey
- Purchasing an extended journey after having completed extended quests will give rewards retroactively.
- Each quest chain will receive 3 new quests per week.
- Quests are not lost or removed until the end of the journey. This means if you join in the last week, you will have access free quest chain of 36 quests and an extended quest chain of 36 quests to progress but you will begin with the first quest. (total of 72 quests).
All quests give 20 CP upon completion and generally we aim to:
- Keep them easily completable (avoiding grindy quests). Our general aim is for them to be completable with 2-3 matches.
- If a quest requires you to play a specific mechanic like vitality, or assimilate, the goalpost of the quest should be relatively easy to reach.
If you have maxed out your journey, you can still complete the quests, but their rewards will have no effect moving forward.
Alright with that clarified, let's crunch some numbers!
Conclusions:
The average time to complete a week's chain is rather low at 1.5 hours a week. This means that relative to other ways to get CP, this is the least grindy way to gain CP by a rather large margin. Thus moving forward, especially considering the rather small requirement of 18 hours over 3 the course of 3 months, any calculations will assume you always get all the weekly quests CP as they become available.
For free players, completing quests can lower the amount of CP required to grind in other ways by up to 30%. This, however, assumes you don’t otherwise reach level 100 before the last week in a Journey in which case the quests will speed it up less. We are ok with this as this is meant as a catchup mechanic that also provides a burst every week for more casual players.
For players, this reduces the amount of CP required to get from a non-quest source by more than 60%!
How late can I join Journey without missing out?
Since quests grow the amount of RP you can reasonably get quickly, it's rather easy to find out how late you can join a journey and still be possible to grind for level 100. From earlier sections, we calculated that those with extended journey would only need to grind 936 CP from outside quests and that those without the extended journey would need to grind 1656 CP.
Conclusion:
It is impossible to reach level 100 when playing F2P after one month has elapsed in a journey
It is impossible to reach level 100 by only purchasing the extended journey after 2 months have passed.
The range at which players joining into an ongoing journey can still complete it is rather large, especially for F2P players.
How much RP is available in Journey?
There are some assumptions here on how RP is valued. Let’s take a look at what we currently have so there is no confusion:
Conclusions:
Both the total RP and Avg RP per level values will be useful in future calculations. We will also play with the idea of what increasing small RP to 3 would mean for the system.
END of Part 1 of hopefully 2 due to character and image restrictions
