Introduction
The first Battle Pass in the history of Gods Unchained was released a few weeks ago and people have had plenty of time to experience it. Many have already reached the end and collected all rewards, so I think it's time to look at that experience from a player standpoint and give some feedback.
It's not my intention to list all the problems that happened with the BP in this post. I'd rather focus on the most important points and offer new ideas and improvements for the future.
Value
Both paid tiers had tremendous value. Let's look at each separately.
Premium tier
The Premium tier was priced at 38 $GODS (27 during pre-sale) and as you earn XP and clear the levels you get a cashback of up to 24 $GODS. That's 63% of the buy-in price (89% with discount) just on currency! Regarding packs, you'd get:
6 Battlepass packs, totaling 18 Fallen Age expansion cards
9 Fallen Age Regular packs, totaling 54 cards
2 Fallen Age Premium packs, totaling 12 cards, 2 of which are guaranteed Legendaries
So that's 84 cards total, including at least 2 Legendaries and a really good chance of multiple shiny cards. And that's for paying 14 or just 3 $GODS, essentially. Let's continue.
You'd also get a bunch of Core packs, including some Legendaries. I'm not going to detail them, but with the current Daily Play & Earn rules, Core cards are valuable and it is perfectly possible to make a small profit forging Meteorites to sell to other players.
Then you get a few cosmetics that you cannot sell (for now at least), but you can use them for flexing and customization of your game area. These include 3 manawheels (Nature, War and Magic), plus the 'Rest in Peace' and the 'Rage Valka' emotes.
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Shiny tier
The Shiny tier was priced at 220 $GODS (165 during pre-sale) and as you earn XP and clear the levels you get a cashback of up to 71 $GODS. That's 32% of the buy-in price (43% with discount) just on currency alone. So what would you get for 149 (or 94 with the discount) $GODS net cost?
You get all the rewards in the other tiers plus the Shiny tier exclusive rewards. In packs that would be:
18 Battlepass packs, totaling 54 Fallen Age expansion cards
19 Fallen Age Regular packs, totaling 114 cards
5 Fallen Age Premium packs, totaling 30 cards, 5 of which are guaranteed Legendaries
1 Fallen Age Shiny pack. containing 6 cards of Shadow quality or better, 3 of which are guaranteed Legendaries
So that's 204 cards in total. And just to bring this point home more clearly, that's at least 8 Legendary cards, 3 of which are Shadow or better. Considering the current floor prices in the secondary market, the absolute worst case possible for just the 3 shiny Legendaries would be in the ballpark of 35 $GODS, at the time of writing.
This tier also includes the promo card Citadel Spy, currently priced at ~11 $GODS.
As for cosmetics, you'd additionally get new God portraits for Nature, War and Magic, plus the 'Popcorn Rat' and the 'Big Brain Elder' emotes. This is the first time the game is providing additional God portraits besides the standard ones.
The Shiny reward track also includes 2 Sealed tickets, valued at 20 $GODS. From the Sealed rewards you can get more $GODS, FA cards (Meteorite only, but a good chance of Legendaries) and trinkets. There are no new trinkets or card backs for this expansion, so far.
Although some of these details were not available when the Battle Pass was announced, they became publicly available during the pre-order week.
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Consequences for card prices and pack sales
Likely as a consequence of the success of the BP sale there is an abundance of heavily discounted cards available in the market. Approximately 40% of the daily active players bought a Shiny BP, and approximately 63% bought one of the BP.
This contrasts with the situation of the previous set, which had the same shop supply but no other source of cards, apart from Sealed (which we also have this time). The Shiny pack at the end of the Shiny BP in particular is a source of a lot of Legendary cards, and all Shadow or better. This creates an imbalance in the market, as we probably have the same number of buyers as for ToD.
As a consequence of so many cheap cards falling into the hands of players who do not care nor feel any incentive to collect or own the new cards, a lot of the cards earned from the BP were just dumped in the marketplace, which predictably caused the prices to tank. There is a stark contrast between the prices of Meteorite ToD Legendaries and FA Legendaries under otherwise comparable circumstances, except for the release of the BP.
So the pack sales essentially halted when about half the players completed the BP and it doesn't look like any pack tier will sell out, as the current price on the secondary market for FA cards is much lower than the cost of any pack.
On the other hand, this is still a limited print set and these prices can be a good opportunity for anyone looking to buy cheap and willing to hold for a while, or perhaps forge cheap Diamond cards.
Was it worth it? My results
Let's go for the juicy part first: Meteorite Adusa, 2x Gerhardt, and Scrappy; 2x Shadow Adusa, Sian, and Dro; Gold Dro.
I also got a bunch of Shadow and Gold cards I'm not going to detail, plus a Diamond Epic Wasteland Lawbringer. This was very lucky. The floor price for this card, considering the Meteorite price at $0.46, is 0.46 x 125 + (31 x 0.7 x 0.13) = $60, including forging costs. This card value alone represents double what I paid for the Battle Pass.
From the 2 Sealed tickets I was able to collect 21 $GODS plus a bunch of cards and 1 trinket.
So yea, I got the $30 back and then some. I didn't sell any cards, I bought a few more in fact, to complete the set and shine up my collection a bit more 😁
Time to completion
The BP could be completed in about 1 week, if all the additional Missions were cleared every day. This is super quick. For someone leisurely playing just the 10 DP&E games every day, it would take a while longer, maybe a couple of weeks?
This is too fast. There should be an incentive structure to bring players back every day during the duration of the BP, not just rush it as quickly as possible and then have no further rewards to collect for the rest of the month / duration. We have indication that the team is considering adding extra levels so that players can still collect some rewards after the main track is completed.
Infinite levels and more Flux rewards?
In an excellent Feedback thread, Glacial Pace explains how he would like to receive more Flux from the BP and offers an idea of bonus levels without limit, after the main rewards are all collected. These extra levels would reward more Flux, Star Points, and Core packs, for example.
Another idea for competitive players is to award prizes to the top 10 players by level. This would give people an extra reason to play consistently and reward the most dedicated. This would need to be paired with a good bot detection system or some rules to prevent other forms of abuse like match-fixing with multiple accounts. Maybe this leaderboard reward could be available as a collection reward, as a way to combat abuse. Eligible players would need to hold a fair number of cards in their collection (considerably higher than the prize value) to collect the rewards.
Uncompetitive Missions
The Missions we have now require players to compete with sub-optimal decks in competitive game modes, since Casual mode is not eligible. I think any incentives to play with a bad deck in a competitive setting should be avoided as much as possible. It's not fun to lose consistently while artificially hamstrung by restrictions the opponents don't have to follow and is definitely not fun to de-rank while doing so. Finally, it feels like a huge waste of time and makes completing the missions take a lot more time than it should.
Perhaps with a good detection system for multi-accounting and match-fixing these quests could be allowed in Casual mode, but I don't know if this detection will ever work as well as it would need to.
An alternative opting for quests without win conditions (spend 300 mana, play 50 spells, deal 60 damage with relics, etc.) is also not a solution, as it would open a vector for abuse, making it possible to collect XP from the Missions while always loosing, which works really nice for bots:
So maybe the best option is to combine a bit of both. For example:
Win 3 matches before turn 6
Play 30 Core cards in winning matches
Play 100 mana worth of spells in winning matches
Heal your creatures for 40 Health in a single winning match
Sacrifice 20 creatures in winning matches
Win 3 matches with you God's Health above 15
Activate Raid 20 times in winning matches
Activate Wither 20 times in winning matches
Deal more than 15 damage in a single turn and then win the match
But it appears the game engine is currently not able to keep track of these kinds of stats.
Cosmetics
As I explained in my preview article, it doesn't make sense to keep the new cosmetics account-bound. I also don't think they should be minted directly like cards in packs, and I offered two approaches that I'm going to repeat briefly here:
Keep the cosmetics account-bound for 6-12 months as an exclusive flex for BP buyers and then allow minting, for a fee. By that time there would be a rolling number of recent, account-bound cosmetics that BP buyers can use for flexing. The fee will raise the floor price of the cosmetics, compounded by their low print numbers, which would be kept low also by the players who choose to keep and continue using them and therefore would have no incentive to mint them. This would be an adaptation of the approach by KARDS.
Make minting the cosmetic rewards available immediately, but for a short period of time. The BP buyer would always be able to use the account-bound cosmetics, but if they wish to sell them, they'd need to spend some $GODS to forge them as NFTs. In this case, there would be a minting window that could be the duration of the Battle Pass season. After that period expires and a new BP is activated, only the cosmetics from the new BP would be mintable. This would be an adaptation of the Parallel Battle Pass system.
Either of these approaches would provide further utility to the $GODS token and put an interesting floor on the value of these cosmetics, which would be printed in lower numbers due to the restrictions and hopefully appreciate in value in time, as out-of-print rare collectibles.
Cosmetics bugs
There was this very funny bug where the new mana wheels would show instead of the God portrait, or the new God portrait art would be placed at the mana wheel location. Check out the new God of Mana below:
I suggest using this as an opportunity to create new tongue-in-cheek, insiders-joke type of trinkets consisting of manawheels. They could be flat and static, exactly like the mana wheels. Or even better, they could be made 3D animated, like a slowly rotating coin seen from above. This would be a perfectly good excuse to introduce craftable cosmetics in the game, where for example 5 flat mana wheels would be forged into a new 3D rotating one. This would give BP buyers something of value to sell to others who wouldn't mind splurging on a very low-print, special trinket.
Furthermore, I think it would be great to celebrate the anniversary of the first Battle Pass every year during the second week of February, where during that week all God portraits would be mana wheels 😁. The number of mana pips could increase or decrease as your God loses or gains Health during the match. If all the mana pips turn off, you lose!
Card art variants as cosmetic rewards
One of the prizes could be a Meteorite art variant of a non-Legendary card (so as to not be confused with Mythic Variants) that can be shined up in the Forge (contrary to the Zaskia and Glinn variants which currently cannot). Most people wouldn't mind parting with those to recoup the BP cost, while a few others would surely appreciate the bragging opportunity in-game while still benefiting from DP&E rewards.
Tiered board as the final reward for the Shiny tier
This suggestion ties in with the collection rewards section below. The board could be themed around the latest expansion. It could also be a tiered board like the Genesis or Order boards, where increasing the minimum Quality for the full collection of the latest expansion at the time of claiming would yield a better-looking, more detailed board. There could be an option to upgrade in the Forge as well. For fairness, this would probably need a way to filter out wallet addresses containing rented cards.
Rewards scale with collection size?
The player jazus came up with this idea in Discord chat that I really like, and I would like to highlight here:
Missing a robust set of collection rewards is one of the issues that is creating big distortions in the game economy, currently. From what I read from other players and the team, it is pretty consensual that this would be a very good thing to have. Unfortunately, the game is still missing other features and improvements that are deemed even more urgent, so implementing collection rewards appears to be on hold until those priorities are addressed first.
What this idea brings though is an easy way to start implementing collection rewards without having to code a lot of new systems and tools. If the collection rewards were based on set completion and minimum Quality, each set could be weighted (this has been done before) and some of the rewards could be boosted based on the player's overall score. So taking the rewards we got this time as the examples, suitable targets for boosting would be:
Flux points
Core packs quantity and quality
Number of Promo cards minted
Number of cosmetics allowed to be minted - see my ideas about minting cosmetics above
Battle Pass price discount
Number of Sealed tickets
Offer a tiered board (like the Genesis boards) as the final prize for the top tier BP, and make the tier attribution tied to the collection score.
Pack naming
Naming some of the packs 'Battlepass pack' is a source of confusion, as people tend to refer to any pack they get from the BP track as a 'Battle Pass pack'. Others may understand that it would be possible to get Legendaries from Battlepass packs when that is not the case. The 'Battlepass pack' should be named 'Crafting pack' or any other name that does not include the word 'Battlepass'.
Inconsistent XP per level
A fair number of people on Discord were confused with the varying amounts of XP needed to complete each level, as they were trying to gauge the days left until they could reach certain levels. If the levels are going to require increasing amounts of XP, I think the increase should be constant (and not 'bouncy'), while the required XP for each level could be anticipated by moving forward in the BP rewards table and having the required amount of XP for each (future) level indicated in the UI.
The card art is sourced from the official image server https://card.godsunchained.com/
All other images are screenshots from the game launcher.
I hope you find this analysis useful and interesting. Thanks for reading!
