Hello mortals! InFinitySquid here, I’m one of the latest members to join the Gods Unchained team. As the Product Manager of Monetization, I’m here to help grow the game’s economy and ensure it remains healthy as more players come to enjoy Gods Unchained.
First on the list for me is an issue that’s been at the forefront of a lot of competitive players’ minds recently: deranking ahead of the Weekend Ranked event.
The deranking problem
As a quick overview, let me explain what I mean by deranking. Players have been deliberately losing games towards the end of the week to lower their Rank so that when the next Weekend Ranked event rolls around they are competing against players who have a much lower rank. This unfortunately leads to a negative experience for the players who are participating in Weekend Ranked fairly as they are matched against opponents who should be placed in a much higher rank.
We’re looking to make a few changes to Weekend Ranked rewards to discourage this behavior and ensure all players are looking to increase their rank in order to get access to the best rewards that the event has to offer.
Encouraging positive actions
Our main goal with these changes is to reward more positive behavior, with everyone aspiring to raise their rank in order to get access to more lucrative prizes. Basically, our philosophy is to encourage and reward players who do the right thing by Gods Unchained and its community.
Our next goal is to monitor how these changes perform and get feedback from all of you. This is a very important step to building out the future of Weekend Ranked and other similar events, as we want all of you to have the best possible experience while playing.
The new system
We love seeing you working hard and striving to improve, so we want to do what we can to reward our players who bring this sort of mindset to the table. We have updated our rewards so that each rank has its own possible prizes for players who achieve up to 25 wins during the Weekend Ranked event. As players increase their rank, they will find that they have to achieve less wins to receive the same prizes they were vying for in their previous rank. By reducing the number of required wins, we can actively reward players who improve themselves and increase their Rank, as they will earn better prizes for the same number of wins.
In order to maintain this sense of progression as players increase their rank, lower ranks have had their prizes updated as well. We have increased the number of wins that must be achieved in order to receive Expansion Packs (in the current events, that means Divine Order packs) so that players from higher ranks are inclined to keep their rank for the possibility of greater rewards. This should allow players at these lower ranks to compete on a more even playing field and hopefully allow them to progress to higher ranks in the future.
For a full list of our updated prizes, check out this rewards mockup.
Note that there are currently no changes being made to the Elite prizes or the “What a Mortal!” prize, though we will continue to monitor how players respond to these changes and will potentially make additional changes in the future to ensure our systems are encouraging players to act in a way that benefits everyone.
Wen?
These aren’t going out this weekend, as there needs to be a few tweaks behind the scenes as well as with our third-party partners. We are aiming to roll out these updates to our available prizes in the coming weeks though to ensure that you have a chance to earn even better rewards in our Weekend Ranked events.
As always your feedback is greatly appreciated, so please share your thoughts with the development team over on the reddit thread!
We’ll be jumping in and out to collect your feedback and see your thoughts on all of this.
These aren't the only changes that will come to Weekend Ranked as we move forward, just the most immediate. This system was designed for a much smaller audience, it's not a perfect system and there are other issues that we are looking into across the board that we will be addressing down the line. But for now, we feel this is a step in the right direction.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post!
~InFinitySquid, Product Manager of Monetization
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