Economy balance update, 28th June 2019
Hutch_Tim
Posts: 684 admin
Any economy rebalance will provoke debate. Top Drives is coming up to 2 years old and is doing well; we all want Top Drives to continue to thrive for as long as possible, but not everyone will agree on how exactly the economy should work to help that happen.
We have many different types of players and play-styles to consider, and balancing them will always be hard. Club Events was our first major attempt to tune the economy to work best for the long term.
While we have access to the data that tells us how the game is working, we recognise it doesn’t tell the whole story, which is why we pay attention to what players tell us about their experience of the game.
At this point we thought it would be helpful to take the unusual step of sharing some of the data with you, so you can better understand how the game is working as a whole, and we can have a more informed discussion.
The TL;DR version:
Average RQ150 players are making more money now than before.
The 1% most active RQ150 players are making a bit more money now than before, but are doing significantly more races to achieve that.
We will continue as planned for now and review again in a week.
First, a recap on recent history:
Clubs to replace Dailies and remove Smarfing
Smarfing: playing terrible cards to sink to the bottom of the leaderboard, so you can get easy 3-star wins. Aka the most efficient way to make money in Top Drives.
As Schmidti said, you could say we kind of created a “farming monster” - there are a lot (not a majority, but a lot) of players smarfing and quite used to it. We always thought it wasn’t ideal that smarfing earned such huge rewards (compared to other things), that you should spend so many tickets playing in a non-competitive way. TD42792 correctly identified a big part of the issue too: the biggest imbalance that smarfing creates is between smarfers and non-smarfers.
Players have raised the question of how newer players might be able to catch up with older ones. Roughly 50% of high-trophy (6000+) RQ150 players smarf, compared to 25% of low-trophy (<500) RQ150 players. That means a lot of those low-trophy players are being constantly outpaced, and not by a small amount either.
So, we came up with Club Events as an alternative to the highly-smarfable and (based on typical daily feedback) generally-disliked Daily: a way to earn money by winning, in an environment where you had some choice over requirements, and with a more interesting wider strategy element to it. You could make a bit of money by entering and racing in a few events; if you raced in more events, and did more races, you make more money - much more intuitive than the complete switch you have to make to smarf.
So, hopefully farmers would embrace this new way to make their money, and those low-trophy RQ150 players could see a more intuitive way to increase their earnings - do more in Clubs.
Replacing Dailies with Club Events also had the benefit of adding a new game-mode in Top Drives without universally increasing cash and gold in the game - inflation. To get right to the point on that subject - to have Top Drives thrive for a long time, we obviously do need it to continue to make money; it’s easy to imagine that if all sources of in-game gold doubled, the effective value of IAPs for gold would halve. That’s an extreme example, but if every new mode added new sources of income, we would continue to step in that direction, so we do need to be careful about it.
The Response to Clubs
Players told us quite emphatically that the Daily was too important to lose: the ability to play your strongest hands; the cards for upgrades; the instant gratification; the mental effort/earning ratio. Club Events are supposed to be more entertaining than the daily, but many players were feeling it was just more effort for less reward.
Daily but with less farming
We realised we couldn’t improve Club Events as much as needed by tuning the dynamic aspects (rewards, season length etc), or even with a few quick features - but we still wanted to reduce the significance of smarfing. So, we proposed a compromise: return daily events (with a bit more variety in the rotation), add more cars to prize boards but reduce their overall value, and put more cash in end-of-event prizes instead. My post intimating this idea (perhaps with too much subtlety) didn’t go down well (link), but when Robin proposed a more detailed version (link) and clarified it involved the Daily (or something extremely similar) coming back, it was a lot more popular, so we figured we had a good solution.
The Response to 'less farming'
Now PL9 is here and we have been starting to find out how the rebalance feels and plays out in practice. Although Club event cash hasn’t been reduced yet, and Challenge cash will increase from this weekend, we can still take an early view.
In terms of community response, as we would expect, people who smarfed the most are the most affected, and the least happy with the changes. Some of the people who didn’t smarf do seem to like the increased cash prizes for events. It’s definitely been a more mixed response than just removing the Daily.
In terms of the data on what people are actually achieving under the new system, it’s hard to be certain of things as both the new cars and the auto-hand-forget bug are likely to alter people’s behaviour. Factoring out the spike in activity around a new launch though, we can now see the following.
We considered players of all types, but the most interesting here are probably RQ150 players, with low vs. high trophies, and average players of each type vs. the top 1% most active. Since Clubs have been out for 37 days, we looked across the time period from 37 days before Clubs through to 37 days after, and identified the 1% most active players across that whole period.
If we compare how things are now (with the rebalanced prizes and Clubs, after the PL9 activity spike) vs. how they were before Clubs was introduced, we see the following:
- Average RQ 150 player: They are playing 9% more matches (Daily events, non-daily events and Club events) and making 7% more cash.
- RQ150 with < 500 trophies: 7% fewer matches, 4% more cash
- RQ150 with 6k+ trophies: 23% more matches, 15% more cash
- 1% most active RQ150: 44% more matches (from 72/day to 103/day), 9% more cash
- 1% most active RQ150 <500 trophies: 60% more matches (from 68/day to 108/day), 17% more cash
So what does this tell us?
- Average earnings are up.
- The most active players are also making more cash.
- But - the most active players are getting significantly less cash-per-race...
- ... and lower trophy players are actually doing fewer races, which is probably not ideal.
So what next?
This analysis is only a snapshot - just as important is how things change over time. It’s also important to consider how the game feels to play, as that can help us predict how it will change - if the average player is making more money, but is less happy, they are less likely to stick around. The data doesn’t tell us how people feel, so of course we will continue to listen to your feedback and ideas.
For now we will continue with the plan, adjusting Club prizes and Challenge prizes, and continue to observe the data and collect feedback. We’ll do another update like this in a week.
Comments
Also you looked at a small sample size, in terms of statistics, that's one of the worst things you can do.
I'm sure many many people will voice their opinions on this, however I'll just leave this;
I'm still perplexed as to why Hutch seems to want to tackle smarfing with this much ferocity. Does it pose such a threat to your model?
I would also like to point out the reason why I myself, started to smurf. And I suspect the same will go for many many other players. The game is fun. Really fun. But when you hit that wall when you hit RQ140 was it? When all the non-Daily events meant you were in a bracket with RQ140+ players. I must have hit that over a year ago. And my lowly 2 Legends and 1 maxed Epics was just never ever ever going to cut it against Bugatti TD, Eric Shih, and all the other multitude of players who I saw rock 5 Bugatti's in the Dailies.
So when I tried to play the game as intended, best hand down, fight every event, I was humbly reminded that this was the start of a long long road. Where I would have to be very very patient. Slowly acquire Tier 4 Cash & Gold because that was genuinely all I could get.
Fast forward an entire year and I can now make it up to Tier 2 in Dailies, and Tier 2 in the 2 day events. Do I have a Legend for every event? Of course not.
Now, that bracket between Top x% of players and me hasn't shortened because I started smurfing for efficient cash gains, case in point the current Nissan event, where my top Nissan is a 333 R34, and many people have 3(!) Nissan Legendaries or more from players' reports.
My point is, the ability to play the game efficiently in that way was the reason I hung onto the game and hoped that one day, I'd earn a few very good cars through lucky Ceramics over a VERY long time. To feel this playstyle has been marked as somewhat "incorrect" and actions have been taken to remove such playstyle....it leaves a sour taste in the mouth...
People who have been loyal to this game for HUNDREDS of days are telling you that their gaming experience has fundamentally changed for the worse and are no longer motivated to play.
I’m sorry, but the figures you present just don’t echo the reality that players are experiencing right now...
What I see are various flaws, and I am happy to be corrected in return because I truly would like to understand the premise, but why are you looking at RQ150 + <500 trophies / Most active 1% / and then a combo of those two criteria.
The <500 RQ150 group should be relatively small. Without having gone the multiplayer aspect for very long, this group don't have much experience to compare the previous situation vs now. They also have rapidly improving garages at the beginning and so their daily income will improve each week, without playing more. Late-game players garages rarely improve.
Next, the 1% most active RQ150+<500 trophies group must be tiny! This group simply does not represent the wider majority, and so their stats are not at all useful to you. If you want significant data you need to check how the large majority of players are doing.
Check the statistics of the long-term players. Why these guys? Because Hutch wants the game to thrive over the long term. If the late-game players show reduced income / are playing less (not just logging in - I am still logging in to pick up the daily reward and ad gold) that should point to the fact that the economy re-balance isn't working for those players.
Check this group for the matches played in multiplayer vs club mode to understand popularity. If us telling you doesn't do it, the stats should. It is very unhelpful to base your decisions on data gleaned from your newest customers. Make the game work for players who've stayed with you, and new players should follow in the same footsteps. Why 'fix' what isn't broken?
Clubs is an additional game mode, not a replacement. I am merely logging into clubs to not fall behind while I keep an eye on what you guys decide. I earn the 50xp a day and that's it. I can't be the only person skewing the data by participating in clubs grudgingly.
I sincerely hope you guys come to the right conclusion, which is to stop making long-term and passionate players feel excluded from your priorities. We have invested in this game and we're being helpful by being vocal about how it should be.
Maybe it is time to move on to something less stressful and more rewarding, I see a lot of those idle games being advertised.
For the top/bottom 1% (even more than that) you should drop them or cap them, or use another method in order for the results to not be skewed.
Plot your regression line and figure out how the outliers effect your results and assumptions you made. Look at the association on the data.
Stats 101. Nuff said.
* Those three children may or may not have been my own children.
There are so many variables that you have to consider when you are doing statistics. There are so many assumptions made here for that outlier sample size that probably does not define the rest of the player base.
Look at the 1% demographics for example. If 90% of those are in the US or Asia your data is skewed, ending times affect things, F2P vs P2W, age etc.
Send me the data Hutch.
Anyway.
Yes I could earn the same cash as before but I really do have to spam the Club, I'm sorry but it is getting really tedious. Probably need to spend at least 5x the amount of the time which quickly becomes soul destroyingly dull. I'm a grinder by nature so others are likely playing a lot less than me.
Also as I said, statistics are ever the whole story. Even if earnings remained similar but felt worse, that's not a great sign.
Also interpreting silence as a good sign is funny. Its silent because disappointment about a lot of things is huge.
For me the game is in a crisis, and we can only hope for a fast turnaround.
Just to inform on this bit - there are actually more RQ150 players with trophies <500 than with trophies >6000!
As I keep saying, we know numbers don't tell the whole story, it's always a balance. In fact that's very specifically what helped bring back the daily - incomes were similar without the daily and with Club Events instead, but it obviously felt radically different to just about everyone, so we could see it would have to change.