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Events - News and Roadmap

Thanks for reading! We had heaps of play internally and incredible community feedback on the first Contested Territories event. This was a massive system, absolutely a game within a game, and we were pleased that the bones of the system worked well, although our first cut on some numbers and systems did need some improvement. With the second event now live, we wanted to cover some changes that you can expect to see in this 2nd run of the CT event but also a roadmap of changes for future updates, relative to the size/complexity of the change. If issues most critical to you are not covered, please comment below as we may have overlooked something - if we can't address it soon or at all, we'll try to give context.

CT Event live now - running on client 32.2 only

• We did have first day ticket issues. We did an event restart within the first hour and made other changes that fixed most issues but some players were still affected. We hugely apologize for this and believe this is now fixed and will not happen again.
• Degradation timers shifted to 28 hours - this will allow players to come back the next day at roughly the same time for fresh tickets and not see all of their tiles reverted to neutral; at the same time it does not inflate CT points massively
• Degradation will not start until 4 hours have passed, and decay curve will be flattened so that decay is minimal to start and doesn't end with huge values; this preserves value of skill and competition for top scores for longer on the heavily contested tiles
• Event duration shortened - now planning a consistent 7 days on, 7 days off; we all agreed the first event was too long, and we're hoping this will preserve team interest better, while we continue to review event length and feedback
• Team Creation cost significantly increased - 2000MM; while we wanted to have an accessible cost, too many dormant teams were created with the low entry cost; the new cost will make Team creation much more considered and more casual players who just want to check the event out can join open public teams
• Matchmaking - we're approaching this carefully and over time and this first implementation will start moving players of similar activity into instances; we're not giving detail here as we'll be evolving the system iteratively but the intent is to have Teams that are seeking challenge find similarly motivated groups and reduce the occurrence of single dominant teams
• Pool tickets reduced to 2 per player per day until individual leaderboard change made below (see 32.3)

32.3 update, NZ Aug 31 , in time for CT event # 3

• Info text and UI distinction between personal and pool/Team tickets; info text will be updated to note that Teams persist after the event ends as we had some questions around that
• Separate degradation rates for the different tile types; this will allow us to adjust time until neutral and degradation curves for Regular, Relic, and Banner tiles individually for more competitive balancing as well as allowing more impact for casual players
• Automatically removing disbanded Teams from instances to allow new drop ins; within limited time windows, open up existing instances to new Team joins when a Team disbands or is disbanded, so known dormant Teams can be replaced by active ones; replacement windows would include time from event start and time from disband so the joining Team is not heavily disadvantaged; we will look at other non-participating Team controls in future updates
• Individual leaderboards fair play - will only count 4 daily personal tickets toward leaderboard scores; pool/Team tickets will not count to individual leaderboards, making individual leaderboard scores more fair regardless of Team size; we tried to get this in for 32.2 but it required deeper changes and we did not want to delay CT2 further given the improvements already made
• Individual CT point eco display on Team Roster; like the Team score eco display in 32.2, we'll add each player's individual earn rate to the Team Roster display so players (and Mayors) can see level of participation and value, especially as new tiles update that value; this will help teach the different tile values

33 update and beyond

• Sort/filter Team display by CT points earned; especially for joining, this will allow players to measure team standing/participation before joining and should help surface and fill active Teams to allow the overall funnel to fill faster
• Quick Join improvements - shift the logic from records currently on display to parameters of team size and participation, again helping foster full, active teams
• Daily Play rewards - incentives to play daily and to use all personal tickets daily, to motivate players to stay active and support their Teams
• Notifications - opt in notifications, mainly for tickets refreshing but also options for local leaderboard rank changes or tile events
• Relic refinement
• Remove Team relic voting - this has proven to be confusing and frustrating to some players; we'll adjust the UI to enable players to choose their 4 most desired Relics from the list of all Relics the team currently holds
• add new, balance existing, and potentially remove Relics from overall play; refine the Event Relic list further so the most compelling Relics show up for Team Trophy activation
• Potentially removing the Team Trophy funding of Daily Power Relic and just making that auto-on for all Teams, as a way of engaging new players in using Relics - this is still in discussion
• Team Management
• Targeting enabled for Assistant Mayors
• Multiple targets, potentially by tile type, potentially with curated tags
• Curated rules for team participation, allowing Mayors to set a curated "tone" for the Team (casual/dedicated) and participation expectations