Raid: Shadow Legends has had a big update with their patch 4.50 (patch notes here). With it came some small balance changes (generally ignored), a change to their daily log in rewards (generally hated) and an update to the clan system which included clan quests (generally leaving players frothing at the mouth). Let’s briefly discuss the changes, player reaction, and if any of it matters to the developer, Plarium.
Log In Rewards
“We’ve added Champion Fragments to the final 30-Day repeating stage of the Login Rewards program (Days 271+) and swapped another reward around. The first Fragments will be for Cleopterix, and will switch out for another Champion after you’ve managed to collect all of Cleopterix’s Fragments. Note: this Champion will not drop from Sacred Shards. Here are the changes:
– Day 10: 300 Energy → Champion Fragments
– Day 25: Rank 5 Chicken → 300 Energy
– Day 30: Sacred Shard → Champion Fragments.“
As you can see, they are removing the Rank 5 Chicken (used to level champions to their maximum rank) and the Sacred Shards (summon the highest rarity champions). When it comes to free rewards, these are essentially the two best in the game. It takes a fair amount of resources to get a champion to rank 5 to use as food (aka a chicken) for a rank 6 champion. The sacred shards are also very rare, with free to play players getting only a couple per month, including this one that will be gone. Sacred shards not only summon the best champions, but are worth a lot of points when used during summon events. Losing these for one guaranteed champion of middling quality every 4 months has many players pretty tilted – free to play and spenders alike.
Clan Quests, Levels, and Store
Clans now have levels, those levels have some okay rewards tied to them, one of those is the clan store with a selection of decent and/or overpriced rewards. While the number requirements for some of those rewards or level experience seems a little silly right now, I expect that we’ll see that iterated on or just clarified when we know all of the variables. What has players riled up are the clan quests. Clans have 30 members each and at launch, clan quests have 20 quests in total, with players being able to pick up 3. This means, best case, two-thirds of your players get none, and at worst only 7 players might end up with any if they grab all 3 available. This is already causing major friction as clans struggle to deal with uninformed or greedy players and how to fairly distribute these quests.
Additionally, some of the quests are nearly impossible, such as the one shown below courtesy of a reddit user.
Does It Matter?
The Raid: Shadow Legends sub reddit is awash in players threatening or claiming to have quit the game, stop spending, give the game a 1 star review on their play store, dislike the video (as shown at the top). Hell Hades, a major Raid content creator called the patch a “Clown Parade” in one video and tore up the clan quests in another.
Despite all of this, Plarium seems silent on the issue. While, a lack of communication isn’t terribly uncommon for them, in my ~9 or so months of playing this game, this is the most unified I’ve seen the community on hating a change to the game… and some of these content creators were making videos bashing the changes before they even went live. So, the community as a whole are mad… Does Plarium care? And I don’t mean “do individual humans at that company care”, because surely some do. I mean, does this matter to the company? Does a few thousand negative reviews, dislikes and low spenders stopping their raid cards and what not matter? I really don’t think so. Games like this are primarily supported by the whales – incredibly big spenders. The game is too large for even a few thousand negative reviews to drop the rating enough to deter new players or for one poorly reviewed video to affect their relatively small youtube presence.
If enough spenders stopped spending, and did it quickly during the hate-hype right now, they might get the message. But, things that piss off low spenders and free to play tend to just require the whales to whale a little bigger, maybe go kraken for a week or two and if that happens, Plarium wont see any real fiscal consequences. The daily reward changes probably won’t see many big spenders quitting this game… but, the clan changes might. If content creators are to be believed, even their clans – fairly large and established – are struggling with the clan quests. And if players in big clans (and big spending clans) are faced with extra friction, drama and stress, it could either push them away from the game or push them to send a message to the company – with their closed wallets. So, if you want to see changes, keep giving feedback, stop spending and if you have friends that whale out, see if you can convince them to take a week off.
Only time will tell if the uproar gets loud and expansive enough to reach the developers ears and only more time to see if that message is acted upon, but, while I expect the new clan systems to be ironed out a bit, I don’t think the log in rewards will be reverted… and, maybe that’s part of the point. Fix the thing that really upset the crowd and maybe enough players will forget that they essentially traded 4 random champions every 4 months for 1.