Legends:Patch/1.59.2

Released on September 21, 2016.

Letter from the Devs (Sept 20, 2016)

Hello to all Legends players! The Dire Wolf Digital development team has been hard at work on various things, and I thought I'd give you an update on where we are and where we're headed.

'''Tomorrow's Patch'''

We're rolling out a patch tomorrow that includes a variety of things. One of them is streamlining game navigation so that it takes fewer clicks to do what you want to do. We're merging the functionality of the Play Menu screen into the Main screen, as several players have suggested. Here's what it looks like:

Another change that is happening with this patch is a significant adjustment to the ranking system. What we've found is that the progression to the upper ranks is a bit too fast. We'd like to slow down this progression a little bit, so that achieving the mid-to-upper ranks feels like more of an accomplishment. Note that we're still happy with the general way the system works, so we're not performing an overhaul, just implementing a few tweaks, namely:

:1) We're removing loss protection earlier for low-ranked play. We've noticed feedback from new players who perceive significant mismatches in the ranked system, and a lot of that is due to how quickly you're climbing through the lower ranks. This change will make it easier for players to be matched against others of similar experience.

:2) Reaching the top star in a constellation doesn't immediately promote you to the next rank. Now, you must win one more game when you're at the top of the constellation to ascend to the next one. This essentially adds 1 more net win required per rank, so 12 additional wins from rank 12 to Legend.

:3) To make the upper ranks feel like even more of an accomplishment, we're removing bonus matches from rank 5 and above. This will mean that more skill is required to ascend from those ranks, so each rank thereafter will be more notable and celebrated. This will also help some players from "over-ascending" from persistent play and getting into a situation where the matchmaker is unable to find good matches for them within or near their rank.

Creature Type Changes

Creature types are part of the game to provide flavor and to provide gameplay hooks that can be leveraged by other cards. When the Design team looked forward to see what kinds of cards we could make with the existing creature types, we found two that had issues. Undead and Animal contained too many different kinds of creatures to be useful.

We're breaking up Undead into Skeletons, Spirits, Vampires, and Mummies. All of those types are more flavorful than a catch-all term like "Undead." And, as an example, being able to design cards in the future that work with or buff Vampires specifically without working with other Undead such as Draugr offers both more opportunities for strong resonance as well as opportunities for new deck archetypes.

Animal, in the same way, included Beasts, Reptiles, Mudcrabs, and Spiders, and each of those can have flavorful distinctions. Everybody loves Mudcrabs, right?

So, in order to provide better gameplay and more flavorful cards in the future, we've split up Undead and Animal each into four different types.   has the word "Animal" in its game text, but it still summons the same creatures it did before (we just included all four new types).

  had the word "Undead" in its game text, and that's one that we had to change. First of all, it looks like a Draugr (which we are calling Skeletons). Secondly, it creates Skeletons when you play it. He's gone from being "the lord of all undead" to the Skeleton Boss. There are now more than half a dozen Skeletons in the game, more than enough to build a Skeleton deck.

Final note:   still uses the word "Undead" and it will affect all four types of Undead.

Monitoring the Meta

Beyond the creature type changes mentioned above, we don't have any other card changes at this time. However, we are currently spending a bit of time evaluating the metagame and we're preparing to make some changes, possibly even before the end of September. We carefully consider card changes but we're not resistant to them, either. We want to take full advantage of the digital medium to bring you an exciting strategy game that doesn't get stale. And if that means applying a little grease to a few cards from time to time for metagame tuning, we are more than willing to do so, if we feel like the game will overall be significantly healthier.

Ramping to Release

Finally, we want to mention a bit about the release roadmap.

Coming soon, we plan on releasing another patch that will finally bring a working chat system into the game. We're putting some finishing touches on the tablet versions of the game. (And speaking from experience as an early tablet playtester, Legends is extremely enjoyable in a relaxed position on a comfy chair or couch!) We're planning to have both iOS and Android versions ready in the next couple of months, though we may do a regional release for a few weeks or a month as a test run, before going global.

Community

Before signing off, I'd like to extend a hearty thanks to our players. We have some truly outstanding community members and content creators who are active on Twitch, Reddit, YouTube, and elsewhere. We don't always get a chance to interact with you but know that we've been reading your posts, listening to your podcasts, watching your streams and YouTube videos, and the design team regularly discusses community feedback. So thank you for your involvement!

Signing off,

Paul "Merakon" Dennen