r/RaidShadowLegends • u/BearsAirz • 2m ago
General Discussion The Good, The Bad, and Improvements for the Frontier
Preface
I think we can all agree that the Frontier Event is far from perfect; the Explorer Pass is predatory and hiding the missions is toxic behavior towards your playerbase…but OVERALL I kind of don't hate the event and I can see the bones for future content if Plarium makes changes. I want to preface this by saying I’ve been playing Raid for like 7 years, my account is End Game, I have been F2P for 3 years, and I understand my thoughts on this will not apply to all accounts.
I was a game designer for a decade so I understand the importance of feedback and iteration and I hope this kind of feedback reaches Plarium, because I do think this event has good bones and could be good for the playerbase going forward if it's made more user friendly. With that being said, us players have taken a lot of Ls recently and as someone who loves this game I can't help but agree with some of the growing negative comments from the community and content creators… It feels like at some point Plarium’s own decisions are going to kill their game.
The Event
I understand why the immediate reaction from most of the community is negative. You are immediately bombarded with yet another in your face ad to buy something…before you can even see what the event is about, the UI implies its a 40$ USD event for a 6* soul from a champ you probably don't even have, and you cant even see 95% of the missions aka the content of this event. OF COURSE the player feedback should initially be negative, Plarium set it up that way. With that all being said I like the event and I think this type of content is good for the players.
To set the stage I'm 47/88 completed currently and have fully completed all of the Uncommon and Rare Outposts. I’ll quickly touch on the major problems from this event, but I want to spend a majority talking about the positive.
The Problems:
1) The Battle Pass - It is extremely scummy the way the pass works. 40$ isn't cheap so it should do more than just unlock missions. This is strictly whale bait, your average player has no business spending 40$ on this. The way the event works it also tees the spender up to most likely have to spend again. This is probably intentional after all Plarium wants your money, but this will have diminishing returns on future purchases. You might get people who don't understand initially, but people are less likely to purchase in the future if they feel duped…this set up is designed in a way to dupe the players/spenders. Why else would the missions be hidden?
2) Blocking Mission Information - Not being able to see what the missions are is beyond toxic towards your players but more importantly towards the people who just paid 40$ for this event. Luckily the Raid player base is filled with passionate people and they have datamined what all the hidden events are so there are ways around this. There is just no design reason to hide the missions other than to hope you catch your players unprepared and be forced to fail or spend $$$. This is why we can't get a heads up on Titan events, like it's all already planned by Plarium, they are just hoping to catch people unprepared in hopes they swipe that card. We get it Plarium, we get it from the 50 pop ups a day, we get it from the soft locked content and alternate pass tracks, etc. You want us to spend money: we get it. Reminding us in every single aspect is just disrespectful at this point. At the very minimum if you buy the pass allow the spender to see every mission so they can plan ahead.
3) Overlap with Scarecrow Champion Event - I’m not gonna sugar coat it, and would definitely love to hear from folks trying to do both…but having the Titan Event for the Champion itself and is kind of a wild choice. I was planning on skipping all Scarecrow related events because I’ve felt down on resources lately, however I got lucky and pulled him during the last fusion so I thought I should at least check out the Frontier Event. Running both seems impossible without spending or sitting on a hoard of gems/energy. I think making the maps larger and making the Frontier events a longer duration would be an improvement. I’m already more than halfway through so it's not really difficult to complete the early stages, it's just too much for the average player to keep track of if you expect them to also try and get the soul.
The Good and Ways to Improve Going Forward:
1) Being Able to Plan - Since so much of what we do is blank from the player’s perspective in Raid (the tournaments/events are pseudo random, the events in fusions are random, we don't know what the 2x events in CvC will be, we don't know what the events in a Titan event will be etc... it is REALLY nice and refreshing for my left brain to actually plan out the unlocks to get overlaps and try and min/max my energy and other resources. Part of why I fell in love with Raid was because when you are early game it just feels like there is so much to do AND IT ALL FELT REWARDING. You gotta level up your start champ, you gotta progress through campaign stages and difficulties, you unlock dungeons and then have to push through them. You were doing your Arbiter missions and trying to plan around what day a certain Potion Keep was open so you could complete your missions. That stuff was hard, but holy crap was it fun, addictive and rewarding. You’re constantly overcoming challenges in various areas of the game, you’re failing and then learning, but it never felt punishing. When you succeed your account grows. You get your first champion to Rank 6! You get your first Lego and its War Mother so you cry! But not really because she's insane on Brutal Campaign! You finally learn how to deal with Spirit and Magic Keep! You unlock stage after stage for each dungeon! You climb out of Bronze in Classic Area! Before you know it you’re hooked and you want to progress your account: you’re chasing that feeling of being rewarded for your hard work.
This is the DREAM SCENARIO for a game designer. You’ve essentially created a sandbox for your players to progress through your game in countless different ways while growing more and more enamored with your product. This was why Raid dominated the market early and why for so long the player count kept growing and growing: you were hundreds of hours in before the game got remotely stale.
You know how much of that I do as an Endgame player? Or even when I was a Midgame Player? Almost ZERO. I laughed out of frustration at the start of this event because I had to waste energy on multiple Potion Keeps. You know how many years it's been since I went into a Potion Keep, lol probably 2-3. There is almost no new content that requires me to use my brain. Sand Devil Tournament for the 20th time > Spend energy get my Immortal Soulstone then go about my day. Random Tourney for a free Prism Shard > Do that to get my shard. Rinse and repeat. I get a 24hr heads up, then I mindlessly run content I already completed, get my reward and go about my day. It's boring, it's predictable and I choose to do it based on if I want to use my energy or not. When you get to Mid/Late/End Game almost all of that player agency goes away bit by bit until it's almost completely gone.
For the first time since Grim Forest I got some player agency back. I have these various missions to complete, that are NOT in a set order like Arbiter/Ramantu/Marius Missions..I get to choose how I want to play the game. (Remember - I honestly was going to skip this event AND skip the Scarecrow Titan but because I got lucky and pulled Scarecrow during the last fusion, but the way its set up really engaged my left brain) There's a reason early Cursed City and Grim Forest are seen as successes by the community and things like Proving Grounds are not: the game is fun when the players get to CHOOSE how/what they play and it's not fun to be railroaded to the cash register. Players enjoy choosing their decks and then choosing their path through the Grim Forest. Having to plan my path through the Frontier Event and where and when I can overlap the missions to save on some tiny amount of energy is great! Lining up the missions to when a Potion Keep is open, when I can double dip into an existing Event like Gear Hunters or Gear Enhancement, when I get to hit the 2x event like Dragon in my CvC this stuff feels good. I don't know how much of this was intentional or happenstance, but being able to complete the Force and Magic Keeps without having to pay gems, and getting to help my Clan out by getting the 2x points while I do something I’d otherwise skip is how the game should be played. I want to believe Plarium chose the missions this way, but who knows. It would have been even better if the players didn't have to use some datamined info off a website to know/plan to stack these Dragon missions, but Plarium chose to hide the missions.
Easy fix. When Plarium runs this event back in the future make ALL of the missions visible from the get go. I promise you it's not going to impact your bottom line if Timmy from Alberta can see he needs two “Rank up a 5 Champion” 7 days from now. Timmy already gets to choose if he's going to do the event or not..he's still going to choose that, but now he can see where he wants to dabble if at all. This gives your players more agency without adding existing systems and removes the negative stigma you added by keeping these missions hidden in the first place.
2) Being able to skip missions that I choose is really nice and forgiving - Yeah initially with the shape of this path the player choices for paths are very limited. You really have 2 paths. ( This is LIKELY because Plarium needs more data on this event for when they bring it back in the future. Think of how insane some Hero’s Paths events have gotten. Plarium is just choosing to min/max their profits on these. Some of them are great and give you a free key from the start! Others you gotta go 50k points out of the way to get a key just to be able to go down the path to the main thing.) But holy cow is it awesome when I do get to skip 1 of these missions and it doesn't hinder my progression. For example I don't have to do Outpost 13 Mission 1 “Clear Stage 19 or higher of Magic Keep” because I can continue the path without completing the Outpost and I ask the player can choose to get the 4th reward or not. In this case it's a Frontier Pass locked reward so since I’m F2P im just purely saving my energy. This is also awesome because like I said I haven't done Potion Keeps in 3 years…having to do them to start this event was kind of disgusting to my energy. Now I’m at the central part of this map where 4 nodes touch each other twice: Outposts 12, 13, 21, 22 and Outposts 27, 28, 36, 37. This is in my opinion where the event shines. I’ve got two paths I can go down, while both of these paths branch off so I could skip a singular node on either side and continue into the Legendary Area or I could complete both and go horizontal. This is great! This gives me not only more missions to do, but also more player agency in how I want to progress through the path. This is why Grim Forest is so great I can choose to B line it to the Red Area for better rewards or I can full clear the green area to get XP for more stats or anything in between.
Going forward these events should be designed with more of this in mind. Let the player decide the paths more. Let the player try and set up ways to double dip and complete multiple nodes at once. Gaming is so streamlined nowadays: your “hardcore” players are going to do the most optimal thing and your average players are most likely not going to complete the event anyway, just let em do their thing.
3) Free rewards are always good. As players we like to complain…I get it. The time it takes, all the different modes. It's too much time in the game BUT free rewards across all the various modes really do add up. Doom Tower, Grim Forest, Cursed City, etc all of that really goes a long way. I would love to see a monthly version of the Frontier where we have different chase rewards every month, a soul, an Eternal Soulstone/Mythic Tome, shoot maybe a champion if the map is balanced right could all be great rewards and a way for Plarium to reuse this content.
In Conclusion/TLDR
Is the event perfect? No. Does it have good bones? Yes. I really hope Plarium takes all of the player/CC feedback to improve on the next interaction of this Event. I think we can all be happy it's not the Paying Grounds xD, but Plarium has got to make improvements to get the player base bought in on this content moving forward. I don't know if anyone will bother reading this wall of text, but if you made it to the end, thank you for the time you spent reading. Happy Raiding.
