A lot has been said about Squad Builder, the game mode that looks more or less like video poker. Some people like it, some hate it, a lot of people have been very critical about it. Me personally I don't hate it, I did play it (like: to death), but I don't think it is a particular good implementation. But what do the numbers say (this should be my catch phrase).
In week three I actually decided to try to figure out in rough terms what the player participation was like. Since this was week 3, on the one hand you could argue that maybe participation was lower because players had several weeks to get tired of it. On the other hand, you could argue that this is precisely the point: if the whole point of squad builder was to give people some fun little thing to do occasionally as a way to keep players engaged, how well it was doing in week three might be more important than how it was doing in week one when it was a novelty.
Before I start, I feel it's necessary to mention my own personal involvement with the mode. How much did I play it?
I played the heck out of it. That's bit over 300k points, by the way. And it is even more than it appears for reasons not important to this discussion. And I'm not even in an alliance actively farming this. I have zero shot at Heimdall. So there was absolutely no point to this at all. But I am a lunatic: what was everyone else doing?
This is why I have alts. I decided to score a relatively low amount of points hoping to try to figure out where the cutoff for 50% participation was. I figured I would try to get one score above and one score below that cutoff, so I scored 11556 on one alt and 24717 on the other. However, that didn't turn out the way I expected.
11556 -> rank 119589, 41-50%
24717 -> rank 73720, 21-30%
*Both* scored above the 50% mark. In other words, out of everyone who participated at all, more than half scored less than 11556 points. That's staggering. We can use both scores to bracket the total number of player participants. Since I know the rank and that rank must fall within the bracket limits, I know that the first score tells me that the total number of participants must lie between 239178 and 291680, and the second score tells me that the total number of participants must lie between 248733 and 351047. So the actual total number of players participating must be between 248733 and 291680 (the overlap between the two ranges).
In other words, about 250k - 300k players did at least one round of squad builder. And half of them scored less than 11556 points. Statistically speaking, that's probably less than a dozen rounds in a week. It is probably just enough points to get the very easy milestones at the start, and that's it.
250k players doing anything at all is not a lot. It isn't horrible, but it is often the case that more players do at least one round of battlegrounds, and that's a much bigger ask of the players. And when they played it at all, a lot of players were apparently literally just doing a couple rounds and that's it. Not only was it not getting people to engage deeply, it doesn't appear like it was even getting many players to engage casually.
There are a lot of potential reasons why, but one reason I think squad builder didn't do as well as I would think Kabam would want it to has to do with agency. Basically, squad builder has none. In terms of agency, it is even worse than the original iteration of squad builder which looked more like video poker. With the poker version, there was some requirement that players think about poker hands and make decisions. The actual best decision was generally pretty obvious and automatic, but agency is not about players being asked to make hard decisions, it is asking them to make meaningful ones - meaningful to them. If the player thinks they are actually making an important decision about which "holos" to hold and which to discard, that's a hook for engagement. It is grindy and trivial, but it is something. This edition of squad builder is just as grindy and just as trivial, but it also seems meaningless. The player isn't being asked to do anything except mindlessly grind the same fights over and over again. They aren't asked to do anything that could improve their results much.
In fact, there was some actual strategy to the mode. For example, three fire and two water, you toss the three fire and hold the two water. That's probably counterintuitive to most players. But even to the extent that there was any kind of strategy like this, it required a math degree to figure it out, and (almost) no one is going to try to figure that out. So players were left feeling there was no strategy for them to use, no thinking for them to figure out.
The problem, in a nutshell, is squad builder was designed for robots to play, and players hate feeling like they are being treated like robots.
So what can be done about it? Well, some people would say just toss the mode entirely, but I doubt Kabam is going to do that. They historically do not toss out things they've spent a lot of time working on unless there's no alternative. They want to try to make it work. So we're going to see squad builder again. And there are players who like it, and thus there's something to be said for trying to make it work for them while also making it better for everyone else. I have two ideas there.
First: I think Kabam thought that this version would do better than the previous one because it simplified things. By eliminating the various poker hand combinations and just rewarding on how many of a type you had, they thought they would streamline the mode. And it does. But I think it does so to the point where it becomes completely trivialized. Games can be simple, but they cannot be so simple that the player thinks there's nothing for them to do. Games are fundamentally about choice. Games offer choices, players make choices, and then they live with the consequences of those choices. It is what makes games worth playing at all - the feeling that whatever happened, it was because of you. If squad builder comes back, it must be far more interesting. Stuff needs to happen in there, stuff that breaks up the monotony. for example, pulling one of each element was a thing that happened to me many times. It's a cool thing to see, except it is completely worthless. It is literally a "nothing is really worth keeping" draw. But that's a completely arbitrary design choice. It could be worth something, it just isn't. The players should get pleasantly surprised by the mode when rare or unusual things happen. That's the whole point of the mode, or should be. Players play, they try to make rare things happen, and they get rewarded when rare things actually happen. Whether they should *aim* for this rare thing or that rare thing is why would give the mode agency. As often as possible, there should be more than one option for the players to consider, and thus the reward tables should be more rich. *What* we can aim for should be intuitive, so we are not constantly looking at reward tables. It should be obvious that aiming for this is more likely but less rewarding, while aiming for that is less likely but more rewarding. Give players something simple *but interesting* to actually do in the mode, so they feel like their decisions matter.
Second: let us cheat. We have two ways to play the mode. We can use energy or we can use tokens. Tokens give out more rewards, but we generally have a limited supply. How do we know when we should use energy and when we should use tokens? We don't. It is all random, so it is possible for someone to get really lucky while using energy and then switch to tokens and get duds. This is not unfair, but it sucks. But since this is obviously intended to be a casual engagement tool, why not let us cheat? Let us decide *after* we see our cards whether or not to burn tokens.
Suppose we always spent energy to start a draw, but after we see our cards we have the option to burn a token or not to triple up our rewards. So it is far less likely we burn a token on a complete dud. Suppose we pay ten energy to draw the initial hand, and then we can pull cards for free or we can pay a token to pull cards. If we pull the cards for free, our rewards stay the same but if we pay a token to pull cards our rewards triple or quadruple or whatever. We decide after we see our hand.
It feels like cheating, but so what? It is a game, we make the rules, the rules can be anything want. The fact that it feels like cheating is the point. It gives players even more agency, more control over what happens. And nothing feels better than thinking you beat the game with an option you aren't "supposed" to have. Remember: reward tables are designed by the devs, it doesn't matter if players score more points this way, because the rewards will factor that in. What will change is that fewer players will see their valuable tokens burned on sucky hands. But rank rewards will still be fair because everyone will have the same options, and milestones can be calibrated on the assumption players will generally boost better hands.
Some people are not going to like the game mode no matter what. But we're probably going to see it come back, because Kabam doesn't throw game modes away when they cost a lot of development time to build. They tend to iterate, not extirpate. And I think it should remain a casual, simple, optional game mode. But I think simple doesn't mean brain dead, and random doesn't mean punitive. The game mode needs to be sufficiently interesting that players actually have to have choices, because a game mode without (material) choices is not a game mode, because it is not a game. And it needs to reward players time, specifically their patience waiting for good draws to randomly appear. Giving them a way to boost the rewards of those hands after they know they are getting them is a way to do that, and few things are more rewarding than sticking your finger in the eyes of the randomness gods.
Tl;DR
Improve the squad builder experience by:
- Make squad builder reward tables more interesting, so it is much more likely that whatever hand I pull there's more than one option I can aim for, that is also as intuitive as possible.
- Let me spend reward boosting tokens on winning hands after I know they are winning, instead of having to pray every time I use them that the next hand won't be a dud.
