In Development: Loot System

Author: Matt Festa, Lead Systems Designer

Update 0.16 of Armored Warfare will introduce a major update to the Loot system that has been around in the form of Booster inventory since 2015. This system will be expanded across future versions with additional features and content. Update 0.16 contains four main elements that create the core of the loot system:

• Supply Crates
• Insignias
• New Boost Functionality
• Inventory UI

There will also be several major improvements to the existing Boost system that simplify and extend the feature.

Armored Warfare’s Supply Crates are the containers that you will earn to receive Loot. Supply Crates come in one of five quality levels (Steel, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum), and the quality of Loot received from a Supply Crate increases with each quality level.

In version 0.16, Supply Crates can drop Credits, Global Reputation, Consumables, Boosts, and Insignias. Insignias are match reward bonuses which are applied to individual vehicles and are consumed in each match, much like the Protein Bar or Engine Oil Consumables, and will be described in greater detail in the next section. While there is some randomness in terms of what a Supply Crate of a given quality may drop for you, there are guaranteed minimum and maximum levels for exactly what a Supply Crate of a given quality might generate. For example, you will never open a Supply Crate that does not contain anything, and likewise you will never receive the best rewards from the lowest quality Supply Crates.

While there will be multiple ways for you to earn Supply Crates from playing Armored Warfare, the most common mechanism will be from playing PvE or PvP matches. Both the chance to earn a Supply Crate and the quality level of Supply Crate you receive will be determined primarily by your overall performance in the match, modified by a small amount of random chance. Within the Loot system, performance is defined as how well you perform in the match compared to all other individual match results within the same tier and game mode. In other words, the performance metric used by the Loot system is not compared directly to other players in the same match you just played, but instead are compared all the individual player results from all matches of the same tier in the same game mode. You do not need to be on the winning team in order to be rewarded with a Supply Crate.

What this means is that your chance to receive awesome Loot is not based on which game mode you prefer to play, but on how well you play. Players that have a spectacular match in PvE Easy will have as much of a chance to receive the highest quality Supply Crates as players that have a spectacular match in PvE Hard or in a competitive PvP match. So the summary here is: good matches mean good Loot. However, the system’s inherent randomness will also ensure that players of all skill levels will have access to great Loot.

In addition to playing matches, you will also be able to reliably earn Supply Crates from other sources like Daily Missions, and additional sources for Supply Crates will be added in future versions of Armored Warfare.

Insignias will provide you with another way to increase your match rewards beyond the methods already available like the First Win of the Day bonus, Boosts, Premium Account time. Insignias are applied to individual vehicles just like Consumables, and each vehicle can have five Insignias applied – one from each of the five types:

• Credits
• Reputation
• Global Reputation
• Commander XP
• Crew XP

These five types of Insignias are available in each of the same five quality levels as the Supply Crates.

Insignias are managed on a new Insignias Tab that has been added to the existing Service Screen used for modifying your vehicle’s loadout and crew.

By checking the “automatically resupply” checkbox in the Insignias Tab, it will be possible for you to set a vehicle to auto-resupply Insignias of the same type and quality as those that are currently applied on a vehicle. If you run out of a particular type and quality of Insignia, you will need to place a different Insignia into the slot. We are considering additional methods for automatically resupplying Insignias that may be added into future versions, such as an option to automatically apply the Insignia of the next lowest quality from your inventory rather than not resupply anything at all. Once you have had an opportunity to get familiar with the Insignias their user interface, please post your thoughts on the forums so that we can determine whether additional resupply methods would be a useful addition to the feature.

The existing Boosts feature and content will be overhauled in 0.16 to improve usability and make these user-activated progression bonuses available to all players through the Loot system. Their core purpose will remain the same: Boosts are items that are activated at your discretion to temporarily increase the rewards from any match that is played while the Boost is active.

However, beginning in 0.16 all Boosts will have the same duration of 12 hours. This means that you will have more flexibility in how you use your Boosts so you won’t have to waste your precious bonuses on days when you can’t login to play a few matches. Due to this change, all Boosts that you have at the transition from 0.15 to 0.16 will be converted into 12-hour versions. As an example, all 1-day Boosts will be converted into two 12-hour Boosts.

During the transition, there will be cases where there will not be an exact one-to-one conversion possible between an old Boosts and any of the new Boosts. In all these cases, we will convert the old Boosts in your favor. That means that we will always round up and add another Boost when the duration of your old Boosts does not divide evenly into 12-hour increments. Similarly, if there is not a new Boost that has the same progression bonuses as your old Boost, the new Boosts you receive as replacements will have additional bonus types, or the same bonus types with better modifiers. It is worth noting that all of your active Boosts will be deactivated and converted during this transition (also in your favor).

Finally, there will be a minor change to the “Premium Time Boosts.” We will be consolidating all existing Premium Time Boosts into a smaller set of Premium Time items with the same durations as the originals. These items will no longer be called “Boosts” and will be in a separate category in the new Inventory interface. This will help avoid confusion since Boosts and Premium Time items have different purposes and apply their bonuses in different ways. Similar to the update to Boosts, no Premium Time will be lost by players by this change.

In 0.16 and beyond, Boosts will be activated by adding them into Boost Slots. There will be two Boost Slots available to players in 0.16 – one Global Slot and one Premium Slot. The Global Slot can be used at any time, while there will be a Gold cost associated with activating a second Boost in the Premium Slot. The cost of activating a Boost in the Premium Slot will vary based on the quality of the Boost you wish to use. In future versions of Armored Warfare, there will be special events which can activate a third (Global) slot in addition to the two standard slots, and possibly even events which increase the bonuses or duration of Boosts placed in the slots. Much of our planning for the future of Boosts, Insignias, and the Loot feature in general will be based off of player feedback and our own internal analysis of how the new Loot system is impacting the economy and individual player progression. Our goal is to provide a system that makes accelerated progression and awesome rewards available to everyone in the game, but which also still has some premium benefits for players that want to further accelerate their progression and earn the best vehicles in the game as fast as they can.

The new Inventory screen will be the user interface that ties all of the new Loot features together. In 0.16, the Inventory will contain all of your Supply Crates, Boosts, Insignias, Premium Time items, and Consumables. You will be able to access your Inventory from the Garage by clicking the Supply Crate icon located in the lower left corner of the screen (just above the vehicle bar).

You will be able to open your Supply Crates as well as activate Boosts or Premium Time items directly from within your Inventory, and double-clicking an Insignia, Consumable, or Boost will navigate to the appropriate tab in the Service Screen so that you can equip the selected item. As new varieties of Loot are added in future versions of Armored Warfare, the Inventory interface will evolve to include them as well.

The new Loot feature that will be introduced in 0.16 is only the beginning of this system. Over time, we will be adding a variety of new Loot types that will be available as rewards through the Loot system. Much of this new content is still top secret for now, but we can give you a preview of a few of the things in the works. For example, we’ll be adding features that will allow you to trade-in your unwanted Loot for something better. We’ll even be incorporating the Loot mechanics as a core component of one of the major gameplay systems, and it’s going to be awesome. I can’t wait to share more about this in a future post.

In the meantime, we sincerely hope you enjoy the new Loot system and ask that you continue to provide us with your feedback about these new features and your experience with the game in general.

And of course, we’ll see you on the battlefield!