In Development: Upcoming Economy Changes

Commanders!

One of the topics that are hotly debated amongst players and developers alike is the Armored Warfare game economy – specifically, the rewards and their relation to in-game prices and costs. In this article, we’d like to give you an overview of our plans for the future of Armored Warfare economy.

Update 0.19 and Update 0.20 both brought significant changes to many Armored Warfare mechanics, including those that had major impact on the game’s economy. Time to kill, hitpoint amount, shell damage and armor layout – they all influenced it to a degree. After the launch of Update 0.20, we took a long hard look at the game’s economy itself as well as the player feedback on it and decided to introduce a number of changes.

Our goal is not to slow down the game progression, but to introduce a system where both the player contribution to the battle and the personal performance are justly rewarded.

We took the initial steps in Update 0.20.3831 when we increased the rewards for Global Operations and removed the ammunition and repair costs from the mode to make it more profitable, but we are planning to make more adjustments down the road.

The first and the most important change we are looking to make is the redefinition of rewards. In Update 0.20, Credits and Reputation are more or less awarded for the same actions, such as winning the battle or dealing damage.

In the future, the Reputation will be tied to the existing reward reasons, but Credit income will be rebalanced to depend mostly on damage done instead of a large number of parameters as it is now. To that end, the Credit reward per damage done will be increased by 50%.

To prevent the Credit income from becoming excessive and imbalanced compared to the Reputation income, we will be introducing several economy adjustments such as:

• Removing the victory Credit multiplier and rebalancing it into a fixed Credit reward per victory
• Removing the kill and assist Credit rewards (these are incorporated into the 50% increase)
• Changing the spotting damage reward mechanism – damage reward will only be awarded to players who are dealing damage but are not spotting the target themselves (the decrease is compensated by the damage reward increase since AFVs also deal damage – sometimes a very high amount of)

As a result of these changes, players who do not contribute to battle should see a sharp drop in income while skilled and active players should see their income become the same – or increase. Additionally, we will be increasing Credit penalties for team damage.

Armored Warfare contains a large amount of different economy modifiers that are difficult to keep track of, making the end battle results sometimes difficult to calculate and predict due to the sheer number of economic influencers. To make the system better understandable to players, we would like to remove a number of economic modifiers and focus on the main sources of income. To that end, we will be removing:

• Kill streak bonuses (bonuses for achieving kills in a row)
• Assist streak bonuses (bonuses for achieving assists in a row)
• Spotting streak bonuses (bonuses for achieving spotting in a row)
• Rewards for destroying vehicle modules and for wounding members of the crew
• Rewards for deploying a smoke barrier (this source has very little influence on total rewards)

Reward for spotting an opposing vehicle will also be awarded only to the player who spots him first.

All these changes will be compensated by an increase of income from other sources (for example, the compensation for lost destroyed module rewards will turn into more rewards per standard damage) so that the overall income stays the same on average.

The abovementioned changes are scheduled to appear in Update 0.21. While they will have a considerable effect on the economy, they are not final. The following updates will bring further changes, including but not limited to:

• Base capture reward overhaul, aimed towards more fairness
• Spotting damage rewards will be split between all who spot the vehicle (currently only the person who spots the enemy target first benefits from spotting damage reward – right now, a player can be an active spotter but if he isn’t the first person to spot the enemy target, he does not get any spotting damage reward, something we consider quite unfair)
• Players damaging targets someone else is spotting will receive reduced rewards (currently, they receive the same rewards as if they were spotting the targets themselves, which is unfair towards players who risk their neck spotting enemy targets and are therefore in more danger)
• Players damaging targets that someone else immobilized will receive reduced rewards (currently the immobilized status does not matter, but players who fire at mobile targets risk more as the mobile targets have more means of defending themselves)
• PvE reward overhaul (increasing the difference between the rewards for winning and for losing)
• Match Tier bonus overhaul (will be changed into a combination of vehicle Tier bonus and Tier difference bonus between you and the enemy target)
• Changes to retrofits (replacing those retrofits that reduce incoming damage with retrofits that increase hitpoints, which will lead to an overall increase in income due to higher health pools)

And much more. Even further down the road, we are considering adding 2-hour boosts for player convenience as well as the ability to merge low quality boosters or insignias into high quality ones.

We plan to, step by step, take a look at all the economy aspects to make the game more logical and comfortable to play. As we previously announced, we do not plan to increase the grind compared to pre-Balance 2.0 or to make players lose Credits on battles (guaranteed by the Compensation system that makes sure that players can’t lose Credits in a battle with the exception of using Consumables).

What we do want is an economy that is fair and easy to understand.

We’ll see you on the battlefield!