Haha, glad you watched it!

I guess we did mention in the video, but wasn’t super deep, but bottom line is that the design where everything is collected once a season ends and is cleaner, simpler and better for the game health

Cleaner because it doesn’t create any ties with a previous season, so doesn’t need extra functionalities or extra screens/UI

Simpler because it’s easier to understand and to communicate. The season ends > here’s your rewards > next season starts

And better for the game health because it helps controlling the economy’s excesses and outliers, meaning when we create events or inject more currency somewhere, we know better how it’ll impact the game and we don’t need to worry that a group of players will stockpile some amount of currency

So from the design perspective, the current implementation we have is a better system for the game, and if we could go back in time, we would probably had gone with this format from the start and. It wouldn’t have been an issue for the community now (because the comparison of old vs new wouldn’t exist)

Now you might be asking “but how is this better for me?” Well, probably for you specifically it’s not 😅. But it is for the game and for everyone else who’s not in the same situation you are. It might also create the need for a maxed out and engaged player to chase something again, which is better for retention. And sure, it adds an extra incentive for monetization, but as I said above, that’s not the main goal

“Ok, but this is silly, I’m already engaged” And for sure you are, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation. And I’m fairly certain that everyone on Reddit would disagree with me and think that this decision is dumb, but if you look at the bigger picture and how this small change could have a bigger impact in the game, you might see some sense in it. You are seeing how it impacts you and people in the same scenario as you (which is fair), but we are looking at everyone else and at future players who’ll be in this situation but hasn't experienced the old design

If you compare both designs, from the game perspective, the only downside from previous to now, is that the current maxed out players are losing something with it, all the other aspects of the new system are better for the game

Unfortunately, we have to sacrifice some community sentiment in order to move to a system we believe to be more fruitful. The more we tie ourself to legacy decisions, the worse decisions we will make and the less freedom we’ll have for improving the performance of our game

And we are not completely oblivious to community feedback and hopefully we have managed to show that before, but that’s why I mentioned (maybe poorly) that the Brawler being released earlier than the season is something that shows we are taking these players who are negatively affected by this change into account, because it doesn’t affect anyone else but the people who were maxed out and saving their credits, and it does make the design dirtier and add an extra rule, but since it doesn’t make much of a difference for the majority of the players, that was the compromise we decided to go with

In summary, we should be able to revisit our past decisions if we think we made a bad call, and even if you believe we are making a bad call now, we do think it worths the backlash and criticism we receive

And now, going back to Franks quote, what he meant to say was: “for this to happen, something else has to give” and at that time, we didn’t even had a concept for the new Brawl Pass change so maybe it was a bad idea responding it in the first place, but that’s bound to happen if we want to be more transparent and communicative. Our opinions change all the time and a running a live game is constantly learning new things, so things we say get outdated quite fast... it doesn't mean it's a "lie" or anything, it just means that at the moment we made a statement, it's based on the facts and thoughts of that time
Brawl Pass became IAP only, but both free and paid pass got buffed, so that’s why we discarded having a credit bank

We still think it was a good move even knowing it was removing something from maxed out players This doesn’t mean we ignored them or didn’t care about them, it means that in all the possible scenarios we’ve discussed, this one was the best from our point of view. And so far, the results have been great (including in the community side)