Monday, October 18, 2021

Plarium's Clan Boss game design leads to huge waste of time and battery life

Clan Boss is the most popular part of RAID Shadow Legends mostly because of the best rewards for players, and, consequently, many strategies created to reach them.

However, a big negative part of the Clan Boss is the forced time to run it. Forced for no good reason by the bad game design of Plarium.

On the below picture you see an example of a Clan Boss run taking just over 16 minutes. However, some other teams take up to 30 minutes per run.

As we have 4 keys per day that means all the players waste more than 1 hour per day just running Clan Boss. 

Since there are estimated over 3 million players in RAID Shadow Legends, out of which estimated 250,000 are daily active players then with simple math we can see that every single day players waste 271,333 hours of their time running Clan Boss.

Moreover, same waste is done on the battery life as players switch on Clan Boss and let it run on their phones without even looking at the screen. Plarium's bad game design forces this behavior. They once commented that they wanted players to enjoy their graphics, which was an idiotic comment for several reasons; the main reason being that we are not even looking at the damn screen. It is simply a daily absolutely uninteresting grind - there are no graphics to enjoy after the first few times.

So this Plarium's game design is both unfriendly towards their players as well as anti-environment which can be translated both as wasted energy and financial damage to the players.

There are easy solutions! They just have to move their behinds to implement them. Note: they have been promising over a year to implement measures to reduce time spent by players in the game, but they have done nothing.

The best solution would be adding a tick box option to instantly complete a run. This will have no waste at all. And those players experimenting can still run normally by unticking this box.

Next best is to activate x4 or x6 speeds for Clan Boss to complete runs faster. They previously commented that higher speeds disturb their animations, but again, we are not looking at the damn screen, so that excuse is not applicable.

Lastly, it would help players to have another tick box option to do a test run. This would facilitate players testing different champions in Clan Boss and not having to crash the game every time.


Update: 

For Unkillable teams or other strong Clan Boss teams which can survive 50 turns or more:

Expect 90+ minutes per day!