It’s clear we didn’t hit the mark with the latest update. We’ve also made some operational mistakes recently. In this post, we’ll be going through how we got here, how we’ll be adjusting our plans, improving the current state and talk about some of the new exciting stuff we’re working on.

Ultra Legendary was born as we did want to improve monetization around Brawlers + we had an interesting and deep Brawler design, more so than the Legendary Tier. We thought the new rarity, depth of Brawler design justified a higher price. We were wrong about that. This kicked off an entire rethink of how we release Brawlers. We’ll be removing the IAP paywall for early access, and doing it in a better way. We’ll touch on that a bit more below.

We also tried ending the Mastery event early, a decision we pulled back quickly, and let the event end in full. We rushed that choice, and glad we reverted it. We’ll be taking more time to decide how we make live changes to the game, unless it’s preventing you from playing.

Our Goals with this Update

• Improve the new player tutorial, together with a better Trophy Road with better rewards and visuals

• Add an achievement system (Records) where the veterans could flex their skills

• Bring back the Angels & Demons event with a new twist, to add more excitement for all players

• Remove Masteries to redistribute its rewards to places that are more accessible with less playtime

While content such as Brawlers, Game modes, Hypercharges and Skins is more aimed at our most engaged audience, on the feature development side, we try to improve the game for all player types, new, mid and elder. This is how we grow Brawl Stars long term.

We bit off more than we could chew. Records went through many design pivots, and in the end, we made a call to ship the simplest version we could deliver. We pushed ourselves to get it done on time, cut many Records and didn’t leave any room for iteration. As a team, we’ll be taking this as a learning, and better plan the amount of things we try to execute on in the future.

Why Masteries were Removed

Masteries as a system was not optimal from a design perspective. It gave great rewards, but most new and even engaged players never understood how it worked (especially the Trophies to Mastery points scaling) or engaged with it. Masteries also incentivised grinding, which isn’t the most fun engagement motivation (there are similar problems with some Records, read the Records section on how we’ll improve them). But we missed a few important things before removing it. Here is how we’ll fix those:

1 - The potential Mastery Rewards that come with new Brawlers also got removed. We will be adding those Rewards to every Battle Pass, in the form of deterministic Rewards matching Legendary Brawler, starting next update. Like the Trophy Road buff, these will also take a lot less time and effort to obtain, compared to Masteries.

• 3000 Coins

• 450 Power Points

• 300 Credits

2 - Credit banking/storing is something we don’t want to incentivize, as not collecting Rewards is an unintuitive way to play for most players. The core issue is; you want to unlock the new Brawler on the first day after early access and not let Credits go to Fame. Unfortunately, we don’t have a new Brawler release in July, but Trunk will be the last IAP early access Brawler in August. We will be changing the way we do early access entirely in the next update. The design is still work-in-progress, but we’re certainly removing the IAP pay wall offer (Trunk will be the last), allowing everyone to play the Brawler during early access and have a chance to get the Brawler earlier, for free, just by playing. In addition, this Brawler release event will give even more rewards on top of the Battle Pass buff.

Improving Records

We completely hear you on the Records feedback. There is a lot we want to improve, short and long term.

1 - There are a lot of Record rewards missing from the cut down release version you see, more Records, along with those missing rewards attached, will be added over the next few updates

2 - Record rewards are much less than Masteries, and we know it’s impossible not to compare Records to Mastery rewards due to similar tasks and cosmetic Rewards. But the Record rewards are not replacing the Mastery rewards alone. The replacement was the Trophy Road buff (the milestones you are eligible to claim), the #1000Masteries event, the released Record rewards and future Records still to come. For new players, they will earn Rewards much faster compared to before. Elder players received a massive amount of rewards with a lot less effort and time during the #1000Masteries event. But regardless, it still doesn’t feel good enough.

In addition to adding more Records and buffing the Brawl Pass in the next update, we will also be increasing the number of events dramatically, starting this Thursday:

• A mini-community event around Mortis

• Unlimited Lives Challenge for free Skin

• Mega Pig

• Hypercharge Unleashed (again)

• More Quests

You can expect a dramatically increased number of events, and therefore rewards. With more events, we’ll also be reducing the time to get these rewards. For example, Hypercharge Unleashed will take a lot less Wins to complete. The Angels event coming on July 17th, will only be two weeks, instead of 1 month, but having a similar level of rewards.

3 - Some specific Records are not great currently. The Win Records fall into the same issue we had with Masteries, they are grindy. Some special Records feel impossible and not fun either.

• We’ll be looking at rebalancing a number of Records that feel impossible

• Still under discussion, but we’ll likely replace Win Records condition from “Wins” to getting Star Player (also addresses how Star Player feels less meaningful, and win bot farmers)

• Ask the community which Records they would like to see in Brawl (you can already comment on this post!)

4 - Longer term, there are system improvements we’re discussing, but have not decided or designed yet

• Overall visuals from Icons to Frames

• Surfacing improvements, such as tracking progress after each match

• What kind of rewards we want to add in the future, or replace Starr Drops entirely
  
  

Random Rewards vs. Deterministic

We know the Mastery (and also the Bling) updates were two of our most praised updates we ever had and it’s of course amazing to see our channels full of positivity. But these updates, unfortunately, couldn’t stop our decline in players in early 2023, after the removal of Boxes. So that led us to introduce Starr Drops, which was a controversial update (and also had reallocated resources), it not only stopped the decline, but sparked one of the biggest resurgences of any game. As we come down from those highs, we’re at a baseline today, still more than 3x higher than this same time in 2023. We’re really excited about the next few updates, as we’re working on new collabs, Brawloween and more...

And of course, this isn’t a balance where the community needs to be unhappy for the game to succeed; we have many examples where we achieved both players’ satisfaction and business results, and we always aim for that. But the example above is only to illustrate that we need to try different, and sometimes unpopular routes, if our previous plans didn’t perform as expected. Similarly to the Starr Drops update, our hypothesis is that if we move resources to more accessible places that require much less effort, such as the Trophy Road, more players in total, will stick around for longer.

Random rewards for Brawl are here to stay, as we do believe random rewards are fun, especially as a part of engagement, whether in the form of Trophy Boxes or Sushi. But slapping Starr Drops everywhere isn’t the right way to do that. Deterministic rewards are also nice, as they set clear progression goals. We need a balance of both. So we’ll be adding more deterministic rewards, first with the straight Brawl Pass buff. But for random rewards, we’ll be adding them in more exciting ways in the future.

TL;DR

• You won’t be seeing any more $50 early access offers, in fact, Trunk will be the last IAP early access Brawler

• More Records added every update, and likely more system improvements in future updates

• Battle Pass F2P rewards will be buffed, matching Legendary Brawler Masteries, next update

• New Brawler early access design, which also has more F2P rewards next update

• Way more events and therefore, way more F2P rewards, starting this Thursday