Clash Royale (2020-present)

Clash Royale (2020-present)
"Superspendcell (, the creators who saw EA) presents... Cash Roy... oof... Clash Royale!"
Genre(s): Vertical Tower Defense Platform(s): iOS Android Release Date: March 2, 2016 Developer(s): Supercell Publisher(s): Supercell Country: Finland Series: Clash of Clans Predecessor: Clash of Clans

"Clash Royale" is a strategical vertical tower-defense game developed by the Finnish gaming house Supercell, released in 2016 and it's a spin-off of the well known Clash of Clans, being the second game of the Clash game universe. The game became so popular due not only to the popularity of the just-mentioned Clash of Clans, yet its vertical mechanics and the elixir gimmick made it one of the most popular games in the App Store. Once, the game was well received by Clash fans, critics and audience, until the company went greed in the new decade (keeps milking more the game even today) and the clan wars got a controversial reworking that still piss off thousands upon thousands of users everyday.

Why It Should get 0 Crowns

NOTE: Some of its flaws that already existed even before this era will also be pointed out.

1. The first thing we can notice here is how the game is bad-treated by Supercell, since they turned it and its original source in one of the biggest cash cows ever seen in a mobile game, and due to this, they do put effort only at pleasing high-pocket players and continuing to give dishonor among new players. Keep do this by making incredibly horrible offers on premium stuff that cannot be afforded through money or gems and the infamous Pass Royale (which we'll talk about it soon) they have ripped off from Fortnite. Everyways, they'll do everything to let customers spend more real money in game.
   • The fact they're only focused on the Clash franchise and do ignore other games like Boom Beach or Hay Day make their thoughts unoriginal, as their situation is a rehash of the same situation Rovio has with Angry Birds, which is a rehash of what PopCap Games does to Plants vs. Zombies, which rehashes what Nintendo, Sega, Activision do to the respectly Mario, Sonic and Call of Duty's franchises. So why they cannot go new leaf and become original?
   • Speaking of microtransations, most of them are based on a purpose "buy-to-level up", which despite being at least better than the "pay-to-win" one, becomes just unfair when you suddendly meet players who got lvl 15 king, despite being in Arena 8-10 and have all the cards who can easily kill your deck in less than 25 seconds. The other part of them are just cheap cosmetics that don't deserve to be paid with real money (whoever wants to spend 5 bucks for an emote?).
     • They even use this latest technique to milk even in game problems. Once they sold for $3 an emote based on disconnection.
2. Another major problem here is the Clan Wars reboot happened in Summer 2020, which shocked almost the entire community due to miss what made original Clan Wars at least good. In that, users had to collect cards by doing battles against other opposing clans' members to fill a unique card selection with which players then chose among the limited cards to compete in a big final battle, which was an original concept that was never done before and it encouraged fair-playing. Meanwhile, the new one focuses around you trying to set up alone a defense to your ship and your main objective is to let clan ship to cross a goal as you have to destroy other people's defences, so you and your squad will be able to tear down temporarily the enemy ship. Despite it cannot sound bad on paper, having it as a server's main profit feels kinda wasted, since people cannot relate at all to other members to help each other, cause is based more on how you manage your situation over other's.
   • You have almost two days to prepare your defence deck before war starts, during this, you're allowed to fight a random someone in other battles not related to your clan's power. Apart defending the ship, you're literally doing nothing helpful for the progression.
   • The defence system is awful, both in how you set it up both in how you fight it. You have three elixir gatling gun towers with tons of HP (in a way others can damage them too), and each have four card slots, and their purpose is to spawn randomly on the map when the tower gets damage or after being destroyed during a current battle. During a battle against it, you got limited time and your king health will be something less than 200 HP. The towers act like the giant X-bows which don't wait to exterminate your team while enemy's units come to defend them. It's so bad made that's provoking.
3. They cannot ever decide if maintain a brand new feature or just delete it out to make space to a worse one. After the Play Store achievements went deleted in 2017, Supercell replaced them with the Quest Book, which had hideous unlock goals.
4. However, after the rework happened, it netted massive backlash for the numerous problems that can cause this to become accused of being pay-to-win.
   • It favored larger clans over smaller clans, meaning said smaller clans or large clans with many inactive members will struggle due to low numbers.
   • Clans are not matched with clans of the same or similar time zones. This means that one clan can have an unfair time advantage since they are active in one time zone when their competitors are not active for not being in the same time zone.
   • All cards have an uncapped level, which when combined with poor matchmaking, means that there's a possibility of being matched with a clan far stronger that one's own clan.
   • Rewards for not winning is far too punishing, as one losing gets a 1/10 of the winners reward.
   • The update to coincide rework needlessly changed UI and removed features like daily quest against player bases' demand.
5. The development team can make extreme balance change, making certain cards extremely powerful (i.e. the Royal Giant damage buff or freeze spell rework), or make the card extremely weak (i.e. the Royal recruit elixir cost increase or magic archer slower first attack nerf), which becomes extremely controversial in the community due to Supercell's weak communication to players.
   • Speaking of which, some of the worst examples happened in late-2018, when Supercell held community polls to vote for buffs and reworks of certain cards. Only two were ever held due to backlash of the ice wizard buff (October 2018) was insubstantial and stole the space for cards that needed buffs more than the Ice Wizard at the time and the Dart Goblin damage buff (November 2018) sparked controversy since it was voted over the health buff of archers, which the latter was underused at the time.
   • A second example is in late-2019, Supercell started to rework cards in the game.
     • One was the Executioner in September 2019, which had it's damage significantly increased by 82%, slightly decreased axe return time, but reduced range. Many feared that this rework would make the executioner too powerful due to the massive damage increase alone. This fear even reached Supercell due to the finalized damage buff was a tapered down from the original 98% damage buff. The fact that Supercell reduced the damage buff due to fear of backlash should show that even they knew this rework would make the card too powerful before release of the update.
     • The Witch rework in October 2019 was a problematic one as well, due to losing the splash damage that made it potent in some deck layouts and changed skeleton spawning layout turned the card to becoming similar to the musketeer that can spawn skeleton. This received backlash due to the fact that they changed the mechanics of the witch when it's far too late to make such change.
   • Overall, both cards were changed in function when people didn't asked for, so much that later on in late-November 2019, Supercell reverted the most problematic reworks of said cards, issuing an apology note for the change. With that in mind, it took Supercell the period of almost three months to know the saying of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
6. The Royal Giant and Elite Barbarians. The two troops are known for infamy for being strong cards that's easy to over-level due to being a Common rarity. These cards when over-leveled, is extremely strong to where the cards are hard to counter. There are also supporter asking to buff both said cards, due to their underwhelming performance when equal level to all other cards.

Comments

Loading comments...