I am excited the game finally decided to focus on improving the new player's experience, since we are at this topic I started to wonder can we group a few key goals together to create something new and fresh for the game and also solve the "bot" issues the newcomers tend to face?
So I am suggesting that we can make a fresh new section for Novice and Bronze level experience and create a "Novice playground" that you will be required to purchase a monthly battle pass to participate in and all rewards in this area are account bound (For example all reward cards earned in this section are account bound and only if they are level up to beyond silver level then the extra can be traded or sold) With this new Novice Playground we will combine it with onboarding new players, new player guides, mobile optimization all in one if we manage to attract 100,000 new players at $9.99/mo for battle passes the operation cost of the game is basically covered.
We can focus on creating fun and engaging content aim to keep new players interested and having fun for the first 6~12 months of joining the game and giving out either locked reward cards or account-bound rewards and top it with achievement titles, custom avatars, and skins so we can make sure the new players will be able to explore the game without bots since the bots will have nothing to gain for a long time or ever so is not cost-effective for bots to be in this area of the game.
One of my suggestions is for us to create a "ghost card arena" starting with all available cards for Chaos Legion and Riftwatcher level 1 ghost cards for the first two months of buying a battle pass, adding another deck (Untamed or Dice) for the third and fourth month, and following months will gradually unlock older deck as ghost cards, they can win opportunities to level up their ghost card and other prizes along the way. So if a new player purchased a 3-month pass we can unlock the "Ghost card" deck that includes CL, RW, and along with either Dice or Untamed deck at level 1. We can also offer different package deals from time to time. This will provide new players a chance to try out and use all the available cards while competing in a fair and fun arena since rewards will be account bound no bot will be interested. Our goal is to let them try out all the different cards the game has to offer while slowly building up a minimum silver-level deck before "graduating" to the main league while competing with similar-level players. And once the new players collect enough cards (account bound and locked) until they can comfortably play in the Silver league or higher then it will be a soft handoff for them to join the main game leagues and once they begin to play in the main league no more battle pass is needed and they can always purchase the battle passes to go back to "Novice Playground" and "Ghost card arena" if they choose.
Making the "Novice playground" section of the game mobile friendly and easy to use should be the first step to increasing our player base, with the "battle pass" system all the new players are also contributing to the game. We can also create a specialized tournament for them to win credits to rent cards and create weekly challenges for them to accomplish and earn rewards. And throughout this period we will also have tutorials to guide the new players into the more advanced part of the game including secondary markets, card buying and renting, how to use Hive engine, and slowly prepare them so when they "graduate" to the main league they will be well prepared. The global mobile games market generated an estimated $6.6 billion from player spending across the App Store and Google Play in February 2022. But we only need a very small piece of that pie to be profitable.
The "novice playground" reward can also include rewards to help level their "Ghost card" so they can advance to maybe even playing in gold league level in the "Ghost card arena".
I strongly feel that if we can focus on creating a fair and fun beginners arena for the new player we will have a better chance of actually attracting and retaining new players for eventual soft-hand off into the main league of the game and making the onboarding process way smoother and also weed out the "bots" and prevent them on driving away new players. And with so many successful mobile games on the market maybe we can outsource the process and hire a mobile gaming company that already has the know-how and capability to "port" our game into the mainstream mobile gaming market.
Thank you for spending the time to read over my post, there are so many new mobile games that already hit the market after a short time of development and still manage to succeed I don't see why with our successful game that's trialed and tested for so long will fail to compete.