MMM - Hero Academy Update Inbound!

Hero Academy Update Coming This Wednesday!

Last week we announced a new update coming to Hero Academy this Wednesday. The update is the largest one we’ve done to date, and there’s a lot to talk about. For starters, it brings with it the Dwarves, an explosive new team.

We’re also doing several other updates to the game and servers this week. I’ve asked some of the other bots here to help out with this week’s MMM and give you an overview of what they’ve been working on lately.

Balance Changes

By Marcin Szymanski, Hero Academy Lead Designer

As an evolving competitive game, Hero Academy will experience typical challenges in the realm of balance. We identified that one of the main issues at high levels of play was the effectiveness of the Council's Knight. Simply put, they weren't presenting a good enough tradeoff for the Council player, and allowed for some overpowered brute force strategies (especially when matched with a Ninja and a Cleric). We decided to reduce their health so that a Council player will now have to provide better support for their forward Knights, and so that a correctly positioned dps unit like an upgraded Archer can take out a Knight and potentially stomp it in 5 action points using a scroll. To complement this change, we gave the Wizard a slight boost in the form of some innate magical Resist. This will strengthen the Wizard against Dark Elf Necromancers, for example.

Speaking of Necromancers, we reduced the health of the Phantom they spawn from KO’d units. The Necromancer is a very powerful mainline unit, and Phantoms present a significant AP (Action Point) efficiency hurdle for their opponent. Weakening the Phantom slightly will ensure that it can nearly always be destroyed by a single attack from any other unit. Along with this change, and in an effort to address a weakness in the Dark Elves' mainline unit arsenal, we increased the Void Monk's movement range and splash damage slightly. We found that players were using this unit mostly as cannon fodder, and he wasn't being used often enough to threaten enemy unit clustering. This change enables several new options for Dark Elves players.

We will continue monitoring balance, especially with the Dwarves entering the fray on Wednesday, and will continue to make changes where needed. Please keep submitting feedback and comments, and thanks very much for playing!

Server Updates

By Stephen Clayburn, Robot Online Server Lead

While you’ve been beating up your opponents in Hero Academy, we’ve been hard at work to streamline the multiplayer experience for you moving forward. One of the most common complaints we hear is about players who will abandon their games if they are losing, leaving a handful of unanswered attacks on your “Waiting” list. This week we’ll be rolling out a new auto-resign system. For randomly matchmade games, players who don’t make a move within seven days will automatically be resigned from the game. For all custom games, including those started with Facebook friends, the expiration time will be 14 days. If you have a tendency to forget about games, don’t worry. We’re working on a method of letting you know that you have games that are going to auto-resign you if you don’t take a turn. We just want to make sure that we’re not spamming people with notifications.

Last week, we also rolled out a change to the servers that should fix the chat bugs players were having, particularly when chatting in non-English languages. There are more bug fixes coming this week, as well. We’ve heard reports from a very small percentage of players about games getting stuck in odd states and not being removed from the active games list when they’re completed. There’s good news on this front. We’ve been able to identify the most common ways of getting games stuck in this state. The update this week will do much more to prevent players from ever getting games in this state, and we’re currently looking at methods to remove all of the known “stuck” games from your lists.

Lastly, there are players still having issues with having purchased the Dark Elves or other content in the game but it hasn’t unlocked properly. We’ve identified the problem, and after the update this week, those issues should resolve themselves. Be sure to check the app again to download your purchases.

Hero Academy League Going Strong

Are you really good at Hero Academy, but keep finding yourself randomly matched up with players who can’t quite play at your level? If you’re looking for some very stiff competition, sign up with the RobotEntertainmentFans.com Hero Academy League. Some of the best players around (nearly 200 of them now!) are facing off in some very stiff competition and even tracking their own skill levels. Sign up for REF and join the league here.

Dark Elves Booster Content Raffle

Last Friday we opened up a raffle on the site for an awesome Hero Academy Dark Elves Booster Content prize pack. The community responded in spades! We had over 900 entries in the brief three days of the raffle. Thanks to everyone that entered! The winners have been announced and can be seen below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Congratulations to all of the winners! Emails will be sent out today with your content unlock codes. If you didn’t win this time around, don’t worry. You all made this raffle such a huge success that we’ll be doing more in the future.

We did hear from several of you that you couldn’t enter because you don’t use Facebook. We’ll look to make more options for entering future updates, as well as making things like Facebook entry an optional method of entry instead of a mandatory one.

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