Warcraft Rumble - the ULTIMATE Deconstruction
Written by Christopher Brousseau. A 10-year gaming industry veteran, leading game development teams focused on free-to-play titles across mobile and PC. Worked on hit mobile titles such as Sims Freeplay, Need for Speed No Limits, Subway Surfers, and Sims Mobile.
Summary
Warcraft Rumble is an action-strategy game akin to Clash Royale but with a focus on single-player tower offense. It began its soft launch in August and slowly expanded to several more countries throughout the month.
Disclaimer, I’ve been playing since soft launch, so some of the details might have changed by the time you’re reading this article. Initially, I had doubts about its potential in a market still dominated by Clash Royale. Those doubts then increased further during the early hours of gameplay which proved both challenging and confusing. Yet, once I overcame the initial hurdle, what I found was something with a promising meta that set it apart from its competitors and consequently kept me hooked. With the backing of the beloved Warcraft IP and Blizzard's reputation, Warcraft Rumble has the potential to break new ground in the mobile gaming landscape and carve out its own niche among players seeking a fresh take on the genre.
Warcraft Rumble is a mobile action-strategy game, similar to Clash Royale, set in the Warcraft universe.
During its soft launch, the game demonstrated potential in terms of monetization and player engagement.
It does a good job at solving the issues many of these games have, which is the One Deck Problem by forcing you to have multiple decks fully upgraded to finish the campaign.
The game's complexity, especially for new players, is a significant challenge, with an overwhelming number of game mechanics introduced rapidly.
The tutorial phase doesn't adequately prepare players for the intricacies of the game, leading to confusion and potential player churn.
Warcraft Rumble features an innovative progression meta, allowing players to build armies with leaders and troops and allows for almost unlimited gameplay which is interesting compared to other games in the genre such as Marvel Strike Force and Galaxy of Heroes etc.
The GRID shop offers opportunities to unlock troops and enhance them, with a rotating selection of upgrades and offers a unique twist on a traditional rotation shop.
To succeed in the mobile gaming market, Warcraft Rumble needs to address its initial player learning curve and refine its unique progression system to be easier to understand.
Warcraft Rumble utilises in-game special offers and bundles as its primary monetisation strategy, leaving the game feeling very grindy for non-payers.
Special offers become increasingly appealing as players progress, offering significant value.
The Arclight Booster pack, available for $19.99 USD, provides a permanent coin and XP boost, greatly benefiting players, something not seen in many mobile games.
Addressing the initial learning curve, introducing enticing mid-game offers, and refining unlocking progression are essential for the game’s long-term success.
With Blizzard's expertise in creating compelling end-game content, Warcraft Rumble has the potential to become a major success and influence future game design trends.
Warcraft Rumble - Soft Launch
Warcraft Rumble soft launched on August 9th and expanded its soft launched countries to include Canada, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway on August 18th and its world wide release is scheduled for November 3rd. Being in Denmark myself, I’ve been playing the game solidly since soft launch so I decided to do a deconstruction of it focusing mostly on the meta because this is where I think Warcraft Rumble is doing something interesting.
To sum up the game in a quick sentence, it’s an action-strategy game with similar gameplay to Clash Royale. However… the maps in Warcraft Rumble are far more complex. The game focuses more on the single player experience as opposed to PVP. You command small collectibles of mini Warcraft characters and throw them down in a bid to beat the other side. It’s what Blizzard is calling a ‘tower offence’ game.
Now when I first heard about this, I thought to myself why in the world would anyone want to play a single player focused Clash Royale but with Warcraft IP, seven years after Clash Royale has already launched? As a business plan this poses a significant risk, especially when Clash Royale is still going strong generating $500k per day. And truthfully, I’m not sure what the appetite is for a single player focused Clash Royale, so I was sceptical going in. I myself spent two years playing Clash Royale when it first came out, and eventually I did stop playing, so my first thought was that maybe they are making this for the players who churned out of Clash Royale.
This is always a risky move for any company, but if it works it could work out really well! And I love Warcraft and Blizzard are still Blizzard so I said let’s try this out and see what it’s all about.
What I then encountered was a disastrous first two hours of gameplay, filled with confusion and a lot of losing, which is odd for a mobile game. But… after the first two hours, once I had finally started to grasp all of the systems and understand all of the details, I then saw where this game is going. And, I think there’s a really good chance that this will become far bigger than anyone ever thought.
Also, as I’m constantly curious, I decided to take a look at how it was performing and what I saw was encouraging too.
As the above image shows, the game had a spike of downloads when it opened up to the new countries, and for a soft launch game with the name Warcraft in it and with some hype around it, this is very normal behaviour for it to drop off after that first spike.
What was interesting though was when I took a look at the revenue.
Now this is what you want to see! As your downloads drop, the revenue stays relatively stable. I’ll explain later on why I think it drops significantly after September 4th, but despite the drop, the game is actually monetising pretty well. Especially given that it is during the soft launch period where people are typically more hesitant to spend.
What is also promising is if you look at the Revenue Per Downloads it’s doing pretty good! Currently sitting at $3.17 in Australia which is a really strong start. Marvel Snap was sitting around $2.20 Revenue Per Download just before going live (see image below). Which at the time was fairly low for a CCG genre but with scale, a strong brand and a strong user acquisition push they managed to increase it afterwards (see image below). And since this is called Warcraft Rumble by Blizzard, I’d expect the organic downloads to be quite significant. Plus given the size of Blizzard I’m sure they won’t go lightly when it comes to advertising and getting as many users as possible for launch day.
I expect it to follow along the lines of Marvel Snap and increase once it goes worldwide as players tend to feel more comfortable spending and there is also the hype factor of the game being fully released which tends to increase your numbers.
Gameplay - Battles
To sum things up before I dive in, the main goal of the game is quite simple (see screenshot below). Play some battles, so you can earn coins and XP to upgrade your Troops and Leaders to a high enough level to be able to defeat Onyxia (main boss of the game). They have a token called Sigils which you earn by finishing the single player levels in Campaign mode, and once you’ve earned enough you unlock the ability to battle Onyxia. It’s a simple loop that is familiar to anyone who has played games such as Heroes Charge, Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, Marvel Strike Force etc. An easy to understand progression meta, but with the gameplay of Clash Royale. However where it differs is in the details.
The gameplay and battles are a bit problematic. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good stuff going on here, there’s a lot of depth and different aspects to the gameplay which make it feel better than Clash Royale, but for someone just starting off, it’s massively overwhelming.
Let me just explain the basics really quick so we can all be on the same page. Units cost Gold to deploy, you can only deploy them wherever you own a tower (so at your base just like Clash Royale) and by destroying the otherside you win. As you can see from the screenshot below, the Gold slowly goes up over time (just like Clash Royale with elixir) and different units have different costs etc.
The next series of screenshots illustrate the first battle, which starts off fine. They try to explain that the Ranged Troll can attack flying. Ground Troops are good against range etc. It’s a small map, not too overwhelming and the battle lasts about two minutes and you have a limited amount of units. This is great! After playing this battle, you feel like you know what is going on to some degree.
In the second battle (see second and third screenshot above) they introduce about 5 new concepts to the game, all of which are kind of new for the genre, and the screen gets so chaotic and confusing that it’s hard to follow. Not only that but you have to scroll up and down on the screen to keep an eye on what is happening.
For example, in the second screenshot I’ve circled a Gold Vein. Every couple of seconds a piece of Gold comes up on that vein (up to 3) and you can mine the vein with a small gold miner which costs 1 Gold to deploy. This is an interesting aspect of the game because you can risk a miner, hoping it doesn’t die, with the potential reward of more than 1 Gold, whilst at the same time denying the other side from getting a Gold. This alone deserves its own tutorial level.
Instead as you can see from my third screenshot there is also a battle going on in the right lane. With chickens, wolves, chain lightning, the pilot with the pink hair! The second battle was beyond intense! I was still wrapping my head around the Gold Vein concept but then I had brand new Troops which I needed to defend against, nevermind trying to figure out which Troops are the correct counter that I should use. It’s just too overwhelming.
And it doesn’t stop there, the game doesn’t let you sit with any new concept for a reasonable amount of time, the third, fourth and fifth battle only throw more your way (see screenshot below). As you can see below, in the third battle you get taught about height. There’s a bridge that Troops can go under, and over. Ranged Troops can attack from on top of the bridge. There’s also a stone which you can capture as a new spawn point to place your Troops down from, but it can only be captured by land based Troops (so not flying). Just in that third screenshot alone there are so many concepts which feel new and confusing. And without the proper time and tutorial given to them, it feels overwhelming and will cause players to churn.
In the fourth battle there’s an ogre-like person flinging barrels down the path which destroy you. However there’s a blue arrow which you can tap on to change the trajectory of your Troops mid battle! Cool! But I didn’t know this, so my Troops just walked into the barrels and died. Again there’s a lot to learn here and I’ve just learned about five other things in the previous battles which I’ve now forgotten and subsequently I feel like I haven’t learned anything.
In the fifth battle, there’s a chest which spawns and the first one to get it gets some Gold! Okay sweet I like it, but wait, why are those Troops purple? Oh it means they’re ‘stealthed’ and can’t be attacked until they attack? How is anyone supposed to know this? They just fling these things at you with no explanation, all while you’re getting attacked and trying to defend your main tower. It’s a lot.
Let’s look at how Clash Royale handles this, as an example of what good can look like. As you can see (screenshots below) the first three battles are on the same map, you have the same Troops, and you are against the same Troops that you are using as well. The Troops are obvious, a Knight, a Giant (obvious tanks) and Ranged (Archer and Musketeer).
This is super clear, that first battle is obvious (not only through the tutorial but instinctively too, it’s obvious that the Giant and Knight can take more damage than the small Archer). You put the smaller looking Archers behind the armoured knight. It makes sense and it’s clear what each Troop will do. In Warcraft Rumble, it’s not so obvious. They try to mimic the same setup as Clash Royale but instead of the Archer, they use the Troll, and instead of the Knight, they use the Gnoll. I don’t think that it’s obvious that placing the Troll behind the soft looking Gnoll is the correct strategy, the Gnoll doesn’t even look like a tank in any way (see second screenshot below)!
For reference, this is the Gnoll (first and second screenshot below). He looks small. He doesn’t look like a tank? I would suggest that they use the Molten Giant (third screenshot) instead to explain the gameplay, it’s much more obvious that the Molten Giant is a tank, if you look at the first screenshot below, you can see just how much bigger and more armoured the Molten Giant looks over the Gnoll.
There’s a lot of innovation and fun going on in the battles of Warcraft Rumble, there’s a lot of depth too, but it’s thrown at the player at a mile a minute and you are made to feel like a failure within the first 5 battles of the game. Whereas Clash Royale makes you feel like you’re clever and a winner almost all of the time.
Let’s refer back to the first three battles of Clash Royale. It's very clear what to do, it’s not overwhelming, and you have the same level, with the same units so you can clearly understand what they do, how to counter them, and how to effectively use spells. If Warcraft Rumble wants to retain non Warcraft lovers, they need to do two kinds of tutorials; one for beginners, and one for advanced users. If they do not fix this, they will risk losing a lot of players at the beginning which will result in a huge loss of revenue.
As I mentioned, the first two hours of Warcraft Rumble were a bit of a disaster, and something they should seriously take a look at to improve their retention. We can see from the already strong monetisation that they are pleasing the core fans, and people who love Warcraft will stay and play. However, for the more casual Warcraft fans who are interested in the game, the likelihood of them staying is diminished greatly by the lack of clarity and the poor (and easy to fix) experience of the first two hours of the game. If they do fix this, I can see them retaining and monetizing much more strongly from a wider audience and therefore making even more money. And who doesn’t like to make more money? I know for a fact that Activision-Blizzard-King (Now Microsoft) always wants more money.
As I’ve stated before, in a map there are Gold Veins, Switches, Towers, Bosses, lots of different enemies, and different points to capture. The battles are overwhelming and you are often left not knowing what to do. The gameplay feels utterly chaotic. That said, all of these systems create a deeply layered and fun game once you learn everything.
Once I got through the first couple of maps, a few hours in, then Warcraft Rumble does what I think it does worst. It unlocks modes way before I’m even ready for it, or even capable of doing it with the team that I have. There are several game modes in Warcraft Rumble, such as a ‘Hard’ campaign mode, PVP, Dungeons etc. Every single time I unlocked a new game mode, I lost the first battle that I did. I get the idea of unlocking a game mode you cannot complete to create a strong goal, but within the first two days this is not ideal. It leaves the player feeling like a failure all the time, which is not what you want to do in mobile games.
Twist on an old Meta
Now let’s talk about what makes Warcraft Rumble super interesting to me; a bit of background on mobile game meta’s first. Since Clash Royale and more recently Marvel Snap, there has been a distinct lack of meta innovation happening in midcore competitive games. Game meta progressions have largely been the same, if I had to briefly sum it up I would say there are a total of ten unique game meta’s out there: Clash Royale style progression meta, Clash of Clans, Playrix’s progression meta, Coinmaster meta, Candy Crush meta, Summoners War / Heroes Charge meta, Fortnite meta, Game of War meta, Golf Clash meta, Merge Dragons meta and that sums up 90% of the games out there. Whenever a new game comes out I’ll play it and think to myself, oh it’s like Coinmaster’s meta but with Monopoly on it (Monopoly Go!) so for Warcraft Rumble I instantly thought, oh this is like Clash Royale’s meta but with Warcraft on it, and single player focused instead of PVP focused. Turn's out... I was wrong. It’s not necessarily new, but it innovates on existing Clash Royale and Heroe’s Charge meta progressions in a way I haven’t seen in any other game.
The reason I’m writing about Warcraft Rumble is because the game gets really fun as you progress, and the meta is different enough than anything I’ve played before. I love writing about games that take risks in this fashion, that’s why I wrote about Marvel Snap, where they risked making a PVP Card Battler game which monetised solely on cosmetics! That’s an exciting but risky idea!
Now, let me dive into how the progression meta works in Warcraft Rumble, and all of the complex layers built into the game in terms of how you upgrade your Troops, and expand your Army. Whilst I walk through this, it might seem confusing, I’ve tried to map out the progression layer as much as possible, and it does seem like a mess, but while you are playing it, it works.
Army
Let’s start with your Army, you basically have to choose from a pool of 13 Leaders and 47 Troops. An Army consists of the Leader (see screenshot above) and along with that Leader you have to pick the Troops that you want to equip onto it (6 Troops per Army). If you want you can think of this as your deck. You can’t mix Leaders with other Leaders, but you can mix any Troops with any Leader. So each Army is 1 Leader + 6 Troops. The Troops range from tanks to spells to all kinds of things from the Warcraft lore and to be honest there are a serious amount of stats and combinations between each one.
Spells have unique abilities and can be cast anywhere on the map, some Troops can be cast anywhere on the map or just wherever you’ve captured a tower. Leaders have unique passive abilities which encourages you to change up which Troops you use. As an example, using Rend Blackhand (fourth image up top) reduces the cost of other flying Troops, so naturally it makes sense to use more flying Troops when paired up with this Leader. The game has some serious depth and makes for a compelling single player campaign experience where every battle is a puzzle.
Where the game shines though is in the upgrading of your Troops. There are two upgrade streams for each Troop and Leader which you can go down: Levels and Star Levels.
Every time you play a battle, you get XP, which makes you go up in Levels, towards one of the Troops or Leaders you have equipped. As you level up you need more and more XP (see image above, 341/1200 XP needed for level 14), but also as you progress your rate of earning XP goes up. The maximum level is 20, but you can get it to 31 in other ways that I’ll explain later.
There are also many other ways to get XP which is where the game gets interesting. I love games where I feel like I can make progress every time I play. Next up, let’s go into the many ways you can level up your Troops in more detail, starting with Quests.
Quests
Warcraft Rumble has a Quest system, which works very simply; you tap the button, and you can choose to do a battle to get a decent amount of XP for three random Troops (it seems to weigh the three Troops based on the ones used in the previous battle) so you always feel like you can make progress towards a specific Troop.
What’s cool about this function is that there is no limit to how often you can do this! The Quest system works as follows: there is a chance for x1, x3 or x5 worth of XP types of Quests, so either you earn a normal amount of XP (x1) or you get x3 / x5 etc. It’s a pretty simple system, but the beauty of that system is that once you finish this quest it will rotate to a new one, no cooldowns, no timers, it’s almost infinite. There is a cap at 20 quests per day which stacks up to 300, but it’s difficult to hit. This makes the game very fun to play and allows you to grind for as long as you have time. You can quite literally sit all day and grind for hours (which is what I do) and make micro progress towards your Troops and Leaders.
Tomes & Leveling
Tomes (the books circled in the first, third and fourth images above) are sprinkled as rewards throughout the game, they can be purchased for real money, and soft currency and given to you daily for winning 9 battles per day (fourth picture). When you open a Tome, you are presented with the two options of Troops or Leaders to give XP to (second image above).
If you want to quickly level up, you can buy Special Offers priced in real currency in the store where you get Tomes which give a very large amount of XP (third image above). Tomes are also given to you in PVP rewards and for completing some of the single player campaign missions.
Whenever you gain enough XP to level up a Troop, they will get more health and deal out more damage, these are the only two stats that increase by level. There are a total of 20 levels per Troop, but there are ways to get 11 more levels. In the second image with the Molten Giant, every time you get enough stars you gain a level. As you gain stars the Troops upgrade from Common to Uncommon to Rare to Epic to Legendary. As they upgrade, they also gain bonus levels! Now let me walk you through how to get stars.
Troop Stars & GRID Shop
As you can see from the image below, not only do you have normal Levels, but you can increase Troops and Leaders Star Levels as well.
Whenever you obtain a new Troop you get them at base level. But once you get a ‘duplicate’ you gain a star. This is a very similar system to Clash Royale and most other games in this genre such as Heroe’s Charge, Summoners War etc.
There are 5 different Star Levels:
Common (this is what you start with)
Uncommon
Rare
Epic
Legendary
To increase in Star Level, you must obtain enough duplicates of the Troop or Leader and then pay some currencies to upgrade them. If you look at the second screenshot below, you can see that to upgrade my Quilboar from Rare to Epic, I require 5000 Arclight Energy (which is an earned currency), 1 Epic Core (these are difficult to earn) and 25 Stars. Once I have enough I can upgrade my Quilboar from Rare -> Epic and then they will gain +3 Level (which increases their damage and health).
I know that was probably hard to follow but it’s all in the second and third image below.
On top of this the Troops gain a special talent. This is the noteworthy bit about Warcraft Rumble’s Star Level system. If you look above at screenshot one and four, you can see that there are three possible talents in which I can equip onto my Quilboar.
Every Troop has three talents, but only one can be equipped per battle. At first I wasn’t keen on this, but as I kept playing I did find it useful to have a different talent equipped based on the Leader / Army I was using. But, ultimately it does feel a bit broken. Once you get the talent that you’re looking for, the reason to collect more stars diminishes… significantly. Something I think Blizzard needs to address because the effort to reward ratio simply isn’t there.
With all that said, the talents you can equip really change how the Troops behave, which makes for compelling battles and unique Army compositions. For example, some talents can make the Troops stealth, so by finding all of the Troops which can be stealthed via a talent, you can create an all stealth Army. This creates huge variety and makes for interesting PVP Battles.
Now let’s talk about the GRID Shop, which is the only way to get stars.
The GRID Shop is at first glance very confusing and convoluted, but it does have a lot of depth to it. Simply put, it’s a new spin on a rotating shop. Essentially, every day the bottom layer goes off the screen, and a new layer appears up top, showing you some new Troops which you can buy a star for, or buy the initial Troops if you don’t own them. This is the only way to unlock new Troops.
They run events every seven days where only a specific Leader type will appear on the GRID for that week (see Blackrock G.R.I.D Event above). Oh that’s something I didn’t mention yet… but basically every Leader has a specific type, and to succeed in this game you need one of each type. Eventually, just like games such as Heroe’s Charge and Summoners war, you can do the ‘Hard’ Campaign (see second image below), which actually gives you really good rewards, but to do this you need to finish the level with every single Leader type.
If you look at the second image below, you see the empty crests that represents the Leader type, you can see I’ve circled in the first image the three different symbols. Those represent the Leader types, and there are 5 in total at the moment. What this means is, if you want to complete everything the game has to offer and progress as far as possible you MUST have one of each type of Leader at a high level with their Army also at a high level in order to complete the campaign. On top of this, your PVP rank is based on your three highest ranked Leaders (third image below), so to maximise the PVP, you need at least 3 of any Leader to be high level. It doesn’t necessarily have to be different Leader types however.
I’ll dive into the coin currency a bit later, but just know that you’ll need to spend your hard earned coins to buy a star for a Troop or Leader.
If you are impatient and just want to cycle through the GRID you can do that in two ways; one, you can buy a Troop, and that will get rid of the column that the Troop is on, and partially cycle the GRID that way, or two, you can buy or earn a Big Red Button!
The Big Red Button allows you to blow up the GRID and take your chance at having something better. You also get gifted some randomly throughout the week as a reward. These are both fun and really useful.
Also a few more things to note. Sometimes on the GRID you will get ‘Rare’ drops, where you can pay a lot of coins to fully upgrade a Troop, these are super rare, and I’ve only seen it twice so far and from memory, the cost was over 800 coins.
The other thing is sometimes there will be an XP Gem Boost on the Grid, as you can see in the image below, there is a Modest XP Boost which gives whichever Troops or Leader that you buy on the row or column +210 XP on purchase!
In this example above, you can see that if I purchase the 250 Skeleton Talent I’ll also get 210 XP towards the skeletons! You can pay a small amount of coins to switch the place of the XP boost so that you can target the Troops that you want to give the boost to when buying it.
I think the GRID Shop feature is a really cool system, and something completely new that I haven’t seen before in a game. Whilst it is confusing at first, after playing with it for a few days I’ve come to look forward to seeing it each morning, and finding out what is new on the GRID. It also does a great job of occasionally having something really rare. When that rare thing which I want comes onto the board, there is a natural sense of urgency as I know I only have three days to get it (if it’s at the top of the GRID) before it goes away.
To try to explain how powerful the GRID Shop is in naturally creating monetisation situations, let me explain to you what happened to me. There was a chance of getting 10 stars for 1 Troop with around 800 Coins or so, and at the time, I only had about 200 Coins. However, it just so happened that there was a special offer at that time to purchase 750 Coins + a Tome for around $4.99 USD, which of course, I bought. This meant I could instantly upgrade my Troop a level and gain a new talent right away. Creating these kinds of ‘natural’ situations in mobile games is where the money can be made and I think Blizzard have done something really awesome with this system.
Earning Coins
Let’s talk about earning coins for a little bit, since it has to do with the above GRID Shop and is one of the main meta components to upgrade your Troops. You earn coins in several ways, either by completing levels in the Single Player campaign, going up in PVP ranks, completing Arclight Events or spending money.
The coin economy is super tight. As you can see in the first screenshot, when you earn coins in a Single Player campaign it increases slowly to more and more per mission, but with that the mission difficulty increases too, and it can get very difficult.
You can earn some in PVP, but not many.
Then every three days, two of the zones on the map will ‘light up’; this is called Arclight. During which time you have to do a random mission and in turn you’re awarded 60 coins.
So 60 x 5 = 600 coins every three days. Considering 1 star costs 90 coins, this means that once you get stuck in the campaign, it does become a bit grindy and that’s when the habit formation part of the game starts kicking in. Where you rely on those Arclight moments every 3 days as your main source of coins. The grind becomes painfully slow. However… They are very good at alleviating the slowness with non stop offers.
Special Offers & Permanent Buff Bundle
Warcraft Rumble has made in-game special offers their main way of monetising the game. In my opinion, the coin packs are not worth it, but there is a constant onslaught of bundles which very much are. As you level up, unlock new map areas or go up in PVP ranks various tempting offers are dazzled before your eyes and if you are enjoying the game and have some cash to spend, then they are very much worth it. The rotating special offers are pretty good, but the one time bundles in the third screenshot below are crazy worth it. I think so far in my player journey I have seen at least 25 of these offers all at various price ranges, but all under $20 USD.
There is even a permanent offer which unlocks early enough in the game for $19.99 USD called the Arclight Booster pack (see image below), which gives you a permanent buff on earned coins, and XP.
This is highly valuable, especially knowing how difficult it is to earn coins in this game. I think this is the key in Warcraft Rumble's monetisation strategy. They’ve carefully crafted the economy to make the offers and bundles they offer at every step of the way worth it. For a free to play game this can sometimes be dangerous, but they are clearly concentrating on raising their lifetime value early on in the funnel, and continuing to push it up throughout. And with Blizzard's skill at creating compelling end game content, I have no doubt they will figure out how to monetise just as strongly on the back end of this game.
In fact, if you go back and look at how it’s making money, I believe the constant bump in the first few days are the players unlocking these packs, buying the Arclight Bundle and buying as many of these special offers as they can.
As I mentioned above, the game gets exceedingly grindy once you get most of the Troops. About ten hours into the game, you hit a wall. Your progress slows and consequently players stop seeing new offers. I believe that’s what is causing the dip in monetisation; people either get stuck in the grind and churn, or they stop seeing new offers. I also think it’s fair to say that as a free to play player, this game feels extraordinarily grindy which may cause them issues with long term retention.
If Warcraft Rumble wants to continue their upwards trajectory, they have to get even better than they already are in creating constant special offers and present players with way more in the mid game layer. Because I can tell you firsthand, that once you’ve started buying the special offers, it feels good, but once they run out, you feel like there’s little to spend money on. Why? Because as a player you become so used to the special offers and in addition, are trained to ignore the main packs, those are purely just for anchoring. If I go back and look at the GRID Shop, 1 star = 90 coins which equates to $1 USD. There is no way that 1 Star = $1 USD, however when a $10 USD offer with a lot of coins comes along, which also gives me 10 stars for a Troop that I’m using, I will definitely buy that. The anchoring in this game is strong, so they need to increase their offers in both the early-mid and mid game to increase the Revenue per Downloads.
Dungeons
Finally, one of the last ways to upgrade your Troops level past the 20 cap, is through dungeons, which is an interesting system that allows you to go through a series of battles with a specific Leader, and at the end it gives you a buff, to put on your Army slot which if equipped with the right Troops will give that Troop an extra level.
As I’ve explained before there are 5 Leader types, all with a little symbol (see red circles) and every 7 days it rotates to a new Leader type in which you can do a Dungeon event. Going through the Dungeons is quite entertaining. You need to do 3 battles which are fun and different from the single player campaign part of the game, and you get different buffs between levels. Plus you only have a few attempts to complete the 3 levels to get your reward.
It’s kind of hidden but if you look at the first screenshot on the left, in the first circle from the top it shows you the 5 symbols of each Leader. This is the Dungeons rotation schedule. You can see the picture blown up just below.
Each of these symbols is the symbol of a Leader type. Currently active are the Blackrock Leaders. This means that for one week, you can only upgrade your Blackrock Leaders by going through the dungeons. The symbol on the left of the highlighted Blackrock icon is the Horde icon. Since the schedule goes left to right, this means that a player will need to wait four weeks before being able to do a Dungeon for a Horde Leader. That’s a long time!
The reward you get is great yet a bit hard to understand at first. Simply put, every Troop has a set of Traits, as you can see in the second image below there are a lot of traits in which a Troop can have. For example the Harpies have Flying, Squad, Miner and Fast and the Squad Trait means they usually come in a small squad of three.
Now, every time you finish a Dungeon you get a unique reward which you can only get by completing them (see image below).
first screenshot is the reward, where you can pick what kind of ‘Army Upgrade’ you want to applThe y to your Leader’s Army. As you can see, I currently have the Squad Bonus at Bronze, and the Ranged is at Silver, that means that if I match the Troop Trait in that specific slot, at Bronze they will gain +1 Level, Silver +2 Levels and Gold +3 Levels. There is also a Leader slot available to upgrade your Leader Level!
This is super powerful, as gaining levels actually gives you a huge advantage in the game, as well as PVP.
Every time you complete the Dungeon, you can do it again right away, but the NPC Opponent goes up by one level, so it becomes more and more difficult each time. To get an entire Gold set you have to complete the Dungeons 21 times.
This is an awesome system which adds even more depth to the meta, but also depending on when you start, it makes you want to level up at least one of each Leader Type.
In short, Dungeons = Levels.
Guilds / PVP / Raids
I won’t spend too much time talking about the rest as they’re fairly stock standard systems, but I’ll quickly mention this. PVP is the same as most games, there’s a Leader board with rewards which reset every X days. The only new thing in PVP, which I’ve already mentioned, is that your total score is calculated by using three Leaders instead of just one.
The Guild system is pretty good! You need to earn points in PVP and depending on your Guild Leader you’ll get 200 Crests for the top 3 Leaders. But, whenever there’s an Arclight Surge (remember that thing you can grind for coins) then depending on which Leader you use to do those, you’ll earn points for that Leader’s slot. As you can see, every 2000 points per specific Leader that you earn as a Guild, you’ll get Tomes for which give you XP towards those Troops. So you really have to mix and match which Leaders you have equipped when doing the Arclight Surges to maximize the Tomes and to get all of the benefits from the Guild War Chest.
And finally, Raids is on the screen, and it says Coming Soon! So I’m looking forward to seeing how that pans out. I just figured I would capture the fact that it’s here so as we look back on this article in the future, we can remember that it wasn’t even a thing yet.
Final Thoughts
Warcraft Rumble is fun, different and once you get into it, compelling! The GRID Shop is clever and creates natural monetisation opportunities. While confusing at first, as you live with the system it becomes understandable and a strong retention mechanic.
The way the game encourages you to play with multiple Leaders is a great choice for the game and will serve them well in the long term.
The fact that I can literally play endlessly is a bit of a risk, but the progression is still slow enough that it might work out in the end. And Blizzard’s ability to create end game content in every game they make gives me confidence that they will figure out how to extend the lifecycle of Warcraft Rumble.
The fact that the meta system feels different is refreshing and exciting. Going to a single currency is dangerous, but they seem to have the right balance and it creates compelling reasons to buy the offers.
Overall, I really do think that it has a solid chance of becoming a hit, but it needs to do the following things:
Work on those first two hours. It’s not good, and after speaking to many people they all had a very similar experience as I did. I lost so much in the beginning, it felt too hard, and it was too overwhelming.
Make more special offers in the early-mid and mid game. While they are currently really strong, they could be better, and that will stop the drop in revenue after the first few days.
Have a solid Live Ops cadence to extend the end game meta so that a player never feels like they are ‘finished’ with the game. I assume this is coming, but there are no signs of it yet.
Stop unlocking game modes before the player is ready to succeed in them, as losing on the first try of every game is disheartening.
If Warcraft Rumble can fix those things, I think this game can definitely become a huge success, and I think we will see other games copy this Meta in the future. Even though the Meta seems familiar at first glance, when you’re playing the game, it feels new, plus the GRID Shop is a really cool and innovative spin on a rotating shop. I look forward to seeing what the next few months have in store for the game, and how they plan on extending the end game too.
