🎮 The Future of Gadgets (First Look at Upgrade Rebalancing) — Coming Soon as an Experimental Change!
Hey, Coaches!
Welcome back to our Dev Diary series! I’m Eldroido, your Community Manager, here to give you a behind-the-scenes preview of what the Pocket Champs team is working on! 😎
Today, I’ll be focusing on the important Gadget Upgrade rebalancing that has been in the works since last year — and that will soon launch as an Experimental Change for selected players.
💡 Keep in mind that everything I’ll present below is work-in-progress. Plans and concepts may change.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
Why We Want to Change Gadgets
🚀 Since the game’s inception, Gadgets have been at the core of what makes Pocket Champs, well… Pocket Champs! Every player unlocks their first Gadgets within minutes when discovering our game, and increasing or upgrading this Collection are moments we want to ensure are always satisfying.
While we’ve made lots of changes over the years for how Gadgets can be obtained based on your feedback (including most recently the Island Fortune sets of rewards added to the Champions League), leveling up Gadgets has mostly stayed the same since the start.
Thanks to last year’s survey, we’re much more aware of the kind of experience our community currently has with Gadgets — and what needs to change first. What we’ve found is that in comparison to obtaining new Gadgets, which is an exciting event, the process of leveling them up can be rather underwhelming.
👉 Which brings us to this Dev Diary: whenever you choose to upgrade a Gadget, we want you to immediately feel a clear difference in how it can help you win races.
What Does Rebalancing Mean?
Up until now, Gadgets would start at different minimum Levels based on Rarity — yet all of them would still be capped at a maximum of 13. This means some Gadgets have had less room to grow between their minimum power and the best they can be, making upgrading less frequent due to high requirements.
🔧 To get this rebalanced, the first thing we want to try is making every Gadget start at Level 1 — which would guarantee that every Gadget has 12 upgrading steps, allowing Gold and Card requirements to be much lower at the beginning so that you can make progress more frequently as requirements increase.
Note: this applies only to Gadgets you don't own yet. Your current Gadgets won't be scaled back. Players will keep all the Gadget levels reached during the experiment.
✨ Additionally, upgrades have so far only contributed to the Speed Bonus increasing with every step, which isn’t always easy to notice when racing and can make it seem like upgrading doesn’t really do much.
💡 To combat this feeling, we want to try making other parameters evolve, such as your Gadget’s boosted Distance increasing after reaching specific levels — giving you a much more impactful reward.
We want to avoid this feeling of being too random, so we’re thinking that every Gadget could have “Milestone Levels” that really bring them to the next stage of their evolution, with the most visible changes — for our current concept, these would be Levels 3, 6, 9, and 12, so there’s always one not too far away.
💭 With these ideas, we aren’t changing how Gadgets behave when all maxed out — being at Level 13 would still feel the same, but we’re hoping the journey to get there is much more satisfying for our newer players!
Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t want to go further for our endgame players! In fact, we’ve got lots of ideas, but to get them out there, we first need to go through this necessary rebalancing process. The team really hopes to share more about our long-term vision for Gadgets later this year!
Game-wide Rebalancing
🗞️ There is more news, though! Our idea is to apply important balancing to how the game operates and feels, allowing players to receive more rewards and to grant them, daily, a sense of novelty about our game. Some mentions here:
- Chests: We want to increase the amount of Gadget Cards players can receive from Chests and also increase the drop chances of rarer items.
- Daily Deals: More options in our Daily Deals for Gadget Cards! More affordable deals are coming for Gold, too!
👉 We also rebalanced the difficulty of Daily Events to make them more accessible to players!
Launching as an Experimental Change
🧪 When changing such core aspects of Pocket Champs, we really want to be particularly careful!
As game creators, we truly believe that what we’re doing would enhance the game and pave the way for much bigger and more exciting updates down the line — but we need to be realistic about our community not fully vibing with what we’re cooking. 😅
That’s why we’re doing this step by step, starting with an Experimental Change this Spring:
• At first, only for brand new players — to detect any concern in the crucial early hours of the game without disrupting the current experience.
• Then, if we are confident with how it’s going, available to a wider % of players, both new and old!
👉 Regardless of the outcome, once this experiment concludes, all players will be returning to the classic Gadget Upgrade system (while, of course, keeping Gadget progression at an equivalent level) as we will be taking some time to look at gameplay data and decide what the best way forward is.
If everything goes well, all players will be enjoying this rebalancing in the future!
Don’t worry — that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening in Pocket Champs in the meantime! While work is being done on Gadgets, other people from the team will be releasing new seasonal content and even new features for you to enjoy!
Leave your feedback!
Thanks for reading this Dev Diary! I hope you enjoyed this quick look behind the scenes, and I can’t wait to share more news about our future updates!
Until then, see you on the race tracks!
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