Hello Contestants, I’m the producer of Soul of Eden, QQ.

Since the day of Soul of Eden’s launch, within about a week’s time, over 1,500,000 contestants have stormed the Coliseum and over 14 million battles have ensued. Thank you so much for all the support.

To improve the gaming experience for the contestants, the development team has been working their fingers to the bone to come up with new cards, new game modes, and systems. I wish I could say more at the moment, but we’ll be putting out news soon, so keep your eyes on social media.

This article will address two issues that contestants have brought up and the idea behind their design. The first is why faction must be unlocked by gaining a certain number of points, and the second is the plan for performing balance adjustments to the game. I hope this article makes clear the team’s design regarding these two issues, as well as future plans for the game.

Unlocking Factions

We fully understand that some players want to play as a certain faction, but discover they can’t do so immediately. Actually, in the initial stages of development, and well into the closed beta, there were no faction restrictions. Why did we make this adjustment? The reason is simple: To better facilitate novice training.

What makes SoE different from other card games is that in a real-time strategy game, if your opponent plays a card you’re not familiar with, you can’t take your time reading the card descriptions. To players who are used to this, it may be nothing. But to a player who is first experiencing this type of game, it might be difficult to get used to.

Real-time battle games and card strategy games are game types that are not super easy to pick up. Soul of Eden is a fusion of the two, and during closed beta, we got a lot of feedback saying that it was difficult to learn how to play.

We didn’t want SoE to be a game just for hardcore gamers. Rather, we want it to be a game that is accessible to a broader gamer base, where three or five friends can play a round whenever they want. From the initial revamping of the art style to the later stage of the closed beta where we implemented the faction unlocking system, it was all to achieve this goal.

On the one hand, we didn’t want the tutorial to be too long; but on the other hand, there was too much information for players to have to learn.

So, we took this learning process and transformed it into a journey of “upgrading” factions. When contestants enter the Coliseum, they’ll start with the Republic and only encounter opponents using the Republic. This makes it a simple environment, suitable for learning. After getting to know the Republic, as the game progresses, players start to understand the Republic and the neutral cards shared by the Republic and Alien. Battles combinations go from one faction to three. By the time the Beasts and Empire have been unlocked, we believe the contestants will have had enough training to take on any challenge.

When a faction is first unlocked, there’s a higher probability of being matched up with the same faction. We hope this allows the player and their opponent to learn about the faction’s offensive and defensive advantages and disadvantages

Besides this, when the player’s score is in the lower range, they’ll get more points when they win, but won’t lose so many when they lose. This allows the overwhelming majority to get enough points to unlock all the factions simply by putting in time training in actual battles, albeit some slower or faster than others.

Our initial hope was for both experienced Coliseum contestants as well as newcomers to the genre to be able to experience the joy of SoE. Just remember, once you’ve unlocked all the factions, your journey in the Eden Coliseum has only just begun.

Balance Adjustments

Here, we’ll discuss our plan for Soul of Eden’s balance adjustments. I believe this is what most contestants are concerned about.

Soul of Eden is Rayark’s first PvP competitive game. Maintaining a fair and ever-evolving battle environment is not only a massive challenge, but also one of our top priorities.

Before the official launch, we had 100 thousand contestants participate in the closed beta. After analyzing this valuable data and performing tons of balance adjustments, we launched version 1.0, and the four factions had relatively similar win rates.

Of course, some cards will be stronger than others and will be beneficial overall. These cards will most likely become the core of the player’s battle strategy, and the player’s offense and defense will revolve around them; yet the strengths of some cards might ruin the whole gaming experience. When that happens, the balance team has to step in and maintain a healthy battle environment.

We will decide the content of future balance adjustments after further analyses, testing, and an overall assessment of various data (including faction win rates for different levels, card win rate, card usage rate, etc.).

However, Soul of Eden’s real-time qualities and unit freedom makes it especially easy for balance adjustments to produce a butterfly effect. Even minor adjustments will affect the whole system. For this reason, besides the data, we place immense value on the contestants’ experience. All feedbacks and suggestions we’ve gotten from the contestants will become important reference material for future balance adjustments.

In the current environment, the greatest discussion revolves around the Faceless Saint. Both the data and player experience suggest that this card must be adjusted. As such, the development team is already in the process of planning and testing ways to adjust the Faceless Saint, expecting these adjustments to its strength to be implemented in the next balance adjustment (9/14).

Besides this, we have our eyes on several other cards. For example, the Terminite Queen has been a hot topic of discussion, given that its win rate is alarming, putting it in the danger zone; another card players are discussing is Hotshot. Although players think that it is too strong, its win rate is still within a reasonable range. The team is also assessing how to strengthen those cards whose usage rate and win rate are relatively low.

Of course, the team won’t simply look at the win rate to determine which adjustments are necessary. Rather, they’ll carefully assess the current condition of each card, the way they affect each other, and the condition of players who have upgraded their decks, then adjustments will be made.

Although getting the hang of Soul of Eden may take a bit of time, after the contestants gradually build up control techniques and think over their battle strategy, they’ll realize that there are so many strategic possibilities, and the game will only get more and more exciting to play.

Since we started on this journey, our main focus has been to make this game more fun to play. We will continue to work as hard as we can, and you contestants will join us every step of the way. Whether it’s by creating new strategies, developing awesome decks, mastering meticulous controls, or even more directly by discussing issues on social media and sending us customer service emails, we love to hear your valuable thoughts and opinions that come straight from the frontlines. Thanks everybody!