Considering its huge popularity, it’s no wonder that “Clash of Clans” is still getting updated with new features and content on a regular basis. And as long as the game is pulling in nice profits as it is right now, we wouldn’t expect this trend to stop anytime soon. Supercell, the game’s developers, have been very diligent in maintaining a high level of quality for the title and listening to player feedback.
Recently, the company released a relatively large update for the game, adding many new features and rebalancing a lot of units. However, as is usually the case in game development, a large update like this was bound to be full of various bugs, large and small, and the studio was quick to follow up with a smaller update that addressed many of those issues.
For example, the Clan War matchmaking feature was broken with the last update, preventing some clans from getting into a match that’s right for them – or into any match at all. The AI of the Wall Breaker was tweaked as well, or rather reverted to its state from before the patch. Apparently, the new behavior has a glitch that’s yet to be resolved, so for the time being Supercell have just decided to disable the new AI as a faster solution.
The value that was shown for the Clan War star requirement for Clan XP during wars was incorrect in the last update, and this was addressed with the small patch as well. Some incorrect names and translation strings have been fixed too, such as wrong names for Simplified and Traditional Chinese in the Language selection menu.
The Dark Spell Factory update added various things to the game, but the most notable feature that was introduced was the Dark Spell Factory itself that the update was named after. It gives players access to three Dark Spells, namely Haste, Poison and Earthquake.
The first one, Haste, increases the movement speed of all units for the duration of a raid or an attack. On the other hand, Poison will slowly drain the health of defending troops, making it good for a frontal push. It can also open up the possibilities for some interesting strategies when combined with other skills, but players are still exploring the best ways to put it to action.
Last but not least, we have Earthquake, which causes massive damage on both walls and buildings, and has an area of effect. The update also changed the multiplayer portion of the game to some extent, and even though there were reportedly no major bugs discovered during that round of patching, the company still needed to address some issues with the game’s balance.
It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting there. “Clash of Clans” is a massive game that can be updated in many different ways and its balance has to be approached from multiple angles. It’s not as simple as tweaking a few numbers and calling it a day, the game is actually quite large in terms of relations between its units, and requires an appropriately careful approach in its balancing.
Because of this, we would expect to see these balance patches to keep coming out for some time. Maybe they won’t be on such a large scale for much longer as the studio will eventually figure out the important issues, but we expect to see more balance changes over the next months. It’s also part of the way online games work in general, and this has been a common trend for a while.