Hello Guardians.
This is the Defense Derby development team.

First, we want to apologize for not engaging properly with the feedback we have received from the community.
Going forward, we will provide updates about future plans and respond to feedback more quickly, more often, and more proactively.

This development note will address game balance, the most common point of feedback from our Guardians.
What follows is an acknowledgment of current issues and our plans for balance adjustments going forward.

Some Guardians may not agree with what we say or may have different opinions.
We will carefully consider the feedback for this development note,
and use it as fuel in continuing to build Defense Derby.

Please share your opinions with us!

Core Derby Gameplay

The core of Derby gameplay is making the best selections in the situation you've been given.
These selections involve deck construction and deliberate play.

Ideal gameplay means that our Guardians' selections determine victory or defeat,
and we have determined that it is a problem when we do not provide these results and experiences.

Therefore, determining which of the many possible situations in Defense Derby are problematic is crucial
in order to adjust balance and create ideal gameplay.

※ To prevent problematic situations, it is essential that there are no heroes, units, or strategies
- so powerful that they eliminate the need for good judgment.
All heroes and units do not need to have the same performance and abilities.

※ Game balance direction
The development team has determined that there is good balance to be found somewhere between the following two situations:
 - A certain faction, hero, unit, combo, or strategy is too powerful
 - A certain faction, hero, unit, combo, or strategy always leads to the same outcome

This means that a certain combo or strategy can outperform others,
but it should always have weaknesses that can be attacked.

With this kind of balance, changes to the current scouting and play strategies
lead to the creation of even more strategies. Players then put their own spin on these new strategies, leading to their further development.

Major Issue - Increasing Final Wave Level

The level of the final wave has been increasing since the launch of Defense Derby.
The development team considers this a primary reason for the current balance issues.

Defense Derby is becoming a game that is hard to play casually since the time of each match is increasing.
This increased play time reduces the effects of rewards from events, quests, and Derby Requests.
Playing for these rewards feels like homework
and reduces the perceived value of rewards in higher leagues. This leads to players not wanting to advance beyond a certain league.

Why Wave Levels Increase

Final wave levels are increasing due to a complex mixture of reasons.
This situation is not limited to certain decks, but affects the game as a whole.
In particular, we have confirmed that the wave level increases as one progresses through higher leagues.

The development team believes the key reasons for this are as follows:

1. Uniform scouting strategies increasing the rate of simultaneously successful bids
2. New units and balance patches increasing the power of decks
3. Power differences between decks and strong recovery and crowd control abilities

1. Uniform scouting strategies increasing the rate of simultaneously successful bids

Scouting strategies have unified and many Guardians now bid between 4-7 (or 5-7) chips.

On release, default play in Defense Derby involved bidding in order to take away units from each other, or keep each other in check.
Gradually this scouting strategy changed so players only properly bid on units useful for their own decks (heroes) and strategized to take the smallest loss when selling.

This has created a situation in which the difference between betting amounts is small, and simultaneously successful bids are now common.
This situation is related more to the increased power of decks than to wave difficulty.

Furthermore, this has reduced the tension of scouting, thus reducing much of the fun of this core feature of Defense Derby.
The development team views the much lower value of units not used in the player's deck as the root cause of the problem and plans to implement two major changes in response.

1-1. Combo Effect Adjustment
Making use of faction and type combos in battle was meant to be a core system,
but we did not intend for it to be the one and only factor in achieving victory.

The development team is adjusting these combos as our top priority.
We plan to have our final test of adjusted combos and wave difficulties in the soon-to-be-opened Rival mode.
Afterward, we will consider the results of this test along with the feedback from our Guardians and quickly apply the changes to Derby mode.

1-2. Deck Concept Direction Shift
We plan to revamp the deck concept in Defense Derby to focus on building decks with units that maximize the characteristics of the 12 heroes.
In addition, each unit will be categorized as either amplifying the deck's specialty or being universally applicable.

This change is intended to diversify the play experience, in part by addressing scouting strategy uniformity. Further details will be provided later.

2. New units and balance patches increasing the power of decks

Starting with the first new unit, the Plaguemancer, we have adjusted balance by increasing the power of new units and also of underused heroes, units, and artifacts.
We did this because we believe it's a major issue if the cost and effort needed to grow heroes and units is considered wasted.
Of course, we also made some reductions to the power of certain heroes and units that caused significant balance issues.

As a result of these upward balance adjustments, the difficulty of waves became less than intended,
the time required for matches increased, and there was even an effect on scouting strategies.

While we have a principle not to undermine the efforts of our Guardians, we consider it even more important to not allow a situation that compromises the core of our game.
Therefore we plan to adjust wave difficulty in consideration of increased deck power.

3. Power differences between decks and strong recovery and crowd control abilities

3-1. Power differences between decks

It is hard to see the current balance of decks as perfect when looking at them by hero.
The biggest issue is the varying number of units each deck can use effectively.

Lana and Merham decks can be seen as strong as they have access to units with single-target, splash, and crowd control capabilities.
This differs from Elgry and Finesse decks which lack units with splash and crowd control capabilities and are therefore difficult to use.

While temporary balance adjustments have been made to some units, we acknowledge that these measures have been insufficient.
The development team is making every effort to quickly make an update to the lacking units, and internal testing is underway for these units for the first half of 2024.
We endeavor to make a variety of decks more usable by continuously adding new units.

3-2. Strong recovery and crowd control abilities

We can see that the most direct reason for the increase in the number of waves is decks with a recovery or crowd control concept.
There have been multiple downward adjustments for damage reduction and recovery, but we have deemed that these abilities are still too effective.

In particular, there are cases in which such decks can achieve victory more consistently than decks carefully constructed by a Guardian, which highlights an urgent need for improvement.
We considered reducing the amount of healing or adjusting the number of figures for crowd control abilities as immediate fixes, but we have decided to more fundamentally change the play concept in order to solve the root issue.
Further details will be shared later along with the direction for deck concepts going forward.

This was a lengthy explanation, but we can sum it up succinctly as follows:
 - The final wave level is increasing due to game balancing, scouting strategies, combo effects, etc., and this is a serious problem.
 - In the short term, faction and type combos, wave difficulty, and recovery and crowd control skills will be adjusted.
 - In the long term, we will encourage dynamic scouting by providing unit updates for each deck. We will also overhaul the deck concepts for the 12 heroes.

Even though we have shared a lot of information, there are still further adjustments to be made and some details that could not be shared at this time.
We will provide additional development notes to continuously address the concerns of our Guardians.

Additionally, we will do our best to listen to the opinions of our Guardians and improve Defense Derby further.
Your opinions, your support, and even your criticism are greatly appreciated.

Thank you.