Greetings Champions! This blog kicks off a mini-series of Developer Insight posts detailing various aspects of updates released this year as well as small previews of what is arriving over the horizon. Our goal with these is to answer some frequent questions we see from the community, explain various changes and issues we’ve experienced and how we’re resolving them, and hopefully along the way showcase some of the behind the scenes it takes to develop Paladins. This first post is all about Event Passes, and specifically the 2023 variation of them.
Eventful Chests
Throughout this year, we’ve made a lot of changes to the Event Pass meant to reduce the risk of bugs in future passes & standardize how passes work from release to release to provide content more often and consistently. This started with the transition to Chests being the main way of delivering content, a change that players rightfully felt was random. We went into a little bit of detail in the Wild Hoard Update Notes, but we think we should share more to elaborate why we made the change.
In the original Battle Pass & Event Pass structure, each level needed to be created and configured from scratch with no ability to reuse the structure of previous passes. Each reward, whether it was a whole new cosmetic item or a bunch of crystals, needed to be manually added and tested every time. This meant content that worked in one pass might break in the next pass if the new item configuration had a mistake that nobody caught. To cut down on both the effort of making new Event Passes and also the chances of errors happening, we came up with tools and systems that could include more automation. This is how we landed on using chests, since we could keep the same level reward structure by giving out the same chests each pass and only need to change out the items within the chests.
Once the kinks in the new chests have been ironed out, the reduction of manual configuration should prevent bugs that would previously have taken 3-4 days of testing and fixing per patch, which doesn’t sound like a lot but that’s often the difference between several balance changes, a new LTM, or general polish and bug fixing that our designers can do with that time. It also cuts down on human error, something that really began to show with passes like Midnight Masquerade and Valor’s End. Handling all the Item configuration manually meant often we would break Items in ways that made it not only impossible for players to receive, but harder for us to fix.
However, as players have noticed, the initial implementation of this new system came with new bugs and issues that we're working on addressing. Conveying the contents of a Pass, the need to open Chests in order to receive your rewards, and general frustrations with clarity are all topics we’ve listened intently to. We’re planning to take steps to address this, starting with the next update coming later this month. To begin with, we know that the auto-rolling tech has confused many players as to what items they’ve acquired, so for now we’re disabling it.
Flashback Passes
Flashback Passes began as a way for us to offer previous Battle & Event Pass content for a great discount in-between normal Event Passes. In case some players are worried that the Flashback Passes meant less original content, so far that hasn't really been the case & was not our intent. For comparison sake, here’s 2023 versus 2024:
2023 Event Passes
- Into the Abyss (February - May)
- Midnight Masquerade (May - August)
- Sand’s of Myth 2 (August - October)
- Valor’s End (October - January 2024)
2024 Event Passes
- Wild Hoard (January - March)
- Flashback: Beat Botz (March - May)
- Feudal Fables (May - July)
- Flashback: Buried Treasure (July - October)
- New Event Pass
- Flashback Event Pass
You’ll notice that 1 new Event Pass is missing while 3 Flashback Passes were added, this was so we could invest more resources into the new skins this year to improve & test their visuals. Moving forward, we’re still figuring out how 2025 will look on the Event Pass front & will share info once we have it. However, we do have some changes being made based on feedback on this year’s passes and their cadence. One small change we plan on testing is adjusting Event Pass XP to be a mix of the modern curve & past Event Pass level curves to make it feel better for players.
Feudal Fables & Buried Treasure
For Feudal Fables, players had assumed that Feudal Fables was running significantly longer than we had planned, because the in-game timer indicated as much, and we didn’t update this timer before launching Tidal Surge. That’s purely an oversight on our end, & we wanted to make up for that to players as soon as we could.
Feudal Fables is returning…and Buried Treasure is staying! This is something we’ve never done before (and is still deep in testing) but we felt the best remedy to the fact that we moved on too quickly from an Event Pass was to let the 2 of them run side by side.
Players who already made progress on Feudal Fables will still have that progress & be able to finish up their passes between now and the next new Event Pass currently aimed for October. As for Buried Treasure, as a one-time only offering, we’re adding 6 Items to the Event Pass to sweeten the deal and hopefully make up for the issues experienced around launch of this Flashback. Players who already purchased it will be able to earn these as normal, and new purchasers will have 42 levels they can progress between now and October. Both passes will progress simultaneously, no need to pick which you are working on at a given time!
This system is highly experimental, being based on what we did for Anniversary back in 2023. We’re doing our due diligence to ensure this system works as players would expect and are excited for you all to get your hands on it later this month.
TL;DR
7.5 Update (August)
- Feudal Fables Event Pass returns alongside Flashback: Buried Treasure!
- Flashback: Buried Treasure has an additional 6 Levels added.
- Chests will no longer auto-roll on acquisition. We will revisit this system in the future with improvements.
7.6 Update (~October)
- A New Event Pass will be released!
- XP adjustments will be made to make progression feel closer to past Event Passes.
Thanks for all of your support and patience while the team has been hard at work on this upcoming update. We have a lot more going on with the update coming in a few weeks, we’ll be sharing details in future blog posts touching on topics from specific Champion balance, Ranked, Wave Defense, and even a special Event! Stay tuned!