A Recipe for The Proving Grounds
Hi there! I’m Mark, lead feature designer for The Proving Grounds. With The Proving Grounds launching soon, I’m excited to share some insight into what the design team was thinking as we designed it.
When we started working on the Proving Grounds feature, I had one thing in mind: what can we do to extend the social player experience in the game beyond Guild vs Guild (GvG) and weekly events?
As someone who enjoys a lot of what MMORPGs offer, I was heavily influenced by the content available in those games. If you look at World of Warcraft as an example, there are tons of Raids that you can only access if you are at max level. If you’re not at max level, you have the option of instances, which are level-appropriate dungeons you can enter with a group. Can you guess where the best place to get a highly-effective group was?
Yes, it was in your guild! Like in World of Warcraft, Guilds are a big part of Legendary. Our Guilds (and esteemed Guild Leaders!) keep us all together, provide support in events, and in some cases, out of events and in real-life as well! (Shoutouts to RAOD who are holding it together for Otto.) More than that, there is no better way to bond than to take down a big, bad Boss together.
Guild Bosses in the weekly event are Legendary’s equivalent of end-game content. Since Legendary already had that, we wanted to create opportunities for players of ALL levels to enjoy the game with their guilds — the instanced dungeons, so to speak.
With that goal in mind, we settled on designing a feature that checked off a few things:
- More guild-related activities for players
- Provide more opportunities for guild-wide pride
- Create a system that allows players to strategically sync resources
- Allow players to make progress on their favorite UFs
More Guild Activity
Playing weekly events is fun, but what if you wanted a break from constantly devastating the myriad of bosses available in Slayer and Commander events, while still playing with and helping your guild progress? Current features for Guilds include just the once-a-day GvG hits and the weekly event. We wanted to provide another, daily avenue of guild-related activity for players, to give them another common goal to work hand-in-hand together.
Guild-Wide Pride
We also thought about what was better than being in a guild. The answer was simple: being in a really good guild that kicks ass each event and decimates its GvG opponents, that’s what. The Proving Grounds will provide another tangible source of guild-wide pride in shiny new leaderboard emblems, which will showcase your progression and yes, make you feel better than the rest! These emblems will be viewable on the third guild leaderboard to hit the game, which you’ll be able to view in The Proving Grounds feature when it’s live.
And yes, the leaderboards will also be providing rewards for leaderboard placement, particularly as gifts to your Guild Leader for sharing!
Strategic Resource Syncing
It’s probably time to go into what those rewards actually are, and how we decided on them. Do you remember that one, underutilized slot next to your Relics…?
Yes, scrolls are making a comeback! Scrolls will be available to you as an individual player, but there will be many Scroll gifts from leaderboard rewards as well. While we wanted to reintroduce Scrolls to the game, the original idea behind the Scroll Guild Gifts was to empower Guilds to strategically sync the resources that they have, so all members would be able to perform at their optimum level. That would also tie in to our second goal mentioned above — creating guild-wide pride.
Making progress on favorite UFs
Finally, one thing we’ve seen players bring up a lot has been to bring back historical cards. Many players have that one (or several) favorite cards they enjoy using, but it is difficult to complete a Collection once the weekly event featuring them passes through. Once The Proving Grounds is in full swing, historical MC and UR cards will be periodically available only in that store, so that you can finally craft that historical UF you’ve been missing, and complete your collections!
We put all of the above together, stirred the pot a bit, squashed a few bugs, said a few “bubble-bubble” spells, and came up with The Proving Grounds! There are many other aspects of the feature that we did not mention here, so jump into Legendary and find out for yourself when The Proving Grounds launches tomorrow.
We would love to hear what you think, so please give it a try and let us know! The best of you will be immortalized as the Proven Ones after all.
Wait, you want to know what that is? Remember to log in and find out ;)
Be Legendary!
