#GrowAmityArena:

Worried about all of the players who have quit the game? Want to grow the playerbase so that Amity Arena stays healthy for many years to come? You’ve come to the right place.

#GrowAmityArena is a player petition for RWBY:Amity Arena. This petition was organized and approved by a group of 14 highly active players, but we want it to be a movement for all Amity Arena players. We are organizing an email and Twitter campaign to guarantee that the developers hear our concerns.

In order to make this succeed, this is what we need to do:

EMAIL CAMPAIGN: Please copypaste and sign this petition letter, and email it to help@hangame.com on December 26, 2019. Timing this on the day after Christmas maximizes the chances that it will be read (as a letter sent right before Christmas could be lost over holiday break).

TWITTER CAMPAIGN: Also on December 26, 2019, please tweet the petition link https://tinyurl.com/u2yeynf at the Amity Arena social media team (@RWBYAmityArena). Here’s an example of what your Tweet may look like:

@RWBYAmityArena: I want to #GrowAmityArena by making it more attractive to new and old players. Please read our petition at https://tinyurl.com/u2yeynf

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Dear Amity Arena dev team,

We the players of Amity Arena love the game and have spent considerable time and money on it. That said, in recent months we have become concerned about the direction that the game is going, for reasons we will explain below. We would love for Amity Arena to stay fun and exciting and for the playerbase to grow. But after half a year with a shrinking playerbase, it is clear that several critical changes must be made in order to #GrowAmityArena.

It’s nearly impossible to get a big group of players to agree on anything. Ask 10 people what they think about Ice Flower and you’re likely to get 10 opinions. However, we have outlined the major concerns that we feel need to be addressed as follows:

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Communication should be a two-way street.

This is a major source of frustration for many of us, including those of us who have spent lots of time discussing game balance across various platforms.

For many months, player feedback has gone to the official Discord #weekly-feedback channel, various Facebook fan groups, and the official AA Twitter. Some of our suggestions are implemented, some are not, and sometimes we get patch changes that very few players expected or asked for.

Regardless of what happens, the development team never replies to player feedback. Sometimes we get an answer from the Twitter social media team, but these answers are filled with vague promises without concrete details or ETAs.

Players would feel much better if the dev team regularly posted “dev diary” updates and/or “Upcoming Changes”.

With some clue of what’s coming next, our weekly feedback would feel more like a conversation rather than shouting into the void. Simply stated, we want communication from the developers about their primary objectives and rationale.

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New (and old) cards need more extensive QA.

In recent months we have seen many issues with card glitches or unintended interactions. While it’s impossible for every card to be perfectly balanced, many of these issues should have been caught in QA testing.

For example, Apathy multiplying exponentially and crashing phones, Checkmate failing to make things invincible, Arslan’s hitbox preventing her ability from dealing area damage, Mutant Creeps pushing Ursa, and Arachna Mines dealing zero damage to structures should have all been caught prior to being released.

Furthermore, there are bugs with old units that haven’t been fixed for a long time. These include:

Certain academy members become donation locked, so you cannot donate cards to them unless you completely uninstall and reinstall the game.
Neo re-gains the double damage buff every time she switches targets. 
Penny’s ability sometimes ticks 6-7 times instead of 8.

Simply put, the game appears to be lacking in QA. Cards should never be released with game-breaking abilities or non-functional abilities.

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The release cadence needs to slow down.

Ever since mid-February, Amity Arena has been on a crazy release cadence of one card every week. This is bad for game balance because neither the devs nor the players have time to adjust to one new card before three more are released. Even with heavy spending it can take ~2-3 months to get a newly released card up to decent levels. By the time this happens, there are 10 newer cards skewing everyone’s perception of game balance, since we don’t know how a card will perform on ladder until it’s properly leveled.

Granted, it does seem like the release cadence is already slowing down somewhat, as the December Update doesn’t contain a huge number of new cards. We hope that this trend continues.

To put things into perspective, Clash Royale launched with 42 cards and released 28 cards in its first year of existence (2.3 cards/month), 13 cards in its second year (1.1 cards/mo), 7 cards in its third year (0.6 cards/mo), and 6 cards in its fourth year of existence (0.5 cards/mo) for a total of 96 cards.

In contrast, AA launched with 41 cards and released 52 cards over the first year (4.3 cards/mo), plus 3 since the one-year anniversary, for a total of 95 cards. That’s an insane release cadence for a game with a much smaller budget than Clash Royale.

Please slow things down.

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