December Update + Balloon Warz v2.0 - Dev Diary! + MVP Leaderboard Update

[NekoRei]

Hello Growtopians!

Winter is here! What better way to celebrate it than with awesome updates?

The new Item of the Month: Go-Go-Growformer! Bestows you with speed and the ability to transform it from a cute car to an amazing robot!
A new Winter Clash Branch is now available. Discover more fantastic Winter prizes!
The Winterfest Calendar is back and giving everyone gifts for the Holidays!

This is just the beginning of our holiday extravaganza, too. Watch out for more!

Please note that the structure of Winter Clash rewards changed for the rewards unreleased. The new format is: 4 normal branches and 1 legendary branch including 1 item only.

We’d like to know your thoughts! Feel free to share your feedback and suggestions here!


-The Growtopia Team

[Starkos]

Hello Growtopians!

Balloon Warz returns! Man, it's been ages, hasn't it? Why so long? Well, the simple answer is that we got a lot of feedback from the previous events and wanted to have time to make some solid changes to the way the system worked... and we have!

I'm sure you've already noticed one of the first major changes, which is the use of special balloon battle worlds (head to balloonwarz now to get started)! Balloon Warz still involves throwing balloons at people (of course!) and there are still three teams, but now the action will take place in these pre-made arenas, instead of all over the place. This should help to keep players from getting involved in the war when they're not interested and/or using popular worlds to create an unfair advantage for themselves. Note that this does mean the Balloon Jammer is now obsolete, at least for the time being (and has been removed from the prize drop tables as a result). We'll have to think of something fun to do with it in the future...

Now, because the war is a bit less omnipresent, we wanted to make sure you guys were involved and invested in the battlefield, which was why we turned to the community for help in making these worlds - and the results were awesome! You guys submitted so many cool, eye-catching, and fun worlds, it was a real challenge picking the seven finalists. The ones you'll be fighting in were our favorites, and we hope you enjoy them, too!

(For those who made the worlds, by the way, you haven't lost any investment - we made copies of your submissions for the official balloonwarz world, so you'll get to retain ownership of the originals)

We've also added lots of new items and awards for engaging in the war, earned from the fragments and balloon-o-matics as well as new milestone prizes. In keeping with our learnings from the Season Clashes, we've also added in a special set of gloves that can help you earn points faster, but with a break chance - in this way, we hope to prevent endless point grinding (like we saw with our first attempt at Season Clashes, when you guys burned yourselves out and everything was awful), but still make everything achievable with enough dedication. Please let us know how we did!

Oh, and there's no prep phase this time, SO GET GOING! BATTLE AWAITS!

As always, your comments and feedback are incredibly helpful. After all, they helped us redesign and rework Balloon Warz, and we can't wait to see how you guys like the new changes (and items)!

Happy ballooning, my friends!

[Starkos]

Hello Growtopians!

Wow. Okay, so clearly, our numbers and predictions for Balloon Warz 2.0 were a teeny bit off. For those who aren’t in the loop, we launched a new version of the Balloon Warz feature this weekend, and part of that included a system where you could earn items by hitting point milestones, since that worked really well for the Season Clashes and would mean getting rewards would be less dependent on other players’ performance.

When I balanced this system, I pulled up the stats for the previous Balloon Warz to get an idea of what sorts of point ranges to expect. We wanted the final prize – OVEROLL’s Wings – to be very rare, with maybe only 30-50 players getting it. I used the values of the top players from the previous Warz to set the milestone for this (ignoring the very highest ones because I knew they’d gotten those scores by water-bombing their trade worlds), then reduced it by about 20%, because I figured there would be fewer targets this time.

Turns out I was half-right, because while there were totally fewer targets, I was off by something like a factor of ten on the degree. Trust me, we weren’t angling to make this a money-grab (I see you, Oldsock ), because if we WERE, we’d have made it at least semi-possible. Regardless, this has been very much our mistake, and we’ve retuned the numbers to be a whole lot more sane (and achievable) now, and lengthened the Warz by an additional day to give everyone who was a bit discouraged by the madness a chance to climb those charts!

Thanks for your feedback, guys. We are listening, and it really helps us. Keep it coming, and happy ballooning!

[NekoRei]

Dear Growtopians,

Balloons are flying everywhere! Keep on splashing your enemies and work your way up in the leaderboards. You've got 2 more days left!

Here's the overall MVPs of the Balloon Warz so far, along with their kill counts. Note that the MVP trophies will be given out after the event.

Player	Kill count
Robin	2014
cinderman	1445
GetChilly	1421
GeneralLoon	1333
DayumJason	1198
JellyTan	1142
ImKazzs	1041
Zefly	932
NatureTimes	919
Gradience	886
Hhanson	872
101Genesis	846
Hixus	843
2VEND	799
SamePerson7	780
IcySurffer	734
PotatoBae	715
KinkyyAF	702
ZyrenGt	687
Endorphins	683

Good job everyone!

~ NekoRei

[NekoRei]

Dear Growtopians,

Balloons are flying everywhere! Keep on splashing your enemies and work your way up in the leaderboards. You've got 1 more day left!

Here's the overall MVPs of the Balloon Warz so far, along with their kill counts. Note that the MVP trophies will be given out after the event.

Player	Kill count
Robin	2014
DayumJason	2001
JellyTan	1487
cinderman	1445
GetChilly	1430
GeneralLoon	1392
EZCookOven	1257
ImKazzs	1250
2VEND	1236
lellid	1168
NatureTimes	1166
Hixus	1131
HHanson	1123
KinkyyAF	1045
2Robin	1041
DESTRUCTION	1041
SamePerson7	1008
PotatoBae	983
101Genesis	937
Zefly	932

Good job everyone!

~ NekoRei