Hey everyone! I'm Clash of Clans Community Manager Darian Vorlick.
My name is Eino Joas, the Game Designer for Clash of Clans.
We're here today to give you a little preview of what's in store
for Clash of Clans' winter update.
Before we get to the juicy stuff,
let's get some of the easier things out of the way.
It's a tradition for Clash of Clans to have seasonal Clashmas content.
- Anything we can share with them? - Well, just a little bit.
Like in previous years,
we have a bunch of Christmas content coming up when the game is live.
So, look forward to that.
There might be some crowd-pleasers from previous years.
You know what I'm talking about.
But then, we also have a bunch of balancing changes coming up.
More about that later.
The gist of it is that we want to make
Town Halls 10 and 11 a little bit easier for the attacking players.
Because the difficulty scales pretty radically from Town Hall 9.
And make some of the Dark Elixir troops a bit more powerful out of the gate,
so you don't have to upgrade them so much to get them on the battlefield.
I think that's something that will be pretty welcome.
We are adjusting a couple of things apart from the holiday content.
The first one of these kind of leads to the next.
Let's talk about the first one.
Magic Items. What are they?
Magic Items are a totally new thing that we are adding to the game.
They are these wonderful things that you can use to do wonderful things.
- Magical items. - They're magical.
The idea is actually bigger than what we are adding now,
and we'll probably keep on adding to it later.
In the first place, they'll do a few things.
They will help you finish ongoing upgrades and do this in various categories:
for your buildings, heroes, troops and spells.
The other thing is that some of them boost your village in various ways.
So you can, for example, get your attacks going faster
by using a Magic Item that boosts
your troop production, spell production and hero regeneration.
And then, there are a couple of other boosts
that let you, for example, boost all your collectors, stuff like that.
So, essentially, if one of these finishes your upgrades,
for example, if you're leveling your Barbarians from level 5 to 6,
and you use of one these upgrades, it instantly upgrades that troop to 6
bypassing the upgrade time.
- You still have to use your resources. - Right.
But, for example, if you're participating in a war,
and this is the situation that players actually come to us with a lot:
You're in a war, and you want to upgrade your Archer Queen,
you have the Dark Elixir for it, but you can't start the upgrade,
- because then... - It takes seven days.
And you won't have the Archer Queen in the battle with you.
So, what the hero Magic Item, for example, does
is it instantly finishes the upgrade of any hero that you have ongoing.
In this situation, if you have the Dark Elixir,
you can start the upgrade,
and then immediately use the Magic Item to finish it.
- And then you're good to go again. - Awesome.
Now that you guys know what Magic Items are,
I guess the key question is: "How do we get them?"
Excellent question. That actually brings us comfortably
to the next big thing that we're doing in this update.
And that big thing is called Clan Games.
What are Clan Games?
Clan Games are a new type of event that is meant for the whole clan,
and it actually requires a Clan to participate in.
Maybe I'll start from the beginning, how everything happens.
It's pretty complex. It requires a lot of Clan, social dynamics.
You'll see Clan Games starting when a new character,
which we'll add to the game, called Strongman,
appears in his caravan.
- He's the ringmaster for the Clan Games. - Pretty much. He's the organizer.
And he appears in his caravan on the side of the Village.
We've carved a small space for him there.
Once he gets there, there'll be a timer until the games start.
When they start, what happens is...
The user interface opens up,
where you can see a bunch of challenges.
- The challenges are a kind of quests. - And everybody can see them in the Clan.
Everyone can see the same challenges.
They are a type of quest that requires you to do certain things.
And there's a big variety of them.
So, there will be challenges
that are a better fit for lower level players,
challenges that are a better fit for higher level players.
There'll be troop challenges, where you use a specific troop, for example,
or building challenges, where you attack Villages and destroy certain buildings.
And quests for the main Village and the Builder Base.
Yeah. If you're a Builder Base player,
you can play the Builder Base challenges instead of the Home Village ones.
To answer the question where we've started from:
At the very end of the Clan Games, you'll get pretty great rewards.
One of these rewards on the highest tiers
will be Magic Items.
And it's important to point out that...
you can't reach the top tiers just by yourself.
You need your friends and Clan mates to help you out.
You need to work together,
because everyone's points scored by completing the challenges
feed a Clan total,
and that Clan total determines how many reward tiers you can unlock.
So, the higher tier you unlock depends on the Clan point pool?
You want to maximize who takes what. So, obviously, a lower level Town Hall
won't take "Destroy as many Eagle Artilleries as possible"
- if they can't destroy them. - Exactly.
You need to be smart and work together to get the best rewards.
What are the other rewards that people would get?
We'll give out resources, Gems, and Magic Items.
How rare are the Magic Items?
They're pretty rare, because they're very powerful.
We'll have to experiment on how often we give them out,
but we definitely want to help people progress faster.
So, for those wondering what the Q-word was:
Yes, it was quests, but in a very different way.
Once Clan Games are here,
how long will they last, and how often will they come around?
We haven't decided on how often we'll bring them back,
but when we launch the next update,
the Clan Games will be active immediately.
Then during the holidays, there'll be another round, a bit longer.
The first round will...
It'll only last a couple of days,
but then the second round will last four to five days.
But it's going to be a regular thing, not a one-time seasonal event?
Like I said, we're still figuring out how often we want to run this,
but I think you can expect them to come every now and then,
but not as a seasonal event.
We'll probably run small ones in between and a bigger one every now and then.
Like with the Magic Item feature,
we want to keep working on this.
So we've been talking about adding competitive elements between Clans.
Right now, it's just you and your Clan working together to unlock reward tiers.
Later on, we want to bring competition between Clans to the Clan Games.
It's a building block for greater things we want to build on top of.
It's setting the foundation for a greater Clan interaction.
- Yeah, precisely. - Excellent.
Now, everyone. You've seen a quick glimpse of the Magic Items
and the upcoming Clan Games. Anything else you want to add?
We didn't mention when it's coming out,
but we'll be announcing that in a couple of days.
Stay tuned to the Clash of Clans website
to see the full release date, along with the patch notes,
and details on the Clashmas content, and the balancing stuff we've mentioned.
- Apart from that, happy Clashmas! - Happy Clashmas!