Hey folks, thank you for your patience! As we promised in the midpoint update, we've been working hard on making further improvements to the Paths of Adventure — and we're happy to share that we've managed to finalize things just in time to ship them for this one.

Please feel free to close this message now and start making progress on your new Paths already! For those of you that were hoping to settle in for a read with a nice cup of tea, however, we'd like to share some of our thought processes behind this second round of improvements.

Big-picture direction: Aside from bumping up the total value of the rewards, one design goal we had for this overhaul was to greatly increase the supply of items that are generally immediately useful to players (resource crates, Trainer Troops/Heroes, Ascension Materials, Aethers, regular/Master Emblems, etc.), and balance things out by removing or reducing some of the items that may be worth a lot but typically need to be held onto for a long while. Through this, we hoped to make it easier & faster for players to train newly obtained Heroes up to the level where they can be thrown into battles and pull their own weight.

While doing this, however, there were some important aspects that we ended up overlooking. Today's round of improvements hopefully should address most if not all of those issues!

Value is subjective: The big mistake we made when putting together the first round of improvements was not paying close enough attention to how players might feel about changes to exactly which items can be gotten from PoA. We ended up overlooking the fact that the value of each item is very different for each and every player. As a result, a number of players felt that our changes were a flat-out nerf — something we had never intended to do — instead of an improvement.

Today's update brings back the overall catalogue much closer to the original platter that had been offered in the two paths, but still preserves the vision we outlined above. We hope you'll enjoy these sets of rewards more!

On the new difficulty setting: On July 1, we made it significantly more convenient for our players to complete the Paths of Adventure — and while we plan to continue to keep an eye on things for a while, what we've seen over the past 4 weeks looks quite promising!

Many players managed to reach personal best milestones or even complete the Paths of Adventure for the very first time, collecting more rewards than they've ever done before. Meanwhile, numerous veteran players voiced their pleasure about how they no longer feel "forced" to clear challenges that they never really enjoyed just for the sake of completing PoA. Overall, we've seen heartening improvements across the metrics concerning the two paths.

Of course, most players (particularly our veterans!) do enjoy a good challenge and we never want to make things feel too easy. In the case of PoA, however, it seems like loosening completion requirements did make the whole experience more stress-free and enjoyable — we believe that this is a quality-of-life improvement worth keeping! We'll continue to monitor things and there may be additional tweaks in the future, but for now we feel that we're in a good place.

More free rewards: We're well aware that the free milestone rewards from PoA are an integral part of the F2P/C2P experience. While we did improve the total value of the free rewards (by our numbers, roughly 8% for PoV and 16% for PoG) even in our first round, we later recognized that we underestimated the worth of certain items that are typically harder to come by for F2P/C2Ps.

With today's update, we've not only restored the vast majority of the original free rewards, but also more than doubled the total value increase for the free rewards (now roughly 19% for PoV and 36% for PoG). We hope this makes everyone's gameplay experience more enjoyable :)

On Golden Emblems: We recognize that many players were disappointed to see them disappear with our initial changes. Something we did not fully take into account when working on that round is just how much cooler super-rare items like Golden Emblems are; while Golden Emblems can certainly be obtained from loot via normal gameplay, they're definitely a lot harder to come by compared to things such as 4-star Ascension Materials or even Alpha Aethers.

As we stated above, our original intent was to greatly increase the supply of items that are far more often immediately useful to players. Golden Emblems may be worth a lot but can only be used for maximum value when you're very close to completely maxing out a Hero, so we felt that this was one of the items that could be removed/reduced in the service of making it easier & faster for players to train newly obtained Heroes.

While we do believe that the direction of our changes are correct, you guys have reminded us that we still need to remember that shiny rare items are cool, and that's a value that shouldn't be overlooked! For example, many players would prefer a Golden Emblem over a collection of Emblems and Master Emblems and Food and Iron Crates that would completely cover the cost of a Legendary Master Talent Node. Technically, the latter is just as valuable and more flexible, which is why we've moved towards that direction — but still, Golden Emblems are much cooler.

With this player feedback in mind, we've decided to bring back 1 Golden Emblem but maintain the overall direction of our changes, in the hopes of reaching a happy medium!

On rewards in the game in general: We're fully aware that our players would very much like to see new and/or improved sources of loot that can be obtained via regular gameplay. At least some of the negative responses to our initial round of PoA improvements, we feel, came from this place of wider frustration (rather than the actual changes themselves).

To be clear, we believe it's quite evident that the total amount of free gifts and quest/event rewards that can be collected in the game have massively increased over the past 1–2 years! However, we also agree with you that this isn't enough on its own and more should be done in this regard. We are already working on a number of things — a few are close to done, others are still in the planning phase — that will hopefully better address the issue. So don't worry; we hear you, and we agree.

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If you made it this far, thank you for reading and congratulations on maintaining this kind of attention span in the year 2024! Please rest assured that we're always listening to our players, even if we don't always have the time to respond.

Have a great rest of July, and best of luck in the battles!