Welcome back to round three of our look into battle passes. In part one, we took a broad look at battle passes and how the different types work. In part two, we dug in a little deeper into the value of items and how to figure out what the designer believes the value of each item and pass is. If you haven't read those yet, I highly recommend them as they’ll set the stage for today’s post. This time, we’re going to be chatting about progression in the battle passes. This one is going to be very math and logic heavy, but I’m going to break it down so anyone can understand it.
So why should I care about battle pass progression?
When I was building the economy in NBA Ball Stars, I designed a system for crafting gear where the player would use lower levels of gear to craft higher levels of gear. I modeled out the economy and popped all my data in. Play testing went fine and we released it. After release, I started to notice I wasn’t progressing along my gear model’s estimates. The Executive Producer a couple hours later came up to me and noticed the same thing. I started to look at our analytics and came to the conclusion that while we were giving out the correct amount of resources to progress in the economy, I put them as rewards too deep in the progression. This was resulting in players not unlocking the resources they needed to engage with the system. This was a progression problem which was affecting the economy. It was so bad that players in the discord started to make memes out of the deficit of the specific resource. Progression and economy in games often go hand in hand. If your economy is off, it’s going to throw off your progression. If your progression is off, it’s going to throw off the economy. Because I had a model to compare it to, we were able to analyze the problem, assess solutions, and deploy a fix VERY quickly. According to our charts, engagement spiked to normal rates, and the discord showered us with praise for fixing a problem quickly.
Back to our battle passes. All of our examples require the user to gain XP in some fashion to level up. XP can come from various sources, but the primary source is always just playing the game. Continuing forward, we’re going to stick to only one game. This is because the logic is the same across all of them and I don’t want to write a novel to cover them all. Let’s continue with Halo Infinite.
Typically, most games give out XP for playing PvP directly. Halo does, but it’s a little different.They have a daily mission which never runs out, but, each time it’s completed, awards less and less XP. This is clever because it creates a situation with diminishing returns. When you have a game with no energy restricting your play, this is an excellent strategy to keep grinders from blowing through all the content too quickly.
You’ll notice the daily mission at the top. In Halo, the XP awarded is the following:
Match 1: 300 XP
Match 2: 200 XP
Match 3: 200 XP
Match 4: 200 XP
Match 5: 100 XP
Match 6: 100 XP
Match 7+: 50 XP
In addition to the research above, let’s make some additional assumptions:
A single match takes 10-12 minutes
The total XP to complete the battle pass is 100,000 XP
One Level is 1,000 XP
The player has 3 months to complete the battle pass
A weekly mission pays out 200 XP on average
There are 5 weekly missions available on any given week
The average player is expected to play for 60 minutes a day
It’s likely the developers want the player to play roughly five matches per day. You can guess this by a few factors: playing five matches earns the player1000 XP, which is enough to level up the battle pass and give the player a visible reward. This is an excellent session ender. Additionally, five matches take roughly an hour to complete as each match takes between 10-12 minutes on average. It just ends up being such a neat and even parcel of time. Match 6 is likely to give players who have just a bit more time a nudge so they can start the next session slightly above. Match 7+ is just players grinding. So, the initial level up is five matches, which is roughly an hour. To go to the next level, it’s twenty matches, which at best is just over three hours, and, at worst, four hours.
Let’s say you have a player that is grinding non-stop, such as a streamer, playing all day and all night with no breaks. This person will be able to progress roughly six levels in a twenty four hour gaming marathon. We can assume they spend one hour for the initial level, three hours for the next, and four hours for the rest. Since it’s physically impossible to figure out exactly how much a person will play, Economy Designers will frequently plan for the maximum grind, and also someone more casual. Then they will figure out how to make this a rewarding experience for both. Additionally, there is always a chance that there is one person who loves your game so much they will play as much as they physically can before their body collapses, so more reason to plan for them.
But what about weekly missions?
It's similar logic, but simpler. Typically, there are a specific number of weeklies that are available to a player. So, you take the max amount of XP a player can get from weeklies, divide it by 7, and add it to the daily amount. Let’s say, after you complete a weekly, a new one pops up for a total of five weeklies. At 200 XP each, that’s only an additional level for the whole week. The most hardcore grinder would only be able to get a total of thirtyone levels a week, though they would likely drop dead from lack of sleep, but it’s good to plan for it and then scale back if needed. Players will never complain if something is too difficult and you change it to be easier. They will start a war against you if you do the opposite.
So, using these numbers, where does this put our estimates?
Hardcore grinder finishes the battle pass in about 3 weeks, 2.5 days
Casual players: 12 Weeks, 4 days (8 levels a week, 7 from dailies, 1 from weekly)
Looking at these numbers, we can see the grinder will finish in about a month. And the casual player will be just shy of being able to complete the battle pass in three months. This is going to either reinforce the need for them to play just a little bit more often than one hour a day, or spending to complete the battle pass as they’ll be so close to completion that FOMO will kick in. Either way, it doesn’t feel out of reach, which is super important for a player who has been playing every single day. All things considered, this is pretty well balanced.
This same logic we used to create estimates for Halo Infinite can be applied to Fortnite, CoD, and even Destiny. Though, to be fair, Destiny’s would be a tiny bit more complicated because there are so many sources to get XP from. Each planet alone has a series of dailies and weeklies, not to mention those from the Iron Banner and the Tower, which range from killing certain enemies to killing them in certain ways, or as broad as engaging in Strikes… you get the idea. But the logic is the same.
Looking at the estimates above, I could see how you’d be concerned by the grinders blowing through all the content. If a player finishes all the content, there is a substantially higher chance of them churning, a term for quitting your game and never returning. Different games handle this differently. In Fortnite, they have additional levels and rewards which go past the carrot reward, resulting in an almost unlimited grind. In other games, this is typically where Live Ops Events come in. And boy has Halo done an excellent job integrating it.
But that’s a subject for another time! Thanks for stopping by and I hope you’ve been enjoying this series. By now, you should be equipped with the logic to balance your own battle pass. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments section below, and I’ll get to as many as I can.
Scott
That’s it for this post! If you like my work and want to support my caffeine addiction, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi.
Bonus: Savvy readers who have played Halo may have noticed Halo has unlimited weeklies. How would you solve the effect it has on the grind? I’ll give you a hit, I’ve referenced similar logic in this article.