The Frost Giant team put out a post on Friday, September 23 about their perspectives on StormGate battle passes, so we’ll discuss that then where I think we need to go. They state that they take significant lessons from the Starcraft 2 battle pass - which is a good starting point. It really was the only RTS Battle Pass system that has any kind of success, to my knowledge. More importantly, like the DOTA 2 International Compendium, it directly funds esports - which I know we are all incredibly excited about (at least I am!). Almost as important is their statement that there won’t be gacha-style mechanics in their battle pass setup - which is something that has come more and more into criticism as more games adopt it. While it may bring in tremendous money for the devs, it harms goodwill and makes most battle pass components pretty inaccessible to the average player - only the whales get the interesting items.
They then go on to ask a ton of questions about where the community wants to see a battle-pass system evolve. We’ll use these questions as a framework for the rest of the article, which means we can break things down into a couple sections - progression, content, and outcomes.
Progression seems the easiest one to start at, and the category that has the most difference between different formats. Some battle passes (DOTA 2) reward the completion of actions that the player would not normally do (play different heroes/game modes, etc) while others, like the War Chests, rewarded players for simply interacting with the game - you could be guaranteed to advance pretty much by playing a game. Battle Pass systems provide developers a unique opportunity to incentivize the average player to explore parts of the game they would not normally interact with, so the idea of incentivizing Battle Pass rewards behind different types of game content is a great one. That being said, it really shouldn’t be the only means of advancement - there needs to be some baseline sense of progression that rewards interacting with the battle pass. We see this in things like the new Gundam Evolution’s Battle Pass - there are certain quests that reward battle pass XP for logging in or playing games (not necessarily winning). We don’t really know how long StormGate games are going to be yet - but nothing feels worse than logging in to play a game or two to get the next reward, losing them all and getting nowhere.
It would actually be rather interesting to see a branching quest system in the battle passes - all which contribute experience to a linear progression. For example - you’d have a weekly 1v1 set of questions (win so many games, play a game on every map, etc), a co-op quest set (play X different heroes, complete a game on Y difficulty level, etc), a custom arcade series - round out all the potential game modes. This allows the pass to incentivize faster progression through exploration while still providing progression for people that only want to play one way - it just gently nudges them elsewhere.
But as important as progression is - it’s equally important to talk about what the rewards might be. Frost Giant asks about gaining skins for races/modes you don’t play, which I personally think is fantastic. If we just talked about finding ways to incentivize exploring the other parts of the game, providing rewards for them encourages players to experience those. I’d be pretty likely to play a game of Demons if I play the Human resistance faction because I got some awesome Battle Thrall set - same story for trying a new commander in Co-Op. I’m also not the biggest fan of segmenting into multiple Battle Passes - I feel like it unnecessarily feeds into a segmentation of the community. Blizzard-like RTS titles tend to be exceedingly tribal about their race choice community. Terran players strongly identify with terrans, and are far less likely to watch a PvZ, for example. While part of that is a commentary on how different the races play and how hard it is to master even one, I think it is important to not have the developers feed into that tribalistic idea. Race-specific battle passes do not provide the incentive to try new factions like a unified one would - and if developers are worried about the pace of progression, that is something that can be tuned (or you can provide 3 skins per level that offers them - one per race).
We also need to go beyond race skins when talking about battle passes. Consoles were a popular addition to War Chests, but I want even more than that. Loading screens, client backgrounds, big moment voice lines that you can use in game (think playing “He gets the fully 360 surround!” after you wipe your opponents army), different music packs - there's a ton of customization beyond the skins that the War Chests provided.
As we talk about these rewards though, it's important to discuss what happens if you don’t complete a battle pass. For those War Chests, Blizzard eventually made it possible to purchase the sets for some amount. While I think it is good to allow people that didn’t play the game to buy some of the Season 1 sets (of the beta sets, whatever the case may be), I’m much more of a fan of Valve’s system than Blizzard's. Set up a community marketplace for skins and other items, and allow players to sell what they’ve unlocked after a certain amount of time (say one year). Some items should truly be bound to account and unpurchasable - allow players to celebrate their experience in the game.
The other thing I want to talk about, and it’s not exactly something that Frost Giant touched upon in their post, is the concept of 3rd Party Battle Passes. This is something that’s a bit older - the best example I’m aware of is the DOTA 2 Asia Championship (DAC) back in 2015. MarsTV put together a Compendium (Battle Pass) in the DOTA client that people could interact with much like an official Valve one, and it allowed the prize pool to increase from $250,000 to north of $3,000,000. If StormGate esports is to thrive, and I have a lot of faith in the team behind that department, we need to enable our third-party tournament organizers to get a shot at the pot. Not every event will have the staff to put something like this together - but imagine a Red Bull Battlegrounds Battle Pass. I would have thrown my money at that in a heartbeat back in 2014, and maybe that opportunity would have kept Red Bull esports in the scene even as Blizzard didn’t let them host a WCS event.
So those are my thoughts. Give us more than just unit skins, incentivize alternate game modes without locking progression behind it, and allow third parties to work with Frost Giant to put together their own battle passes. What are yours?