Happy October! 🎃 Let’s check back in on our World Health initiative progress.
Our last Dev Log explained what World Health is, and why it is such a complex element to design around. While difficult, our community has communicated that this is very important to players, so it is very important to us.
The outcome we want are healthy, competitive worlds where friends can play together.
There are many paths to get there, and some of the most straightforward sounding solutions have hidden consequences that can hurt a game in the long term. We want our dragons to fly for many years to come, so we are committed to tackling this the right way, even if it takes a little more time and thoughtful exploration to get it right.
Since our last update, we have been planning, implementing, and evaluating the success of
- Progress: What have we been doing?
- Learnings: What have we learned so far?
- Exploration: How are we using these learnings and player feedback to direct our next moves?
- Looking Ahead: What is actively in development and where do we go from here?
Progress: Transitions
If you’ve kept in the loop in our Discord, our Change Log on 8/17/26 mentioned a temporary stopgap we implemented on Transitions occurring from August through October 2026. Our goal was to implement an immediate solution to improving the Transition system as we investigated other avenues of improvement.
- Half of our transitioning population previewed world Merges. These merges combine worlds together without leaving behind previous users you met. This did not guarantee Faction selection, as usual, but gave you another chance to join those on a different faction.
- The other half of our transitioning population continued to experience our Remixing system. This system aims to improve the current matchmaking system to remix players more efficiently, building off the work we released over the last couple of months. This prioritized creating interesting world compositions and match ups, but meant you weren’t guaranteed to play with anyone from last Reign outside of your alliance. This is what we refer to as our MMR or ‘Match Making Rating’ system.
- A player’s rating is generally calculated based on a player’s activity and progression, what we call player effectiveness, over a reign. We say “generally” because we are continuously updating our MMR system on a per-transition basis. We compare and contrast how this system did, looking at an entire world’s lifecycle, then adjust when we find pieces that did or didn’t make the remixing as effective as we would like.
Learnings
We found that Merging didn’t improve player activity or world balance, while Remixing performed in line with our expectations.
Feedback from players going through transitions using Merging echoed a similar sentiment: They wanted something new, and they wanted to leave old enemies behind in search of greater conquest. Remixing addresses this problem more effectively. As players, there is no right or wrong solution you may choose, but according to your most recent experience and feedback, we’ve decided to continue improving the Remixing system to make it a better experience.
For the forseeable future, we will only use our Remixing system.
Ongoing Exploration
When going through player feedback regarding our current Transition process, we are focusing on two major problems.
- Transitions are confusing.
- The way we currently display and provide information about transitions is insufficient. We need to improve the experience to make it so new players can understand what to expect, what is in your control, and make information more accessible.
- Players want to be able to play with their friends.
- Feedback highlighted that a majority of these cases involved friends ending up in opposing factions.
We allow the most agency in the Heirs of the Dragon Campaign, giving new players time to organize into the groups they want to play with. However, there are limitations to this approach that are not suitable in the long term.
We want to make sure any solutions we decide on are safe and immune to exploitation. Our ideal solutions accomplish the following goals:
🔸Increase Player Agency without compromising competition – Above all, we want to allow players some choice in regards to who they play with. This will need reasonable constraints to avoid compromising world health.
🔸Choose your starting point – New players should always have the flexibility to move to a world their friends are on, even if it is a later campaign.
🔸Go forwards, not backwards – We want to avoid situations where experienced players can go back to younger campaigns where they would have a competitive advantage.
Work into expanding this agency is underway!
World Health is a many-headed hydra, so addressing it means making many tweaks, small and large. Game development takes time, and because these long term solutions will be a wait we’ll be rolling out both long-term and short-term solutions on a rolling basis.
We have 3 areas we have been pursuing:
With that, let us go through our most recent initiatives.
Transition Clarity
Our explorations brought to light several ways in which players could be better educated in-game on the end of campaign/world transition process at the beginning of their journey in Game of Thrones: Dragonfire. This lack of comprehension adds friction, and needs to be addressed.
We’re making changes to how we display, promote, and highlight a World is about to go through a Transition to players going through their first reign.
These changes may extend to adjustments that will affect informational panels, faction selection, as well as implementation of notices and pop-ups that could be visible in your System Messages.
We want to make this information as clear and accessible as possible.
End of Campaign: Joining Alliances across Factions
One proposal that kept coming up in survey responses was the ability to join your friend’s Alliances, despite being in different Factions. We know that many of you form connections across Factions, and the inability to reliably play with those people in the next Campaign has been a major point of frustration.
With that in mind, we are preparing to allow players to do exactly that during the final stage of a Campaign after the fight for King’s Landing is over.
Our goal is to allow our players to get into the alliance they want ahead of a transition, despite their faction, to ensure they can continue to play with the people they want to be allied with.
Some of the technology supporting this new feature will allow us to build new foundations towards improving other features.
Cross World Friend Code Event
We are investigating conducting a Cross World Friend Code Event in tandem with the work we are completing with the previously mentioned feature!
For a limited window of about one day, the intent is to loosen restrictions on Friend Codes for players who have already completed Heirs of the Dragon & Shadows of the Greens.
This would allow players who have completed those Campaigns the ability to join each other, while restricting the ability to travel backwards to new Worlds.
Note, as usual, we would do our best to honor your Faction Selection preferences, but will always prioritize creating a fun and balanced experience for the most players.
We hope to have more news to share in our next Dev Log! Because the event window is so short, we’ll announce it well in advance so you can plan. We can not guarantee this event will appear repeatedly, as it will hinge on the success of the first.
Stay in the Conversation
World Health is not a problem we will solve once and move on from. It is something we intend to invest in continuously as Game of Thrones: Dragonfire grows, the player base evolves, and we learn more about what makes our Worlds thrive.
Joining alliances across factions at the end of a campaign should be released by early 2027, along with continuous updates to our MMR Transition system.
We will update here or in our next dev log if we foresee a delay to this timeline.
If you’re interested in discussing World Health and Transitions, be sure to join us on Discord! We are always looking for your input when designing these features, and we always appreciate your perspective.
We’ll see you soon, and thank you for playing Game of Thrones: Dragonfire!
