Today we are chatting about a very complex game design topic, but one that we care about a lot: World Health.
As a studio, our roots are in creating complex MMOs and immersive worlds, and we carry that to Game of Thrones: Dragonfire. With long-lived games, the priorities of our players naturally change over time and the problems to solve can become quite complex.
One of these complex and evolving topics we often hear from players is that of the World population, playing with your friends, and creating competitive match ups. This is definitely on our minds too, but we think the solutions are part of a much bigger update and want to give it the development focus it deserves to deliver them correctly.
Now that we’ve officially gone worldwide, let’s take some time to reframe the discussion into how we view World Health, Competitiveness and World Transitions.
In this post, we will discuss:
- What World Health means to us
- How we define Competitiveness
- How World Transitions work
- What we learned in Soft Launch
- What we’re working on next to address this
What is World Health?
In Game of Thrones: Dragonfire, we call the many servers of players existing in parallel ‘Worlds.’ Each World is unique, beginning at different times, containing different communities of players, running events at different times, and so on.
We believe the game is the most fun when you have players to talk to, compete against, and form alliances with. We want to design a platform and gameplay experience that allows these interactions to thrive. When we achieve this goal, that is when your World is ‘healthy’.
You can just feel it when you’re in one of these vibrant, competitive communities, with a rich web of strategic planning, social coordination, and well-matched battles. It can feel like you’re living a storyline straight out of Westeros.
But this doesn’t just happen by chance. Designing a game that consistently delivers those experiences, especially as Worlds age and populations shift, takes deliberate, ongoing work. That’s what World Health is about.
A healthy World contains a competitive population of other dragonriders and engaging ways to play with them.
How to Define Competitiveness
Competitiveness isn’t one thing. When we design around it, we’re thinking about several definitions:
- Variety – Are there different types of players and playstyles around you?
- Novelty – Are there new faces to join forces with or play against? Or are you playing with the same players you’ve competed against since the beginning of the game?
- Balance – Do the Factions within a World progress at a similar pace, resulting in a compelling campaign?
- Social Engagement – This is a social game. The human element of communal strategizing, alliances, etc, can drastically change the experience of a World that may otherwise have appeared more or less competitive.
No single definition can encompass every World experience, but by designing a balance of each of these points, we are more likely to deliver on the vibrant, competitive Worlds that are most fun for our players.
How World Transitions Work
When players first join the game, they are placed on a recently created World running the introductory “Heirs of the Dragon” Campaign. Once that Campaign concludes, every other introductory World that is ending at the same time is eligible to be transitioned together. We call this group of Worlds a “cohort.”
This marks players’ first World Transition: the process of remixing existing Worlds into new Worlds before the next Campaign begins.
During a Transition, Alliances are always kept intact, but your World and Faction groups are not. We also do our best to honor your Faction Selection preferences, but will always prioritize creating a fun and balanced experience for the most players.
Transitions are the most powerful tool we have for maintaining World Health over time. They’re the moment where we can inject variety, introduce new faces, and recalibrate the competitive landscape.
- Done well, a Transition feels like the start of an entirely new chapter.
- Done poorly, it can feel disruptive, unfair, or confusing.
This last year has taught us a great deal about what that actually takes.
What We Learned from Soft Launch
We want to be direct about what we have observed during Soft Launch, because understanding those problems is the key to understanding why the new system is built the way it is.
Problem #1: Lower Population
With the worldwide launch behind us, this constraint no longer applies. The player pool for Transitions is dramatically larger, which gives us the flexibility to build better-balanced, more vibrant Worlds.
Problem #2: Faction Balance Was Random
Soft Launch ran in a limited number of countries by design. That meant the pool of players available for any given Transition was much smaller than the system was built for. When fewer players enter a Transition, it becomes harder to construct Worlds that feel full, competitive, and alive. Especially as groups of players entered their third, fourth, and later Campaigns. Some Worlds ended up underpopulated in ways that hurt the gameplay experience for everyone in them.
Previously, we did not have the technology to evaluate player or Alliance progress when constructing Transitions. Factions were balanced entirely by player count, which meant the strongest players in the game could end up stacked on one side against a group of significantly weaker or less active players on the other.
That’s not a competitive World, and was leaving the health of Worlds up to chance.
Problem #3: Difficulty playing with your friends
Friend Codes is one of the most-requested features in the game, and we want to directly address the concerns we’ve heard over the course of Soft Launch and our games release.
Why are Friend Codes limited to new Worlds?
Friend Codes were designed to let you choose your World and play alongside the people you want to play with. In principle, that’s exactly the kind of feature we want to build.
In its current iteration, Friend Codes potentially allows players to jump between different World cohorts, which may be running different experiences, or include different content. Joining a World in this case could affect your game experience negatively. A few examples:
- If you were going to a World that didn’t have a certain item available, that item could disappear from your account.
- If a player friend coded into a World who was in a different campaign that had a feature they didn’t previously have access to, it could leave the player at a severe disadvantage compared to others on that World.
- If you joined a World that didn’t have a feature you previously did have access to, it could cause you to lose access to that feature while in that World, or provide an unfair advantage to you compared to other players in the World.
- Unrestricted Friend Coding in the middle of a Campaign could lead to World health deterioration.
- It also allowed for alt account abuse, where players could create multiple accounts to spam and take over rivaling factions with inactive users.
Due to the above, we were forced to make the difficult decision to limit Friend Codes to new Worlds going through their first campaign, Heirs of the Dragon, while we look to build out friend codes for players in older cohorts in a way that safely handles the above problems.
We want to be sure your account is safe when changing Worlds, and that the Worlds you end up on are healthy with active users.
Coming Next
#1: Addressing Population
Our first problem, population, has largely solved itself with our worldwide release. Most cohorts from now on can expect to have a sufficient population to create multiple vibrant and populated Worlds upon a Transition. We are very open to feedback here, and want to hear from you if population density feels right in future Campaigns.
#2: Matchmaking for World Transition
Second, we are building tech to balance Alliances by multiple factors, such as retained progress and player effectiveness across Factions and Worlds as part of World Transitions. With this, we expect much more reliably balanced Faction competition than before.
This is a key piece of creating healthy Worlds with balanced competition, new faces, and keeping new Campaigns exciting. We expect to begin using this new tech for transitions by the end of July 2026.
#3: More ways to play with your friends
Finally, we are exploring additional options for player movement between Worlds in later Campaigns.
As highlighted above, Friend Codes in their current state are limited to new Worlds. We want to expand Friend Codes, take note of potential avenues of abuse, prevent it and allow players to join their friends in different Worlds when applicable.
We want to give you the opportunities to join your friends. Maintaining World Health is our highest priority, and we welcome your feedback on continuing to improve the process.
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.
This will be the first update of many making sure you all are in the loop in regards to the state of World Health and how we tackle the Transition process.
Your feedback has already shaped what you’ve read in this post. Soft Launch players surfaced the problems we’ve described, and that input drove the new system’s design. We want to keep that channel open.
If you’re interested in discussing World Health, Transitions or Friend Codes, be sure to join us on Discord! If you have a specific point of feedback, create a post in our #gameplay-suggestions channel. We are always looking for your input when designing these features, and always appreciate your perspective.
We’ll see you soon, and thank you for playing Game of Thrones: Dragonfire!
