Flock Forward 01: Soar to New Heights
Hi Flockers,
Angry Birds has always been about overcoming new challenges in creative and exciting ways. And that is why we are here today. Let’s talk about the future of Angry Birds 2.
Your passion for Angry Birds is what drove us to create a unique experience like no other with Angry Birds 2. This love for the flock and your commitment to the community drives us yet again to launch into a brighter future. But let’s be clear – over the last year, we’ve not managed to meet many of your expectations in terms of technical stability or which changes you would like to see. We’ve been closely collecting your feedback from all over the Angry Birds fandom and took our time crafting a way forward to reinvigorate Angry Birds 2.
We understand your frustration about technical issues you had to endure and the many poorly received changes we made to the game and beloved features, like the changes to Daily Quests, Hat Events, and more. We acknowledge that. Not only that, but we are here today to discuss what will change and how we will make sure Angry Birds 2 is the definitive, fun Angry Birds experience you want it to be for years to come.
Introducing: Flock Forward
After 9 wild years of anger, it’s time for change. With Flock Forward, we are creating a new and recurring way to discuss your concerns and share more information about how we will address them, as well as the exciting new changes we are making. So, let’s talk about what will change and what we’ve been working on. Let’s make Angry Birds 2 soar to new heights – or simply, let’s flock forward together.
Let’s Talk About What’s Changing
Dive into the first Flock Forward Q&A or read about each topic below to learn about the changes we are making and the new things we are working on based on your feedback.
Game Stability & Squashing Bugs
The older a game gets, and the more features are added, the more difficult it becomes to add new features. This complexity can lead to issues that are difficult to foresee and catch before an update is released. Imagine a Piggy tower, built higher and higher the more features are added. Imagine changing one block at the bottom or moving the whole tower to a new location. After many exciting years of Angry Birds 2 building a tower of new fun content, adding new features without breaking others became increasingly challenging.
These issues impact your experience and cause long response times from our Player Support Team, as they are overloaded with justified requests. It also does not let us release new events and new features as fast as we would like to. Lastly, it makes it difficult to test and identify issues before we release updates, as a bug could appear in the most unforeseeable areas of the game.
The current state of Angry Birds 2 is not the experience you deserve, not the level we would want it to be, and far from what the team wants to achieve, so we came up with a plan.
When this task force was created, its goals were clear: identify issues earlier and resolve bugs faster and more efficiently. We also started evaluating and reviewing our processes, and we are revamping many of them to become even more focused on delivering a better experience to you. With all of this said, we ask for your patience while these new teams begin their work to squash all the bugs.
Better Reporting, Faster Solutions
Last year, we decided to switch to a new and more modern Player Support platform to improve processes and the way we help you in the game.
This change came at arguably not the best time, as we faced some technical issues simultaneously, negatively impacting your experience. While the timing was not perfect, we were able to launch this new platform and have been improving the processes ever since. This has already drastically improved our response time to your requests. There is still much room for improvement, especially giving you the correct answer you are looking for – we are dedicated and genuinely want to support you the best we can.
Ways to Complete Hat Sets
Hats are the primary way of customizing your birds and one way of growing stronger. We think hats are great and wanted to provide you with more hats – the more, the better, right? However, increasing the number of hat events per month while making new hats generally more exclusive wasn’t well received. We understand that some of you feel at the same time exhausted from Hat Events while wondering how you can complete unfinished Hat Sets.
We want to anticipate Hat Events, completing Hat Sets should feel exciting, fun, and rewarding, so here is our plan:
We believe that new hats should be exclusive, and obtaining the whole hat set should be something to strive for. Making them immediately purchasable invalidates this feeling.
By not adding new Hats to the Black Pearl shop, we wanted to achieve two things: make new hats feel more exciting to get and reduce the need to focus on Black Pearls. However, by removing the option to complete a Hat Set on the Hat Shop, it left you guessing when and how to finish incomplete Hat Sets. We are sorry to keep you wondering. To resolve this frustration and achieve exclusivity we think the best solution is first to make Hats purchasable with Black Pearls only after a certain time, but also to offer other ways to complete hat sets, with some upgrades sprinkled in between.
We know you want to learn about all the ways to obtain new hats, and while we cannot share all of them yet since we want to keep some of the new features a surprise, one example will be Treasure Pass!
Treasure Pass 2.0
Treasure Pass aimed to connect many of the game features through quests and provide consistent progression. Unfortunately, Treasure Pass had a rocky start and some live issues. We also acknowledge that many of you disliked the removal of the old Daily Quests and their Gem rewards.
You also told us that Treasure Pass is difficult to complete and did not feel rewarding enough, with many of you citing that the cosmetic rewards don’t add anything.
But we won’t stop here!
While we are trying to address all of your feedback and make this evergreen feature truly lush and rewarding, it will take some time. We hope to give you an early look at all the changes we are planning to make soon!
Better Experience in Tower of Fortune
We want to clarify first that the chances in Tower of Fortune of encountering a pig when choosing a reward when reaching the next floor are equal, but we are aware that it is not perceived that way due to the nature of the system.
By giving you more ways to obtain and upgrade hats in the future outside of the Tower of Fortune, and making it no longer the only source for obtaining hats, we hope to improve the situation and tackle the core of the problem first before looking into how to improve Tower of Fortune as a feature.
More Fun and Power in New Events
You also told us that Hat Events, combined with Tower of Fortune and Hat Adventures, are too predictable, repetitive, and just not as fun as they could be, so we are looking into adding new events to spice up your experience. One thing we’ve done already is to empower and supercharge your flock’s abilities from time to time in Hat Adventures, and we really don’t want to stop there.
Going forward, we will do our best to make progression satisfying and minimize frustration and friction as much as we can. We want a fun and engaging experience, and we want your help to move in this direction, so make sure to let us know what you think about the features and events once you get your hands on them.
Updates to Clans
Exciting changes are finally coming to Clans and Clan Battles! Clans are not only the endgame activity our most engaged players flock to the most, but we believe that Clans and Clan Events have the biggest potential for growing a healthy and active community.
For now, we decided to make each day more interesting – if there is a Bird Fever on both days, most likely it will be a different bird, so you can still experiment and have something to do on both days of the Clan Battle.
But we are not stopping there; we have more changes planned in the future. Currently, we are conceptualizing ideas for providing clans as teams with clearer goals, more interesting events, unique rewards, and quality-of-life improvements. While we will share more details in the future, now is your time to let us know what you want to see improved about Clans!
Silver’s Summer Sunshine Season
As you might have noticed, Silver has taken over Facebook and the latest Treasure Pass Season. Let’s celebrate Silver’s Summer Sunshine Season, and maybe … and maybe there’s a smash hit surprise waiting for you at the end. Read more here!
That’s a wrap for this Flock Forward; we hope to give you as much insight as possible into what we are currently working on. Make sure to join our Discord Server and follow us on Facebook so you don’t miss out on anything! Stay tuned for more news and the next update from our end.
Soar high, Flockers!
– The AB2 Team