Not all game modes are created equal. BetaDwarf recently announced that they would be placing the Expedition game mode in Minion Masters on a hiatus as they make some tweaks to it.
The decision seems to be based in a simple fact: the game mode just isn’t popular. BetaDwarf intends to do some testing and tweaking to the game mode to try and find a way to make it so that more people want to play it, targeting the reward system and game mode itself.
“We’ve made the difficult decision to put Expeditions on Hiatus from the game in our upcoming update,” the team announced. “We think it’s time to retire the game mode for the time being as maintaining it was becoming a difficulty on our end without revisiting the mode, and we want to take the opportunity to have time to focus and improve the experience of the remaining game modes.”
The team’s stats and surveys were indicating that “only a small portion” of the players actively engage with the mode, though they don’t say the exact numbers. BetaDwarf found that putting Season Tokens behind it, which are used for a chance to get one of the season’s unique cards, only served to push new players into a strange and confusing game mode.
BetaDwarf intends to replace the weekly expeditions with a weekly quest instead, which will grant the same Season Tokens for winning 5 matches in Premade 2v2 Battles. They hope that this works to replace the rewards, which seem to have been the only real reason players were moving into Expeditions.
It does seem like the reward for the weekly quest will only be given for premade 2v2s and not for queuing up solo. There’s a pretty extensive Minion Masters Discord server if you don’t have a premade partner to queue up with and gain the rewards though, so grabbing these rewards shouldn’t be too difficult. The developers gave no word on when (or if) the game mode will return, so this weekly quest will likely be the new mechanic moving forward.
All in all, it seems like a hard-but-good choice on BetaDwarf’s part. The independent developers have limited resources and time as it is – especially in the current complications continuously caused by Covid-19 – and spending them on a game mode no one was playing was definitely not ideal. Hopefully, with their time and resources freed up, BetaDwarf will be able to continue pushing out the excellent (and almost always free) content that they’ve been putting out since launch.
