Update on new currency

Dearest Kards players,

While working hard on the mobile version, more features and new cards, we are also proceeding with the work on the new currency described in a previous dev blog, in which we also asked for your feedback.

We really appreciate all the feedback from you guys and we have gone carefully through all your comments and debates. As a result, we have internally discussed and tested various tweaks and changes to the original plan and now want to update you on the status.

While many of you were pretty positive or neutral about the whole affair, others naturally raised concerns about some parts of our designs and/or implementation plans and in this blog we want to address some of the most common concerns.

1. The new currency is just a way to trick players into spending more.
   
   
2. Diamonds are not the right way to present the new currency.
   
   
3. Pricing changes with the transition are favorable only for big bulk purchases (good for high spenders only).

So let’s go through each of these, step-by-step.

[h3]The new currency is just a way to trick players into spending more[/h3]

Perhaps not much we can say about this other than repeat that our main goal with these changes is not to obscure the prices and/or “trick” people into spending more. We are doing this to simplify the process on our end greatly when we have the game running on multiple platforms and stores. With that in mind, we designed the diamonds in the way that 10 diamonds reflect $1 in real money to make the system as transparent as possible.

But we can also just be frank about the fact that we hope having this currency will increase sales of the cheapest items in our shop. Like single card-backs or other cheap items one might not necessarily pull up the credit card to buy but is convenient to buy if you have a bit of the new currency available.

[h3]Diamonds are not the right way to present the new currency.[/h3]

We got quite a bit of strong feedback on this and many suggested War Bonds as an alternative choice and some other suggestions came up.

The dev team debated this back and forth, mocked up and tested various designs but after all we decided to stick to Diamonds. While we realize diamonds may have some stigma as being the same thing as the most commonly used hard currency “Gems”, we also feel this is a strong benefit. We regard the familiarity as a pro and branding it as something else would not really be in the spirit of being transparent about what we are doing.

In regards to War Bonds, which we very seriously considered, there are a couple of cons that made us decide against them in the end.

• Although very thematic, players that are not history or WWII enthusiasts may not be familiar with the concept of War Bonds at all.
  
  
• While we managed to make them look pretty nice as objects (fancy paper bills), it proved to be challenging to design them as smaller icons needed in many use-cases in the game.

Finally, we feel that Diamonds are actually very thematic as well as having the pro of being familiar in this context and that our designs make them look the part very nicely:













[h3]Pricing changes with the transition are favorable only for big bulk purchases (good for high spenders only).[/h3]

We have considered this carefully and decided to reduce the diamond prices for the lower cost pack bundles. A base pack will now cost 14 Diamonds instead of 15, and an Officer pack will cost 43 Diamonds instead of 45.



We hope this provides some insight into the design process, and we look forward to sharing more info like this about some other exciting projects we are working on at the moment.

Peace!