Ben Brode Reveals They May Implement a “Boosters-Per-Day” Limit

For players in the closed beta of Marvel Snap, one thing is becoming quickly apparent: Credits are hard to come by. The daily missions, the main reliable source of the Credits, only unlock two at a time every eight hours. And although you can get more Credits along the various rewards tracks in the game, those take longer and longer to unlock the farther along the track you are. If you are playing more than a few games a day, you will soon find your Collection screen filled with green upgrade arrows on your cards.

That’s because, even though you have limits on the amount of Credits you can get, there are no such limits on Boosters. You get them after every game, no matter what. Very early on in your Snap experience, you will hit a point where you have the Boosters to upgrade a card but not the Credits. This quickly builds and soon nearly half your Collection is able to be upgraded but you have zero Credits to perform the upgrades. Not only is this frustrating, in and of itself, (as someone who compulsively clears all notifications on his phone regularly, having to look at the red notification badge on my Collection tab all the time is a bit triggering) but it also makes the times you get Boosters as a “reward” in the Season Pass or on the Collection Level feel completely useless.

The developers are aware of this issue and Ben Brode, the Chief Development Officer at Second Dinner, recently addressed it in the official Discord for Marvel Snap, implying that they may implement a “boosters-per-day” limit in a future build of the game.

Part of the issue with boosters is that they feel useless for players who play above a certain amount, but are the more exciting reward for players playing under a certain amount. We will likely need to do more work to keep things in balance. We were hoping to get a boosters-per-day limit into this current build but didn’t get it in time. This would likely make boosters rewards feel a lot better.

Ben Brode via official Discord server

As you can imagine, this was not well received amongst the community. Most players were hoping for an increase in the Credits earned per day, so they could use the Boosters they are rapidly stockpiling. But, instead of making a change to increase progression, the developers seem to want to slow things down. But Ben assured the community that for most players, the implementation of a cap would not affect them.

I don’t think it should affect players too much. Right now players who play a lot have infinite boosters and are feeling like they just don’t need any more boosters. In fact every time we give them boosters they’re like “this is useless”. By capping boosters we just stop boosters from being useless things that those players never really want. Based on our data the booster cap will affect very few players as most players aren’t playing enough to hit the cap right now. And if you are playing enough to hit the cap, you’re drowning in boosters and you don’t really need them (which breaks our rewards systems). We’ve been reading a lot of feedback on this topic and we’re certainly not sure we have the perfect answer here.

Our current situation is unsustainable for some players. Because credits are capped, you can only “convert” a certain amount of boosters per day into collection level. The top 5% of playtime players are getting more and more boosters they will never be able to turn into collection level and boosters just become quickly useless. Capping boosters just keeps the currencies closer in balance. Again, not sure we have perfect answers here, and we appreciate the feedback on this.

Ben Brode via official Discord server

Keeping the currencies in balance makes sense, I just hope they are taking players’ experience into account. At the moment, once you have completed your dailies, there is very little to play for outside of climbing the ranked ladder. At times, it can feel very unrewarding to play the game, just collecting endless Boosters but having no way to use them. Ben addressed that in one more comment on this topic.

I think that’s very fair feedback. We did want to have some limits (soft or hard) on this stuff in the same way that rested XP works in games like World of Warcraft, we want the first few games you play each day to be highly rewarding and then taper that down so it isn’t such a massive gap in progress between casually engaged folks and hyper engaged folks. Y’all’s feedback is helpful in determining how to reach these goals in ways that feel as good as they can.

Ben Brode via official Discord server

All in all, it sounds like the team is still fine-tuning the way rewards are doled out. This is a beta, after-all. But their overall philosophy certainly seems to be one of keeping progression slow for everyone, both hardcore and casual players alike. Time will tell whether that is the right decision for the long-term health of the game or not.