Chapter 309 - The COG test

Under Emperor dynasty Entertainment’s frantic urging, the date of COG’s testing was brought forward again to February 13th, the year before.

The person in charge of GA expressed that this was already a very risky decision, because the current COG was not perfect yet. At least in the eyes of the designer, Clive Lehman, it was a very stupid decision to bring forward the closed beta.

What’s the point of taking the test a week earlier?

Clive Larman and GA really wanted to reject Emperor dynasty Entertainment’s proposal because they felt that a Chinese company’s competitive game would be released a week or two earlier than them, and that was nothing.

COG was going to be targeted at the global market. As for League of Legends, which was launched by that Chinese company? At most, he would only be able to cause a ruckus in that small piece of land in China.

However, Emperor dynasty entertainment was very determined, and the GA couldn’t completely ignore the huge Chinese market, so they brought the testing date forward in the end.

The reason it was set on the awkward 13th of February was that Chen Mo had already spread the news that there would be special Valentine’s Day events on the 14th of February and the week after that.

This included introducing limited skins for Valentine’s Day, limited couple profile pictures, and special matching missions.

Obviously, Emperor dynasty entertainment didn’t want to clash with League of Legends at such a critical time. After all, the Valentine’s Day event was prepared. For players, the Valentine’s Day event was only held once a year, and cog…It didn’t matter if they played it a few days later.

If the test were to be conducted on February 14th, the relevant data would most likely be squeezed out.

Lin chaoxu’s sharp intuition told him that Chen Zhao came prepared. If he still couldn’t think of a solution, the situation would become very bad.

It all depended on the feedback from the players after COG was launched.

……

On February 13th, COG (Battle of the Gods) began its closed beta. Emperor dynasty entertainment promoted it through various channels, even using some of fantasy gaming platform’s channel resources.

Although the success of COG was uncertain, the smooth promotion of League of Legends had boosted Lin chaoxu’s confidence in this brand new game model, so he had invested a lot of marketing resources for a game in the testing stage.

Even though many of the original players of COG were Chen Mo’s die-hard fans, they still preferred to try it out.

Moreover, with Emperor dynasty Entertainment’s promotion, there were many other players coming in, and a large portion of them had played League of Legends.

After all, among the games that were released before the new year, these two were the only ones that were more interesting and talked about, so it was impossible to avoid them even if they wanted to.

The beta version of COG and the map in Warcraft had the same core gameplay, system, and hero skills. There weren’t many changes.

In his opinion, some of the original designs of COG were quite perfect, especially among the core players. The art style and operation mode of COG were some key elements that they liked. If he changed it rashly, it would mean giving up on these core players, which was not worth it.

The main difference between the closed beta version and the original map was the packaging and the derivative games.

COG did not get the copyright to the hero, so they could only redo all the models. They had also made corresponding adjustments to the name to avoid legal risks.

After all, GA was a big company, and they were afraid of being extorted.

For example, Death Knights were renamed Dark Knights, dark Rangers were renamed shadow Rangers, and forest guardians were renamed elven prophets.

There were also classes like Paladins, which only had their models changed but not their names. Paladins were a classic class in Western fantasy, so there was no copyright to them.

These changes might seem like imitations to older players of COG, but it wasn’t important. Clive Lehmann believed that the game wouldn’t be restricted to only players who had played Warcraft before, and the main players wouldn’t feel that the models were out of place.

After all, it was a European and American company, GA’s art design was very good at Western fantasy themes, the scenes and hero models were very authentic, so the sense of imitation was not particularly strong.

There were some minor changes in the map elements and hero skills, but there were no major changes.

Other than that, there were also some derivative games and profit models.

Similar to League of Legends, COG also had a friend system, a matchmaking system, and a shopping center system. In terms of profit model, COG was also free of charge for all heroes and charged for skins, but there were two things that were different from League of Legends: Card collection and unboxing.

COG had created a set of card modes, which was equivalent to an additional skill enhancement system. Each hero could wear a card set (containing four cards) to enhance the hero’s four skills.

For example, the dark arrow of the dark Ranger would add additional damage, and the last hit would summon little skeletons. There were three different cards available for dark arrow. They were: increase damage, increase skeleton’s HP, and increase skeleton’s duration. Players could choose one of them to add to their deck.

Clive Ramon’s idea was that this card mode would increase the diversity of the game, allowing players to freely choose their favorite card sets. Of course, it was also to increase profits.

The GA company didn’t approve of a model that solely relied on skins to make money. After all, this model was too risky, and it was completely uncontrollable whether players would buy skins or not, which couldn’t guarantee the revenue of the game.

Unless COG became popular all over the world, but in the eyes of the GA, this idea was somewhat unrealistic.

The GA’s suggestion was to either set up a threshold to buy out, or to add a charging system linked to the attribute. After much consideration, Clive Ramon chose the latter because he felt that the cut-off fee would cost him more players.

As for the way to obtain the cards and skins, it was very ‘European’: The treasure chests were opened.

Different from the unboxing in League of Legends, everything in COG was obtained by unboxing, and couldn’t be bought directly.

Players could earn gold coins through the game, and they could earn game coins by topping up. These two types of currency would open different chests. The gold chest would open different cards and card pieces, while the in-game coin chest would open skins and cards.

Of course, the speed at which the players obtained gold coins was strictly controlled, and the amount of gold coins required to open the chests would increase every week. It was definitely impossible for players to obtain all the card sets in the early stages through the gold treasure chest. If they wanted to form a more complete card set, they would need to top up.

Moreover, it depended on the player’s face what would be opened after the top-up, and it was possible to open a hero card that one did not know how to play at all.

However, unboxing was still quite popular in the European and American market, and they had some experience with successful games in this area, so GA and Clive Lehmann didn’t feel that there was anything wrong with it.