To start, Clash Royale is a quite popular mobile game made by the company, [Supercell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercell_(company). To sum the game up in a few sentences for those who haven’t played, it is a high strategy game where you and an opponent use cards to fight each other, managing your elixir and the cards that you have in your hand. I have been playing this game for a total of 6 years, going through ups and downs in popularity, good and bad updates, and all different kinds of META’s(most effective tactics available). I have stayed loyal to the game like so many others, and I feel that the game is not keeping its side of this bargain. By taking a break, I mean not spending any money, not playing any normal games, and not playing any ranked games, though I will still play games with friends and will keep up with what is happening with the game. Now I want to zoom in on why I am taking a break.

What Is Expected Of A Game

As I stated earlier, I have stayed loyal to the game for quite a long time, and I just don’t think Supercell is holding their end of the deal. Now I want to define loyalty for a game. I would say it is the obligation for the game to stay fun for all who play (F2P/P2W), for the company to actively listen to the community, and finally, for the game not to go into a pure money-hungry mode. Now, while I think it is unfair for somebody who plays a game to always expect all of these to be met perfectly 100% of the time is unreasonable, I would say it is reasonable to expect 2/3 of these most of the time(As long as it’s an easy change for the company). Would you agree? So now let me tell you how Clash Royale violates everyone right now.

F2P/P2W

One, the game is not fun for F2P players. The matches are not based on card levels, which means somebody with drastically weaker cards can match into a battle and get no leveling, so they cannot win. This means that F2P players can’t get any higher in the game and are losing 80% of their matches; this is not fun. Games like Clash Royale hold a responsibility to make sure that it is not mandatory to spend money on their game. It should be fun and reasonable for everyone. I will hold up my end of the deal and give an easy way to fix this. Make players with equal-level cards fight each other. This would be a very easy fix that would make the game way more fun and balanced for EVERYONE.

Community

Two, Clash Royale simply doesn’t care about the people who play the game. Many games actively implement things that the communities want, most notably Larian Studios, Hello Games, and Arrowhead Game Studios. Clash Royale has consistently shown no effort to interact or listen to the community, ever really, but they have definitely done better than what is happening right now. It is like they are looking at what all of the committed, hardcore player base want and then doing the EXACT OPPOSITE. In the past 8 months, almost every update they have released has gone against the community, and the worst part is that they say it’s for the community. They say “It will help progression” or “make it easier for lower-level players,” but if they ever actually played the game, they would see that all of these are the exact opposite. In total, I think they have released 20 big changes into the game, and 2 of them followed what the community wanted. To me, this really bugs me for two reasons: one being that these people are the most committed to your game, and you continually say screw you to them, and two, when they lie and say “it will help the community,” it doesn’t. It hurts the progression and makes the game less enjoyable. Now the fix? Actually, listen, they have one of the biggest communities, especially with how popular the game has gotten; there are so many good ideas. Even just implementing a few would go a long way.

Money Hungry

Three, Clash Royale has made it nearly impossible for anyone who doesn’t want to spend money. I fully support both ways of not spending money and spending money. I myself have spent a good amount of money on Clash Royale. It makes you progress much faster, and if you really like the game, I think it is a good use of money. But all that said, I do think it should be a choice and that the game can be playable and some fun if you aren’t spending money. If you just go on Reddit, Youtube and other apps, you will be able to see how if you are free to play the game becomes almost unplayable because a lot of Clash players do spend some amount of money and because they don’t matchmake based on level most of the players you go against do pay so you are stuck in a loop were you either have to pay to just have a chance at winning or constantly loose. I have a direct example, as one of my friends is F2P. He is a very good player, sometimes beating me. I am the literal top rank(UC,12K) in the game, and he is like half of the way there. The sole reason is that he hasn’t spent money on the game. Clash Royale can fix this by giving more rewards to F2P people, or only matching F2P with equal-level cards.

All of the reasons I gave are how Clash Royale has continuously disappointed and does not hold up to its end on player loyalty. And now I will share specific evidence points on where Clash Royale went wrong and exactly how and why the game is suffering.

Timeline

In 2016, the game was released, it became massively popular, and the game, while having some bugs and unbalancing, was at an all-time best. The game slowly died off after that. Many loyal players stayed, but most of the hype died down. For the next two years, the game lies dormant and waiting until Clash Royale unveils the new mechanic, Champions. These are a new type of card that are super cool and good. This brings some life into the game until they release level 15. The game should have died here; any popularity it had gained was stripped, and most players left. Supercell left it for dead, and it would have stayed there if it weren’t for Jynxzi. Now, all of this information is background info to where we currently are. This is where I will explain the meat of what is wrong with Clash Royale.

Jynxzi, I’m sure many people have heard of him. He was probably the best R6 player in the world before taking a break from the game. He got massively popular in 2024, right before he quit R6, for his viral raging moments and for being a nice and funny guy. He, after quitting R6, decides to start playing one of his childhood favorite games, Clash Royale. This is where the revival begins. Overnight, the player base 10X’s with all of the fans hopping online.

You can see on the graph that almost immediately, there is a huge spike in searches and downloads. Clash Royale is relevant again. Now this is great for everybody, we start to see a ton of new content made about the game, and there are fun collab streams between Jynxzi and Ryley(one of the best players in the space). Clash Royale is given everything on a silver plate, and what do they do? They add broken evos to the game that you have to buy, then three days later, they nerf them so they are never playable again. They make the game more P2W. And while the new players are good, it also creates a whole new problem. These people are part of the fad, they are not looking to become active players in the community, they just want to play while Jynxzi plays and then they will leave later, This means they spend a ton of money and make decks that are no fun to play against because they don’t really care about the game; they more care about the fad. While all of this was manageable about one and a half months ago, Clash Royale repeated history. They released Heroes=Champions, and worst of all, Level 16=Level 15. They had done this exact thing two years earlier, and it almost killed their game, but instead of learning, they go ahead and do it. Immediately after Jynxzi, who was just playing because it was fun, stopped playing because it simply wasn’t fun, this means half of the playerbase follows him off to the next fad. And because of the new cards, the META becomes broken. Clash Royale has consistently shown they have no idea how to balance cards, and these were no different, as so many toxic and annoying to play against decks come back to be competitively viable. The entire game goes sideways and becomes not fun.

You can see even in this highest form of competition, almost every deck is the same due to unbalanced cards

You can see how bad it got over just a month. There is a lot of variety in these decks, and then it all goes away.

Now we are caught up to the current date. Everyone is playing stupid, toxic decks, Supercell doesn’t care, and everyone’s mad. Now I want to come to the next piece of my article. How Supercell responded.

How Supercell Responds

This is one of the most frustrating things for me, as Supercell makes no effort to make anything better; instead, they silence the players. many YouTubers are getting mass copyright struck including a big OG streamer. If you say something bad about the new update, you may get copyright banned. Instead of owning up to their mistake, they say that it is good for the players and then go ahead and silence anyone who says otherwise. Now, to give some credit to supercell this may not be all their fault. In 2016, they were bought out by Tencent, a large Chinese gaming company that is known for doing bad things to games. But regardless, they still should try to do some good things for the game.

All of what I have said should give you an idea of how SuperCell is not being good to their players, and then a timeline of where they have gone wrong. I genuinely hope that they will fix their game soon, as I really enjoy playing it, but I would also encourage all Clash Royale players to stop playing or at least stop buying things, as this might be the only way for them to make any change in their game. If nothing inspires any change in the company, I’m not sure what our next steps should be as a player base, but I hope this sheds some light on how and why Supercell as a company isn’t great.

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