Came back to this on Wednesday after the revamp with @Gordon and one other. Was good fun and enjoyed the new stuff. Noticed that progress through the Season Pass (which you did get for free for already “owning” the game) was a lot slower than before. The below confirms the reasons we thought were behind that (i.e. Kudos payouts much lower for doing well in a round)
For reference a good run to the final round used to net you 300-400 Kudos. Now it’s less than 100. It is mitigated by challenges pay outs, but the fundamental core of playing the game how you want to play - and not how you are being told to play - is not so great for levelling up. And levelling up is what gets you new outfit bits etc from the Season pass - which you now ordinarily have to pay for. This used to be just included as part of the game prior to going FTP. I’ve not looked but apparently prices for buying outfits seems to have gone up significantly too. The Epic effect I guess.
20m players is going to mean a lot of backend server costs obviously, but it’s a notable change coming from a place where the structure wasn’t based around free-to-play. I will also re-iterate we did have lots of fun playing, and it’s re-ignited our Wednesday night game club, but I’m not sure how long it will be before we move on to other games.