IdleOn Shipped a Class, Then Moved Its Price Four Days Later

The Deep Dive

IdleOn got a new class on August 25: the Royal Guardian, a masterclass with fifteen talents, seventy upgrades in a shop of its own, and a kingdom economy that plants outposts across every world in the game.

Four days later, LavaFlame2 cut the cost of getting into it from 600 orb kills to 250.

Nothing was broken about the class. What was wrong was the number standing in front of it, and the only way to learn that was to ship it and watch where players stopped.

The ramp moved before the players did

The August 29 post is nominally about a harvest event. Buried in it is a retune of a class four days old.

The unlock fell from 600 orb kills to 250, a 58% cut. Every Royal Armory upgrade got 10% to 30% cheaper. The World 2 sand the class runs on had its caps raised by 2x and 5x. The upgrades required to open shelves #20 through #44 went down. Mighty Militia stopped costing World 2 sand and started costing World 1 clouds, which is a bigger change than it reads as: it moved a cost off the resource the class was already starving for. The only nerf on the list was Solo Militia Status, 5% per upgrade down to 4%.

Then the line that gives the whole thing away:

"Moved 'Resource Grades' from Shelf #23 -> Shelf #22, this is arguably the most important upgrade in the Royal Armory!"

One shelf. In a shop where each shelf unlocks behind a count of upgrades already bought, one shelf is not decoration. It is hours for a strong account and days for a normal one. He moved the best upgrade in the new system one notch closer to the door and said so in public.

An idle game does not ship content, it ships an exchange rate

Add a class to an action game and you are adding verbs. Players grade verbs in a weekend, because feel is what that genre reports on.

Add one to an idle game and you are adding an exchange rate: how much of a player's banked time converts into how much of the new thing, and where on their curve that conversion becomes worth starting. You cannot find that number by playing your own build for an afternoon, because your own account has every resource in the game. It lives out in a population of save files, and the only instrument that reads it is a live release.

So the four-day retune is not a stumble. It is the measurement.

Three bonuses that quietly paid less

The same August 29 notes carry the other half of the story.

Resource Replenish was not giving its collection rate at all. In LavaFlame2's own words: "Adjusted the amount display to be +1% per level instead of +5% per level, but it was giving +0% per level so like erm actually thats technically an infinitely strong buff."

Outpost Glorification, bought with the class's own currency, was "not granting it's 2x Rank Exp bonus fully."

A week later, on September 5, the third Outpost upgrade, Greater Education, was fixed "to give its full bonus."

Three multipliers inside one eleven-day-old economy, each paying less than the interface promised, each found and corrected after release.

The bug nobody can feel

Here is why that class of bug belongs to this genre specifically.

In a game with a health bar, a broken multiplier announces itself. You swing, the number is wrong, you notice in one fight. The player holds a control group at all times.

In an idle game every number is going up all the time, on purpose, at a rate no player has an independent model of. A +5% per level upgrade that pays +0% does not feel like anything. "Slower than it should be" and "this is an idle game" produce identical sensations, and the only baseline available is the same account yesterday, running the same broken code.

So the bug never arrives as a bug report. It arrives, if it arrives, as a spreadsheet from the one person in the community who fits a curve to their own logs. The cost of it never arriving is not a crash. It is a player who decides the new class is not worth it and never comes back to check.

That is why patch notes here are load-bearing in a way they are not in other genres. They are not marketing. They are the instrument.

The developer cannot feel it either

The September 5 notes have my favourite line of the month, and it is not a joke line.

The spelunking upgrade Ambery Supply Swap "was changed from 25x amber & 20x less amber drops to 15x amber & 10x less amber drops. I will continue to adjust this upgrade until it is strictly beneficial to have, in case this change doesn't quite do such."

Read it twice. Both sides of the trade are printed, before and after, multiplier and divisor. The ratio moved in the player's favour. And the developer who authored both numbers still will not promise the upgrade is worth taking.

That is what a compounding economy does to intuition. Once every number multiplies three other numbers, "is this good" stops being a question you answer by looking and becomes one you answer by simulating. His response is the right one: publish the arithmetic. These same posts print the average payout of the event minigame, 2.31 points per play, along with the strategy the simulation assumed. Nobody makes a developer do that. He does it because arithmetic is the only sense organ anyone has in here, players and designers alike.

The other kind of retune, one week earlier, one game over

Compare what Jagex spent August doing to Old School RuneScape. The Summer Sweep Up lengthened the Colossal Wyrm Agility course by 25% and 40% for its two tiers, then raised XP, bone shards and termites to match, so it runs at "roughly the same XP/hr and termites/hr but fewer inputs/hr." The next week's batch made aerial fishing "considerably less click-intensive" and cut the wait on deadfall traps from 15 ticks to 8.

That is a retune of a quantity players feel immediately: how often they have to touch the screen. It lands the day it ships and the forum grades it within the hour.

LavaFlame2 is retuning a quantity nobody feels: how fast an unobserved number compounds. Same month, same corner of the genre, opposite instruments. One job is tuned by feedback. The other is tuned by arithmetic and by being honest in the notes, and it is the harder of the two by a distance. The alternative to a four-day retune was never a perfect launch. It was leaving 600 standing.

The version of this bill I pay

I build an idle RPG, Tideward, so read this last part knowing that.

Tideward simulates while it is closed. You put the phone down, you come back, and the game reconstructs the hours you were not there. That makes this failure worse on my side, not better. A rate that pays less than it claims underdelivers into a stretch of time nobody watched, then reports itself as one summary number with nothing to check it against. If mining came back 5% light for a week, not one player would file that. They would say the game feels slow, and they would be right without being able to say why.

Which leaves one workable answer, and it is printed all over those IdleOn notes. Put the rate in the tooltip. Put the arithmetic in the patch note. When a bonus changes, say what it was and what it is now. Not because players will audit you, most will not. Because it is the only way anyone, yourself included, ever finds out you were wrong.

Royal Guardian announcement, August 25 | Retune and Cropfall notes, August 29 | W7 Taskmaster notes, September 5 | OSRS Summer Sweep Up, August 12 | OSRS Hunter and Skilling, August 19

P.S. Tideward is up for pre-order on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. Free to download, one $9.99 unlock. It launches February 11, 2027, and you can pre-order it now.

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