Early Information on Soul Exchange Updates [Part of The Beta Beat V85]

[Maryij - Ghost Division RO]

This thread is to provide early insights and discussion on Soul Exchange Updates
Don’t get too attached

• Details from Beta, especially brand-new Beta content, don’t tend to be very reliable for actual release.
• It’s incredibly common that features are changed during Beta testing, or sometimes even after testing but before release. That is, after all, the purpose of Beta testing.
• So I wouldn’t get too attached to any of this — it’s not unheard of for entire portions of features to be removed or reworked, or for radical changes to functionality to be made.
   

Soul Exchange Updates 

• The tiers are changed from 10, 15, and 20  to 5, 15, and 50.
• You can perform now 1 trade in all tiers instead of doing a single trade during the whole event.
   

Quote of info tooltip in the game:
Soul Exchange

• The Soul Exchange allows you to trade your Legendary Heroes for a new Legendary Hero of your choice from this Soul Exchange's selection.
• Soul Exchange cannot be undone.
• Traded heroes will be lost.
• Soul Exchange can be done once for each tier.

Heroes available
Tier I - 5 Heroes Required

• Odile
• Meresankh
• Abigail
• Thalassa
• Ahmose Costume

Tier II - 15 Heroes Required

• Swiftpaw
• Silverpaw
• Iocantha
• Pophit
• Peregine

Tier III - 50 Heroes Required

• Agadh
• Iron-Heart
• Gardered
• Wu Song
• Fafnir

[Ruskin505]

I could have sworn I've seen folks requesting a higher cost tier for newer heroes for years.  But I've seen almost exlusively negative reaction to a 50 soul cost tier.  If the hero option is right, I'll gladly do it.  I'm f2p with 37 legendaries at 1/1.  It's well within the possibility (just not often).

[HootingPirate]

I think most of those asking for a 50-hero tier are really just looking to clear roster space and don't care much what they get for it.

And I think a lot of the negative energy is coming from the removal of the 20-hero tier. For most players that was probably the only tier that made sense. A decision I sure hope they reverse.

Yes there has been the odd gem at 15, and even 10. But the vast majority of 10 and 15 tier options for the last 2 years were already obsolete long before they were offered.

[Ginger]

50 is too much. Switch it back to 20. The average player won't have 50 extra heroes to trade.

[BobTheSnark]

Given my penchant for “Bob’s Brief Bizarro Budget Breakdown” looks at Soul Exchanges over the years,  I’d argue that shopping for a bargain has long been part of this event — and a welcome one — and one player’s “outmoded” is another player’s godsend.

 I mean, by construction even most, if not all, of the 20-soul choices are largely “outmoded” in the frame of reference of someone with at least some number of really-recent heroes.

One of the most fun things about Soul Exchange is that it has been an event for “the rest of us” — especially C2P and dedicated F2P who could, at least once in a while, make the decision to push a bunch of dupes and “eh” and even “maybe” heroes into the pot to get something we really want.  

Yeah, okay, SE has never aimed greatly at the biggest spenders — but it didn’t need to.  Pretty arguably a large chunk of the game, from the constant onslaught of new often hard-to-match heroes vomited forth from a panoply of portals, to anything competitive (PvP or PvE ranking), ALREADY has leaned first and foremost to those both budgeted and lucky enough to have both a deep but especially ever-refreshing fully-upgraded modern roster.

It’s one thing to *maybe* make the top tier of heroes *slightly* more expensive in order to have significantly more recent choices — though given the ever-increasing pace of hero release and power, even that’s arguable.

But FIFTY SOULS?!?

Come on.

This all but puts a literal graphic between the first two tiers and the third tier marked “PAYWALL.”  There’s already plenty of this game that already increasingly feels that way, but this takes one of the handful of the actual proletarian-feeling events in the game and slaps the majority of the playerbase in the collective face with a chiding “ah ah ah!  not for you.”

Even having a cheaper lower tier of Soul Exchange isn’t going to make up for this, especially given the bevy of already-expressed opinions that “10-soul choices [almost] always just suck.”

Soul Exchange engages much of the playerbase in a way that few other events do because it IS “for the rest of us.” Taking away one-third of that from many players to cater yet again even more to the biggest spenders is an alienating decision.

And? To be honest? A player who summons so much that they have fifty spare 5* heroes to throw in, much less four times a year?  Is actually unlikely to benefit much from ANY POSSIBLE Soul Exchange.

Cheesing off a large chunk of the playerbase to cater to the already-most-catered-to part instead -- in a way that won’t even help most of the latter much if at all? Sounds like a really bad trade to me.

 

[Bruce]

I really really like this idea ! Finally I can use a lot of old unusefull heroes to get one of the newest ! And in parallel I can free my roster ! Good !

[Gargon]

I like the change. I think it could be further improved, but this version is better than what we currently have.

The 50 is tough, but the heroes are worth saving up for. I would rather pick one of those than 2 or 3 of the ones we get offered at 20.  I also like the 5, because it makes the budget deals a) affordable to basically anyone and b) so cheap they actually become an option to pick, while I would pass on them for 10. Like in this case for example Thalassa or Odile. At 10 I would not recommend picking them if you can get a better hero for 15. (Only 50%more) But 5 is nothing. And now the better option costs 200% more. So the cheaper options gain value.

I also like that picking multiple heroes is an option, especially combined with the new 5 soul category. Before the lowest were usually excluded because better heroes were picked, but now it’s possible to pick a little niche hero up on the side.  like I was very happy with Silverpaw last time, but if this SE had been available I could have picked Silverpaw and Odile as well as a Bearnie counter or Ahmose for rush etc. 
 

As to what I don´t like: I don’t see why it is necessary to get rid of the 20 category. They could have just kept it or maybe upped it to 25 for the symmetry of pricing and then added added the 50 category. I guess they didn’t want to change the gamecode to add another line of heroes or something like that? Or maybe they figured, people would complain if they upped the price by 5 souls, so instead they went to change it completely, which I guess will produce fewer complaints as it is harder to compare new and old versions. People always complain when there is an easy target to complain about: "Oh they increased the cost from 20 to 25, SG is all about money" (duh!) Vs now people have to value better heroes at a higher price which isn´t as black and white and well we all know much people like judging grey scales... But I am drifting off into sales psychology for no good reason...

Anyway overall I would be more interested in this version than the old one.

[Gargon]

4 hours ago, BobTheSnark said:

Yeah, okay, SE has never aimed greatly at the biggest spenders — but it didn’t need to.

"Need to" from a players perspective I agree. 
"Want to" from SGs persepective though. SG is happy to keep FTPs happy if it doesn´t cost them anything, yes. But if they have the option to get paying customers interested at the same time? The only thing I wonder is: why not earlier? What (especially cheap or free) players want and what SG want is not often the same thing and since they make the rules...

People already struggle with rosterspace, it´s one of the main arguments when one reads comments about SE. Now people can spend a max of 70 souls per SE compared to a max of 20 souls before. The big spenders that are now attracted more to SE, so far only had to keep 20 roster spaces for SE (if any at all, the biggest ones may not even have bothered at all)  have to buy an extra 30 (if only the 50 category is a goal) to 50 (if they want to pick all 3) roster spaces. At big roster sizes that is a considerable amount of money.
 

4 hours ago, BobTheSnark said:

This all but puts a literal graphic between the first two tiers and the third tier marked “PAYWALL.”

I think that´s a bit exaggerated. All of this money spending is on a sliding scale. The step from 20 to 50 isn´t a new dimension, not even an order of magnitude. If there´s a paywall now, it has been there before, it just moved a bit down the scale. If there hasn´t been one before, there still isn´t. So sure less people will do 50 every time than did 20 every time before. Nobody says you have to do top category every time. But if 20 was an option before you can just save up for 2 or 3 rounds to get to 50. If 20 wasn´t an option, 50 still isn´t. It´s not like we go from everybody going every time, to nobody going ever.

I think the change from 10 to 5 in the lowest category is much more significant to a lot more people than the change from 20 to 50. Now the lowest category is a serious alternative, when previously it was a "skip it, save up for better" recommendation in 95% of cases. On the old pricing you had to choose between 3x10er heroes vs 2x15er heroes, which the 15ers would always win. Now it is 3x5er vs 1x15er hero, that is much better matchup for the 5ers. Not only can a lot more people afford these heroes and if we are talking about people struggling to find 10 heroes we are in a group of players who should be able to find useful heroes in that category. But I personally will be a lot more open to actually recommending heroes as a good value deal.

[BobTheSnark]

9 hours ago, Gargon said:

But if they have the option to get paying customers interested at the same time?

SE has been appealing in no small part because it’s useful to the kind of player who still uses at least some heroes generally even when they are, say, 2+ years old.

For the kind of player who heavily focuses on constantly cycling Heroes from the Last Six Months (if that), a 50-soul choice will generally age out just as quickly as all the rest (assuming that the 50 tier are even Brand New Choices; if the 50 tier offers heroes that are, e.g. even six months old already, then they often might not be worth leveling/ascending/embleming/LBing — to the kind of player who can afford them — compared to a hero out this month).

 

9 hours ago, Gargon said:

I think the change from 10 to 5 in the lowest category is much more significant to a lot more people than the change from 20 to 50.

This may depend somewhat on what kind of heroes are available at 5 souls.

For one thing, it seems like I am one of the few people to make much argument for generally considering 10-soul heroes as serious choices — outside of the occasional, say, Blossom.  (Heck, this is why I still call my SE analyses “Bob’s Brief Bizarro Budget Breakdown,” alliteration aside: they grew out of me initially doing an analysis ONLY of 10-soul choices amidst forum discussions which were 90%+ focused on 20-soul choices and 95%+ focused on 15-and-20-soul choices.)

So it can come off as a little disingenuous to have both the “lowest-tier SE heroes just suck and are a waste of time/food/mats/LB/etc to anyone” argument AND the “well now that more players would be able to afford the ‘sucky’ heroes more easily, it’s okay” argument.

If the lowest tier are actually okay budget options, then a price cut on them actually is a good deal; if the lowest tier is “trash,” then a price cut is false economy.

This will be also influenced by any possible future selections at 5 remaining at least as relatively on-a-budget-useful as the old 10s; if they get relatively worse (“because they’re so cheap now”) then we’ve gone from the old argument of “lol, never take a 10, just save for a 20” to “lol, never take a 5, just save for a 50“ argument.

 

9 hours ago, Gargon said:

The step from 20 to 50 isn´t a new dimension, not even an order of magnitude.

Er.

There kind of is.

First, the difference between the “sucky”/“budget” choices and the “premium” choices goes from a factor of 2 to a factor of 10.

But putting that literalism aside, there is a BIG difference for at least some, if not many, players between 20 and 50.

For a long time, for me, 20 has been kinda a stretch goal at best.  If I want the possibility of splurging on some future 20 choice, I need to be conservative spending souls with the most immediate SE choices *and* aggressively pursue every free pull I can get *and* tilt what C2P spending I do toward cheaper (e.g. EHT) pulls over more premium (e.g. Wilderness) pulls so I get more trade-in souls per unit currency spent *and* grind the ever-loving daylights out of multiple TC20s (which doesn’t help me when it comes to feeders leveling the heroes I do get).

In short, SE is something I have to TRY to be able to use.  I don’t just get “lol, 30 HotM duplicates this month while I was chasing my second Ustad, third Thaffer, and full set of veggie heroes.”  I hardly ever choose a 20 hero, because the difference in cost -- to me — between even a 15 and a 20 is a lot.  (Often bigger than any difference in utility to me, if any, between a 15 hero and a 20 hero.)

And yeah, I’ve entirely skipped more than a few SE — even when there are heroes I wouldn’t mind getting, because I have to weigh kinda-nice-hero now against a bigger-difference-maker later.

And to a certain extent, okay, fine, resource management is DEFINITELY a huge part of this game. (At least, for folks with finite resources.)

But taking that up to “if you can save up for 20, then you can save up for 50”?

Not for me! Not practically, at least.

It already takes me so long to save for 20, that SPENDING 20 is a rare and precious splurge. Of course I can EVENTUALLY get to 50 in principle, but in practice actually chasing 50 means I’m getting a new SE hero so seldom that SE might as well hardly exist for me.

Meanwhile, the folks who can afford 50 souls every time are just… what… splurging on expensive collector pieces I will rarely be able afford (if 50-soul choices aren’t really worth it compared to what they pull everyday anyway) OR widening the already-considerable gap between Borg Paradigm spending and Bob spending (if 50-soul choices ARE worth it).

—

All of this comes back to my biggest problem with having a 50 tier in SE:

a positive aspect of a few specific features in the game — Hero Coach, Visiting Outfitter, and Soul Exchange (even, perhaps, Fated Summon) — is that they are “anti-frustration” features for the “rest of us.”

They don’t close the gap between “Borg Paradigm” and “everybody else” — heck, they may barely slow the rate at which the gap widens — but they give the proletariat bulk of the playerbase options, choices, toys, and maybe a slightly enhanced ability to “punch up” occasionally.

Most of the game is already devoted to “spending more = more advantage,” and I get it, RNG help me, I really really do, that SG/Zynga/TT is a BUSINESS. Fine.

But a 50 tier takes something that was a very small measure of “here’s something for everybody else, to help you to maybe have an interesting set of choices once in a while” and turns it to “let’s take part of that and give that to the biggest spenders too.“

For those of us who aren’t the biggest spenders, that…

sucks.

[Sillyboy]

I like the idea of an upper tier of SE, but 50?! That seems crazy..

[Gargon]

On 3/27/2026 at 9:03 PM, BobTheSnark said:

For the kind of player who heavily focuses on constantly cycling Heroes from the Last Six Months (if that)

Maybe I´m just in a lucky bracket, where I can afford 1 or 2 of those heroes a year, while heroes like Hrothgar (one of the best 20 Soul options last time) I still play, but they are the weakest links on my teams. Playable yes, but not for long. Song on the other hand would be a top notch hero for me, basically the hero that would replace Hrothgar.

[NevarMaor]

I am not quite f2p but I essentially am when it comes to chasing heroes. I have made SE exchanges in the 15 and 20 tier levels. I would never be able to make a 50 soul exchange unless I saved up for a few years. As is I only exchange every 2-3 rounds.

From my perspective, 50 is a paywall. Yet another event where non-spenders are baggage class.

[BobTheSnark]

On 4/6/2026 at 10:11 AM, NevarMaor said:

From my perspective, 50 is a paywall. Yet another event where non-spenders are baggage class.

And this is a lot of my problem with the reported upcoming potential change (to 50).  Yes -- in principle, if the 10-soul heroes stay at the same tier of usefulness but only cost 5 souls, that part is potentially a boon for F2P and VC2P.

But 20 souls was at least a "stretch goal" for VC2P/C2P players, or perhaps some few particularly motivated and/or extra-patient F2P.  50 souls is pretty much almost by design out of reach of most-to-all C2P players.  (More to the point, even a C2P player who could, even eventually, save up 50 souls has to confront whether one 50-soul choice is worth more than three 15-soul choices.)

Let's put this another way in terms of "how much of a paywall really?" -- 

In order to have an average of at least 50 trade-in 5* heroes every three months (not just as a "once in a blue moon" sort of trade-in), you need roughly 1316 summons (I'm assuming here for simplicity that all summons have a total effective 2.5-per-100 rate of 5* heroes plus a 1.3-per-100 rate of HoTM, which is largely-but-not-universally true; I'm also assuming that Mystic Summons drop a negligible number of completely free 5*).

This will also land you up to 13 Fated Summon picks, but since you can only take 20 FS heroes every six months, I'll just assume for simplicity that 10 FS choices every three months are going into SE to allow you to actually keep 10 of the 5* heroes you actually want during that time.  (If you want to keep more than 10 new heroes every three months, obviously you'll need to summon more; I'm trying for a reasonable floor estimate.)

Where this gets squirrelier is figuring out how many of these summons you can accomplish for free (i.e. through earning pulls through in-game events, Daily Streak, opening chests, Seasonal Brawls, people buying "help your alliance" offers, even saving up all freely earned gems for gem-pulls, etc.)  In the interest of keeping a very conservative round estimate, I'm going to allow for up to 100 freely earned summons per month (which I frankly think is a significant overestimate, but gives us a starting point).

This means, conservatively, you need to buy a minimum of 1000 summons per three months.  Some deals might allow you somewhat less than 1USD/pull, but at that scale you likely won't be to keep all pulls at  or below that price (more expensive coin deals, gem pulls are more expensive, composite deals may involve buying other things, etc etc.).  Let's be generous and assume you can somehow make that many summons at 1USD/pull....

to be at the 50 tier regularly for Soul Exchange, you need to be dropping easily over 330USD/month on summoning alone -- and possibly closer to 500, depending on the actual cost/pull for many large pulls. (Never mind anything else like mats, LB items, emblems/memblems, roster space, etc.)

While I am generally careful not to assign exact dollar amounts to "C2P" or what have you, I'd argue that much of the playerbase would not consider "several hundred US dollars a month" to be a small amount of money to drop on a single game.

A 50 tier is pretty arguably dang close to being a hard paywall (or, maybe at most generous, a "peon players can maybe choose one 'real' SE hero every year or two," which is hard enough of a paywall to likely just not bother with).

[Ginger]

I don’t like the idea of changing it to 50. F2P/ C2P will have a hard time using SE. Or unless max trainers are counted towards this or SG gives us some freebies max trainers. 

[NevarMaor]

On 4/11/2026 at 2:04 AM, BobTheSnark said:

"peon players can maybe choose one 'real' SE hero every year or two,"

This would be where I would land, getting one new hero every couple of years and having to carry those dupe 5* for all that time to do so. And to do that they would have to make the heroes significantly better than the 15-soul tier ones (and significantly better than what is on offer currently). I doubt that would happen, I can see them being incrementally better but not enough that I would save that long and forego what is available at 15, or even 5. I have drawn 15-soul heroes from half my SE draws as is.

[Shohoku79]

Playing as a collector, if roster space is not an issue, I might be able to save up enough duplicates to do the 50 once every two years.  But since roster space is not free, and quite expensively so to keep up in order to hold these dupes, I wouldn't be able to do so.

I'd hope they won't make this happen and just keep incorporating what they did recently (public poll/vote to decide who gets in). But if they do, The most I'd see myself do is to save up to 20 as a stretch, and pluck one from 5 and another from 15.

Edited April 13 by Shohoku79 (see edit history)

[BobTheSnark]

On 4/13/2026 at 4:30 AM, NevarMaor said:

This would be where I would land, getting one new hero every couple of years and having to carry those dupe 5* for all that time to do so. And to do that they would have to make the heroes significantly better than the 15-soul tier ones (and significantly better than what is on offer currently). I doubt that would happen, I can see them being incrementally better but not enough that I would save that long and forego what is available at 15, or even 5. I have drawn 15-soul heroes from half my SE draws as is.

Indeed!  20 souls also already a "stretch goal" for me, generally, and part of why I write my "budget guides" to SE.  (And why I just PASS on at least some SE, even when I have some tradeins.)

Along these lines, I was thinking even something along the lines of "how much difference can any one hero make?"  --Especially if that one hero is understood to be potentially, or actually, a blue-sky-lightning sort of event.

Specifically, consider the hypothetical scenario in which the game offered you, or me, or anyone, or even EVERYONE

• one free hero.  Any hero currently released in the game, but you have, say, 3 days to choose.

???

I'm not even sure how I would start picking a hero out of, say, the current Borg collective.  Partly because I wouldn't be able to surround it with Borg-level companions, and partly because I'm not sure how much any one hero would change the game for me.

Either the marginal utility of a single Mega Hero would be less than what I hoped for (which would be disappointing), or -- as a unique event if it did single-handedly fundamentally change even some aspects of the game for me -- that could be its own kind of depressing, not only that a single current hero could so completely outclass my current roster (and making all my current attack teams "This Big Guy/Gal plus Four Randos") but also watching it "Flowers for Algernon" decay in usefulness without similar companions or costumes or replacement as New Borg Heroes inevitably shoved it from the limelight.

I mean, sure, I'd take a free megahero, don't get me wrong -- but if it would be that potentially problematic for free and out of any of the released heroes, then how in heck would dropping 50 souls to purchase a near-blue-sky-lightning effect from a much more limited set of heroes be better?

When I pick a "workhorse" SE for, say, 15 souls, I expect it to be a decent bench or even second-string hero I can  use for a while and/or for certain purposes.  If I were to save for  a 50 soul choice... that's such a big investment for me (and for MOST players at least) that it's hard to imagine it not at least eventually disappointing.
 

On 4/13/2026 at 9:03 AM, Shohoku79 said:

Playing as a collector, if roster space is not an issue, I might be able to save up enough duplicates to do the 50 once every two years.  But since roster space is not free, and quite expensively so to keep up in order to hold these dupes, I wouldn't be able to do so.

I'd hope they won't make this happen and just keep incorporating what they did recently (public poll/vote to decide who gets in). But if they do, The most I'd see myself do is to save up to 20 as a stretch, and pluck one from 5 and another from 15.

Also a good point!  For folks for whom 50 is a major stretch goal, the roster space requirement is an added burden.

For the sort of folks who have (as I estimated above) a $300-500/month summoning budget (and could thereby regularly benefit from a 50 choice, never mind burning up to 70 souls per SE), roster space buys are perhaps an annoying but minor tax by comparison.

[NevarMaor]

8 hours ago, BobTheSnark said:

I'm not even sure how I would start picking a hero out of, say, the current Borg collective.  Partly because I wouldn't be able to surround it with Borg-level companions, and partly because I'm not sure how much any one hero would change the game for me.

The two main considerations I have when choosing an SE hero (or FS too) are: does it improve my roster either by improving my damage dealing ability or by adding new abilities; do I already have family members to team it with? Family bonuses improve all the heroes in that family.

A top-level hero at 50 souls likely would be an orphan on my roster. And yes, some families have family bonuses with one member (which makes zero sense to me).

[mpolo]

I feel like this just destroys SE. The only people who are able to consistently afford 50 souls every 3 months are going to be huge spenders, and they likely have all the heroes on offer. As I currently have a handful of souls saved up and only 19 roster places, it'd cost me about 2500 gems (or more, since the price goes up) to even THINK about getting 50 souls, and then it would happen every two or three years.

They could, of course, make those 50-soul heroes be brand new, SE-only heroes. Which would then be only for whales and out of reach for mortals. 

This sort of change is pushing me in the direction of leaving the game, actually.

[BobTheSnark]

On 4/15/2026 at 3:52 PM, mpolo said:

This sort of change is pushing me in the direction of leaving the game, actually.

This has been a sort of feeling I've been having / been concerned about:  though Soul Exchange early on had at least somewhat of a "paywall" feel, the increasing availability of free summons (through gameplay, Daily Streak, ads, etc) has made it increasingly accessible and an interesting option for many.

Jumping to a FIFTY tier makes it feel like the Great Paywall of China:  super dedicated F2P might be able to land one top-tier SE per year, maybe, but it really seems more a reward for "lol, fiftieth HotM of the month for me" sort of players.  These folks... don't need Soul Exchange choices to be rerouted for their benefit, they are doing pretty fine on summons almost by definition, neh?

And as I mentioned above, even if the new tier has Super Whoopee heroes and some players scrimp and save and wait with baited breath... how much does a single Borg-class hero matter?  One Thaffer is annoying to face, but by itself, might well seem disappointing to get yourself; it's when you're facing e.g. three Thaffers interspersed with two Mahayoddha heroes that it's device-throwing time.

Actual team building with "lesser" heroes may well be a better play for most folks...

...except those folks who summon a berjillion times already and would quite like to go ahead and pick up their third Thaffer (or whatever) for free.

And I'm wondering about the message a 50 tier sends, to , say, C2P players who already feel increasingly left behind by exponential power rush.  Widening the gap further between "have all the Borg" and "not" can kinda beg the question "why even spend money on this game, if Borg-level budgets aren't involved?"