Rebuilding Friendly Battles: How to Make Jurassic World Alive's Most Overlooked Feature Great
- IDGT902
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
The Friendly Battle system is one of the most underdeveloped parts of Jurassic World Alive. It's a feature with huge potential, but is weighed down by bugs, missing options, and constant player frustration.
Most of the time, if not always, friendly battles simply don’t work as intended. What was once a great way for players to prepare for tournament weekends, test out new creatures, or have casual fun has now become a feature many players avoid entirely. Battles often fail to connect or require too much effort just to function properly.
In this article, we’ll explore some exciting new additions and practical solutions that could finally make Friendly Battles a feature worth fixing - and one that could genuinely energize the player base if handled right.
Current Problems with Friendly Battles
Unreliable Matchmaking: Battles often fail to connect, crash mid-match, or leave players stuck in endless loading screens.
Random Team Selection: Players can't choose their exact creatures before a friendly battle, making serious testing difficult.
No Custom Rulesets: There’s no way to adjust battle conditions (e.g., boosts on/off, rarity limits, creature bans).
No Tournament Tools: Players and alliances have to organize brackets and rules manually, outside of the game.
No Spectator Mode: Hosts can’t easily watch or verify battles during friendly tournaments.
Zero Incentives: Friendly battles offer no rewards, meaning there’s little reason for most players to use the mode.
To be fair, some of these problems are expected given the limitations of an older system, and players have developed creative workarounds over time. For example, Spectator Mode can technically be replicated through Discord, with players streaming their battles for others to watch. However, this method is largely limited to active server communities and isn't a built-in feature of the game itself.
Similarly, hosting tournaments based on friendly battles was once a common practice among top alliances, giving players the chance to compete internally for bragging rights. Yet without built-in tournament tools or reliable matchmaking, these events have become increasingly rare and difficult to manage.
We'll touch on some solutions now and how implementation could have a huge impact.
Full Team Selection Before Friendly Battles
One of the biggest frustrations with Friendly Battles is the lack of control over your team. Currently, players are forced to rely on random draws from their full battle roster, making it almost impossible to properly test specific creatures, strategies, or synergies.
A simple but hugely impactful fix would be to allow full team selection before a Friendly Battle begins.
Players would be able to manually pick the four creatures they want to use, just like setting up a squad in a tournament.
How it would work:
After sending or accepting a friendly battle invite, each player would be prompted to select 4 creatures from their full collection.
Once both players are locked in, the battle begins normally.
Alternatively, if Ludia wants to keep a little surprise factor, we could also still keep the team of 8 as an option that both players will need to agree to prior to the start of the match.
This simple change would make Friendly Battles much more useful for testing teams, preparing for tournaments, and having more serious practice matches without relying on random luck. It would also be easy for players to understand and could be implemented without overcomplicating the system.
Add Customizable Rulesets for Friendly Battles
Right now, Friendly Battles are stuck with only one option: standard battle rules. There’s no way to create special conditions, limit creature types, or mirror tournament restrictions, which severely limits the creativity and usefulness of the system.
Introducing Customizable Rulesets would immediately make Friendly Battles more dynamic, strategic, and tournament ready.
Players could set simple conditions before starting the match, making each battle more tailored to what they want to practice or compete in.
Possible Ruleset Options:
Boosts On / Boosts Off
Set Rarity Limits (e.g., Common Only, Epic Only)
Allow/Disallow Specific Abilities (e.g., no Flock creatures, no Swap-In Damage creatures)
Speed Tie Adjustment (alternate who goes first, or randomize first move)
Creature Bans (manually ban 1–2 specific creatures from both sides)
Even just a handful of these options would make Friendly Battles vastly more appealing for casual practice, alliance tournaments, and competitive prep.
Customizable rulesets would open up endless creative opportunities for alliances and players. While it would require a bit more setup before each match, the long-term impact on player engagement and community-driven content would be huge.
The Bigger Opportunity: What Working Friendly Battles Could Unlock
Fixing the Friendly Battle system wouldn’t just improve casual matches, it would open the door to even bigger possibilities.
With stable matchmaking, full team selection, and customizable rules, Friendly Battles could become the foundation for:
Alliance-Hosted Tournaments with bragging rights and alliance rewards.
Community-Wide Competitive Events, where friendly battles determine placements or unlock cosmetics.
Special Weekend Events, where participating in Friendly Battles counts toward bigger goals.(Community Events)
Keeping rewards external preserves the casual, low-pressure spirit of Friendly Battles, while giving players exciting new reasons to engage with the feature long-term.
How to Make Friendly Battles a Core Feature
Friendly Battles working properly isn't just about fixing bugs, it's about rebuilding a system that can become a major pillar of Jurassic World Alive's long-term success.
Other competitive games have successfully made their friendly match systems core parts of their player experience.
Looking at a game like Pokémon Pocket TCG, it allows players to easily create private lobbies using invite codes: short, unique codes that players can share to quickly bring friends or alliance members into custom matches.
This system streamlines the process:
The host sets the rules (e.g., format restrictions, boosts on/off, rarity limits).
A code is generated, which players enter to join the lobby instantly.
Matches begin once players are ready, with full team selection and parameters already set.
For Jurassic World Alive, adopting a similar invite code system would offer several major advantages:
Simplified Friendly Battles: No more fragile matchmaking invites or needing players to already be on your friends list.
Reduced Friends List Bloat: Players wouldn’t need to constantly add and remove people just to organize battles.
Future Raid Improvements: The same code-based system could eventually be expanded to make Raid invites faster and more flexible, especially for cross-alliance teamwork.
Implementing an invite code system would not only revolutionize Friendly Battles, it would also lay the groundwork for smarter, more flexible multiplayer experiences across the entire game.
Endless Possibilities: What a Functional Friendly Battle System Could Unlock
If Friendly Battles are given the updates and support they deserve, they could evolve far beyond casual practice matches, becoming a true backbone of Jurassic World Alive's competitive and social ecosystem.
Here are just a few possibilities that a working Friendly Battle system, powered by invite codes and custom rulesets, could unlock:
1. Alliance Seasons and Championships
Alliances could organize official internal seasons or brackets using private friendly battles. Points could be tracked manually (or automatically in the future), creating a year-round reason for alliances to stay active, competitive, and connected, even outside of traditional tournaments and raids.
2. Community Tournaments and Events
The JWA community has already shown massive interest in organizing tournaments. With better Friendly Battle tools, players, YouTubers, Discord communities, and content creators could host larger-scale public competitions with custom formats, featured matches, and potential rewards (either in-game or just for bragging rights).
3. Limited-Time Event Modes
Ludia could introduce official Friendly Battle “Event Weeks,” featuring wild rulesets like "Commons Only," "No Swap Damage," "Speed Penalties Active," or even "Boosts Disabled." Players could join lobbies and experience these temporary challenges with friends or alliance members, keeping gameplay fresh without needing new creature releases every time.
4. Creator Collaborations
Content creators could host special Friendly Battle challenges, livestreamed or recorded, bringing more visibility to the game. Friendly Battles could become a showcase feature, highlighting clever strategies, funny challenges, or epic rivalries.
5. A True Entry Point for New Competitive Players
Right now, the competitive scene feels intimidating to newer players. A functioning Friendly Battle system would allow newcomers to practice in safe, low-pressure environments, building skills and confidence before diving into tournaments or high-stakes PvP.
Friendly Battles could evolve from an overlooked feature into a major pillar of Jurassic World Alive's future, strengthening alliances, growing the community, and breathing new life into player engagement without requiring constant new content drops.
All it takes is the right foundation, and a little creative vision.
Conclusion: A Missed Opportunity Ready to Be Fixed
Friendly Battles were once a promising idea in Jurassic World Alive, but over time, they’ve been left behind being buggy, unreliable, and often overlooked. Yet the potential they hold is massive.
With a few critical improvements, stable matchmaking, full team selection, customizable rules, and a simple invite code system, Friendly Battles could become one of the strongest pillars of the game's future. They could empower alliances, ignite community tournaments, create new content opportunities, and offer players endless ways to compete, practice, and have fun.
Other games have already proven that friendly match systems can drive engagement for years if built right. Jurassic World Alive has all the ingredients, it just needs to take the next step.
It’s time to fix Friendly Battles, not just for what they were supposed to be, but for what they could become.