Still, I don't see how rank down tickets and some good will from Kabam for a change would hurt anyone.
It will, it just won't be obvious or calculable. But to explain, I need to mention two other non-obvious things.
First: giving things away devalues other things, and the most important thing it devalues is playing time. Let's look at a really simple example. Suppose you play one hour a day and earn 100 units, and I play three hours a day and earn 300 units. Makes sense. Now imagine Kabam hands out 100 units a day entirely for free. That's "equal" across all players, but now you're getting 200 units a day and I'm getting 400. I'm playing three times as much to end up with twice as much stuff. This makes the ratio of playing time to game progress different than before, and reduces the value of playing.
All the stuff all the players have in the game comes basically from three sources: cash, playing time, and "for free" from Kabam. There's a balance between cash value and playing time value that is influenced by the value of each, and the amount that both are diluted by the "free stuff" like calendar rewards, etc. Adding more stuff to one bucket devalues the other two buckets by changing the ratios between what you can buy for cash, what you can grind through playing, and what everyone just gets automatically. Of course, these relationships are subtle and sometimes we can't really calculate how they change when you do just one small thing, but the effects have to be there regardless.
Second: games like this are balanced on relative, not absolute terms. That means the difficulty of content like Heroic or Master is set relative to the ability of the playerbase to complete it. If the average player gets stronger, that content will slowly drift upward in difficulty to match, so that the *perceived* difficulty of the content when played by the average player is about the same. In a global sense, we are all in indirect competition with each other collectively. So if literally everyone got, say, a ton of 5* champs for free suddenly and the rank up materials to rank them up, that wouldn't make the game "easier." Over time the game would crank up in difficulty until the content was just as hard as before on a relative basis. But in the meantime, all the *other* champs you earned over time would now be less valuable than before, because the content they would have to face would now be harder. In effect, your strength wouldn't be proportional to the roster you earned, but more proportional to the roster you were just handed.
Mathematically, I would say that game rewards and game difficulty are normalized. That means, in a sense, that giving one player something is similar to taking something away from everyone else. And giving everyone something is similar to simply lowering the value of everything they own. Every positive change is mathematically identical to some other negative change that has the same overall effect. But there are often side effects and secondary effects that make these changes actually a net negative, once the large effects balance each other out.
What happens if you give everyone RDTs to rank down 4* champs to accelerate their ability to get more 5* champs ranked up? You force Kabam to make Act 6.2 have even harsher entry requirements than they had planned, to compensate for the fact that Act 6.1's restrictions are now much weaker than originally designed. You'll just never know that happened, because unless you work for Kabam you'll never be told that happened. It will just be an invisible ratchet upward to keep everything relatively where they were intended to be.
It also makes no logical sense in that the complaint most people have about the 4* issue is the synergies. A synergy champ is the same at rank 1 and rank 5 so that doesn't make any sense.
It’s a problem if they have the 4*, or maybe even the 2* version of a champion that they use solely for synergies. For example, I occasionally use my 5* ghost, but my ant man is a 2* and my wasp is a 3*. I don’t actually use them for playing, but not letting me bring them in would hypothetically make playing ghost a lot more annoying.
Think about how many R5 4* champions you have that you can’t use now.
You mean the ones that you can't use in one part of the game but are still useful everywhere else including future content like Back Issues #2 and possibly even later portions of act 6?
Hey guys, we've already stated in the Forum FAQs that we don't have any plans to bring back Rank Down Tickets. However, if we change our minds about that, we'll be sure to let you all know!
Comments
First: giving things away devalues other things, and the most important thing it devalues is playing time. Let's look at a really simple example. Suppose you play one hour a day and earn 100 units, and I play three hours a day and earn 300 units. Makes sense. Now imagine Kabam hands out 100 units a day entirely for free. That's "equal" across all players, but now you're getting 200 units a day and I'm getting 400. I'm playing three times as much to end up with twice as much stuff. This makes the ratio of playing time to game progress different than before, and reduces the value of playing.
All the stuff all the players have in the game comes basically from three sources: cash, playing time, and "for free" from Kabam. There's a balance between cash value and playing time value that is influenced by the value of each, and the amount that both are diluted by the "free stuff" like calendar rewards, etc. Adding more stuff to one bucket devalues the other two buckets by changing the ratios between what you can buy for cash, what you can grind through playing, and what everyone just gets automatically. Of course, these relationships are subtle and sometimes we can't really calculate how they change when you do just one small thing, but the effects have to be there regardless.
Second: games like this are balanced on relative, not absolute terms. That means the difficulty of content like Heroic or Master is set relative to the ability of the playerbase to complete it. If the average player gets stronger, that content will slowly drift upward in difficulty to match, so that the *perceived* difficulty of the content when played by the average player is about the same. In a global sense, we are all in indirect competition with each other collectively. So if literally everyone got, say, a ton of 5* champs for free suddenly and the rank up materials to rank them up, that wouldn't make the game "easier." Over time the game would crank up in difficulty until the content was just as hard as before on a relative basis. But in the meantime, all the *other* champs you earned over time would now be less valuable than before, because the content they would have to face would now be harder. In effect, your strength wouldn't be proportional to the roster you earned, but more proportional to the roster you were just handed.
Mathematically, I would say that game rewards and game difficulty are normalized. That means, in a sense, that giving one player something is similar to taking something away from everyone else. And giving everyone something is similar to simply lowering the value of everything they own. Every positive change is mathematically identical to some other negative change that has the same overall effect. But there are often side effects and secondary effects that make these changes actually a net negative, once the large effects balance each other out.
What happens if you give everyone RDTs to rank down 4* champs to accelerate their ability to get more 5* champs ranked up? You force Kabam to make Act 6.2 have even harsher entry requirements than they had planned, to compensate for the fact that Act 6.1's restrictions are now much weaker than originally designed. You'll just never know that happened, because unless you work for Kabam you'll never be told that happened. It will just be an invisible ratchet upward to keep everything relatively where they were intended to be.
Arena, arena infinite streaks, event quest, future special requirement events andddd Arena.
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO