Best Of

So I just want to ask, Kabam —will there be any kind of package for players who actually went through this month’s Adaptive EQ on Elder difficulty?

Because, this EQ isn’t “adaptive,” it’s absurdly overtuned. The defenders feel like Everest-level defenders with health pools and attack values way beyond anything reasonable. Add in punishing, unfun interaction nodes, and it’s less “adaptive” and more “unplayable.”

Each fight is 5+ minutes of slogging, 16 fights per quest, burning through revives and potions— for what? Rewards that are barely on par with what we’ve already seen from the Valiant Gauntlet.

At first, I thought players calling this EQ garbage were exaggerating. Then I played it. Turns out, they were being generous. How did this even pass testing from the same team that claims to “keep player experience in mind”?

And look, I get it — mistakes can happen. Maybe the team thought boosts would make these fights go faster, but in practice that clearly hasn’t worked. Instead, it turned into a frustrating slog. When those mistakes translate into pure pain for the players, it only seems fair to compensate the ones who actually pushed through and finished it.

Now, plenty of players are skipping this EQ altogether. But for those of us who went through it, dealing with Kabam’s mistake and carrying the pain, shouldn’t there be something better than these insult-tier rewards?

If next month’s EQ really is going to be “less miserable,” fine. But that doesn’t erase the disaster this one turned out to be. Players who suffered through it deserve acknowledgment— and better rewards than what we got.

So, as a player of 9-10 years, I've seen the game evolve so much (as many of us have)
And yeah, a lot of us veterans have the old "These kids today.. in my day we walked to school barefoot in the snow, uphill.. both ways.." (did Variant 1 with 2017 5 stars, etc.) mindset sometimes 😂 but honestly there have been many great improvements to the game on the whole over the years

So, anyone who has been playing for even 3-7 years will know that EQ has largely been behind the curve for endgame players for years at this point.. meaning the rewards and difficulty were always at least one progression level behind.. though Kabam did try to supplement it with other things

But, I can remember when Uncollected EQ first came out (MODOks release I think) and it was difficult for me relative to my progression and to the attackers available at the time, etc. But.. I used items to complete it because the rewards were worth it (again, relative to my progression) and this marked a time when EQ was tuned correctly imo, both difficulty and rewards

But, as the years went by EQ began to fall further and further behind the curve of the player base (difficulty and rewards not high enough for endgame)

And we all begged and pleaded for Kabam to start keeping EQ current and relevant (adding new, higher levels more frequently)

First piece of positive feedback is: they finally tried to actually give us what we have been asking for.. and also created a system that automatically updates EQ for every player.. indefinitely

So, it's actually an amazing idea and I want to give credit to Kabam for taking the time to work on it and roll it out.. is it perfect? Nope, it's not haha.. but I think it's great that they tried

I also appreciate the huge challenge that is attempting to make as many players happy as possible - it's not easy, not at all.. so I hope folks will have patience if they need to work a few things out.. because I'm excited about the *idea* of a permanent solution to the long standing issue of EQ that becomes outdated quickly

As for the actual content itself.. so far my feedback is:

1) If we are using one persistent health bar for 16 fights, maybe tune the attack rating down a hair? I actually think the health stats are ok.. because the idea behind the class based quests is that we seek and use damage modifiers that are provided in the nodes (some of the fights took me 45s)

2) Instead of having one node set theme for all 15 fights - use a different theme for each section
Because in a single use format for our champs, we're going to have different sub sets within each class that are good for different themes (something that used to rotate month to month and that made more sense when we could use a champ more than once - traditional 5 champ team).. but if each section is a different theme (Mutant A, Mutant B..) we could plan our sections in advance to use those best for each section within each class based quest.. this would be more fun and allow for more utilization of the class based damage modifiers

Finally, I want to say that I do understand why single use format has been implemented recently.. it's because it's harder to tune things up without it.. for example, I cleared the Classic Skill quest with literally one champ for all the fights plus boss.. and ended at 75% on that champ with all 4 of the other champs on team untouched lol.. Rank 4 MoleGod just basically stomped on the whole quest and the same can be said for certain champs in other classes - so, how to you tune this up? When one champ can clear an entire quest when you can use them for each fight?

You'd have to drastically tune up attack and heath values *and* start cranking up the node sets.. right? Issue is this.. a lot of players will hate this 😂.. so I actually see why single use quests were implemented tbh, that way you can still keep the relatively simple node sets that even include pro player damage modifiers.. all is to say that it's not easy to tune something up, while also keeping everyone happy

But I'm glad they are actually doing something to solve the issue of outdated EQ.. the effort is appreciated and I hope they come up with a more popular solution

As for the content

A lot of people have given feedback on adaptive difficulty. There are a few people that like it, a few more at least have no problem with it, and a lot of people don't like it. There are a lot of reasons why: fight lengths, fight difficulty, narrow roster checking, relative reward value. Now that I've had a chance to both see it and think about it, plus discuss it with others, I think there's a fundamental problem with Adaptive difficulty that no amount of tweaking alone will solve. It is a problem that no matter who you listen to, and no matter who you try to please, will still break it for everyone else. And the problem, in effect, is us. We as a player base are wildly diverse in player strength, not to mention our approaches to the game, our tolerance for difficulty, our time availability. We are thousands and thousands of different people with different skills, knowledge, money and time.

But there's only one Adaptive difficulty.

The idea of adaptive difficulty is to eliminate difficulty tiers, and instead have a monthly EQ that can grow with you. You get stronger, it gets stronger. You move up, your rewards move up. Whether they hit the target correctly, in theory that's great. The problem is there is no target to hit. If there exists a player twice as skilled as me (and there are) there is no difficulty you can design into Adaptive EQ that will properly challenge us both. I can eventually have the same roster, but I will never have the same skill. Or maybe I'm a casual player will less time. I am not likely to grow into a player with more time. Or maybe I'm a casual player that doesn't want to stress on content. I'm not likely to grow into someone that does.

There has always been a choice. Just because you're Uncollected, doesn't mean you have to do UC EQ. You can do lower tiers if you want. You can pick your difficulty level. You will get less rewards, but that's your choice. You can choose to play the game casually if you want. You can choose lower difficulty if you just aren't that good. Remember, almost half the players in this game are below average. If Adaptive difficulty targets the average player, that means half the players can no longer do monthly EQ. And that's a problem.

When I did my Act 6 difficulty analysis, there was a central point to all of it. The point was that things like Labyrinth, Abyss, Eternity of Pain, can be whatever difficulty the devs set. Whether its hard for the top 20% or top 10% or top 1% is a matter of design choice. But the story arcs were, and still mostly are, the main progression path to the game. They can't be balanced around what the top 20% can do, because that leaves the bottom 80% nowhere to go. Now, you do have some leeway with story Arcs: if you aim for the average player, below average players could try to "outlevel" it. They can grow much stronger than the average player gets before tackling it, to level the playing field. This has limits, but it can happen, and you don't have to aim for the very bottom of the playerbase as a result.

But you can't outlevel Adaptive EQ. Its designed to grow with you, so you can't make it easier by growing stronger. It will grow stronger with you. If you can't do it now, you might never be able to do it no matter how much you progress or how strong you build your roster.

What happens to the bottom 25% of the playerbase? What happens to the bottom 10% of the playerbase? I'm perfectly fine telling them they might never do the Grandmaster's Gauntlet. But monthly EQ *has* to be accessible to everyone. It is a central part of the game.

Maybe elder is too hard. Maybe classic needs more rewards. But none of that will matter if most of the playerbase can't do monthly EQ, because I doubt they'll stick around. But we also can't make Adaptive so easy that 90% of the players sleep walk through it with mediocre rewards. Really, we need difficulty modes.

We need an adaptive difficulty that asks the player: so, who are you? Are you MSD? Okay, here you go. Are you an average player? Here's your difficulty. Are you just looking to cruise casually? Well, we will let you do that also. We need something that can be fast, can be easy, can be simple to do. Its fine if it is harder and more rewarding for the players who can and want to do that. But while it is great that Adaptive scales with roster strength, that grows with me as I grow, we also need Adaptive to scale with the player. We have different tiers of roster. We also have different tiers of player. Adaptive needs to include as many of them as possible. Adaptive should grow with the player, but it needs to first know who that player is.

Whatever else happens, in my opinion if Adaptive doesn't scale with player, it is going to be a very serious long term problem for the game. No reward buff fixes this. No difficulty tweak fixes this.

Adaptive scales with roster. It must also scale with our players.

Everything else is tuning. But in my opinion, this is fundamental.