Best Of

It's not just the update that has turned a lot of people off of MCOC since mid-December. If I may state the obvious changes that have been controversial for majority of players this will help:

- EVERY UPDATE is riddled with bugs. Sometimes (like January) they released a Hotfix, but it was bugged for 2 weeks (just shy by 2 days). So the lack of QA and Testing is seen as non-existent.

- Nerfing AQ RAID Revives as soon as new champs were refreshed which always results in bugs 100% of every release change to this mode we have seen. The only difference this time, it was more a busted Boss in player's favor. A rarity but still a bug.

- Two weeks of the Paid Sigil was down onlytocome back lackluster with promise of it being "fixed" with minor things that we asked for back but still not addressing the insanely high cost of some items as well as requiring everything to be paid by Sigil Credits which we only get once a month. Biggest changes that haven't been addressed are: Potion Trade-ins, shard trade-ups and reasoning for such high cost of Titan to name but a few. This re-launched out dated already which is disappointing to Valiant players the most.

- Power Boosts being nerfed and hidden in an update and not properly addressed beforehand in either the Livestream to explain the reasoning after 10+ years of being this way or a detailed Forum/in-game mail/Discord well ahead of time.

- Speaking of which: COMMUNICATION has been severely lacking and typically we don't hear a response UNTIL the majority of summoners are already upset and frustrated.

- Banquet backlash that has never been properly addressed as it was seen as one of the worst over-hyped events to date, but the whales helps make Kabam lots of money, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?

- No Lunar Event in 2025 and was not even addressed until community expected and asked when it was supposed to be starting. The reasoning was stated as because it was "Stale" but that hasn't stopped many other items from not being changed in years (Alliance Quest for example) whilst simultaneously ignoring this was a cultural relevant event that is celebrated by BILLIONS of people around the world, but since it didn't affect those in North America or some of Europe, no one cares, right? Even the promise of the same "rewards" ojpy said to be Units (no mention of Loyalty, Battlechips or Artifacts) being "spread out" in the past vague fashion it feels like a blow off. (may not be intent but it is what it is).

So with all those I just listed happening in past 6 weeks alone, yeah it feel like either Kabam is trying to kill the game or lack of respect for the community can be only two reasons this is continuing.

But this is just one person's opinion based on all the feedback I see and hear within multiple communities within MCOC. What do I know?

- Mando

Some of those are valid complaints, some of those are not valid complaints, and some of those are only opinions not everyone, or even a majority of players, agrees with (and yes, I am willing to go over them one by one upon request). And the whole "game is broken and Kabam disrespects the players" complaint has been around since practically the very beginning. These characterizations are not original, but every time they come up people always say "but this time it is different" without specifying why.

Nobody likes bugs, but once upon a time we didn't used to have broken content and broken clients, we used to have wholesale server instability. New content day wasn't "oops my crystals are not visible" day, it was "oops, emergency maintenance is kicking everyone out because the servers are about to die" day. Do you think players then would see the issues you're reporting now as a serious degradation in service?

The day I did my RoL run way back when critical hits somehow got magically turned off game-wide. There was no announcement about it until significantly after the fact. It just took me a thousand hits for some fights to beat it. Sure, fights are buggy now, but that too is something that isn't unique to recent events. It happens, and it has happened.

And as to the banquet event "backlash" sure, there was a lot of chatter about it on the forums, but that also happens all the time. It literally happened last year and much of the issues people complained about this year were specifically traceable to changes the devs made to address last years' complaints. Meanwhile, a lot of those complaints were borderline delusional. My favorite part was the people who were puzzled by the fact that the participation data - which was strong enough signal that even I could report on it without resorting to private Kabam data - did not match the "obvious" player discontent, and so concluded that somehow the participation data was wrong, misleading, or somehow irrelevant to player satisfaction with the event. Because if there's a contradiction between what players are doing and what their opinions are, it certainly can't be their opinions.

I see the same feedback you do. I also remember all the feedback from last year, and the year before, and the year before. I've been involved in all those threads going back to 2015. Once upon a time people used to come here on the forums and try to organize boycotts of the game because according to them things were so bad the game needed to be saved from itself. Nobody does that anymore. Do you know why? Because every single one of those attempts failed horribly, because extrapolating eighty people complaining on the forums to what several hundred thousand people think and are willing to do has always ended in abject failure.

Here's a petition on Change.org to boycott MCOC due to the fact the game is broken and unplayable. I recall this petition was posted on the forums. At the time of the petition (April 2018) there were several thousand active forum participants, and over a million active players. It got 126 signatures. A petition to rehire an AP history high school teacher got three times as many. And I would say public sentiment in early 2018 was significantly more negative then than it is now.

Here's a "why I might quit" post from that month: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/65331/why-i-might-quit-and-why-i-believe-it-matters

Here's one advising Kabam to spend more time fixing bugs than other stuff: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/64972/kabam-stop-wasting-your-time

Here's one complaining about transparency: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/64891/c-mon-kabam-at-least-pretend-to-care

Game is heading in the wrong direction: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/61716/is-this-the-direction-of-the-game-kabam-should-be-heading-to/p1

Just a reminder this was the month that Kabam "broke" AQ by replacing the minions without asking us first: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/62860/opinion-poll-have-sentinals-ruined-your-aq-experience/p1

And causing everyone to quit in the process: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/61329/players-are-quitting-all-over-the-place-hope-kabam-is-taking-notice

Oh look, a Gold thread https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/59296/gold-is-it-really-an-issue/p1. And it got to 600 posts before being closed because it turned into a firefight.

Unlike this one that barely got to 120: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/62868/serious-gold-problem-kabam

Game is lagging, crashing, has been getting worse for months, and Kabam doesn't care: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/62973/so-that-lag-performance-investigation

This one is more for me than anything else, since it gives me a sense of nostalgia: Matchmaking is unfair: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/62867/how-does-matchmaking-work-it-never-seems-fair

Once upon a time, instead of "why is the client broken" threads we used to get "why is the game down" when emergency maintenance happened, which it did very often: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/60327/emergency-maintenance-merged-threads

I'm going to skip over all the Dungeons-related complaints, although there were a lot of those at that particular time as well. And just to remind you, that was all in one month that I picked randomly as coinciding what that amusing Change.org petition's inception.

None of this is to excuse bugs and other problems. We should try to be getting rid of those, or better yet not introduce them into the game in the first place. But the idea that things are way worse than they have ever been, or that the playerbase has never been more unhappy with the state of the game, or that any of this is likely to have unforeseen consequences is very difficult for me to really buy into, given the fact that I've lived through 12.0, several cycles of AW and AQ adjustments, the arrival of Dungeons, three different cycles of burnout, a billion gold scarcity threads, the community team being called stooges and gaslighters, actual death threats against players and developers, and this thing called the gifting event that we no longer have that everyone complained about but spenders continued to spend on anyway. The game is always dying, the studio is always slapping the players in the face when they pay attention to them at all, and things are always better in retrospect but worse at the time.

People are comparing client interfaces missing stuff these days to the past when the servers would randomly go down in the middle of the day and people's phones were actually catching on fire. And missing the good old days.

Wouldn't prof x still work?

That's what I was thinking.

Given that Prof X's special attacks cost up to 70% less Power during Mind Control, I would think he relies less on these boosts than most champions do.

And he's still going to be able to spam Unblockable SP2s against a Power Locked opponent who can't activate Evade or Miss during Mind Control, because it's actually part of his kit to do that.

If you think that's useless, I really don't know what to say...

Try it. I did. Doesn't work that way. Power back boost will look to see if by some power reserve mechanic you saved power after your special. If you saved more than half the power used by the special, power back will give you 0. What does this mean for profx? You build to sp3 and throw that. After sp3 you have sp2 ready. You throw sp2. After sp2 you don't even have 2 bars. That's how it works. Not to mention some other champs like bishop get 0 power no matter what, because the power back will see his power reserve mechanic (which only counts if you ko your opponent, but you lose all the power if you dont) and will give you exactly 0 power. So after sp2 you always have exactly 0 power left. This is one of the worst changes in the history of this game, as they didn't even properly looked into every possible interaction with the many champs in this game. Not to mention this is happening during war season. Complete and utter bs