Best Of

I’m being sarcastic as to show why it’s a dumb reason the SBCs were made so bad on purpose so only the rich whales would be able to get anything good from them with there riches. It wouldn’t of hurt the game at all to make the SBCs better.

Saying SBCs were made bad on purpose so only rich whales would be able to get anything good from them is like saying dollar bills are made worthless so only rich people can use them to get anything worthwhile.

SBCs are worth the same thing to the whales as to anyone else. They don’t get anything from them anyone else doesn’t. What they get is more.

Also, when you say it wouldn’t hurt the game to make them better, how would you know? How much of your house would you let me set on fire before it mattered? 5%? 1%? What difference does a few percent make?

A long time ago in this very game there were people like you saying “letting us have more 5* shards won’t hurt anything.” What it did was accelerate the saturation of 5* rarity and force the introduction of 6* champs sooner than would have happened otherwise, forcing players to start building rosters again. What it did was allow players to save up giant hoards of 5* shards and burn them on the original featured crystal, allowing them to practically guarantee getting the new champs every single time, completely breaking the rarity model and with it a significant chunk of the monetization systems of the game. Which caused the devs to get rid of that otherwise extremely popular crystal permanently from the game.

No one thing breaks a game economy. It is a lot of little things collectively. But there’s no such thing as doing just one thing, because there are only two kinds of designers. The conservative ones that hold the line, and the weak willed ones that give in when players demand more. A dev that would have made the SBCs a little better would have made them a lot better, because why not. They would have made everything else better as well, because why not. Because none of those things would hurt the game individually. But collectively, actually none of this would have happened, because the game wouldn’t still exist by now. the game would have Monty Hauled itself out of existence, or inflated itself into oblivion, or pay to winned itself into a death spiral.

Which has happened to many of this game’s competition in the early days. Once upon a time there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t hear people comparing this game to any one of a number of other Marvel games that were running side by side. I don’t know what happened to those players, but I do know what happened to those games. We don’t talk about them all that much anymore. Most are dead, some are still around but in a state that obviously discourages favorable comparisons. I had a lot of debates with those people back then, and I believe time has demonstrated just how misguided they were in retrospect.

I like to think I’m a pretty smart guy, and I know a lot about game design and game economies. I like to think I’m just as clever as MCOC’s economy designers. But I don’t know if I could have steered a mobile game economy (both sides) through ten years of existence and still be going just as strong. They did, and that means given a choice between a game economy designed by me or one designed by the Kabam devs, my own self-interest would force me to choose them.

Granted, it also gives me someone else to blame.

Me personally I am hoping for the lawsuit. These lawsuit threats are far more disappointing than the banquet is, because at least there was an actual banquet. The lawsuit threats always come to absolutely nothing.

Suing Kabam in Federal court (I’m assuming US Federal court) would be extra interesting, because I would be curious to see how the venue was justified. There are in fact conditions that would allow a Federal court to take jurisdiction, but those would tend to limit the scope of the lawsuit.

This is actually a complicated bit of law I am not an expert at, or even competently knowledgeable of, but I do know that there are a complex set of roadblocks to succeeding legally here. Most attempts to prove fraud require both intent and material damages, both of which would be difficult or impossible to prove. Regulatory violations such as false advertising claims do not require either of those things, but tend to run afoul of proving a failure with so many indirect steps. I.e. you bought the bundle and got the tickets, so you cannot claim to have not gotten what was advertised. The tickets did not grant what you expected, but that wasn’t an advertised benefit at sale. The utility value can be inferred, but that utility was actually disclaimed in the game via the points statement. That statement was arguably ambiguous, and thus it was clarified, but can that ambiguity form the basis of a reasonable expectation and then followed all the way up the chain to the purchase moment? I’m highly skeptical.

But if there are any lawyers out there who a) think I’m wrong and b) want to try to prove it in court, by all means. I would be fascinated win or lose.

Hopefully small players can get some good compensation since Kabam let the game balance get out of control with this banquet event

"Small players" had no chance of catching up with me, much less the top players.

Game balance is not about giving everyone the same chance to reach the exact same account size and strength. Spenders always have an advantage; that's why they spend. That's what they are spending their money to get. You accept that, or you don't. But game balance is not here to give you compensation to catch up with them.

Everything the spenders get, everyone else gets eventually. The medium spenders catch up with the big spenders on a time scale of months. The small spenders catch up with the big spenders in a year or two. The free to play players catch up with the big spenders in a couple years.

This has always been true. Spending has never given anyone any sort of permanent advantage in the game. The temporary advantages they get are what we allow spenders to get to allow free to play players and small time spenders to actually play a game they would otherwise have to spend a lot more on.

The same thing is true of grinders and other high activity players. If you play a lot, you're going to have an advantage over those that can't or won't play as much. There's no compensation for that either. You accept that, or you find another game. Big spenders are no different from arena grinders or players in high tier alliances who get more rewards because they are willing to do what it takes to get them. Except for the fact that unlike all other players willing to do what it takes, they are willing to do the thing that keeps the game alive.