Best Of

What are you even talking about? No one's even discussing stellar piece or Twitch drops. At least bother to read the post before commenting (maybe have your AI explain it in simple terms)

Im not joking. The crystal reel for Valiants are purposely misleading. If you open one right now, I guarantee that the crystal will stop right next to a 7 star crystal drop. Literally the exact same like a slot machine. Crazy how this is not illegal.

Someone mentioned this ruling in conversation and I asked chatgtp if it was true and to provide the source because chatgtp is easier to use for me than google search.

My link is to the actual ruling on the actual regulatory website from the UK agency; the link came from chatgtp and that's why it's listed in the url.

But if you want a link that does not include chatgtp in the url, here it is:

https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/kabam-games-inc-a25-1295667-kabam-games-inc.html

Perhaps not a miscommunication so much as things need to be updated.

This was a decision by Ukie back in 2023, and they just started enforcing it heavier this year. This sounds more like a miscommunication between Kabam and the platforms than anything. Kabam has always had a histoty of following required guidelines.

My assumption the Magik in the store is just going to become a normal Magik.

If there is another chance of first appearance then its not really a first appearance.

A little late to the party, so I'll just focus on one thing, the thing I think you're post is primarily interested in: if I may paraphrase, the disparity between how the changes in the game as a whole has causes a lot of resources - rank up resources in particular - to be revalued and reassessed by players, and the fact that the reward channels for those resources haven't been updated to reflect those new values.

I think that's normal. Rarely does the game change in a way that alters players' perceptions - objective or otherwise - of the value of a resource and simultaneously adjust how that resource is handed out in the game. Supply tends to follow demand, sometimes quite a bit behind. Some of that is practical limitations, and some of that is deliberate by design.

Practically speaking, it can be very difficult to anticipate how players will respond to changing game conditions. Sometimes they burn resources in certain ways, sometimes they don't. Imbalances are often difficult to predict because they aren't a static consequence of the game economy, they are also the result of players actions. Remember the days when players complained about lacking T1 alpha and when they were told they could just buy T1A with glory the response was often "I'm not going to spend my precious glory on something small like that, I need to save it for the important stuff." And in the process self nerf their rank up capabilities. That's an extreme example, but players do this sort of thing on micro scales all the time. They aren't robotic economy calculators. Balancing game economies in that sort of environment is difficult.

But there's also, at least in my opinion, a certain deliberate by design element to allowing supply to follow demand. This game would not exist if there didn't exist players willing to spend money on it. And players don't spend on what they can easily get. They spend on what is hard to get, where supply is constrained. MCOC doesn't permanently paywall much, so most of the time scarcity is temporary. Players will only spend on a scarcity for a limited amount of time, because scarcities literally don't last for long in this game. So every time the game creates a demand for something, the fact that supply lags behind that demand by several months creates that scarcity gap that the game can monetize, and that most F2P players won't notice for too long.

Demand shifts. Kabam monitors that demand and what players do to try to react to it. Spenders try to erase that scarcity with spending. The data tells Kabam what the gap between spenders and non-spenders is. They adjust the game economy to lower that gap, after the spenders have had some time to play with their toys. And then the cycle repeats.

For the record, this is my own take on what's happening here, and it is, like all economic discussions, extremely oversimplified. I of course cannot speak for the economy team here, but I would say my opinion is an informed, if completely unofficial one.

TL;DR: Kabam tends to make supply changes based on data-driven processes when demand changes. These data processes take time. That time window not coincidentally creates monetization opportunities in a game that actually has few such opportunities that are permanent in nature, so the process is self-reinforcing.