Best Of

All voting is rigged anyway, summoner choice results are proof.

(I am being sarcastic just in case someone is about to rage quote me)

People think Kabam makes decisions based on forum polls?

Agreed. I was backup that week after never missing a day of AQ because of a family emergency and because we the player base weren’t made aware of the consequences of this new game mode.
I hope Kabam can address this well, and not the usual ways. With a terrible 2025, a reason to hope for a week in December’25 and another mistake filled decisions in Q1 2026 that impacts the long term game… I actually don’t mind becoming fully F2P and barely casual player at best. Cheers to Kabam not Kabbaming as per usual.

@Kabam (Osaurus) Rex

I'm not terribly worried, but not because the complaints about Ascension aren't valid; they are, to varying degrees.

I think the biggest irony about all of this is that Ascension is really meant to replace a rarity step, i.e. the jump to 8* champs. To mitigate some of the issues inherent to rarity jumps Kabam decided to fold that into Ascension, and in doing so made the rarity reset look more like rank ups. But in doing so, they fell into the trap of having the player base judge ascension like rank ups, because that's the only reference players have for this.

With rank ups, players have the sense that of course the spenders and top players will get access to those first, but then those will open up to the wider player base on a relatively short time scale. Rank ups are important, but they are incremental improvements to existing rosters. Holding back progress for a long period of time isn't palatable. In the long history of the game, rarity jumps are different. For most of the game's history, acquiring new champs in new rarities was a much slower process than rank ups (with a catch I'l get to). We can rank up whomever we want (to at least a significant degree) so the difference between someone who does three rank ups and someone who does ten rank ups is not as high as the numbers would suggest - because the player who does three at least tends to do the three at the top of their list. But the players getting dozens of champ crystals of a new rarity are in a much better position initially than the players who only get a few, because champion acquisition is (deliberately) random. It's hard to get the champs you want, so numbers matter. Eventually this evens out, but it can take a long time. At least in theory.

The OG Featured crystals completely messed that up. The 5* featured crystals were originally intended to offer a small hedge against the otherwise borderline depressing fact that the spenders could target champs directly and everyone else was subject to luck, and that luck was getting harder and harder to find as the number of champs increased and the need to be lucky became the need to get really lucky. The featured crystal had a smaller pool and thus a higher chance to target newer champs. But Kabam increased the 5* shard economy too quickly, and the 5* Featured crystal went from being a less unlucky crystal to basically being a cheap way to target new champs ("Save For Blade").

The 6* Featured, and then the Titan crystal were all attempts to try to fix that Original Sin of breaking the new champion acquisition conveyer belt, to varying degrees of failure. Not all players Saved For Blade, and not all players are just swimming in Titan shards, but a pretty big slice of the higher tier players are, and they seriously degrade the monetization path of champion acquisition. Ascension is The Next Attempt to address this, along with trying to address some of the issues with rarity resets - the whole "starting over" problem that makes new rarities unpalatable. The selector box Ascension path is probably the Titan crystal of Ascension, if that means anything to the design geeks out there.

So why am I not worried that Ascension is going to be all these bad things people have been pointing out? Well, to be frank, because Kabam has messed this up every single time they tried. I know that sounds bananas, but hear me out. The 5* featured crystal was supposed to be the way to balance the need for a relatively long runway for new champion acquisition without making it too oppressive for everyone else. But Kabam refused to hold the line on 5* shard acquisition when players complained 5* acquisition was too slow, and the result was players willing and able to hoard literally hundreds of thousands of 5* shards turning the low chance to hit the jackpot into a near certainty. Literally the exact same thing happened to the 6* featured crystal, and while I think the Titan crystal was a much better attempt, we can see the forces trying to slow down how fast champs enter the crystal and the overall Titan shard economy pretty much stretching that crystal past its breaking point as well.

Kabam is constantly walking a very fine line between making sure the monetization path for new champions - which a very large fraction of the game's overall viability rests upon - remains healthy and the desire to keep the game friendly for new and existing players, most of whom do not spend on that stuff but need to feel like they still have a viable path through the game. And historically speaking, Kabam tends to break towards the free to play concerns, not the monetization ones. For all that people love to complain about how greedy the company is and how awful the game's monetization is, at the end of the day Kabam always fails to become the mustache twirling robber barons they are caracaturized to be.

Whatever Ascension looks like now, it won't look like that in a year. Or rather, it probably will look very similar, but the numbers will bend in ways a lot more friendly to the (free to play) player base than it seems to be now. Because it always has. Players just need to continue to provide feedback to the devs about where the pain points are, and not expect instantaneous changes. They'll happen, as they always have, over time. And honestly, that's probably for the best, because again, there is a fine balance between the monetization requirements of the game, which is another way of saying "whether we have a game or not" and the accessibility of the game to the bulk of its player base. Kabam is never going to hit the bullseye on this, so allowing them to shift from a more monetization heavy system to a more free to play friendly one over time provides a way to balance the two in the long run, even if it might seem to be unbalanced in the short term.

Keep in mind someone once calculated it would take four years to collect enough T4 Class Catalysts to max rank a single 4* champion unless you were a whale. That calculation was accurate. What it failed to take into account is the fact that the game as it existed then didn't exist even one year later, much less four. Maybe it will take a year to Ascend certain champs, maybe not: we can't say for sure. What we can say for sure is the game as it exists now won't even exist in 2027. Some other game will, and its rules will be different. I don't know what that will look like, and to be candid I don't think the devs do with certainty either.

I think it is valid that players have concerns, and by all means they should express them. Just keep in mind that nothing anyone says today is going to have the slightest impact on what Ascension looks like in April. But it might have an impact on what it looks like in December. And it will definitely have an impact on what it looks like in 2027. For better or worse, it always has before. And as long as players continue to push in that direction, I'm not worried about Ascension becoming F2P hell.

thanks. Really dragging this one out. Such a tease.

Next year then.

Omg roofers, don't shingle the roof until the electrical is done!

Plumber, you can't do your plumbing until the landscaping is done!

Do you see how stupid that sounds?

That's how your post sounds.

I hope this thread is everything kabam was hoping for with ascension.

If they just gave us all the information and actually ANSWERED QUESTIONS none of this would currently be happening and im all but certain community sentiment would be leaning more positive