Will six stars fracture the player base?
MMCskippy
Member Posts: 356 ★★
It seems to me that there are 2 classes of Summoners: Guys with multiple 6*s and guys trying to build their rosters to get their 6*s.
Honestly, I'm not good enough to get through Uncollected on a regular basis, so I may have a decent 5* roster, but due to a combination of mediocre skills and an iphone 7 I think I'm stuck behind a content wall. I have 8,800 6* crystals from before they beefed up Uncollected difficulty. I couldnt' pass Aegon with my champs and skills. I couldn't pass Emma with my champs and skills.
I ground for 4* Domino to try and face Aegon in the last event and even trying to max my damage as much as possible, she couldn't down him before his combo meter was ramped up too much.
What got me down was seeing the Crystal Opening Whale opening 12 featured 6* crystals because I saw how far I am behind some summoners.
Another honest moment here: I'm ok with falling behind. The level of effort it takes to stay on the cutting edge of this game is silly. It almost feels like there will be two layers of the game going forward and that's probably ok. It does seem that upgrading your phone to keep up with the game is a requirement to play at the top level, especially with the unexplained lagginess of the bosses this month. It just feels like game depth and complexity is accelerating instead of moving up at a more measured pace.
With the reduction in financing available for new hardware from mobile carriers, this game is going to have to face a reality where people aren't upgrading their phones every year and if there are lag issues every month it could start to erode the player base.
Honestly, I'm not good enough to get through Uncollected on a regular basis, so I may have a decent 5* roster, but due to a combination of mediocre skills and an iphone 7 I think I'm stuck behind a content wall. I have 8,800 6* crystals from before they beefed up Uncollected difficulty. I couldnt' pass Aegon with my champs and skills. I couldn't pass Emma with my champs and skills.
I ground for 4* Domino to try and face Aegon in the last event and even trying to max my damage as much as possible, she couldn't down him before his combo meter was ramped up too much.
What got me down was seeing the Crystal Opening Whale opening 12 featured 6* crystals because I saw how far I am behind some summoners.
Another honest moment here: I'm ok with falling behind. The level of effort it takes to stay on the cutting edge of this game is silly. It almost feels like there will be two layers of the game going forward and that's probably ok. It does seem that upgrading your phone to keep up with the game is a requirement to play at the top level, especially with the unexplained lagginess of the bosses this month. It just feels like game depth and complexity is accelerating instead of moving up at a more measured pace.
With the reduction in financing available for new hardware from mobile carriers, this game is going to have to face a reality where people aren't upgrading their phones every year and if there are lag issues every month it could start to erode the player base.
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Comments
You are not in competion with anyone elses account. So cow made you feel less of a person, because he is part of a high Alliance and does uncollected every month and as a result has lots of 6* shards??? Well that is a personal problem. The only time u compete here is in AW and even that is a team effort. I dont get people that feel that if someone has more than you its unfair and ruins your experiance in this game. I see this jealously alot from millennials, and also the wanting to be on top without the work and time put in. RNG is the great equalizer, because no matter how much money u spend or what alliance you are in , you could still pull garbage or spend 6 grand for a new chracter, still there is no 100%, even worse if you lack the skill.
Yeah I must agree... DPX and IF are pretty sucky champs...
It always seems to be the case that people think there are two classes of players, and they are in the lower one. There aren't two. There are lots of them. More players think you're in the upper one than think you're in the lower one, I guarantee you.
At the moment I have five 6* champs. I don't buy GMCs (not regularly: one or two every so often for fun, and not in the last six months at least), I just play the game and I grind the 5* featured arena - for shards only. And I do play the game in what I consider a fairly efficient manner in terms of going after the rewards that will best improve my ability to earn rewards even faster (going all the way back to pre-12 when I used to grind for the 4* basics that were in low demand, so that I could build up my 4* roster faster, so I could better compete in the 4* arenas).
The Crystal Opening Whale has 23 6* champs after his latest mega mega opening. He easily spends several thousand dollars a month just on his streamed crystal openings alone. You could be looking at a $100k account easily there. And $100k buys him less than five times the 6* champs I have. Personally, I think that proves something I keep saying: you don't actually *want* high value in cash offers. You want the COWs of the world to be paying a lot for a little, so that no matter what you spend you can't pull out very far ahead of the people who don't spend.
Game play has a higher return on investment, which is a good thing. COW doesn't depress me. He reminds me you can only buy so much in this game, and even the most extreme levels of buying don't buy your way out of sight of players just playing. COW is way past me, it is true. But side by side, my account isn't complete trash next to his. It is a fraction of his, but a decent fraction. And that's all I want. I don't expect to grind my way past the COWs of the game. I just want to be able to play my way into the same game, and that's currently still possible.
Now imagine if the game did what a lot of players wished they did. Imagine if you could pick with high certainty which champs you got from crystal pulls. Imagine if all cash offers for all purchases had Prof Hoff-certified grade A+ value. The Crystal Opening Whale's account would be *vastly* stronger than it is now, and no matter how much you spent on those better offers you'd never be even in the same zip code as his $100k+ account. He wouldn't have the best of everything, he'd have straight-up everything. And he would have had it long ago. And so would everyone else spending anything remotely close. And the people who don't spend, even the top efficient grinders like the Brian Grants of the game? They'd be completely trashed.
All these champs are tools. Albeit, some are more equipped and streamlined, when given the proper tools you can go about the job. If you’re tackling a looooooong fight with a high PI defender, a 6 star Corvus as AMAZING as he is just isn’t the tool for the job. But that old, dusty 4 star StarLord...bingo.
I hate sounding like an echo, but an average all around 4 star champ in the hands of a great player will knock down more content than a amazing 6 star in the hands of an impatient or unskilled player.
Dang...I am sorry, those all suck. I got a LC, Winter Soldier, and and Punisher 2099.
I will point out that I don't begrudge COW for spending on crystals. It is his money and he clearly has lots of it and can do anything he wants with it. But you should feel no more bad comparing yourself to COW's roster than you should feel bad comparing your business class airline seat to the guy that just took off in his private Gulfstream.
I tend to see complaints, or observations, like the OP as similar to someone saying there's two kinds of people: those that fly around in private executive jets, and those that have to fly in commercial business class. They forget that most of the aircraft they fly in is coach seating, and most people aren't flying around on the company dime in any class seat. You have to calibrate your sense of accomplishment to your own personal circumstances, and not to what other people are doing far outside of your circumstances, or you will be unhappy a lot.
The fact that it is easy to rank 6* champs to 1/25 (which has roughly the equivalent of 4/55 strength) but much more expensive to rank to r2 actually makes them slightly more democratizing for players that can acquire them. Players who could not keep up with the earning power of higher tier players to obtain T2 Alpha cats can instead slowly build up a roster of 6* champs. My guess is that among the uncollected doing uncollected difficulty, the spread of 6* champion rosters is lower than the spread of 5* R4/r5 rosters. In effect, among players that can complete uncollected are forming a pseudo-tier of players whose strongest growth in roster over time is 6* champs, that sit in between players not yet uncollected and players that are earning enough T2A and T5B to have a sizeable number of r4/r5 champs. I may even be on the borderline of one of them.
All of my items in my original post have been spawned by me trying to get back into playing again. I'm a good example of a somewhat f2p player who grew his line up, finished RoL, the Road to LoL, became uncollected and burned out. I seemed to be locked in this mode where I couldn't even hit weekly Summoner's Advancement event minimums for my alliance. I started to come back by grinding arena for credits and BCs to get enough resources to grow. Then, I realized that getting the basic 4* champs are relatively easy with my roster and that started to get me the newer champs to start utilizing the newer strategies for tackling content.
When I picked up Domino and even just paired her for questing with 3* Red Hulk and 3* Massacre, she deals as much damage as some OG champs before they were nerfed. Corvus is another killer.
I'm facing a couple of problems with coming back, one of which is a decent platform to practice on. I used to handle RoL easily on my phone to farm pots or a million years ago, revives. Now? Extended fights with the more aggressive AI aren't feasible enough to reliably grind for items, aka practice.
I'm sure my woes aren't like those faced by android users, but when I know finishing monthly uncollected is the key to advancing in the game, it frustrating to not have a realistic chance at finishing it.
It does seem that the game benefits people who have a key champ they build around. 5* CM is my highest ranked champ and has been for a while. Within the last month, I've picked up 5* Hype and 5* DV with a 5* dungeon crystal and a featured 5* crystal. I've also decided to only open featured crystals to reduce the chance for less desirable champs.
This game does get frustrating in that it takes more time to master than you ever have available. It doesn't help that it's development schedule seems to be exceeding how fast phones are developing.
This... This is the real divide. The only saving grace is if you have multiple 6*, you very likely have a stacked 5* roster including r5s. I've explored every uncollected except Modok and am coming up on my 5th 6*.
I'm already dreading opening that crystal, and will probably just hold it and brood for a few weeks.
This is true however 6*s are the future of the game with tier 5 class cats coming soon to bring a 6* to r5
People said the same thing about 5*s when they came out
What's wrong with yellowjacket!?
The only reason you're unhappy with 6* Yellowjacket is because you can see others with CapIW and Domino. You may not like it, but that shows the system is working perfectly.
You judge how well you are doing not by the capabilities of what you have but by your perceptions of how much better someone else is doing. Multiplayer games encourage you to pursue other players, even though the people you think you're "falling behind" represent only a tiny fraction of players. It is how they get you to always want more. If everyone always had the ability to get what they want in the order they want it, no one would need to pursue anything, and everyone would get bored and quit. You need to balance that urge to pursue others with the ability to be happy with what you accomplish on your own, or you will never be happy playing progressional multiplayer games. Not this one, not any one.