**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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So Uncollected isn't doing anything Master before it didn't do.
It is more fundamental of a disagreement than you even realize, because like most games like this it is pretty obvious to me Kabam is using the same data-driven methods as most game operators. And that means the very definition of difficulty is data-dependent. Which is another way of saying that difficulty is judged not based on some paper analysis of the content, but on pure numbers: what percentage of the intended playerbase completes it.
In other words, according to you (I'm assuming) the exact same identical piece of content released month after month has constant difficulty. But according to data-driven game developers (which is like most of them in online gaming) that would be decreasing difficulty, because more and more players would be completing it due to them progressing.
UC doesn't get easier and harder because the devs want to make it easier and harder on a whim. It gets easier and harder because in data-driven terms UC's effective difficulty is being adjusted month by month to make its difficulty constant relative to its target audience. Its a very rough adjustment month by month, but on long time scales the trend is more obvious.
The only reason you don't really see this happen with, say, Easy difficulty is because Easy difficulty's intended target audience remains relatively fixed over time: relatively new players. New players are always new players, even as existing new players progress upward and new new players replace them. Where you see this most dramatically is at the top tier of players, because there's no way to "graduate" out of that player bracket (as there's no higher one). So UC, and to a lesser extent Master, are the only brackets where anything actually happens that's noticeable.
One thing and one thing only is going to determine when we get a difficulty tier higher than UC within the normal monthly quests. And that is when the devs determine enough players exist that could comfortably do it, given the approximate difficulty scale that the higher difficulty will likely have. Nothing else really matters, and at the moment I'm skeptical that a sufficient number of players actually exists yet.
The point of the standard difficulty tiers for the monthly quests isn't to be there to challenge the first player to reach a new progress mark. If you're the first player to rank up r3s, the only thing you're really going to be using them for is content like the maze, until enough players catch up to you.
But if you were to make a monthly difficulty that few if any players could defeat initially, then that would mean you'd be spending a lot of development time on content no one was doing - because no one was strong enough to do it. Almost no one would do the first month, or the second month, or the third month. That's a waste of development resources. A one-off just to test the playerbase like the Maze can be justified, but spending dev time month after month on a difficulty tier no one was actually doing couldn't be cost-justified in my opinion. I don't think you could get a producer to sign off on that idea.