Kabam your logic confuses me, could you explain? Average Player Experience

So I have been playing this game for about a year and some of the decisions Kabam makes with this game just completely confuse me, so in fairness, I would be interested to hear a logical explanation for some of the decisions or direction that Kabam has made with the game. This may also help Kabam as in a lot of cases, myself and others feel you may be completely out of touch with what the players are experiencing.

I don't even know where to begin, so in no particular order.

1. Why are some of the most popular and loved characters such bad champions in the game?
I realize you need to balance the game, however...

Iron Man, the MCU and this game probably would not even exist if it were not for the success of the Iron Man films. Doctor Strange, Netflix Daredevil, Luke Cage, Punisher, Colossus, Venom, Carnage, now Green Goblin, these characters have their own Films and TV shows, yet they are some of the worst champions in the game that are not fun to use and have no real use for the player in the game.
Luke Cage was an excellent TV Show and in this game, he has been the biggest joke for the longest time. Why?

2. Adding the majority of the worst champions in the game to the 5* Crystal and Featured Crystal.

Opening a 5* crystal that you grind nearly a month for should be a rewarding experience, but instead it is usually disheartening experience that can turn a person completely off from the game and quit. This cannot be good for retention.

Now some people will argue that having any 5* champ will help you in the featured Arena, I disagree. Unfortunately, not everybody has a roster or the time to even begin being competitive in the Featured Arena, so these 5* do not really help majority of the players. I myself and most people I know only have time for 1-2 Arena Grinds per week, so the Basic makes the most sense.

3. The extreme fluctuation in terms of Value and usefulness of some of the offers.

I remember earlier in the year something like 20 Stamina Refills costing 30 dollars or so, considering a recharge is only 5 units, so 100 units, which is less than a Peter Parker's Wallet that goes for 5 dollars. I don't know who designed these offers, but have they even played the game?

4. The Ai and responsiveness of the game.

This is a big problem right now and has been for a while, every month we hear it will be fixed next month, players will begin to lose faith and eventually will just quit. This is really bad for retention.

Right now the Ai is cranked up so high that the game has become more or less unplayable. Besides Parry not working and other responsive problems mentioned in other threads, the Ai not using their Special Attacks nearly as much or baiting for a good 3 times longer than the previous version has become a huge problem, especially in Alliance Quest and Alliance War with a 3 minute time window. I played an OG Vision in AQ on Day 1 about 4500 Prestige who would not use his Specials at all, I was baiting for a good 30-45s, now combine this with Synthesis and I could not do anything but just get KO by a Special
A lot of players have been playing long enough to notice this stuff, can you explain this one? This is unplayable.

I am not sure about other players, but any time the game is broken or buggy like this, I am much less inclined to spend anything on the game as I feel the Quality Assurance has failed. I do not spend any units or money on revives, potions because even if I did, I would still lose, I hope that makes sense?

Kabam, I have said this before, like many others who love the concept of the game and the execution of the visuals, sound, etc is top notch, if you can balance or fix the issues above which are a a major source of frustration for a lot of players, everybody wins.

Thank you for your time.

@Kabam Miike

Comments

Etaki_Lirakoi

Punisher, Venom and Green Goblin are good. The rest are pretty bad though.

DNA3000

waynegcore wrote: »

So I have been playing this game for about a year and some of the decisions Kabam makes with this game just completely confuse me, so in fairness, I would be interested to hear a logical explanation for some of the decisions or direction that Kabam has made with the game. This may also help Kabam as in a lot of cases, myself and others feel you may be completely out of touch with what the players are experiencing.

I don't mean to be deliberately rude, and perhaps you are sincere, but most of the people who say this are not actually interested in hearing logical explanations for things. That's why most MMO dev teams don't openly discuss their development directly with the playerbase. Most people want to argue with the devs, or will not accept explanations they don't agree with.

For example, people keep harping over #2. Kabam has already stated more than once that they are simply adding the 5* champions into the basic crystal in the order they were introduced to the game, in an accelerated version of how they were added over time to the 4* crystals. That's a reasonable, logical explanation for what they are doing. Saying "yeah, but you don't understand" is basically admitting that the explanation was only a gateway for arguing a completely separate point.

As to #3, the offers in general make perfect sense if you're thinking about balancing the two factors all F2P games have to balance: generating offers across the spectrum of players with different propensity to buy, and not allowing purchases to have an accelerating effect at higher levels of the game. Above all, you have to account for the fact that most of your players will spend little or nothing and a few will spend a ton.

The balance point most developers try to approximate is one in which there are a few offers that have low cost and high value, targeted at trying to encourage small spenders to buy offers. The value for these rewards can be high on a relative level because they are low in size on an absolute level and most of the players buying them are likely to be low on the progression scale. It doesn't skew the playerbase as a whole if you allow low players to buy their way to "less low." You also want some really big offers to engage the whales. But these offers cannot have the same huge value proposition because they are large in the absolute sense and because they are more likely to be purchased by the higher tier players on average. You actually want these offers to have relatively low value, so the players already at the top cannot use them to accelerate away from the center of mass of the playerbase exponentially fast. In effect, you want to apply diminishing returns on those offers.

Separate from that, you want to be generating offers continuously, but you don't want offer fatigue to set in. So you do what every retail organization that sells anything over long periods of time does: you have sales. Some offers have relatively low value. Some people buy them, some don't. Occasionally, but not often, offers will have higher value. These offers are perceived as much better offers precisely because they are compared to the average offer. This encourages more players to buy those offers because of the perceived higher value. This tiering of offers means you get the revenue from the players that will only buy the sales, on top of getting the revenue from the less pickly players.

All of this is designed to balance getting a little money from the players that can only afford to spend a little while also getting a lot of money from the players willing to spend a lot, while handing a higher average value rate to the lower spenders that have to be encouraged more to spend and handing proportionately less value to the high spenders that don't need to be encouraged as much to spend.

Superimposed on all of this is the strange fact that when a game makes too many offers that too many players universally agree are worth it, you get the paradoxical opposite problem of players complaining that the game compels them to spend too much money. When a game makes offers that are more segmented, most people will think any one particular offer is not worth it and not buy. What's important is the belief that most other similar players will think similarly. But when you think all other players like you think the offer is good and are buying it, it puts pressure on you to buy it also to keep up with them. History says this problem is worse.

Kabam does a lot of things wrong. But I suspect whoever is in charge of monetization knows what they are doing. If I was that guy (and I don't want to be that guy) I actually know I'm doing my job correctly when most of the time most of the players think most of my offers are nonsensical, and yet a small subset of the playerbase thinks they are perfect and buys them, for every single offer. I actually would *want* that to happen. I'd be worried if I made an offer everyone thought was a good idea to buy. I actually rarely want that to happen. That might make me more popular with the playerbase, but it would also mean I was not doing my job correctly and hurting the game in the long run.