The Collector’s Vault
VanillaCoke
Member Posts: 1,528 ★★★★★
As many of us are familiar with, champion acquisition can be a very frustrating thing since it’s random from crystals or you spend an ungodly amount of time in arena, which not a lot of people are a fan of. Please let me know your thoughts on my post below.
In Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (BO4), they have a Black Market where you can purchase various items from weapon skins, character outfits, emotes, and other things you can use to personalize your profile. One thing I particularly like about BO4’s Black Market is that it updates every 30-45 days with brand new items and weapons. And every new weapon seems to be stronger than the previous weapon in the last update. What’s great about it? Everybody has the same chance to get these weapons!
How does this work? Well as you can see from the image above, in Tier 100 you see the Ultra Rare Weapon called the Switchblade available for pick up. In BO4 when you play a match, you get XP for both yourself (to level up) AND you get Black Market XP. Gaining Black Market XP allows you to increase your Tier level, therefore get more items along the way as you play the game. At the beginning of every new update, everybody starts out in Tier 1 in the Black Market. Now, if you want the latest weapon on the first day when the new update drops, you can purchase all Tiers available from that update. However, if you want to play the patient route you can play during the course of the update and earn your way up to Tier 60 (for example) and get the new weapon.
Since we already have a Black Market, we can call this “The Collector’s Vault” The tiers can be different for every *progression* title. For example, the Collector’s Vault items for that update would be different for Contender, Proven, Conqueror, Uncollected, and Cavalier.
The way this system would work for the different progression titles is that everybody has the chance to get 2 versions of 1 new character. If we take this month as an example, with Uncollected you’re able to get the 4* and 5* version of Aarkus. I suggest the higher the progression title, the more tiers for that month since there will be greater rewards. And for the sake of balance, I do suggest that only 1 new character per month or every other month to be available for acquisition during a particular Collector’s Vault update. I do want to emphasize though that the ability for the player to gain all tiers during a particular update should be there.
Here are the Vault tiers for each progression title as well as what you get from certain tiers:
- Contender: 35 tiers (PHC shards throughout the tiers)
- Proven: 50 tiers (tier 50, new 3* character)
- Conqueror: 70 tiers (tier 50 3*/ tier 70 4* character)
- Uncollected: 100 tiers (tier 65 4*/tier 100 5* character)
- Cavalier: 150 tiers (tier 100 5*/tier 150 6* character)
I think a system like this can definitely be beneficial in MCOC for everybody for the following reasons:
- You can keep the Cavalier crystals, since they are generating a great deal of revenue for you.
- Along with sales from Cav crystals, you can get more sales from using this Vault system because a lot of people want the hottest and latest thing day 1 (you can set the price point of each tier between $2-$4 USD).
- This also helps people who spend money every now and again.
- Not only does this system benefit paying players, but also Free to Play players because everybody has the same amount of time to grab the various items available from this update.
- A system like this would certainly benefit the grinders since they’re maximizing the amount of energy and time they use during the course of a typical MCOC update.
What do you think?
In Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 (BO4), they have a Black Market where you can purchase various items from weapon skins, character outfits, emotes, and other things you can use to personalize your profile. One thing I particularly like about BO4’s Black Market is that it updates every 30-45 days with brand new items and weapons. And every new weapon seems to be stronger than the previous weapon in the last update. What’s great about it? Everybody has the same chance to get these weapons!
How does this work? Well as you can see from the image above, in Tier 100 you see the Ultra Rare Weapon called the Switchblade available for pick up. In BO4 when you play a match, you get XP for both yourself (to level up) AND you get Black Market XP. Gaining Black Market XP allows you to increase your Tier level, therefore get more items along the way as you play the game. At the beginning of every new update, everybody starts out in Tier 1 in the Black Market. Now, if you want the latest weapon on the first day when the new update drops, you can purchase all Tiers available from that update. However, if you want to play the patient route you can play during the course of the update and earn your way up to Tier 60 (for example) and get the new weapon.
Since we already have a Black Market, we can call this “The Collector’s Vault” The tiers can be different for every *progression* title. For example, the Collector’s Vault items for that update would be different for Contender, Proven, Conqueror, Uncollected, and Cavalier.
The way this system would work for the different progression titles is that everybody has the chance to get 2 versions of 1 new character. If we take this month as an example, with Uncollected you’re able to get the 4* and 5* version of Aarkus. I suggest the higher the progression title, the more tiers for that month since there will be greater rewards. And for the sake of balance, I do suggest that only 1 new character per month or every other month to be available for acquisition during a particular Collector’s Vault update. I do want to emphasize though that the ability for the player to gain all tiers during a particular update should be there.
Here are the Vault tiers for each progression title as well as what you get from certain tiers:
- Contender: 35 tiers (PHC shards throughout the tiers)
- Proven: 50 tiers (tier 50, new 3* character)
- Conqueror: 70 tiers (tier 50 3*/ tier 70 4* character)
- Uncollected: 100 tiers (tier 65 4*/tier 100 5* character)
- Cavalier: 150 tiers (tier 100 5*/tier 150 6* character)
I think a system like this can definitely be beneficial in MCOC for everybody for the following reasons:
- You can keep the Cavalier crystals, since they are generating a great deal of revenue for you.
- Along with sales from Cav crystals, you can get more sales from using this Vault system because a lot of people want the hottest and latest thing day 1 (you can set the price point of each tier between $2-$4 USD).
- This also helps people who spend money every now and again.
- Not only does this system benefit paying players, but also Free to Play players because everybody has the same amount of time to grab the various items available from this update.
- A system like this would certainly benefit the grinders since they’re maximizing the amount of energy and time they use during the course of a typical MCOC update.
What do you think?
1
Comments
that game is not a pay to win faster game. You pay for the game upfront.
also everyone in this game has the same chance to get the items.
the system you propose works well in a game like that , not in a game like this where their revenue largely comes from their crystal sales. if we got the champs every month then there would be no reason to buy the crystals.
You can check how much they made from microtransactions alone and it dwarfs their game sales.
Source: Worked closely with people who worked at Activision Blizzard, and worked for many years in the games industry myself.
In terms of Kabam doing it. I agree with you.
Call of Duty is a shooter, MCOC is a progressional collector game. In a shooter, the game designers want to create a roughly level playing field in general. "Progress" in a game like that revolves around veteran players getting more skilled, and players acquiring things over time that have some benefit, but not an overpowering amount. You actually want all players to have roughly the same access to most things, because you don't want time to confer a lot of advantage in the game.
But in progressional games like MCOC, the driving point to progression is that it confers significant advantages. It would be pointless to progress in the game if it didn't. And that progress includes (besides skill, which I'm not always going to explicitly disclaim since it gets repetitive) roster growth and development (rank up). Basically, getting new champions and ranking them up has to matter, a lot.
But that creates a problem. In a shooter, with at least a nominally roughly level playing field between veterans and new players, the barrier to entry is low. Anyone can jump in and not have to face veteran players shooting low yield nuclear weapons at them. But in MCOC, you do. So why join as a new player? The solution MCOC uses is to make it difficult to acquire champions in a deterministic way. The very very top grinders can do so, but only a couple hundred can do that in the arena. Everyone else has to acquire champions randomly through crystals. And that means veterans are in a similar situation to new players when it comes to new champions: veterans do have some advantages over new players in getting new champs (they have larger rosters for grinding, they acquire shards faster, etc) but they cannot leverage their veteran status to get those champs way faster than new players can.
If they could, new players would be in the hopeless situation of not just being behind veterans, but doomed to fall further behind with each passing day, as not only would they not have the large rosters of veterans, they'd perpetually be earning new champs slower. But in fact, because champs are earned randomly, there's actually a diminishing return on crystal openings. When you have very few champs, the odds of pulling a new champ are high and the odds of pulling a champ that will make a material difference in your roster is also higher. The more champs you have, the lowe those odds drop (because there are simply fewer options you don't have).
A system like you're describing would, in somewhat simplified terms, replace the diminishing returns system of random crystals with a more linear system of getting champs with predictable and deterministic effort. Two obvious side effects are that players will be spending less time and less money acquiring new champions, but the third less obvious one is that it shifts the advantage strongly towards veterans always outracing new players to the newer champs. And I think in a free to play game, that's a dangerous thing to do.