I normally don't agree with you @GroundedWisdom , but the last few points you have made, I do. I agree that the revenue brought in by the top % of players is nowhere near 80-90% of the total. It's a narrow-minded view of the company. That also leads into what you just stated about accommodating your customers. The forumbase that's active is a small subset of total gamers - spread across various demographics. From the company's perspective, I can't always be sure that this subset is an accurate reflection of my playerbase. Even in this thread, it was built around a lot of Act 6 concerns. I don't even know where the majority of players actually stand in relation to these players.
That said, I understand exactly what everyone else is saying, too. While you may not feel that content creators or the top players leaving won't create a void, it will. Think about it this way. Kabam has created content that, as you tend to consider it, the player grows into. This involves challenging conventional patterns/muscle memory and requires much more strategy. The same players that you were defending are the same players who NEED those people - at least the content creators. Seatin become who he was because ___ is too hard and he usually has a video on it. He tells you counters! You can watch gameplay. He makes it look simple. That encourages these players who otherwise would give up the game to keep playing. That also increases the chances that some of them keep spending.
You seem like an older gamer. I was born in the 80s, so to some I'm older and some I'm younger. I mention that you seem like an older gamer because I feel like you underrate what the content creators bring to Kabam. I grew up reading the gaming mags to find help for accomplishing game tasks (until gameFAQ became well developed) so that's the world I'm used to. But YT is a HUGE deal now, and matters. Even if you don't use YT for MCOC help, you likely have used it for help for something else in the past, so you should be able to understand how valuable that can be. If they leave, that will hurt the company, and I don't really think that's in doubt. Content creators for this video game serve as an unpaid marketing firm. That's huge and I'm not sure why you discount that aspect so much.
I didn't say it wouldn't affect things. I just said I don't agree that the game will die. Besides the issues brought up, there's also the point that people reach a stage where they get bored. They've done everything, they're bored with waiting on the few Champs they don't have, and progress is slowed. It's part-and-parcel with pretty much all gaming. Eventually you get to a stage where you're somewhat over it. As for content creators, there's a difference between those that make content, and those who are members of the CCP. Anyone can make content, really. You have to discern what the quality is. Some create genuinely helpful content, others create content to fire start. Everything should be taken with a grain of salt. Sure, promotion is big. It's just self-serving to play into the issues people have and rile them up. The only thing that does is make the creator look like the savior, and the company look apathetic. I'm not going to get into names, but it's clearly apparent who stirs the pot and who genuinely creates content out of the love of the game. I am an 80's baby, and have been around for some time, which means I can see the difference. I'm not so easily swayed or triggered. All-in-all, I do agree that it's not good to lose promotion or customers. I'm not that cut-and-dry about it. What I'm saying is people who are loyal to the game and not just to the creators, are better business in general. The game will survive if people are getting bored with it. I play because I love MCOC. Not because I blindly follow whatever Joe YouTuber says.
I get it. I'm not a huge YT guy, either. And I don't base my opinions off anyone specifically, so I can see where you are coming from. That said, the key thing is that many players DO turn to YT in the same way someone from our generation may have turned to Game Informer, Nintendo Power, GamePro, PC Gamer, IGN, or GameFAQ for information on the game or tips on how to beat X boss or Y challenge mode.
It doesn't mean that everyone blindly follows this or that content creator and hangs on every single word. Are there some stans? Well, yeah of course. But the people that WILL leave are the people who can no longer get through X boss or Y challenge because the content creator community isn't there. There will always be people who can beat this challenge with their own strategy and skill. There will always be a bigger populace that needs help. The ones who need the help would feel the effects of those types leaving the game.That's not to mention the segment of people who watch them for cool tips on champs, crystal openings, tier lists, etc.
I think you're inferring that the game will go on as the playerbase evolves. These content creators leave, these others step up - that sort of thing. I don't disagree. But even in that, there's a segment of those players who will be turned off by those new content creators. Without a robust community, the game does choke off because it's too hard to figure it out on your own (for most people; some people are just awesome). The only way around that would be to lessen the difficulty so that average players can pass it with a small trial-and-error phase. But making it easier could cut into potential profits. I guess they could make it easier to acquire "god tier" champs, but the long of it is that would cut into potential profits. So, long term, imo, the game COULD choke off. Now it may not, but my point is it's not so cut and dry as you portray and that I think there's a lot of validity into that school of thought. At the least, it's why Kabam has taken this thread so seriously. They obviously think there's a link to all of it, or I think this thread would have been closed long ago.
I presume you're referring to Act 6, and they are in the process of looking at that. I'm not Anti-YouTube by any means. I use it selectively. Especially if there's a particular piece of content I'm dealing with. I don't watch it religiously for my Ranking choices or investments, and I don't engage in drama channels. Something that's par for the course on YouTube, regardless of the content. I don't imagine the game team wants anyone to leave or be dissatisfied. Having said that, getting pulls we don't want is part of the game. It comes with RNG. In terms of YouTube, that also has a part in it because people are being guided and told what's useful and what isn't, which results in being unhappy with most of what's in the Crystals. Content like Act 6 plays a part, but it's been going on a long time. The "God Tier" mentality is only a gauge, and only one person's opinion for that matter. Yet people see it as absolute value on Champs. There are many Champs with uses. They're completely overlooked because they're not the "best". Hype is an inverted U. Some hype is good for the game. Relying on it too much, and the result is misinformation, confusion, and disproportion.
It happens within my own Ally even. I love my guys to bits, but if people ask for advice on Line, we have one or two that are entirely too selective with Champs and they only suggest the same ones that everyone else does. I'm not huge on that. Many times people want different choices, and keep asking because they want to Rank who they want to Rank. I always encourage them to Rank whoever they want. There's a reason I chose Mephisto for my first R4.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
..... I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
I 100% agree as I don't see the harm in being able to target specific champs. Unless the problem is Kabam has released widely unbalanced champs the last several years and they don't want everyone to have OP champs that Kabam designed a certain way.
The inability to get a specific champ at present can be a huge issue for two reasons. 1. As others have pointed out this game is billed as a chance to play with your favorite Marvel characters. There are a lot of characters that I like in the Marvel Universe that are not released as 5*/6* or are practically unusuable in the content I am out now. 2. Kabam has made many nodes and paths that require certain counters/immunities.
If there is a convergence of being good and in the 5*/6* pool, you have to contend with the RNG. I've opened hundreds of 5* crystals over the last 4+ years and still haven't pulled champs like Magik, Archangel, etc. This doesn't mean that we just get whatever champ we want with minimal effort (there isn't much of an incentive to keep playing at that point)...but Kabam has put the carrot so far out that people don't see being able to reach it without great luck.
So changing the RNG, adding better feature crystals, or increasing use of nexus crystal need to be part of the fix. Also, I would rather have Kabam fix two bad champs a month then release two brand new champs for at least a period. Kabam could still put out these updated champs crystals to get some of that sweet whale milk.
It is also ironic that Kabam is trying to slow-walk people getting 6* champs and rankups when many in the community were against 6* being added (myself included). It didn't make sense at the time when there wasn't even rank 5 5*s and people were worried it would make the lower level champs largely irrelevant. This has proven true for me and KT1 is finding the same in his baby account.
Others may have already said it, but Kabam is just hurting themselves by taking so long for this roadmap. The longer it goes the greater the anticipation/expectation is building. It is unlikely that even a great roadmap is going to match the pent-up expectation.
The issue that exists even for a lot of veteran players is the inability to pick up champs for niche content when at the mercy of pRNG. At least I might be fine knowing I’ve got a decent shot at a champ with X abilities months after its release (instead of potentially years later or not at all).
This is I think a solvable problem, or at least an addressable one. There's an average time gap between when the whales snag a champ (eight seconds after release) and when the typical player does. Some get lucky some get unlucky, but there is some average. But it is impossible that this time period is "correct" no matter how you define correctness, because it is increasing all the time as new champions are added to the game. Once you accept the fact that this time gap cannot be some magic thing set by a design formula, it is really just an accident of implementation, the door is opened to questioning what it should actually be. Weeks seems obviously too short, too many years seems obviously too long, and for some middle ground number there is a way to work backwards and ask how good should crystals be, or how random can they be, and still produce reasonable time delays. The basic crystal, where you have a one in 150 chance, seems obviously too low. The old school featured crystal, where you have a one in five chance, seems way too high.
One question I'm contemplating is whether there is some objective guidance for this number, and it isn't just some arbitrary preference. Is it possible to "prove" at least colloquially, that it should be no more than six months, or a year, or some fixed time period. I think maybe that's true, that there is an objective frame of reference that is dependent on factors like how fast champions and content are added to the game, and not just people's speed preferences. Still working on that one. Knowing this determines how "big" a targeted crystal should be, and vice versa.
But there are some obvious guardrails. Speaking very, very loosely, if Kabam added new story arc Acts every six months, but it took the average player eighteen months to pull reasonable counters to complete that content, I'd say that was objectively wrong. So you can make objective statements about how fast players should be able to grow their rosters, given typical skill and roster growth.
I always encourage them to Rank whoever they want. There's a reason I chose Mephisto for my first R4.
What reason really? The only reason I can see for someone to have as his first r4 a mephisto is lack of other options. Otherwise is an own progress sabotage move. And after all this game is all about progress.
I always encourage them to Rank whoever they want. There's a reason I chose Mephisto for my first R4.
What reason really? The only reason I can see for someone to have as his first r4 a mephisto is lack of other options. Otherwise is an own progress sabotage move. And after all this game is all about progress.
I always encourage them to Rank whoever they want. There's a reason I chose Mephisto for my first R4.
What reason really? The only reason I can see for someone to have as his first r4 a mephisto is lack of other options. Otherwise is an own progress sabotage move. And after all this game is all about progress.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. People pressure others into making the same choices. I chose him because of the Regen, the DoT, and the Soul Imprisonment. Which comes in useful when you're preventing annoying Sigs. Only, people don't think for themselves overall. They don't Rank for their own reasons. They just do what others tell them to do. Do I mean all people? No. Overall, most don't even pick Champs up unless they're on the short list. They don't Rank them and test them to see their actual potential and uses for applications. They just sit and wait on a few popular pulls and complain that the RNG is terrible. Of course it's terrible if you're handpicking a few and not touching anything else.
I always encourage them to Rank whoever they want. There's a reason I chose Mephisto for my first R4.
What reason really? The only reason I can see for someone to have as his first r4 a mephisto is lack of other options. Otherwise is an own progress sabotage move. And after all this game is all about progress.
Dude my first r4 was Mordo and I took him to r4 over Blade, even though I had all the catalysts to take up Blade. Why did I do it? Because I loved Mordo and I thought he was a good champion. And he is, he helped me become both Uncollected and Cavalier. People rank who they want to. Mephisto is a solid champ
This is exactly what I'm talking about. People pressure others into making the same choices. I chose him because of the Regen, the DoT, and the Soul Imprisonment. Which comes in useful when you're preventing annoying Sigs. Only, people don't think for themselves overall. They don't Rank for their own reasons. They just do what others tell them to do. Do I mean all people? No. Overall, most don't even pick Champs up unless they're on the short list. They don't Rank them and test them to see their actual potential and uses for applications. They just sit and wait on a few popular pulls and complain that the RNG is terrible. Of course it's terrible if you're handpicking a few and not touching anything else.
Content requirements and big gaps between champs values pressure people to rank up specific ones (and not always what they like) not other people. The short list of god tier champs is the outage of a huge player base experience over long time on the game. Good luck at act6 if you dive into with a champ that isn’t on this short list. Champs that are popular aren’t out of luck. They are because they are effective. It’s easy to say “rank who you like”, but it’s harder to clear content with the ones you like 😉
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
The idea of using time delays is something I've been toying around with as well, examining *lots* of different possibilities (dozens of distinct ones in fact). For example, a sketch of one I've been analyzing the numbers on is to take all the champs released in a particular year and release them in an annual crystal some time after that year, say in May 2020 we release a crystal that contains all the 2019 champs. This has pros and cons: calendar year crystals still contain squibs, and waiting five months after the December champs release means waiting 17 months since the January champs release, and rolling crystals create lots of additional complications.
But the idea of embargoing champs is definitely one I've spent a lot of time considering. For example, in my previous suggestion regarding datamiine-driven crystals, we'd have to embargo recently released champs. That's why I say I'm still working on that idea: for it to work it has to incorporate a lot of different ideas or the whole thing falls apart.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. People pressure others into making the same choices. I chose him because of the Regen, the DoT, and the Soul Imprisonment. Which comes in useful when you're preventing annoying Sigs. Only, people don't think for themselves overall. They don't Rank for their own reasons. They just do what others tell them to do. Do I mean all people? No. Overall, most don't even pick Champs up unless they're on the short list. They don't Rank them and test them to see their actual potential and uses for applications. They just sit and wait on a few popular pulls and complain that the RNG is terrible. Of course it's terrible if you're handpicking a few and not touching anything else.
Content requirements and big gaps between champs values pressure people to rank up specific ones (and not always what they like) not other people. The short list of god tier champs is the outage of a huge player base experience over long time on the game. Good luck at act6 if you dive into with a champ that isn’t on this short list. Champs that are popular aren’t out of luck. They are because they are effective. It’s easy to say “rank who you like”, but it’s harder to clear content with the ones you like 😉
It's beyond that. If your only consideration for Ranking is a piece of one-and-done content, then it's too narrow. Enjoyment is what the game is all about. Not just completing everything. Which is why there's very little enjoyment among those seeking God Tiers. It's actually deeper than just restrictions. Act 6 hasn't been out that long, compared to the years people have been cherry picking Champs. So much discovery and enjoyment is lost. No room for picking a new favorite and spending time getting to know them and Ranking them. Just wait on the same ones everyone else wants. No wonder people find it boring. The game is what you make it.
The issue that exists even for a lot of veteran players is the inability to pick up champs for niche content when at the mercy of pRNG. At least I might be fine knowing I’ve got a decent shot at a champ with X abilities months after its release (instead of potentially years later or not at all).
This is I think a solvable problem, or at least an addressable one. There's an average time gap between when the whales snag a champ (eight seconds after release) and when the typical player does. Some get lucky some get unlucky, but there is some average. But it is impossible that this time period is "correct" no matter how you define correctness, because it is increasing all the time as new champions are added to the game. Once you accept the fact that this time gap cannot be some magic thing set by a design formula, it is really just an accident of implementation, the door is opened to questioning what it should actually be. Weeks seems obviously too short, too many years seems obviously too long, and for some middle ground number there is a way to work backwards and ask how good should crystals be, or how random can they be, and still produce reasonable time delays. The basic crystal, where you have a one in 150 chance, seems obviously too low. The old school featured crystal, where you have a one in five chance, seems way too high.
One question I'm contemplating is whether there is some objective guidance for this number, and it isn't just some arbitrary preference. Is it possible to "prove" at least colloquially, that it should be no more than six months, or a year, or some fixed time period. I think maybe that's true, that there is an objective frame of reference that is dependent on factors like how fast champions and content are added to the game, and not just people's speed preferences. Still working on that one. Knowing this determines how "big" a targeted crystal should be, and vice versa.
But there are some obvious guardrails. Speaking very, very loosely, if Kabam added new story arc Acts every six months, but it took the average player eighteen months to pull reasonable counters to complete that content, I'd say that was objectively wrong. So you can make objective statements about how fast players should be able to grow their rosters, given typical skill and roster growth.
Agreed, and I think a workable solution here would fix a lot of the problems for near-endgame players. Not a pity system per se, but some way to quantify how much “frustration” a player has to endure before he/she gets an appreciably better chance at a keystone champ.
But I think it’s necessary, because I don’t believe the team can continue producing two new champs a month with multiple bells and whistles and not employ some form of champ-specific content as a way to challenge players and their rosters.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
Jesus is everything a combative stance to you? I wasn’t implying anything. I merely stated it because some people may not know that drop rates were hidden before now and that’s why there was a reddit post trying to figure it out. The point I was making is that not everyone gets the champion because RNG still exists not that Kabam was sneakily hiding anything
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
Jesus is everything a combative stance to you? I wasn’t implying anything. I merely stated it because some people may not know that drop rates were hidden before now and that’s why there was a reddit post trying to figure it out. The point I was making is that not everyone gets the champion because RNG still exists not that Kabam was sneakily hiding anything
Well, yes. That's exactly the point of RNG. Not everyone gets the Champ. You also felt the need to point out that Apple allegedly forced them to do so, so I presume there was a reason for that.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
*20% to 25% where the odds so not above par
No. The old Featured Crystals were always presumed to have a 20% Drop Rate. Which was the case, apparently. That's for one specific Champ. The new Featured Crystals have a 25% chance at a new Champ, not one specific one.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
That was back when shards were rare not when you could easily stack 10+ crystals everytime you wanted someone. People who opened 4 or 5 back then had saved for months. Some people could do that in a couple of weeks now
but you also now receive crystals at a greatly accelerated rate. easily receive 5* crystals 5 x faster then you did before so 5% drop rat and 20% drop rate is quite similar in practice. if the old crystals still existed and we received 5* at the rate we do now the crystals would be borderline broken especially for the ability. you could almost assure yourself atleast one of the 2 new champs each month. saving 75k shards was months work before. now it is a single months work
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
*20% to 25% where the odds so not above par
No. The old Featured Crystals were always presumed to have a 20% Drop Rate. Which was the case, apparently. That's for one specific Champ. The new Featured Crystals have a 25% chance at a new Champ, not one specific one.
Wrong. They were presumed to have a 20 to 25% chance.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
*20% to 25% where the odds so not above par
No. The old Featured Crystals were always presumed to have a 20% Drop Rate. Which was the case, apparently. That's for one specific Champ. The new Featured Crystals have a 25% chance at a new Champ, not one specific one.
Wrong. They were presumed to have a 20 to 25% chance.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
*20% to 25% where the odds so not above par
No. The old Featured Crystals were always presumed to have a 20% Drop Rate. Which was the case, apparently. That's for one specific Champ. The new Featured Crystals have a 25% chance at a new Champ, not one specific one.
Wrong. They were presumed to have a 20 to 25% chance.
I've never heard 25%. I've been around a long time. 20% was the commonly-accepted hypothesis.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
*20% to 25% where the odds so not above par
No. The old Featured Crystals were always presumed to have a 20% Drop Rate. Which was the case, apparently. That's for one specific Champ. The new Featured Crystals have a 25% chance at a new Champ, not one specific one.
Wrong. They were presumed to have a 20 to 25% chance.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
*20% to 25% where the odds so not above par
No. The old Featured Crystals were always presumed to have a 20% Drop Rate. Which was the case, apparently. That's for one specific Champ. The new Featured Crystals have a 25% chance at a new Champ, not one specific one.
Wrong. They were presumed to have a 20 to 25% chance.
I've never heard 25%. I've been around a long time. 20% was the commonly-accepted hypothesis.
I've heard 20 to 25% been here on and off since end of 2016
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
*20% to 25% where the odds so not above par
No. The old Featured Crystals were always presumed to have a 20% Drop Rate. Which was the case, apparently. That's for one specific Champ. The new Featured Crystals have a 25% chance at a new Champ, not one specific one.
Wrong. They were presumed to have a 20 to 25% chance.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
*20% to 25% where the odds so not above par
No. The old Featured Crystals were always presumed to have a 20% Drop Rate. Which was the case, apparently. That's for one specific Champ. The new Featured Crystals have a 25% chance at a new Champ, not one specific one.
Wrong. They were presumed to have a 20 to 25% chance.
I've never heard 25%. I've been around a long time. 20% was the commonly-accepted hypothesis.
I've heard 20 to 25% been here on and off since end of 2016
Well there's no use in arguing over something small like that. Perhaps you did hear 20-25. I've only heard people say it's about a 20% chance. Been here since 2015. In any case, it doesn't really matter. Even if it was presumed to be 25, a result of 24% with a Reddit sample size is not cause for concern. They were greater than the chance of getting one specific Champ. Too high, actually. Reason being, 5*s were much more rare when they were introduced.
We need more choice instead of chance. I know everybody's always worried about "well you can't let everybody have a corvus glaive" well guess what, all the top players and end players already do. Stop dangling the carrot Kabam.
So you want to let people choose which characters they get? I'm all for limiting the champ pool, but not for directly choosing a champion.
Agreed. The smallest pool a crystal should be is ten champs, like incursion crystals. RNG is a pain, but it is necessary for the game I think.
The pool doesn't matter, just increase the odds to target a certain champion. The featured 5* crystal that has the 20% drop rate for a champion should return. They started tailoring content around certain champions and then removed our ability to target champions. We need that crystal now more than ever.
20% is far too high with as readily available 5* shards are now. That's the whole reason it got scrapped. 10% with a 10 champ pool is a bit more tolerable. It's still fairly high odds and more than double the featured 5* odds but leaving it at 20% basically guarantees anyone can get any champ at this point. That's just not healthy for the game and would basically make basic crystals pointless unless the new crystal was exorbitantly expensive
20% is definitely not too high and why does everyone parrot the whole targeting isnt "healthy" for the game. We had 20% crystals before and arguably that was the peak of the game in terms of it being enjoyable.
Being able to targeting *specific* champs is plenty bad for the game. That's why we don't have that crystal anymore. You had two, and only two choices. You could keep that crystal and keep 5* shards permanently scarce. Or you could make 5* shards more accessible and lose that crystal. And the moment kabam decided to make 5* shards more accessible, your choices went from two to one.
This isn't some arbitrary decision by Kabam either. A large part of the game, including a big chunk of what funds the game's existence, is chasing champions. If you can easily target one specific champion, that chase is over, and the game is also over. There's also the psychological laddering issue. If we're allowed to collect champions in the order we want, it is inevitable that every champion we target will be less valuable than the previous one, because we're always going to target champions in the order we think they are valuable. Even accounting for new champs being added to the game, that's a strong negative pressure. Games that involve collection pursuit all face similar constraints.
The reason why 20% was too high is also not arbitrary. When players could only buy one or two of those crystals per cycle, then that number represented the chance a player might get that champion. But when it became possible to buy literally *dozens* of those crystals per cycle, it was no longer a question of if, but just a question of how much shards it would take to all but guarantee getting the champ.
The problem isn't that there's a low chance to get the specific champ you want. You're not going to be able to do that regardless. The only problem that is solvable, and would improve RNG crystal acquisition, is reducing the downside. The floor of how useful the champions are can be raised, without explicitly allowing players to bypass random chance and just get the champ they want with high chance of success.
While the precise % may be too high at something like 20%, I’m curious who actually gets harmed by a structure similar to the old crystal. That’s an honest question—not trying to be combative.
It’s easy to find endgame accounts that nab the newest champ and immediately elevate them to R5 and high/max sig. Many of those accounts are playing with a full deck of R2/3 6* awakened and L100+, so I don’t see how even the current system does much to “slow” the rapid accumulation of a new champ for them.
Lower tier players have traditionally been able to buy new champ crystals, but I suspect a more targeted featured crystal wouldn’t significantly accelerate the influx of new champs for them either—and many are restricted from getting anything beyond 4*/5* based on their Summoner level. If they did land a great new champ, that also might be the event that fully engages them in the game, something I’ve seen happen many times among ally mates and friends. Getting lucky on one Blade featured long ago probably kept me playing in 2018.
For the upper tier but non-endgame player (where I would place myself), the 5* crystal is nigh irrelevant. I’m sitting on 130-ish 5*’s and, excluding the purchasable champs and special champs, I’m lacking 20-ish 5*’s. Of those, I may realistically want 2 or 3 and maybe 1/4 champ pulls are what I would consider “additive.” The thrill of the 5* champ chase is for all intents and purposes non-existent; 5* shards are just a proxy for sig stones for me.
I don’t include 6*’s at all, because I think they stand apart and have their own problems. But I’m curious to know how being able to more specifically target what a player wants and needs (especially as it relates to being able to target specific content they’d like to tackle) is a bad thing. The analogy I’d use is the carrot that’s dangled too long—eventually, the poor beast loses interest in carrots altogether and just quits running.
Again, honest questions. Not an attack.
Dr. Zola
Let's unpack this one at a time. First of all, let's look at the players who are whaling out on crystals to nab new champions as fast as possible. Adding a way to get them quickly with some kind of targeted crystal doesn't *slow* them down, it makes them less likely to spend. In other words, a targeted crystal undermines the game's monetization model by taking away the advantage that the whales are spending money to get. And that isn't champions - that's a misunderstanding of the model. Whales don't buy champs, not even the ones that *think* they are buying champs are buying champs. What they are buying is *time*. They get them before we get them. There's no champ the whales spend to get that I won't eventually get for free. The question is when. Any reduction in that time advantage reduces the incentive to spend, so that has to be very carefully considered; you have to balance the speed at which players can acquire specific champs normally with the incentive to bypass that delay by spending.
This also applies to lower tier spending, but here you also face a different problem. You say that a targeted crystal wouldn't accelerate the influx of those new champs. But that depends on how good the targeted crystal is. If the numbers are low enough that would be true, but then the crystal would also be worthless to such players. It is literally impossible to make a crystal that helps players acquire champions, but doesn't increase the influx of those champions in a noticeable way.
If you are chasing champs, how quickly you can chase them is relevant and thus the structure of the crystals that create that opportunity is relevant. If you aren't chasing champs, the crystals themselves are irrelevant and any improvement in their structure would be equally irrelevant.
So to answer the question, being able to specifically target specific champs in a meaningful way can be detrimental because for players that are spending money to get them this would reduce the advantage they are spending money to get, devaluing their spending. For players that are pursuing them more conventionally, either the crystal accelerates that, and above a certain threshold that acceleration is problematic for reasons I mentioned earlier, or it doesn't accelerate them noticeably and the crystal has no perceived benefit. The gap between those two does exist, but it is both narrow and difficult to quantify. And for players not pursuing champs, offering better ways to target champs is harmless, but also meaningless. They don't factor into the discussion at all.
I think you are missing an easy fix here. Don't release the targeted crystal (20% crystal) until at least 6 months or so has passed since the champ was initially released. The original release of these crystals had issues because they were released twice (once as soon as the new champ was released and then a re-run several months later before being added to the basic). If you build in a 6 month gap between spenders and those acquiring the new champ via the targeted crystal you don't have to worry about the problem you stated above. By the time the champ is available in the targeted crystal the whales/spenders are on to the next bigger/better/higher prestige champ (12+ new champs would have been released by then). It makes everyone else happy in that if they really want a specific champ all they have to do is wait and they will have a very good shot at it.
Time delays would only address half the problem, or rather half of half the problem. What you're suggesting would automatically build in a time delay between champion introduction and wider availability, but it wouldn't solve the problem of trivializing the chase for champions elsewhere in the game, and in eliminating most of the chase it would create a completely separate problem. Right now spenders spend to get champions now that everyone else has to chase after and get much later. Would they spend money to get champions now that everyone gets almost immediately themselves after the cooldown expires with only minimal chase? That would be a completely separate kind of devaluation.
Everyone gets almost immediately? Has RNG suddenly disappeared? Using Blade featured crystals as an example. There was a reddit post collating all the blade crystal pulls to determine what the drop rate was (this was before apple forced them to show drop rates) and thousands of people missed. Only 24% got blade so I don’t understand how everyone gets champions almost immediately when RNG is still much a factor
You're implying that there was some type of deception concerning the Drop Rates prior to Apple "forcing" them (which is untrue, since they complied with the suggestion and were not forced), and we as a collective have been gathering data on pulls for years. Nothing to note actually varied from the findings we had. The Drop Rates were congruent. Further to that, the Blade Crystals were the last set at 20%, so if "only" 24% got Blade, that's above par.
Jesus is everything a combative stance to you? I wasn’t implying anything. I merely stated it because some people may not know that drop rates were hidden before now and that’s why there was a reddit post trying to figure it out. The point I was making is that not everyone gets the champion because RNG still exists not that Kabam was sneakily hiding anything
Well, yes. That's exactly the point of RNG. Not everyone gets the Champ. You also felt the need to point out that Apple allegedly forced them to do so, so I presume there was a reason for that.
There is no allegedly here. Apple did force them to show the drop rates.
Comments
I don't imagine the game team wants anyone to leave or be dissatisfied. Having said that, getting pulls we don't want is part of the game. It comes with RNG. In terms of YouTube, that also has a part in it because people are being guided and told what's useful and what isn't, which results in being unhappy with most of what's in the Crystals. Content like Act 6 plays a part, but it's been going on a long time. The "God Tier" mentality is only a gauge, and only one person's opinion for that matter. Yet people see it as absolute value on Champs. There are many Champs with uses. They're completely overlooked because they're not the "best". Hype is an inverted U. Some hype is good for the game. Relying on it too much, and the result is misinformation, confusion, and disproportion.
The inability to get a specific champ at present can be a huge issue for two reasons. 1. As others have pointed out this game is billed as a chance to play with your favorite Marvel characters. There are a lot of characters that I like in the Marvel Universe that are not released as 5*/6* or are practically unusuable in the content I am out now. 2. Kabam has made many nodes and paths that require certain counters/immunities.
If there is a convergence of being good and in the 5*/6* pool, you have to contend with the RNG. I've opened hundreds of 5* crystals over the last 4+ years and still haven't pulled champs like Magik, Archangel, etc. This doesn't mean that we just get whatever champ we want with minimal effort (there isn't much of an incentive to keep playing at that point)...but Kabam has put the carrot so far out that people don't see being able to reach it without great luck.
So changing the RNG, adding better feature crystals, or increasing use of nexus crystal need to be part of the fix. Also, I would rather have Kabam fix two bad champs a month then release two brand new champs for at least a period. Kabam could still put out these updated champs crystals to get some of that sweet whale milk.
It is also ironic that Kabam is trying to slow-walk people getting 6* champs and rankups when many in the community were against 6* being added (myself included). It didn't make sense at the time when there wasn't even rank 5 5*s and people were worried it would make the lower level champs largely irrelevant. This has proven true for me and KT1 is finding the same in his baby account.
Others may have already said it, but Kabam is just hurting themselves by taking so long for this roadmap. The longer it goes the greater the anticipation/expectation is building. It is unlikely that even a great roadmap is going to match the pent-up expectation.
One question I'm contemplating is whether there is some objective guidance for this number, and it isn't just some arbitrary preference. Is it possible to "prove" at least colloquially, that it should be no more than six months, or a year, or some fixed time period. I think maybe that's true, that there is an objective frame of reference that is dependent on factors like how fast champions and content are added to the game, and not just people's speed preferences. Still working on that one. Knowing this determines how "big" a targeted crystal should be, and vice versa.
But there are some obvious guardrails. Speaking very, very loosely, if Kabam added new story arc Acts every six months, but it took the average player eighteen months to pull reasonable counters to complete that content, I'd say that was objectively wrong. So you can make objective statements about how fast players should be able to grow their rosters, given typical skill and roster growth.
I chose him because of the Regen, the DoT, and the Soul Imprisonment. Which comes in useful when you're preventing annoying Sigs.
Only, people don't think for themselves overall. They don't Rank for their own reasons. They just do what others tell them to do. Do I mean all people? No. Overall, most don't even pick Champs up unless they're on the short list. They don't Rank them and test them to see their actual potential and uses for applications. They just sit and wait on a few popular pulls and complain that the RNG is terrible. Of course it's terrible if you're handpicking a few and not touching anything else.
The idea of using time delays is something I've been toying around with as well, examining *lots* of different possibilities (dozens of distinct ones in fact). For example, a sketch of one I've been analyzing the numbers on is to take all the champs released in a particular year and release them in an annual crystal some time after that year, say in May 2020 we release a crystal that contains all the 2019 champs. This has pros and cons: calendar year crystals still contain squibs, and waiting five months after the December champs release means waiting 17 months since the January champs release, and rolling crystals create lots of additional complications.
But the idea of embargoing champs is definitely one I've spent a lot of time considering. For example, in my previous suggestion regarding datamiine-driven crystals, we'd have to embargo recently released champs. That's why I say I'm still working on that idea: for it to work it has to incorporate a lot of different ideas or the whole thing falls apart.
but alas, on this one topic he has the right idea.
But I think it’s necessary, because I don’t believe the team can continue producing two new champs a month with multiple bells and whistles and not employ some form of champ-specific content as a way to challenge players and their rosters.
Dr. Zola
saving 75k shards was months work before.
now it is a single months work