I feel like people are starting to just not care anymore. That has me scared about the future of this game. I have spent 5 years playing and for the most part (outside of The Maze) I enjoyed all the content through 6.1. Maybe there just isn’t anything Kabam can (or will) do at this point to save it.
The Roadmap should be out this week, so let’s wait until then to get maudlin. I’m sure whatever Kabam has planned in it will absolutely revitalize the game and people’s interest in it!
To get back on topic I feel these serioiusly need to be addressed \ 1) The game economy. We need to either reduce the amount to rankup 6 stars or get double the iso for 5 star dubs and 6 star dups. The 5 star sig stone freeze has to end and become a regular part of the game so people can move up in alliances if they want to and not get held by prestige. 2) AQ needs 30 min timers or they need to extend the energy minimum to 8 instead of 5. 3) Masteries need to be made free to change once you unlock or they need 3 sets that you can swap to at anytime even if its for a price. 4) The need to update outdated reward systems. Mainly summoners advancement, solo event quests, and alliance events. 5)We need a 6 star arena and the 5 star arena needs to widen its champion acquisition to either 5% or first 800.
Please add on if I'm forgetting anything major that needs to be addressed. Those are the core issues with the game in my opinion.
To get back on topic I feel these serioiusly need to be addressed \ 1) The game economy. We need to either reduce the amount to rankup 6 stars or get double the iso for 5 star dubs and 6 star dups. The 5 star sig stone freeze has to end and become a regular part of the game so people can move up in alliances if they want to and not get held by prestige. 2) AQ needs 30 min timers or they need to extend the energy minimum to 8 instead of 5. 3) Masteries need to be made free to change once you unlock or they need 3 sets that you can swap to at anytime even if its for a price. 4) The need to update outdated reward systems. Mainly summoners advancement, solo event quests, and alliance events. 5)We need a 6 star arena and the 5 star arena needs to widen its champion acquisition to either 5% or first 800.
Please add on if I'm forgetting anything major that needs to be addressed. Those are the core issues with the game in my opinion.
We also need to increase the amount of six star shards we can get
Adding to @TheTalents post: 1. Champion Acquisition is slow and painful due to several factors: a. The basic pool has somewhere around 150-170 champions in it which makes targeting a specific champ hard and awakening them just as hard. b. The reason why we have to target specific champions is because so much of Act 6 is incredibly champion specific and, so far, Act 7 is looking to be the same. c. Proposed solutions to this so far have been: make Nexus crystals available for purchase with shards for somewhere between 12,500 to 20,000 shards, make the five star crystal pool similar to the Incursion crystals where there are multiple crystals with ten champs each, class specific five stars, reduce the amount of champion specific content and make it more skill based, replace basics with Nexus crystals, or implement a sort of pity system. 2. Transparency and Open Communication with Kabam 3. Reduce unit/revive grab nodes in future content 4. Replace nodes that solely punish and do not reward (Nodes like Special Conessiour, Do You Bleed, Crit Me With Your Best Shot, Acid Wash, Pleasure to Burn, where you can only deal damage with x effect but you do not gain any benefit from doing x effect). These nodes, if they continue to exist, should be rewarding so they behave like this: Defender only takes damage from X but while under the effect of X, Defender takes 200% increased damage or something similar. 5. Get rid of Defensive Tactics in War 6. Make War more Rewarding in general 7. Increase FtP availability of endgame resources like Sig Stones and t5cc fragment crystals. 8. Cavalier difficulty for the monthly EQ 9. Increase the availability of 6 star shards 10. Proper Communication on Bugs and Fixes 11. Bring back content like Champion Challenges and Boss Rushes as they were widely loved 12. Stop jacking up the attack values to make content more difficult 13. Increase the level cap so we have more mastery points 14. Add new masteries designed to help in Act 6 and 7 15. Remove the cost of respeccing masteries 16. Stop designing maps that require more than 70 energy to complete. If we have a max of 70 energy, the maps should be a max of 70 energy per path. If I missed anything, please add it
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.
Adding to @TheTalents post: 1. Champion Acquisition is slow and painful due to several factors: a. The basic pool has somewhere around 150-170 champions in it which makes targeting a specific champ hard and awakening them just as hard. b. The reason why we have to target specific champions is because so much of Act 6 is incredibly champion specific and, so far, Act 7 is looking to be the same. c. Proposed solutions to this so far have been: make Nexus crystals available for purchase with shards for somewhere between 12,500 to 20,000 shards, make the five star crystal pool similar to the Incursion crystals where there are multiple crystals with ten champs each, class specific five stars, reduce the amount of champion specific content and make it more skill based, replace basics with Nexus crystals, or implement a sort of pity system. 2. Transparency and Open Communication with Kabam 3. Reduce unit/revive grab nodes in future content 4. Replace nodes that solely punish and do not reward (Nodes like Special Conessiour, Do You Bleed, Crit Me With Your Best Shot, Acid Wash, Pleasure to Burn, where you can only deal damage with x effect but you do not gain any benefit from doing x effect). These nodes, if they continue to exist, should be rewarding so they behave like this: Defender only takes damage from X but while under the effect of X, Defender takes 200% increased damage or something similar. 5. Get rid of Defensive Tactics in War 6. Make War more Rewarding in general 7. Increase FtP availability of endgame resources like Sig Stones and t5cc fragment crystals. 8. Cavalier difficulty for the monthly EQ 9. Increase the availability of 6 star shards 10. Proper Communication on Bugs and Fixes 11. Bring back content like Champion Challenges and Boss Rushes as they were widely loved 12. Stop jacking up the attack values to make content more difficult 13. Increase the level cap so we have more mastery points 14. Add new masteries designed to help in Act 6 and 7 15. Remove the cost of respeccing masteries 16. Stop designing maps that require more than 70 energy to complete. If we have a max of 70 energy, the maps should be a max of 70 energy per path. If I missed anything, please add it
17. Add more 5 and 6* crystals like class ones or certian types like a bleed crystal ect...
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.
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.
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.
That's a horrendous idea and would flat out break multiple aspects of the game
Deleting comments in valid bug threads doesn’t help your cause, kabam.
I'd agree with this.
One of the biggest things I'd like to see improved in this game is how bugs are addressed.
If a player finds a bug, the preferred method of reporting it according to Kabam is to post about it in the Bugs and Known Issues section of the forums. Unfortunately, it seems that if a player reporting a bug is seen to be a problem, their posts will go missing. I've noticed a few of @MikeHock 's posts just vanish, despite being full of good data that can be used to get to the root of bugs.
Sometimes you get a response that is usually "do you have a video of this?"...which honestly would be very reasonable if these forums had a viable way of uploading videos directly. So the preferred method requires players to use a 3rd party site (like YouTube) to host a video and then post that in the Bugs and Known Issues portion of the Forum.
If you happen to catch the attention of a mod and have a video, you'll get a "We'll pass this along to the game team". At this point, communication breaks down completely, which is endlessly frustrating to players.
Sometimes they fix it, sometimes they don't. Sometimes asking for an update will get be met with a warning and either having the thread locked or your post deleted.
Sometimes players will be told to "have patience" when the players have no indication that any effort is being spent on fixing bugs that are discovered.
Really, it comes down to communication.
Known Bugs should be added to a list for players to see. This list should be updated often. If something is "passed onto the game team", it should be added to the list. This would go a LONG way in letting players know what bugs are and aren't getting attention.
Communication on the bug front should improve. This is the feedback I have for the game.
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.
If we can choose our champions that would create a different game and I don't think people want a different game they just want the upgrades that are long overdue. RNG is what makes the good pools feel so special. I think the RNG needs to be removed from rank up materials though. That part is not fun.
Champion Acquisition is slow and painful due to several factors:
* The basic pool has somewhere around 150-170 champions in it which makes targeting a specific champ hard and awakening them just as hard.
* The reason why we have to target specific champions is because so much of Act 6 is incredibly champion specific and, so far, Act 7 is looking to be the same.
* Proposed solutions to this so far have been:
** Make Nexus crystals available for purchase with shards for somewhere between 12,500 to 20,000 shards
** Make the five star crystal pool similar to the Incursion crystals where there are multiple crystals with ten champs each
** Class specific five stars
** Reduce the amount of champion specific content and make it more skill based
** Replace basics with Nexus crystals, or implement a sort of pity system.
** Make greater use/regularity of year-specific Champion crystals (that you do not have to purchase)
Transparency and Open Communication with Kabam
Reduce unit/revive grab nodes in future content
Replace nodes that solely punish and do not reward (Nodes like Special Connoisseur, Do You Bleed, Crit Me With Your Best Shot, Acid Wash, Pleasure to Burn, where you can only deal damage with x effect but you do not gain any benefit from doing x effect). These nodes, if they continue to exist, should be rewarding so they behave like this:
* Defender only takes damage from X but while under the effect of X
* Defender takes 200% increased damage or something similar.
Get rid of Defensive Tactics in War
Make War more Rewarding in general
Increase FtP availability of endgame resources like Sig Stones and T5CC fragment crystals.
Cavalier difficulty for the monthly Event Quests
Increase the availability of 6 star shards
Proper Communication on Bugs and Fixes
Bring back content like Champion Challenges and Boss Rushes as they were widely loved
Stop jacking up the attack values to make content more difficult
Increase the level cap so we have more mastery points
Add new Masteries designed to help in Act 6 and 7
Remove the cost of respeccing Masteries
Stop designing maps that require more than 70 energy to complete. If we have a max of 70 energy, the maps should be a max of 70 energy per path.
Add more 5 and 6* crystals like class ones or certain types like a bleed crystal etc...
Better system for bug reporting & addressing
Better sorting system interface for resources.
Update potions.
Finally resolve the gold drought.
Champion reworks need to come with greater speed & frequency
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.
If we can choose our champions that would create a different game and I don't think people want a different game they just want the upgrades that are long overdue. RNG is what makes the good pools feel so special. I think the RNG needs to be removed from rank up materials though. That part is not fun.
Yeah I'd be fine with limited pool crystals at this point for 5*s in particular and agree with Stevie that I don't think the pool should be smaller than 10 at minimum. Regardless of what changes they either need to address champion acquisition (especially in 5*s) or take a new approach to how they design difficult content
I just watched Kt1's video about Kabam's tendency to do the bare minimum when it comes to compensation and rewards in general and I think he nails a lot of points on the head in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lum3nlHSEYQ I have to wonder they are this way. Kabam, what's your reasoning for always giving us the barest of the barest minimum for rewards and compensation? Like Act 6, when the rewards first came out for completion and exploration, they were so abysmal and even now, they are only a little better. When you compare them to the rewards we got from act 5, at least resource wise, Act 5 is way more bang for buck, especially for being significantly easier content.
I just watched Kt1's video about Kabam's tendency to do the bare minimum when it comes to compensation and rewards in general and I think he nails a lot of points on the head in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lum3nlHSEYQ I have to wonder they are this way. Kabam, what's your reasoning for always giving us the barest of the barest minimum for rewards and compensation? Like Act 6, when the rewards first came out for completion and exploration, they were so abysmal and even now, they are only a little better. When you compare them to the rewards we got from act 5, at least resource wise, Act 5 is way more bang for buck, especially for being significantly easier content.
I think bare minimum is apart of their business strategy which is why they took away the gold from map 6 crystals. No need to do it at all, was a huge win for map 6 players until they realized how gold was stripped. I think we've made it abundantly clear that strategy is no longer viable when it comes to their long term plan this is why the minimal changes we've seen in communication haven't been good enough. They allowed it continue far too long.
I just watched Kt1's video about Kabam's tendency to do the bare minimum when it comes to compensation and rewards in general and I think he nails a lot of points on the head in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lum3nlHSEYQ I have to wonder they are this way. Kabam, what's your reasoning for always giving us the barest of the barest minimum for rewards and compensation? Like Act 6, when the rewards first came out for completion and exploration, they were so abysmal and even now, they are only a little better. When you compare them to the rewards we got from act 5, at least resource wise, Act 5 is way more bang for buck, especially for being significantly easier content.
I think bare minimum is apart of their business strategy which is why they took away the gold from map 6 crystals. No need to do it at all, was a huge win for map 6 players until they realized how gold was stripped. I think we've made it abundantly clear that strategy is no longer viable when it comes to their long term plan this is why the minimal changes we've seen in communication haven't been good enough. They allowed it continue far too long.
I really hope they understand the extent of how serious this is, if they continue with their bare minimum strategy, I really do think that the game will only last another year at the most.
I just watched Kt1's video about Kabam's tendency to do the bare minimum when it comes to compensation and rewards in general and I think he nails a lot of points on the head in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lum3nlHSEYQ I have to wonder they are this way. Kabam, what's your reasoning for always giving us the barest of the barest minimum for rewards and compensation? Like Act 6, when the rewards first came out for completion and exploration, they were so abysmal and even now, they are only a little better. When you compare them to the rewards we got from act 5, at least resource wise, Act 5 is way more bang for buck, especially for being significantly easier content.
Now compare the rewards for completion of Act6 and it’s exploration:
So basically the main difference among both is only T5CC and awakening Gem and both are random. Rest rewards are cancel out on the basis of bad RNG.
Exploration requires tons of units, depth of roster and lots of time while completion just requires few refills and going with easiest paths. Completion * 10 times = Exploration But rewards are only T5CC and Awakening gem (both random). I don’t know who decides these rewards but whoever it is He/she need much more knowledge of difficulty and time put in exploring anything.
I just watched Kt1's video about Kabam's tendency to do the bare minimum when it comes to compensation and rewards in general and I think he nails a lot of points on the head in it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lum3nlHSEYQ I have to wonder they are this way. Kabam, what's your reasoning for always giving us the barest of the barest minimum for rewards and compensation? Like Act 6, when the rewards first came out for completion and exploration, they were so abysmal and even now, they are only a little better. When you compare them to the rewards we got from act 5, at least resource wise, Act 5 is way more bang for buck, especially for being significantly easier content.
Now compare the rewards for completion of Act6 and it’s exploration:
So basically the main difference among both is only T5CC and awakening Gem and both are random. Rest rewards are cancel out on the basis of bad RNG.
Exploration requires tons of units, depth of roster and lots of time while completion just requires few refills and going with easiest paths. Completion * 10 times = Exploration But rewards are only T5CC and Awakening gem (both random). I don’t know who decides these rewards but whoever it is He/she need much more knowledge of difficulty and time put in exploring anything.
Exactly, we should have gotten 2-3 t5ccs and a generic gem for exploration
Deleting comments in valid bug threads doesn’t help your cause, kabam.
I'd agree with this.
One of the biggest things I'd like to see improved in this game is how bugs are addressed.
If a player finds a bug, the preferred method of reporting it according to Kabam is to post about it in the Bugs and Known Issues section of the forums. Unfortunately, it seems that if a player reporting a bug is seen to be a problem, their posts will go missing. I've noticed a few of @MikeHock 's posts just vanish, despite being full of good data that can be used to get to the root of bugs.
Sometimes you get a response that is usually "do you have a video of this?"...which honestly would be very reasonable if these forums had a viable way of uploading videos directly. So the preferred method requires players to use a 3rd party site (like YouTube) to host a video and then post that in the Bugs and Known Issues portion of the Forum.
If you happen to catch the attention of a mod and have a video, you'll get a "We'll pass this along to the game team". At this point, communication breaks down completely, which is endlessly frustrating to players.
Sometimes they fix it, sometimes they don't. Sometimes asking for an update will get be met with a warning and either having the thread locked or your post deleted.
Sometimes players will be told to "have patience" when the players have no indication that any effort is being spent on fixing bugs that are discovered.
Really, it comes down to communication.
Known Bugs should be added to a list for players to see. This list should be updated often. If something is "passed onto the game team", it should be added to the list. This would go a LONG way in letting players know what bugs are and aren't getting attention.
Communication on the bug front should improve. This is the feedback I have for the game.
Thanks for the support, @Mirage_Turtle. I read your post about bug reports/fixes pages back and agreed with it very much. The old forums, and this forum, used to be a place where you can report a bug and get a response , a reply, and some action from Kabam. Now, it seems like they care more about appearances (ie not wanting known bugs to be on the front page) than actually fixing bugs.
I think bare minimum is apart of their business strategy
Honestly, I don't see what Kabam is doing with MCOC any different than I've seen any other game studio do with any other game as a service. Anyone that wants to quibble details is free to do so, but the way they manage rewards is in broad strokes exactly what I would do, if my intention was to try to avoid killing the game I was working on and moving to Virginia to find another job.
People think Kabam treats rewards as limited when they are actually unlimited and you can give out as much as you want. But actually, rewards are limited. For any given progression point there's only so much rewards that are meaningful, and then start diminishing in value. Ask any high end player who claims 5* champs don't interest them anymore if diminishing reward value is a thing. You could argue that the game should now be giving those players more 6* champs since 5* champs don't mean as much, but you could just as easily argue that the game mistakenly gave them too much 5* champs in the first place and erased their value.
Mathematically speaking there are two problems. The first is you can only push the top of the game upward so fast. Which means you can only add higher tier rewards so fast. In between ratchets, you only have so much rewards you can hand out, beyond which you can still hand them out but no one will care. The second is reward curves only go upward and not downward, and for psychological reasons they have to increase exponentially. People don't appreciate linear reward increases. Increasing rewards from 100 to 110 means more than increasing rewards from 1000 to 1010, even though that's the same increase. If you increase rewards from 100 to 110 today, you'll be increasing them from 1000 to 1100 tomorrow, which is an exponential increase.
So you have a pile of rewards from which you're handing them out to players, and however much you hand out today you have to hand out exponentially more tomorrow. And if you ever run out, for a particular player, you're just out. There's no way to "create" more, because the bottleneck is not reward creation, it is reward devaluation.
So ALL game studios are more cautious with rewards than players think they need to be. And before someone says "yeah but" whatever you could possibly say after "yeah but" is just a detail. I'm not arguing details. Everyone has a different opinion on details. Every player, every developer. What I'm describing is the source of the motivation for why be conservative at all. If you're a game developer, you can piss off the players who want more rewards and maybe lose them, or you can saturate the reward system and piss off even more players. And too little rewards always has a solution, too much has no solution. So if employment is something you're addicted to, being conservative is a much better career move than being aggressive. If you're going to err, you're going to err on the side of having problems that are solvable.
No amount of videos is going to convince a developer to do anything different. You can convince them to increase the rewards in the game of course, on a case by case basis. But you're never going to convince them to think about rewards in anything other than a conservative way, at least not the ones actually in charge of balancing rewards. Because contrary to what most people believe, game developers are not out to make a quick buck, because they don't make any of that revenue personally. Game developers want to have a job making games, and preferably the same one for as long as possible unless they like moving a lot. So their goal is generally to keep the game running for as long as possible. And no game developer is going to risk their employment over any player's resource conjectures.
I wouldn't.
I think there's a lot of ways to improve the reward system, some I've suggested and some I'm still working on. But I'm not operating on the premise that the developers are just irrationally stingy. If I believe that, I wouldn't bother. Because there'd be no point in trying to suggest improvements to such people. The devs have to have logical reasons for doing what they do, or my feedback would be completely worthless.
I think bare minimum is apart of their business strategy
Honestly, I don't see what Kabam is doing with MCOC any different than I've seen any other game studio do with any other game as a service. Anyone that wants to quibble details is free to do so, but the way they manage rewards is in broad strokes exactly what I would do, if my intention was to try to avoid killing the game I was working on and moving to Virginia to find another job.
People think Kabam treats rewards as limited when they are actually unlimited and you can give out as much as you want. But actually, rewards are limited. For any given progression point there's only so much rewards that are meaningful, and then start diminishing in value. Ask any high end player who claims 5* champs don't interest them anymore if diminishing reward value is a thing. You could argue that the game should now be giving those players more 6* champs since 5* champs don't mean as much, but you could just as easily argue that the game mistakenly gave them too much 5* champs in the first place and erased their value.
Mathematically speaking there are two problems. The first is you can only push the top of the game upward so fast. Which means you can only add higher tier rewards so fast. In between ratchets, you only have so much rewards you can hand out, beyond which you can still hand them out but no one will care. The second is reward curves only go upward and not downward, and for psychological reasons they have to increase exponentially. People don't appreciate linear reward increases. Increasing rewards from 100 to 110 means more than increasing rewards from 1000 to 1010, even though that's the same increase. If you increase rewards from 100 to 110 today, you'll be increasing them from 1000 to 1100 tomorrow, which is an exponential increase.
So you have a pile of rewards from which you're handing them out to players, and however much you hand out today you have to hand out exponentially more tomorrow. And if you ever run out, for a particular player, you're just out. There's no way to "create" more, because the bottleneck is not reward creation, it is reward devaluation.
So ALL game studios are more cautious with rewards than players think they need to be. And before someone says "yeah but" whatever you could possibly say after "yeah but" is just a detail. I'm not arguing details. Everyone has a different opinion on details. Every player, every developer. What I'm describing is the source of the motivation for why be conservative at all. If you're a game developer, you can piss off the players who want more rewards and maybe lose them, or you can saturate the reward system and piss off even more players. And too little rewards always has a solution, too much has no solution. So if employment is something you're addicted to, being conservative is a much better career move than being aggressive. If you're going to err, you're going to err on the side of having problems that are solvable.
No amount of videos is going to convince a developer to do anything different. You can convince them to increase the rewards in the game of course, on a case by case basis. But you're never going to convince them to think about rewards in anything other than a conservative way, at least not the ones actually in charge of balancing rewards. Because contrary to what most people believe, game developers are not out to make a quick buck, because they don't make any of that revenue personally. Game developers want to have a job making games, and preferably the same one for as long as possible unless they like moving a lot. So their goal is generally to keep the game running for as long as possible. And no game developer is going to risk their employment over any player's resource conjectures.
I wouldn't.
I think there's a lot of ways to improve the reward system, some I've suggested and some I'm still working on. But I'm not operating on the premise that the developers are just irrationally stingy. If I believe that, I wouldn't bother. Because there'd be no point in trying to suggest improvements to such people. The devs have to have logical reasons for doing what they do, or my feedback would be completely worthless.
I would agree with your sentiments but we've seen the quality of rewards go down right before our eyes. 3 to four years ago we regularly got maintenance compensation everytime the game went down for an extended period. 30 min AQ timers as a bonus. I remember the days when act rewards weren't so rng based like the fundamental change with act 6 and sig stones have never had such a freeze in the games history until the last year.
So even though that may be a good business decision the problem is that there are too many players that remember how the game used to be and can properly make a comparison and see the difference. If Kabam wanted to do this strategy it would've made more sense to do it from the beginning. That is the core issue.
I have examples for days. 4 stars gave more than enough iso and hasn't increased with 5 and 6 stars and all the maps used to give back a certain amount of balttlechips and gold to alleviate the costs. The game has blatantly changed for the worse in their business strategy and now the result is too many issues that need to be fixed at once.
I think bare minimum is apart of their business strategy
Honestly, I don't see what Kabam is doing with MCOC any different than I've seen any other game studio do with any other game as a service. Anyone that wants to quibble details is free to do so, but the way they manage rewards is in broad strokes exactly what I would do, if my intention was to try to avoid killing the game I was working on and moving to Virginia to find another job.
People think Kabam treats rewards as limited when they are actually unlimited and you can give out as much as you want. But actually, rewards are limited. For any given progression point there's only so much rewards that are meaningful, and then start diminishing in value. Ask any high end player who claims 5* champs don't interest them anymore if diminishing reward value is a thing. You could argue that the game should now be giving those players more 6* champs since 5* champs don't mean as much, but you could just as easily argue that the game mistakenly gave them too much 5* champs in the first place and erased their value.
Mathematically speaking there are two problems. The first is you can only push the top of the game upward so fast. Which means you can only add higher tier rewards so fast. In between ratchets, you only have so much rewards you can hand out, beyond which you can still hand them out but no one will care. The second is reward curves only go upward and not downward, and for psychological reasons they have to increase exponentially. People don't appreciate linear reward increases. Increasing rewards from 100 to 110 means more than increasing rewards from 1000 to 1010, even though that's the same increase. If you increase rewards from 100 to 110 today, you'll be increasing them from 1000 to 1100 tomorrow, which is an exponential increase.
So you have a pile of rewards from which you're handing them out to players, and however much you hand out today you have to hand out exponentially more tomorrow. And if you ever run out, for a particular player, you're just out. There's no way to "create" more, because the bottleneck is not reward creation, it is reward devaluation.
So ALL game studios are more cautious with rewards than players think they need to be. And before someone says "yeah but" whatever you could possibly say after "yeah but" is just a detail. I'm not arguing details. Everyone has a different opinion on details. Every player, every developer. What I'm describing is the source of the motivation for why be conservative at all. If you're a game developer, you can piss off the players who want more rewards and maybe lose them, or you can saturate the reward system and piss off even more players. And too little rewards always has a solution, too much has no solution. So if employment is something you're addicted to, being conservative is a much better career move than being aggressive. If you're going to err, you're going to err on the side of having problems that are solvable.
No amount of videos is going to convince a developer to do anything different. You can convince them to increase the rewards in the game of course, on a case by case basis. But you're never going to convince them to think about rewards in anything other than a conservative way, at least not the ones actually in charge of balancing rewards. Because contrary to what most people believe, game developers are not out to make a quick buck, because they don't make any of that revenue personally. Game developers want to have a job making games, and preferably the same one for as long as possible unless they like moving a lot. So their goal is generally to keep the game running for as long as possible. And no game developer is going to risk their employment over any player's resource conjectures.
I wouldn't.
I think there's a lot of ways to improve the reward system, some I've suggested and some I'm still working on. But I'm not operating on the premise that the developers are just irrationally stingy. If I believe that, I wouldn't bother. Because there'd be no point in trying to suggest improvements to such people. The devs have to have logical reasons for doing what they do, or my feedback would be completely worthless.
That's very interesting, never occurred to me. When you put it like that, it makes a lot of sense.
I would agree with your sentiments but we've seen the quality of rewards go down right before our eyes
I disagree. I think the rewards themselves have been the least problematic part of the game. I think if anything Kabam increases rewards too much over time. No one can point to a moment in time where Kabam decided to add too few rewards and that caused long term damage to the game. I can point unequivocally to at least two: increasing 5* shard availability, and eliminating T4CC as a significant rank up bottleneck.
In my opinion, players have the same delusion the developers have at times exhibited: anything is acceptable if you bribe the players with enough rewards. Act 6 isn't too hard, its rewards are too low. Or perhaps more subtly, 6* champs are not useful enough, give me enough crystals so I can just get all of them. This entire thread was kicked off by a player who said they were bored because they had basically done almost everything, and the one thing left for them to do - build up their 6* roster - they were not doing fast enough. To me, that's a symptom of a real problem: that players are no longer thinking in terms of making the game enjoyable to play at any level, the only reason for a level to exist is to give us enough rewards to get out of that level and into the next one. And that's not sustainable. We already see players starting to hit the wall on 6* champs and rank 3s. We already see players far lower than that talk about how the game has already "moved past the 5* meta." Which borders on ludicrous for all but the highest of the top tier players, of which there aren't enough to fill a Dennys.
Rewards are not the problem. Rewards are the spackle that players keep asking for and Kabam keeps giving, that cover up the kinds of problems that take significant structural change to fix. Here's a question: did increasing Abyss rewards solve more problems than it created? I don't think anyone could argue that it did. The problem is that everyone wanted to do it on day one, and on day one its difficulty was fairly high. That difficulty would have gone down over time as players themselves progressed higher, but we can't ask people to wait, because that's silly. Instead, we validated the notion that if a player decides to spend thousands of units on optional content that is going to be around forever then we have to compensate them with a gigantic pile of rewards that they will then be complaining they can't use, because there's not enough rewards in other parts of the game. That doesn't describe game design. That describes chemical addiction.
You could argue that the pent up demand for end game content compelled people to race into the Abyss, and there's something to that. But once again, that's not a rewards problem, that's a content problem.
I would agree with your sentiments but we've seen the quality of rewards go down right before our eyes
I disagree. I think the rewards themselves have been the least problematic part of the game. I think if anything Kabam increases rewards too much over time. No one can point to a moment in time where Kabam decided to add too few rewards and that caused long term damage to the game. I can point unequivocally to at least two: increasing 5* shard availability, and eliminating T4CC as a significant rank up bottleneck.
In my opinion, players have the same delusion the developers have at times exhibited: anything is acceptable if you bribe the players with enough rewards. Act 6 isn't too hard, its rewards are too low. Or perhaps more subtly, 6* champs are not useful enough, give me enough crystals so I can just get all of them. This entire thread was kicked off by a player who said they were bored because they had basically done almost everything, and the one thing left for them to do - build up their 6* roster - they were not doing fast enough. To me, that's a symptom of a real problem: that players are no longer thinking in terms of making the game enjoyable to play at any level, the only reason for a level to exist is to give us enough rewards to get out of that level and into the next one. And that's not sustainable. We already see players starting to hit the wall on 6* champs and rank 3s. We already see players far lower than that talk about how the game has already "moved past the 5* meta." Which borders on ludicrous for all but the highest of the top tier players, of which there aren't enough to fill a Dennys.
Rewards are not the problem. Rewards are the spackle that players keep asking for and Kabam keeps giving, that cover up the kinds of problems that take significant structural change to fix. Here's a question: did increasing Abyss rewards solve more problems than it created? I don't think anyone could argue that it did. The problem is that everyone wanted to do it on day one, and on day one its difficulty was fairly high. That difficulty would have gone down over time as players themselves progressed higher, but we can't ask people to wait, because that's silly. Instead, we validated the notion that if a player decides to spend thousands of units on optional content that is going to be around forever then we have to compensate them with a gigantic pile of rewards that they will then be complaining they can't use, because there's not enough rewards in other parts of the game. That doesn't describe game design. That describes chemical addiction.
You could argue that the pent up demand for end game content compelled people to race into the Abyss, and there's something to that. But once again, that's not a rewards problem, that's a content problem.
I like this post a lot, but I disagree that t4cc isn’t a major bottleneck. With all my rank ups, t4cc is always what drags me down and stops me. I can get every other resource reliably except for t4cc. For example, I’m trying to take my six star Psylocke and Havok to r3. I have 8 t5b, 25t2a, and 2 mutant t5cc, what I’m missing is 11 t4cc and that will be holding me back from ranking them both up for a long time. I can get a max of 6 t4cc a week, but it’s subject to RNG to decide what I get, in the last 19 t4cc crystals I have opened, I have pulled 0 mutant. So t4cc continues to be a huge bottleneck for me and a lot of other endgame players, though plenty of other endgame players have tons of t4cc and are lacking t2A or t5b
I think bare minimum is apart of their business strategy
Honestly, I don't see what Kabam is doing with MCOC any different than I've seen any other game studio do with any other game as a service. Anyone that wants to quibble details is free to do so, but the way they manage rewards is in broad strokes exactly what I would do, if my intention was to try to avoid killing the game I was working on and moving to Virginia to find another job.
People think Kabam treats rewards as limited when they are actually unlimited and you can give out as much as you want. But actually, rewards are limited. For any given progression point there's only so much rewards that are meaningful, and then start diminishing in value. Ask any high end player who claims 5* champs don't interest them anymore if diminishing reward value is a thing. You could argue that the game should now be giving those players more 6* champs since 5* champs don't mean as much, but you could just as easily argue that the game mistakenly gave them too much 5* champs in the first place and erased their value.
Mathematically speaking there are two problems. The first is you can only push the top of the game upward so fast. Which means you can only add higher tier rewards so fast. In between ratchets, you only have so much rewards you can hand out, beyond which you can still hand them out but no one will care. The second is reward curves only go upward and not downward, and for psychological reasons they have to increase exponentially. People don't appreciate linear reward increases. Increasing rewards from 100 to 110 means more than increasing rewards from 1000 to 1010, even though that's the same increase. If you increase rewards from 100 to 110 today, you'll be increasing them from 1000 to 1100 tomorrow, which is an exponential increase.
So you have a pile of rewards from which you're handing them out to players, and however much you hand out today you have to hand out exponentially more tomorrow. And if you ever run out, for a particular player, you're just out. There's no way to "create" more, because the bottleneck is not reward creation, it is reward devaluation.
So ALL game studios are more cautious with rewards than players think they need to be. And before someone says "yeah but" whatever you could possibly say after "yeah but" is just a detail. I'm not arguing details. Everyone has a different opinion on details. Every player, every developer. What I'm describing is the source of the motivation for why be conservative at all. If you're a game developer, you can piss off the players who want more rewards and maybe lose them, or you can saturate the reward system and piss off even more players. And too little rewards always has a solution, too much has no solution. So if employment is something you're addicted to, being conservative is a much better career move than being aggressive. If you're going to err, you're going to err on the side of having problems that are solvable.
No amount of videos is going to convince a developer to do anything different. You can convince them to increase the rewards in the game of course, on a case by case basis. But you're never going to convince them to think about rewards in anything other than a conservative way, at least not the ones actually in charge of balancing rewards. Because contrary to what most people believe, game developers are not out to make a quick buck, because they don't make any of that revenue personally. Game developers want to have a job making games, and preferably the same one for as long as possible unless they like moving a lot. So their goal is generally to keep the game running for as long as possible. And no game developer is going to risk their employment over any player's resource conjectures.
I wouldn't.
I think there's a lot of ways to improve the reward system, some I've suggested and some I'm still working on. But I'm not operating on the premise that the developers are just irrationally stingy. If I believe that, I wouldn't bother. Because there'd be no point in trying to suggest improvements to such people. The devs have to have logical reasons for doing what they do, or my feedback would be completely worthless.
I would agree with your sentiments but we've seen the quality of rewards go down right before our eyes. 3 to four years ago we regularly got maintenance compensation everytime the game went down for an extended period. 30 min AQ timers as a bonus. I remember the days when act rewards weren't so rng based like the fundamental change with act 6 and sig stones have never had such a freeze in the games history until the last year.
So even though that may be a good business decision the problem is that there are too many players that remember how the game used to be and can properly make a comparison and see the difference. If Kabam wanted to do this strategy it would've made more sense to do it from the beginning. That is the core issue.
I have examples for days. 4 stars gave more than enough iso and hasn't increased with 5 and 6 stars and all the maps used to give back a certain amount of balttlechips and gold to alleviate the costs. The game has blatantly changed for the worse in their business strategy and now the result is too many issues that need to be fixed at once.
Eh as far as the RNG rewards, getting t4c used to be just as difficult. A lot of players don't realize that now bc they started playing when Act 5 was already released (not saying this applies to you as I don't know how long you've been playing). Things like increased AQ rewards and the glory store already existed when a large amount of players started.
I definitely agree with you on the 5/6* iso situation though. I can't fathom why still to this day they have increased the iso gotten from duping them. Getting the same amount as you do from a 4* is ridiculous and I actually think it would help quite a bit with a lot of players gold issues if they increased it relative to the increased costs of ranking/leveling them
Comments
1) The game economy. We need to either reduce the amount to rankup 6 stars or get double the iso for 5 star dubs and 6 star dups. The 5 star sig stone freeze has to end and become a regular part of the game so people can move up in alliances if they want to and not get held by prestige.
2) AQ needs 30 min timers or they need to extend the energy minimum to 8 instead of 5.
3) Masteries need to be made free to change once you unlock or they need 3 sets that you can swap to at anytime even if its for a price.
4) The need to update outdated reward systems. Mainly summoners advancement, solo event quests, and alliance events.
5)We need a 6 star arena and the 5 star arena needs to widen its champion acquisition to either 5% or first 800.
Please add on if I'm forgetting anything major that needs to be addressed. Those are the core issues with the game in my opinion.
1. Champion Acquisition is slow and painful due to several factors:
a. The basic pool has somewhere around 150-170 champions in it which makes targeting a specific champ hard and awakening them just as hard.
b. The reason why we have to target specific champions is because so much of Act 6 is incredibly champion specific and, so far, Act 7 is looking to be the same.
c. Proposed solutions to this so far have been: make Nexus crystals available for purchase with shards for somewhere between 12,500 to 20,000 shards, make the five star crystal pool similar to the Incursion crystals where there are multiple crystals with ten champs each, class specific five stars, reduce the amount of champion specific content and make it more skill based, replace basics with Nexus crystals, or implement a sort of pity system.
2. Transparency and Open Communication with Kabam
3. Reduce unit/revive grab nodes in future content
4. Replace nodes that solely punish and do not reward (Nodes like Special Conessiour, Do You Bleed, Crit Me With Your Best Shot, Acid Wash, Pleasure to Burn, where you can only deal damage with x effect but you do not gain any benefit from doing x effect). These nodes, if they continue to exist, should be rewarding so they behave like this: Defender only takes damage from X but while under the effect of X, Defender takes 200% increased damage or something similar.
5. Get rid of Defensive Tactics in War
6. Make War more Rewarding in general
7. Increase FtP availability of endgame resources like Sig Stones and t5cc fragment crystals.
8. Cavalier difficulty for the monthly EQ
9. Increase the availability of 6 star shards
10. Proper Communication on Bugs and Fixes
11. Bring back content like Champion Challenges and Boss Rushes as they were widely loved
12. Stop jacking up the attack values to make content more difficult
13. Increase the level cap so we have more mastery points
14. Add new masteries designed to help in Act 6 and 7
15. Remove the cost of respeccing masteries
16. Stop designing maps that require more than 70 energy to complete. If we have a max of 70 energy, the maps should be a max of 70 energy per path.
If I missed anything, please add it
One of the biggest things I'd like to see improved in this game is how bugs are addressed.
If a player finds a bug, the preferred method of reporting it according to Kabam is to post about it in the Bugs and Known Issues section of the forums. Unfortunately, it seems that if a player reporting a bug is seen to be a problem, their posts will go missing. I've noticed a few of @MikeHock 's posts just vanish, despite being full of good data that can be used to get to the root of bugs.
Sometimes you get a response that is usually "do you have a video of this?"...which honestly would be very reasonable if these forums had a viable way of uploading videos directly. So the preferred method requires players to use a 3rd party site (like YouTube) to host a video and then post that in the Bugs and Known Issues portion of the Forum.
If you happen to catch the attention of a mod and have a video, you'll get a "We'll pass this along to the game team". At this point, communication breaks down completely, which is endlessly frustrating to players.
Sometimes they fix it, sometimes they don't. Sometimes asking for an update will get be met with a warning and either having the thread locked or your post deleted.
Sometimes players will be told to "have patience" when the players have no indication that any effort is being spent on fixing bugs that are discovered.
Really, it comes down to communication.
Known Bugs should be added to a list for players to see. This list should be updated often. If something is "passed onto the game team", it should be added to the list. This would go a LONG way in letting players know what bugs are and aren't getting attention.
Communication on the bug front should improve. This is the feedback I have for the game.
- Champion Acquisition is slow and painful due to several factors:
- Transparency and Open Communication with Kabam
- Reduce unit/revive grab nodes in future content
- Replace nodes that solely punish and do not reward (Nodes like Special Connoisseur, Do You Bleed, Crit Me With Your Best Shot, Acid Wash, Pleasure to Burn, where you can only deal damage with x effect but you do not gain any benefit from doing x effect). These nodes, if they continue to exist, should be rewarding so they behave like this:
- Get rid of Defensive Tactics in War
- Make War more Rewarding in general
- Increase FtP availability of endgame resources like Sig Stones and T5CC fragment crystals.
- Cavalier difficulty for the monthly Event Quests
- Increase the availability of 6 star shards
- Proper Communication on Bugs and Fixes
- Bring back content like Champion Challenges and Boss Rushes as they were widely loved
- Stop jacking up the attack values to make content more difficult
- Increase the level cap so we have more mastery points
- Add new Masteries designed to help in Act 6 and 7
- Remove the cost of respeccing Masteries
- Stop designing maps that require more than 70 energy to complete. If we have a max of 70 energy, the maps should be a max of 70 energy per path.
- Add more 5 and 6* crystals like class ones or certain types like a bleed crystal etc...
- Better system for bug reporting & addressing
- Better sorting system interface for resources.
- Update potions.
- Finally resolve the gold drought.
- Champion reworks need to come with greater speed & frequency
If I missed anything, please add it.* The basic pool has somewhere around 150-170 champions in it which makes targeting a specific champ hard and awakening them just as hard.
* The reason why we have to target specific champions is because so much of Act 6 is incredibly champion specific and, so far, Act 7 is looking to be the same.
* Proposed solutions to this so far have been:
** Make Nexus crystals available for purchase with shards for somewhere between 12,500 to 20,000 shards
** Make the five star crystal pool similar to the Incursion crystals where there are multiple crystals with ten champs each
** Class specific five stars
** Reduce the amount of champion specific content and make it more skill based
** Replace basics with Nexus crystals, or implement a sort of pity system.
** Make greater use/regularity of year-specific Champion crystals (that you do not have to purchase)
* Defender only takes damage from X but while under the effect of X
* Defender takes 200% increased damage or something similar.
I have to wonder they are this way. Kabam, what's your reasoning for always giving us the barest of the barest minimum for rewards and compensation? Like Act 6, when the rewards first came out for completion and exploration, they were so abysmal and even now, they are only a little better. When you compare them to the rewards we got from act 5, at least resource wise, Act 5 is way more bang for buck, especially for being significantly easier content.
I think we've made it abundantly clear that strategy is no longer viable when it comes to their long term plan this is why the minimal changes we've seen in communication haven't been good enough. They allowed it continue far too long.
Completion: 7 T2A , 3 TBC, 1/4 T5CC(selector), 10k 5* shards , 1 5* Nexus , 10k 6* shards, 1 Rank 1-2 6* gem
Exploration: 8T2A, 4 TBC, 1 T5CC (RNG), 1 6* Awakening, 1 6* Nexus, 2 Rank 1-2 gem
So basically the main difference among both is only T5CC and awakening Gem and both are random. Rest rewards are cancel out on the basis of bad RNG.
Exploration requires tons of units, depth of roster and lots of time while completion just requires few refills and going with easiest paths.
Completion * 10 times = Exploration
But rewards are only T5CC and Awakening gem (both random).
I don’t know who decides these rewards but whoever it is He/she need much more knowledge of difficulty and time put in exploring anything.
People think Kabam treats rewards as limited when they are actually unlimited and you can give out as much as you want. But actually, rewards are limited. For any given progression point there's only so much rewards that are meaningful, and then start diminishing in value. Ask any high end player who claims 5* champs don't interest them anymore if diminishing reward value is a thing. You could argue that the game should now be giving those players more 6* champs since 5* champs don't mean as much, but you could just as easily argue that the game mistakenly gave them too much 5* champs in the first place and erased their value.
Mathematically speaking there are two problems. The first is you can only push the top of the game upward so fast. Which means you can only add higher tier rewards so fast. In between ratchets, you only have so much rewards you can hand out, beyond which you can still hand them out but no one will care. The second is reward curves only go upward and not downward, and for psychological reasons they have to increase exponentially. People don't appreciate linear reward increases. Increasing rewards from 100 to 110 means more than increasing rewards from 1000 to 1010, even though that's the same increase. If you increase rewards from 100 to 110 today, you'll be increasing them from 1000 to 1100 tomorrow, which is an exponential increase.
So you have a pile of rewards from which you're handing them out to players, and however much you hand out today you have to hand out exponentially more tomorrow. And if you ever run out, for a particular player, you're just out. There's no way to "create" more, because the bottleneck is not reward creation, it is reward devaluation.
So ALL game studios are more cautious with rewards than players think they need to be. And before someone says "yeah but" whatever you could possibly say after "yeah but" is just a detail. I'm not arguing details. Everyone has a different opinion on details. Every player, every developer. What I'm describing is the source of the motivation for why be conservative at all. If you're a game developer, you can piss off the players who want more rewards and maybe lose them, or you can saturate the reward system and piss off even more players. And too little rewards always has a solution, too much has no solution. So if employment is something you're addicted to, being conservative is a much better career move than being aggressive. If you're going to err, you're going to err on the side of having problems that are solvable.
No amount of videos is going to convince a developer to do anything different. You can convince them to increase the rewards in the game of course, on a case by case basis. But you're never going to convince them to think about rewards in anything other than a conservative way, at least not the ones actually in charge of balancing rewards. Because contrary to what most people believe, game developers are not out to make a quick buck, because they don't make any of that revenue personally. Game developers want to have a job making games, and preferably the same one for as long as possible unless they like moving a lot. So their goal is generally to keep the game running for as long as possible. And no game developer is going to risk their employment over any player's resource conjectures.
I wouldn't.
I think there's a lot of ways to improve the reward system, some I've suggested and some I'm still working on. But I'm not operating on the premise that the developers are just irrationally stingy. If I believe that, I wouldn't bother. Because there'd be no point in trying to suggest improvements to such people. The devs have to have logical reasons for doing what they do, or my feedback would be completely worthless.
So even though that may be a good business decision the problem is that there are too many players that remember how the game used to be and can properly make a comparison and see the difference. If Kabam wanted to do this strategy it would've made more sense to do it from the beginning. That is the core issue.
I have examples for days. 4 stars gave more than enough iso and hasn't increased with 5 and 6 stars and all the maps used to give back a certain amount of balttlechips and gold to alleviate the costs. The game has blatantly changed for the worse in their business strategy and now the result is too many issues that need to be fixed at once.
Any update on the roadmap?
Its been over a month since this thread has started.
In my opinion, players have the same delusion the developers have at times exhibited: anything is acceptable if you bribe the players with enough rewards. Act 6 isn't too hard, its rewards are too low. Or perhaps more subtly, 6* champs are not useful enough, give me enough crystals so I can just get all of them. This entire thread was kicked off by a player who said they were bored because they had basically done almost everything, and the one thing left for them to do - build up their 6* roster - they were not doing fast enough. To me, that's a symptom of a real problem: that players are no longer thinking in terms of making the game enjoyable to play at any level, the only reason for a level to exist is to give us enough rewards to get out of that level and into the next one. And that's not sustainable. We already see players starting to hit the wall on 6* champs and rank 3s. We already see players far lower than that talk about how the game has already "moved past the 5* meta." Which borders on ludicrous for all but the highest of the top tier players, of which there aren't enough to fill a Dennys.
Rewards are not the problem. Rewards are the spackle that players keep asking for and Kabam keeps giving, that cover up the kinds of problems that take significant structural change to fix. Here's a question: did increasing Abyss rewards solve more problems than it created? I don't think anyone could argue that it did. The problem is that everyone wanted to do it on day one, and on day one its difficulty was fairly high. That difficulty would have gone down over time as players themselves progressed higher, but we can't ask people to wait, because that's silly. Instead, we validated the notion that if a player decides to spend thousands of units on optional content that is going to be around forever then we have to compensate them with a gigantic pile of rewards that they will then be complaining they can't use, because there's not enough rewards in other parts of the game. That doesn't describe game design. That describes chemical addiction.
You could argue that the pent up demand for end game content compelled people to race into the Abyss, and there's something to that. But once again, that's not a rewards problem, that's a content problem.
I definitely agree with you on the 5/6* iso situation though. I can't fathom why still to this day they have increased the iso gotten from duping them. Getting the same amount as you do from a 4* is ridiculous and I actually think it would help quite a bit with a lot of players gold issues if they increased it relative to the increased costs of ranking/leveling them