My issue with Summer of Pain
BitterSteel
Member Posts: 9,264 ★★★★★
So don’t worry, this is not a SoP is too easy it should be harder I’m a bored end game player post. I’m writing this post to share my feedback. It’s a long one, so while I appreciate anyone taking the time to read it, I’ve also done a TLDR at the end.
I think it’s safe to say that endgame players feel like Summer of Pain may not have hit the mark when it comes to what it was hyped as. Take a look at the text below from the announcement of SoP.
“As if the summer didn’t have enough, we’re designing a brand new challenge for the best of the best of MCoC Players. Something for those that have blasted through all of Act 6, beat the Abyss while on vacation, and treat Variants like a stroll along the beach. In response to these feats and to deliver challenges which will test your sanity, we’re working on something that may make you question life itself. The strongest, most fearsome, and finger breakingly difficult fights from across The Contest will return but with unique roster requirements, smaller teams, and new ways to play them."
Really think about the fights that we’ve been shown and ask yourself if that fits the description of what is above. I’d argue definitely not. The fights have been fun, they’ve tested which champ tags you’ve got ranked up. But ultimately, they aren’t finger breakingly difficult. And honestly, I would be ok with that if that’s what this was advertised as. But it’s been advertised as the hardest thing in the game, maybe ever.
So what’s the solution, and why is this post not just a “MaKE SumMER oF PaiN PaiNFuL KabOoM” post? I think the structure of summer of pain doesn’t really allow for the content to be as hard as it was advertised as. And that’s because it’s temporary.
I think there should be some really hard content like summer of pain that’s permanent. The potential issue with making hard content temporary is that people feel hard done by missing out. But by having it there whenever you want to tackle it, you can have a progression goal to aim for.
New interesting fights or quests that are genuinely painful but that you can get through and target when you’re ready, but that aren’t gonna go away if you can’t do it in time.
That way, kabam can really go wild with the difficulty. Because right now unless there’s a dramatic rise in how hard these fights are, I’ll view this event as decent, but ultimately mainly because of the rewards. In regards to the pain? More like summer of mild discomfort. I did enjoy the fights, but I’ve not really felt challenged, so that box hasn’t been ticked for me.
This isn’t so much of a complaint, as a grudging acceptance that this event, while being touted as the hardest event we would have ever had, is not what was advertised and I’ll take it for what it is, a weekly fun challenge to see which of my champs I can use to solo for fun this week.
To be clear with my feedback, I was hoping for something that I would open each week and spend a couple days trying different counters, struggling through until I finally cracked it. Not something that I open, take one look at a screenshot of the nodes and decide which 3 champions I can solo with to complete the objectives, go in one at a time, and only need to restart the fight if I make a mistake.
This event for me out of 10, in terms of fun is a 7. I enjoy doing the fights, and using different champs for the solo.
In terms of difficulty is a 4. I’ve not felt challenged apart from trying to get perfect runs, or trying to solo rogue with professor X (not the best champ for it). The fights themselves generally don’t have many layers of complexity, you’re usually presented with one challenge and have to solve that.
And honesty, all of this isn’t bad. I’ve actually enjoyed the event, especially as a challenge on my second account with a much shallower roster. But my mind is split in two, the disappointment from not getting the challenge that was promised to end game players is there too.
I think expecting kabam to make this temporary content as difficult as I imagined may have been a bit short sighted, and not in a bad way. I get wanting to involve a majority of the community, and making something so hard that 1% or less people are gonna complete is closer to a waste of time than kabam probably want it to be.
I think making end game permanent content solves these issues. Any cav who is currently finding SoP every bit the challenge that I and other end game players wanted, would be able to work towards it, while end game players (that 1%) will struggle through it and have their challenge. I mean just look at abyss, nowadays your average Cav, who at the start of abyss had 0 chance of making it through without a small fortune, is tackling it. And the rewards are still relevant. But the end game players enjoyed it when it was released. I imagine something similar with the next hard content to be released. Make it like that please!
Maybe I’ll eat my words if SoP gets a lot harder, and honestly I hope this ages like milk and I’ll be able to say thank god it picked up difficulty.
In any case, thanks for reading my opinion on SoP! I’ve tried to view it from both sides and be as objective as I can, so I hope that’s come through
TL:DR Summer of Pain isn’t as hard as expected, and that’s ok. I think that really hard content should be permanent, not temporary. As temporary content has limitations with how many players will actually end up playing it. But permanent content is, well, permanent and can be done at any point
I think it’s safe to say that endgame players feel like Summer of Pain may not have hit the mark when it comes to what it was hyped as. Take a look at the text below from the announcement of SoP.
“As if the summer didn’t have enough, we’re designing a brand new challenge for the best of the best of MCoC Players. Something for those that have blasted through all of Act 6, beat the Abyss while on vacation, and treat Variants like a stroll along the beach. In response to these feats and to deliver challenges which will test your sanity, we’re working on something that may make you question life itself. The strongest, most fearsome, and finger breakingly difficult fights from across The Contest will return but with unique roster requirements, smaller teams, and new ways to play them."
Really think about the fights that we’ve been shown and ask yourself if that fits the description of what is above. I’d argue definitely not. The fights have been fun, they’ve tested which champ tags you’ve got ranked up. But ultimately, they aren’t finger breakingly difficult. And honestly, I would be ok with that if that’s what this was advertised as. But it’s been advertised as the hardest thing in the game, maybe ever.
So what’s the solution, and why is this post not just a “MaKE SumMER oF PaiN PaiNFuL KabOoM” post? I think the structure of summer of pain doesn’t really allow for the content to be as hard as it was advertised as. And that’s because it’s temporary.
I think there should be some really hard content like summer of pain that’s permanent. The potential issue with making hard content temporary is that people feel hard done by missing out. But by having it there whenever you want to tackle it, you can have a progression goal to aim for.
New interesting fights or quests that are genuinely painful but that you can get through and target when you’re ready, but that aren’t gonna go away if you can’t do it in time.
That way, kabam can really go wild with the difficulty. Because right now unless there’s a dramatic rise in how hard these fights are, I’ll view this event as decent, but ultimately mainly because of the rewards. In regards to the pain? More like summer of mild discomfort. I did enjoy the fights, but I’ve not really felt challenged, so that box hasn’t been ticked for me.
This isn’t so much of a complaint, as a grudging acceptance that this event, while being touted as the hardest event we would have ever had, is not what was advertised and I’ll take it for what it is, a weekly fun challenge to see which of my champs I can use to solo for fun this week.
To be clear with my feedback, I was hoping for something that I would open each week and spend a couple days trying different counters, struggling through until I finally cracked it. Not something that I open, take one look at a screenshot of the nodes and decide which 3 champions I can solo with to complete the objectives, go in one at a time, and only need to restart the fight if I make a mistake.
This event for me out of 10, in terms of fun is a 7. I enjoy doing the fights, and using different champs for the solo.
In terms of difficulty is a 4. I’ve not felt challenged apart from trying to get perfect runs, or trying to solo rogue with professor X (not the best champ for it). The fights themselves generally don’t have many layers of complexity, you’re usually presented with one challenge and have to solve that.
And honesty, all of this isn’t bad. I’ve actually enjoyed the event, especially as a challenge on my second account with a much shallower roster. But my mind is split in two, the disappointment from not getting the challenge that was promised to end game players is there too.
I think expecting kabam to make this temporary content as difficult as I imagined may have been a bit short sighted, and not in a bad way. I get wanting to involve a majority of the community, and making something so hard that 1% or less people are gonna complete is closer to a waste of time than kabam probably want it to be.
I think making end game permanent content solves these issues. Any cav who is currently finding SoP every bit the challenge that I and other end game players wanted, would be able to work towards it, while end game players (that 1%) will struggle through it and have their challenge. I mean just look at abyss, nowadays your average Cav, who at the start of abyss had 0 chance of making it through without a small fortune, is tackling it. And the rewards are still relevant. But the end game players enjoyed it when it was released. I imagine something similar with the next hard content to be released. Make it like that please!
Maybe I’ll eat my words if SoP gets a lot harder, and honestly I hope this ages like milk and I’ll be able to say thank god it picked up difficulty.
In any case, thanks for reading my opinion on SoP! I’ve tried to view it from both sides and be as objective as I can, so I hope that’s come through
TL:DR Summer of Pain isn’t as hard as expected, and that’s ok. I think that really hard content should be permanent, not temporary. As temporary content has limitations with how many players will actually end up playing it. But permanent content is, well, permanent and can be done at any point
Post edited by Kabam Zibiit on
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Comments
You saw the description of SoP
This is for people who beat the Abyss on Vacation and stuff. I haven’t even beat Labyrinth and I’ve only missed one fight and it was because I had no counter
Not really Summer of PAIN
I’d be happy if they made some sort of permanent content with maybe the old variant style of quests with 3 chapters with 3 quests per chapter, but only one very hard boss fight per quest with increasing difficulty and rewards based on linked nodes and gate restrictions maybe. That way everyone can still have a go like the summer of pain and not be left out but the really juicy rewards would have to be earned and people could work towards them over time since it’d be permanent.
We've had super high difficulty temporary content in the past. The Maze, for example. Such things are uncommon, but it depends on what you count. Omega Boss Rush and Grandmaster's Gauntlet are also very high difficulty content. Maybe not the hardest content in the game, but there can only be one hardest content.
I think the real reason SoP has the difficulty level it does has to do with the current design ethic of MCOC's higher tier content. It used to be difficult content was designed with sledgehammer nodes and effects that would bludgeon the player and were all but impossible to genuinely counter. Today, content is designed to be more interesting and tactically interactive. Most effects have counters or mitigators via roster options or tactics or both. Difficulty is always relative, but in the past content could be designed to be 50 out of 100 and some players would perceive it to be a 40 and some would see it as being a 60, but there was only so much you could do besides attack the fight via the most optimal methods of beating it. Today, content that is designed intrinsically to be a 50 might seem to be a 40 if someone used a good option, but it could also be a 20 if they used the optimal roster option. It could look like a 75 if the player had not yet mastered certain tactical skills like intercepting. The range of difficulty depending on what skills and roster a player brings to the fight is now much wider, and deliberately so: that's part of what makes the fights more interesting to tackle.
But it also means if you want to make "the hardest fights evah" if you aim for 200, players with the best options will still see an 82 and yawn. Meanwhile if you aim so that the absolute best options is now 200, most players without them will now be seeing 800 and the fight will be ridiculous. Difficulty is now much more "fuzzy" and I think that is part of why aiming for specific difficulty targets is much more likely to fail to meet expectations from players expecting something in particular.
The fact that the content is temporary does play a role here, in that if you aim for the absolute best options to still be very difficult, anyone without them will be seeing such ridiculous relative difficulty that it won't be possible for them to do, and they won't have time to adjust. But as I said earlier, the trade for making the content permanent is making the rewards less spicy, and if you don't allow the content to be temporary, it becomes harder to make the rewards match the expectations of the players for such high difficulty content.
many people finding it easy of course have a well-developed roster and have the resources and also the skills.
If i didn't have Mojo in my roster and the rank up resources to R5 him straight away today, I'd be contemplating what other way to get the villain+XL point today as my only other ranked champ Sentinel wouldn't be ideal at all, thus earning this week's final extra point to be obtained worthy of the "summer of pain" title.
But you might say, well why compare Abyss and SoP, it's different content. Well Kabam launched this whole event by mentioning if you liked abyss then this will be harder. Frankly, I had a tougher time with abyss. I had a tougher time with gauntlet, which while not perfect for the challenge I had in mind, was a lot harder than SoP - but perhaps that's owing to the lengthy structure, as opposed to the one fight that you can repeat as many times as you want.
I think my main bug bear with this entire event is the hype that Kabam built onto it. Either they knew this wasn't what end game players wanted in terms of a challenge, and hyped it up as that anyway, or they just don't know what we would find interesting. The former means they knew they were setting us up for disappointment, and the latter means content is a hit or miss based on what kabam decide to do without knowing what this section of the playerbase truly want.
While I agree with you that temporary vs permanent may not be the entire picture, I think if Kabam wanted to do something will finally get that itch scratched for end game players, it should be permanent. Because to me, that's as close to a win-win scenario that Kabam can get. Cavs and early TB may not be ready, but they can get ready. How often do you hear a complaint that Abyss is too hard? Vs how many complaints we got for gauntlet/maze/SoP.
Probably less interesting too since objectives have been one of the few things giving the last few bosses variety.
For TB players however, I can definitely see why the objectives are frustratingly easy. The fight has been made easier mainly to account for the accessibility required by the objectives.
honestly I just want to see one of the last 9 objectives require TB players to use, for example, a 4 star champion that isn't one of those cheese champions. I think it'd be cool to see people struggle with that, and hey it's simple.
Definitely not as tough as I think some people were expecting, but I understand why the problems are there. People expected something like the first three bosses, but objectives make that type of challenge unreasonable to force on people for those objectives.
who wants to see grandmaster with some regular nodes btw? i think that could be interesting.
The question here is what should we take from that experience. I think some players think the lesson Kabam learned was make the reward better. But I don't think that's the case. Instead, the lesson they learned was: be careful about making permanent end game content like the Abyss, because players won't be satisfied with the rewards you want to give out for it.
Rewards are not set individually for every piece of content in isolation. They come, in a sense, from a reward budget. There's a dude at Kabam who is the god of rewards, and he decides how much stuff will flow into the game every month, every year, every decade. From that stream of rewards, content designers allocate rewards to content. If they give more for this, they have to give less for that. They can make local decisions like increase the rewards for this side quest, but they can't arbitrarily add rewards to the game from nowhere.
This is an oversimplification, but it captures the core idea. The devs that make content like the Abyss must follow the design rules of the game. The win for the players that allowed them to get much bigger rewards for the Abyss than originally intended came from somewhere. We will never know from where, but somewhere out there is a basket of rewards we would have gotten, that now we will never get. And maybe it was attached to content that we will never see. And if you're the designer of content like the Abyss, you've now learned how difficult it is to meet player expectations, you'll likely get burned if you try again, and you can't keep pulling rewards out of thin air to make the players happy. We squished him between our desire for more rewards and the directors and managers who actually run the game.
I don't think you can draw a straight line of cause and effect directly, but I suspect the player reaction to Abyss rewards, and the impact that the higher rewards had on the game economy, has played a role in why we don't have another Abyss in the game and why we have more temporary end game content. Temporary content quickly goes away, and takes most of the economy problems it might cause away with it.