**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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Every cav player is shooting for TB at some point, and even those with a t5cc have to have completed 6.4 and have a champ they're willing to rankup. Not every cav has completed act 6 and not every cav is going to hit the 75% on this event. And many cavs will come after this event and have to get the rankup materials a different way.
the engagement SOP has created is a huge success. I have 15 r3s but ive not used a single one in any SOP so far. This is genuinely fun.
But, people are still going to complain that something is too easy and other people will still complain it's too hard. How is that different than today? But more importantly, how will others getting TB from these rewards impact you or your account... Specifically?
My opinion that TB requirements were an absolute joke from the start however stem from being someone who's account has been at least in the top 1% of the game for a significant period of time and likely a fair bit higher than that actually. If progression titles are meant to separate the player base into similar progression points so as to be able to aim content/offers at those players levels, they've done quite a poor job at that with this one. Cavalier was diluted somewhat quickly but TB was diluted on day 1. Now you have people struggling to get their first R3 in the same bracket as people with 30-40+ R3s. It's also why I don't have a problem with things like the SoP rewards as all that tells me is that another title is likely on the horizon. I just hope they do a better job with this one personally.
The initial post made no sense. The discussion in its entirety made me lose brain cells. What are y’all arguing about
That cavs can finally push for thronebreaker with a guarantee?
And? Why so pressed?
6* R4s are coming either way. Kabam has a roadmap were not privy too, but if you don't think they've already mapped out the timelines at least 12 months down the road and probably more like 24-36, that's silly. Whatever day they decided, when that day comes, there's nothing you can do about it and having some CAVs get TB from SoP won't make a bit of difference, especially as T5B and T5CC keep getting more available... And it will because you still need them to R4 champs.
Kabam isn't "pushing" r4 materials into the game. That's not how it works at the top. Kabam has been doing the reverse: holding them back for as long as possible. Longer than many players believe was warranted, even. There was and is two different sides to this among end gamers: those that want to move on to the next higher thing, and those that do not want the massive effort they put into "the top" devalued by the next higher thing. There's no universal agreement on when the right time for R4 is: I know many players who think this was way too soon, and many others who think it was long overdue. Kabam has to navigate that chasm of opinion.
Now that R4 materials are here, they are going to accelerate their way into the game. You can hold them back indefinitely, but once they are here, they are subject to the progression resource treadmill. SoP's impact on that will be relatively small, because the content is time limited. People are focused on the instantaneous value of the rewards, but the reward economy isn't balanced around instantaneous value, it is balanced around reward rates. SoP is a ton of rewards all at once, it is a big pile of rewards for a two month event, but its impact on the rewards per year of the game is much smaller, and only affects the players who are actually here (and Cav or higher) now.
It is a lot of rewards to be sure, and a lot of rewards for relatively little effort, and a lot of rewards in one big burst. But on the timescale and scope of the game economy, it isn't much. This time next year TB+ players will be earning that much R4 materials regularly. That was going to be true with or without SoP.
It is also true that after SoP there will be more TB players, because of course. But does that create pressure to expand the progress ladder above TB? Maybe, but that requires making assumptions that are common, but I think are also baseless. The presumption seems to be that SoP will deplete the Cavalier tier and shove all those players into TB, which will then put pressure on Kabam to differentiate the TB layer because in effect, basically all the Cav and TB players will now be all in one tier and need segregating. But I don't think there's any evidence that's true beyond the notion that completing Act 6 is trivially easy and forming a T5CC is exceedingly difficult, so the vast majority of Cav players are sitting at Act 6 completion just waiting for their first R3 to move on.
More likely, there's a continuum of players from newly minted Cav to "almost TB" players evenly distributed within that range. What SoP is going to do is create what my physics background would call a depletion zone between Cav and TB. Instead of a continuum of players from early Cav through late Cav into early TB and upward, most of the late Cavs will be accelerated immediately into TB, and all the early TB will be accelerated into mid TB. The borderline between them will get depleted of players, and there will be a clearer gap between Cav and TB. And I suspect that this is desirable if not intentional. We want to reduce the number of players who think they are stuck just outside looking in. We want most of the work to get from Cav to TB to take place on the path to get there, not on the hurdle in the last ten feet.
Because we're talking about depleting that small gap of players, I don't think that changes the dynamics of TB much. There's huge pressure on Kabam to not proliferate progress tiers: they can only support so many, which is why they've been slowly deactivating lower tiers. They only want so many rungs on the ladder, and separating TBs into two tiers when the number of players in that tier is relatively small - and will remain relatively small even after SoP - seems unlikely given those changes.
SoP isn't triggering these things, and it can't accelerate them more than a tiny amount in practice. So while these concerns are legitimate concerns, I don't think SoP has the firepower to alter these forces by more than a trivial amount.
The difference between the strongest and the weakest TB player is pretty wide, but the problem is there's probably still barely enough of us to sell out Dodger Stadium. It is simply impractical to have an early TB tier and a mid TB tier and a top tier TB tier, because there's just not enough of each.
Every progress tier is defined by a top and a bottom, forming a range. Except for two tiers: the beginner tier and the top tier. TB is not defined by a range. It is defined by a bottom, and the sky's the limit. That's unavoidable. There was never an attempt to define TB as a specific narrow range of players, because that was never practically possible.
I should point out though that progressional tiers are made in large part to help manage how the progressional needs of a group of players should be addressed. And all (or almost all) TB players fall into one of two groups: those working on "the last thing" and those that have done everything. By "the last thing" I mean whatever they are working on is not a prerequisite for something else: at the moment nothing else in the game comes next. So act 7, for example, is basically the last thing when it comes to story arc content at the moment. Rank 3s are basically the last thing when it comes to vertical roster progress. For all the players in this group, there's a certain range of rewards that are appropriate to fuel their progress in the game.
The other group, the ones that have done literally everything, are practically out of progress. There's nothing more they need, because there's nothing more they can do outside amassing larger and larger rosters with little to use them on (non-progressional game modes like Alliance War being the exceptions). If we could hypothetically make a "progress tier" containing only those players, we'd get the weird situation of players whose progressional requirements were basically zero. The normal rules for how we make appropriate rewards for a progressional tier would break down. And that's almost certainly why we'll never see such a progressional tier defined in the game. It would serve no practical purpose for the developers.
I feel as though in my progression, there was a point to every tier of champion. The rankups felt meaningful because they gave me a tool I needed to climb the next rung. I ranked champions to r3 expecting to have some need for them in content that just never materialized and now we’re going to r4. Just feels empty.
Is driving a large quantity of cavs to be TB or close enough to TB.
And TB won't be that exclusive in Cyber weekend deals, Good for business and making player base happy...
Can't wait for the next exclusive progression title from book 2 act 8...
"The Re-Builder of BrokenThrone"
First of all, taking a champ from rank 2 to rank 3 is not actually increasing that champion's strength by as much as most rank up increases do. Most rank up increases increase the champion's attack and health by on the order of 35% or so. This actually increases the champion's strength by over 80% (how that's determined is a separate discussion). So in loose terms, every rank up is almost doubling the champion's strength, at least in terms of its attack and health values. But going from 6* rank 2 to rank 3 you get only half that rise, which translates to less than half the total strength increase. This rank up is much less dramatic, and thus cannot come with the same kind of rise in content difficulty. It is just a much smaller jump.
And second, the way difficult content is designed is now different. In the past, the primary scaler of difficulty was simply increasing attack and health values for the defenders, analogous to what we were doing to our champions with rank ups. So if the devs unlocked a new rank up for us, they could respond with increasing the difficulty of the content by an equal or higher amount with simple numbers/node fiddling. But that's not how difficult content is constructed today. The design ethic is now to use interlocking nodes that offer "RPG-like" ways to counter them. In other words, part of how we deal with difficult content is to bring stronger champs, part is how well we play the game, and part is how we read and understand the nodes and respond tactically (with roster options or playstyle choices). That last part didn't really exist in the past, and is becoming more important now. Because of that, a lot of the "difficulty increases" in current content are happening in ways that many of the top players don't find particularly challenging. They are knowledgeable and experienced, they understand the game's tactics and interactions, and when knowledge of those things is challenged it is easy for them to respond. But most players find these things very difficult or unfamiliar, and for them the content is actually much harder.
For those of us that are knowledgeable veterans, those kinds of difficulty increases are easy to dismiss. They don't challenge us. But they are the way difficulty is constructed now, and that makes some of the difficulty in the game "invisible" to us. It doesn't require stronger champs, it just requires learning things we already know.
Eventually I hope that changes, in the sense that as players get used to the kinds of mental challenges we see in say Act 7, the devs will continue to ratchet them upwards until they can eventually challenge even knowledgeable players. I actually thought Summer of Pain might be that, but it didn't turn out that way. We'll have to see if and when the game evolves to the point where that becomes more commonplace.