Grandmaster's Gauntlet Return Date

Hello.

Previously we've been told, that Grandmaster's Gauntlet will return. More than 7-8 months passed, and there is no glimpse of that quest's returning, and there is a ton of players that are waiting for it because they couldn't complete it when it first came out.

Can we get at least approximate date of this quest's returning? Thank you

Comments

Turpissimus

I’ve actually been thinking about asking about that too for a while! I decided to pass when it came out as I was doing my last path in Abyss. My understanding was it would be possible to complete every 2/3 months for those who haven’t, what is up with that?

xNig

And let those who have already done GM’s Gauntlet do a new quest for his Boot.

DrZola

Related question to the team: how difficult is it to tee up content like Gauntlet (or even the Maze) that has previously been created (especially in an otherwise slow content period)?

Regardless of how much a player has done, I’d at least consider it worthwhile to test how much my account has progressed if things like those quests popped up more regularly.

But I don’t know if it puts unnecessary strain on the servers, the team, the rest of the game.

Just interested in a reply…

Dr. Zola

Lpoo

@DrZola ive been wondering the same about boss rushes. Those seem simple enough and pretty well liked across the community

K00shMaan

Yeah I think the slow roll out is specifically there so that players don't hammer out all of the content for the month in the first few days then spend the next 3 weeks complaining about lack of content. This at least guarantees that they won't have the side quest finished before the last week of the month.

unknown

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zuffy

Boss rush is basically 5-6 fights. Celebrity challenge is the one you hate then. That is 6 fights and repeat again in another 5 paths with higher pi after another.

Turpissimus

The thing is that whilst Maze was announced as a time-limited quest, Grandmaster’s gauntlet was announced as a quest that would be coming back for those who won’t complete it while it’s on for the first time. It was stated very clearly and made me proceed with another bit of content. With nothing else but three Carina challenges left to do in the game, I’d personalny love to see it back. While there was no guarantee on when it would be back, I’d assume even every 6 months wouldn’t be very often.

unknown

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Mauled

Content like the Gauntlet should come out quarterly IMO. That way there’s less pressure to complete it if you’re not ready for it and it keeps the spenders and end game players entertained. At the moment people rush so hard to complete content like this when they’re not ready for it because they come out once a year and they can elevate their account in a way they aren’t going to get for the rest of the calendar year. If these pieces of content came out a little bit more frequently everyone wins, including Kabam because their players are more entertained, therefore more likely to spend and there’s more hard content to use players’ boosts and items making it more likely for them to spend on consumables.

DNA3000

I doubt it. They didn't say "GG will return" in the sense they were scheduling it to return, or in the sense that they were explicitly planning for it to return. They said "GG will return" in the same sense that every James Bond movie says "Bond will return."

DNA3000

Personally, I would love that, but with a caveat that I think a lot of players would be openly hostile towards, and refuse to accept was necessary. Content like that simply cannot have Gauntlet's rewards.

What prevents us getting Gauntlet style content frequently are two bottlenecks. The first one is developer speed. They simply can't make new quarterly gauntlets. This is not a trivial problem to solve, even if you were willing to hire more bodies to make that content. Dev pipelines simple don't scale that way. That's problem one.

Problem two: the game can't handle four times the amount of Gauntlet rewards. It just can't. How do I know? Because if it could, Gauntlet would have had them. Rewards are budgeted over time, and there's no way to accommodate huge increases in higher tier rewards. So even if we could get tons of end game tier content released per year, the actual amount of rewards would have to be spread out among all of it. You might be able to swing a small increase, but not a several times increase.

(I should say, when I talk about "Gauntlet rewards" I'm referring not to the literal amount of rewards, but the proportional amount of rewards such content contains relative to the time in which it is released. Abyss rewards were huge at release, but they are more moderate today because higher reward tiers have come out since then. New Gauntlet-like content would probably have higher rewards than Gauntlet originally did because it would be relative to today's reward levels, but this talks about scaling beyond that. Whatever you think Gauntlet's rewards would scale to today, the problem is trying to flood the game with four times *that* much rewards).

There are ways to theoretically streamline the dev requirements to make end game content. But there's no way around the reward limits. If the devs believed the end game players would accept challenge content without proportional rewards, just for the entertainment value, I believe they might try to see if there was a solution to the dev resource barrier. But I don't think they do, and I don't think I do either, so trying to work around those limits would be valueless.

Turpissimus

Yes, they did.

Typhoon

Pretty sure they said your progress will be saved and you can continue it again at a later date.

Wozzle007

I’d like to see it back, but probably once the whole parry/dex bug fiasco is resolved. I think Kabam are probably delaying content for as long as possible to be able to fix the game.

unknown

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DrZola

Did the most recent one say that?

Dr. Zola

DrZola

You’re correct. It was difficult for many players, myself included. Which is why I’d like to see it again. Was it that hard, or was I unable to counter the nodes? How would Herc and Kitty fare?

Dr. Zola

LeNoirFaineant

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xNig

Like terminator? Took a couple of years after 3…

xNig

Mauled

Gauntlet rewards were spectacular, but there’s nothing stopping them from releasing content that’s hard, temporary and rewarding; the loot doesn’t necessarily have to change the status quo - just don’t put tons of sig stones into it and it won’t impact the prestige race which is ultimately what the economy is built around. Kabam barely play test their releases as evidenced in frankly most of their releases of 2021 and outside of Act content most of their nodes are recycled into different combinations.

It’s not going to take them 12 months to pick 10 bosses, give them some nodes that’ll make them hard but not total BS and give a chunk of 6* shards and T5B.

Players complain if there is content, if there isn’t content, if the content that there is is too easy or hard and if the rewards are poor or too good. I’d say I probably fall into the majority of end game players by saying that it’d be nice to just have the option of doing some interesting champion and node combinations, most of whom don’t complain when mid-tier content is put out for mid tier players.

If Kabam have a bottleneck in releasing content then they need to revise their processes because releasing content is what their business model is built on because that’s what generates them revenue.

Monk1

All of what you say in true about rewards… until they give us gifting!!!

This then makes these whole 6 paragraphs obsolete - they can enable more rewards if they wanted, difference is they want to lock them behind ££/$$

DNA3000

In a world where you have to pay for things, no, the gifting event doesn't make those words obsolete. Every source of rewards has the same pro and con balancing tension regardless of whether they are earned, given away for free, or sold. But the distinction here is that the resources they sell directly supports the continued existence of the game. And *most* of the time the resources that spenders get is crappy compared to the money they spend. Sometimes it is stellar. This averages out over time across all spenders.

Saying if they can do it there they can do it everywhere else is sort of missing the point of budgeting. Spending here doesn't mean you can spend there. Usually, it is the reverse. The gifting event is not rewards on top of the game that are exempt from the rules, they are part *of* the game that all resource balancing must account for.

DNA3000

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty certain at the end of the credits it did.

DNA3000

In fact, both at the time I read it and now as I reread it, I don't see this saying it would return in the sense of them scheduling it to return and just not telling us when. They said they intend to eventually rerelease it, but left it completely open ended as to when this might be.

DrZola

Maybe 007. But not Bond.

Dr. Zola

DNA3000

If Spiderman can be in high school for fifty years, Bond can return.

DrZola

So now there’s a Bond multiverse???

Dr. Zola