Another thing worth noting is that the #1 spot has been consistently hovering around a 2,000 point rating, and your rating doesn’t naturally decrease over time from not playing. This means that you don’t have to constantly be playing to maintain your position on the leaderboard, you just need to get there and then you may be able to coast.
I mean, haven't they already stated that there will eventually be a friendly/unranked version of Battlegrounds? They already specifically refer to them as Ranked matches in game. Not necessarily at release but there is no way they just leave out what inevitably will be one of the best aspects of Battlegrounds which is the ability to challenge a friend. I think 15 Energy is fine as long as it's restricted to the ranked version of the game mode. A lot of competitive players have energy to burn each month and if this is going to give decent rewards they won't have a problem using it here. I think it would be a good idea to also have tokens for entry and a small number of these are handed out. Maybe like 1 a day with the ability to stockpile quite a few of them.
I don’t agree with the contention I’ve seen here that somebody could spend their way to the top of the scoreboard via energy refills. No matter how many rounds of Battlegrounds you play, you will eventually plateau at the proper ranking for yourself. And a skilled player is going to climb the leaderboard with relative ease to the point at which they should be.
In my own case, I played exactly enough instances of Battlegrounds during this beta to get the 5,000 6* shards. That turned out to be 25 matches, I went 20 and 5 throughout my matches. During my games, I matched up with players who have played many, many more matches than I have. Hundreds more. But I have a higher rating than them having played only 25 over the course of a week.
Obviously practice will help you perform better, but other than that the ability to grind away endlessly at the mode does not promise any better results. If anything, that player who is just throwing energy refills at the mode is going to see diminishing returns as they become tired and frustrated by watching their rating decline.
Small thing to consider here is that ratings got reset but your # of matches played didn't. Some people went hard in the first Beta as this was something very new for MCOC. Yes they have more experience in the game mode but just looking at their matches played isn't necessarily and accurate representation of what their record is. If they have a rating of 1660, it means that they've won about 10 games more than they've lost this beta. hard to tell what their actual record is without knowing specifically how many matches were done in each beta.
I agree wholeheartedly with this post. Side quest should cost 0 energy across the board.
We have whole months without new content outside of the monthly quests and the last thing I want to worry about is whether or not it is worth playing due to energy. It is not fun and I don't want to have to use units just to get 3 and 4 star shards. Or whatever the lower difficulties give as rewards nowadays.
It's a balancing factor. If people are spending all their Energy on BGs, they're going to come up short for other content, and it's going to lead to larger problems. As much as people don't like limitations, they're necessary.
That's precisely why we need dedicated energy/ranked-fight-tokens (like duel credits). I think non-competitive fights should have no cost at all and just be in place for fun and friendly competition. If we had a dedicated energy/token to do competitive fights I think the mode would thrive but for now 15 energy and the extremely competitive nature won't work for all players which will seriously impact the player reception around the game mode and how it is to be played.
I originally advocated for battlegrounds to use its own energy currency, but the more I thought about why the devs would design it to burn quest energy, the more I've come to realize that's a dangerous suggestion, and I now advocate reducing the costs to manageable levels, not dedicate separate energy to it.
It is important to realize that the reason why AQ and AW have their own energy is not to give those modes more energy, it is to constrain them more than quest energy would allow. If we could use quest energy, even if a move had high costs like say ten or fifteen energy, that would still potentially allow players to move farther and faster than originally intended, because players could choose how to spend energy. That agency is actually a powerful choice when handed to the players, and it is a choice players get when battlegrounds burns quest energy.
Yes, it means the player might have to choose to do a bg match instead of a side quest path. In those situations, the player can choose which one is more important to them. That may seem like an agonizing choice, until you ask if you want the devs to make it for you. They aren't going to decide to let you do everything. They will instead choose for you, allowing you do to X side quests paths and Y battleground match ups. Don't like those numbers? Too bad.
With BGs having their own energy currency, you'll be able to do X matches per day, and that's it. Miss your matches that day? Eventually, just like all energy bars, you'll get full and start losing match opportunities. Would you rather do more BG matches than heroic side quest paths? Sorry, you can't.
The downside to burning quest energy is a lot of players have tight energy budgets, and doing battlegrounds will mean not doing something else. But that's not an entirely bad thing, when the alternative is the developers choose for you, and you don't get a say. With dedicated energy they can and will decide how many matches you can do per day, per week, per month. You won't have any choices (short of spending, which will always be an option).
Given those two options, I greatly prefer having the choice of where to burn my energy, and a system where the devs aren't micromanaging how I use it. I might not want to choose which thing to do, but I would rather make the choice myself than let someone else make it for me.
Yes, but isn’t the fact that champs have limited entry use and a cool-down with a price to “re-energise” already a limiting factor determined by the developers in addition to questing energy cost? It should be one or the other not both. I know in the beta cooldown was 1 gold but I expect on go live this will work like incursions and be a unit expense which on top of the energy cost is steep.
That's irrelevant to whether battleground matches cost quest energy or a special energy bar. You seem to be suggesting that since champions have recharge cooldown there's no need for matches to cost anything at all. But that's incredibly unlikely to happen, because recharge cooldown doesn't limit matches, it only limits the number of times you can draft a specific champion in a period of time. Anyone with a large roster can sidestep that limitation. It may be suboptimal for people who want to use their absolute best champions, but the RNG draft already prevents them from consistently using their absolute best champs every time.
In fact, it is specifically for that reason that champion cooldown is more likely to be a way to shift monetization away from the general population and more towards the top competitors. It is disproportionately more important for the top competitors to keep their best champions refreshed. It is less important for more casual competitors. So champion recharge gives Kabam a way to monetize top tier competition in a way that has the smallest impact on everyone else. It can't simultaneously also function as a general throttle for everyone. That's why there are two throttles: one skewed towards higher rating competitors, and one skewed towards more active players.
This thread has brought in many different sides to the energy situation, which was the whole point of the thread, but this is definitely a game changing situation with battlegrounds whether it is good or bad is hard to say. Battlegrounds is completely different than any mode in the game as it is much closer to PVP than anything else. While there is a bit of strategy in AW, AW, questing, and arena it is no where near the level of battlegrounds. Actively playing against another player who is strategizing masteries, champion decks as well as actively fighting a fight where heath and time matter. The real question is if battlegrounds is what Kabam is trying to make the face of Marvel. It is unlikely that battlegrounds play is only going to be one fight a day as that would literally take less than ten minutes and Kabam tries to keep people actively on the game as much as possible. If the rewards for battleground are very good, which it seems is the intention than it is very likely going to require near all of energy be used towards it. This means a fundamental shift away from questing as this is literally almost a new game within a game. The fact that Kabam has nerfed an energy farming chapter seems to indicate that Kabam is planning to make battlegrounds the main focus of the game. I am not certain that players will jump on board, but this is most definitely game changing. There are going to be 2 different paths to choose battlegrounds or questing and I am fairly certain it will be nearly impossible to maintain energy levels for both. It is not necessarily bad, but this seems to indicate a giant shift in Kabam's vision for Marvel.
The real question is if battlegrounds is what Kabam is trying to make the face of Marvel. It is unlikely that battlegrounds play is only going to be one fight a day as that would literally take less than ten minutes and Kabam tries to keep people actively on the game as much as possible. If the rewards for battleground are very good, which it seems is the intention than it is very likely going to require near all of energy be used towards it. This means a fundamental shift away from questing as this is literally almost a new game within a game. The fact that Kabam has nerfed an energy farming chapter seems to indicate that Kabam is planning to make battlegrounds the main focus of the game.
You actually have this backwards. Kabam is not trying to make battlegrounds the predominant game mode, to the exclusion of all others. It is precisely for that reason that battlegrounds costs quest energy. If Kabam wants the game to be dominated by battlegrounds, they wouldn't be trying to test high energy costs.
Your logic seems to be: it costs quest energy, so kabam wants to shift activity away from quests and towards battlegrounds. But that's not how a game designer would think about it. A game designer would make battlegrounds costs quest energy if they wanted to *balance* activity between the two modes, using quest energy as the constraint for balance. They would then use the match costs to shift the preference towards or away from the battleground mode to balance the activity ratio between the two.
Also, no game designer would even attempt to do what you're describing in the first place. You don't replace your core gameplay with something completely different, you build around it. The idea of "hey, lets turn MCOC into a moba tomorrow" is the sort of thing that only happens when an entire dev team is taken over by pod people. It would basically never happen otherwise. If they thought they could make a successful game centered solely on battlegrounds, they would have attempted to launch a new game around it.
The risks associated with tossing aside the core gameplay of a game that is currently highly successful and replace it with something new is a risk no dev team would ever take, and no management team would ever allow. Game designers rarely design revolutions, they design evolutions. They incrementally build upon what's already there. They don't replace something that's working completely fine.
I have energy refills that expire all day everyday. Just don't explore uncollected EQ and suddenly you have 18-20 refills of energy to dump somewhere else. As mentioned, this only affects the try-hards of the communities who put a ton of time into the game. For casual players who just beat cav EQ and call it a month, this won't affect them, except by giving them an outlet to use some energy quickly. Battlegrounds is also much more fun than the EQs.
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We have whole months without new content outside of the monthly quests and the last thing I want to worry about is whether or not it is worth playing due to energy. It is not fun and I don't want to have to use units just to get 3 and 4 star shards. Or whatever the lower difficulties give as rewards nowadays.
Rewards better be worth spending the energy. An side quests need to stop costing energy (heck bad rewards and energy cost, i've stopped doing them)
In fact, it is specifically for that reason that champion cooldown is more likely to be a way to shift monetization away from the general population and more towards the top competitors. It is disproportionately more important for the top competitors to keep their best champions refreshed. It is less important for more casual competitors. So champion recharge gives Kabam a way to monetize top tier competition in a way that has the smallest impact on everyone else. It can't simultaneously also function as a general throttle for everyone. That's why there are two throttles: one skewed towards higher rating competitors, and one skewed towards more active players.
Your logic seems to be: it costs quest energy, so kabam wants to shift activity away from quests and towards battlegrounds. But that's not how a game designer would think about it. A game designer would make battlegrounds costs quest energy if they wanted to *balance* activity between the two modes, using quest energy as the constraint for balance. They would then use the match costs to shift the preference towards or away from the battleground mode to balance the activity ratio between the two.
Also, no game designer would even attempt to do what you're describing in the first place. You don't replace your core gameplay with something completely different, you build around it. The idea of "hey, lets turn MCOC into a moba tomorrow" is the sort of thing that only happens when an entire dev team is taken over by pod people. It would basically never happen otherwise. If they thought they could make a successful game centered solely on battlegrounds, they would have attempted to launch a new game around it.
The risks associated with tossing aside the core gameplay of a game that is currently highly successful and replace it with something new is a risk no dev team would ever take, and no management team would ever allow. Game designers rarely design revolutions, they design evolutions. They incrementally build upon what's already there. They don't replace something that's working completely fine.