**WINTER OF WOE - BONUS OBJECTIVE POINT**
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
There is currently an issue where some Alliances are are unable to find a match in Alliance Wars, or are receiving Byes without getting the benefits of the Win. We will be adjusting the Season Points of the Alliances that are affected within the coming weeks, and will be working to compensate them for their missed Per War rewards as well.
Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.
Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.
Comments
Also, there’s no such thing as a necessity that is a bad deal relative to other options. By definition, any deal that satisfies a necessity is better than all others that don’t. Anyone who opens these crystals “out of necessity” would by definition be worse off if they didn’t exist, and also worse off if they were forced to open basics instead. That makes their value proposition better than basics in those circumstances.
Don’t agree? Who would want their basic crystals stuck in 2018? Players *wait* until champs they want are added. Nobody says they better open up all their basics before more champs are added. At least not since a long time ago (there was that one weird time a while back, when the game meta was still primitive and Star Lord was still at the top).
But I myself was not talking about the intrinsic value of the basic crystal. In fact, I said if you just want any champ the basic is probably the better choice. Because the intrinsic value of the basic champ was likely to be similar to the intrinsic value of the dual class crystals. I was talking about the *targeting value* of the crystals. The relative value of the crystals to someone specifically trying to target a limited pool of champs. The relative value of the basic crystal as a targeting device obviously drops over time, because it’s pool grows over time. No matter what you’re looking for, over the long run it’s value in chasing that thing will drop over time (except, say, on the day that thing is added).
Acquiring champs in general and acquiring specific champs now are two different things. Basic crystals are perfectly fine to acquire champs in general, and their value for that purpose doesn’t drop over time. But for players trying to narrow their pursuit of champions, they get worse over time, and thus there is a need to eventually offer additional targeting opportunities. But those additional targeting opportunities don’t necessarily come for free, relative to acquisition costs. In fact, the mistake Miike mentions is almost certainly that by setting 5* dual class crystals as having the same price of basics, they destroyed the value of the basics and eliminated the choice between getting more and getting better choice. Because the price is identical, then for the reasons I mentioned above, there must always be a dual crystal that has a better value proposition than the basic. They can’t all be worse, because the basic is the average of the duals, For any rational actor, the basics should never be bought. That was certainly not intended.
A fundamental tenant of game design is games are about choices, and every choice should contain a meaningful trade off. Choices with no meaningful trade off are themselves meaningless, and most likely design errors. This is a principle that is easy to find millions of players to disagree with, and zero game developers. People can disagree with it, they just won’t be able to find any game developers to go along with that.
One a day keeps the economy designer away.
2 years ago, my best 6-star champ was Vision Arkus. I had about a 20% chance of pulling my next best champion from any single basic opening. Now there are only a few dozen champs that I’m even interested in pulling from that crystal at all.
You’re clearly just trying to defend Kabam’s idiotic decision.
You seem to be arguing solely about Targeted value, while DNA3000 is trying to make a distinction.
As a separate topic, if Kabam let me pick which two classes comprise a Dual Class Crystal for that extra 2500, then that might be worth it for me. Considering I strictly don't want any specific Skill champion, if I could instead choose a Mutant/Cosmic that would seemingly be close to a wish crystal and potentially worth those extra shards.
Relative to a single person, roster also grows over time. This tends, on average, to reduce the pool of desirable champions. This makes *all* crystals less valuable on average in terms of targeting, not because of the crystal contents, but because if you want a smaller set of things, it becomes harder to get those smaller set of things randomly. All random crystals will now have a harder time hitting the target.
The fact that the crystals dilute over time is an acknowledged issue: it is why the game has been adding more targeting options. This is a problem that affects everyone (albeit in different ways) and is a side effect of game growth. But the fact that the more things you have, the harder it is to target the rest, is not an unintended aspect of the game. It is *intended* that champion collection starts easy and gets harder. That front loads the experience of the game. If champion acquisition was somehow "linearized" so that it was just as easy - or hard - to collect champions at the start of roster acquisition and the end, the players with large rosters would have an easier time finding the things they were looking for but the players just starting would have a much harder time acquiring things at all. That's just the natural consequence of trying to make things not escalate: if they are never going to get harder, they can't start off too easy either.
A highly underappreciated aspect of random champion collection is that it intrinsically has this property: it is easy to start, and gets harder. This is a deliberate approachability aspect of the design. If you want to characterize this darkly, you could say that the game deliberately tries to hook players with easy champion acquisition to start, and then monetizes champion acquisition once they have made enough progress to be attached to the game. But however you choose to look at it, this particular aspect of things getting progressively harder is not a bug, it is a feature.
Kabam has mentioned in previous posts that champion acquisition is something they want to be considerate about from a player perspective. They’ve mentioned it in posts about the Buff Program and I think it’s been tied into posts about increasing access to Nexus Crystals. The additional price for Dual Crystals seems to contradict that. And in my opinion, it comes across as stingy, unnecessary and supports my opinions that Kabam is very out of touch with their player base.
This is not an assumption. First, this is very common knowledge among game developers, as I've had this conversation among multiple dev teams across multiple games, not to mention this is something that comes up in public discussions constantly. And second, this is a topic I've discussed with this team on this game, and the basic fundamental principles of game design do not appear to be things they are unfamiliar with. There's a lot of healthy debate over the details and the edges of the principles, but I have never had a developer of this or any other game try to stake out a directly contrary position. I would like to meet such a dev, because that would be a potentially very interesting conversation. Like asking a Martian about bank holidays.
Looking forward to that 2021 wish crystal!