Removal of Revive Farming and the Apothecary Discussion

gohard123

I just want to add that this has always been Kabam's view of revives. If you go to RichTheMan's interview with @Kabam Jax a month ago. They discussed misconceptions and disconnects between the community and Kabam. One of those misconceptions was how units are seen in spending perspective, Kabam expect units to be spent on revives and potions so they inherently do not want us to farm those resources.

Youtube Interview Link

Chuck_Finley

Leslie316 said:

Dear Kabam,please consider about this, modders will be giggle about this nerf

They can’t (won’t) stop them. Much easier to just limit legit players.

Ironman3000

DNA3000 said:

Ironman3000 said:

DNA3000 said:

37v417 said:

What a disgusting money grab. Shame on you, you vultures.

How much are you planning on increasing your spending after this change? Because I wasn't planning on spending more because of this change. How exactly is this going to make money? Who's going to be spending more?

This is just wrong DNA. Do you not remember before the revive path? In most cases, it was drop an Odin or don't complete the content. This is an awful change.

I have never spent cash to complete any content in the game. I have no plans to start any time soon.

Then you have no skin in the game. You don't complete the content that you need revives for so this doesn't affect you.

That's like me, who doesn't play arena, supporting a nerf to units from the milestones because it doesn't affect me.

Very selfish stance.

SoazzerMcFly

Here’s my thoughts. If Kabam wanted to nerf revive farming, why not just remove the option for items to be kept even if you exit the quest? That would slow down revive farming by a good portion, but not eliminate it completely. For some reason, it has to be all or nothing with Kabam.

Personally, I don’t want them to touch it, but I thought it was at least interesting that they would remove it entirely instead of making a compromise.

kikiFurieux

the Apothecary,[...] and provide, what our team has deemed, a reasonable amount of consumables.

Thank you for your generosity Kabam. As you can see on the forum, it's well appreciated.

#stopBeingGreedy

BigBlueOx

This definitely feels like another move that encourages modding.

1.) TOS is soft poopoo in regards to punishments

2.) there is little appetite to try and find you anyways

3.) legitimate pathways have intentional road blocks now.

Or maybe it’s a big brain move to create more modders so they can get more data points and maybe catch one or two.

MrSakuragi

This is just another in the long line of poor decisions aimed at generating revenue (hint: it won’t) that has happened since the netmarble acquisition.

Off the top of my head:

- Changes to war potions
- Selling specific champs for $
- Catalyst store
- Elder Marks

And many more, I’m sure. We know netmarble had a poor year in 2022 and likely leaning on their cash cow to increase revenue. But this ain’t it.

Valmez

So there's more modders floating around than disagrees on Kabams post ...

But hey, let's let them run free, unchecked as they abuse the game and don't use revives.

Meanwhile legitimate players who farm revives and are either ftp or spend money on the game through deals such as Cyber Weekend get taken to the cleaners, in turn encouraging people to consider taking up modding.

Literally the biggest issue in the game right now should be addressing the modders, they affect the game integrity which is the very core of any video game.

Instead no, let's vehemently annoy the player base and push people to leave (via losing intetest), discourage new players from getting through the game as others had done before them or new/old players just turn to modding.

Well done, great thinking. Keep it up.

Mauled

As I've said before I'm wholeheartedly against this change for a few reasons. I'm going to focus on the two that I believe are the most significant.

1 - The potion/revive market has been in dire need of an overhaul for years, but especially in the last year or two since our champions have been hitting R3/4 and now R5. In order to revive and fully heal an un-boosted R4 costs something like 120 units, depending on the health pool, and even more if the champion is boosted. As the potion economy currently stands cases it's actually worth allowing boosts to expire - depending on the boosts you're using -before healing a champion. Using the free potions from 4 hour crystals it takes an average of about 10 crystals to heal a champion from a 40% revive (assuming you're a Paragon), using the lv3 from RoL it takes about 15 or so.

The potion situation being so ludicrous is one of the reasons that revives are farmed in the way that they are: players can't afford to spend the units to heal their champions up, or have the time to spend hours and hours farming RoL for lv3 potions to heal. It's far more efficient to just farm revives and use 20% revives.

Solution: Health potions should be % based, starting with 10% for lv1, up to a 60% heal for lv6.

2 - Difficult content is being designed to make you revive. If you look at AoL upon release that was a piece of content that came with a hard ceiling on the amount of damage that you could do per hit - 85k - and a hard ceiling on the amount of hits you could do, depending on the power level of the champion ~240 hits. Unless you're using someone like Prof X, or Stryfe using a heavy-only playstyle soloing any of the fights was next to impossible, and it still is for many of the champions in the game no matter what their power level is now. This is a design philosophy that has continued into the Carinas Challenges, V1 was full of punitive challenges like the Star Lord challenge which is impossible to do without an enormous amount of revives, V2 isn't quite as bad though the Carina's Challengers challenge is still a revive fiesta. Carina V3 was designed to force you to revive multiple times per fight - there's only one of the Challenges where Peni isn't a total revive fiesta (CMM), for example.

Solution: The design philosophy needs to change. There's a difference between hard and impossible content. Much of Carina V3, AoL (At least on release) is impossible content and people just aren't keen on the idea of spending 2-3k units to do a challenge or a single line in a quest.

rischio

SoazzerMcFly said:

Here’s my thoughts. If Kabam wanted to nerf revive farming, why not just remove the option for items to be kept even if you exit the quest? That would slow down revive farming by a good portion, but not eliminate it completely. For some reason, it has to be all or nothing with Kabam.

Personally, I don’t want them to touch it, but I thought it was at least interesting that they would remove it entirely instead of making a compromise.

no one is doing this. the quest resets only if the boss goes down so you don't exit the quest, you consume the whole 40 energy (wow!) and down the boss. rinse and repeat.
if you exit the quest you have no respawn of the revives.

Rafael_Egend

We're going to have a golden opportunity to get a lot of revives, like everything Kabam does, they're going to screw up and increase the revives by 5000% before fixing it to -5000%. Be prepared. And where are my Kabam gauntlet keys?

Godslayer_1

Carracho01 said:

Like to see @Kabam Miike @Kabam Zibiit @Kabam Porthos @Kabam Vydious @Kabam Lyra doing all Carina challenges without revive farming!

Livestream please

Get them all past grandmaster first 😂

MrSakuragi

Godslayer_1 said:

Carracho01 said:

Like to see @Kabam Miike @Kabam Zibiit @Kabam Porthos @Kabam Vydious @Kabam Lyra doing all Carina challenges without revive farming!

Livestream please

Get them all past grandmaster first 😂

They were told not to spam revives

Viking_St3v3

The boardroom conversations the last 6-12 months must have been borderline hilarious. Let’s see, what can we do to enrage the player base in MCOC.
- Omnipotent AI? Check.
- Input issues? Check.
- Larger EQ health pools? Check.
- Crappy grindy rewards? Check.
- Remove system to grind what players need to complete content? Check.
- Belittle the player base with asinine reasoning for all the above? Check.

Basically let’s make ALL the worst decisions we can as a business so our player base is outraged. Sounds like a winning business plan to me. Leadership at its finest. That or this is all a cruel extended April fools joke.

Stantona

It was fun whilst it lasted, only good thing to come from this is it might save me from arthritis in my thumbs for the future 👍🏻

Maxus7

I used a lot of revives on Scytalis because she was bugged, and countless other revives becuase of other bugs this game has. its a joke that Kabam expect us to pay money for their mistakes. im done with this game

BigBlueOx

Mauled said:

As I've said before I'm wholeheartedly against this change for a few reasons. I'm going to focus on the two that I believe are the most significant.

1 - The potion/revive market has been in dire need of an overhaul for years, but especially in the last year or two since our champions have been hitting R3/4 and now R5. In order to revive and fully heal an un-boosted R4 costs something like 120 units, depending on the health pool, and even more if the champion is boosted. As the potion economy currently stands cases it's actually worth allowing boosts to expire - depending on the boosts you're using -before healing a champion. Using the free potions from 4 hour crystals it takes an average of about 10 crystals to heal a champion from a 40% revive (assuming you're a Paragon), using the lv3 from RoL it takes about 15 or so.

The potion situation being so ludicrous is one of the reasons that revives are farmed in the way that they are: players can't afford to spend the units to heal their champions up, or have the time to spend hours and hours farming RoL for lv3 potions to heal. It's far more efficient to just farm revives and use 20% revives.

Solution: Health potions should be % based, starting with 10% for lv1, up to a 60% heal for lv6.

2 - Difficult content is being designed to make you revive. If you look at AoL upon release that was a piece of content that came with a hard ceiling on the amount of damage that you could do per hit - 85k - and a hard ceiling on the amount of hits you could do, depending on the power level of the champion ~240 hits. Unless you're using someone like Prof X, or Stryfe using a heavy-only playstyle soloing any of the fights was next to impossible, and it still is for many of the champions in the game no matter what their power level is now. This is a design philosophy that has continued into the Carinas Challenges, V1 was full of punitive challenges like the Star Lord challenge which is impossible to do without an enormous amount of revives, V2 isn't quite as bad though the Carina's Challengers challenge is still a revive fiesta. Carina V3 was designed to force you to revive multiple times per fight - there's only one of the Challenges where Peni isn't a total revive fiesta (CMM), for example.

Solution: The design philosophy needs to change. There's a difference between hard and impossible content. Much of Carina V3, AoL (At least on release) is impossible content and people just aren't keen on the idea of spending 2-3k units to do a challenge or a single line in a quest.

Completely agree @Mauled. Great points.

The revive farm is a consequence of negligence of reviewing the potion ecosystem and making sure that a reasonable amount of account potions are available in endgame content. I’m not talking about ground breaking things here but a revive every other quest on a single line that doesn’t refresh would be a huge upgrade. Including heal pots that are relevant to the story content. This doesn’t meant L3 (1500 go revives in TB difficulty, gtfoh with that) but maybe L5s on an Act8 line. Another option would be to changed pots to % based pots, then maybe a L1 might be something of relevance to all players. Rather than less than 1% of a 6star R5 HP… again gtfoh with that.

Additionally it’s a consequence of unreasonable objectives that aren’t designed to be challenging yet fun like EoP but instead are design to consume resources in punishing fashion that requires a level of Masochism to push through, as you know that no amount of skill makes that content possible

TheCleaner

Contradiction:
Kabam in the opening paragraph in the forum post:
"introducing a new way to earn consumables without having to rely on path RNG."

Also Kabam, in the same forum post, introduced a RNG component to rely on:
Easy - One Path has "a 1% chance of containing 1 level 1 revive"
Hard - One Path has "a 5% chance of containing 1 level 1 revive"

Bonus Question(s):
"This frenzied revive farming trivializes difficult content like Carina’s Challenges and Eternity of Pain because Summoners simply spam revives. For us to allow what is effectively a loophole for these challenging pieces of content, we would have to dilute rewards given from that content, and that is not something we want to do."

Since the beginning, people have earned millions of battlechips in Arenas and cashed them in for units and used the units to buy revives to beat challenging pieces of content. Please explain how this as any less of a loophole, and, if applicable, explain how you plan to either correct what is effectively another loophole or how you plan to dilute the rewards. What's the difference between spending 60 minutes/day in Arena vs 3.2.6? Why is one detrimental to the game and the other is not?

BigPoppaCBONE

Viking_St3v3 said:

The boardroom conversations the last 6-12 months must have been borderline hilarious. Let’s see, what can we do to enrage the player base in MCOC.
- Omnipotent AI? Check.
- Input issues? Check.
- Larger EQ health pools? Check.
- Crappy grindy rewards? Check.
- Remove system to grind what players need to complete content? Check.
- Belittle the player base with asinine reasoning for all the above? Check.

Basically let’s make ALL the worst decisions we can as a business so our player base is outraged. Sounds like a winning business plan to me. Leadership at its finest. That or this is all a cruel extended April fools joke.

Maybe this is Kabam's version of The Producers? At first look, this seems to be a poorly considered anti-$ move that was delivered seemingly to maximize negative customer reaction, so who benefits?

Hickdog27

I'm not a FTP player and have spent more money on this game than I care to admit, so my question to Kabam is this, "How much more of my money do you want?"

If you want the endgame content to be more challenging, stop allowing people to BUY your broken champs, rank up materials, and sig stones. That certainly makes the game easier.

Additionally, your PR on issues like this is atrocious. You were clearly aware that this would be unpopular, so you throw it in a forum post and throw your moderators to the wolves.

Yayoi

This company doesn’t understand it own base anyway nor does it care, with all the issues that are going on in the game that they should prioritise and fix the main thing that they prioritise to address is removing an important part of the game for us players in revive farming, it’s really a disgusting approach that they have towards their own player base and this is why I don’t spend in this game because I don’t want to support a company like this and if it wasn’t for the Marvel characters I would never touch this game but I do want kabam to know that I will play this game, but I will never pay for this game. I don’t even play this game that much anyways, but the little that I do play this type of decision-making just makes me not even want to engage in this game at all and they did this

BinkPlayz

TheCleaner said:

Contradiction:
Kabam in the opening paragraph in the forum post:
"introducing a new way to earn consumables without having to rely on path RNG."

Also Kabam, in the same forum post, they introduced a RNG component to rely on:
Easy - One Path has "a 1% chance of containing 1 level 1 revive"
Hard - One Path has "a 5% chance of containing 1 level 1 revive"

Bonus Question(s):
"This frenzied revive farming trivializes difficult content like Carina’s Challenges and Eternity of Pain because Summoners simply spam revives. For us to allow what is effectively a loophole for these challenging pieces of content, we would have to dilute rewards given from that content, and that is not something we want to do."

Since the beginning, people have earned millions of battlechips in Arenas and cashed them in for units and used the units to buy revives to beat challenging pieces of content. Please explain how this as any less of a loophole, and, if applicable, explain how you plan to either correct what is effectively another loophole or how you plan to dilute the rewards. What's the difference between spending 60 minutes/day in Arena vs 3.2.6? Why is one detrimental to the game and the other is not?

TheCleaner said:

Contradiction:
Kabam in the opening paragraph in the forum post:
"introducing a new way to earn consumables without having to rely on path RNG."

Also Kabam, in the same forum post, they introduced a RNG component to rely on:
Easy - One Path has "a 1% chance of containing 1 level 1 revive"
Hard - One Path has "a 5% chance of containing 1 level 1 revive"

Bonus Question(s):
"This frenzied revive farming trivializes difficult content like Carina’s Challenges and Eternity of Pain because Summoners simply spam revives. For us to allow what is effectively a loophole for these challenging pieces of content, we would have to dilute rewards given from that content, and that is not something we want to do."

Since the beginning, people have earned millions of battlechips in Arenas and cashed them in for units and used the units to buy revives to beat challenging pieces of content. Please explain how this as any less of a loophole, and, if applicable, explain how you plan to either correct what is effectively another loophole or how you plan to dilute the rewards. What's the difference between spending 60 minutes/day in Arena vs 3.2.6? Why is one detrimental to the game and the other is not?

Can’t have us not using units on revives, how else are we gonna spend our money to spam revives!

altavista

AustinU823 said:

Players will seek the simplest solution to the problem at hand whether it’s Hercules, Corvus, or whoever. That’s their prerogative. The difference with Hercules is that a single 20% revive in his hands is going to go much much further than that revive in Corvus’s. Because Hercules is this way, the entire mindset of creating the content changes and the difficulty has to spike up to accommodate the cheese potential. Nerfing Hercules is going to make a large chunk of the playerbase sore but it’d be ultimately beneficial when you’re able to use your favorite champs with a little bit of skill again instead of tossing revives at Hercules until your path is cleared.

The excuse of "Herc too good so hard to make difficult content" is entirely a straw man argument.

There are a myriad of solutions that could avoid the Herc nuke:
1. Nodes that specifically target a champion (as seen by the practice of targeting Quake).
2. Apply a tag to Herc that results in AAR interactions for these 'difficult' content (such as giving a Blade esque danger sense to the boss).
3. Lock the best rewards behind special objectives (Such as defeat in one try, as seen last month).

#3 seems like the easiest solution that pisses the least people off, and one that already exists. Carina Challenges already do that, in that you have to use certain tagged champions to get those special rewards. Simply design your future content so you can't swap-in and out Hercules for a good amount of the fights.

Players shouldn't conflate the reasons Kabam is removing revive farming with existing champions and difficulty.

KingInBlack

A good sign of company community relationship is taking negative feedback to heart and reconsidering a major change like this. Unfortunately kabam is allergic to that and they'll just do the standard radio silence until this goes into effect and just shut down any discussion while players slowly leave. Sad how they can ruin such a great product with poor decisions. I think karatemike summed it up well in his video on it. His was short so it was the only I've looked at but I'm sure others summed it up similarly.

pseudosane

This is a massive change to the current economy, and I'm going to share my thoughts in the most constructive way possible, and add some suggestions in the end.

1)

This statement is cherry picking imo. Considering the latest piece of content : Carina v3, "spamming revives" is a wrong phase. Carina V3 was downright awful content that forced insane damage on the summoner. The only way to combat this was using revives, and possibly healing up. Even with that, the attack values are so high, one missed parry ends in death. Forcing revives was the intent of this piece of content.
let us look back at previous challenges. Abyss? Hard cap on hits. Unit collector is downright awful to fight.
Carina v1? One of the worst pieces of content ever released with those 4* challenges. "Spamming revives" was the ONLY way to get past these challenges.

Herein comes another assumption. A majority of the summoners aren't like the most skilled folks like MSD/Karatemike and the rest. They do not represent us. We struggle through content designed to mess with us at every turn using every tool possible.

2)

These rewards are a joke. Level 1 potion? Level 2 potion? they are currently irrelevant to even a day1 player. Successful parries do more damage than what these potions heal.


So why this huge disconnect? Why is this huge backlash from the community, especially the low spenders (which includes me), and the f2p community?
The reason lies with the change in the unit spend change.

Years ago, without revive farms, units were seen as a way to spend for revives to complete tough pieces of content. Ive explored ROL/AOL this way. But this started to change with the push for more unit based offers pushed over the past few years. The big weekend sales came in, first with a max of 18k units, and now in the past year, ballooning to over 25k units spend. Then came other important offers like Valentines day/Act offers/Random unit deals.. and now the 1k offers every month to get those 30% boosts (mainly for top tier AW). Offers galore. The only way to get them is farm ALL year long for units, and open your wallet from time to time (which I do). Now, if the push is to use these hard earned units for content, these offers are simply out of reach for people like me. Maybe folks like me aren't worth getting those offers? Possibly. But is it worth it to kabam to alienate folks like me for this?

The alternative options given forward are just too extreme. 1 revive every day is absolutely nothing seeing how tough everest content is. Again, highly skilled players on youtube doing reviveless runs are NOT representative of the community at large.

So what can we do to ease the pain, if Kabam wants to go down this path?

1) Extend Consumable expiry dates. 15 days is nothing. Get it to a few months. 30/60 days at minimum. That will help.
2) Massively increase revive inventory limits. 15 revives (17 with sigil) is nothing. make that 45 so we can store more revives. This would go for potions as well, as well as team consumables.
3) have a second look at the healing situation in the game. Potions are heavily outdated. CHange the system or improve it.
4) heavily buff the Apothecary. 1 revive a day is nothing. 2-3 revives at least.
5) relook at the design for everest content. Making it incredibly punishing is what forces summoners to "spam revives".

I hope these are some points which may achieve some sort of alignment between the community and Kabam.

rischio

farming is a staple of every online game. you either spend time or money. it is a staple of MCOC as well and always been and will continue to be even if they enforce this new rule.
Resource farming damping is already existing through inventory restrictions and expiry.

Kabam please find a better solution.