I love proposal 1 and 2 but the idea of having a "restart" potion troubles me. If they decided to create a new consumable for everest content then wouldn't it be better to just have everest content specific potions and revives? Change this new quest to award said potions and revives which can only be used in the everest content. Of course you'll still be able to purchase said consumable with money/units at an unlimited amount. Then just nerf the revive drop rate (not into the ground but a significant reduction) in acts 1-3.
DNA, i liked reading the proposal, but i do not agree with it one bit. The game has moved past this sort of gating. When offers provide endgame resources without playing at all, and the option of just reviving through is cut down dramatically, on tough content, along with other AI challenges, tougher defenders, trickier nodes and interactions, gating revives and limiting them to next to nothing is not acceptable. This game has multiple gamemodes and we dont need to like all of them. In fact, we dont need to play all of them either. BUT, everest content affects ALL of them. This forces those on the higher end of such gamemodes to actually play Everest content, whether they like it or not. With the growing difficulty of content, revives availability is needed. Revives bypass the broken potion system (which needs a massive overhaul in itself). A reduction from the (close to broken) revive farm is acceptable, but the apothecary is too limiting to be acceptable. This proposal does not alleviate anything, unfortunately.
I honestly believe though that the best solution is to implement a limit of revives in everest content. Go into Abyss (for example) well then you can only revive a maximum of 40 times. Doing this would eliminate the need to nerf anything and also eliminates the need for ANOTHER quest in the game. The only downside (not to the players anyway) is that people can't spam revives with units/money, clearly something that kabam won't do as I think they hope this change will generate more revenue. But it would solve the problems 🤷♂️
I honestly believe though that the best solution is to implement a limit of revives in everest content. Go into Abyss (for example) well then you can only revive a maximum of 40 times. Doing this would eliminate the need to nerf anything and also eliminates the need for ANOTHER quest in the game. The only downside (not to the players anyway) is that people can't spam revives with units/money, clearly something that kabam won't do as I think they hope this change will generate more revenue. But it would solve the problems 🤷♂️
I would hate this because I would for sure be one of those guys who used his 40th revive to bring the boss to 1hp then die and have no way to revive.
I honestly believe though that the best solution is to implement a limit of revives in everest content. Go into Abyss (for example) well then you can only revive a maximum of 40 times. Doing this would eliminate the need to nerf anything and also eliminates the need for ANOTHER quest in the game. The only downside (not to the players anyway) is that people can't spam revives with units/money, clearly something that kabam won't do as I think they hope this change will generate more revenue. But it would solve the problems 🤷♂️
I would hate this because I would for sure be one of those guys who used his 40th revive to bring the boss to 1hp then die and have no way to revive.
So would I lol that's me all over and I would also hate it but it would solve the problem ... the problem being "revive spamming trivializes challenging content" as Kabam have said.
I honestly believe though that the best solution is to implement a limit of revives in everest content. Go into Abyss (for example) well then you can only revive a maximum of 40 times. Doing this would eliminate the need to nerf anything and also eliminates the need for ANOTHER quest in the game. The only downside (not to the players anyway) is that people can't spam revives with units/money, clearly something that kabam won't do as I think they hope this change will generate more revenue. But it would solve the problems 🤷♂️
I would hate this because I would for sure be one of those guys who used his 40th revive to bring the boss to 1hp then die and have no way to revive.
In this case we should get all spent recources back so we can try again from the start, otherwise nobody would dare to do those quests anymore only to risk spending all the way to the limit and then have to quit out with nothing in return
I honestly believe though that the best solution is to implement a limit of revives in everest content. Go into Abyss (for example) well then you can only revive a maximum of 40 times. Doing this would eliminate the need to nerf anything and also eliminates the need for ANOTHER quest in the game. The only downside (not to the players anyway) is that people can't spam revives with units/money, clearly something that kabam won't do as I think they hope this change will generate more revenue. But it would solve the problems 🤷♂️
I would hate this because I would for sure be one of those guys who used his 40th revive to bring the boss to 1hp then die and have no way to revive.
So would I lol that's me all over and I would also hate it but it would solve the problem ... the problem being "revive spamming trivializes challenging content" as Kabam have said.
I have seen you say this numerous times and also seen it around the community a lot so I'm going in.
They did say that but they don't mean that. They mean revive spamming 20% revives gotten from farming lower act content is the problem. I mean when we had to spend 4k units for an abyss path it wasn't a problem so it's obviously only a problem because of lower act content farming. I have seen people say that it's the same thing as arena grinding but arena still needs you to fight manually and lower act farming doesn't except for 1 min or less setup time. I think that's their problem.
So yeah all I'm trying to say is don't get too hang up on kabam's exact wording of the problem because they have a track record of not expressing themselves well.
I honestly believe though that the best solution is to implement a limit of revives in everest content. Go into Abyss (for example) well then you can only revive a maximum of 40 times. Doing this would eliminate the need to nerf anything and also eliminates the need for ANOTHER quest in the game. The only downside (not to the players anyway) is that people can't spam revives with units/money, clearly something that kabam won't do as I think they hope this change will generate more revenue. But it would solve the problems 🤷♂️
I would hate this because I would for sure be one of those guys who used his 40th revive to bring the boss to 1hp then die and have no way to revive.
So would I lol that's me all over and I would also hate it but it would solve the problem ... the problem being "revive spamming trivializes challenging content" as Kabam have said.
I have seen you say this numerous times and also seen it around the community a lot so I'm going in.
They did say that but they don't mean that. They mean revive spamming 20% revives gotten from farming lower act content is the problem. I mean when we had to spend 4k units for an abyss path it wasn't a problem so it's obviously only a problem because of lower act content farming. I have seen people say that it's the same thing as arena grinding but arena still needs you to fight manually and lower act farming doesn't except for 1 min or less setup time. I think that's their problem.
So yeah all I'm trying to say is don't get too hang up on kabam's exact wording of the problem because they have a track record of not expressing themselves well.
What they mean isn't apparent, we can only assume things. Your opinion differs to mine and that's fine, I won't challenge that. I don't believe it was to do with the 20% revives but again, that's my opinion you can agree or not. If it was in fact only the 20% revives then say so, don't be so cryptic that people are going to draw assumptions.
I'm also not getting caught up in their wording. I'm quoting it back to them, if their intent isn't what they said then acknowledge it and correct/clarify what you mean.
The main issue is how content is designed with this change. What percent of the player group can complete EOP with only 19 revives? 0.1%? 0.01%?
If they want to implement this revive farming change then they also need to change their approach to creating "Everest" content. The labyrinth of legends carina challenges cannot be complete without a massive amout of revives. Many other pieces of content (Abyss, etc) require more than 19 revives for 99% of the player base. Having content where an extremely small portion of the player base can complete it with the parameters set by Kabam is a major issue. Why would they create content that 99% of the player base cannot complete with the set amount of revives a player can hold at one time? The only reason they would do this is to make more money off people being required to buy revives or with the intent that most of the players have to ignore the new content.
TBH, this is just too much work and will never happen.
The real discussion is what is the number of revives one should be able to farm in a day and put them in the Apothecary.
We all can agree that unlimited farming is too much and that 1 revive a day is too few. TBH, if you don't agree with both of those statements then you're not having an honest discussion.
I did the math in another thread and if 25k people farmed 12 pots a day they'd hit the 300k number mentioned in the OP. If 12 is too many, how about half that number? 6-8 revives a day from the Apothecary is enough that one could still do the content if they farm for 2 weeks, and not so many that they can steamroll it.
IMO, 6-8 revives in the Apothecary is fair to the players AND slows the farm enough that people won't be able to revive spam for free.
Seven per day is the sustainable average using non-Sigil boosted energy recovery. That equates to having 98 potions in overflow and 15 in inventory, for a total of 113 revives usable before they start expiring from overflow.
I believe it is highly unlikely that Kabam would consider 113 to be reasonable. The problem is that our inventory and stash are one size fits all. That's what we have to work with, whether we are doing Act 6, the Abyss, EoP, or Carina's challenges. There's content out there that a strong player can do in five revives, and other content that even the strongest players need dozens of revives to reasonably do. And at the moment it is trivial to be able to bring 113 revives to bear on all of it.
The Apothecary essentially brings that number down to around 30, more or less.
To sustain 12 revives per day a player would have to use something on the order of 33 energy refills in a fourteen day period. That's possible, but that's also far above both the likely average and the amount necessary to complete almost anything with almost anyone (that farming rate would equate to a total of 183 revives between inventory and stash possible to accumulate before expiration).
98 is not a realistic number. That's 14 straight days of 100% efficient farming w/o doing ANYTHING else with energy. The Apothecary is only open 10 days over that 14-day time so you're using disingenuous numbers.
7 from the Apothecary would be 70 over a 2-week span, not 98.
Where do game issues (which Kabam knows about) factor in? Even if we say 30 revives is the appropriate amount to have, isn't that 30 under the assumption of a well-functioning game, which we all know it isn't right now?
I need a clarification: does the reset potion restart the last attempt or the entire defender?
Because things tend to get stressful during the end of a fight. There were numerous SoP/EoP fights where I could easily shave 90%+ off the defender in one take and then needed 5 revives or so to finish off because of stupid mistakes. That one's skill issue, true, but the game may as well decide after the first revive that your parry wasn't actually a block at all. In this case using two revs doesn't really matter as much and is hardly different from using just one - but I'd like to discuss this, as it's kinda relevant to your manifesto: at which point using revives becomes cheesing content? When should a pileup of mistakes be pushed through instead of done over?
Yes, it's highly subjective. But let's find out what people think.
I need a clarification: does the reset potion restart the last attempt or the entire defender?
Because things tend to get stressful during the end of a fight. There were numerous SoP/EoP fights where I could easily shave 90%+ off the defender in one take and then needed 5 revives or so to finish off because of stupid mistakes. That one's skill issue, true, but the game may as well decide after the first revive that your parry wasn't actually a block at all. In this case using two revs doesn't really matter as much and is hardly different from using just one - but I'd like to discuss this, as it's kinda relevant to your manifesto: at which point using revives becomes cheesing content? When should a pileup of mistakes be pushed through instead of done over?
Yes, it's highly subjective. But let's find out what people think.
From my understanding, it sounds like it would completely reset the defender. It would be a programming nightmare to implement though, but it would be very cool.
I like proposal 2, it would acutally be great so you could split an AOL path or similar content in like three or four sessions without blocking all other story or event quests. Playing several hours for a path in AOL is pretty exhausting imo so that proposal 2 would be greatly appreciatet.
Everest content would be AOL, LOL, Gauntlet and EOP as for now or did i misunderstand anything?
Basically. You could technically put RoL in there, but nah.
I need a clarification: does the reset potion restart the last attempt or the entire defender?
Because things tend to get stressful during the end of a fight. There were numerous SoP/EoP fights where I could easily shave 90%+ off the defender in one take and then needed 5 revives or so to finish off because of stupid mistakes. That one's skill issue, true, but the game may as well decide after the first revive that your parry wasn't actually a block at all. In this case using two revs doesn't really matter as much and is hardly different from using just one - but I'd like to discuss this, as it's kinda relevant to your manifesto: at which point using revives becomes cheesing content? When should a pileup of mistakes be pushed through instead of done over?
Yes, it's highly subjective. But let's find out what people think.
From my understanding, it sounds like it would completely reset the defender. It would be a programming nightmare to implement though, but it would be very cool.
If it was a matter of resetting the Fight completely, the technology already exists, in some form. It's currently being used for the Fight Recovery system that activates once every 2 hours. It would become more tricky if the objective is to return any Items used during the Fight.
I need a clarification: does the reset potion restart the last attempt or the entire defender?
Because things tend to get stressful during the end of a fight. There were numerous SoP/EoP fights where I could easily shave 90%+ off the defender in one take and then needed 5 revives or so to finish off because of stupid mistakes. That one's skill issue, true, but the game may as well decide after the first revive that your parry wasn't actually a block at all. In this case using two revs doesn't really matter as much and is hardly different from using just one - but I'd like to discuss this, as it's kinda relevant to your manifesto: at which point using revives becomes cheesing content? When should a pileup of mistakes be pushed through instead of done over?
Yes, it's highly subjective. But let's find out what people think.
From my understanding, it sounds like it would completely reset the defender. It would be a programming nightmare to implement though, but it would be very cool.
If it was a matter of resetting the Fight completely, the technology already exists, in some form. It's currently being used for the Fight Recovery system that activates once every 2 hours. It would become more tricky if the objective is to return any Items used during the Fight.
Would be simple, but what about if the summoner uses a revive then decides they'll just reset the fight after the next attempt? It should reset back to when you first got to the fight. The only way you could reset after a revive is used is by storing in the game the summoners entire team with their current health right when the fight starts which could potentially cause more memory leak problems.
The alternative is not allowing the use of a reset potion after a revive has been used which could cause other unintended problems.
TBH, this is just too much work and will never happen.
The real discussion is what is the number of revives one should be able to farm in a day and put them in the Apothecary.
We all can agree that unlimited farming is too much and that 1 revive a day is too few. TBH, if you don't agree with both of those statements then you're not having an honest discussion.
I did the math in another thread and if 25k people farmed 12 pots a day they'd hit the 300k number mentioned in the OP. If 12 is too many, how about half that number? 6-8 revives a day from the Apothecary is enough that one could still do the content if they farm for 2 weeks, and not so many that they can steamroll it.
IMO, 6-8 revives in the Apothecary is fair to the players AND slows the farm enough that people won't be able to revive spam for free.
Seven per day is the sustainable average using non-Sigil boosted energy recovery. That equates to having 98 potions in overflow and 15 in inventory, for a total of 113 revives usable before they start expiring from overflow.
I believe it is highly unlikely that Kabam would consider 113 to be reasonable. The problem is that our inventory and stash are one size fits all. That's what we have to work with, whether we are doing Act 6, the Abyss, EoP, or Carina's challenges. There's content out there that a strong player can do in five revives, and other content that even the strongest players need dozens of revives to reasonably do. And at the moment it is trivial to be able to bring 113 revives to bear on all of it.
The Apothecary essentially brings that number down to around 30, more or less.
To sustain 12 revives per day a player would have to use something on the order of 33 energy refills in a fourteen day period. That's possible, but that's also far above both the likely average and the amount necessary to complete almost anything with almost anyone (that farming rate would equate to a total of 183 revives between inventory and stash possible to accumulate before expiration).
98 is not a realistic number. That's 14 straight days of 100% efficient farming w/o doing ANYTHING else with energy. The Apothecary is only open 10 days over that 14-day time so you're using disingenuous numbers.
7 from the Apothecary would be 70 over a 2-week span, not 98.
Yes, I did simply multiply those numbers here, so seven per day from the Apothecary assuming it keeps its five up and two down structure is 70, not 98. However, that is a distinction without a difference in this case. 98 is not a little too high, 98 is approximately an order of magnitude too high. As it is we're talking about at least a hundred revives farmable from 3.2.6, if a hundred is so much that it requires taking action to stop, 70 is just as bad as 98.
I also think you're vastly overestimating the effort required to reach "100% efficient farming." Even with 3.2.6, this level of effort is trivial.
I need a clarification: does the reset potion restart the last attempt or the entire defender?
Because things tend to get stressful during the end of a fight. There were numerous SoP/EoP fights where I could easily shave 90%+ off the defender in one take and then needed 5 revives or so to finish off because of stupid mistakes. That one's skill issue, true, but the game may as well decide after the first revive that your parry wasn't actually a block at all. In this case using two revs doesn't really matter as much and is hardly different from using just one - but I'd like to discuss this, as it's kinda relevant to your manifesto: at which point using revives becomes cheesing content? When should a pileup of mistakes be pushed through instead of done over?
Yes, it's highly subjective. But let's find out what people think.
In my proposal, it would reset the fight itself. It would be too powerful if it could be used to reset the "session" because that would be in some circumstances a more powerful revive.
As envisioned, you would not be reviving through a fight and occasionally using resets. You'd more likely be resetting to get a good fight, then reviving to finish the rest. This is a compromise to prevent (too much) exploitability. Its dancing on the edge as it is.
I get what Kabam is saying about revive farming. A summoner can brute force just about any piece of content which isn't in the spirit of the game. I understand that. Given enough time, a counter can come out that would make the path to completion/exploration much more manageable items-wise. Not all of us get that counter. I've been playing this game for 8 years and still don't have high rarity champs missing from my roster that were released years ago.
We've always had revive farming but I think the biggest issue we're seeing is that new players are able to progress far faster than ever before. Newer accounts are accessing the most challenging content with rosters that aren't fully developed. This strain can be seen with how the devs have implemented progression-based objectives to try and slow completion down a bit.
Abyss was never designed to be done in 0 revives. We see the MSD's and BetoMen (see what I did there) completing content in 0 revives which is phenomenal to see, but that isn't realistic. We lose sight of the fact that they may have spent days/weeks practicing on the Beta server before getting that video out to the masses. The common player doesn't have that ability.
It'd be nice if Everest-based content had portions made available to the masses that you could play through without the need for resources. What I mean is, make 1 path in Abyss open to everyone. No rewards for completion. It's practice. we wouldn't have to jump off the proverbial deep end and be required to use up our resources for the sake of learning new content. When we feel like we're ready for the real challenge, then we play in the normal Abyss for real. Different paths for Abyss would be made available each month or quarter or something. I think this would put the challenge back into content.
Anyways, my two cents. DNA is onto something as many of you are. No real solution because everyone's approach to the game is different, including the devs.
Yes, this is about the revive farm changes. But no, this is not exactly about the revive farms themselves. Rather, it is about one aspect of the revive farm changes that I believe is the most divisive component of the change, and yet it isn't something that is being directly discussed. Its being danced around, sure, and people are mentioning it in passing, but I haven't seen an actual discussion directed at the core point. In part, I think there's a real fear surrounding opening this Pandora's box. But I think it is a necessary discussion to have, and I'm going to jump in and see where it goes. Hopefully somewhere productive, but then again that was the last evil of Pandora's box (hope).
I'm going to present what appears to be a suggestion. It is, but its one I don't think has a snowball's chance in heck of happening. Instead, I want to present my ideas in the form of a suggestion, so that everyone can see where I'm going in the simplest way possible, rather than circle around the ideas too much.
Warning: every single one of these ideas will probably be super controversial on the surface. If you're just going to flag the post without reading them thoroughly, might as well hit the disagree now and save yourself some trouble. I guarantee there will be something here you don't like. Heck, I'm going to start with the biggest one right now.
There is a TL;DR at the end, but more for summary purposes. The point to the post is the discussion of the ideas itself.
Proposal Number One: Retain all announced changes to revive farm and the Apothecary numbers exactly as they are.
Yep, I'm going there. I'm just going to say this up front now: the amount of revives we could get from maps like 3.2.6 were blatantly ridiculous, and for basically no effort. I've stated elsewhere what the actual numbers were and I won't repeat those calculations here, but a free to play player could easily count on saving up a hundred revives or more without spending, and without even seriously impacting their game play by much, relative to the value they would presumably be getting from the content they were using those revives on. The numbers are just plain bananas, and would be plain bananas even at half the value. Even at one third the values. There's really no point in nit picking over the difference between thirty revives (which is more or less what you can count on with the Apothecary) and forty, or fifty. There's no real point to trying to squeeze five more revives out of the devs, when we're dropping from 150 to 30. Just accept the fact that in the new reality of the game, absent massive crystal stashes or unit grinding or spending cash, 30 is more or less what you're going to be able to save up before they start to expire.
Still here? Okay. So what are the ramifications of this? Well, lots. The obvious one is that players will no longer be able to plow through content with an essentially unlimited revive stash. But we need to consider how this affects different content. For the core progressional content, like the Story Acts, this is a good thing. We don't want players to blast through that content by simply reviving past it. There are always other options. The most obvious being: it is progressional content. You are supposed to progress to the point where you can beat it. For some players, this will take more roster progress than others, because some players have more skill. But even average players - or even below average players - can expect to eventually get past Act 4, and the Collector, and Act 5, and Act 6. If they are impatient, they can try to do it with thirty revives. If that's still not enough, they can wait until their total progress catches up with the difficulty. Or they can spend, which is fine: we need impatient people spending on stuff to keep the game alive. But that's their choice: no one is "forced" into spending on progressional content, because the *intent* is for them to do it at the pace appropriate to their skills and roster development. If they want to go faster than they are capable of going without spending, that's their problem not ours.
But that doesn't quite work with the non-progressional challenge content, i.e. the so-called "Everest content" like Grandmaster's Gauntlet, or EoP, or Carina's challenges. These things are not designed for everyone to necessarily do. If you can't do Carinas without spending, that might not be because you need to wait until your progress catches up. It might be that you will *never* be strong enough to tackle that piece of content without spending. But that's not a problem like it is for core progressional content, because it isn't intended for everyone to complete. Maybe you're one of those people.
This idea that some content is aspirational, but also some people might never be able to achieve that aspiration, is a bit daunting. If the game was always like this, then okay. Life's rough. But the game hasn't always been like this. In fact, it has never been like this. Some of us might have inferred it to be that way in theory, but the experience of most players contradicts this. Instead, the vast majority of players' experience has been this: if you can't do it with skill, you can do it with skill plus a stronger roster; and if you can't do it with skill plus a stronger roster then you can do it with skill plus stronger roster plus some cheese options; and if skill plus roster plus cheese is not enough then you can spend time collecting the tools you need to beat the content by grinding out resources. Skill plus roster plus cheese plus resources always wins.
I think this is the core problem. On the one hand, we have a game trying to continue to add challenging content for a variety of reasons, and we have an evolving playerbase that has continued to escalate the arms race to beat that content in ways other than the content intended. This arms race has led to revive megafarming, and content that requires revive megafarming for most of the end game players to tackle. It is a locked cycle that Kabam is trying to break with the elimination of the easy revive farms.
Okay, but what about the generations of end gamers that did not sign up for that? For them, this is an abrupt and impossible to predict dramatic change in the way the game works for them. In effect, the game is saying the skills they have been using all this time to advance in the game will stop working overnight. They used to be able to play the game with two hands, and now they are being told they have to play with one. Can anything be done about this? Maybe.
Proposal two: create a new game mode "container" that contains Everest content. In this game mode champions being used in any piece of content within this container behave as if they were being used in another game mode, like Incursions. In other words, you can still use them elsewhere, and you can still enter content in other game modes.
I'll give that a minute to sink in.
What this means is, if a piece of Everest content is placed into this content container, you can run it simultaneously with normal single player content. That's right, if you die, and you're out of revives, you can run the Apothecary and get more. In effect, this means you will never be "stuck" in such content. You can always leave, earn more resources, and then come back.
Wait. Didn't I just effectively add infinite farming back? What's the point? Well, kinda. First, farming rates will still be much lower than before. You could still use a hundred revives on something, but it will take months to grind those, not weeks. You would be slowed down. There would still be a strong incentive to get it done with less, because less is faster. But also, creating this new Everest content container allows for an additional way to try to balance the challenge of challenge content with the player expectation that end game players should have a path to complete such content. When any new Everest content first releases, it releases in the normal game. In other words, it is still exclusive to all other solo content, just like now. During this initial release phase of the content, everyone would be limited by much lower revive capacities of the Apothecary. The content would be "harder." Only after the content has been around for a while would it get moved to its permanent home in Everest-land, where it would then be much easier to use resources to plow through it.
The combination of Suggestion One and Suggestion Two is to create a new game environment where in effect all existing Everest content is "grandfathered" into a system where its all still "grindable" with revives, but at a slower pace. And all future Everest content has an initial "high challenge phase" where it can't really be grinded with unlimited revives, and then a long term "moderate challenge phase" where players are no longer going to be first past the post and getting those juicy rewards early, but they still have a chance to get them while they are still relevant to them.
I'm pretty sure no one is going to like this, especially the devs. I'm basically recreating the problem they are trying to solve. But I believe I'm doing so in a way that is more fair to the players, given that the game itself led many players to have the expectations they now have. The current Everest content has already been beaten by revives, and is continuing to be. That ship has sailed. Grandfathering it to be doable with unbounded revives contains the problem while offering a more nuanced option for future content. With this system future Everest content starts off more or less the way the devs appear to be intending them to work, with the proposed changes to revive farming and all the limits those imply. But as that content ages, we can downshift it to work more like how Everest content works now, with players combining skill and resource management to tackle that content and stay within striking distance of the rest of the top tier end game.
Is anyone still here? One last suggestion:
Proposal three: add a new resource potion to the game, called the restart potion. The restart potion restores the player back to full health, but it also resets the defender back to full health (and resets all other state information, like persistent charges, timers, etc). Basically, this allows a player to restart a fight from scratch if it goes south.
This is the most technically tricky, and for that matter conceptually tricky suggestion. What do I even mean by "reset?" If we set aside all the weird problems this might create, the rationale for this new potion has to do with what revives are supposed to be for. They aren't really supposed to be content fuel, where you burn X revives to complete Y content. Instead, they are there to allow the player to overcome a mistake, a glitch, an error. To oversimplify, you're not supposed to take 5% health from the defender, calculate that implies it will take twenty revives to kill the defender, and just chip away. You're supposed to try to beat the defender without using revives, but if you make a mistake when the defender is down to 15% health, the revive is there to reduce frustration. You made a mistake, that mistake can be erased at a cost, the revive is the mechanism to pay for those mistakes.
But what if the game glitches? What if the AI goes nuts? What if your heavy turns into a back dash, or your debuffs bug out? There are lots of ways for the game to unintentionally kill you, and those events are just as much, if not more a source of frustration for the player. But if we allow the player to use an unlimited amount of revives to overcome glitches, we can't tell the difference between a player using twenty revives because the game messed up and they messed up. We just made revives much more expensive, in the sense they will be harder to farm and also there will be fewer at the player's disposal. What if we offered players a cheaper way to erase mistakes without giving them a way to just chip away in an unlimited fashion.
The restart potion does that. If you *can* beat the fight but a game glitch messed you up, a replay of the fight from the start would benefit you a lot. But for a player trying to overcome the fight with revives, the restart potion is worthless. Suppose we just straight up hand these to the players for minimal or no cost. They would only be usable in Everest content, and maybe only once the Everest content "retires" to the Everest content container. Players attempting such content would now have two tools at their disposal. They could revive through them, or they could save the revives and restart fight if they think they could beat it, but just had something go wrong that one time.
The overarching idea, and this is I think a controversial one, is that the game should have tiers of challenge, and by definition challenges separate the players into those who can, and those who can't. By extension, those who get certain rewards, and those who don't. At the moment, that separation is very binary. There are no shades of grey in there. The combination of these three suggestions are really ideas to highlight how that separation should work moving forward. It should be less binary. There should be more of a separation between those who can, those who can with help, those who can only with unbounded help, and those who can't even with unbounded help.
This is less refined than some of my other posts, because a lot of this is still raw ideas. It took a day to reduce it down to this level. I could probably make it more eloquent after another week or so, but I think it is sufficiently worth discussing to just throw it all out there even if it is in a form that can be pecked to death by ducks.
TL;DR:
1. Eliminate the revive farms and leave the Apothecary as announced. This reduces the rate at which players can farm revives to a level that means at any one time revives are a limited resource.
2. Create a permanent home for Everest content which is separate from solo content. Players are allowed to run content in this section of the game independently from the rest of solo content. Meaning they can be running Everest content and other solo content simultaneously. This allows players who get stuck in Everest content to farm resources they can use to go back and finish it. Slower, but still.
3. Release future Everest content in the normal game as now, where it is exclusive to all other solo content. During this release phase, players cannot farm and run the content at the same time. After an appropriate amount of time has passed, move it to the Everest content section as above.
4. Add a restart potion/token to the game that would allow a player to restart a fight within content in the Everest section of the game. Make this token much easier and cheaper to get, so that players who experience problems or glitches in Everest content have a way to restart the fight without using revives. This should still be a limited resource, but because it does not allow players to preserve progress within a fight, they are much safer and reasonable to offer to players running such content. This should be limited to Everest content only.
I honestly believe though that the best solution is to implement a limit of revives in everest content. Go into Abyss (for example) well then you can only revive a maximum of 40 times. Doing this would eliminate the need to nerf anything and also eliminates the need for ANOTHER quest in the game. The only downside (not to the players anyway) is that people can't spam revives with units/money, clearly something that kabam won't do as I think they hope this change will generate more revenue. But it would solve the problems 🤷♂️
I think people are assuming "the problem" is "people are using too many revives." But that's an oversimplification of the problem. The real problem is much more complex.
Let's ask the obvious question: why not set that limit to zero? If we're going to limit potions and revives, we should first ask the question why allow them at all? And the answer is pretty subtle in details, but pretty obvious in the broad strokes. It is to reduce frustration. Without potions and revives, content becomes too frustrating. There are a wide range of players of differing skill levels, but the content has to be designed to target just one difficulty point (per piece of content). Even in EQ where we have six different difficulty tiers, we don't just have six different kinds of players. Without potions and revives, there will be a range of players who can do the content, and then at some point everyone below a line would fail. Even if they could do 99.9% of it, they would still fail (this is an oversimplification, but a necessary one to keep the discussion relatively straight forward).
Potions and revives are a way to "blur" the difficulty of content so that the dividing line between who can do it and who cannot do it is less binary. With potions and revives, any player who can do 99.9% of the content can probably do the content. And probably anyone who can do 99% of it. Maybe 90%. The line isn't solely dependent on the content design, it is also dependent on how much resources the player is willing to devote to it. This is also player-dependent. The net result is that players have additional agency in completing content. They can choose how much additional resources are worth it to them to expend.
So that's why the limit isn't just zero. But why can't we make it some non-zero number? Well, what number? If the whole point is to give agency to players to decide how much resources to expend, setting a hard limit takes that agency away. Some people would be willing to spend three revives. Some would be willing to spend five. Some ten. If we set the limit to four, we are in effect taking the very choice potions and revives are there to offer from a majority of the players who would be willing to spend more. Instead, those resources have a cost associated with them. It takes time, or units, or whatever, to get them. So the decision of how much to expend becomes one of how much of these resources the player wishes to deplete. This becomes a value choice.
And yes, monetization factors in here. The way monetization works in a game like this is no one gets everything they want. Most players want more than they can conveniently get. Beyond that point, they must decide whether to spend more time than they would conveniently spend, or spend more money than they would ordinarily spend, to get those things they want. Most players won't, some players will, and the percentage that end up spending cash support the rest of the game. Whenever we set hard limits on things, we remove some of the opportunity for spenders to spend, and that's also something the designers need to consider whenever designing any part of the game, not just potions and revives. Honestly, revives aren't likely to be a huge source of revenue. But taking the opportunity away can have an outsized impact on monetization, because monetization is not just a value proposition in a game like this. All the value in this game is completely artificial: we don't actually buy anything of material value. The value is in people's heads. Tampering with any part of the game's monetization doesn't just directly affect revenue, it also affects the perception of how the game values the players that spend on it. That's a completely different discussion, but for completeness, that's an additional factor to consider.
"People are using too many revives" is a simplification of a symptom of the problem. The full description of the problem is that the excessive farming of revives from 3.2.X has distorted the value proposition of revives as used within the game to lower the effective difficulty of content with high difficulty curves in an economy breaking way, and the solution to that problem must not just change that behavior, it must do so without breaking all the other constraints on the game that surround it. Hard item caps would not do that.
I need a clarification: does the reset potion restart the last attempt or the entire defender?
Because things tend to get stressful during the end of a fight. There were numerous SoP/EoP fights where I could easily shave 90%+ off the defender in one take and then needed 5 revives or so to finish off because of stupid mistakes. That one's skill issue, true, but the game may as well decide after the first revive that your parry wasn't actually a block at all. In this case using two revs doesn't really matter as much and is hardly different from using just one - but I'd like to discuss this, as it's kinda relevant to your manifesto: at which point using revives becomes cheesing content? When should a pileup of mistakes be pushed through instead of done over?
Yes, it's highly subjective. But let's find out what people think.
From my understanding, it sounds like it would completely reset the defender. It would be a programming nightmare to implement though, but it would be very cool.
If it was a matter of resetting the Fight completely, the technology already exists, in some form. It's currently being used for the Fight Recovery system that activates once every 2 hours. It would become more tricky if the objective is to return any Items used during the Fight.
Would be simple, but what about if the summoner uses a revive then decides they'll just reset the fight after the next attempt? It should reset back to when you first got to the fight. The only way you could reset after a revive is used is by storing in the game the summoners entire team with their current health right when the fight starts which could potentially cause more memory leak problems.
The alternative is not allowing the use of a reset potion after a revive has been used which could cause other unintended problems.
Yes, this is about the revive farm changes. But no, this is not exactly about the revive farms themselves. Rather, it is about one aspect of the revive farm changes that I believe is the most divisive component of the change, and yet it isn't something that is being directly discussed. Its being danced around, sure, and people are mentioning it in passing, but I haven't seen an actual discussion directed at the core point. In part, I think there's a real fear surrounding opening this Pandora's box. But I think it is a necessary discussion to have, and I'm going to jump in and see where it goes. Hopefully somewhere productive, but then again that was the last evil of Pandora's box (hope).
I'm going to present what appears to be a suggestion. It is, but its one I don't think has a snowball's chance in heck of happening. Instead, I want to present my ideas in the form of a suggestion, so that everyone can see where I'm going in the simplest way possible, rather than circle around the ideas too much.
Warning: every single one of these ideas will probably be super controversial on the surface. If you're just going to flag the post without reading them thoroughly, might as well hit the disagree now and save yourself some trouble. I guarantee there will be something here you don't like. Heck, I'm going to start with the biggest one right now.
There is a TL;DR at the end, but more for summary purposes. The point to the post is the discussion of the ideas itself.
Proposal Number One: Retain all announced changes to revive farm and the Apothecary numbers exactly as they are.
Yep, I'm going there. I'm just going to say this up front now: the amount of revives we could get from maps like 3.2.6 were blatantly ridiculous, and for basically no effort. I've stated elsewhere what the actual numbers were and I won't repeat those calculations here, but a free to play player could easily count on saving up a hundred revives or more without spending, and without even seriously impacting their game play by much, relative to the value they would presumably be getting from the content they were using those revives on. The numbers are just plain bananas, and would be plain bananas even at half the value. Even at one third the values. There's really no point in nit picking over the difference between thirty revives (which is more or less what you can count on with the Apothecary) and forty, or fifty. There's no real point to trying to squeeze five more revives out of the devs, when we're dropping from 150 to 30. Just accept the fact that in the new reality of the game, absent massive crystal stashes or unit grinding or spending cash, 30 is more or less what you're going to be able to save up before they start to expire.
Still here? Okay. So what are the ramifications of this? Well, lots. The obvious one is that players will no longer be able to plow through content with an essentially unlimited revive stash. But we need to consider how this affects different content. For the core progressional content, like the Story Acts, this is a good thing. We don't want players to blast through that content by simply reviving past it. There are always other options. The most obvious being: it is progressional content. You are supposed to progress to the point where you can beat it. For some players, this will take more roster progress than others, because some players have more skill. But even average players - or even below average players - can expect to eventually get past Act 4, and the Collector, and Act 5, and Act 6. If they are impatient, they can try to do it with thirty revives. If that's still not enough, they can wait until their total progress catches up with the difficulty. Or they can spend, which is fine: we need impatient people spending on stuff to keep the game alive. But that's their choice: no one is "forced" into spending on progressional content, because the *intent* is for them to do it at the pace appropriate to their skills and roster development. If they want to go faster than they are capable of going without spending, that's their problem not ours.
But that doesn't quite work with the non-progressional challenge content, i.e. the so-called "Everest content" like Grandmaster's Gauntlet, or EoP, or Carina's challenges. These things are not designed for everyone to necessarily do. If you can't do Carinas without spending, that might not be because you need to wait until your progress catches up. It might be that you will *never* be strong enough to tackle that piece of content without spending. But that's not a problem like it is for core progressional content, because it isn't intended for everyone to complete. Maybe you're one of those people.
This idea that some content is aspirational, but also some people might never be able to achieve that aspiration, is a bit daunting. If the game was always like this, then okay. Life's rough. But the game hasn't always been like this. In fact, it has never been like this. Some of us might have inferred it to be that way in theory, but the experience of most players contradicts this. Instead, the vast majority of players' experience has been this: if you can't do it with skill, you can do it with skill plus a stronger roster; and if you can't do it with skill plus a stronger roster then you can do it with skill plus stronger roster plus some cheese options; and if skill plus roster plus cheese is not enough then you can spend time collecting the tools you need to beat the content by grinding out resources. Skill plus roster plus cheese plus resources always wins.
I think this is the core problem. On the one hand, we have a game trying to continue to add challenging content for a variety of reasons, and we have an evolving playerbase that has continued to escalate the arms race to beat that content in ways other than the content intended. This arms race has led to revive megafarming, and content that requires revive megafarming for most of the end game players to tackle. It is a locked cycle that Kabam is trying to break with the elimination of the easy revive farms.
Okay, but what about the generations of end gamers that did not sign up for that? For them, this is an abrupt and impossible to predict dramatic change in the way the game works for them. In effect, the game is saying the skills they have been using all this time to advance in the game will stop working overnight. They used to be able to play the game with two hands, and now they are being told they have to play with one. Can anything be done about this? Maybe.
Proposal two: create a new game mode "container" that contains Everest content. In this game mode champions being used in any piece of content within this container behave as if they were being used in another game mode, like Incursions. In other words, you can still use them elsewhere, and you can still enter content in other game modes.
I'll give that a minute to sink in.
What this means is, if a piece of Everest content is placed into this content container, you can run it simultaneously with normal single player content. That's right, if you die, and you're out of revives, you can run the Apothecary and get more. In effect, this means you will never be "stuck" in such content. You can always leave, earn more resources, and then come back.
Wait. Didn't I just effectively add infinite farming back? What's the point? Well, kinda. First, farming rates will still be much lower than before. You could still use a hundred revives on something, but it will take months to grind those, not weeks. You would be slowed down. There would still be a strong incentive to get it done with less, because less is faster. But also, creating this new Everest content container allows for an additional way to try to balance the challenge of challenge content with the player expectation that end game players should have a path to complete such content. When any new Everest content first releases, it releases in the normal game. In other words, it is still exclusive to all other solo content, just like now. During this initial release phase of the content, everyone would be limited by much lower revive capacities of the Apothecary. The content would be "harder." Only after the content has been around for a while would it get moved to its permanent home in Everest-land, where it would then be much easier to use resources to plow through it.
The combination of Suggestion One and Suggestion Two is to create a new game environment where in effect all existing Everest content is "grandfathered" into a system where its all still "grindable" with revives, but at a slower pace. And all future Everest content has an initial "high challenge phase" where it can't really be grinded with unlimited revives, and then a long term "moderate challenge phase" where players are no longer going to be first past the post and getting those juicy rewards early, but they still have a chance to get them while they are still relevant to them.
I'm pretty sure no one is going to like this, especially the devs. I'm basically recreating the problem they are trying to solve. But I believe I'm doing so in a way that is more fair to the players, given that the game itself led many players to have the expectations they now have. The current Everest content has already been beaten by revives, and is continuing to be. That ship has sailed. Grandfathering it to be doable with unbounded revives contains the problem while offering a more nuanced option for future content. With this system future Everest content starts off more or less the way the devs appear to be intending them to work, with the proposed changes to revive farming and all the limits those imply. But as that content ages, we can downshift it to work more like how Everest content works now, with players combining skill and resource management to tackle that content and stay within striking distance of the rest of the top tier end game.
Is anyone still here? One last suggestion:
Proposal three: add a new resource potion to the game, called the restart potion. The restart potion restores the player back to full health, but it also resets the defender back to full health (and resets all other state information, like persistent charges, timers, etc). Basically, this allows a player to restart a fight from scratch if it goes south.
This is the most technically tricky, and for that matter conceptually tricky suggestion. What do I even mean by "reset?" If we set aside all the weird problems this might create, the rationale for this new potion has to do with what revives are supposed to be for. They aren't really supposed to be content fuel, where you burn X revives to complete Y content. Instead, they are there to allow the player to overcome a mistake, a glitch, an error. To oversimplify, you're not supposed to take 5% health from the defender, calculate that implies it will take twenty revives to kill the defender, and just chip away. You're supposed to try to beat the defender without using revives, but if you make a mistake when the defender is down to 15% health, the revive is there to reduce frustration. You made a mistake, that mistake can be erased at a cost, the revive is the mechanism to pay for those mistakes.
But what if the game glitches? What if the AI goes nuts? What if your heavy turns into a back dash, or your debuffs bug out? There are lots of ways for the game to unintentionally kill you, and those events are just as much, if not more a source of frustration for the player. But if we allow the player to use an unlimited amount of revives to overcome glitches, we can't tell the difference between a player using twenty revives because the game messed up and they messed up. We just made revives much more expensive, in the sense they will be harder to farm and also there will be fewer at the player's disposal. What if we offered players a cheaper way to erase mistakes without giving them a way to just chip away in an unlimited fashion.
The restart potion does that. If you *can* beat the fight but a game glitch messed you up, a replay of the fight from the start would benefit you a lot. But for a player trying to overcome the fight with revives, the restart potion is worthless. Suppose we just straight up hand these to the players for minimal or no cost. They would only be usable in Everest content, and maybe only once the Everest content "retires" to the Everest content container. Players attempting such content would now have two tools at their disposal. They could revive through them, or they could save the revives and restart fight if they think they could beat it, but just had something go wrong that one time.
The overarching idea, and this is I think a controversial one, is that the game should have tiers of challenge, and by definition challenges separate the players into those who can, and those who can't. By extension, those who get certain rewards, and those who don't. At the moment, that separation is very binary. There are no shades of grey in there. The combination of these three suggestions are really ideas to highlight how that separation should work moving forward. It should be less binary. There should be more of a separation between those who can, those who can with help, those who can only with unbounded help, and those who can't even with unbounded help.
This is less refined than some of my other posts, because a lot of this is still raw ideas. It took a day to reduce it down to this level. I could probably make it more eloquent after another week or so, but I think it is sufficiently worth discussing to just throw it all out there even if it is in a form that can be pecked to death by ducks.
TL;DR:
1. Eliminate the revive farms and leave the Apothecary as announced. This reduces the rate at which players can farm revives to a level that means at any one time revives are a limited resource.
2. Create a permanent home for Everest content which is separate from solo content. Players are allowed to run content in this section of the game independently from the rest of solo content. Meaning they can be running Everest content and other solo content simultaneously. This allows players who get stuck in Everest content to farm resources they can use to go back and finish it. Slower, but still.
3. Release future Everest content in the normal game as now, where it is exclusive to all other solo content. During this release phase, players cannot farm and run the content at the same time. After an appropriate amount of time has passed, move it to the Everest content section as above.
4. Add a restart potion/token to the game that would allow a player to restart a fight within content in the Everest section of the game. Make this token much easier and cheaper to get, so that players who experience problems or glitches in Everest content have a way to restart the fight without using revives. This should still be a limited resource, but because it does not allow players to preserve progress within a fight, they are much safer and reasonable to offer to players running such content. This should be limited to Everest content only.
Ah. You wrote all of this?cmoon. Too long. Lol
Fortunately, Kabam hasn't decided to monetize the forums yet. They don't charge by the word.
Who am I kidding. I would be the biggest whale here.
I think you missed the mark with your 'what is the problem'. Containing Player behaviour isn't much of an issue and your proposal barely sorts any of that out.
The problem is that in the past 2 years, content and the game has changed significantly. Where we could supplement our revive and units with a few hours of MANUAL grinding potions in ROL now becomes days of an endless slog which is what made the over-farming of revives so lucrative in the first place. Why spend hours getting 100 potions to heal up one R4 character back to max, when you could just grab another revive and give it another shot? It's ridiculous.
And its really quite simple. Potions are the problem. Their effectiveness is whats changed from way back in 2021 to now. With the input issues and non-interactive damage (Close Encounters Peni or Thanos Final phase for EOP examples), starting a fight at max health allows for the leeway that we used to have previously for when things go wrong, something that is much more difficult to deal with now as we advance to much higher health pools. The simplest fix would be to revolve around adjusting potion acquisition or as others have previously suggested, make potions percentage based. You can then keep the revives down at a minimum, but whilst also allowing players to grind up and earn themselves some extra leeway for fights, because quite simply, 20% is not enough to recover from any mistake or input issue that might occur in a endgame fight.
On the note of your reset token idea. I get that its a rough idea, but its pretty awful. It only accounts for mistakes that would have occurred when the enemy started at full health. Otherwise its pretty useless and doesn't contribute anything whatsoever.
Yes and no. It isn't quite as simple as how many revives Abyss was designed to require.
Suppose I asked you to design end game content. Something that would challenge the absolute best players in the game. But because they are your target audience, the one thing you can't do is ask them to test it. How would you do that?
You can't make it the maximum difficulty you can possibly do, because (unless you happen to be one of those top players) hard enough for you is not hard enough for them. But if you make it much harder than you could possibly do, how do you test it for difficulty?
You're aiming at an almost invisible target. And if you aim too low, your target audience will walk all over it. So you aim high. But if you aim way, way too high, you'll be accused of making a cash grab, because the only way those top players will be able to do that content is by spending huge amounts of resources.
You don't *want* people reviving through it. But short of disallowing revives altogether, how do you make something that isn't a) too easy, b) too ridiculously hard, and c) isn't just outside of reach, such that using a couple revives would be super tempting?
DNA, i liked reading the proposal, but i do not agree with it one bit. The game has moved past this sort of gating. When offers provide endgame resources without playing at all, and the option of just reviving through is cut down dramatically, on tough content, along with other AI challenges, tougher defenders, trickier nodes and interactions, gating revives and limiting them to next to nothing is not acceptable. This game has multiple gamemodes and we dont need to like all of them. In fact, we dont need to play all of them either. BUT, everest content affects ALL of them. This forces those on the higher end of such gamemodes to actually play Everest content, whether they like it or not. With the growing difficulty of content, revives availability is needed. Revives bypass the broken potion system (which needs a massive overhaul in itself). A reduction from the (close to broken) revive farm is acceptable, but the apothecary is too limiting to be acceptable. This proposal does not alleviate anything, unfortunately.
This is, ultimately, the choice I mentioned. Whether the game has "moved past this" or not is less an objective reality, and more a question of perspective. There are people who believe the game never really had this kind of gating in any serious form, and there are people who believe the game has always had it and hasn't changed at all to this point.
There is not, and will almost certainly never be general consensus on the narrative of the past. The real question is, what should the game decide to be moving forward. The narrative is going to break for someone, probably for a lot of someones, and in fact it could break for *most* players. We could all be in our own minority pocket of perception. But however we all got here operating under our own narratives, we've reached a point where one of them has to take the wheel moving forward. We can't maintain the illusion that everyone is playing the same game.
So, its a choice. And ultimately it is a choice the developers will make, but it is a choice we should at least understand is going to happen, and why. And if we want to change it, we have to first recognize the larger forces that are making the kinds of changes we're seeing. The revive farms aren't going away because the developers don't like revive farms. They are going away because they are a piece that doesn't fit the bigger puzzle.
TBH, this is just too much work and will never happen.
The real discussion is what is the number of revives one should be able to farm in a day and put them in the Apothecary.
We all can agree that unlimited farming is too much and that 1 revive a day is too few. TBH, if you don't agree with both of those statements then you're not having an honest discussion.
I did the math in another thread and if 25k people farmed 12 pots a day they'd hit the 300k number mentioned in the OP. If 12 is too many, how about half that number? 6-8 revives a day from the Apothecary is enough that one could still do the content if they farm for 2 weeks, and not so many that they can steamroll it.
IMO, 6-8 revives in the Apothecary is fair to the players AND slows the farm enough that people won't be able to revive spam for free.
Seven per day is the sustainable average using non-Sigil boosted energy recovery. That equates to having 98 potions in overflow and 15 in inventory, for a total of 113 revives usable before they start expiring from overflow.
I believe it is highly unlikely that Kabam would consider 113 to be reasonable. The problem is that our inventory and stash are one size fits all. That's what we have to work with, whether we are doing Act 6, the Abyss, EoP, or Carina's challenges. There's content out there that a strong player can do in five revives, and other content that even the strongest players need dozens of revives to reasonably do. And at the moment it is trivial to be able to bring 113 revives to bear on all of it.
The Apothecary essentially brings that number down to around 30, more or less.
To sustain 12 revives per day a player would have to use something on the order of 33 energy refills in a fourteen day period. That's possible, but that's also far above both the likely average and the amount necessary to complete almost anything with almost anyone (that farming rate would equate to a total of 183 revives between inventory and stash possible to accumulate before expiration).
98 is not a realistic number. That's 14 straight days of 100% efficient farming w/o doing ANYTHING else with energy. The Apothecary is only open 10 days over that 14-day time so you're using disingenuous numbers.
7 from the Apothecary would be 70 over a 2-week span, not 98.
Yes, I did simply multiply those numbers here, so seven per day from the Apothecary assuming it keeps its five up and two down structure is 70, not 98. However, that is a distinction without a difference in this case. 98 is not a little too high, 98 is approximately an order of magnitude too high. As it is we're talking about at least a hundred revives farmable from 3.2.6, if a hundred is so much that it requires taking action to stop, 70 is just as bad as 98.
I also think you're vastly overestimating the effort required to reach "100% efficient farming." Even with 3.2.6, this level of effort is trivial.
It's not the effort, it's the face that you can't do anything else w/ energy for those 14 days, which is not feasible.
If 70 is too many, what is the number you think would be feasible?
TBH, this is just too much work and will never happen.
The real discussion is what is the number of revives one should be able to farm in a day and put them in the Apothecary.
We all can agree that unlimited farming is too much and that 1 revive a day is too few. TBH, if you don't agree with both of those statements then you're not having an honest discussion.
I did the math in another thread and if 25k people farmed 12 pots a day they'd hit the 300k number mentioned in the OP. If 12 is too many, how about half that number? 6-8 revives a day from the Apothecary is enough that one could still do the content if they farm for 2 weeks, and not so many that they can steamroll it.
IMO, 6-8 revives in the Apothecary is fair to the players AND slows the farm enough that people won't be able to revive spam for free.
Seven per day is the sustainable average using non-Sigil boosted energy recovery. That equates to having 98 potions in overflow and 15 in inventory, for a total of 113 revives usable before they start expiring from overflow.
I believe it is highly unlikely that Kabam would consider 113 to be reasonable. The problem is that our inventory and stash are one size fits all. That's what we have to work with, whether we are doing Act 6, the Abyss, EoP, or Carina's challenges. There's content out there that a strong player can do in five revives, and other content that even the strongest players need dozens of revives to reasonably do. And at the moment it is trivial to be able to bring 113 revives to bear on all of it.
The Apothecary essentially brings that number down to around 30, more or less.
To sustain 12 revives per day a player would have to use something on the order of 33 energy refills in a fourteen day period. That's possible, but that's also far above both the likely average and the amount necessary to complete almost anything with almost anyone (that farming rate would equate to a total of 183 revives between inventory and stash possible to accumulate before expiration).
98 is not a realistic number. That's 14 straight days of 100% efficient farming w/o doing ANYTHING else with energy. The Apothecary is only open 10 days over that 14-day time so you're using disingenuous numbers.
7 from the Apothecary would be 70 over a 2-week span, not 98.
Yes, I did simply multiply those numbers here, so seven per day from the Apothecary assuming it keeps its five up and two down structure is 70, not 98. However, that is a distinction without a difference in this case. 98 is not a little too high, 98 is approximately an order of magnitude too high. As it is we're talking about at least a hundred revives farmable from 3.2.6, if a hundred is so much that it requires taking action to stop, 70 is just as bad as 98.
I also think you're vastly overestimating the effort required to reach "100% efficient farming." Even with 3.2.6, this level of effort is trivial.
It's not the effort, it's the face that you can't do anything else w/ energy for those 14 days, which is not feasible.
If 70 is too many, what is the number you think would be feasible?
As someone who exclusively used all of their energy for 14 days straight in just farming revives so I could do every carina challenge week 1, I can tell you the rewards I got from the carina challenges far outweighed anything else I could have used my energy on in the game. It isn't as big of a trade-off as you're thinking.
TBH, this is just too much work and will never happen.
The real discussion is what is the number of revives one should be able to farm in a day and put them in the Apothecary.
We all can agree that unlimited farming is too much and that 1 revive a day is too few. TBH, if you don't agree with both of those statements then you're not having an honest discussion.
I did the math in another thread and if 25k people farmed 12 pots a day they'd hit the 300k number mentioned in the OP. If 12 is too many, how about half that number? 6-8 revives a day from the Apothecary is enough that one could still do the content if they farm for 2 weeks, and not so many that they can steamroll it.
IMO, 6-8 revives in the Apothecary is fair to the players AND slows the farm enough that people won't be able to revive spam for free.
Seven per day is the sustainable average using non-Sigil boosted energy recovery. That equates to having 98 potions in overflow and 15 in inventory, for a total of 113 revives usable before they start expiring from overflow.
I believe it is highly unlikely that Kabam would consider 113 to be reasonable. The problem is that our inventory and stash are one size fits all. That's what we have to work with, whether we are doing Act 6, the Abyss, EoP, or Carina's challenges. There's content out there that a strong player can do in five revives, and other content that even the strongest players need dozens of revives to reasonably do. And at the moment it is trivial to be able to bring 113 revives to bear on all of it.
The Apothecary essentially brings that number down to around 30, more or less.
To sustain 12 revives per day a player would have to use something on the order of 33 energy refills in a fourteen day period. That's possible, but that's also far above both the likely average and the amount necessary to complete almost anything with almost anyone (that farming rate would equate to a total of 183 revives between inventory and stash possible to accumulate before expiration).
98 is not a realistic number. That's 14 straight days of 100% efficient farming w/o doing ANYTHING else with energy. The Apothecary is only open 10 days over that 14-day time so you're using disingenuous numbers.
7 from the Apothecary would be 70 over a 2-week span, not 98.
Yes, I did simply multiply those numbers here, so seven per day from the Apothecary assuming it keeps its five up and two down structure is 70, not 98. However, that is a distinction without a difference in this case. 98 is not a little too high, 98 is approximately an order of magnitude too high. As it is we're talking about at least a hundred revives farmable from 3.2.6, if a hundred is so much that it requires taking action to stop, 70 is just as bad as 98.
I also think you're vastly overestimating the effort required to reach "100% efficient farming." Even with 3.2.6, this level of effort is trivial.
It's not the effort, it's the face that you can't do anything else w/ energy for those 14 days, which is not feasible.
I don't understand this objection. How is this not feasible?
If you're saying there are players who would not make that trade of energy, sure. For them it might be unpalatable. But that's a choice, not a question of infeasibility.
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The game has moved past this sort of gating. When offers provide endgame resources without playing at all, and the option of just reviving through is cut down dramatically, on tough content, along with other AI challenges, tougher defenders, trickier nodes and interactions, gating revives and limiting them to next to nothing is not acceptable.
This game has multiple gamemodes and we dont need to like all of them. In fact, we dont need to play all of them either. BUT, everest content affects ALL of them. This forces those on the higher end of such gamemodes to actually play Everest content, whether they like it or not. With the growing difficulty of content, revives availability is needed. Revives bypass the broken potion system (which needs a massive overhaul in itself). A reduction from the (close to broken) revive farm is acceptable, but the apothecary is too limiting to be acceptable. This proposal does not alleviate anything, unfortunately.
They did say that but they don't mean that. They mean revive spamming 20% revives gotten from farming lower act content is the problem. I mean when we had to spend 4k units for an abyss path it wasn't a problem so it's obviously only a problem because of lower act content farming. I have seen people say that it's the same thing as arena grinding but arena still needs you to fight manually and lower act farming doesn't except for 1 min or less setup time. I think that's their problem.
So yeah all I'm trying to say is don't get too hang up on kabam's exact wording of the problem because they have a track record of not expressing themselves well.
I'm also not getting caught up in their wording. I'm quoting it back to them, if their intent isn't what they said then acknowledge it and correct/clarify what you mean.
If they want to implement this revive farming change then they also need to change their approach to creating "Everest" content. The labyrinth of legends carina challenges cannot be complete without a massive amout of revives. Many other pieces of content (Abyss, etc) require more than 19 revives for 99% of the player base.
Having content where an extremely small portion of the player base can complete it with the parameters set by Kabam is a major issue. Why would they create content that 99% of the player base cannot complete with the set amount of revives a player can hold at one time? The only reason they would do this is to make more money off people being required to buy revives or with the intent that most of the players have to ignore the new content.
7 from the Apothecary would be 70 over a 2-week span, not 98.
Because things tend to get stressful during the end of a fight. There were numerous SoP/EoP fights where I could easily shave 90%+ off the defender in one take and then needed 5 revives or so to finish off because of stupid mistakes. That one's skill issue, true, but the game may as well decide after the first revive that your parry wasn't actually a block at all. In this case using two revs doesn't really matter as much and is hardly different from using just one - but I'd like to discuss this, as it's kinda relevant to your manifesto: at which point using revives becomes cheesing content? When should a pileup of mistakes be pushed through instead of done over?
Yes, it's highly subjective. But let's find out what people think.
The alternative is not allowing the use of a reset potion after a revive has been used which could cause other unintended problems.
I also think you're vastly overestimating the effort required to reach "100% efficient farming." Even with 3.2.6, this level of effort is trivial.
As envisioned, you would not be reviving through a fight and occasionally using resets. You'd more likely be resetting to get a good fight, then reviving to finish the rest. This is a compromise to prevent (too much) exploitability. Its dancing on the edge as it is.
We've always had revive farming but I think the biggest issue we're seeing is that new players are able to progress far faster than ever before. Newer accounts are accessing the most challenging content with rosters that aren't fully developed. This strain can be seen with how the devs have implemented progression-based objectives to try and slow completion down a bit.
Abyss was never designed to be done in 0 revives. We see the MSD's and BetoMen (see what I did there) completing content in 0 revives which is phenomenal to see, but that isn't realistic. We lose sight of the fact that they may have spent days/weeks practicing on the Beta server before getting that video out to the masses. The common player doesn't have that ability.
It'd be nice if Everest-based content had portions made available to the masses that you could play through without the need for resources. What I mean is, make 1 path in Abyss open to everyone. No rewards for completion. It's practice. we wouldn't have to jump off the proverbial deep end and be required to use up our resources for the sake of learning new content. When we feel like we're ready for the real challenge, then we play in the normal Abyss for real. Different paths for Abyss would be made available each month or quarter or something. I think this would put the challenge back into content.
Anyways, my two cents. DNA is onto something as many of you are. No real solution because everyone's approach to the game is different, including the devs.
Let's ask the obvious question: why not set that limit to zero? If we're going to limit potions and revives, we should first ask the question why allow them at all? And the answer is pretty subtle in details, but pretty obvious in the broad strokes. It is to reduce frustration. Without potions and revives, content becomes too frustrating. There are a wide range of players of differing skill levels, but the content has to be designed to target just one difficulty point (per piece of content). Even in EQ where we have six different difficulty tiers, we don't just have six different kinds of players. Without potions and revives, there will be a range of players who can do the content, and then at some point everyone below a line would fail. Even if they could do 99.9% of it, they would still fail (this is an oversimplification, but a necessary one to keep the discussion relatively straight forward).
Potions and revives are a way to "blur" the difficulty of content so that the dividing line between who can do it and who cannot do it is less binary. With potions and revives, any player who can do 99.9% of the content can probably do the content. And probably anyone who can do 99% of it. Maybe 90%. The line isn't solely dependent on the content design, it is also dependent on how much resources the player is willing to devote to it. This is also player-dependent. The net result is that players have additional agency in completing content. They can choose how much additional resources are worth it to them to expend.
So that's why the limit isn't just zero. But why can't we make it some non-zero number? Well, what number? If the whole point is to give agency to players to decide how much resources to expend, setting a hard limit takes that agency away. Some people would be willing to spend three revives. Some would be willing to spend five. Some ten. If we set the limit to four, we are in effect taking the very choice potions and revives are there to offer from a majority of the players who would be willing to spend more. Instead, those resources have a cost associated with them. It takes time, or units, or whatever, to get them. So the decision of how much to expend becomes one of how much of these resources the player wishes to deplete. This becomes a value choice.
And yes, monetization factors in here. The way monetization works in a game like this is no one gets everything they want. Most players want more than they can conveniently get. Beyond that point, they must decide whether to spend more time than they would conveniently spend, or spend more money than they would ordinarily spend, to get those things they want. Most players won't, some players will, and the percentage that end up spending cash support the rest of the game. Whenever we set hard limits on things, we remove some of the opportunity for spenders to spend, and that's also something the designers need to consider whenever designing any part of the game, not just potions and revives. Honestly, revives aren't likely to be a huge source of revenue. But taking the opportunity away can have an outsized impact on monetization, because monetization is not just a value proposition in a game like this. All the value in this game is completely artificial: we don't actually buy anything of material value. The value is in people's heads. Tampering with any part of the game's monetization doesn't just directly affect revenue, it also affects the perception of how the game values the players that spend on it. That's a completely different discussion, but for completeness, that's an additional factor to consider.
"People are using too many revives" is a simplification of a symptom of the problem. The full description of the problem is that the excessive farming of revives from 3.2.X has distorted the value proposition of revives as used within the game to lower the effective difficulty of content with high difficulty curves in an economy breaking way, and the solution to that problem must not just change that behavior, it must do so without breaking all the other constraints on the game that surround it. Hard item caps would not do that.
Who am I kidding. I would be the biggest whale here.
The problem is that in the past 2 years, content and the game has changed significantly. Where we could supplement our revive and units with a few hours of MANUAL grinding potions in ROL now becomes days of an endless slog which is what made the over-farming of revives so lucrative in the first place. Why spend hours getting 100 potions to heal up one R4 character back to max, when you could just grab another revive and give it another shot? It's ridiculous.
And its really quite simple. Potions are the problem. Their effectiveness is whats changed from way back in 2021 to now. With the input issues and non-interactive damage (Close Encounters Peni or Thanos Final phase for EOP examples), starting a fight at max health allows for the leeway that we used to have previously for when things go wrong, something that is much more difficult to deal with now as we advance to much higher health pools. The simplest fix would be to revolve around adjusting potion acquisition or as others have previously suggested, make potions percentage based. You can then keep the revives down at a minimum, but whilst also allowing players to grind up and earn themselves some extra leeway for fights, because quite simply, 20% is not enough to recover from any mistake or input issue that might occur in a endgame fight.
On the note of your reset token idea. I get that its a rough idea, but its pretty awful. It only accounts for mistakes that would have occurred when the enemy started at full health. Otherwise its pretty useless and doesn't contribute anything whatsoever.
Suppose I asked you to design end game content. Something that would challenge the absolute best players in the game. But because they are your target audience, the one thing you can't do is ask them to test it. How would you do that?
You can't make it the maximum difficulty you can possibly do, because (unless you happen to be one of those top players) hard enough for you is not hard enough for them. But if you make it much harder than you could possibly do, how do you test it for difficulty?
You're aiming at an almost invisible target. And if you aim too low, your target audience will walk all over it. So you aim high. But if you aim way, way too high, you'll be accused of making a cash grab, because the only way those top players will be able to do that content is by spending huge amounts of resources.
You don't *want* people reviving through it. But short of disallowing revives altogether, how do you make something that isn't a) too easy, b) too ridiculously hard, and c) isn't just outside of reach, such that using a couple revives would be super tempting?
Where's the target? Is there anything left?
There is not, and will almost certainly never be general consensus on the narrative of the past. The real question is, what should the game decide to be moving forward. The narrative is going to break for someone, probably for a lot of someones, and in fact it could break for *most* players. We could all be in our own minority pocket of perception. But however we all got here operating under our own narratives, we've reached a point where one of them has to take the wheel moving forward. We can't maintain the illusion that everyone is playing the same game.
So, its a choice. And ultimately it is a choice the developers will make, but it is a choice we should at least understand is going to happen, and why. And if we want to change it, we have to first recognize the larger forces that are making the kinds of changes we're seeing. The revive farms aren't going away because the developers don't like revive farms. They are going away because they are a piece that doesn't fit the bigger puzzle.
If 70 is too many, what is the number you think would be feasible?
If you're saying there are players who would not make that trade of energy, sure. For them it might be unpalatable. But that's a choice, not a question of infeasibility.