Post-Update Discussion re: Apothecary/Consumable Economy

Hey Summoners,
As Miike mentioned, because the last thread got cluttered, we wanted to provide you a new space to discuss the most recent changes announced in this followup post!

Comments

Suros_moon

This update still needs a lot of work…

CyrillFromTula

It's still not enough if you die because of broken inputs. And here we have no timeline

Axew

Good changes overall, but still disappointed with the farming nerf. It will definitely slow down progress for f2p accounts considering it takes almost month to stack up the max amount of revives.

Would have preferred a larger increase to the revive cap, but having level 2 revives available through events is great. Not a fan of the rate of acquisition, boosting the apothecary to a guaranteed 2 level 1 revives instead of 1 + a 1% chance at another would have been another good change. 2 more revives per week will take a while to add up

DrZola

Ah. So the hard content became too democratized.

Dr. Zola

unknown

This content has been removed.

Pikolu

Those changes are quite fair. I love how we are getting level 2 revives and I also appreciated the inside view that the devs were going to be done creating content due to the revive farm issues. It would have been a real shame if the story ended with act 8 because the writing is phenomenal and it has some of my favorite content in the game in it.

It is interesting to think how people these last few weeks have said that removing revive farming would kill the game when the inverse is actually what is true. No endgame content being created is what would actually kill the game.

I appreciate the transparency, and also approve of the changes being made. I do wish the potion overhaul would be faster than 5-6+ months, but I also understand it isn't as simple as changing a few numbers and the team already has a lot on their plate.

Hickdog27

Timeline seems a bit stretched out more than I would like, but we also don't know when the new Everest style content will release, so it might line up.

GroundedWisdom

Thank you for the update, Jax. Happy to see the team is compromising. I suspected as much. It never goes over well when something is taken away, but design objectives are a key part of releasing content.

Ironman3000

Still pretty garbage. A slight easing of restrictions, which we all knew was coming, and we just have to accept it.

ItsyaboyStephy05

There's one major thing I dislike about this post and that's their description of Everest content. Saying it's "aspirational" and "Should take skill" is a very hypocritical statement. I wouldn't mind these changes if content such as the Labyrinth challenges in Carina's Vol 1 didn't throw skill entirely out the window.

DarkestDestroyer

I still think a stash of only 20 isn’t that great, having to pay money, to store more revives doesn’t seem fair.

Why not just have 25 for all, and add something else for the sigil?

Mackey

So basically it's just another 2 revives per week in comparison to the original change announced 🤨

Eb0ny-O-M4w

Simply, delay the changes until everything is set up. You can't just push the nerf right away and make us wait a year for the rest of the changes to take place. At that time the changes are already outdated and in need of a buff.

Then for the item capacity increase, it is still far too low. Keep in mind, that you are making assumptions, calculations on what people are able to hoard on their STASH. You can't count on those, as that isn't an inventory, but rather just a way to aware players of items expiring. Your calculations are already wrong if you are including this area of the game.
I'll make it simple to understand: the Star-Lord Carina challenge. It takes 50 revives to complete, more depending on the RNG or dropped inputs. So at the very least, the capacity should be 50 revives, not including the ones in the stash for logical reasons.

As for the potions, if they aren't changed for % values, then make it at the very least 200-300 inventory capacity.

A major flaw you are also making on your assumptions is "how much we expect people to spend". Content should be designing with the idea of being possible to complete ITEMLESS. If the content ultimately forces someone to spend items, then it's flawed.

And finally, you continue to avoid the simple solution in order to stop people from "simply spamming revives", which is to limit the item usage.
When Abyss was introduced, you lied to yourselves saying "we don't expect anyone to be able to complete this in the next few months". When in reality you knew very well that this was a lie, and that people would spam revives to complete it day 1.
Now, you are afraid of new everest content being introduced and that it won't meet your expectations. It will NEVER meet, no matter how many nerfs you do to the revive farming. Unless you directly conter the concept of "spamming units to spam revives", then forget about new everest content being challenging.

Yodabolt21

While I totally understand (and still disagree with) why this is being done, it just seems like it was not thought out and a shoot form the hip reaction to CCP members blasting through Carina 3.0 in a week. How can you basically take away revives, which yes, does dull down the content, but not adjust the potions to match the current power level of champs at the same time? 5-6 months from now (I am guessing anyway) that we will have r2 7* with around 70k health pools (again, a guess and unboosted I might add). So If I want to heal up a champ for boss fight or any fight for that matter, I have to spend 150+ units doing so because there currently is no way to get higher level potions in game except the EQ deal?

Being honest here Kabam, I think you will see this will have the reverse effect you're intending. I would not be surprised to see MANY summoners lose interest in new content and ultimately leave the game. Being FORCED to use units for story mode or any content is a major issue with game. You said in a nutshell that units are for revives and potions, ok, fair enough. But then why does nearly every single deal in the game require units? How am I supposed to keep up with the rest of the players in the game, let alone my very own alliance, without spending real money? It has mostly been easy for f2p players to keep up, but this changes that, whether you want to acknowledge that or not. And for the record, I AM NOT a f2p player but many in my p2, map 6 alliance are and they will not be able to keep up with us in just 3 months time. That is not right.

All in all, this still goes back to what I believe is the community's biggest issue here. You don't want us to just plow through content with revives? I understand that completely. But when you design content (carina challenges, Abyss) that REQUIRE a ton of revives AND an insane amount of time commitment, then what is the point and what is YOUR suggestion to counter that?

Trafalgarwar96

So, for kabam, the units are meant to be spent in revives.....but at the same time they put offers in units....

pika

Weak changes overall, sure its better than before, but still at least would prefer to add 2 revives per day from that quest and revive expire after 30 days not 14

Jeal79

I think the changes seem fair (so long as potion revamp also happens) but only if the game is functioning properly... Which by large concensus it is not.

On the whole this still feels like a very poorly timed change to champion sustainability when the mechanics of the game are still a long way off what they should be.

When the contest returns to being a "fair" fight (meaning that defenders aren't capable of things that attackers can't do) then the latest proposal doesn't seem to bad. But we aren't there yet are we?

Mars___

It will be really nice if we get to know why the new quest cant be completed with auto instead we have to do fights everyday.

Ghost_Fan

You say this:
Yes, it will still take longer to build up a large surplus of revives, but we think this is a fair tradeoff for what is considered a reasonably large stash of easily accessible revives.

You are so out of touch with the player base. Noone really cares about the increase in the inventory if you are cutting our supply of revives in half (at least).
Before we could theoretically do a Carina Challenge v3 once every 2-3 weeks (with let's say 70 revives). Now we are gonna have to wait for god knows how long.

This point, is the point in which the game will begin it's downfall. Now the question is not if the game will continue but for how long. I'm giving it 15 months top.

GroundedWisdom

It will be really nice if we get to know why the new quest cant be completed with auto instead we have to do fights everyday.

They indicated in the original Post that you will be able to do it on Auto Play, but not Auto Complete.

Mackey

Overall I think it's ever so slightly better than the original change that was announced. The only thing I think it's good is the inventory cap, would of been nicer to have it a bit higher of course but a 5 increase is still decent. The change to solo revive wasn't needed or asked for, while it may be nice to have a level 2 revive over a level 1, for the most part a revive is a revive and that hasn't changed.

The original announcement was about farming in 3.2.6 and how it had to stop etc etc as well as the introduction of this new quest. This new quest guaranteed a return of 5 revives per week, so over 5 weeks you would have got a total of 25 guaranteed revives before they started to expire 1 by 1 ... 15 in inventory and 10 in overflow. The new announcement (the compromise to the original announcement) now guarantees a return of 7 revives per week with an increase to your inventory by 5 (sigil is more but let's work without it) meaning over a 5 week period you now get a total of 34 guaranteed revives.

That means the overall increase of revives that one is guaranteed to get is 9 revives, before they start expiring 1 by 1.

You have addressed (openly) about why the farming had to happen, you've addressed the issues we had with it by giving us the above mentioned compromise but I really can't work out why the solo event has anything to do with the original announced changes and the huge discussion the community had following it, almost like its created to appear like we're better off 🤷‍♂️

Ironman3000

Glad that there are now more things that are "coming soon" to go with the BG changes. Can't wait!!

VestasCure

So basically it's just another 2 revives per week in comparison to the original change announced 🤨

They literally said in the post that the individual changes seem small but combined they have a big impact, which is true. Did you just choose to skip over that bit or just choosing to only look at one change for some reason?

The biggest change is to the 22hr events being level 2, so we're no longer stockpiling one kind of revive but 2, so in essence doubling the amount of guaranteed revives we can stockpile (while also slightly increasing the cap, which is nice but not a huge deal). We're definitely worse off than before, but overall it's not a horrible compromise.

DRTO

I feel like the main message was "Grind/buy units, stop grinding revives, get your butts back in the arena" Because I guess if you buy units and buy thousands of revives its okay, but if you farm them without units suddenly it affects development of content. Still don't see the issue.

Also I feel like if they're going to adjust the potion ecosystem they should just hold off the apothecary until then. 5-6 months probably gonna be longer than that so rather see it all at once.

MrSakuragi

But it’s still ok to brute force aspirational content if our wallet can support it

AverageDesi

Ah. So the hard content became too democratized.

Dr. Zola

The game isn't a democracy. So yeah. It's not supposed to democraticed

GroundedWisdom

But it’s still ok to brute force aspirational content if our wallet can support it

That's been the case as long as the game has existed. It's also the case with a plethora of games on the market. It's called Freemium for a reason (unofficially). You can play for free, or you can spend to advance faster. That's not going to change.

Chobbly

First of all, credit where it's due this second post conveys the position a lot, lot better.

There is an aspect to the 'brute force' that hasn't been mentioned - the frustration and blocker to progress that continually pulling bad champions is. By 'bad' I mean champions that do nothing to help with progression in the Contest.

If you have the ideal champion and are lucky in your pulls, you can progress without needing to brute force. If you can't, you have to wait or brute force with less than optimal champions. Skill is important, but roster selection can be king.

Brute forcing though content isn't working for Kabam. I understand that even if I think there's more layers to it than just that.

Barriers to progression aren't working for players. Whether it's the issues with input controls or the fact that opening a 6* basic crystal will result in most champions being only being useful in Arena. That's a barrier to progression. So many paths and nodes demote player skill into second place in favour of optimal or perfect champion selection. Or brute force.

This isn't intended to be a rant about the wish crystal, but the need for players to have more control over their rosters and champion acquisition is perhaps the other side of the brute force coin. Maybe?

Mackey

So basically it's just another 2 revives per week in comparison to the original change announced 🤨
They literally said in the post that the individual changes seem small but combined they have a big impact, which is true. Did you just choose to skip over that bit or just choosing to only look at one change for some reason?

The biggest change is to the 22hr events being level 2, so we're no longer stockpiling one kind of revive but 2, so in essence doubling the amount of guaranteed revives we can stockpile (while also slightly increasing the cap, which is nice but not a huge deal). We're definitely worse off than before, but overall it's not a horrible compromise.

The solo event isn't guaranteed in the sense that apothecary is though, is it? You run 2 paths in Apothecary and get 1 revive per day guaranteed, solo events require much more time than that so can't be included as a guaranteed revive in the same way. Either way though you're still only getting 1 revive from the solo events if you do go for them ... which is the same quantity as before, just now you get a little more health (yay). If you're building up level 2s faster than before as a side effect of the solo event change then that means you're losing 1 level 1 revive at the same time

BigBlueOx

I think, on the whole this is a much more well thought out change and much more professionally delivered justification for the changes. The clear and transparent reasons are explained well in a method that I can accept (tolerate may be a better word) the changes from how the information was delivered. It’s not the compromise I would have pushed for but it is a compromise that does address certain aspects in a pro player way. The L2 revive was a nice unexpected touch.

That said, it’s misguided to see that the original solution which was disappointing to say the least will still be implemented on the original timetable. I’m not optimistic about when the changes I can agree with as an acceptable compromise will be delivered on in the current trust environment will be implemented and because of trust being at an all time low for myself and many others it is a mistake in my opinion that the original design will be launched in-spite of community feedback.