Why changes to revives acquisition are unnecessary and fundamentally greedy move
Fantomaxop
Member Posts: 165 ★★★
Hello! In this post i will discuss upcoming changes to revive farming in mcoc, including latest feedback from Kabam Jax in this post:
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/331907/further-updates-to-consumable-acquisition-followup-to-revive-farming-apothecary; if you are unfamiliar with whole situation of revive farming nerf and introduction of apothecary, i would advise to read prior official posts first to get the idea.
INTRODUCTION
The main place for revive farming has been created due to changes to early content implemented in November of 2021.
3.2.6 became famous as the best place for revive acquisition not only because of how often summoners could find desirable consumables there, but also due to frequent appearance of full energy refills that allowed to immediately rerun the mission in search of more revives. Despite Kabam's statement that "players needed to rely on RNG while spending 42 energy", i genuinely never heard any complains about this farming method and it served well for the community as far as i know.
That to be said, now Kabam has decided to make a move about it and they had explained their reasoning of why changes are necessary. Their main argument was about revive farming "trivializing" difficult content like Carina's challenges and Eternity of pain.
Well, let's think about the content itself and how we "trivialized" it.
TRIVIALIZED CONTENT DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
In mcoc content can be categorized by different measures: the resources that are used in it (energy, types of consumables or lack of them), rewards, availability, design behind them. Today we are interested in content where common revives and consumables are used.
This is Story quests, Event quests, specific quests often referred in community as "Variants", and Special quests. They are also known as Endgame or Everest content and are the most interesting for us since Kabam mentioned how revive farming might "cancel development" of such content.
Excluding Road to Labyrinth, the endgame content shares several similarities: giant heathpools, requirement of specific counters for possibility of efficient run and replayability value, immersed by Carina's challenges.
Not all three of these similarities can be equally shared between all modes, due to them being product of their time. Realm of Legends might been scary 6 years ago, but now it's just test field for new additions to the battlerealm.
Yet we can clearly see the pattern of their design: summoner is set to face series of fights against opponents with unusually big heathpools, nodes and fight some kind of boss fight, then return after some time to repeat the run under certain conditions for more rewards.
Regardless of how skilled you are and how you perceive difficulty of these content, some fights are objectively designed to be impossible to pass without specific counter or additional resources being used, such as revives and potions. Like Abyss Mephisto that requires incinerate immunity, Electro in Labyrinth, Gauntlet's Terrax and many others. Abyss and Labyrinth will complicate things even further with timer-like global nodes that directly set certain limitations to duration of the fight/number of hits you can do.
It all becomes even worse when it comes to Carina challenges, since they task you with going in same battles again but with limited roster to choose from, purposely giving you tags to work with that lack needed utilities to pass the test itemless.
Famous Labyrinth run with 4-star Star Lord "Dance off" requires minimum of 50 revives, and all thanks to Enrage timer that makes it literally impossible to solo any opponent on any lane.
"Mike's revenge" with 3 star Cyclops needs around of 30 revives thanks to how well designed Collector is to kill you no matter what with ability accuracy reduction, random unstoppables and unblockable specials.
And many more tag-based challenges that are tied to EOP, where being left without proper counter against Peni, Ikaris or Terrax will force you to revive spam.
As you can see, many pieces of Everest content are fundamentally designed to force revives out of you by putting you into positions where you are doomed regardless of how well you are performing in the fight. Many mechanics will simply kill you even if you never took a single hit. You can't trivialize something with revives, if their use is implied from the beginning.
TOO MANY CONSUMABLE ITEMS!
So we have discovered that usage of consumables is unavoidable, but what if we assume that we might access to unhealthy amount of revives?
This question can be answered only by answering what should be considered "appropriate amount of available consumables", but this isn't as one-sided as you might think since here we have 2 completely different perspectives: Community's and Kabam's.
From perspective of player, the amount of available consumables should be appropriate to challenges they must face. As i mentioned above, some content inevitably comes down to revive spam, sometimes going as far as forcing 50 revives on one terrible challenge. Regarding the fact that we have more than 2 dozen of Carina challenges in game, requirement in revives even for one volume easily surpasses 100, and that is if you are somewhat competent player that faces no issues while playing the game.
It only makes sense to have the source of consumables that allows to store more than 70 revives in preparation for missions.
Community is also interested in the source of revives being reliably available at any time, which 3.2.6 does incredibly. To get consumables from farming this mission all you essentially need is time because of constant drop of energy refills on top of random potions. It is opened for everyone and has no limitations on repeated walkthroughs. 3.2.6 is easily autoplayable, and yet cannot give you more revives than you can store in inventory + overflow.
On other side is Kabam, who want to provide us with reliable source of revives only in words.
- Apothecary guarantees only 1 revive per day - which is just pathetic in comparison to 3.2.6
- Gives additional revive on rerun with 1% chance, with no full energy refills drop - unironically just worse RNG than 3.2.6 offers
- Everything guaranteed is limited by daily refresher - means that players are no longer in control of pacing of their farm.
Summoner that might had no time during weekdays to play/farm had agency in being able to comfortably replenish their inventory and even stash whenever they could, on weekends for example. This was somewhat player-friendly type of farm, now is replaced with alternative that strictly turns revive farm into daily routine.
The fact that we also get inventory cap increase doesn't make apothecary into less of a grind fiesta.
Buff from lvl 1 revive to lvl 2 in 22 hour events is treated like incredible achievement that should be celebrated, despite the fact that was supposed to be done years ago, along with 4 hour crystals potion drop-rate buff.
Their "appropriate" amount of revives is significantly lower, harder to get and will be grindy experience. And for what you ask?
Maybe they have some estimated amount of revives that they want to see us use without surpassing it, so this is why the changes are implemented?
This argument falls flat as soon as you realize that all they have to do is make limitations of usage of consumables, just like in alliance war.
And same can be said about any type of gatekeeping they want to implemented into endgame content: they can setup account lvl requirements, champion rarity requirements, champion rank, account progression requirements - you name it.
But they won't do that, because they are completely fine about you spamming items in Legends-type content. They just want you to pay for it, that's it. Keep in mind that nothing was said about impropriety of spamming revives bought with units.
NEW EVEREST CONTENT AT RISK?
The threat of cancelation of endgame content is mentioned both in first post and Jax's response.
Kabam claims that they can't operate on net loss from people not spending anything on completion/exploration of EOP-like quests, yet it doesn't make sense at all from any perspective.
Endgame content is what drives many people forward, the existence of player-friendly revive farming method is not changing that, its actually quite the opposite. With people having more ways to deal with the same content: by skill, money, farm and etc - it makes game accessible for more people and ultimately unites the playerbase in their capabilities regardless of how competent at the game they are or how much time they have, which is not a bad thing on its own.
With Kabam stopping the development of this type of Everest content they are going to simply lose investment of all people who play the game for the challenge and satisfactory of "getting over it" (even if it was terribly designed and felt like complete ****).
It's up tp them to come up with new way of monetizing the game instead of alienating the FTP playerbase or literally killing all what drives people to play the game.
By threatening us with cancelation of development of future content, they literally threatening themselves.
Also how they are supposed to sell all crazy ramp-up champions like Kate Bishop and Baron Zemo if there is no content to use them in?
UNEXPECTED CONSUEQUENCES
This is something that is not widely discussed right now and only youtuber i heard mentioning it is Seatin (link to the video below)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53x2B_Qz-uU&ab_channel=SeatinManofLegends
What mostly concerns many people and probably Kabam is influence of revive farming on their newly released Endgame content, but more far-reaching consequences will be for casual playerbase, newbies and summoners who just did not reach latest progression levels before April update.
You see, with the way how 3.2.6 worked any player could approach story content on their own terms. Summoners were relatively free in their walkthrough pacing, did not need to stress over losing revives and always could count on ability to do things without unit spending as long as they planned everything correctly. Not being forced into unit spending is essentially important for new accounts who still have masteries to unlock.
Going in against comparatively straight forward path and boss or tricky path with really bs boss fight - by the end of it player could return and replenish their inventory and not feel awful about their accomplishments.
Replacement of player-friendly farming place with daily grind sludge of apothecary will turn already disgusting experience into slow paced torture where wasting big amount of revives without success will push summoners WEEKS AWAY from progressing.
Collector of 5.2.6, Mr. Sinister of 6.2.2, Captain America of 6.3.6 and many more terribly designed fights will become graveyards where people drop out of the game because of how nightmarish progression feels. Nicely designed but challenging fights like Grandmaster will become checkpoints of huge stress for so many newbies, and for what reason?
Because greedy company, who already made MCOC best performing Netmarble mobile game, wanted to monetize our suffering?
Do i even need to remind you that there are out there bosses that to this day cannot even be revive spammed through?
Like crazy Mister Sinister that needs poison immune counter with way to deal with his insane passive healing while having fury buff... Increasing inventory cap to 20 revives won't change anything about roadblocky nature of this boss fight.
CONCLUSION
The changes to 3.2.6 will have immense influence on the entire game economy, and consequently on community's view of any Endgame content.
With the way how spending in last years mostly moved from storing units and doing hard content to Cyber weekends, July 4-th's and other holiday deals, i wonder if Abyss and all the more so Labyrinth will be irrelevant now from time/resource perspective investment...
It's going to make already awful new player experience absolutely unbearable and further the gap between FTP and spender groups. I'm not sure how much Kabam gonna profit from 3.2.6 nerf, but this is undoubtedly biggest L for MCOC community in recent years.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/331907/further-updates-to-consumable-acquisition-followup-to-revive-farming-apothecary; if you are unfamiliar with whole situation of revive farming nerf and introduction of apothecary, i would advise to read prior official posts first to get the idea.
INTRODUCTION
The main place for revive farming has been created due to changes to early content implemented in November of 2021.
3.2.6 became famous as the best place for revive acquisition not only because of how often summoners could find desirable consumables there, but also due to frequent appearance of full energy refills that allowed to immediately rerun the mission in search of more revives. Despite Kabam's statement that "players needed to rely on RNG while spending 42 energy", i genuinely never heard any complains about this farming method and it served well for the community as far as i know.
That to be said, now Kabam has decided to make a move about it and they had explained their reasoning of why changes are necessary. Their main argument was about revive farming "trivializing" difficult content like Carina's challenges and Eternity of pain.
Well, let's think about the content itself and how we "trivialized" it.
TRIVIALIZED CONTENT DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
In mcoc content can be categorized by different measures: the resources that are used in it (energy, types of consumables or lack of them), rewards, availability, design behind them. Today we are interested in content where common revives and consumables are used.
This is Story quests, Event quests, specific quests often referred in community as "Variants", and Special quests. They are also known as Endgame or Everest content and are the most interesting for us since Kabam mentioned how revive farming might "cancel development" of such content.
Excluding Road to Labyrinth, the endgame content shares several similarities: giant heathpools, requirement of specific counters for possibility of efficient run and replayability value, immersed by Carina's challenges.
Not all three of these similarities can be equally shared between all modes, due to them being product of their time. Realm of Legends might been scary 6 years ago, but now it's just test field for new additions to the battlerealm.
Yet we can clearly see the pattern of their design: summoner is set to face series of fights against opponents with unusually big heathpools, nodes and fight some kind of boss fight, then return after some time to repeat the run under certain conditions for more rewards.
Regardless of how skilled you are and how you perceive difficulty of these content, some fights are objectively designed to be impossible to pass without specific counter or additional resources being used, such as revives and potions. Like Abyss Mephisto that requires incinerate immunity, Electro in Labyrinth, Gauntlet's Terrax and many others. Abyss and Labyrinth will complicate things even further with timer-like global nodes that directly set certain limitations to duration of the fight/number of hits you can do.
It all becomes even worse when it comes to Carina challenges, since they task you with going in same battles again but with limited roster to choose from, purposely giving you tags to work with that lack needed utilities to pass the test itemless.
Famous Labyrinth run with 4-star Star Lord "Dance off" requires minimum of 50 revives, and all thanks to Enrage timer that makes it literally impossible to solo any opponent on any lane.
"Mike's revenge" with 3 star Cyclops needs around of 30 revives thanks to how well designed Collector is to kill you no matter what with ability accuracy reduction, random unstoppables and unblockable specials.
And many more tag-based challenges that are tied to EOP, where being left without proper counter against Peni, Ikaris or Terrax will force you to revive spam.
As you can see, many pieces of Everest content are fundamentally designed to force revives out of you by putting you into positions where you are doomed regardless of how well you are performing in the fight. Many mechanics will simply kill you even if you never took a single hit. You can't trivialize something with revives, if their use is implied from the beginning.
TOO MANY CONSUMABLE ITEMS!
So we have discovered that usage of consumables is unavoidable, but what if we assume that we might access to unhealthy amount of revives?
This question can be answered only by answering what should be considered "appropriate amount of available consumables", but this isn't as one-sided as you might think since here we have 2 completely different perspectives: Community's and Kabam's.
From perspective of player, the amount of available consumables should be appropriate to challenges they must face. As i mentioned above, some content inevitably comes down to revive spam, sometimes going as far as forcing 50 revives on one terrible challenge. Regarding the fact that we have more than 2 dozen of Carina challenges in game, requirement in revives even for one volume easily surpasses 100, and that is if you are somewhat competent player that faces no issues while playing the game.
It only makes sense to have the source of consumables that allows to store more than 70 revives in preparation for missions.
Community is also interested in the source of revives being reliably available at any time, which 3.2.6 does incredibly. To get consumables from farming this mission all you essentially need is time because of constant drop of energy refills on top of random potions. It is opened for everyone and has no limitations on repeated walkthroughs. 3.2.6 is easily autoplayable, and yet cannot give you more revives than you can store in inventory + overflow.
On other side is Kabam, who want to provide us with reliable source of revives only in words.
- Apothecary guarantees only 1 revive per day - which is just pathetic in comparison to 3.2.6
- Gives additional revive on rerun with 1% chance, with no full energy refills drop - unironically just worse RNG than 3.2.6 offers
- Everything guaranteed is limited by daily refresher - means that players are no longer in control of pacing of their farm.
Summoner that might had no time during weekdays to play/farm had agency in being able to comfortably replenish their inventory and even stash whenever they could, on weekends for example. This was somewhat player-friendly type of farm, now is replaced with alternative that strictly turns revive farm into daily routine.
The fact that we also get inventory cap increase doesn't make apothecary into less of a grind fiesta.
Buff from lvl 1 revive to lvl 2 in 22 hour events is treated like incredible achievement that should be celebrated, despite the fact that was supposed to be done years ago, along with 4 hour crystals potion drop-rate buff.
Their "appropriate" amount of revives is significantly lower, harder to get and will be grindy experience. And for what you ask?
Maybe they have some estimated amount of revives that they want to see us use without surpassing it, so this is why the changes are implemented?
This argument falls flat as soon as you realize that all they have to do is make limitations of usage of consumables, just like in alliance war.
And same can be said about any type of gatekeeping they want to implemented into endgame content: they can setup account lvl requirements, champion rarity requirements, champion rank, account progression requirements - you name it.
But they won't do that, because they are completely fine about you spamming items in Legends-type content. They just want you to pay for it, that's it. Keep in mind that nothing was said about impropriety of spamming revives bought with units.
NEW EVEREST CONTENT AT RISK?
The threat of cancelation of endgame content is mentioned both in first post and Jax's response.
Kabam claims that they can't operate on net loss from people not spending anything on completion/exploration of EOP-like quests, yet it doesn't make sense at all from any perspective.
Endgame content is what drives many people forward, the existence of player-friendly revive farming method is not changing that, its actually quite the opposite. With people having more ways to deal with the same content: by skill, money, farm and etc - it makes game accessible for more people and ultimately unites the playerbase in their capabilities regardless of how competent at the game they are or how much time they have, which is not a bad thing on its own.
With Kabam stopping the development of this type of Everest content they are going to simply lose investment of all people who play the game for the challenge and satisfactory of "getting over it" (even if it was terribly designed and felt like complete ****).
It's up tp them to come up with new way of monetizing the game instead of alienating the FTP playerbase or literally killing all what drives people to play the game.
By threatening us with cancelation of development of future content, they literally threatening themselves.
Also how they are supposed to sell all crazy ramp-up champions like Kate Bishop and Baron Zemo if there is no content to use them in?
UNEXPECTED CONSUEQUENCES
This is something that is not widely discussed right now and only youtuber i heard mentioning it is Seatin (link to the video below)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53x2B_Qz-uU&ab_channel=SeatinManofLegendsWhat mostly concerns many people and probably Kabam is influence of revive farming on their newly released Endgame content, but more far-reaching consequences will be for casual playerbase, newbies and summoners who just did not reach latest progression levels before April update.
You see, with the way how 3.2.6 worked any player could approach story content on their own terms. Summoners were relatively free in their walkthrough pacing, did not need to stress over losing revives and always could count on ability to do things without unit spending as long as they planned everything correctly. Not being forced into unit spending is essentially important for new accounts who still have masteries to unlock.
Going in against comparatively straight forward path and boss or tricky path with really bs boss fight - by the end of it player could return and replenish their inventory and not feel awful about their accomplishments.
Replacement of player-friendly farming place with daily grind sludge of apothecary will turn already disgusting experience into slow paced torture where wasting big amount of revives without success will push summoners WEEKS AWAY from progressing.
Collector of 5.2.6, Mr. Sinister of 6.2.2, Captain America of 6.3.6 and many more terribly designed fights will become graveyards where people drop out of the game because of how nightmarish progression feels. Nicely designed but challenging fights like Grandmaster will become checkpoints of huge stress for so many newbies, and for what reason?
Because greedy company, who already made MCOC best performing Netmarble mobile game, wanted to monetize our suffering?
Do i even need to remind you that there are out there bosses that to this day cannot even be revive spammed through?
Like crazy Mister Sinister that needs poison immune counter with way to deal with his insane passive healing while having fury buff... Increasing inventory cap to 20 revives won't change anything about roadblocky nature of this boss fight.
CONCLUSION
The changes to 3.2.6 will have immense influence on the entire game economy, and consequently on community's view of any Endgame content.
With the way how spending in last years mostly moved from storing units and doing hard content to Cyber weekends, July 4-th's and other holiday deals, i wonder if Abyss and all the more so Labyrinth will be irrelevant now from time/resource perspective investment...
It's going to make already awful new player experience absolutely unbearable and further the gap between FTP and spender groups. I'm not sure how much Kabam gonna profit from 3.2.6 nerf, but this is undoubtedly biggest L for MCOC community in recent years.
13
Comments
New players get plenty of materials from everywhere else that they don't need to do either of those pieces of content. They really don't need to do variants either but it's a decent place for 5* rank up mats for act 6.
I never farmed as I've always taken the easy road and used units for anything that needed revives thrown at it so I'm staying away from the rest of your post. But you're wrong about LoL and Abyss.
The only thing newer players will need to plan for will be EoP and gauntlet, at the moment at least. But those newer players won't know what revive farming was to begin with so they'll have a different approach regardless.
First on "Too many consumable items" theme:
1. Kabam never said that you cant farm revives anymore, you are still able to rerun quests to look for them, the first quest that comes to mind is low lvl EQs, those give resources as well, but not only that, they didnt say that they are removing the drops of resources, they are going to low the droprates, and those were acts from 1 to 3, so you could still go to Act 4 Venom Boss fight and restart it till you get revives per example, or some other quests from Act 5 aswell, so if you really want to have more revives without doing arenas you can still get them but it wont be that easy and that fast.
2. Content is meant to be done with X resources in X time by X amount of players, thats what they said (simplified), that means you would have to use X revives and X units, but they never said that you have to pay for it, so they want you to either spend money or spend time, thats the point, revive farming removes both, because you dont spend money, and the time spent is WAAAAAY lesser than it should be, so they never said that they want you to pay for the revives instead of farming them, they said that the place meant to farm is Arena's, and thats just a fact, and redoing quests to farming revives was never meant to be done, which people would be like "Yeah sure", but there is nothing that proves otherwise, that resources are meant for players doing that quests the first time, to be able to have some help on their journey, not for Paragon and TB players to be doing 3* and 4* fights to farm revives.
And people would argue that farming on Arenas is slower and more boring, surprise, thats how farming works on every game, is not meant to be funny, is not meant to be fast, is meant to help you, nothing else, for funny/fast content you have anything else, EQ, SQ, BGs, etc. Arena's are meant for either working hard to get X champs, or just doing it to farm units so you can get resources.
And people complaining about "Yeah but we have to hoard for sales, so they want us to spend on revives and pay real money for sales", well, that is how is supposed to be, thats the opportunity cost, and thats how every game and even real life works, if you spend energy on BGs, you are not going to be able to do EQs, so you will have to either farm units to get Energy Refills, spend money to buy units, or wait.
If you spend shards on Basic Crystals you are not going to be able to get Featured Crystals, so you will have to farm more shards or pay for them.
If you spend 10 dollars on the restaurant, you are not going to be able to spend those on MCOC, so you will have to work or afford more to be able to do so.
The same way works with units, if you spend units on revives, you wont be able to spend on sales, so you will have to either farm more, or spend money.
And people make this too simple, and its not, you are not farming units to buy revives, you are farming units to be able to do content that grants you X rewards, so you are not wasting units, since you are getting rewards, and a very good ones.
3.The amount of revives we have a cap for is not the amount of revives we should spend on content, is the amount of revives WITHOUT using units Kabam wants us to use, to balance the game, and that was explained by them very clearly.
4. Players assume that every content should be able to be done by everyone, which Kabam already explained that thats not supposed to be like that, and its quite fair, to do harder content you have to play more, and If you dont have time to play more, you have to spend more, and that is how everything works in both games and life. You want to be able to get the same with less time or money? Well, obviously you want it, but it doesnt mean that it should be like that, if you are not able to play more than 2 days a week, you are going to grow your acc slower than the rest of the people unless you spend, and thats fair.
5. The difference between people paying for revives instead of farming them for free is that the money makes up the fact that you spam revives, because it makes the content profitable, so it is worth for them and they can keep making more content, and thats obvious, you cant be annoyed by that and you cant use it as an excuse. And that works for everything, if you are a new player and you want to do X content that is not supposed to be done for you, you have to spend, and thats just fair.
Now on NEW EVEREST CONTENT AT RISK:
This part will also affect the Consumables one:
1. As I said before, you think that removing revive farming removes farming, which is not true, but you will have to go back to the farming that we used to have before Act 1-3 revamp, thats all.
2. They dont threat us with anything, they are just explained that they cant do Content that doesnt achieve their objectives, thats how companies work, the main reason to go with a Project is because it will give you profit, if it doesnt give you the profit you expect, you wont do that Project, you will focus on something else that is more profitable, and that doesnt mean that it gives you more profit, but it gives you more % of profit, so you can spend 1000 hours on doing Project A and get 10 units of X, or spend 100 hours on doing Project B and get 5 units of X, you get less amount but is still more profitable, people has to consider this things. Like a lot of companies, it is reasonable to look at data and numbers instead of looking at what people like, because it doesnt matter if you like X content if that content makes Kabam lose money, not because they lose money itself like "They have no profit", but the same way I explained before, why do 1000 hours for 10 if you can do 100 for 5?.
Now on Seatin stuff:
The fact that you will have to wait more to do content doesnt mean it will make people drop the game, few years ago, Story content was not that easy to be done, and not that fast either, so you would have to wait weeks to do it, and people would keep playing, and now you have a looot of things to do so you wont be bored of waiting those weeks, you have a lot of ways to improve your roster and skills and progress into the content, revive farming removing wont change that.
Overall I think players are not looking in perspective really, they are either watching for themselves or assuming that everything is how they say it is, players have to be listened, but not always, sometimes players have to understand that the game has to be changed so it keeps balanced.
I did read it however, and for some reason every change that comes, it's seen as a F2P vs. P2P issue.
Let me be quite plain about it. There is no competition. Not only does there not need to be, people will NEVER catch up to others spending large amounts of money in the game. That's not a logical goal to aim for.
Thankfully this game doesn't necessitate for it. Everyone can play, whether for free or money. What isn't a given is that people who play for free will have all the things spenders do. That's just not something that even makes sense. People wouldn't pay for something that's given to everyone. That's what they're paying for.
People will do the content the way they're supposed to if they don't spend. By saving Resources and planning ahead. That's the way it's always been. The fact that people find it a personal offense that an erroneous amount of Revs are now being capped is just a highlight to the reason it needs to be stopped.