The "Prestige Race" is manufactured by the Players. You're going to see the ceiling raise from time to time. That's a result of more Rarities and Ranks being introduced.
By the players? Are you for real?
Yes, I'm for real. Prestige was an internal metric. There was even a time where they didn't display it. It was the Players that decided to maximize it and chase after it. It was the Players who also decided to set rules in Alliances for Prestige-only Rank-Ups. That wasn't the design of Kabam. This whole chase for Prestige was Player-made.
Did players create the metric?
No, but that's like saying the people who designed the Tickle Me Elmo doll designed the stores being stampeded.
That's exactly what they designed tickle me elmo for to hopefully be a top selling toy. That's exactly what kabam used prestige for to make new champs more desirable when aq was the top game mode for a while there every new champ was higher prestige that was by design to get top allys to buy up crystals.
Actually, that's not what they designed Prestige for. If you'll notice, it was the most random Champs that had high Prestige back in the day. If they were high in Prestige, they weren't Top Tier. In fact, for the longest time, they turned down requests to display Prestige because they didn't want to further encourage the Prestige Race. Eventually they offered people what they wanted because it was requested so long. At no point ever did Kabam encourage Players to Rank for Prestige alone.
They created prestige as a metric so intentional or not they created the prestige race. The players figured out the scoring and from there it was a wrap.
Actually from what I remember, they added prestige to AQ scoring as a way to break ties at the top of AQ. Higher the prestige, the harder the defenders are.
The "Prestige Race" is manufactured by the Players. You're going to see the ceiling raise from time to time. That's a result of more Rarities and Ranks being introduced.
By the players? Are you for real?
Yes, I'm for real. Prestige was an internal metric. There was even a time where they didn't display it. It was the Players that decided to maximize it and chase after it. It was the Players who also decided to set rules in Alliances for Prestige-only Rank-Ups. That wasn't the design of Kabam. This whole chase for Prestige was Player-made.
That's not exactly true. While prestige was not always readily visible for individual player accounts, prestige was a visible metric for alliances for AQ scoring. The game specifically rewarded high prestige in AQ, so it is the game that explicitly created the prestige race.
And deliberately so, as it gave the whales something to chase. As you point out, the high prestige champs were not consistently the highest performing champs. If the strongest champs were also the highest prestige, there would be no "prestige race" because the chase for high prestige would be synonymous with the chase for the strongest roster. Prestige would be redundant as a pursuit goal. By making prestige orthogonal to champion strength, anyone who wanted to explicitly chase high prestige for high AQ scoring had to chase it deliberately, and independently of chasing a strong roster. This was expensive, and only helped in one place (AQ), which is precisely why it worked the way it did.
How much players choose to focus on prestige is up to the players, but it would not be a true statement in any way to say that the players invented the prestige chase. Kabam invented the prestige chase, and what's more if players didn't take the bait and actually chase it, Kabam would have either added more rewards to it to make it more valuable or they would have replaced it with something else. Kabam invented the prestige chase because Kabam wanted players to chase something separate from natural roster growth, and prestige was the thing they decided to use for that purpose.
If the whales are only chasing what everyone else is chasing, all their spending gets focused into the same direction everyone else is going, and that makes the gap between them and everyone else larger. By giving them a completely different thing to chase that most other players don't chase, the whales have to chase two things at once, and that means the gap between the whales and everyone else for all non-prestige purposes decreases. That's the purpose of prestige. It is in effect a way to do something that seems contradictory and impossible: to give big spenders a lot for their money while also giving them less of what most players care about.
I suppose that's a different perspective. I still think there were extremes that Players took that chase which were not the intended goal of Prestige. That may fall under the way Players choose to play, but I find it self-afacing to say that was Kabam's design. It was an overall metric that measured the average Alliance's strength to determine difficulty and Rewards. Still is, of course. No one told Alliances to start mandating the Ranking choices of Members, and hiring based on Prestige alone. Further to that, I would find it hard-pressed to consider they want Players to value only one aspect of the Champs they produce. You're right in that sense. It's something else to chase, but I'd say the mouse came before the cat decided to chase it to the mouse hole. Personal opinion.
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