Act 4 and 5 Buff

It was just announced that Act 4 and 5 are getting a whole new rework.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/342508/acts-4-and-5-are-getting-revamped#latest

Thoughts? This might be my inspiration to go for full exploration if this makes the content more enjoyable. I'm at least glad they're making updating content a priority. Acts 4 and 5 have just been a chore to get through before getting to the modern point in the game for a while now.

Comments

SpideyFunko

but… why?
they’re challenging at that point in the game and with how five stars have become easier and easier to acquire it’s only gotten easier- there’s no need to change it at all

MrSakuragi

Seems like they’re just moving the frustration from act 5 to act 6 for summoners who have progressed faster in the game than their skills have matured. There will always be a point where progression needs to slow down.

Furrymoosen

What a load of misused time.

Graves_3

Can you just send the rewards by an in game mail and start everyone at book 2 chapter 1 already!!

benshb

I don't really understand why. Newcomers already have a much easier time completing these contents with 5 and 6* champs.

Meanwhile endgame is so dry it could catch fire by a cough from a spicy gyros.

Secret_Gamer

Imo, it's really dumb and unasked for. Eventually every single player will be at the same story progression at some point and apparently any slight form of challenge in story is unwelcome nowadays.
Most people reach Act 5 and 6 within weeks or even days after starting, so what's the point of making it even easier?

Josh2507

Act 4 absolutely does not need a nerf. Maestro is a little tricky to dex on that sp1, but that’s basically the only hard fight.

Act 5 has the bane node, which is the bane of my existence. But also a necessary challenge.

All this is going to do is make the transition to Act 6 a rougher experience for new players.

Wozzle007

Act 4 has already been nerfed! How easy does Kabam want the content to be? I remember going through act 4 with a 3* Superior Iron man as an MVP (I know, but he seriously was) as used his regen to get through. Think I had either a 3 or 4* Gamora as well. I genuinely don’t understand how there are pinch points in this level of content that anyone can argue feels unfair. It should be challenging. There should be some blocks that make players think and choose who to rank up to get through a path (or luckily pull a Hercules). OG act 4 was my favourite content in the game and this honestly makes me feel a little sad. Where are players going to improve their skills now? Same with act 5.

With the strength of champions available now, and at a much higher star level, it baffles me how anyone feels this content difficulty should be nerfed and that Kabam is going to actually do it.

Surely the answer from Kabam for anyone stuck on this content is to do Apothecary every day until you have the revives to do it, or purchase units and unitman through it.

All this will lead to is eventual calls to nerf act 6 (again), nerf act 7, nerf act 8, nerf EOP. It’s all unfair. Then these same who’ve been spoon fed the content will complain Battle Ground nodes are unfair, because they’ve never learned how to play with challenging nodes or make decision on what champion to use for different situations.

TyEdge

“We need new players to progress really really fast because we have to have passable replacements for players who give up.”

^that’s what this reads like to me.

Eb0ny-O-M4w

The faster/easier they progress in these acts, the faster they will be eligible in BG's mode and more are the accounts we will be able to stomp in there.

Ashacekar

That is technically nerf not buff.

GroundedWisdom

“We need new players to progress really really fast because we have to have passable replacements for players who give up.”

^that’s what this reads like to me.

That's a strange assertion.

I_tell_no_tales_1

“We need new players to progress really really fast because we have to have passable replacements for players who give up.”

^that’s what this reads like to me.

Agreed
But once the old players start leaving, the game pretty much dies.

Fit_Fun9329

It’s in line with take away the act 6 challenge at all. So act 4-6 is easy peasy then

Ercarret

I just read the announcement and while I don't know the extent of the changes (Act 4 doesn't really seem like a piece of content that needs to be streamlined in my eyes), I do agree that there are certain things that would benefit from a do-over. All of 5.3 is just bad, for example. It's probably the content I hated the most in the entire game. Those class restrictions were truly awful and just stopped me dead in my tracks when I was a little n00b years ago. I remember ultimately just pushing through with the champions I had and ignoring the 50% damage reduction. Everything took way too long to get through, and there were six quests of that complete BS to get through just to get to 5.4. Not to mention exploring it all.

I really hope they remove that class-based damage reduction.

As for the other quests in Act 4 and 5, I'm more hesitant about those changes. While I do agree that especially Act 5 is a trial by fire, I also think that Summoners come out all the better for it in the end. It's a hard but, in my opinion, ultimately necessary lesson.

Giantwalrus56

This seems more detrimental than beneficial

DNA3000

Imo, it's really dumb and unasked for.

By us.

These rebalancing passes on progression content like the Story arc content are rarely if ever done just because people think they should be done. That's not just people as in us the players, that's also people as in the developers as well. These things are almost always data driven. They don't ask if there are pain points in Act 4. The look at the playthru data and find pain points exhibited by the players running it.

None of us are running Act 4, except in replay alts where we know everything and are obliterating it. It is the new players that don't know anything and can't use the champs they are getting and have no idea what the optimal play through paths for the game are that are running Act 4 and Act 5. A lot of them are much more casual players than any of us now, or even any of us were back then. We're the survivors. 90% of the players that were with us when we played through Act 4 are gone. We're the much more knowledgeable, dogged, experienced ones that remain.

I think we keep forgetting, and many of us straight up deny, that this game keeps adding new players. I've seen people straight up state that this game is only for us, the veterans. If that were true, the game would also be in maintenance mode or dead. Games as a service, and this game in particular, are constantly losing old players and adding new players. There are almost certainly more players that joined the game in the last year than there are veterans of the game from the first four years. The early game must be appropriate to them for the game to survive long enough for them to become the grizzled veterans of tomorrow.

The players who play today have it so much easier than we did. But the are also not playing the same game we did. We did not see eight year veterans tower over us when we were playing through Act 4 and 5. We did not have guides to the Collector, but we also did not have players wondering what's taking us so long to beat the Collector. We did not have alliances tell us that since we hadn't completed Act 6.1 yet we were not worthy of inclusion. When we were playing through Act 4 and 5, that *was* the game. Today, that's just the prelude to the game. The expectations then were that we should be slogging through it. The expectations today is that players should be blazing through it to get to the post-UC game as quickly as possible.

In a perfect world, everyone would go through the game the same way we did. But we don't live in that perfect world. In this world, what it took us a year to do has to be doable by the average player in a month. And when I say "average player" I don't mean the average player among us. I mean the average player among the hundred thousand players who picked up the game in the last few months, most of which we are going to lose to some other new shiny thing. Some of those people are going to be the next Youtubers, the next end gamers, the next whales.

But only if we don't lose them in a week because they run into a weird roadblock that seems to make the game pointless while giants step on them.

Now, if they were just nerfing the Collector, I could see how some players could interpret that as a bad thing. We want players to progress, but we can't do that at the expense of them progressing without the skills necessary to survive in the Cav+ game. But that's not what I see the announcement saying. What it looks like to me is that they are taking a lot of the roster gating and reducing or mitigating it, and removing some of the inconvenient aspects of the content that do not in any way affect player combat skill or roster strength. Removing camera lock is removing a point of pain that can turn off players, but doesn't make them weaker players. Reducing things like role reversal and class gates sounds like allowing players who have the skill to complete the content but relatively narrow rosters (which is a side effect of low level progression acceleration - we have stronger champs, but not as many of them as we are completing content) to have an easier time maintaining a steady rate of progression through the content. Removing the gate keys allows players to do the paths in the content in the order they prefer, which gives them more options on how to play through and compete the content without actually making the content significantly easier in general.

We still have roster checks in Act 6 and beyond, but that's also where progression slows down for most players and gives them time to build those rosters. What these changes seem to be doing is eliminating the need to start dealing with roster checks when rosters are still in the 4* to 5* range, and much of that roster growth will get mooted by the rarity gates in Act 6. I think that's a reasonable compromise.

Overall, I'm not opposed to these changes. I have no idea if they were necessary, but I'm assuming the data says so, because otherwise the devs wouldn't bother. I think streamlining and optimizing the lower levels of progression makes sense, given how much higher the top of progression is now and given how important it is to compress the lower levels so that players get to the more interesting higher tiers and we have a better chance of retaining them. It tells me the devs still believe the game has significant longevity potential, and in fact it also says enough new players continue to pick up the game and play it that it is worth doing this at all, which is a sign the game is not on its last legs. That's a positive sign for the game.

SkyeAtticus

I feel confident that this is how they nerf the 5.3.6 energy farm, unannounced, and when someone notices they'll say "it was a known bug".

Vegeta9001

So, they're bumping the rewards up, and only sending the new ones to people who trceby completed it. Granted they'll hardly be useful to me,but it's the principal, I defeated a technically harder version and get potentially worse rewards.

DNA3000

So, they're bumping the rewards up, and only sending the new ones to people who trceby completed it. Granted they'll hardly be useful to me,but it's the principal, I defeated a technically harder version and get potentially worse rewards.

Then why is it when content comes out there's a mad dash to do it immediately? If there's a non-zero chance that the rewards could be higher in the future, why not wait? What's the harm? The rewards will either be the same or higher. They are very unlikely to be worse.

Because time is part of the value of the rewards. Rewards earned today are worth more than rewards earned tomorrow, even if they are identical in on-paper value, because the true value of rewards is the time spent getting the benefit of those rewards. The rewards we earned in the past were used to gain other rewards, and so on. They in effect earned interest over time.

Tomorrow's players are going to earn more than we did in early content, because on long time scales the game is going to compress the early game to make room for the later game. What we did when it was the only content will be just a tiny bit of all the content in the future. The "principle" of "if I got X, no one else is allowed to get more than that" simply doesn't hold in a game like this on long enough time scales. This is not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

Aomine_Daiki10

RIP energy refills I won't be surprised.

Standardman1989

For me there are other concerns about the game than act 4 act 5 to take care of.

[Deleted User]

A lot of fair points, but it's definitely a welcome change in my eyes. Exploring Act 4 has been pointless for years now, even just completing it feels like nothing more than an energy dump. To me, it's a lot less about whether the content is difficult and more about whether it's worth doing, which Act 4 and 5 just aren't, aside from the fact that it just allows you to move on from them.

Drago_von_Drago

I fear this is another sign of a shift in focus to Battlegrounds and away from quest based content.

Uncollected is the minimum to access Battlegrounds and this will make it easier to get to that progression level.

The first warning sign to me was the Battlegrounds store being the best in the game by far and the other stores not being updated. The second sign was the lack of any endgame content for a long time. The third sign was the announcement that 8.3 will be cut in half. And now they are spending time remaking mid-game content in place of delivering endgame content.

XFREEDOMX

The faster/easier they progress in these acts, the faster they will be eligible in BG's mode and more are the accounts we will be able to stomp in there.

And more "How unfair BG matchmaking is" posts are going to show up! LOL

TyEdge

I fear this is another sign of a shift in focus to Battlegrounds and away from quest based content.

Uncollected is the minimum to access Battlegrounds and this will make it easier to get to that progression level.

The first warning sign to me was the Battlegrounds store being the best in the game by far and the other stores not being updated. The second sign was the lack of any endgame content for a long time. The third sign was the announcement that 8.3 will be cut in half. And now they are spending time remaking mid-game content in place of delivering endgame content.

Dang, dude. You didn’t have to be so…right.

That’s a bummer.

[Deleted User]

I fear this is another sign of a shift in focus to Battlegrounds and away from quest based content.

This is a major worry for me, but seeing how much effort they put into Act 8 so far, I've got some hope that that's not the case. 8.1 was easily the most enjoyable content for me in ages. If 8.3 is a disappointment, I'll lose a good bit of faith in Kabam's content direction.

DNA3000

I fear this is another sign of a shift in focus to Battlegrounds and away from quest based content.

Uncollected is the minimum to access Battlegrounds and this will make it easier to get to that progression level.

The first warning sign to me was the Battlegrounds store being the best in the game by far and the other stores not being updated. The second sign was the lack of any endgame content for a long time. The third sign was the announcement that 8.3 will be cut in half. And now they are spending time remaking mid-game content in place of delivering endgame content.

The shift towards accelerating players to UC as the defacto start of the bulk of the game started long before Battlegrounds existed. And end game caliber content in this game tends to come in waves: people are literally always complaining that the devs are not working on end game content except when we're flooded with it.

I believe this is people seeing what they wish to see.

Dukenpuke

I wish they did this before I got Elder's Bane on all 3 of my accounts.

TyEdge

I fear this is another sign of a shift in focus to Battlegrounds and away from quest based content.

Uncollected is the minimum to access Battlegrounds and this will make it easier to get to that progression level.

The first warning sign to me was the Battlegrounds store being the best in the game by far and the other stores not being updated. The second sign was the lack of any endgame content for a long time. The third sign was the announcement that 8.3 will be cut in half. And now they are spending time remaking mid-game content in place of delivering endgame content.

The shift towards accelerating players to UC as the defacto start of the bulk of the game started long before Battlegrounds existed. And end game caliber content in this game tends to come in waves: people are literally always complaining that the devs are not working on end game content except when we're flooded with it.

I believe this is people seeing what they wish to see.

Shooting stars was highly rewarding content, but it wasn’t hard or time consuming. In terms of this game having “stuff to do,” we’ve had one chapter of story mode in 2023, shooting stars, and the EoP finale/Carina.

I literally can’t think of the last time we had a bonus event along the lines of a boss rush or celebrity challenge. I am choosing not to count Lunar New Year for that. It’s not relevant to the type of content we’re discussing.

Recent summers have included Gauntlet, EOP and SOP. On top of that, we’ve lost functional war and AQ has become fatally unrewarding due to their stubborn refusal to update the glory store.

And I think you’ve said things that are at odds with each other - that we see what we want to see and that we’re flooded at times with endgame content. That’s ridiculous. You can track major releases and see when they were releasing story content and a variant a week apart or a month apart.

Some of those floods were designed to help the most advanced players be first in line for new progression titles or materials, like Carina v2 and 7.4.