Year End Review

Jinxesaxe

With 2023 coming to a close, I think it’s nice to look back on the year we all had, and reflect upon it. I feel like posting this here will also act as feedback from at least one player to the game team, and hopefully some of it will be taken into consideration! I’d also love to hear everyone else’s opinions on the year!

My thoughts on 2023 in MCOC:

New champions have made the game so much better. Everyone has a level of uniqueness and a place in the contest (even if that place is being trashed by the community). Best year for champion design ever.

Champion buffs were a step above, rebalance did its job, and Hulk has become a staple for a lot of people in the contest, as he should be.

7* Rollout was amazing. The paragon crystal event sucked, but was a nice touch to the actual release of the new champions. Pool was great at launch.

7* Titan is mid at best with how rare it is, but I’m so excited every time I’m able to open one or at close to opening one.

Ascension is perfect and I love ascending champs. I just did Kitty as my fourth. It allows champs falling out of relevance to keep up, like Galan.

Events wise, I loved the BrutalDLX challenge. Caps Enlistment should happen every year to boost engagement, it was super fun. Banquet sucked.

Paragauntlet is mid, but rewarding to a player like me. I get the criticism it receives and agree. Maybe they make it so it’s just a single clear of TBEQ?

Necropolis is super healthy for the game, mastery point in completion, a r3, all of it. I’ll only ever do my single path, but the rewards are great for anyone going for exploration.

7 For 7 and the Guillotine’s Trial were amazing and perfect. Super duper fun, not super challenging, and rewarding enough to be motivated to do it, but not feel obligated to do it.

The live streams are great! Didn’t go to the brawl, will try in a few years when I’ll be able to actually enjoy it. Looked cool though!

Bugs have been insane. Made the game almost unplayable at points. Hoping things get better in 2024.

Side Quests; the worst part of this year. We had two fun side quests (imo), being April’s safe cracking quest, and July’s Hades Rifts. Mojos Choice was boring and bugged, dating game is always bad, incursion side quests suck, May was fine, June was bugged and monotonous, Gladiator quest was terrible, October was fun but would’ve been better if we could use the pre-fights, November sucked, and December sucked.

Overall, a good year for MCOC in general. The SQ needs work next year, but I am totally looking forward to what we receive.

Jinx

ESF

The OP is very interesting! I read every word and encourage others to leave even a single thought or two — I like hearing what others think of the game and its general state.

For me…I will do two highs and one low, speaking as a mid-tier player (definitely not the best, probably not the worst):

Highs:

1. I didn’t think any single year could top 2019’s releases — for real, that year was full of bangers, especially after Diablo and Mr. Fantastic got buffed —- but I agree with the OP: 2023, to me, is the best year of releases from start to finish.

I truly believe, as someone who just wanders the Battlerealm testing kits, that one or two years from now when a ton more people get their hands on any number of these kits, get them ranked up and in the rotation, people will see how crazy some of these kits are. The hard counters alone…woof.

By my count, there are AT LEAST five kits from 2023 — I won’t name them, because the higher-end players sometimes find a way around kits that I don’t see — that, as soon as they get into the hands of maybe 75 percent of the player base, will become almost Instant Bans in Battlegrounds, once people really sit down and get comfortable with the mechanics

2. The OG Iron Man release/kit was truly a highlight of my year. I admire that kit more and more almost every single day because it checked off almost every box I wanted, as a longtime fan of the character and game. So glad it happened

The Low:

1. For me personally, I am pretty disappointed that, as best I can tell, we went another year without SOME, REPEAT SOME, gold output being adjusted for where the game is now, heading into 2024 — and believe me, I am not one to go around crying for gold every single month. I absolutely understand it is meant to be a finite resource and people are supposed to make hard choices about how to use it.

At the same time: We are in the age of 7-stars and higher ranked 6-stars. But some stuff is still tuned for gold payouts like we are still in the age of 4-stars — has anyone seriously looked at the Daily Quests, for example? I don’t think those things have been tuned for gold in at least, what? Five years? Maybe never?

Again, I am not saying you should get 1 billion gold for a completing a run through of the Daily Quests. But at some point, isn’t it worth player development and engagement to make it so the low-spenders/F2P can run a daily quest and get, IDK, 50,000 gold and a few thousand T5 CC/basic shards and a few bricks of T6 ISO for completing a retuned Daily Quest? Just so they don’t have to spend a billion hours in Arena?

I say that as someone who does spend and does log in pretty much every single day.

But my thing is this: I never worry about the top, IDK, 5 percent of the game. The best of the best, the highest spenders.

I worry about the casual players, the people who want to play for fun and get a cool character they like and want to put in some time to rank them…then get smacked with an 800,000 gold rank up tax to R4 a six-star and they are just like “What the hell is this?” WHEN THEY STILL HAVE 55 LEVELS OF GOLD AND ISO TO GO.

Again, I am not saying Gold has to become a resource that requires no effort and no hard choices. Getting gold absolutely should require effort and some hard choices.

But I truly don’t believe that where we are right now — right now, heading into 2023 — that the balance is there between “helping as many casual players as possible who are willing to put in consistent effort” and “how much it costs to rank up characters” with “accessible modes that aren’t life or death or get you kicked out of alliances for failure.”

Just my thoughts about what I still believe is an amazing game!