If kabam is making more money throughout the year, then they don't need to rely on Banquet/Cyber weekend/July 4th to make money. If they don't rely on those events for money, then we hopefully won't see a repeat of last J4 which was so disgustingly OP that people like Seatin who hadn't played for 2 years could just drop money on J4 and be caught up with all the top people who have been grinding all the tough content the last 2 years.
The problem with big sales events is they are high risk high reward. You miss just once and you can take a huge hit: just ask retail if they actually like Black Friday.
Kabam never intended revenue to be concentrated into a few gigantic sales. That sort of happened organically, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure they would never have allowed it to happen if they saw where it was going. Deemphasizing the big events and spreading revenue out more evenly throughout the year is something I'm pretty sure they are keen to do. Whether that was an explicit goal of the structure of the banquet event or not is something I don't know, but in general that's something that is likely to happen over time.
It might seem silly to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there are good reasons to think that any revenue they might have lost by not going all-in on the banquet event will be revenue they eventually get elsewhere. It is the same logic that surrounds boycotts. One of the biggest problems with boycotts, besides the fact that they are never as universally applied as most people think they are, is that they are often completely ineffective because they just shift revenue around. If someone decides to "boycott" a game today, and then just spends that money tomorrow, that act is not just ineffective, it is almost invisible. And the people with access to the numbers can see if and when that happens. Spending dips lower than average here, then jumps higher than average there, and it all evens out.
A similar effect can and probably to some extent does happen when players don't spend on one particular event. Some simply don't spend, but others simply shift their spending elsewhere. And even if they do not recover every single penny, having spending be more distributed overall might be a sufficiently useful result that in the long run it might be more healthy for the game if single big event spending is redistributed.
Whether they're happy or not, who knows. The only thing we know is that the event was definitely worse than last year and because of it people didn't whale out as hard as last year, not even close. We'll have to see if they actually change something next Banquet (hopefully make the GBCs progression based cause that was the main reason this Banquet was terrible, it wasn't even the solo or alliance rewards I thought those were alright)
It was terrible, i stopped opening crystals cause of the overflow of t2a and t3b.. and useless 6* shards... Everything that is not progressing based is usually bad; this one was terrible. Low % chance for 750 7* shards?.. agh
It seems an Uncollected player disagrees with us, nvm the event was great... 🤣
Yeah, damn those UC and Cavs with 6r3s still stuck at GM
They know what's up, even though they're still stuck in ultra nerfed Act 6 they know what's up 💀
Kabam NEED to get things together, maybe hire someone who is at High Paragon/Valiant level to have an input on this or actually listen to the content creators feedback.
The idea that if only Kabam listened to "us" things would be better is hilariously naive. Not only do they have players of all progressions in the CCP who they listen to constantly, they have a similar range of employees actively involved in these decisions. They've hired top tier players as well.
As someone who converses with the developers regularly, and sees the chatter between players in the CCP and elsewhere, the notion that there's a bunch of insulated Kabam developers hopelessly ignorant of the genius players who could fix their game if only they listened to them is a hysterical fiction. First of all, there's no general consensus about how the rewards should work in the game, or for that matter anything else. There are players who think the banquet was hopelessly lame. There are players of all progressions who think it was perfectly fine. There are developers who think it should be different than what it was. Reasonable people can have differing opinions and perspectives on how these things should work, and what we get, not just with the banquet but everywhere, is a consensus compromise between a lot of different requirements and priorities, adjudicated by the designers who ultimately have to make the final decisions on things.
There's no voice here that is unrepresented there. When people here say Kabam should listen, they don't actually mean listen. They mean obey. And when they say they should listen to "the players" they almost always have one particular player in mind. I don't agree with every decision Kabam makes, and there's been many times I've been critical of certain aspects of the game, but there's no group of players I can think of that I would vote to hand control of the future of the game to, outside of the hands it is currently in.
And not because I think they are better players or smarter designers or anything like that. Just because they have the track record. For years people have been saying things like "they need to get it together" or "the game's going downhill" or "if they don't do this the game won't be around much longer." And yet, MCOC is a nine year old game that is still making hundreds of millions of dollars a year with hundreds of thousands of active players and millions of people still downloading the game and is still in active development. How many of those are there? And what do I attribute that to? I don't think it is the game play, there are lots of games with similar game play. And not the Marvel license: over the time I've been playing MCOC the graveyard of dead Marvel games is filled beyond capacity. In my opinion, its the game economy. The thing that people complain about the most, that people say Kabam is most out of touch about, that no one thinks Kabam ever gets right, is probably its single biggest strength, and always has been. That's the thing I wouldn't trust in any other hands, especially any player who thinks they know better.
The in-game economy has shifted in a weird way, and its based on inflation. Kabam as kept the price of units the same since starting the game, maybe one can argue it changed with the introduction of the summoner store but its minimal. The only way to adjust to inflation without changing the price of units is lowering the value that those units can acquire. I believe that's the reason behind CM and Banquet being so bad, they can't charge more money for units, so the decrease the value of them (also no reason to increase the price of something that most players farm for free)
That’s not how inflation works. The cost of coding one bundle is the same as coding any other bundle. It doesn’t cost Kabam any more money to sell one bundle than any other.
The deals were “so bad” because Kabam appears to want to shift the primary means of progression to be more content-oriented, supplemented by spending, rather than it being spending-oriented, supplemented by content. I think this is a good shift long term for the health of the game and player morale, although it might sting in the short term as we acclimate to it.
Yeah and i bet their salaries are paid in coding and eat coding for dinner...
How does devaluing units help pay salaries? Majority of the company's revenues likely come from unit sales since that is most valuable in-game currency.
You are right about inflation, in terms that it is easier to grind units now than it was 2-3 years ago due to roster expansion (making Arena milestones easier to achieve). Banquet this year was probably a reflection of the fact that there are too many units sloshing around. Despite all the complaints a lot of people hit all the solo milestones. That didn't even guarantee top 10% ranking even with extra milestones and a lot more unit investment required vs. last year.
Hopefully, between CW, Banquet and Necropolis a lot of units have been drained. Revive farm nerf will balance out some of the unit availability as new content comes out.
You answered your own question?... Majority of revenue comes from unit sales, if the value of what units can buy is reduced then your units are not as valuable are they? Odin is the same price as before 3100 units for 99 bucks, now what you can buy with 3100 units is not even close of what 3100 units were worth a year ago. You think readjusting the milestones for GGCs, readjusting the unit milestones for 4th and CM and increasing the limits of money deals are just a coincidence?
In absolute terms what you can buy with 3100 units today is miles ahead of what you could buy last year which was better than what you could buy the year before. All the things you talk about are units driven, that's not the same as driving down the value of units. What you are seeing is an effort to streamline the usage of units and probably reduce incentives to hoard them as the last couple of years the best use of units have to save for the big sales.
It has been repeatedly said that the main use of in-game units should be for content clearing, so the direction of recent changes are hardly a surprise. A reset was needed and that is what has happened. Unless there is a significant decline in engagement metrics over the next 6 months, I don't think one should expect a big change in J4, CW or the next Banquet event. Apart from players who are already Valiants, I don't think anyone should expect significant r3 materials from J4 sales either. I might be wrong and two bad quarters may lead to a change in strategy but as thing stand units are better used for progression currently.
The in-game economy has shifted in a weird way, and its based on inflation. Kabam as kept the price of units the same since starting the game, maybe one can argue it changed with the introduction of the summoner store but its minimal. The only way to adjust to inflation without changing the price of units is lowering the value that those units can acquire. I believe that's the reason behind CM and Banquet being so bad, they can't charge more money for units, so the decrease the value of them (also no reason to increase the price of something that most players farm for free)
That’s not how inflation works. The cost of coding one bundle is the same as coding any other bundle. It doesn’t cost Kabam any more money to sell one bundle than any other.
The deals were “so bad” because Kabam appears to want to shift the primary means of progression to be more content-oriented, supplemented by spending, rather than it being spending-oriented, supplemented by content. I think this is a good shift long term for the health of the game and player morale, although it might sting in the short term as we acclimate to it.
Yeah and i bet their salaries are paid in coding and eat coding for dinner...
How does devaluing units help pay salaries? Majority of the company's revenues likely come from unit sales since that is most valuable in-game currency.
You are right about inflation, in terms that it is easier to grind units now than it was 2-3 years ago due to roster expansion (making Arena milestones easier to achieve). Banquet this year was probably a reflection of the fact that there are too many units sloshing around. Despite all the complaints a lot of people hit all the solo milestones. That didn't even guarantee top 10% ranking even with extra milestones and a lot more unit investment required vs. last year.
Hopefully, between CW, Banquet and Necropolis a lot of units have been drained. Revive farm nerf will balance out some of the unit availability as new content comes out.
You answered your own question?... Majority of revenue comes from unit sales, if the value of what units can buy is reduced then your units are not as valuable are they? Odin is the same price as before 3100 units for 99 bucks, now what you can buy with 3100 units is not even close of what 3100 units were worth a year ago. You think readjusting the milestones for GGCs, readjusting the unit milestones for 4th and CM and increasing the limits of money deals are just a coincidence?
In absolute terms what you can buy with 3100 units today is miles ahead of what you could buy last year which was better than what you could buy the year before. All the things you talk about are units driven, that's not the same as driving down the value of units. What you are seeing is an effort to streamline the usage of units and probably reduce incentives to hoard them as the last couple of years the best use of units have to save for the big sales.
It has been repeatedly said that the main use of in-game units should be for content clearing, so the direction of recent changes are hardly a surprise. A reset was needed and that is what has happened. Unless there is a significant decline in engagement metrics over the next 6 months, I don't think one should expect a big change in J4, CW or the next Banquet event. Apart from players who are already Valiants, I don't think anyone should expect significant r3 materials from J4 sales either. I might be wrong and two bad quarters may lead to a change in strategy but as thing stand units are better used for progression currently.
Which mean units are overwhelmingly devalued in that scenario. What content exactly is there to clear? Oh sure necropolis exploration- but then what? 8.4 in a few months? Then who knows how long until we get “new content” - If units are reduced to revives, then over a year they are going to be some of the most worthless items in the game. This banquet nerf of units better not be the pattern going forward. Meaningful purchases with units better return.
The in-game economy has shifted in a weird way, and its based on inflation. Kabam as kept the price of units the same since starting the game, maybe one can argue it changed with the introduction of the summoner store but its minimal. The only way to adjust to inflation without changing the price of units is lowering the value that those units can acquire. I believe that's the reason behind CM and Banquet being so bad, they can't charge more money for units, so the decrease the value of them (also no reason to increase the price of something that most players farm for free)
That’s not how inflation works. The cost of coding one bundle is the same as coding any other bundle. It doesn’t cost Kabam any more money to sell one bundle than any other.
The deals were “so bad” because Kabam appears to want to shift the primary means of progression to be more content-oriented, supplemented by spending, rather than it being spending-oriented, supplemented by content. I think this is a good shift long term for the health of the game and player morale, although it might sting in the short term as we acclimate to it.
Yeah and i bet their salaries are paid in coding and eat coding for dinner...
How does devaluing units help pay salaries? Majority of the company's revenues likely come from unit sales since that is most valuable in-game currency.
You are right about inflation, in terms that it is easier to grind units now than it was 2-3 years ago due to roster expansion (making Arena milestones easier to achieve). Banquet this year was probably a reflection of the fact that there are too many units sloshing around. Despite all the complaints a lot of people hit all the solo milestones. That didn't even guarantee top 10% ranking even with extra milestones and a lot more unit investment required vs. last year.
Hopefully, between CW, Banquet and Necropolis a lot of units have been drained. Revive farm nerf will balance out some of the unit availability as new content comes out.
You answered your own question?... Majority of revenue comes from unit sales, if the value of what units can buy is reduced then your units are not as valuable are they? Odin is the same price as before 3100 units for 99 bucks, now what you can buy with 3100 units is not even close of what 3100 units were worth a year ago. You think readjusting the milestones for GGCs, readjusting the unit milestones for 4th and CM and increasing the limits of money deals are just a coincidence?
In absolute terms what you can buy with 3100 units today is miles ahead of what you could buy last year which was better than what you could buy the year before. All the things you talk about are units driven, that's not the same as driving down the value of units. What you are seeing is an effort to streamline the usage of units and probably reduce incentives to hoard them as the last couple of years the best use of units have to save for the big sales.
It has been repeatedly said that the main use of in-game units should be for content clearing, so the direction of recent changes are hardly a surprise. A reset was needed and that is what has happened. Unless there is a significant decline in engagement metrics over the next 6 months, I don't think one should expect a big change in J4, CW or the next Banquet event. Apart from players who are already Valiants, I don't think anyone should expect significant r3 materials from J4 sales either. I might be wrong and two bad quarters may lead to a change in strategy but as thing stand units are better used for progression currently.
Lol for content clearing, if that was the main purpose this game wouldn't have lasted this long. Units have always had a gambling purpose. Recent changes will have a big impact in the value of units, not only for revives, but content like raids. I am pretty sure 4th of july will have 7r3 mats and even close to say there will be AGs available, followed by ridiculous priced sig stones. Explain to me then why the unit sale milestones have increased? Why on the 4th a "trophy champ" was worth spending about 18k units to acquire and converted into a RNG based 300 unit chance or a rough estimate of 10k units for milestones? They can't raise the price of units, they are taking a different route, devalue what you can get with them.
If kabam is making more money throughout the year, then they don't need to rely on Banquet/Cyber weekend/July 4th to make money. If they don't rely on those events for money, then we hopefully won't see a repeat of last J4 which was so disgustingly OP that people like Seatin who hadn't played for 2 years could just drop money on J4 and be caught up with all the top people who have been grinding all the tough content the last 2 years.
The problem with big sales events is they are high risk high reward. You miss just once and you can take a huge hit: just ask retail if they actually like Black Friday.
Kabam never intended revenue to be concentrated into a few gigantic sales. That sort of happened organically, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure they would never have allowed it to happen if they saw where it was going. Deemphasizing the big events and spreading revenue out more evenly throughout the year is something I'm pretty sure they are keen to do. Whether that was an explicit goal of the structure of the banquet event or not is something I don't know, but in general that's something that is likely to happen over time.
It might seem silly to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there are good reasons to think that any revenue they might have lost by not going all-in on the banquet event will be revenue they eventually get elsewhere. It is the same logic that surrounds boycotts. One of the biggest problems with boycotts, besides the fact that they are never as universally applied as most people think they are, is that they are often completely ineffective because they just shift revenue around. If someone decides to "boycott" a game today, and then just spends that money tomorrow, that act is not just ineffective, it is almost invisible. And the people with access to the numbers can see if and when that happens. Spending dips lower than average here, then jumps higher than average there, and it all evens out.
A similar effect can and probably to some extent does happen when players don't spend on one particular event. Some simply don't spend, but others simply shift their spending elsewhere. And even if they do not recover every single penny, having spending be more distributed overall might be a sufficiently useful result that in the long run it might be more healthy for the game if single big event spending is redistributed.
So in simple words you are saying kabam nerfed the banquet event to "earn less" so that they can make up for the "loss" they desired to make by "earning"from different events throughout the year?
If kabam is making more money throughout the year, then they don't need to rely on Banquet/Cyber weekend/July 4th to make money. If they don't rely on those events for money, then we hopefully won't see a repeat of last J4 which was so disgustingly OP that people like Seatin who hadn't played for 2 years could just drop money on J4 and be caught up with all the top people who have been grinding all the tough content the last 2 years.
The problem with big sales events is they are high risk high reward. You miss just once and you can take a huge hit: just ask retail if they actually like Black Friday.
Kabam never intended revenue to be concentrated into a few gigantic sales. That sort of happened organically, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure they would never have allowed it to happen if they saw where it was going. Deemphasizing the big events and spreading revenue out more evenly throughout the year is something I'm pretty sure they are keen to do. Whether that was an explicit goal of the structure of the banquet event or not is something I don't know, but in general that's something that is likely to happen over time.
It might seem silly to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there are good reasons to think that any revenue they might have lost by not going all-in on the banquet event will be revenue they eventually get elsewhere. It is the same logic that surrounds boycotts. One of the biggest problems with boycotts, besides the fact that they are never as universally applied as most people think they are, is that they are often completely ineffective because they just shift revenue around. If someone decides to "boycott" a game today, and then just spends that money tomorrow, that act is not just ineffective, it is almost invisible. And the people with access to the numbers can see if and when that happens. Spending dips lower than average here, then jumps higher than average there, and it all evens out.
A similar effect can and probably to some extent does happen when players don't spend on one particular event. Some simply don't spend, but others simply shift their spending elsewhere. And even if they do not recover every single penny, having spending be more distributed overall might be a sufficiently useful result that in the long run it might be more healthy for the game if single big event spending is redistributed.
So in simple words you are saying kabam nerfed the banquet event to "earn less" so that they can make up for the "loss" they desired to make by "earning"from different events throughout the year?
If kabam is making more money throughout the year, then they don't need to rely on Banquet/Cyber weekend/July 4th to make money. If they don't rely on those events for money, then we hopefully won't see a repeat of last J4 which was so disgustingly OP that people like Seatin who hadn't played for 2 years could just drop money on J4 and be caught up with all the top people who have been grinding all the tough content the last 2 years.
The problem with big sales events is they are high risk high reward. You miss just once and you can take a huge hit: just ask retail if they actually like Black Friday.
Kabam never intended revenue to be concentrated into a few gigantic sales. That sort of happened organically, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure they would never have allowed it to happen if they saw where it was going. Deemphasizing the big events and spreading revenue out more evenly throughout the year is something I'm pretty sure they are keen to do. Whether that was an explicit goal of the structure of the banquet event or not is something I don't know, but in general that's something that is likely to happen over time.
It might seem silly to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there are good reasons to think that any revenue they might have lost by not going all-in on the banquet event will be revenue they eventually get elsewhere. It is the same logic that surrounds boycotts. One of the biggest problems with boycotts, besides the fact that they are never as universally applied as most people think they are, is that they are often completely ineffective because they just shift revenue around. If someone decides to "boycott" a game today, and then just spends that money tomorrow, that act is not just ineffective, it is almost invisible. And the people with access to the numbers can see if and when that happens. Spending dips lower than average here, then jumps higher than average there, and it all evens out.
A similar effect can and probably to some extent does happen when players don't spend on one particular event. Some simply don't spend, but others simply shift their spending elsewhere. And even if they do not recover every single penny, having spending be more distributed overall might be a sufficiently useful result that in the long run it might be more healthy for the game if single big event spending is redistributed.
So in simple words you are saying kabam nerfed the banquet event to "earn less" so that they can make up for the "loss" they desired to make by "earning"from different events throughout the year?
If kabam is making more money throughout the year, then they don't need to rely on Banquet/Cyber weekend/July 4th to make money. If they don't rely on those events for money, then we hopefully won't see a repeat of last J4 which was so disgustingly OP that people like Seatin who hadn't played for 2 years could just drop money on J4 and be caught up with all the top people who have been grinding all the tough content the last 2 years.
The problem with big sales events is they are high risk high reward. You miss just once and you can take a huge hit: just ask retail if they actually like Black Friday.
Kabam never intended revenue to be concentrated into a few gigantic sales. That sort of happened organically, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure they would never have allowed it to happen if they saw where it was going. Deemphasizing the big events and spreading revenue out more evenly throughout the year is something I'm pretty sure they are keen to do. Whether that was an explicit goal of the structure of the banquet event or not is something I don't know, but in general that's something that is likely to happen over time.
It might seem silly to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there are good reasons to think that any revenue they might have lost by not going all-in on the banquet event will be revenue they eventually get elsewhere. It is the same logic that surrounds boycotts. One of the biggest problems with boycotts, besides the fact that they are never as universally applied as most people think they are, is that they are often completely ineffective because they just shift revenue around. If someone decides to "boycott" a game today, and then just spends that money tomorrow, that act is not just ineffective, it is almost invisible. And the people with access to the numbers can see if and when that happens. Spending dips lower than average here, then jumps higher than average there, and it all evens out.
A similar effect can and probably to some extent does happen when players don't spend on one particular event. Some simply don't spend, but others simply shift their spending elsewhere. And even if they do not recover every single penny, having spending be more distributed overall might be a sufficiently useful result that in the long run it might be more healthy for the game if single big event spending is redistributed.
So in simple words you are saying kabam nerfed the banquet event to "earn less" so that they can make up for the "loss" they desired to make by "earning"from different events throughout the year?
Kabam NEED to get things together, maybe hire someone who is at High Paragon/Valiant level to have an input on this or actually listen to the content creators feedback.
The idea that if only Kabam listened to "us" things would be better is hilariously naive. Not only do they have players of all progressions in the CCP who they listen to constantly, they have a similar range of employees actively involved in these decisions. They've hired top tier players as well.
As someone who converses with the developers regularly, and sees the chatter between players in the CCP and elsewhere, the notion that there's a bunch of insulated Kabam developers hopelessly ignorant of the genius players who could fix their game if only they listened to them is a hysterical fiction. First of all, there's no general consensus about how the rewards should work in the game, or for that matter anything else. There are players who think the banquet was hopelessly lame. There are players of all progressions who think it was perfectly fine. There are developers who think it should be different than what it was. Reasonable people can have differing opinions and perspectives on how these things should work, and what we get, not just with the banquet but everywhere, is a consensus compromise between a lot of different requirements and priorities, adjudicated by the designers who ultimately have to make the final decisions on things.
There's no voice here that is unrepresented there. When people here say Kabam should listen, they don't actually mean listen. They mean obey. And when they say they should listen to "the players" they almost always have one particular player in mind. I don't agree with every decision Kabam makes, and there's been many times I've been critical of certain aspects of the game, but there's no group of players I can think of that I would vote to hand control of the future of the game to, outside of the hands it is currently in.
And not because I think they are better players or smarter designers or anything like that. Just because they have the track record. For years people have been saying things like "they need to get it together" or "the game's going downhill" or "if they don't do this the game won't be around much longer." And yet, MCOC is a nine year old game that is still making hundreds of millions of dollars a year with hundreds of thousands of active players and millions of people still downloading the game and is still in active development. How many of those are there? And what do I attribute that to? I don't think it is the game play, there are lots of games with similar game play. And not the Marvel license: over the time I've been playing MCOC the graveyard of dead Marvel games is filled beyond capacity. In my opinion, its the game economy. The thing that people complain about the most, that people say Kabam is most out of touch about, that no one thinks Kabam ever gets right, is probably its single biggest strength, and always has been. That's the thing I wouldn't trust in any other hands, especially any player who thinks they know better.
Is this a joke response? I genuinely can't tell 🤣
I've been playing this game for the past 8 years, I speak to people who have also been playing the game for just as long, I follow countless content creators, see the forums on a daily basis and the people who are invested (the people who spend and keep the game alive) generally have the exact same/very similar consensus on things.
The things that Kabam had control over, just offers, cyber weekend offers, banquet event, new aw tactic, BG nodes, potions update, lack of store updates, lack of rewards updates are almost all received negatively by the players that actually have experience, spend money and have a right to have an opinion.
You're telling me all this is exactly how the game should be run? In a way which the most valued players aren't happy with Kabams decision?
I'm saying the games dying or anything like that in the slightest, what am I saying is Kabam is obviously ignoring the player base. example; last BG season had extremely low scores for the GC brackets, current war season has Masters level alliances not even trying which is a combination of **** nodes that the 'devs are happy about' and the extortionate potion situation and now Banquet event has had one the lowest spend in recent years as we can see from 2nd and 1st spending less than 100k between them compared to 120k for just one person last year.
Kabam have done some great things this year, but can and should be doing so much better... and every month they're being told by the player base what they want and getting feedback that goes unheard 🤷♂️
So in simple words you are saying kabam nerfed the banquet event to "earn less" so that they can make up for the "loss" they desired to make by "earning"from different events throughout the year?
That's not what I said. In other discussions I've stated my opinions on the banquet, how there were many factors (as there always are) that went into the decisions surrounding how it was designed.
What I am saying is that the devs don't consider getting tons of revenue from the banquet event to be an all upside no downside thing, and if the net result of the banquet design is that revenue is lower for that one event than it has been in the past, that might not be something they explicitly think is a bad thing. I don't know if they deliberately aimed lower, or just aimed differently and decided to accept that revenue might be lower, but either way I don't think Kabam is judging the success of the banquet event purely in terms of whether it made as much money this year as it did last year.
So in simple words you are saying kabam nerfed the banquet event to "earn less" so that they can make up for the "loss" they desired to make by "earning"from different events throughout the year?
That's not what I said. In other discussions I've stated my opinions on the banquet, how there were many factors (as there always are) that went into the decisions surrounding how it was designed.
What I am saying is that the devs don't consider getting tons of revenue from the banquet event to be an all upside no downside thing, and if the net result of the banquet design is that revenue is lower for that one event than it has been in the past, that might not be something they explicitly think is a bad thing. I don't know if they deliberately aimed lower, or just aimed differently and decided to accept that revenue might be lower, but either way I don't think Kabam is judging the success of the banquet event purely in terms of whether it made as much money this year as it did last year.
I’m not saying Kabam has no good intention, controlling progress is good, what they did is wrong. The community knew it and gave the feedbacks, Kabam didn’t buy it and the results showed the community is right.
In my alliance, 1/3 ppl bought less than 5 crystals, last year spending 2 odins was the minimum.
War tactics are the same, everyone knew it’s horrible when it’s initially online, Kabam didn’t buy it, now see how things going,
This game is very old, those players played game for 5-8 years have way better understanding of game than most testers of Kabam, or even some of new designers. Kabam just don’t respect their feedbacks.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 4 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
Hey! This is a lot better than I expected from anyone on the team, especially from someone I don’t typically see here on the forums. I appreciate your information and communication here! This is very refreshing to me.
You’ve challenged my own thoughts on the banquet. The disappointment I had with my rewards did end up pushing me into the Necropolis, which was objectively better for my account. I’m very excited to get my Road to the Crypt rewards, and I got a decent place in the banquet itself!
Again, I truly appreciate your communication and respect for the player base and their opinions. I know a lot of us can get nasty, and it can be hard.
I’m glad you’re all taking the response seriously and also continuing to work on other issues raised this month.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
This game is very old, those players played game for 5-8 years have way better understanding of game than most testers of Kabam, or even some of new designers. Kabam just don’t respect their feedbacks.
I'm not saying my experience is unique, in fact the opposite: I'm just one player among many. But it is not my place to discuss the involvement of others, so I can only specify my own. Kabam has taken *tons* of my feedback, among many others over the years. They took my feedback (among others) into consideration when rethinking Act design, particularly Act 6 and Act 7. They took my feedback on war costs into consideration when they acted on my recommendation to make war revives free. And they took my feedback on Battlegrounds into consideration both during beta and after releases. I was a very strong advocate for mastery profiles in Battlegrounds. I was a very strong advocate for a low intensity mode for BG that eventually became the Victory track. And I provided specific feedback on BG post-release regarding scoring, seating, and match making, all of which eventually made it into the mode.
Other players have their own specific stories to tell, and the CCP itself has had a lot of impact on how the game exists today. They just don't keep score publicly about every single piece of feedback that makes an impact on the live game. And threads on the forums also make an impact; as someone who references and points out forum threads to the developers I know that they read and incorporate feedback.
What the devs don't do is design by poll. They factor feedback into their decisions. They don't replace their decisions with the opinions of others, as I wouldn't expect them to. I listen to customers, and I incorporate their feedback into my decisions, but no customer tells me what to do. I expect the same from the developers.
You see player feedback and complaints through rose colored glasses. You think they are always right, and the more unified they seem to be, the more right they are. But that's not remotely true. There were more people saying 6* rarity would destroy the game than were saying the banquet sucks. In retrospect, should the devs have acted upon that complaint? More players complained that Uncollected EQ difficulty was a cash grab than complained about the banquet. How quaint that one was. When players said diminishing returns was stupid and would lead to the downfall of the game, they were wrong. When people said the Cyber and J4 sales were pay to win and would destroy the game, they were wrong.
When people don't like something, they have ever right to express that. Their preferences are their own. However, when players extrapolate what bad things will happen if the things they don't like don't change, their batting average is pretty low. In fact, it is worse than random chance. When someone says that something is bad and if it isn't changed here's what even worse thing is going to happen in the future, betting against them will mean you're right the vast majority of the time. It is the safest money around, and I've been around long enough to have been keeping score for over eight years now, since even before 12.0.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
Common Kabam Crashed W
In all seriousness though. This was one of the best kabam responses we've ever gotten on an issue, especially such a heated one as this. Not only was it detailed with explanations behind decisions made, it also had information on the personal thought process of at least 1 dev on the event and for events in the future. Even brief mentions of other hot topics such as AW, AI and other issues that always tend to be avoided
This game is very old, those players played game for 5-8 years have way better understanding of game than most testers of Kabam, or even some of new designers. Kabam just don’t respect their feedbacks.
I'm not saying my experience is unique, in fact the opposite: I'm just one player among many. But it is not my place to discuss the involvement of others, so I can only specify my own. Kabam has taken *tons* of my feedback, among many others over the years. They took my feedback (among others) into consideration when rethinking Act design, particularly Act 6 and Act 7. They took my feedback on war costs into consideration when they acted on my recommendation to make war revives free. And they took my feedback on Battlegrounds into consideration both during beta and after releases. I was a very strong advocate for mastery profiles in Battlegrounds. I was a very strong advocate for a low intensity mode for BG that eventually became the Victory track. And I provided specific feedback on BG post-release regarding scoring, seating, and match making, all of which eventually made it into the mode.
Other players have their own specific stories to tell, and the CCP itself has had a lot of impact on how the game exists today. They just don't keep score publicly about every single piece of feedback that makes an impact on the live game. And threads on the forums also make an impact; as someone who references and points out forum threads to the developers I know that they read and incorporate feedback.
What the devs don't do is design by poll. They factor feedback into their decisions. They don't replace their decisions with the opinions of others, as I wouldn't expect them to. I listen to customers, and I incorporate their feedback into my decisions, but no customer tells me what to do. I expect the same from the developers.
You see player feedback and complaints through rose colored glasses. You think they are always right, and the more unified they seem to be, the more right they are. But that's not remotely true. There were more people saying 6* rarity would destroy the game than were saying the banquet sucks. In retrospect, should the devs have acted upon that complaint? More players complained that Uncollected EQ difficulty was a cash grab than complained about the banquet. How quaint that one was. When players said diminishing returns was stupid and would lead to the downfall of the game, they were wrong. When people said the Cyber and J4 sales were pay to win and would destroy the game, they were wrong.
When people don't like something, they have ever right to express that. Their preferences are their own. However, when players extrapolate what bad things will happen if the things they don't like don't change, their batting average is pretty low. In fact, it is worse than random chance. When someone says that something is bad and if it isn't changed here's what even worse thing is going to happen in the future, betting against them will mean you're right the vast majority of the time. It is the safest money around, and I've been around long enough to have been keeping score for over eight years now, since even before 12.0.
This game is very old, those players played game for 5-8 years have way better understanding of game than most testers of Kabam, or even some of new designers. Kabam just don’t respect their feedbacks.
I'm not saying my experience is unique, in fact the opposite: I'm just one player among many. But it is not my place to discuss the involvement of others, so I can only specify my own. Kabam has taken *tons* of my feedback, among many others over the years. They took my feedback (among others) into consideration when rethinking Act design, particularly Act 6 and Act 7. They took my feedback on war costs into consideration when they acted on my recommendation to make war revives free. And they took my feedback on Battlegrounds into consideration both during beta and after releases. I was a very strong advocate for mastery profiles in Battlegrounds. I was a very strong advocate for a low intensity mode for BG that eventually became the Victory track. And I provided specific feedback on BG post-release regarding scoring, seating, and match making, all of which eventually made it into the mode.
Other players have their own specific stories to tell, and the CCP itself has had a lot of impact on how the game exists today. They just don't keep score publicly about every single piece of feedback that makes an impact on the live game. And threads on the forums also make an impact; as someone who references and points out forum threads to the developers I know that they read and incorporate feedback.
What the devs don't do is design by poll. They factor feedback into their decisions. They don't replace their decisions with the opinions of others, as I wouldn't expect them to. I listen to customers, and I incorporate their feedback into my decisions, but no customer tells me what to do. I expect the same from the developers.
You see player feedback and complaints through rose colored glasses. You think they are always right, and the more unified they seem to be, the more right they are. But that's not remotely true. There were more people saying 6* rarity would destroy the game than were saying the banquet sucks. In retrospect, should the devs have acted upon that complaint? More players complained that Uncollected EQ difficulty was a cash grab than complained about the banquet. How quaint that one was. When players said diminishing returns was stupid and would lead to the downfall of the game, they were wrong. When people said the Cyber and J4 sales were pay to win and would destroy the game, they were wrong.
When people don't like something, they have ever right to express that. Their preferences are their own. However, when players extrapolate what bad things will happen if the things they don't like don't change, their batting average is pretty low. In fact, it is worse than random chance. When someone says that something is bad and if it isn't changed here's what even worse thing is going to happen in the future, betting against them will mean you're right the vast majority of the time. It is the safest money around, and I've been around long enough to have been keeping score for over eight years now, since even before 12.0.
Of course I know Kabam likes you, but Kabam made all decisions right? If you were around, you should remember Kabam reverted some of changes because pushing back from the community, 12.0 almost killed the game. There were so many mistakes Kabam made that can be avoided, if they listened not only to those they like.
If you played long enough you should remember how many they put untested tactics in wars and had to revert those tactics, so yes, they did listen sometimes, but not always, it’s obviously not enough.
I’m not saying the game is not good,, I’m not saying community is always right, I’m saying kabam are still making mistakes, it can be much better if they listen to broader community, economy of the game is a mess, i know it because I completed all the endgame contents by myself and I spent a lot in many events.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
I liked the detailed explanation, I understand the necropolis engagement explanation; but lets be honest, we are comming from a few bad SQs that seemed lazy and lackluster, everest content that FINALLY showed up after YEARS, and a very underwhelming CM and Banquet. It almost feels as if some players were playing a game that rebooted to year 2 since launch. I dunno where the blame falls on, maybe the crazy pace at which 7* advanced since release, I know people who finished inial run of necropolis and hold the r3 gem because they haven't pulled a champ worth using it on... Maybe its just me, the game has been feeling unrewarding.
Of course I know Kabam likes you, but Kabam made all decisions right? If you were around, you should remember Kabam reverted some of changes because pushing back from the community, 12.0 almost killed the game. There were so many mistakes Kabam made that can be avoided, if they listened not only to those they like.
Did they? That's the narrative, right? 12.0 was a disaster, and the players forced them to revert many of the changes in 12.0.
The two largest changes made in 12.0 were diminishing returns and challenge rating (which are kind of parts of a single change). Neither were reverted. The CR table was reduced in magnitude, but otherwise both CR and DR still exist today pretty much exactly as it did in 12.0.
How about the big nerfs to Dr. Strange, Scarlet Witch, and Thor? Were they reverted? Not really. Thor was tweaked after 12.0, but the biggest impact to Thor wasn't even a change to Thor himself, it was a change to the mechanics of armor break, which were not reverted after 12.0 (although it was tweaked in small ways afterwards). Thor's massive armor break mechanics were only possible because of the way armor break worked, and that was eliminated in 12.0 and has never come back.
They did increase Dr. Strange's heal from its ridiculously low level - which I actually recommended at the time - and they also altered Captain America and Parry mechanics - which actually I was the only one mentioning explicitly at the time - but those were relatively small tweaks after the fact. I wouldn't call the Dr. Strange one a reversion, and practically no one cared about the Captain America one.
The devs did listen to the player complaints, and they did try to address some of them, but a lot of player complaints were bizarrely wrong (for example, a very strong complaint was that Challenge Rating was breaking Parry and thus needed to be reverted) and others were addressed not by reverting the changed but by tweaking the changes to be slightly less large in magnitude, often in cases where the change were obvious overkill. They listened to the players, they incorporated their feedback into post 12.0 balancing tweaks, but in no case did they straight up just change their mind and revert a major change.
I'm no one special. I'm not a traditional content creator, I don't publicize the game or advertise it in any useful way. There's no reason for Kabam to "like me" per se. In fact, I'm often a thorn in their side. They don't listen to me because they like me, or because they need to cultivate a relationship with me. They listen because I say intelligible things (and they aren't afraid to read things longer than a tweet). But I am hardly the only player they listen to. There are players who understand alliance war better than I ever will, and they listen to those players. There are players who understand champion balance in this game better than I do, and they listen to those players as well. Besides listening to the playerbase in general, there are dozens, perhaps even hundreds of players they collectively listen to directly in some capacity. They don't listen to those people because they like them. They listen because those players have expertise, and because they can express that expertise in a collaboratively useful way, and they understand that providing advice is not the same thing as having control.
But every issue has two sides. The problem is not failing to listen. The problem is there are always people advocating both sides. And always knowing which side to listen to and which side to ignore is the same thing as omniscience.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
I feel like the intention for banquet was correct, but the execution was a bit off.
I fully agree with keeping necropolis as the best rewards in the game. If it was devalued after 6 months, what would be the point of doing it? However, you can still keep necropolis relevant while tuning up the banquet rewards. Sprinkling in some r4 mats, 7* shards, and t6cc isn’t gonna break the economy. As a paragon player, looking at the milestones and seeing a 3* relic, t2a, and some 5* shards, it feels incredibly underwhelming. The gifted guardians crystal was a great reward for the last milestone, but there was 5000-6000 units of irrelevant materials to get through before getting to the enticing rewards.
I will admit though that Kabam overall had a great year in 2023, and they started being more in tune with the community which a lot of us greatly appreciate.
I know people who finished inial run of necropolis and hold the r3 gem because they haven't pulled a champ worth using it on... Maybe its just me, the game has been feeling unrewarding.
I did exactly this, because one R3 does nothing for my account. When I explore I will use both even if I need to spend it on mediocre champs, because the title rewards I miss by holding are too valuable and my 7* roster is too severely underdeveloped to wait.
I know people who finished inial run of necropolis and hold the r3 gem because they haven't pulled a champ worth using it on... Maybe its just me, the game has been feeling unrewarding.
I did exactly this, because one R3 does nothing for my account. When I explore I will use both even if I need to spend it on a mediocre champs, because the title rewards I miss by holding are too valuable.
This is completely subjective though. They choose to hold the gem so the game feels unrewarding. If they had a champ to use the gem on then it would feel rewarding to them. It doesn't take away the fact that the gem is the reward and the player is chagning its value after obtaining it.
Thanks for the detailed explanation Crashed. While im fairly neutral to banquet in general I do appreciate the insight into its intended design and whether you guys hit your intended targets.
Also, necropolis and the RTTC are probably the best things to happen to the game in quite some time.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year. This is not me making excuses, but just trying to be as transparent as possible about what I and the others responsible for the event were thinking as we learn from it and move into 2024.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
I gotta be honest here, I wasn't expecting a response like this one (especially after all the feedback from that part of the playerbase that felt alienated) so thank you. Two things I want to say: one I'm glad you guys are acknowledging the issue here and why so many of us were disappointed. It wasn't that the event was terrible in general, it simply wasn't good enough for endgame players, lower players obviously still got all their money's worth. Two, I think releasing Necropolis so close to Banquet was a bad idea in general. Both of them are a huge deal, and most of the players would've wanted to do both for obvious reasons. Necropolis, Abyss 2.0 but without bs nodes and Banquet well, it was great last year so of course endgame players had high hopes. What you guys did was basically make us choose one of them (if you can even call it choosing cause I don't think we even had a choice, the difference in rewards was just off the charts and Necropolis was the obvious choice) but I wanted both, and I'm sure most players did too.
Hey everyone. I thought this would be a good place to share some of my closing thoughts on Banquet this year.
Hey Crashed—this was really nice and a valuable post mortem. Appreciate the time you took to write this out—I know you have plenty to do, but you should come around forums whenever you can. Good stuff.
Kabam NEED to get things together, maybe hire someone who is at High Paragon/Valiant level to have an input on this or actually listen to the content creators feedback.
The idea that if only Kabam listened to "us" things would be better is hilariously naive. Not only do they have players of all progressions in the CCP who they listen to constantly, they have a similar range of employees actively involved in these decisions. They've hired top tier players as well.
As someone who converses with the developers regularly, and sees the chatter between players in the CCP and elsewhere, the notion that there's a bunch of insulated Kabam developers hopelessly ignorant of the genius players who could fix their game if only they listened to them is a hysterical fiction. First of all, there's no general consensus about how the rewards should work in the game, or for that matter anything else. There are players who think the banquet was hopelessly lame. There are players of all progressions who think it was perfectly fine. There are developers who think it should be different than what it was. Reasonable people can have differing opinions and perspectives on how these things should work, and what we get, not just with the banquet but everywhere, is a consensus compromise between a lot of different requirements and priorities, adjudicated by the designers who ultimately have to make the final decisions on things.
There's no voice here that is unrepresented there. When people here say Kabam should listen, they don't actually mean listen. They mean obey. And when they say they should listen to "the players" they almost always have one particular player in mind. I don't agree with every decision Kabam makes, and there's been many times I've been critical of certain aspects of the game, but there's no group of players I can think of that I would vote to hand control of the future of the game to, outside of the hands it is currently in.
And not because I think they are better players or smarter designers or anything like that. Just because they have the track record. For years people have been saying things like "they need to get it together" or "the game's going downhill" or "if they don't do this the game won't be around much longer." And yet, MCOC is a nine year old game that is still making hundreds of millions of dollars a year with hundreds of thousands of active players and millions of people still downloading the game and is still in active development. How many of those are there? And what do I attribute that to? I don't think it is the game play, there are lots of games with similar game play. And not the Marvel license: over the time I've been playing MCOC the graveyard of dead Marvel games is filled beyond capacity. In my opinion, its the game economy. The thing that people complain about the most, that people say Kabam is most out of touch about, that no one thinks Kabam ever gets right, is probably its single biggest strength, and always has been. That's the thing I wouldn't trust in any other hands, especially any player who thinks they know better.
Is this a joke response? I genuinely can't tell 🤣
I've been playing this game for the past 8 years, I speak to people who have also been playing the game for just as long, I follow countless content creators, see the forums on a daily basis and the people who are invested (the people who spend and keep the game alive) generally have the exact same/very similar consensus on things.
The things that Kabam had control over, just offers, cyber weekend offers, banquet event, new aw tactic, BG nodes, potions update, lack of store updates, lack of rewards updates are almost all received negatively by the players that actually have experience, spend money and have a right to have an opinion.
You're telling me all this is exactly how the game should be run? In a way which the most valued players aren't happy with Kabams decision?
I'm saying the games dying or anything like that in the slightest, what am I saying is Kabam is obviously ignoring the player base. example; last BG season had extremely low scores for the GC brackets, current war season has Masters level alliances not even trying which is a combination of **** nodes that the 'devs are happy about' and the extortionate potion situation and now Banquet event has had one the lowest spend in recent years as we can see from 2nd and 1st spending less than 100k between them compared to 120k for just one person last year.
Kabam have done some great things this year, but can and should be doing so much better... and every month they're being told by the player base what they want and getting feedback that goes unheard 🤷♂️
There's also another fundamental flaw with this line of thinking, and in my 9 years, I've seen it made endless times concerning Offers. Kabam has reiterated many, many times that not all Offers will appeal to all Players. This isn't some kind of copy-and-paste response. Some Offers are quite literally not meant to appeal to all Players. There's a tendency to think that everything is targeted at where we're personally at, and if we think it's garbage then it must be garbage for everyone. The belief is because we're the "most experienced", then we know what's best for all Players. This is a bit misguided because we don't speak for where all Players are at, and we can't speak for what appeals to all Players. One person's s&#^ is another person's stepping stone. Popular opinion only goes so far, and you need to take the demographic into account, and where they're at in the game.
Comments
Kabam never intended revenue to be concentrated into a few gigantic sales. That sort of happened organically, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure they would never have allowed it to happen if they saw where it was going. Deemphasizing the big events and spreading revenue out more evenly throughout the year is something I'm pretty sure they are keen to do. Whether that was an explicit goal of the structure of the banquet event or not is something I don't know, but in general that's something that is likely to happen over time.
It might seem silly to look a gift horse in the mouth, but there are good reasons to think that any revenue they might have lost by not going all-in on the banquet event will be revenue they eventually get elsewhere. It is the same logic that surrounds boycotts. One of the biggest problems with boycotts, besides the fact that they are never as universally applied as most people think they are, is that they are often completely ineffective because they just shift revenue around. If someone decides to "boycott" a game today, and then just spends that money tomorrow, that act is not just ineffective, it is almost invisible. And the people with access to the numbers can see if and when that happens. Spending dips lower than average here, then jumps higher than average there, and it all evens out.
A similar effect can and probably to some extent does happen when players don't spend on one particular event. Some simply don't spend, but others simply shift their spending elsewhere. And even if they do not recover every single penny, having spending be more distributed overall might be a sufficiently useful result that in the long run it might be more healthy for the game if single big event spending is redistributed.
As someone who converses with the developers regularly, and sees the chatter between players in the CCP and elsewhere, the notion that there's a bunch of insulated Kabam developers hopelessly ignorant of the genius players who could fix their game if only they listened to them is a hysterical fiction. First of all, there's no general consensus about how the rewards should work in the game, or for that matter anything else. There are players who think the banquet was hopelessly lame. There are players of all progressions who think it was perfectly fine. There are developers who think it should be different than what it was. Reasonable people can have differing opinions and perspectives on how these things should work, and what we get, not just with the banquet but everywhere, is a consensus compromise between a lot of different requirements and priorities, adjudicated by the designers who ultimately have to make the final decisions on things.
There's no voice here that is unrepresented there. When people here say Kabam should listen, they don't actually mean listen. They mean obey. And when they say they should listen to "the players" they almost always have one particular player in mind. I don't agree with every decision Kabam makes, and there's been many times I've been critical of certain aspects of the game, but there's no group of players I can think of that I would vote to hand control of the future of the game to, outside of the hands it is currently in.
And not because I think they are better players or smarter designers or anything like that. Just because they have the track record. For years people have been saying things like "they need to get it together" or "the game's going downhill" or "if they don't do this the game won't be around much longer." And yet, MCOC is a nine year old game that is still making hundreds of millions of dollars a year with hundreds of thousands of active players and millions of people still downloading the game and is still in active development. How many of those are there? And what do I attribute that to? I don't think it is the game play, there are lots of games with similar game play. And not the Marvel license: over the time I've been playing MCOC the graveyard of dead Marvel games is filled beyond capacity. In my opinion, its the game economy. The thing that people complain about the most, that people say Kabam is most out of touch about, that no one thinks Kabam ever gets right, is probably its single biggest strength, and always has been. That's the thing I wouldn't trust in any other hands, especially any player who thinks they know better.
It has been repeatedly said that the main use of in-game units should be for content clearing, so the direction of recent changes are hardly a surprise. A reset was needed and that is what has happened. Unless there is a significant decline in engagement metrics over the next 6 months, I don't think one should expect a big change in J4, CW or the next Banquet event. Apart from players who are already Valiants, I don't think anyone should expect significant r3 materials from J4 sales either. I might be wrong and two bad quarters may lead to a change in strategy but as thing stand units are better used for progression currently.
Units have always had a gambling purpose.
Recent changes will have a big impact in the value of units, not only for revives, but content like raids.
I am pretty sure 4th of july will have 7r3 mats and even close to say there will be AGs available, followed by ridiculous priced sig stones.
Explain to me then why the unit sale milestones have increased? Why on the 4th a "trophy champ" was worth spending about 18k units to acquire and converted into a RNG based 300 unit chance or a rough estimate of 10k units for milestones?
They can't raise the price of units, they are taking a different route, devalue what you can get with them.
I've been playing this game for the past 8 years, I speak to people who have also been playing the game for just as long, I follow countless content creators, see the forums on a daily basis and the people who are invested (the people who spend and keep the game alive) generally have the exact same/very similar consensus on things.
The things that Kabam had control over, just offers, cyber weekend offers, banquet event, new aw tactic, BG nodes, potions update, lack of store updates, lack of rewards updates are almost all received negatively by the players that actually have experience, spend money and have a right to have an opinion.
You're telling me all this is exactly how the game should be run? In a way which the most valued players aren't happy with Kabams decision?
I'm saying the games dying or anything like that in the slightest, what am I saying is Kabam is obviously ignoring the player base. example; last BG season had extremely low scores for the GC brackets, current war season has Masters level alliances not even trying which is a combination of **** nodes that the 'devs are happy about' and the extortionate potion situation and now Banquet event has had one the lowest spend in recent years as we can see from 2nd and 1st spending less than 100k between them compared to 120k for just one person last year.
Kabam have done some great things this year, but can and should be doing so much better... and every month they're being told by the player base what they want and getting feedback that goes unheard 🤷♂️
What I am saying is that the devs don't consider getting tons of revenue from the banquet event to be an all upside no downside thing, and if the net result of the banquet design is that revenue is lower for that one event than it has been in the past, that might not be something they explicitly think is a bad thing. I don't know if they deliberately aimed lower, or just aimed differently and decided to accept that revenue might be lower, but either way I don't think Kabam is judging the success of the banquet event purely in terms of whether it made as much money this year as it did last year.
In my alliance, 1/3 ppl bought less than 5 crystals, last year spending 2 odins was the minimum.
War tactics are the same, everyone knew it’s horrible when it’s initially online, Kabam didn’t buy it, now see how things going,
This game is very old, those players played game for 5-8 years have way better understanding of game than most testers of Kabam, or even some of new designers. Kabam just don’t respect their feedbacks.
I want to start by saying the team absolutely understands your concerns and we do care about them. The part of our community that engages in dialogue on our forums, YouTube, Reddit and other social media represents a slice of our most engaged, long-term fans. We absolutely want to surprise and delight you, and in the case of Banquet 2023, it’s clear for many of you that didn’t happen.
I think there are a few reasons why things ended up this way. The first was, as I said on one of our livestreams, we wanted to do everything possible to encourage people to do Necropolis by moving rewards away from offers and into content. We tuned rewards through the end of this year and into the first part of next year accordingly. This was successful, our engagement with Necropolis has exceeded even our highest expectations. However I do agree, despite this, that portions of the Banquet event ended up undertuned, particularly the rank-up materials in the milestones and ranked rewards.
The second reason is that internally, we valued the limited pool 7-star Gifted Guardians crystal higher than a lot of you did. To us, it carried enough value that it would make the milestones worth it. Overall, the player base seems to have agreed (more on this later), but clearly for some that was not the case.
The third reason is, as many have said here and elsewhere, the Banquet event is the one event that isn’t separated by progression, and over time, the gap from low progression to high progression increases. I don’t think I need to say any more about this, you all seem to have identified this already.
The fourth reason is that the Banquet crystals themselves are deliberately designed to not be great for our top players, but I think aiming for a certain mix of filler and high-quality chase rewards we still ended up slightly undertuned. There will always be filler in these crystals, that’s just the reality of the situation. If a player doesn’t like that, then the event isn’t for them. However about 83% of the crystal was filler for top players this year, and I do agree that’s too high. We went through something similar last year with the inclusion of T4CC but I think that this year there was an additional challenge. For top players 6-star champion acquisition materials are basically worthless and 7-star shards were still too valuable to make up a meaningful portion of the crystal. Without champion acquisition options to fill up the crystal, we ended up in a tough place.
With that all said I do want to address a couple concerns that I don’t agree with. The first is this idea that the people who tune these events don’t understand the game. I have seen various suggestions that we should hire more high-tier players to work on this content. This wasn’t a problem in this case. Of the seven people who worked on this event, two of us were Valiant before the start of December, two are high Paragon players who have completed Necropolis, and the remaining three are all either Paragon or Thronebreaker. If anything, compared to the population of our players, our team is top-heavy. We knew generally where this event would land and that the event wasn’t as good for our end game players compared to last year, relative to the current state of the game. Again, I think the main difference in perception is the value we placed on the Gifted Guardians crystals. The value we placed on that crystal took up too much of the “reward budget” and directly resulted in the rank-up resources being undertuned in the milestones. We also could have included some T4A in ranked rewards below the top 90, and probably some more 6-star 4 to 5 rank-up gems.
The second is that, despite a negative response from our engaged community, Banquet 2023 was broadly very successful. I’ll be honest, after seeing the initial reaction on these forums I was pretty worried. But in the end, players opened a lot of Banquet Crystals, approximately 34% more than last year. Part of this was that players had more Units going into the event this year, but a bigger reason was that, despite common belief, the Banquet event is actually one of our most broad-based sales events of the year - it’s one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from the top players. I know this is counterintuitive in some ways, given what it takes to climb the leaderboard, but it also makes sense when you think about how good the event was for lower-progression players. Broadly, the player base as a whole did think the Gifted Guardians crystal was worth completing the milestones for. So, if you want to argue the event was bad because it left many top players without the rewards they expected, by all means, make that argument, and I’m sympathetic to it. But if you want to argue it was bad because it wasn’t successful from the business and participation side you are going to lose that argument as it’s based on the false premise that the event failed, which it very much did not.
Finally, bringing things back to the question at hand: Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results? I can’t speak for everyone on the team, but I would say overall I’m neutral. On the plus side, we got more players into Necropolis, had a successful event with broad-based participation, and didn’t substantially devalue very much economically aside from the six Gifted Guardians. We still have a huge roster of unreleased 7-star champions, rank 3 materials and other champion items like sig stones and awakening gems that are holding substantial value. You could see a world where Banquet introduced 7-star awakening gems or sig stones, and it made more money in the short term, and players were happier, but long-term we were in worse shape. On the downside, a lot of our most engaged players are pretty unhappy right now, with the Banquet event compounding concerns about Alliance War, defender AI, the meta event and other legitimate issues we need to address. What I can say in closing is that we are listening and we are learning. We aim to surprise and delight as many of you as possible as we get into this new year.
You’ve challenged my own thoughts on the banquet. The disappointment I had with my rewards did end up pushing me into the Necropolis, which was objectively better for my account. I’m very excited to get my Road to the Crypt rewards, and I got a decent place in the banquet itself!
Again, I truly appreciate your communication and respect for the player base and their opinions. I know a lot of us can get nasty, and it can be hard.
I’m glad you’re all taking the response seriously and also continuing to work on other issues raised this month.
Happy New Year!
Jinx
Other players have their own specific stories to tell, and the CCP itself has had a lot of impact on how the game exists today. They just don't keep score publicly about every single piece of feedback that makes an impact on the live game. And threads on the forums also make an impact; as someone who references and points out forum threads to the developers I know that they read and incorporate feedback.
What the devs don't do is design by poll. They factor feedback into their decisions. They don't replace their decisions with the opinions of others, as I wouldn't expect them to. I listen to customers, and I incorporate their feedback into my decisions, but no customer tells me what to do. I expect the same from the developers.
You see player feedback and complaints through rose colored glasses. You think they are always right, and the more unified they seem to be, the more right they are. But that's not remotely true. There were more people saying 6* rarity would destroy the game than were saying the banquet sucks. In retrospect, should the devs have acted upon that complaint? More players complained that Uncollected EQ difficulty was a cash grab than complained about the banquet. How quaint that one was. When players said diminishing returns was stupid and would lead to the downfall of the game, they were wrong. When people said the Cyber and J4 sales were pay to win and would destroy the game, they were wrong.
When people don't like something, they have ever right to express that. Their preferences are their own. However, when players extrapolate what bad things will happen if the things they don't like don't change, their batting average is pretty low. In fact, it is worse than random chance. When someone says that something is bad and if it isn't changed here's what even worse thing is going to happen in the future, betting against them will mean you're right the vast majority of the time. It is the safest money around, and I've been around long enough to have been keeping score for over eight years now, since even before 12.0.
If you played long enough you should remember how many they put untested tactics in wars and had to revert those tactics, so yes, they did listen sometimes, but not always, it’s obviously not enough.
I’m not saying the game is not good,, I’m not saying community is always right, I’m saying kabam are still making mistakes, it can be much better if they listen to broader community, economy of the game is a mess, i know it because I completed all the endgame contents by myself and I spent a lot in many events.
I liked the detailed explanation, I understand the necropolis engagement explanation; but lets be honest, we are comming from a few bad SQs that seemed lazy and lackluster, everest content that FINALLY showed up after YEARS, and a very underwhelming CM and Banquet. It almost feels as if some players were playing a game that rebooted to year 2 since launch.
I dunno where the blame falls on, maybe the crazy pace at which 7* advanced since release, I know people who finished inial run of necropolis and hold the r3 gem because they haven't pulled a champ worth using it on...
Maybe its just me, the game has been feeling unrewarding.
The two largest changes made in 12.0 were diminishing returns and challenge rating (which are kind of parts of a single change). Neither were reverted. The CR table was reduced in magnitude, but otherwise both CR and DR still exist today pretty much exactly as it did in 12.0.
How about the big nerfs to Dr. Strange, Scarlet Witch, and Thor? Were they reverted? Not really. Thor was tweaked after 12.0, but the biggest impact to Thor wasn't even a change to Thor himself, it was a change to the mechanics of armor break, which were not reverted after 12.0 (although it was tweaked in small ways afterwards). Thor's massive armor break mechanics were only possible because of the way armor break worked, and that was eliminated in 12.0 and has never come back.
They did increase Dr. Strange's heal from its ridiculously low level - which I actually recommended at the time - and they also altered Captain America and Parry mechanics - which actually I was the only one mentioning explicitly at the time - but those were relatively small tweaks after the fact. I wouldn't call the Dr. Strange one a reversion, and practically no one cared about the Captain America one.
The devs did listen to the player complaints, and they did try to address some of them, but a lot of player complaints were bizarrely wrong (for example, a very strong complaint was that Challenge Rating was breaking Parry and thus needed to be reverted) and others were addressed not by reverting the changed but by tweaking the changes to be slightly less large in magnitude, often in cases where the change were obvious overkill. They listened to the players, they incorporated their feedback into post 12.0 balancing tweaks, but in no case did they straight up just change their mind and revert a major change.
I'm no one special. I'm not a traditional content creator, I don't publicize the game or advertise it in any useful way. There's no reason for Kabam to "like me" per se. In fact, I'm often a thorn in their side. They don't listen to me because they like me, or because they need to cultivate a relationship with me. They listen because I say intelligible things (and they aren't afraid to read things longer than a tweet). But I am hardly the only player they listen to. There are players who understand alliance war better than I ever will, and they listen to those players. There are players who understand champion balance in this game better than I do, and they listen to those players as well. Besides listening to the playerbase in general, there are dozens, perhaps even hundreds of players they collectively listen to directly in some capacity. They don't listen to those people because they like them. They listen because those players have expertise, and because they can express that expertise in a collaboratively useful way, and they understand that providing advice is not the same thing as having control.
But every issue has two sides. The problem is not failing to listen. The problem is there are always people advocating both sides. And always knowing which side to listen to and which side to ignore is the same thing as omniscience.
I fully agree with keeping necropolis as the best rewards in the game. If it was devalued after 6 months, what would be the point of doing it? However, you can still keep necropolis relevant while tuning up the banquet rewards. Sprinkling in some r4 mats, 7* shards, and t6cc isn’t gonna break the economy. As a paragon player, looking at the milestones and seeing a 3* relic, t2a,
and some 5* shards, it feels incredibly underwhelming. The gifted guardians crystal was a great reward for the last milestone, but there was 5000-6000 units of irrelevant materials to get through before getting to the enticing rewards.
I will admit though that Kabam overall had a great year in 2023, and they started being more in tune with the community which a lot of us greatly appreciate.
Also, necropolis and the RTTC are probably the best things to happen to the game in quite some time.
Two things I want to say: one I'm glad you guys are acknowledging the issue here and why so many of us were disappointed. It wasn't that the event was terrible in general, it simply wasn't good enough for endgame players, lower players obviously still got all their money's worth.
Two, I think releasing Necropolis so close to Banquet was a bad idea in general. Both of them are a huge deal, and most of the players would've wanted to do both for obvious reasons. Necropolis, Abyss 2.0 but without bs nodes and Banquet well, it was great last year so of course endgame players had high hopes. What you guys did was basically make us choose one of them (if you can even call it choosing cause I don't think we even had a choice, the difference in rewards was just off the charts and Necropolis was the obvious choice) but I wanted both, and I'm sure most players did too.
Dr. Zola
Kabam has reiterated many, many times that not all Offers will appeal to all Players. This isn't some kind of copy-and-paste response. Some Offers are quite literally not meant to appeal to all Players. There's a tendency to think that everything is targeted at where we're personally at, and if we think it's garbage then it must be garbage for everyone. The belief is because we're the "most experienced", then we know what's best for all Players. This is a bit misguided because we don't speak for where all Players are at, and we can't speak for what appeals to all Players. One person's s&#^ is another person's stepping stone.
Popular opinion only goes so far, and you need to take the demographic into account, and where they're at in the game.