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Are Kabam devs happy with the Banquet results?

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    FunnyDudeFunnyDude Posts: 491 ★★★★
    edited January 5
    DNA3000 said:

    FunnyDude said:

    DNA3000 said:

    FunnyDude said:

    To me, economy system is the low-hanging fruit

    That's even worse than when I called Crashed a burning bush.
    Tell me, how difficult it is to fix the potion price, how difficult it is to change the dropping rate of Banquet crystal, more difficult than design a champion?
    Technically, both of those are equally easy. Just type some words. Unless you want to do it correctly, of course.

    Once upon a time, I worked on a custom reward system for an MMO. When you got right down to it, all I had to do was pick four numbers. That's it, just four numbers. It took me about two weeks to pick those four numbers, because they had to be the right four numbers. And I actually spent a couple months thinking about the problem before I was hired to actually work on it, so in a sense I spent almost three months thinking about those four numbers. In the same game I proposed a complete rework of a power system set; roughly the equivalent of making half of a champion in MCOC (on the non-art side). That took me about three days of thought.

    Changing almost anything in the game economy is just changing numbers on a spreadsheet. It takes just seconds to do that. Unless you feel the need to get those numbers right. If it was as easy as you seem to think it is, game companies wouldn't need economy designers.

    They actually have an open position for another one, specifically to work on MCOC. Maybe you should consider applying. With you there, in a week we could have the entire game economy "fixed."
    Sorry I just saw this reply, but this is an interesting one so I'd like to reply
    "HELL NO" about "They have an open position"
    I have a very good job and I get paid very well, I don't need pay check from Kabam, I can buy all the deals without blinking my eyes for once if they are reasonable. Yes, I'm a whale, but I'm not stupid and I wouldn't spend my money on something is nonsense.

    So basically you are saying fixing economy system of a game is difficult, somehow I agree (I was a game designer at some point, but I quit because I don't enjoy games anymore if I work on games, and I can make more money on something else), but if you are professional then you should know fixing things can be incremental, devs should take baby steps and listen carefully from users. Back to my question, how difficult is it to add some reasonable milestone rewards for Banquet, what kind of disasters can happen if Kabam fix the potion prices, which is a problem for 2 years?

    Don't just say it took you three days or three weeks to figure out 4 numbers, I know a lot about games and wouldn't buy it.

  • Options
    ItsClobberinTimeItsClobberinTime Posts: 4,063 ★★★★★
    GroundedWisdom said:

    I'm still wondering what had to be fixed with the GBC Drop Rates.

    I have every strong 6* champ in the game awakened and at r3 and above already, many players are on the same boat as me. Tell me, what do 6* shards t2a and t5b do for me (those were my most common pulls out of the GBCs) at this point in the game? If you don't see what had to be fixed in the GBC drop rates for endgame players I don't know what to tell you.
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    StatureStature Posts: 426 ★★★
    xLunatiXx said:

    Cvlr said:

    Kabam Crashed said:

    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.


    3- The fact that ppl overall opened more crystal that last year is obvious, you needed to open more than last year to get all the milestones. I don't think these numbers match reality about how community feel with this event.

    I think it's a combination of your point, and what Crashed said: summoners had more units when coming into this event.

    Now he didn't say why but we all know why: cyber weekend was a disappointment as well. And even if banquet was a disappointment for most, we know most people have difficulties saving their hard earned units till let's say next 4th July event and just went for the banquet anyway. (I personally chose to save for longer cause the ceiling for offers is no longer 18k and we're going to see the first valiant offers next July).

    So I think what happened is a combination of : harder to reach milestones + massive amount of units available as a consequence of disappointing cyber weekend.
    Summoners have more units because new modes have opened up paths to faster resource acquisition. The BG store has been a big addition allowing for faster champ acquisition and rank up than preceding years. Without BG, 7-stars could have probably been delayed by 6-12 months at least.
  • Options
    TerminatrixTerminatrix Posts: 1,825 ★★★★★
    winterthur said:

    Paragon and Valiant, gets Supreme Banquet Crystal with items catering to their level of progression.

    👊🏾 It's as simple as that!
  • Options
    ItsClobberinTimeItsClobberinTime Posts: 4,063 ★★★★★
    Ironman3000 said:

    ItsClobberinTime said:

    Kabam Crashed said:

    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.
    What got me is that they released Necro in November, which gave the new Valiant title, then didn't reward the few players who got Valiant in the Banquet. An extra milestone or two for Val players, that would have been tuned for the most end-game players, would have gone a long way.
    The event needs to be progression based, period. The solo milestones and the GBCs at least should be cause the gap obviously keeps getting bigger after every year (something they've acknowledged thankfully) and they can't just keep unifying the entire playerbase without screwing over some players which was evident this year.
  • Options
    GroundedWisdomGroundedWisdom Posts: 36,376 ★★★★★
    How do you make it progression-based? The heart of the Event has always been an Alliance Event, even back to the days of Gifting. It's about celebrating the holidays with your teammates. It's unfortunate that people have ruined the giving aspect, but it's still a group effort.
    How do you justify my 300 Units yielding more than other Players, and us still playing for the same common goal?
  • Options
    ItsClobberinTimeItsClobberinTime Posts: 4,063 ★★★★★
    GroundedWisdom said:

    How do you make it progression-based? The heart of the Event has always been an Alliance Event, even back to the days of Gifting. It's about celebrating the holidays with your teammates. It's unfortunate that people have ruined the giving aspect, but it's still a group effort.
    How do you justify my 300 Units yielding more than other Players, and us still playing for the same common goal?

    They don't need to change the alliance event but the solo one and the GBCs absolutely need to change. Kabam has already acknowledged the gap is becoming waaay too big (I'm sure you read their reply above). I don't know what or how cause I'm not a game developer and I don't know how much the game's economy will shift by the time next Banquet arrives but something needs to be done regarding progression and they have acknowledged it.
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    BringPopcornBringPopcorn Posts: 3,499 ★★★★★
    edited January 5
    GroundedWisdom said:

    How do you make it progression-based? The heart of the Event has always been an Alliance Event, even back to the days of Gifting. It's about celebrating the holidays with your teammates. It's unfortunate that people have ruined the giving aspect, but it's still a group effort.
    How do you justify my 300 Units yielding more than other Players, and us still playing for the same common goal?

    ... Come on dude... If you have UCs and Cavs in your alliance, progression is clearly not something that matters...
    Its not about more or less, its about being suitable.
    Yay they allowed selling T5B and T2A just to give me more T5B and T2A i didnt need in the 1st place.
  • Options
    GroundedWisdomGroundedWisdom Posts: 36,376 ★★★★★
    BringPopcorn said:

    GroundedWisdom said:

    How do you make it progression-based? The heart of the Event has always been an Alliance Event, even back to the days of Gifting. It's about celebrating the holidays with your teammates. It's unfortunate that people have ruined the giving aspect, but it's still a group effort.
    How do you justify my 300 Units yielding more than other Players, and us still playing for the same common goal?

    ... Come on dude... If you have UCs and Cavs in your alliance, progression is clearly not something that matters...
    Its not about more or less, its about being suitable.
    Alliances come in all different forms. Some are at different places in the game.
  • Options
    BringPopcornBringPopcorn Posts: 3,499 ★★★★★
    GroundedWisdom said:

    BringPopcorn said:

    GroundedWisdom said:

    How do you make it progression-based? The heart of the Event has always been an Alliance Event, even back to the days of Gifting. It's about celebrating the holidays with your teammates. It's unfortunate that people have ruined the giving aspect, but it's still a group effort.
    How do you justify my 300 Units yielding more than other Players, and us still playing for the same common goal?

    ... Come on dude... If you have UCs and Cavs in your alliance, progression is clearly not something that matters...
    Its not about more or less, its about being suitable.
    Alliances come in all different forms. Some are at different places in the game.
    I agree; but this is no longer a gifting event. Its Banquet and you buy your own crystals. The alliance event and milestones were fine, maybe even the solo ones. The content of the crystal was terrible.
  • Options
    ItsClobberinTimeItsClobberinTime Posts: 4,063 ★★★★★
    BringPopcorn said:

    GroundedWisdom said:

    How do you make it progression-based? The heart of the Event has always been an Alliance Event, even back to the days of Gifting. It's about celebrating the holidays with your teammates. It's unfortunate that people have ruined the giving aspect, but it's still a group effort.
    How do you justify my 300 Units yielding more than other Players, and us still playing for the same common goal?

    ... Come on dude... If you have UCs and Cavs in your alliance, progression is clearly not something that matters...
    Its not about more or less, its about being suitable.
    Yay they allowed selling T5B and T2A just to give me more T5B and T2A i didnt need in the 1st place.
    Exactly this too, I have never seen a Paragon with an account my size playing with UCs or Cavs. Why would anyone even do that unless you're semi-retired but at that point you probably don't even care about the game or spending so you won't even participate in the Banquet event.
This discussion has been closed.