Future State of Game
SagaChampion
Member Posts: 1,345 ★★★
What do you think about future of the game?
Summoners Opinions💡
Summoners Opinions💡
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The recent side quests have also given plenty of decent rewards, and were definitely an improvement from the often repetitive side quests of early 2023. There has also been the release of Necropolis and the Starry-Eyed side quests, which were nice additions for endgame players.
When it comes to bugs, there's still a fair amount of frustration, but it's definitely better than last year's situation. I'm quite confident with the game currently, and I think it's just gonna get better from here.
6 months is how long it took for this company to figure out how to give people back a few mastery points, and their new Raid mode has been an embarrassing flop of a game mode nobody likes.
I think Kabam should go back to basics, fix the AI, and stick with what made the game great to begin with.
They are trying to take on too much and in the process, the game as a whole has suffered tremendously.
Going for it would be to do it in less than a week.
That said - 2024 has started in a very rough place. Raids are currently a train wreck. AW tactics are brutal. The AI is atrocious right now. All of which make the game not fun. We went through a period in this game several years ago where the devs seemingly just tried to make things extremely difficult and punishing rather than challenging and fun. I thought we had gone past that point, but it seems we are returning to a past era. So I'm a bit worried about the direction.
I won't rehash in depth all the issues with raids, but briefly - my biggest two issues: (1) why do i suddenly need to log in every single day, (2) RNG in the loot boxes.
AW + Raids have me thinking its time to find a BG focused alliance for a while - play when I want and not be frustrated with the above stated issues.
Every reward seems stale, even the last 2 paid events (CM and Banquet) were extremely underwhelming.
Conqueror's minions have roughly the same power level as 6* R1 champs or between 5* R4 and 5* R5 champs. Which means I would expect a conqueror EQ map to provide a moderate challenge to a average Conqueror player who brought a mix of 6* R1 and 5* R4-ish champs, maybe with an R3 or two thrown in there, or something similar.
This does not mean that the average player who brought such a team would easily cruise through the map, nor does it mean all Conqueror players should be able to do it easily. The game does not guarantee that all Conqueror and higher players can do Conqueror EQ easily, nor would all Thronebreaker players find TB difficulty to be easy. Some would find it easy, some would find it very difficult, but the average player would find it a moderately difficult challenge with a sufficiently strong team scaled to the content.
The question is: does the average Conqueror player have a roster that can assemble a team of 6* R1s and 5* R3s and R4s to do Conqueror EQ? When it first came out, of course not. But these days? I suspect that is in fact the average firepower possessed by Conqueror players. When I did these precise calculations for Proven difficulty, I presented them to the devs and asked two question: one: did these estimates seem reasonable, and two: does that imply that the average players are actually bringing those kinds of teams into the content these days? The answer to both questions was Yes.
There is no shame in wanting to play casually, even hyper casually. If that's what you enjoy doing, you should continue to do it. But the game is scaled to the average players, not the extreme ones, and Conqueror difficulty in EQ is not intended for all Conquerors to be able to do. It is intended to provide the average conqueror with the average conqueror roster a *significant* but not *insurmountable* challenge. A very casual player might find such a level of challenge beyond what they are comfortable with.
This isn't a change from the original game. That is what the original target of those difficulty tiers was. The problem was that roster inflation rapidly caused the players to get out of sync with the designed difficulty, and it wasn't continuously tuned to match. It had simply gotten to the point of being ridiculously trivial compared to what most players were bringing to the content.
When I first started playing, players did not have DorkLessons or content guides or tier lists. The average player skill was such that even a straight up equal match up (where player and defender are about equal rank) was non-trivial. Today, on top of the roster advantage new players have, they also start far ahead of where veteran players did. And when vets roll new alts, they often forget that the stuff they do now, fighting defenders with six times the PI of their attackers, doesn’t scale downward perfectly. It can be much harder to pull off the same stuff on a new account that they routinely do on their top tier accounts. But new players are not attempting such shenanigans.
As far as I can tell, this game still attracts new players at a similar clip as it used to. Perhaps not quite as much, because it is getting long in the tooth, but not dramatically lower. I don’t think new players have a harder time, they have a significantly easier time than players in the past. The AI issues are really an issue for more sophisticated players. Most new players complain about running into fights they can’t figure out because they didn’t read the nodes. They complain they don’t have perfect counters to cheese everything. They complain they are not advancing as fast as they would like, because many of them think they should be able to catch up with the Valiants in a couple weeks. They don’t know the game *has* an AI, much less have any idea it can be problematic to sometimes work around.
I cleared two necro paths but couldn’t find the motivation to repeatedly run act 5 for another 70-100 revives.
I think my relationship to the game has changed in the past few months. I’m not as driven to push to GC in battlegrounds. I don’t want the stress of competitive war. What I’m about to say may just relate to me, but it feels like Kabam can’t figure out what the Next Big Thing is, and we’re getting dragged behind the bus as it fishtails down the road.
Relics! Battlegrounds! Raids! There are 260 champs in this game and now I’m having to deal with BG metas that require knowing which champs are vulnerable to what DOT…and I just find it more satisfying to punch through things with Hulkbuster.
I’ll probably coast along at 70% of my 2023 play level until 8.4 comes out, I’ll become valiant, then I’ll be left hoping they’ve update the in-game stores to make me feel like that’s a meaningful achievement.
Necropolis was a bright spark that is already growing dim for me having explored it.
BGs has lost its thrill for me personally but at least I can say that mode is still going well (metas aside).
*intended or not it's there and it's been there for a long time now
A lot of people, including me, has noted certain situations where the AI behaves inconsistently or frustratingly. But consistently and frustratingly to the point of being unable to play effectively without considering quitting, that's likely to be an extremely rare complaint. You mention streamers complaining. But their streams themselves are direct evidence that such problems are not consistent and common. If they were, we could just pick a random streamer and a random stream from them and see consistent evidence of the problem you're describing at the magnitude you're implying. But when I watch streamed play, such issues are sufficiently uncommon to be noteworthy when they happen.
Truthfully it really depends on where you are in game. I have been communicating about overall issues with the game for years. All it was ever met with was trolling of it being lack of skills. Now that it's more widespread to the players the views are different. The game needs a overhaul in so many ways, but unfortunately I don't see it happening. I agree the difficulty switch was the first major change that had me worried, but as time went on things got progressively worse. I actually took a break from the game for years and I found my own way to have fun, but even that's fading away quickly. Just focusing on the top end players and what they want is not a good thing because it's such a small group. I agree that if they focused on gameplay and a refreshing the game would have staying power as it gets old.
The future is fading unless they put in some serious work.
If you play something lower level like aq map 2 or Proven eq, it's completely different. It's extremely slow, I assume to make it easier for noobs.