Let’s Talk - BGs is Failling Behind, why?
Yet another lack luster season in BGs participation in the Gladiators circuit with 100 points landing you in Quantum and above. A score that would have been lucky to get Arcane in past years. More and more players seem to give up on this mode each season, so why’s that?
Here's my thoughts. Feel free to debate and add your own:
1.) Staleness - The game mode has become monotonous. 2 meta seasons make the game mode feel more like arena. And if one of those metas is unenjoyable it really impacts motivation for the season. The staleness is even worse feeling with the seasonal class nodes that make it more like 2 pseudo metas under a season long meta too. Yes it means more time to plan for a meta in the current configuration but honestly it’s stale compared to 4 meta seasons where you might need to reset your deck and rescheme each week. This also gave you more freedom to target a week that better fit your roster. 2 meta seasons are stale, recommend increasing to 3 or even back to 4.
2.) Bad A.I./Latency/Missing Frames in AI animations - Something about competitive content always makes this set of universal and interconnected problems seem so much worse. MCOC operates on a platform where you can’t always trust your eyes, and getting clipped by a stunned enemy, having hits bypass your block, strikers getting automatically blocked by recovering foes or 0 recovery time for A.I. specials turning into light intercepts for them when they get should be exposed always feels bad… but it just feels worse in BGs
3.) Cash offers making the pay to play feel out of balance with free to play - I say this as a player that buys far too many deals. And when it’s possible to purchase a roster of 7stars over the course of a few sales, it’s possible to bypass 5years of roster development in that same time frame. That leaves smaller f2p rosters feeling like the game mode might as well be locked behind a gated community. The Valliant bundles definitely make this problem feel worse, as every dolphin and whale out there (me included) can just fork over a $100 dollars to get access to the best defender out there now. Not sure what can be done here that isn’t being done already though as there are many ways via content to earn rewards right now. So I think the teams on the right course here.
4.) Content fatigue… too much g things that feel grindy at the same time. It’s awesome to always have things to do, but when there’s seemingly always another brutal defender to learn, or difficult mountain of content dropped people will prioritize elsewhere. Nothing wrong with that either but at some point too much to do has diminished returns when it’s the same player bases being asked to spend more and more time in game.
Ok, long enough from me, and I’m sure I missed something so feel free to discuss. My top ask is to revisit the metas, go back to the drawing board and give us more diversity between metas with more than two each season.
