Rank down tickets

Gmorgan99

I know kabam is not a fan of rank down tickets but hear me out:
This game is almost 10 years old and ranks ups (when you do them, before newer champs come out) is obviously permanent. There’s hundreds of new champs (that are stronger) that would make the game more engaging and appealing if we could max them out instead of the champs we chose at a different time. The grind is mentally taxing (and time consuming) and if it’s something you’ve done already, it’s not exactly appealing to do again and again. Giving us rank down tickets would not only bring old players who left, back. It would be exciting for the current players who feel like they’re stuck in mcoc purgatory of swipe tap tap tap swipe.
I can only imagine how many players are leaving for Snap and Xbox and ps remote play.
I don’t need a snarky reply like “oh you must’ve ranked somebody up that you didn’t want to” no, that’s not the case. I’m simply trying to make the game fun again, and to do that I would like my best champs to be fresh faces. Thank you for time.

DNA3000

The grind is mentally taxing (and time consuming) and if it’s something you’ve done already, it’s not exactly appealing to do again and again.

Then progressional games are probably not for you. The idea that someone has already gathered the materials to rank up a champ so they don't want to do it again, they just want to recycle those materials over and over again is precisely *why* there are no ubiquitous rank down tickets.

Sure, it might be fun for players to be able to rank down old champs and immediately rank up newer ones without having to earn those resources again. For a while. But this causes three separate problems, all of which would, without any exaggeration at all, kill the game.

First, rank up rewards are one of the primary incentives to actually playing the game. Rewards can only do that when they have substantial value. If you didn't need to earn rank up materials, you could just rank down another champ and recycle those materials, the need for those materials would be far lower, and the incentivizing power of rank up materials would be drastically reduced. We already have players constantly complaining that the rewards in content are not enough to make doing that content interesting. What happens when *nothing* you can put in the content is something anyone needs? The only alternative would be for every new piece of content to include rewards that have never been released before, that players could not possibly recycle. And that would require power inflation on a ludicrous scale.

Second, allowing players to recycle rank up materials offers veterans an enormous, almost insurmountable advantage compared to newer players. The advantage veterans get for being veterans is always depreciating, and deliberately so. If veterans always had a giant pile of resources that was always radically larger than newer players, it would be pointless for players to join the game. But because veteran advantages are temporary and depreciating, it is possible for new players to catch up to older players if they play more, if they spend more, if they do more. The rank up materials we spend get permanently locked into the champions we spend them on. To remain competitive, we have to keep playing and keep earning. If we don't, eventually newer players will take the materials they are earning and invest them in newer champs, and higher rarity champs, and we will be left behind. As we should be.

If we instead let veterans keep their huge material advantages by allowing them to constantly recycle them, eventually no one will want to join that game and play, because it would be pointless. And a game that can't attract new players is a dead man walking.

And third, rank down tickets eliminate the consequences of choice. Choosing who to rank up and when to rank them up is a choice, and all games are about choices. Whatever choice we make, we have to live with, so we try to choose wisely. If we could undo any rank up choice we made, we wouldn't care about which choices we made. We could just do whatever, and if we change our minds later we could just rank down and rank someone else up instead. Which would make the act of ranking champs up far less interesting. Who cares who you rank up, because it doesn't matter. Who cares which champ you choose, because it doesn't matter.

At the end of the day, we're all just tapping on panes of glass to move around a bunch of pixels on a screen. We don't own anything, we don't get anything, we don't really achieve anything important except what we *believe* is important. Doing Necropolis itemless is only interesting because we think it is. Tell someone who doesn't play MCOC, or video games in general, that you did that and see how amazing they will think that is. Anything that undermines the value of anything in the game is a long-term existential threat to it. When players think what they do doesn't really matter, they eventually stop doing anything at all.