The game experienced a brief connectivity issue this morning. The team promptly fixed the issue and things are back to normal, thank you to everyone who passed along reports!
Banquet Realm Event Wrap Up: What do the numbers say?
Appreciate the post DNA, but there are too many variables to conclude anything. From the number of players vs active accounts, to the multiple ways that Realm points could be obtained outside of money, it makes it extremely difficult to extrapolate reliable conclusions.
I do believe Banquet is top heavy and your data supports that thought. I also think the active "players" figure is higher than what it actually is. What that number is, I have no idea, but it's not a stretch to assume that 20% of us have secondary accounts that we only open up when bigger events are happening.
Curious to see the data versus Kabam's analysis. Hopefully, there will be some overlapping conclusions to compare.
The main point of my critique was, that as the Realm event was designed, vast majority of players (75%) weren't able to reach majority of the rewards (>50%). For some reason, Kabam designed it this way. And as you've already said: Kabam datamined, that players obtain more units. But then either Kabam decided to release the rewards valve only this little, or players decided not to spend their resources.
It would be more proper to say the majority of players didn’t reach the majority of rewards, not the majority of players were unable to reach them.
We know they didn’t. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t. Most players aren’t Valiant. How many could be if they chose to be and put in the effort to be? Is it weird that Kabam created a progression tier that the vast majority of players fail to achieve?
I don’t think so, because anything everyone does isn’t an accomplishment. I don’t expect everyone to reach the top (non-stretch) milestone in a spending oriented event, just like I don’t expect everyone to reach the top milestone in a battleground event, or the arena, or anything else. What I will say is that considering it was a spending event, the top milestone was achievable at all by non-spenders. And that’s noteworthy in a positive way for MCOC. Consider how difficult it is to design something in any game where the spenders are willing to spend collectively huge amounts of money, and yet the free to play players can still participate to such an extent.
I just don't understand one thing: for this event, Kabam has increased the investment required per player, when compared to BGs Realm Event. Basically, if you divide the "total points required for milestone" with "personal points required for milestone", you get smaller number for Banquet than for BGs. If every player did the exact bare minimum of personal points, it'd take 200k players for BGs, or 186k for Banquet. Now, if it takes MORE players to achieve the community goal, then the personal contribution is SMALLER. And since Banquet required less players, the individual part was larger.
I still stand by my words, that the personal points required were overinflated. Take my example: I have spent 9k units as f2p, and that got me just under a half of the possible rewards. I didn't even reach the boosted milestones! (Still a bit salty about that tbh - does that mean that if I opened "just" 30 SBCs, that I am not worthy of getting more shards bcs the droprates suck? Why does that come only at 35+ SBCs, what's the difference?) Yet, I landed in 11-25% bracket. It just blows my mind that a player who got to the top 1/4 of players can't get more than half of the milestones because of points requirement.
I understand that the Banquet presents a large source of whale income (as this post clearly shows), and whales MUST get glorious ingame rewards for their money, but they got a lot of them from Solo ranks, Alliance ranks and Realm ranks. Was it necessary to add Realm milestones to that? I mean the amount of $$ an individual would have to spend to earn even the PREDICTED milestone ceiling (Isophyne) could buy you a fairly solid laptop...
Not every FTP mobile game provide avenues for earning premium currency in game
The fact that MCOC created arenas for players to earn units is actually quite absurd when viewed through the lens of other game companies
So given the opportunity to earn free units in game and failing to save up sufficient units for big events is actually your own responsibility, not the bad design of the banquet event
Asking for less units to be spent while you are able to earn units for free in game is like asking the game company to become a charity, that's not sustainable in the long run
I disagree. Most of mobile games I played does provide you with in-game currency. I’d even say big majority of them do so. It’s their way of hooking you up to the content. This game does many fatal mistakes. The biggest issue is they don’t understand feedback, or don’t know what to do with it. The second one is it’s imposssible to play with hero you love. It’s an endless RNG chase.
Almost every free to play game that has premium currency provides a way to earn it in-game. But none I’ve ever played or heard of allows players to earn it at anything close to the same rates. It is possible for a free to play player to earn on the order of 100k units per year, which is on the order of $3000 USD of premium currency. And not with the ridiculous exaggerations of “playing 20 hours a day” nonsense people talk about, but with the same amount of time many people spend watching TV every day.
I would also say this game commits far fewer fatal mistakes than most other games, given most of this game’s competition when I first started playing no longer exist and this game does. That’s sort of built into the definition of a fatal mistake.
As to feedback, you’re going to have a tough time convincing someone that regularly provides feedback to the game and has had many feedback points incorporated into the game believe the game ignores or fails to understand feedback. Most games have dissatisfied players filling the forums with dissatisfaction - if they even have official forums in the first place. If that’s how you judge a game’s openness to feedback, nobody does it correctly.
And as to the RNG nature of champion acquisition, if you believe that is a fatal flaw, why are you here? Do you think that’s some weird mistake Kabam is going to one day realize and change? Because that’s never going to happen. This game is built upon random champion acquisition. If what you want to do is have full control over who you get and who you use, then this is not the game for you. There are other games like that, you should play them instead. This game is different from those games, not worse. You pick what you want and then you go find games that make it a point to deliver what you want. You don’t pick a game that explicitly doesn’t and presume one day they will realize you should be in charge.
This game is not going to eliminate RNG champion acquisition any more than it is going to one day become a shooter or one day start releasing DC characters instead of Marvel characters. If this is something you want to see, the only way I can see it happening is you could set aside about a billion dollars of your own money in escrow, go to Netmarble and legally insure the next five years of MCOC revenue in return for them attempting this experiment. Then, maybe.
Comments
I do believe Banquet is top heavy and your data supports that thought. I also think the active "players" figure is higher than what it actually is. What that number is, I have no idea, but it's not a stretch to assume that 20% of us have secondary accounts that we only open up when bigger events are happening.
Curious to see the data versus Kabam's analysis. Hopefully, there will be some overlapping conclusions to compare.
We know they didn’t. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t. Most players aren’t Valiant. How many could be if they chose to be and put in the effort to be? Is it weird that Kabam created a progression tier that the vast majority of players fail to achieve?
I don’t think so, because anything everyone does isn’t an accomplishment. I don’t expect everyone to reach the top (non-stretch) milestone in a spending oriented event, just like I don’t expect everyone to reach the top milestone in a battleground event, or the arena, or anything else. What I will say is that considering it was a spending event, the top milestone was achievable at all by non-spenders. And that’s noteworthy in a positive way for MCOC. Consider how difficult it is to design something in any game where the spenders are willing to spend collectively huge amounts of money, and yet the free to play players can still participate to such an extent.
I spent 24k units in the first 30 minutes of the event to hit all available realm milestones and didn’t open any more crystals with units.
I’m a regular arena grinder usually maxing out all milestones every week.
I opened w/e came available with the accolades calendar afterwards.
I bought 4 Odins with the keys and crystals and the one bundle with the key and 10 crystals.
I did not reinvest the units from the Odins.
I would also say this game commits far fewer fatal mistakes than most other games, given most of this game’s competition when I first started playing no longer exist and this game does. That’s sort of built into the definition of a fatal mistake.
As to feedback, you’re going to have a tough time convincing someone that regularly provides feedback to the game and has had many feedback points incorporated into the game believe the game ignores or fails to understand feedback. Most games have dissatisfied players filling the forums with dissatisfaction - if they even have official forums in the first place. If that’s how you judge a game’s openness to feedback, nobody does it correctly.
And as to the RNG nature of champion acquisition, if you believe that is a fatal flaw, why are you here? Do you think that’s some weird mistake Kabam is going to one day realize and change? Because that’s never going to happen. This game is built upon random champion acquisition. If what you want to do is have full control over who you get and who you use, then this is not the game for you. There are other games like that, you should play them instead. This game is different from those games, not worse. You pick what you want and then you go find games that make it a point to deliver what you want. You don’t pick a game that explicitly doesn’t and presume one day they will realize you should be in charge.
This game is not going to eliminate RNG champion acquisition any more than it is going to one day become a shooter or one day start releasing DC characters instead of Marvel characters. If this is something you want to see, the only way I can see it happening is you could set aside about a billion dollars of your own money in escrow, go to Netmarble and legally insure the next five years of MCOC revenue in return for them attempting this experiment. Then, maybe.