Having champs locked behind a small pool in some crystals like loyalty and incursions is fine cause it's through gameplay. But the amount of champs being currently locked behind some sort of paywall has to stop. Especially with the current basic introduction rate. Fully agree with OP. This is out of touch and I for the first time honestly feels disgust from the game. Keep going that path and I won't stay here for long.
as long as champions aren't locked behind a paywall AND mandated for future endgame content (like the deathless quest) then we're good to go.
kabam has a totally fair way of handing out champions. nightcrawler and the deathless champs were content based. NC dupes were from cash offers.
BRB and dazzler cost $30. hardly unreasonable.
jack for $400 and a nefaria as a prize for spending $800(?) in the webstore were good ways to fund the game and they should do that for bastion too. i didn't buy any of them and won't but it's fair.
i might get the cyclops plat track but that's about it and i probably won't spend $$$ on the eidols.
this is a fair game. whatever the big whales get, everyone else gets for much cheaper later. they keep the game going and don't much in return either. 2 r4s cost $180,000 just 2 months ago. now any f2p bozo has 2 if they did the carina's challenges, epoch, and next week's new gauntlet. seriously, what's there to moan about?? whales get the worst return on investment in the game and it's not even close.
who cares if they monetize DDHK or get a phoenix dupe and we don't? they're keeping the lights on and we're not. maybe we shouldn't get mad and kabam and the whales, they're just making it free for everyone else.
as long as champions aren't locked behind a paywall AND mandated for future endgame content (like the deathless quest) then we're good to go.
kabam has a totally fair way of handing out champions. nightcrawler and the deathless champs were content based. NC dupes were from cash offers.
BRB and dazzler cost $30. hardly unreasonable.
jack for $400 and a nefaria as a prize for spending $800(?) in the webstore were good ways to fund the game and they should do that for bastion too. i didn't buy any of them and won't but it's fair.
i might get the cyclops plat track but that's about it and i probably won't spend $$$ on the eidols.
this is a fair game. whatever the big whales get, everyone else gets for much cheaper later. they keep the game going and don't much in return either. 2 r4s cost $180,000 just 2 months ago. now any f2p bozo has 2 if they did the carina's challenges, epoch, and next week's new gauntlet. seriously, what's there to moan about?? whales get the worst return on investment in the game and it's not even close.
who cares if they monetize DDHK or get a phoenix dupe and we don't? they're keeping the lights on and we're not. maybe we shouldn't get mad and kabam and the whales, they're just making it free for everyone else.
I don't care about end game content, end gamers can blitz through that within a day if we want to. Champs and rank acquisitions being meta relevant for game modes affecting top rankings is the problem. I don't care if champs or R4s acquired through money devaluate within months and we have aquirable ones via content later... that 2-3 month gap you're talking about is all it takes to pay wall you off game modes, it's consistent and widens every month now which makes it impossible to compete and not worth playing this game.
I rather not do future end game content as long as they fix game mode systems where spenders don't have a competitive edge.
New champs requiring to pay to access early is something they have always done. The way they are doing this is different from before but concept is the same.
i don't mind them monetizing champs like bastion and the rest but not for eidols if they're going to be mandatory for future end game content just like the final deathless quest.
i'm totally ok with the spenders going wild but any future endgame content involving eidols shouldn't be cash-locked or here spend 25k units to get 5 eidol champs just to be able to do a challenge. the time restricted content we did last year to get all the deathless champs was fine, i don't think we should stray away from that.
There's no indication that they're going to be required for future end game content. If they were they would have said, just like with the Deathless. You're complaining about something that isn't happening
as long as champions aren't locked behind a paywall AND mandated for future endgame content (like the deathless quest) then we're good to go.
kabam has a totally fair way of handing out champions. nightcrawler and the deathless champs were content based. NC dupes were from cash offers.
BRB and dazzler cost $30. hardly unreasonable.
jack for $400 and a nefaria as a prize for spending $800(?) in the webstore were good ways to fund the game and they should do that for bastion too. i didn't buy any of them and won't but it's fair.
i might get the cyclops plat track but that's about it and i probably won't spend $$$ on the eidols.
this is a fair game. whatever the big whales get, everyone else gets for much cheaper later. they keep the game going and don't much in return either. 2 r4s cost $180,000 just 2 months ago. now any f2p bozo has 2 if they did the carina's challenges, epoch, and next week's new gauntlet. seriously, what's there to moan about?? whales get the worst return on investment in the game and it's not even close.
who cares if they monetize DDHK or get a phoenix dupe and we don't? they're keeping the lights on and we're not. maybe we shouldn't get mad and kabam and the whales, they're just making it free for everyone else.
I don't care about end game content, end gamers can blitz through that within a day if we want to. Champs and rank acquisitions being meta relevant for game modes affecting top rankings is the problem. I don't care if champs or R4s acquired through money devaluate within months and we have aquirable ones via content later... that 2-3 month gap you're talking about is all it takes to pay wall you off game modes, it's consistent and widens every month now which makes it impossible to compete and not worth playing this game.
I rather not do future end game content as long as they fix game mode systems where spenders don't have a competitive edge.
if players don't receive some sort of advantage then no one would spend and the game would shut down.
if some dude is willing to spend a downpayment on a house for 2 rankups that the rest of us bums are getting for practically free 2 months later, why shouldn't they get an advantage?
and the advantage they get is so short-lived anyway cause 9 months from now they'll have 60+r4s (most of them now unused) and you'll have a deck's worth of r4s for a lot less money. is that fair to them?
the spending gap is also not spiraling out of control. if it did players would have left en masse a long time ago and the game would have shut down but it hasn't because the devs clearly know how to balance it.
10 years of complaining and we're still here. they're doing something right.
The frankly aggressive monetization which usually im fine with but I feel like this stream took it a bit too far.
1 paid Pheonix dupe 1 paid Cyclops 1 paid Eidol 1 paid DDHK ("but you can use units" you already know it'll be alot.)
I probably missed some too but come on guys. On top of the monthly champions and other sales and deals. We dont have to buy anything but you can at least not present stuff like how you were this stream.
Thoughts?
Cyclops will be in the Titan, and the eidol will be in the basic and eventually the base pool
Its fine if a company tries to sell you the car with every optional upgrade, every premium, every cosmetical perk. Problem is that the car should run smooth. If you bought a car with all the options and perks, take it to the dealer telling them about a little noise here in there, some other issues, you would be wondering why he is trying to sell you more perks instead of solving the issues you got. So that's my take on Kabam right now, sure I can buy this I can buy that, they can make more sales and try to induce me to spend a little here and there, design this new changes to play with FOMO, spend all their time on making monetized events; but what about the bugs? IE. New rework and design on Cyclops. Heard the VFX being mentioned, is this going to be the same VFX that makes every champ look like they were colored with old muddied crayons?
Yeah I don't get it either. like you need to monetize the free-to-play game sure. However does every old champ that gets a rework or higher tier rarity need to have some monetization aspect for it's release? Awakenging gems are getting more common for 7* sure, but not like someone has 40+ in stash yet. I think if it was a balance of 2 champs can be awakened free-to-play and 2 monetized it would at least be a middle ground.
Yeah I don't get it either. like you need to monetize the free-to-play game sure. However does every old champ that gets a rework or higher tier rarity need to have some monetization aspect for it's release? Awakenging gems are getting more common for 7* sure, but not like someone has 40+ in stash yet. I think if it was a balance of 2 champs can be awakened free-to-play and 2 monetized it would at least be a middle ground.
Wasn't it always like this? If anything, the few times we got any champ without paying is the exception. Awakening the highest rarity was always hard and rare.
To dumb down what my point is. It isn't that they're trying to make money or that we have to pay for some things. Like I said. That's fine. But the issue is in how it is presented to us and in the fashion it is presented.
"Look at this cool chanp you've been waiting for!" Gonna have to pay for the dupe tho
"Look at this cool special champ we've been hyping up which it's predecessor and deathless counterparts you could all get for free!" Gonna have to pay for this one tho lol
"Look at this absolutely AWESOME buff for an amazing champ you guys have wanted and voted for!" Gonna have to pay for it tho
"Look at this cool 7* champ that we're releasing!" Gonna have to pay for him tho (even though he isn't amazing and they could have easily made a way for us to earn it) etc. Etc.
Its not that these things exist. Its how they hype it up and then rapid fire back to back to back to back shoot us in the face with the monetizing. Like we cant even take a second to appreciate how effing cool some of it is and have a flicker of hope we can somehow earn it before John or Mike goes "gotta cough up that dough tho"
To be frank, that's a you thing. New things are almost always monetized in this game, and always have been. There's no "here it is" and then six months later "okay, now we're going to try to make money off of it." The main mode of monetization for MCOC has always been to sell early access. That's always been the best part of the monetization of this game: you don't pay to have things no one else gets to have, you mostly pay just to get them sooner, while everyone else does get to have them later. Very few things are actually paywalled, and even those things tend to eventually get un-walled (think Redpool).
Now, they could separate the announcement and the details of what things will cost, but that's much much worse. Just to satisfy your sense of "show me the thing without bothering me with the monetization so I can bask in it for a while" you'd be asking Kabam to deliberately withhold the costs of things? I would say that they would rather have your complaint rather than the complaint that Kabam was hiding costs.
I strongly believe competive ranks in all game modes are paywalled, wonder if they will someday get unwalled 🤔
That bends the meaning of “paywall” to the point of snapping it clean in half.
Yes, players who spend have advantages. But there is no competitive mode where it is mandatory to spend. You can get into a situation where a spending player might gain a sufficient advantage that no amount of *your* gameplay will overcome it, but that’s still simply an advantage. It’s only a paywall if only spenders can do it. If even one player is competitive at the top tiers without spending, then by definition that means those competitive modes are not paywalled at the top.
To dumb down what my point is. It isn't that they're trying to make money or that we have to pay for some things. Like I said. That's fine. But the issue is in how it is presented to us and in the fashion it is presented.
"Look at this cool chanp you've been waiting for!" Gonna have to pay for the dupe tho
"Look at this cool special champ we've been hyping up which it's predecessor and deathless counterparts you could all get for free!" Gonna have to pay for this one tho lol
"Look at this absolutely AWESOME buff for an amazing champ you guys have wanted and voted for!" Gonna have to pay for it tho
"Look at this cool 7* champ that we're releasing!" Gonna have to pay for him tho (even though he isn't amazing and they could have easily made a way for us to earn it) etc. Etc.
Its not that these things exist. Its how they hype it up and then rapid fire back to back to back to back shoot us in the face with the monetizing. Like we cant even take a second to appreciate how effing cool some of it is and have a flicker of hope we can somehow earn it before John or Mike goes "gotta cough up that dough tho"
To be frank, that's a you thing. New things are almost always monetized in this game, and always have been. There's no "here it is" and then six months later "okay, now we're going to try to make money off of it." The main mode of monetization for MCOC has always been to sell early access. That's always been the best part of the monetization of this game: you don't pay to have things no one else gets to have, you mostly pay just to get them sooner, while everyone else does get to have them later. Very few things are actually paywalled, and even those things tend to eventually get un-walled (think Redpool).
Now, they could separate the announcement and the details of what things will cost, but that's much much worse. Just to satisfy your sense of "show me the thing without bothering me with the monetization so I can bask in it for a while" you'd be asking Kabam to deliberately withhold the costs of things? I would say that they would rather have your complaint rather than the complaint that Kabam was hiding costs.
I strongly believe competive ranks in all game modes are paywalled, wonder if they will someday get unwalled 🤔
That bends the meaning of “paywall” to the point of snapping it clean in half.
Yes, players who spend have advantages. But there is no competitive mode where it is mandatory to spend. You can get into a situation where a spending player might gain a sufficient advantage that no amount of *your* gameplay will overcome it, but that’s still simply an advantage. It’s only a paywall if only spenders can do it. If even one player is competitive at the top tiers without spending, then by definition that means those competitive modes are not paywalled at the top.
Sounds about right to me, have yet to see a non spender rank #1 in BGs, till then I'm done with this game.
To dumb down what my point is. It isn't that they're trying to make money or that we have to pay for some things. Like I said. That's fine. But the issue is in how it is presented to us and in the fashion it is presented.
"Look at this cool chanp you've been waiting for!" Gonna have to pay for the dupe tho
"Look at this cool special champ we've been hyping up which it's predecessor and deathless counterparts you could all get for free!" Gonna have to pay for this one tho lol
"Look at this absolutely AWESOME buff for an amazing champ you guys have wanted and voted for!" Gonna have to pay for it tho
"Look at this cool 7* champ that we're releasing!" Gonna have to pay for him tho (even though he isn't amazing and they could have easily made a way for us to earn it) etc. Etc.
Its not that these things exist. Its how they hype it up and then rapid fire back to back to back to back shoot us in the face with the monetizing. Like we cant even take a second to appreciate how effing cool some of it is and have a flicker of hope we can somehow earn it before John or Mike goes "gotta cough up that dough tho"
To be frank, that's a you thing. New things are almost always monetized in this game, and always have been. There's no "here it is" and then six months later "okay, now we're going to try to make money off of it." The main mode of monetization for MCOC has always been to sell early access. That's always been the best part of the monetization of this game: you don't pay to have things no one else gets to have, you mostly pay just to get them sooner, while everyone else does get to have them later. Very few things are actually paywalled, and even those things tend to eventually get un-walled (think Redpool).
Now, they could separate the announcement and the details of what things will cost, but that's much much worse. Just to satisfy your sense of "show me the thing without bothering me with the monetization so I can bask in it for a while" you'd be asking Kabam to deliberately withhold the costs of things? I would say that they would rather have your complaint rather than the complaint that Kabam was hiding costs.
I strongly believe competive ranks in all game modes are paywalled, wonder if they will someday get unwalled 🤔
They will, probably around the time they announce a game shutdown. Otherwise how is the company supposed to make profit?
I don't see Fornite having any trouble making profit off of skins which don't give any playing benefits...
Because they designed the game from the start and from the ground up to do that.
Monetization is strongly influenced by playerbase culture. Different playerbases will tolerate certain things and reject others. For example, there’s an inherent tension in games that monetize performance where on the one hand you have people who recoil at “pay to win” while others equally demand “value for money.” These are mutually exclusive; the more value you provide to spenders, the more pay to win the game becomes. When MCOC launched a Chinese version of the game in China, it shut down in just a few years. From what i could gather when I was following it at the time, a large part of the problem was that it was insufficiently pay to win. MCOC, the western edition, is actually very, very soft on pay to win. Spending value tends to be low. We have players capable of speed running to Valiant in just days of play with zero spending. In the Chinese market, this is horrifying. Why spend, if a free player can do that with no spending? What’s the point to spending at all? What’s the point to playing at all? They tried several things, including introducing monetized gear, but in the end the game folded. There are probably a lot of reasons, but the fact that their monetization just didn’t offer enough win for their pay was, in my opinion, a significant factor.
If you tried to sell too much power in Fortnite, the players would rebel. But that’s because Fortnite players are self-selected to be the kind of players that want to play a RTS relatively free from too much pay to win, and are willing to spend on cosmetic customization. And Epic owns the IP for Fortnite: they can customize Fortnite in an unlimited fashion.
Conversely if you tried the Fortnite monetization model in MCOC, you’d run into two problems. First, we don’t have that playerbase. Players who demand that sort of environment don’t play MCOC. MCOC players need a certain amount of functionality out of their spending. Not as much as the Chinese market perhaps, but far more than the Fortnite environment. Our players won’t buy cosmetics to the same degree as Fortnite players will. Moreover, Kabam doesn’t own the IP: they license it from Marvel. And Marvel is not going to give Kabam unlimited freedom to customize the game any way they want. Everything has to be approved by editors and brand managers. And Marvel is notorious when it comes to being very controlling when it comes to vendors messing with their characters. Trying to sell outfits for Dr Doom would be an extremely tough uphill fight.
Also, when you say you don’t see Fortnite “having trouble” making money with their monetization, that’s a relative thing. Fortnite makes billions of dollars off of tens of millions of players - maybe as much as a hundred million players active in a good month. MCOC makes hundreds of millions of dollars off of maybe a million players. If MCOC made as much money per player on average as Fortnite, MCOC might generate something between 1% and 10% of the revenue it makes now. At those numbers, we’d probably have seen the game sunset by now.
Fortnite makes a lot of money due to scale. Any game company attempting to replicate its model that fails to become a mega blockbuster hit would probably die in a year. Fortnite itself would die in a year with MCOC’s playerbase numbers. So in fact, Fortnite’s billions of dollars of revenue are actually a struggle to earn revenue, a struggle that only succeeds because a sizeable percentage of the population of Earth plays it (and also spends on it: I’ve heard conversion numbers for Fortnite approaching 25%). If MCOC’s monetization model worked just as well as Fortnite’s, it would be a catastrophic faillure. Fortnite gets away with it, because it is Fortnite.
After the recent Banquet, the "lights" can be "on" for a couple of years with ease. Enough with this "whales pay kabam s salaries" misdirection. The game is not only whales and f2p players, there s thousands of us in the middle, that spend from 9.99 to 200/month or open our wallets in the big sales. This particular set of players are dissatisfied with all this OP described. And this set is the easiest to stop spending. The game cannot be sustained by 100 whales.
After the recent Banquet, the "lights" can be "on" for a couple of years with ease. Enough with this "whales pay kabam s salaries" misdirection. The game is not only whales and f2p players, there s thousands of us in the middle, that spend from 9.99 to 200/month or open our wallets in the big sales. This particular set of players are dissatisfied with all this OP described. And this set is the easiest to stop spending. The game cannot be sustained by 100 whales.
some whales just paid 6 figures 10 weeks ago for 2 r4s that you and many others are getting for free. that's a giant drop in value and you know who should be angry at kabam? them, cause their early adopter fees are so bad you gotta wonder why they even bother.
DNA has said this many times and it couldn't be more true...kabam's offers are literally giving them the least amount of value possible.
as long as champions aren't locked behind a paywall AND mandated for future endgame content (like the deathless quest) then we're good to go.
kabam has a totally fair way of handing out champions. nightcrawler and the deathless champs were content based. NC dupes were from cash offers.
BRB and dazzler cost $30. hardly unreasonable.
jack for $400 and a nefaria as a prize for spending $800(?) in the webstore were good ways to fund the game and they should do that for bastion too. i didn't buy any of them and won't but it's fair.
i might get the cyclops plat track but that's about it and i probably won't spend $$$ on the eidols.
this is a fair game. whatever the big whales get, everyone else gets for much cheaper later. they keep the game going and don't much in return either. 2 r4s cost $180,000 just 2 months ago. now any f2p bozo has 2 if they did the carina's challenges, epoch, and next week's new gauntlet. seriously, what's there to moan about?? whales get the worst return on investment in the game and it's not even close.
who cares if they monetize DDHK or get a phoenix dupe and we don't? they're keeping the lights on and we're not. maybe we shouldn't get mad and kabam and the whales, they're just making it free for everyone else.
I don't care about end game content, end gamers can blitz through that within a day if we want to. Champs and rank acquisitions being meta relevant for game modes affecting top rankings is the problem. I don't care if champs or R4s acquired through money devaluate within months and we have aquirable ones via content later... that 2-3 month gap you're talking about is all it takes to pay wall you off game modes, it's consistent and widens every month now which makes it impossible to compete and not worth playing this game.
I rather not do future end game content as long as they fix game mode systems where spenders don't have a competitive edge.
if players don't receive some sort of advantage then no one would spend and the game would shut down.
if some dude is willing to spend a downpayment on a house for 2 rankups that the rest of us bums are getting for practically free 2 months later, why shouldn't they get an advantage?
and the advantage they get is so short-lived anyway cause 9 months from now they'll have 60+r4s (most of them now unused) and you'll have a deck's worth of r4s for a lot less money. is that fair to them?
the spending gap is also not spiraling out of control. if it did players would have left en masse a long time ago and the game would have shut down but it hasn't because the devs clearly know how to balance it.
10 years of complaining and we're still here. they're doing something right.
To dumb down what my point is. It isn't that they're trying to make money or that we have to pay for some things. Like I said. That's fine. But the issue is in how it is presented to us and in the fashion it is presented.
"Look at this cool chanp you've been waiting for!" Gonna have to pay for the dupe tho
"Look at this cool special champ we've been hyping up which it's predecessor and deathless counterparts you could all get for free!" Gonna have to pay for this one tho lol
"Look at this absolutely AWESOME buff for an amazing champ you guys have wanted and voted for!" Gonna have to pay for it tho
"Look at this cool 7* champ that we're releasing!" Gonna have to pay for him tho (even though he isn't amazing and they could have easily made a way for us to earn it) etc. Etc.
Its not that these things exist. Its how they hype it up and then rapid fire back to back to back to back shoot us in the face with the monetizing. Like we cant even take a second to appreciate how effing cool some of it is and have a flicker of hope we can somehow earn it before John or Mike goes "gotta cough up that dough tho"
To be frank, that's a you thing. New things are almost always monetized in this game, and always have been. There's no "here it is" and then six months later "okay, now we're going to try to make money off of it." The main mode of monetization for MCOC has always been to sell early access. That's always been the best part of the monetization of this game: you don't pay to have things no one else gets to have, you mostly pay just to get them sooner, while everyone else does get to have them later. Very few things are actually paywalled, and even those things tend to eventually get un-walled (think Redpool).
Now, they could separate the announcement and the details of what things will cost, but that's much much worse. Just to satisfy your sense of "show me the thing without bothering me with the monetization so I can bask in it for a while" you'd be asking Kabam to deliberately withhold the costs of things? I would say that they would rather have your complaint rather than the complaint that Kabam was hiding costs.
I strongly believe competive ranks in all game modes are paywalled, wonder if they will someday get unwalled 🤔
They will, probably around the time they announce a game shutdown. Otherwise how is the company supposed to make profit?
I don't see Fornite having any trouble making profit off of skins which don't give any playing benefits...
Because they designed the game from the start and from the ground up to do that.
Monetization is strongly influenced by playerbase culture. Different playerbases will tolerate certain things and reject others. For example, there’s an inherent tension in games that monetize performance where on the one hand you have people who recoil at “pay to win” while others equally demand “value for money.” These are mutually exclusive; the more value you provide to spenders, the more pay to win the game becomes. When MCOC launched a Chinese version of the game in China, it shut down in just a few years. From what i could gather when I was following it at the time, a large part of the problem was that it was insufficiently pay to win. MCOC, the western edition, is actually very, very soft on pay to win. Spending value tends to be low. We have players capable of speed running to Valiant in just days of play with zero spending. In the Chinese market, this is horrifying. Why spend, if a free player can do that with no spending? What’s the point to spending at all? What’s the point to playing at all? They tried several things, including introducing monetized gear, but in the end the game folded. There are probably a lot of reasons, but the fact that their monetization just didn’t offer enough win for their pay was, in my opinion, a significant factor.
If you tried to sell too much power in Fortnite, the players would rebel. But that’s because Fortnite players are self-selected to be the kind of players that want to play a RTS relatively free from too much pay to win, and are willing to spend on cosmetic customization. And Epic owns the IP for Fortnite: they can customize Fortnite in an unlimited fashion.
Conversely if you tried the Fortnite monetization model in MCOC, you’d run into two problems. First, we don’t have that playerbase. Players who demand that sort of environment don’t play MCOC. MCOC players need a certain amount of functionality out of their spending. Not as much as the Chinese market perhaps, but far more than the Fortnite environment. Our players won’t buy cosmetics to the same degree as Fortnite players will. Moreover, Kabam doesn’t own the IP: they license it from Marvel. And Marvel is not going to give Kabam unlimited freedom to customize the game any way they want. Everything has to be approved by editors and brand managers. And Marvel is notorious when it comes to being very controlling when it comes to vendors messing with their characters. Trying to sell outfits for Dr Doom would be an extremely tough uphill fight.
Also, when you say you don’t see Fortnite “having trouble” making money with their monetization, that’s a relative thing. Fortnite makes billions of dollars off of tens of millions of players - maybe as much as a hundred million players active in a good month. MCOC makes hundreds of millions of dollars off of maybe a million players. If MCOC made as much money per player on average as Fortnite, MCOC might generate something between 1% and 10% of the revenue it makes now. At those numbers, we’d probably have seen the game sunset by now.
Fortnite makes a lot of money due to scale. Any game company attempting to replicate its model that fails to become a mega blockbuster hit would probably die in a year. Fortnite itself would die in a year with MCOC’s playerbase numbers. So in fact, Fortnite’s billions of dollars of revenue are actually a struggle to earn revenue, a struggle that only succeeds because a sizeable percentage of the population of Earth plays it (and also spends on it: I’ve heard conversion numbers for Fortnite approaching 25%). If MCOC’s monetization model worked just as well as Fortnite’s, it would be a catastrophic faillure. Fortnite gets away with it, because it is Fortnite.
I appreciate you taking the time to explain all these concerns, it is helpful. And believe me... I do acknowledge them.
Sadly for me, this is not the type of game I want to continue playing although I love Marvel. I understand why it works the way it does however it simply doesn't satisfy my playing needs.
the monetization itself isnt my issue, its the fact that we've been screaming about battlegrounds for a year to get buffed and fixed and made better again and it got nothing while they still asking for money. + no talk about 9.2 literally all the info we got was things you buy
Comments
Fully agree with OP. This is out of touch and I for the first time honestly feels disgust from the game. Keep going that path and I won't stay here for long.
kabam has a totally fair way of handing out champions. nightcrawler and the deathless champs were content based. NC dupes were from cash offers.
BRB and dazzler cost $30. hardly unreasonable.
jack for $400 and a nefaria as a prize for spending $800(?) in the webstore were good ways to fund the game and they should do that for bastion too. i didn't buy any of them and won't but it's fair.
i might get the cyclops plat track but that's about it and i probably won't spend $$$ on the eidols.
this is a fair game. whatever the big whales get, everyone else gets for much cheaper later. they keep the game going and don't much in return either. 2 r4s cost $180,000 just 2 months ago. now any f2p bozo has 2 if they did the carina's challenges, epoch, and next week's new gauntlet. seriously, what's there to moan about?? whales get the worst return on investment in the game and it's not even close.
who cares if they monetize DDHK or get a phoenix dupe and we don't? they're keeping the lights on and we're not. maybe we shouldn't get mad and kabam and the whales, they're just making it free for everyone else.
I rather not do future end game content as long as they fix game mode systems where spenders don't have a competitive edge.
if some dude is willing to spend a downpayment on a house for 2 rankups that the rest of us bums are getting for practically free 2 months later, why shouldn't they get an advantage?
and the advantage they get is so short-lived anyway cause 9 months from now they'll have 60+r4s (most of them now unused) and you'll have a deck's worth of r4s for a lot less money. is that fair to them?
the spending gap is also not spiraling out of control. if it did players would have left en masse a long time ago and the game would have shut down but it hasn't because the devs clearly know how to balance it.
10 years of complaining and we're still here. they're doing something right.
So that's my take on Kabam right now, sure I can buy this I can buy that, they can make more sales and try to induce me to spend a little here and there, design this new changes to play with FOMO, spend all their time on making monetized events; but what about the bugs?
IE. New rework and design on Cyclops. Heard the VFX being mentioned, is this going to be the same VFX that makes every champ look like they were colored with old muddied crayons?
Yes, players who spend have advantages. But there is no competitive mode where it is mandatory to spend. You can get into a situation where a spending player might gain a sufficient advantage that no amount of *your* gameplay will overcome it, but that’s still simply an advantage. It’s only a paywall if only spenders can do it. If even one player is competitive at the top tiers without spending, then by definition that means those competitive modes are not paywalled at the top.
Monetization is strongly influenced by playerbase culture. Different playerbases will tolerate certain things and reject others. For example, there’s an inherent tension in games that monetize performance where on the one hand you have people who recoil at “pay to win” while others equally demand “value for money.” These are mutually exclusive; the more value you provide to spenders, the more pay to win the game becomes. When MCOC launched a Chinese version of the game in China, it shut down in just a few years. From what i could gather when I was following it at the time, a large part of the problem was that it was insufficiently pay to win. MCOC, the western edition, is actually very, very soft on pay to win. Spending value tends to be low. We have players capable of speed running to Valiant in just days of play with zero spending. In the Chinese market, this is horrifying. Why spend, if a free player can do that with no spending? What’s the point to spending at all? What’s the point to playing at all? They tried several things, including introducing monetized gear, but in the end the game folded. There are probably a lot of reasons, but the fact that their monetization just didn’t offer enough win for their pay was, in my opinion, a significant factor.
If you tried to sell too much power in Fortnite, the players would rebel. But that’s because Fortnite players are self-selected to be the kind of players that want to play a RTS relatively free from too much pay to win, and are willing to spend on cosmetic customization. And Epic owns the IP for Fortnite: they can customize Fortnite in an unlimited fashion.
Conversely if you tried the Fortnite monetization model in MCOC, you’d run into two problems. First, we don’t have that playerbase. Players who demand that sort of environment don’t play MCOC. MCOC players need a certain amount of functionality out of their spending. Not as much as the Chinese market perhaps, but far more than the Fortnite environment. Our players won’t buy cosmetics to the same degree as Fortnite players will. Moreover, Kabam doesn’t own the IP: they license it from Marvel. And Marvel is not going to give Kabam unlimited freedom to customize the game any way they want. Everything has to be approved by editors and brand managers. And Marvel is notorious when it comes to being very controlling when it comes to vendors messing with their characters. Trying to sell outfits for Dr Doom would be an extremely tough uphill fight.
Also, when you say you don’t see Fortnite “having trouble” making money with their monetization, that’s a relative thing. Fortnite makes billions of dollars off of tens of millions of players - maybe as much as a hundred million players active in a good month. MCOC makes hundreds of millions of dollars off of maybe a million players. If MCOC made as much money per player on average as Fortnite, MCOC might generate something between 1% and 10% of the revenue it makes now. At those numbers, we’d probably have seen the game sunset by now.
Fortnite makes a lot of money due to scale. Any game company attempting to replicate its model that fails to become a mega blockbuster hit would probably die in a year. Fortnite itself would die in a year with MCOC’s playerbase numbers. So in fact, Fortnite’s billions of dollars of revenue are actually a struggle to earn revenue, a struggle that only succeeds because a sizeable percentage of the population of Earth plays it (and also spends on it: I’ve heard conversion numbers for Fortnite approaching 25%). If MCOC’s monetization model worked just as well as Fortnite’s, it would be a catastrophic faillure. Fortnite gets away with it, because it is Fortnite.
DNA has said this many times and it couldn't be more true...kabam's offers are literally giving them the least amount of value possible.
Sadly for me, this is not the type of game I want to continue playing although I love Marvel. I understand why it works the way it does however it simply doesn't satisfy my playing needs.