True, there are different teams. Designers hand off things to implementers, and implementers hand off to QA who test and that gets passed down to blah blah blah. I understand that
What I mean is this. (as an example) we let QA slow down, don't focus on the new champs, but QA other champs, their interactions like medium intercept. Its still QA, but no longer focusing on new champs, they now can focus on a different agenda or other priorities that they have on their plate.
Again.... they can still make NEW champs like every 3 months, they can STILL re-work old champs. But they can SLOW DOWN a little and work on bigger priorities.
So next building we build, I'll get the electrician to do the concrete and framing (obviously not something they are specialized in) and I'll go do the electrical (definitely not my area of expertise). Because priorities.
Something like getting the design team to fix the bugs, only a different scenario.
I can hold off getting new champs if they focus on fixing the game
I may be in the small minority here, but my preference is for less champs. And I mean removing some from the game. There are too many champs now and they just keep adding on more.
Start removing some (issue rank materials for those taken away) and simplify things a small bit.
I may be in the small minority here, but my preference is for less champs. And I mean removing some from the game. There are too many champs now and they just keep adding on more.
Start removing some (issue rank materials for those taken away) and simplify things a small bit.
I may be in the small minority here, but my preference is for less champs. And I mean removing some from the game. There are too many champs now and they just keep adding on more.
Start removing some (issue rank materials for those taken away) and simplify things a small bit.
I may be in the small minority here, but my preference is for less champs. And I mean removing some from the game. There are too many champs now and they just keep adding on more.
Start removing some (issue rank materials for those taken away) and simplify things a small bit.
And if new champs are really the only thing keeping MCOC alive… is that really a sustainable business model?
Compared to what? What would you replace it with?
I said previously:
But if I were in charge? Instead of relying solely on new champs, I would shift focus to improving core systems, refreshing older champions, and creating meaningful event-driven content. These changes can keep players engaged and spending without overloading dev and QA teams. Monetization could come from champion rework bundles, or special event passes, heck maybe even cosmetics if they really wanted to (although I don't think I'd want that personally) — all while improving game quality and community trust. It’s not about doing less; it’s about doing smarter.
That's not an answer. Improving core systems doesn't replace new champion releases. It is a different thing to do. But it does not replace new champion releases as a monetization opportunity, it does not replace new champions as part of the larger narrative framework, or new content, or meta evolution, or any of the other things new champions do.
You seem to be saying do these other things, and the other stuff will just fix itself. You can't just say monetization "could" come from champion rework bundles or special event passes. We already have special event passes, you're going to add more? How many more? And you can only sell champion rework bundles if you actually rework champions, which often takes comparable levels of work to making new champions in at least some areas. You might not need as much artwork, but to be honest that won't matter if you reduce champion releases because with half the new champions released you're going to fire a lot of those artists anyway.
You have an idea of what you'd rather they work on. But the question is not what would you rather they work on. The question is how do you specifically plug all the holes in the game that reducing new champion releases would create. And how do you know you wouldnt torpedo the game while doing it. It is not like you can experiment with twelve new champs per year for a year and just see what happens. Everything that is going to replace those new champion releases must be ready to go on day one. There's no "could." You know exactly what's going to replace them, or you aren't going to just try it and see what happens.
Saying "if new champions are the only things keeping MCOC alive" is again missing the point. You still think new champions is just one thing the game does among many, instead of being the core thing the game actually is.
The point I’m making isn’t that we replace new champions outright, but that the current pace may be unsustainable without addressing foundational issues that have accumulated over time.
Yes, you're right that reworks take time and resources too—sometimes as much as new champions. But the key difference is that reworks stabilize the ecosystem. They reduce bloat, bring underused characters back into relevance, and create more consistent value across the roster. That’s a long-term investment in the health of the game.
You asked how we plug all the holes that reducing new champion releases would create. The honest answer is: we probably can't plug all of them—but the same is true for continuing at the current pace. More champions alone aren’t solving systemic issues like content burnout, progression bottlenecks, or champion redundancy. Those holes are already there. So the goal isn't perfection; it’s balance.
Instead of trying to endlessly scale one pillar (new champs), why not reinforce the others so that the entire structure holds up better? Champion releases can slow down a little if other systems—like progression, engagement, and variety in gameplay—are given real attention and development. If done thoughtfully, this doesn’t have to torpedo the game. It could actually give players more reasons to stay engaged long-term.
In short: yes, new champions are a core driver. But when the foundation is shaky, more weight isn’t always the answer. Sometimes you need to reinforce the frame before you add the next floor.
Saying the current model is unsustainable is a supposition on your part. An unsupported one contradicted by history. Without a very high degree of proof, it is just that, a supposition. No one is going to act on your unsupported suppositions. I don’t find it particularly convincing, and my livelihood does not depend on whether you’re right or wrong. The developers are betting their rent money they are right and you’re wrong.
You ask “why not?” That’s never the right question. The right question is “why?” Until you have “why?” “why not?” Is a meaningless exercise. The problem with saying things are unsustainable is you’re not the first person to say that. Lots of people have said it over many years. We don’t know if you’re right or wrong with certainty. We do know all those other people were definitely wrong, because the game is still here. If you’re right, you will be the first one ever. The safe bet is that you’re more likely to be yet another wrong person saying the sky is falling. So before we ask why not, first we have to answer the question: why are you the first person ever to be right.
Before anyone says maybe they were all right, it was just a matter of time, that’s nonsense. Saying the game’s model is unsustainable and thus it must be changed now only matters if the unsustainability problem is also imminent. If it is unsustainable because in a hundred years things won’t work, that’s an irrelevant issue. If you’re predicting a game collapse due to unsustainability, you’re predicting one on time scales necessary to completely change the game model. A year, two at most.
This reminds me of the people who keep complaining about rarity jumps. They ask why does Kabam keep releasing higher rarities that are just one number higher, why not be more creative?. It is simply impossible to explain to those people why rarities even exist, and why “being more creative” solves nothing. I could get into a very lengthy discussion on the difference between cardinals and ordinals, that would be very on-brand for me, but I don’t think many people would get the joke.
There is, of course, a very obvious thing in the game that basically moots this entire discussion. The day someone tackles it directly, I’ll listen more intently to what they have to say about new champion release sustainability.
Don’t feel bad OP, the forum is where imagination goes to die. Nothing exploratory survives here for long without being torn apart by the people who can’t conceive of anything other than what already is.
I can hold off getting new champs if they focus on fixing the game
With around 300 champions, a month with good champions released as 7* would give time. But that’s not the same people who design champions and dev-fix the game.
Don’t feel bad OP, the forum is where imagination goes to die. Nothing exploratory survives here for long without being torn apart by the people who can’t conceive of anything other than what already is.
Good ideas survive and bad ones don’t. I can conceive of a lot of things other than what is, and if you think you can stick that one on me personally, I have an alliance revive to sell you.
I see this type of post appear often on the forums, and it usually gets attacked by forum members because it’s probably not framed in the correct way by OPs to express their point clearly.
A better way to express this is in terms of questioning kabam’s allocation of development spending since designers, UI/UX developers, and backend developers are are all working on different teams.
It would make sense for us to ask kabam to reduce spending on UI/UX development, since it’s already good enough, and instead focus more spending on backend (i.e. cut funding for UX/UI staff and hire more backend developers to sort out bugs).
The current UI is good enough, but the last couple of major UI updates, although they do look ‘nice’, were completely unnecessary. So, members are rightfully questioning where the effort is focused.
The other two big Marvel games have never really had any major UI overhauls in years, and they are perfectly fine. The recent UI changes in MCOC, however, resulted in an overloaded menu system, a confusing menu selection, and unreadable text due to font size depending on screen size. As a developer myself, if I published this for a client, it would be an automatic redo for a very upset client.
Kabam, please focus on fixing your gameplay issues, not your UI.
Yeah... that's not how this works. That's not how any of that works.
Kabam are under obligation to both Netmarble and Marvel themselves to release new champs, especially if they're being used to promote a new project and while the idea of "putting things on hold" to focus on the issues seems reasonable, what would entice player interaction between now and when things get fixed?
To fix things as you want them means, there's no battlegrounds, no Incursions, no AQ, no War, no EQ and so on because as you stated these interactions are in "every facet of the game" which means even though you're not having problems in one area of the game, I could be having all those same problems in another area and if I'm not interested in playing Battlegrounds or incursions, then what else is there for Left for me to play in the interim?
While the intention is noble, the execution leaves alot to be desired, especially where the game can survive with a massive dip in participants.
I see this type of post appear often on the forums, and it usually gets attacked by forum members because it’s probably not framed in the correct way by OPs to express their point clearly.
A better way to express this is in terms of questioning kabam’s allocation of development spending since designers, UI/UX developers, and backend developers are are all working on different teams.
It would make sense for us to ask kabam to reduce spending on UI/UX development, since it’s already good enough, and instead focus more spending on backend (i.e. cut funding for UX/UI staff and hire more backend developers to sort out bugs).
The current UI is good enough, but the last couple of major UI updates, although they do look ‘nice’, were completely unnecessary. So, members are rightfully questioning where the effort is focused.
The other two big Marvel games have never really had any major UI overhauls in years, and they are perfectly fine. The recent UI changes in MCOC, however, resulted in an overloaded menu system, a confusing menu selection, and unreadable text due to font size depending on screen size. As a developer myself, if I published this for a client, it would be an automatic redo for a very upset client.
Kabam, please focus on fixing your gameplay issues, not your UI.
Their effort is focused on where it has always focused, and where it always will be focused: on the long term viability and success of the game.
It is easy to say the UI is good enough, no one was asking for this, they would be better served fixing bugs. But no one listens to forums to decide where to spend their money. They look at the actual data. How many players are playing. How many are picking up the game verses how many are leaving How much money is being spent on the game, and in what areas. Everything else is a luxury. These are the existential requirements for the game.
Once upon a time there was a company called Websense, formerly Netpartners and now Forcepoint. Websense was a big player back in the day for corporate web filtering; one among many. At the time, most of the companies playing in this field focused on filtering technology: improving their filtering accuracy, reducing false positives, expanding their databases, adding heuristics, and competing on which product had the best filtering scores.
Websense spend a ton of money on their reporting systems. It wasn't that their filtering was bad, it was just not necessarily the absolute best numerically. And they basically obliterated the market. There was Websense and there was everyone else. And in my opinion, the reason this happened was because of the way Websense was typically sold by integrators (I used to be one of them). If you were anyone else, you had to explain what your product did. Websense would just let the client test drive the system for 30 days, running silently in the background of the network, and then at the end of the 30 days they'd just hand management the system's reports on everything it had seen, everything it analyzed, and everything it would have done had it been live in their network. And then the business would write them a check. We wouldn't have to say a word.
Websense understood the market better than their competitors. And their market was not companies that needed web filtering. It was business managers who had signing authority for big purchases. Websense spent their money where it mattered most: targeting the people who would decide whether to buy the product.
MCOC needs an influx of new players constantly, because all games slowly lose existing players over time. None of us here needs the UI to look any different. Old is familiar to us. But old also looks old to new players. The day we stop getting new players is the first day of the end of the game.
I'm not saying Kabam shouldn't spend significant resources doing things like fixing bugs and cleaning up other issues. However, from a business standpoint bugs hurt the game, lack of approachability kills the game. We don't see (and will never see) the business internals of the game that Kabam has to tackle. But those things take priority over everything else, and the fact that we can't see those issues or ever really analyze them ourselves means we basically have to take their word for it, which is not ideal, but you're just never going to see what they see when they allocate resources between optional items and mandatory items on their priority list.
Comments
Because priorities.
Something like getting the design team to fix the bugs, only a different scenario.
Start removing some (issue rank materials for those taken away) and simplify things a small bit.
You ask “why not?” That’s never the right question. The right question is “why?” Until you have “why?” “why not?” Is a meaningless exercise. The problem with saying things are unsustainable is you’re not the first person to say that. Lots of people have said it over many years. We don’t know if you’re right or wrong with certainty. We do know all those other people were definitely wrong, because the game is still here. If you’re right, you will be the first one ever. The safe bet is that you’re more likely to be yet another wrong person saying the sky is falling. So before we ask why not, first we have to answer the question: why are you the first person ever to be right.
Before anyone says maybe they were all right, it was just a matter of time, that’s nonsense. Saying the game’s model is unsustainable and thus it must be changed now only matters if the unsustainability problem is also imminent. If it is unsustainable because in a hundred years things won’t work, that’s an irrelevant issue. If you’re predicting a game collapse due to unsustainability, you’re predicting one on time scales necessary to completely change the game model. A year, two at most.
This reminds me of the people who keep complaining about rarity jumps. They ask why does Kabam keep releasing higher rarities that are just one number higher, why not be more creative?. It is simply impossible to explain to those people why rarities even exist, and why “being more creative” solves nothing. I could get into a very lengthy discussion on the difference between cardinals and ordinals, that would be very on-brand for me, but I don’t think many people would get the joke.
There is, of course, a very obvious thing in the game that basically moots this entire discussion. The day someone tackles it directly, I’ll listen more intently to what they have to say about new champion release sustainability.
But that’s not the same people who design champions and dev-fix the game.
A better way to express this is in terms of questioning kabam’s allocation of development spending since designers, UI/UX developers, and backend developers are are all working on different teams.
It would make sense for us to ask kabam to reduce spending on UI/UX development, since it’s already good enough, and instead focus more spending on backend (i.e. cut funding for UX/UI staff and hire more backend developers to sort out bugs).
The current UI is good enough, but the last couple of major UI updates, although they do look ‘nice’, were completely unnecessary. So, members are rightfully questioning where the effort is focused.
The other two big Marvel games have never really had any major UI overhauls in years, and they are perfectly fine. The recent UI changes in MCOC, however, resulted in an overloaded menu system, a confusing menu selection, and unreadable text due to font size depending on screen size. As a developer myself, if I published this for a client, it would be an automatic redo for a very upset client.
Kabam, please focus on fixing your gameplay issues, not your UI.
That's not how any of that works.
Kabam are under obligation to both Netmarble and Marvel themselves to release new champs, especially if they're being used to promote a new project and while the idea of "putting things on hold" to focus on the issues seems reasonable, what would entice player interaction between now and when things get fixed?
To fix things as you want them means, there's no battlegrounds, no Incursions, no AQ, no War, no EQ and so on because as you stated these interactions are in "every facet of the game" which means even though you're not having problems in one area of the game, I could be having all those same problems in another area and if I'm not interested in playing Battlegrounds or incursions, then what else is there for Left for me to play in the interim?
While the intention is noble, the execution leaves alot to be desired, especially where the game can survive with a massive dip in participants.
It is easy to say the UI is good enough, no one was asking for this, they would be better served fixing bugs. But no one listens to forums to decide where to spend their money. They look at the actual data. How many players are playing. How many are picking up the game verses how many are leaving How much money is being spent on the game, and in what areas. Everything else is a luxury. These are the existential requirements for the game.
Once upon a time there was a company called Websense, formerly Netpartners and now Forcepoint. Websense was a big player back in the day for corporate web filtering; one among many. At the time, most of the companies playing in this field focused on filtering technology: improving their filtering accuracy, reducing false positives, expanding their databases, adding heuristics, and competing on which product had the best filtering scores.
Websense spend a ton of money on their reporting systems. It wasn't that their filtering was bad, it was just not necessarily the absolute best numerically. And they basically obliterated the market. There was Websense and there was everyone else. And in my opinion, the reason this happened was because of the way Websense was typically sold by integrators (I used to be one of them). If you were anyone else, you had to explain what your product did. Websense would just let the client test drive the system for 30 days, running silently in the background of the network, and then at the end of the 30 days they'd just hand management the system's reports on everything it had seen, everything it analyzed, and everything it would have done had it been live in their network. And then the business would write them a check. We wouldn't have to say a word.
Websense understood the market better than their competitors. And their market was not companies that needed web filtering. It was business managers who had signing authority for big purchases. Websense spent their money where it mattered most: targeting the people who would decide whether to buy the product.
MCOC needs an influx of new players constantly, because all games slowly lose existing players over time. None of us here needs the UI to look any different. Old is familiar to us. But old also looks old to new players. The day we stop getting new players is the first day of the end of the game.
I'm not saying Kabam shouldn't spend significant resources doing things like fixing bugs and cleaning up other issues. However, from a business standpoint bugs hurt the game, lack of approachability kills the game. We don't see (and will never see) the business internals of the game that Kabam has to tackle. But those things take priority over everything else, and the fact that we can't see those issues or ever really analyze them ourselves means we basically have to take their word for it, which is not ideal, but you're just never going to see what they see when they allocate resources between optional items and mandatory items on their priority list.