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Mastery loadout swap costs need to go.
MrSanguini
Member Posts: 219 ★★
Why is there a service fee on my mastery switching? Who gets the commission??
Mastery loadout switching costs are unnecessary and discourage using the feature. I know it has a cost because it already costs units to recover and re-do masteries, but that cost should be for restructuring, not reusing your own mastery sets. Anytime you want to make a minor change to one loadout, say, you're removing 1 point of MD from your BGs loadout because the meta is already giving mystics power (like last month's meta). You need to:
-Switch the active loadout (costs units)
-Recover and redo the masteries (costs units)
-And then switch your loadout back (costs units)
The same applies for if you ever remove masteries to fight a particular boss that punishes certain ones, like Warlock with willpower.
Why can't we just keep the cost to recovering and redoing the masteries?? I have never seen a game that punishes using their loadout systems
An even worse scenario is if you want to use recoils for arena (my current situation). You'd have to switch your loadout twice every day to allow yourself to do alliance/daily content and arena for a given day. Even if you can mitigate this cost with efficient play timing, you'll still be losing around 18k units per year to run a setup like that, and this can jump to 25k if you don't have a strict structure for which days to grind. You tell me if that's a fair mechanic.
At the very least, if Kabam is so adamant about maintaining the cost for the oh-so-incredible technique of changing your masteries, why not make them like Battlegrounds mastery loadouts? One time payment, and then you can switch freely. I don't care if you charge me units to own another mastery loadout, just stop charging me every time I wanna use the dang thing.
Mastery loadout switching costs are unnecessary and discourage using the feature. I know it has a cost because it already costs units to recover and re-do masteries, but that cost should be for restructuring, not reusing your own mastery sets. Anytime you want to make a minor change to one loadout, say, you're removing 1 point of MD from your BGs loadout because the meta is already giving mystics power (like last month's meta). You need to:
-Switch the active loadout (costs units)
-Recover and redo the masteries (costs units)
-And then switch your loadout back (costs units)
The same applies for if you ever remove masteries to fight a particular boss that punishes certain ones, like Warlock with willpower.
Why can't we just keep the cost to recovering and redoing the masteries?? I have never seen a game that punishes using their loadout systems
An even worse scenario is if you want to use recoils for arena (my current situation). You'd have to switch your loadout twice every day to allow yourself to do alliance/daily content and arena for a given day. Even if you can mitigate this cost with efficient play timing, you'll still be losing around 18k units per year to run a setup like that, and this can jump to 25k if you don't have a strict structure for which days to grind. You tell me if that's a fair mechanic.
At the very least, if Kabam is so adamant about maintaining the cost for the oh-so-incredible technique of changing your masteries, why not make them like Battlegrounds mastery loadouts? One time payment, and then you can switch freely. I don't care if you charge me units to own another mastery loadout, just stop charging me every time I wanna use the dang thing.
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Currently it's 70 units to switch (35 to change)
Not very efficient but it was made as QOL change for upper war players who have to swap masteries for specific war fights and now they can change them up with one button.
Or very least make it make it a sigil perk to get free mastery swaps
But not in mcoc
If implemented in mcoc, it means you can set up suicide masteries for champions like Omega Red and non suicide masteries for other champions
It will be pro champion and pro player bcos players get to play each champion to their fullest potential
Every MMO I ever played had respec costs. And that's not a coincidence: respec costs are there as a compromise, because in fact the idea is to not allow respec at all. Respec is a necessary trade off to allow for unintended shifts in the game meta (the actual meta, not the thing we call the meta around here). This is a general rule of thumb for most RPG-like games, which MCOC essentially is.
I guess whatever dimension I'm from, the devs happened to follow me here. Fortunate for me I guess; the game only makes sense to multiversal refugees.
AP carry, AD carry, Support, Tank, Jungler
Every role is different so it requires different masteries setup
Tank requires more defensive masteries
AD carry requires offensive masteries that increase physical damage
AP carry requires offensive masteries that increase magical damage
It's plain stupid to have a one size fit all masteries for all the hundreds of champions in mcoc
But that's where we are at now
The problem with a situation where all the players think one thing and all the game developers think something else is: players don’t make the games. And the strategy of having players learn how to become professional game designers is the weird coincidence that once they actually have to do the work and their livelihood depends on it, they tend to change their minds.
It’s a tax on the players, plain and simple. It suppresses the usage of masteries by imposing a fee. If they wanted players to switch more often, they could cut the price and see if players respond. But they haven’t touched it since the loadouts were introduced. So presumably, Kabam has set the tax at a level that promotes whatever they believe to be the “correct” amount of switching by players.
Or, maybe they just haven’t thought about it in the last two years. That’s a strong possibility too.
But we don’t live in that ideal world. Players don’t always fully understand the decisions they are making when they pick their masteries. The game meta shifts over time and across progressional content. People sometimes just make mistakes. Locking players into one choice forever is too harsh. So the game wants to give players the ability to change masteries when things become unsuitable, without allowing players to simply choose whenever they want. Developers also want to freedom to design content that will be hostile to some mastery decisions without arbitrarily excluding a wide swath of players from it. So masteries can be changed, but the cost is set such that it is high enough that players have to think carefully before doing so, so the choice of mastery set up is still a choice with consequences.
And it isn’t that the devs made this call years ago and haven’t revisited it since. Besides this fundamental reason why the cost exists in the first place, there’s another reason why mastery switch costs are highly unlikely to go away, but it’s a meta reason I’m not going to discuss.
But the reality is this.. there's a still a ton of room for improvement
What's always been so annoying is that you have to wipe and respec an entire tree just to adjust even one point.. you're forced to wipe everything you were happy with and then *pay* to restore.. what you *didn't* want to change in the first place.. the inefficiency is actually what makes is more expensive 😂.. and that's the part that has always been insulting to me
And here's the problem with the load outs (as mentioned above I believe).. you have to have a load out active to adjust it, why? Let's say you want to change your BG masteries.. you need to manually wipe and redo all your points.. in whatever load out you are in then apply them.. here's the issue, if you only wanted those for BG.. you couldn't save the previous state of the load out you were in before you made this adjustment, but actually it's a "new build" vs an adjustment because you had to wipe it all.. but now, you have to pay to rebuild the load out to its previous state... The state you liked and wanted to keep, but there's no way to save that build
Main problem being that I don't mind being charged once.. but we are being charged 2 and 3 times over to accomplish one thing? That's the issue
So accept that and move on
Every player just buy netmarble shares and we appoint 1 player living in South Korea as our proxy to represent us in the shareholders meeting and get the proxy to tell the CEO what we want
However, it isn't my place to tell people what to want, or what to ask for. This subject keeps coming up, even within the CCP discussions. A lot of people want these costs to go away. The answer keeps coming up no. Maybe one day the answer will be yes, but I believe the odds of that happening under the current circumstances is too vanishingly small to be worth my own time. However, everyone else is free to spend their time however they choose. If you don't care why the costs are there and just want to keep asking for them to be removed in the hope that one day you get lucky, well, that's one way to approach things.
I'm not telling anyone to stop asking. However, if someone wants to debate why the costs are even there in the first place, that's an objective question with an objective answer that I happen to know with some certainty. How anyone chooses to use that information is up to them. Knowing *why* costs exist doesn't mean they can't change. Knowing why they exist objectively rather than just wishful thinking is how I got Alliance war revive costs to go away. Something which, incidentally, were I to try today I would almost certainly fail, for those aforementioned meta reasons I won't discuss (that have nothing to do directly with how much anyone was spending on them, by the way).
You were never meant to fit in with the cool kids
However, it would be cool to have a one time unit pay “switch” to assign certain mastery loadouts to different game modes. Like on AW defense, you could assign a defensive loadout. For BGs you could assign your suicides or semi-suicides. And then your third slot would be general questing for content like the acts, epoch, necro, etc. But, having them assignable to certain aspects of the game would be really cool to see.
It's also nowhere near being an RPG let's get that out of the way as well. You aren't playing any roles in this Gacha game. There's the Summoner, but that's about it. You aren't making any custom characters or anything. It's a fighting game, like other fighting games, but more PVE since you aren't ever actually playing against a real person.
There is still a choice if the loadouts were free switching, because the loadouts are only three. It’s not like you can have any mastery setup at anytime, you can only have 3 different sets, and considering how you’d need a specific one for AW defense and perhaps one for recoils if you grind arena, two of those slots are already dedicated for most endgame players.
So no, allowing players to freely switch still emphasizes making choices since you simply cannot have enough loadouts to cover every potential situation, so you MUST still allocate your points efficiently and perhaps even respec for certain situations (like the aforementioned Warlock willpower problem).
The current price tag only makes for an annoying tax when you decide to change masteries for different game modes.
I’m quite particular about this issue because of the arena grinding scenario. This system makes switching to recoils cut down your arena earnings by over 30% if you’d like to play other relevant content without sabotaging your performance. That’s ridiculous.
Now my recoil loadout is going to rot while I spend 70% more time in arena because I want to play AW simultaneously. Does Kabam really need to tax this when their income is already way beyond healthy from other sources?
Loadout slot costs are not intended to cover the costs of possessing a whole new set of mastery choices, to use at will. It’s intended to simply be the cost of having the convenience of redoing masteries without having to manually redo them. But that cost does not intend to make the actual act of using those mastery configurations.
I can see this thread is less about advocacy, and more about commiseration. Game design is something I have experience with. Psychotherapy is something I do not, so I am unqualified to continue here. So I will take my leave of this particular line of discussion.
- Are there any plans to make it more efficient to make minor adjustments to a build (not require an entire tree to be wiped and repopulated to make minor adjustments)?
- Are there any plans to give the ability to seperate attack and defense masteries for BGs?
Those would be the two best changes I could think of.. for me personally anyway
The ability to make minor adjustments (vs a full rebuild) kills 2 birds.. QOL and cost
Edit: as for prerequisites.. if you attempt to make an adjustment that breaks them..there could be a pop up that the adjustment you are attempting to make does not qualify.. and in this case you have to rebuild or make a difference decision? Idk, I'm assuming that's one of the first questions if we are considering allowing fine tuning vs rebuild
What I mean by that is.. it's all a choice made by the player as to how often they "need" to swap and we will each decide this for ourselves (and spend our rss accordingly) based on how important it is to us
But at the risk of this turning into a "pro Recoil" "anti Recoil" discussion (which is slightly off topic).. I personally believe that Recoil is the preferred mastery across multiple game modes (this is a personal opinion) so for me, this particular issues I do not share.. specifically
Game modes that are better with Recoils on (again, this is my opinion and I *know* others will not agree):
- Arena (the one we all agree on)
- AQ (absolutely.. it's a QOL thing just like Arena)
- AW.. yup! Here's why.. ending health does not matter in this game mode, you want to kill the defender asap and get out of the fight before it goes sideways
- Solo questing (short/medium form).. modern quest design only has 6 fights in it
The modes you do not want it on for (usually):
- BGs
- Solo (long form)
All is to say.. there are different views about how often one "needs" to swap out
Edit: there is a small handful of champs who should not run Recoil in AW (but the list is way shorter than you think) Nefaria, Spiral, IH.. that's all I got off the top of my head though