Criticisms of Adaptive Difficulty EQ
1. Adaptive Difficulty EQ misunderstands the role of EQ in the game
In some of MCOC Encyclopedia's guides to Story Content, he calls out that Story Content isn't "going anywhere" - meaning that if your account isn't at a stage to take it on yet, you can go grind elsewhere in the game to improve your account and return to Story later.
And the key place you could go to grind out those rewards for account progression was EQ, with fresh rewards each month.
As such, EQ was a place to go with steady rewards to grow your account.
Adaptive Difficulty turns that on its head.
Now, to unlock rewards from EQ, the player is supposed to have first grown his or her account.
This is completely backwards.
Further, one of the fun parts of EQ was that when you were say, a newly minted Thronebreaker player, TB EQ was actually fairly hard. But as your account advanced, you could feel it get easier -- a reward from your hard work. Now, that's gone. The EQ content won't get easier; that experience is now lost.
EQ is supposed to be steady, and a source to build your account. Not adaptive and requiring you to have built your account in advance.
2. The Whales Already Own Everything Else
EQ isn't supposed to be a competetive zone. The game already has that. In droves.
Every month, the "big accounts" are already getting 5x+ more Radiance than I can earn out of Battlegrounds and Alliance War. And, that is what it is.
But EQ is supposed to be even footing for accounts at the same story-progression level. Not yet another place where the largest accounts are able to earn way more than the small and medium sized ones, further driving the gulf between the whales and the normal accounts.
3. What happened to Clarity, Simplicity and Approachability?
In Crashed's March Dev Diary: Battlegrounds in Focus post, he said he was focused on three goals of Clarity, Simplicity and Approachability.
This new EQ is NONE of those things.
Take a look at the screen that comes up when you hit "View Rewards".
It's confusing and overwhelming.
There are almost 50 different reward components you have to scroll through -- not even counting the "bonus rewards".
This content now thrusts yet another game currency - Etherion - on us to track?
There's a whole different presentation of the rewards as Reward Milestones, and I'm lost how that even works.
And now players have to be aware of, and try to optimize, Prestige. Which is hard to optomize - when you view your champion roster, the PI shown there factors in your masteries; but Prestige does not ... so who is my 31st highest prestige champ? Who knows! And how much presitge will I gain if I add some sig stones or do a rank up? MAYBE you can find random community charts to guage this on the internet, but nothing in game gives you any clue.
Clear? Simple? Approachable? Zero for three, Crashed.
4. Why are you fixing something that wasn't broken?
There is a whole thread of players telling you how much we liked Valiant EQ. It worked. It actually was simple, clear, and approachable. And, it achieved the stated goal of what you want with Adaptive EQ -- namely, rewarding roster depth.
Why did you blow it up after a few months?
This is so much worse.
