Coliseum would be fun without the podium level up nonsense
Coliseum should be about doing the best fights you can do against the boss, not about some stupid podium so you can have a higher multiplier. The latter sucks all the fun out of it and will inevitably make it less fun than the boring week of AQ that it’s supposed to replace. If I find out how to do a really good run with a champ and get through 20 health bars within my first 5 or 10 tries it won’t matter a lick because my podium will be level 1 or 2 which won’t net me enough points for the event. Instead I’ll have to grind that same fight hundreds of times across 5 different podiums before my points actually matter and that is frankly not fun. I’d rather do my AQ path 4 days a week because at least there everything I do meaningfully counts towards hitting the goal.
This also feels like a bait and switch. I was in Vancouver for Summoner’s Fest. I really enjoyed testing out the game mode there. I thought it would be such a fresh and fun addition to the game. Not a single soul mentioned the podium grind aspect to us, nor did Mike or Dave when they demonstrated it on the livestream. Had the community been made aware of this mega-grindy aspect we would have had so much feedback to say. The announcement that this mode would be replacing weeks of AQ wouldn’t have gotten such a big applause over the weekend.
This is the exact same mistake they made with Elder’s Marks in Battlegrounds. It’s an attempt to monetize a mode that already monetizes itself. The competitive aspect of Battlegrounds makes you want to have the newest champs ranked up to the highest levels to give yourself as much of a competitive edge on your opponents as possible which gets people spending on rank up materials and crystals to make their rosters better. It didn’t need a new currency to grab some arbitrary solo rewards and ultimately led to non-competitive actions being taken by players who chose to farm the solo rewards instead of engage with the mode. Like Battlegrounds, Coliseum monetizes itself. People are going to want to have strong champs that are capable of doing very well in the mode. Gladiator’s stocks are rising very quickly right new. People are going to want awakening gems, sig stones, and rank up materials for champs that can do well and get them high scores. Those are big ticket items which are highly sought after in every sale. What people don’t want is to spend those big ticket items ranking up their Deathless She-Hulk and clear 20 health bars only to find out the score won’t matter because they didn’t spend 3-5 hours grinding that podium’s level or because they didn’t spend $50 on a stack of podium upgrade tokens. That is very much un-fun.
This grindy aspect of the mode coupled with the unnecessary monetization of the podium upgrades is going to demotivate people. AQ, while being perhaps the most boring game mode, is still one the most or second most played game mode. We are begging for something either less boring or less time consuming. As it stands Coliseum is neither. It could have been less boring but you have to grind it so much not to get a score that’s worth a damn, but to be able to get a score that’s worth a damn which also makes it more time consuming as well. We like Raids not because of the challenge they present but because the rewards are decent and we can complete them in half the time AQ takes. Coliseum has great rewards but the only long term positive I see from it in its current state is that it’ll only take 3 days. A few months from now you will have a very small handful of whale alliances buying podium upgrades to obtain more radiance while 90% of the community is going to sigh as we begin going through the drudgerous task of grinding out the bare minimum they need to hit for the solo milestone and whatever their alliance’s minimum target is.
In summary, I was very hopeful for this game mode. I thought it would be a lot of fun competing with you alliance to see who could get the highest combined score while earning some great rewards and as a bonus not having to do AQ that week on top of everything else. That promise was not delivered. The podium level up system should be completely eliminated. The mode monetizes itself, it does not need any more monetization. That simple change would make this mode a winner
