Reward Progression makes no sense

Ever since the 12.0 compensation the rewards don't make any sense and don't advance your progression at all. Every player with a half decent account got a 5* awakening and T2A were suddenly coming monthly from calendars, great everyone is making gains. Then the next wave of content comes and its all 4* stuff again. I get that this is geared to catch up lower/mid tier players but how long are vets expected to wait around for meaningful gains, and why should our progress be diminished while lower tier players are now being fast tracked. The 5.2 completion/exploration rewards don't even move the dial for players that have rosters built to handle that content. After you've done you 1st LOL run what are non whales suppose to do ?

Comments

Apache

Kabam is greedy with their overpriced deals and cheap with rewards. Never has and never will change

EvilEmpire

I would welcome an offer that actually made an impact on my roster

Noobeeus

Agreed, the economy has shifted and 4* champs are now only an avenue to more 5* shards.

If you have 2 or 3 R4 5* champs ranking 4* to rank 5 will be unlikely to bump your prestige up so it becomes a 'do I rank this 4* to R5 for arena?' question.

The answer for me is no. I have lots of R5's and lots of t4cc sitting in my inventory. I plan on doing a LOL run before I do 5.2 because to me the rewards are worth the effort and units.

What I don't understand, and Kabam are clearly not divulging, is why the hold up on progression?

Lots of people have 100% LOL and now there is nothing for them except for T2A shards from map 6 crystals?

What Kabam needs to do is review their pricing structure. Its clear that they would sell more if the prices were more reasonable with what can now be earned just for playing.

I can get 2 4* champs a week just from grinding arenas. Why do they still cost 2500 units? Why does an AQ revive cost 180?

Rationalise the prices and watch more people play.

DNA3000

EvilEmpire wrote: »

I get that this is geared to catch up lower/mid tier players but how long are vets expected to wait around for meaningful gains, and why should our progress be diminished while lower tier players are now being fast tracked.

That's really how all MMOs are run. There's always a center of mass of the playerbase that the reward system tends to be engineered around. Players below the center of mass tend to see faster than average reward earning rates, while people higher than the center of mass tend to see lower than average earning rates (relative to their level: they always earn rewards faster on an absolute basis).

Lots of things go into designing rewards in an MMO, and one of them is the difficulty of the content. But players often think that's the only thing that does go in or should go in, but in practice that's actually just a modifier on top of a more global progression scale. That scale in relative terms looks like a "U" with the people at the beginning being pulled downhill towards the center and the players pushing forward past the center facing an increasingly uphill climb. That's deliberate: you can't have the people at the top accelerating away from the middle because it is literally not humanly possible to create content fast enough to keep pace with the fastest players.

This whole notion of the game becoming a 5* game is purely an invention of the players, or at least some of them. It is obvious that this game isn't yet shifting to a 5* focused game. What is true is that the fastest progressing players have reached a point where the only way to increase their power is with stronger 5* champs than they already have. But the game won't explicitly accommodate that until the center of mass of the playerbase reaches that same point. Until that happens, top tier rewards are going to be few and infrequent.

This is so much of a common practice that an experienced player can play an MMO for a few months and just on the basis of judging the reward system get an idea of how strong the average player in the game is. Because the reward system revolves around that average. I would bet the average MCOC player (or at least the average MCOC player that has been around for at least 60 days) has a rating of between 150k and 200k, has a bunch of 4* champs, very few 5* champs, and maybe a few 5/50s. That seems to be what the game rewards themselves tell me across the entire game.

EvilEmpire

Many of the things that were previously appealing to some like feature 4* crystals now seem so pointless, what does another 4* do to help my roster? It's a 5* game but with such limited rank up items for them and nothing on the immediate horizon what is keeping us playing? I think most vets were hopeful to see something come from 5.2 that advanced their roster but with that now out the window now we're just left with various avenues to grind shards but no way to advance our rosters further.

EvilEmpire

@DNA3000 I 100% understand your point I'm just saying when the newest and hardest content is still only offering 4* advancements it makes investing the time and money to complete it unappealing. I don't agree with your theory that the game isn't 5* focused as the culling of god tier champs and challenger rating has made 5*r4 champs a requirement for AW and obviously prestige. It's not the act 5 isn't possible without them or LOL for that matter however it's certainly made the difficulty prohibitive for players that don't have deep pockets.

Tronc

This was to try and entice average players to start becoming belugas.

DNA3000

EvilEmpire wrote: »

I don't agree with your theory that the game isn't 5* focused as the culling of god tier champs and challenger rating has made 5*r4 champs a requirement for AW and obviously prestige.

Challenger rating has done nothing of the kind: CR is a round off error in the grand scheme of the game, no matter how much people try to assert it is not. The devs even came out and specifically made an (overdue) statement about challenger rating here - https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/2317/challenger-rating-explained#latest saying essentially what I've been saying all along: challenger rating only affects the DR equation, and that only applies to a fixed set of stats (Armor, Armor Penetration, Critical Hit Rating, Critical Damage Rating, Critical Resistance, Block Proficiency, Block Penetration).

Setting challenge rating aside, it isn't true that 5* champs are a requirement for AW or AQ. It is more precise to say that 5* champs are a requirement to compete at the highest levels of AW and AQ, and that's because other players in other top alliances have them. That has nothing to do with what the game focuses on: it will always be true that you will need the absolute strongest stuff to compete with the other players with the absolute strongest stuff. That has nothing to do with what the game focuses on in its design. Whether the game focuses on 4* champs or 5* champs, to compete with the strongest players you have to have what they have. That's unavoidable.

EvilEmpire

The games drives you to gain prestige and win wars, 5* champs are a requirement for both this makes them the focal point. I may be in a T1 war alliance (not a top alliance by any means) but I have lower level friends who play and they have the same objectives, gain prestige, get 5* and work towards getting them to r4. I can't see how this is simply an "invention of the players". I don't want to bicker with anyone, I'm simply petitioning for more 5* advancement, if you've been playing this game for any amount of time it's really all that matters now.

Deadbyrd9

Act 5 hasn't released the full chapter rewards for exploration and completion. We only have 2 chapters out so far. The act 4 chapter rewards weren't very good but the full act rewards were. We will see some very juicy item for the whole act rewards. Be patient

DNA3000

EvilEmpire wrote: »

The games drives you to gain prestige and win wars, 5* champs are a requirement for both this makes them the focal point. I may be in a T1 war alliance (not a top alliance by any means) but I have lower level friends who play and they have the same objectives, gain prestige, get 5* and work towards getting them to r4. I can't see how this is simply an "invention of the players". I don't want to bicker with anyone, I'm simply petitioning for more 5* advancement, if you've been playing this game for any amount of time it's really all that matters now.

If you're asking for more ways to advance your 5* champions, I can understand that. I'm just explaining to you how every time someone claims the game is now 5* focused and thus Kabam should automatically be doing so, Kabam isn't going to see it that way, ever, and neither will any other game dev studio, ever. It isn't a persuasive argument. But it is your prerogative to attempt to make it if you choose. It is simply always going to fail. I'm not saying wanting more opportunities to advance 5* champs is an inherently bad idea, just that that particular justification isn't going to work.

EvilEmpire

So to summarize I simply don't understand why we were given all these great 5* advancement items late last year and early 2017 and now the newest and hardest content comes out and we're back to 4* stuff, I'm sure the act 5 exploration rewards will offer some compelling stuff but that could be 6 months away and the current rewards aren't impactful. I see players that spend serious money just throw in the towel regularly because there is nothing to do, I'm gearing for my LOL run but after that I'll have little to play for. Just hopeful that players of all levels can have meaningful content, I'm not asking for it to be easy or even free but would like to always see a path forward.

Noobeeus

@EvilEmpire Could be 6 months away?

Will be at least, and completing it will cost $

EvilEmpire

Noobeeus wrote: »

@EvilEmpire Could be 6 months away?

Will be at least, and completing it will cost $

I don't think that's true necessarily, one of the best parts of this game is you can earn a lot of units if you put in the work. I mean completing LOL exploration seems like a stretch but I'm sure someone has or will do it without spending. Every freemium game gets you on impatience this is no difference.

DNA3000

EvilEmpire wrote: »

So to summarize I simply don't understand why we were given all these great 5* advancement items late last year and early 2017 and now the newest and hardest content comes out and we're back to 4* stuff, I'm sure the act 5 exploration rewards will offer some compelling stuff but that could be 6 months away and the current rewards aren't impactful. I see players that spend serious money just throw in the towel regularly because there is nothing to do, I'm gearing for my LOL run but after that I'll have little to play for. Just hopeful that players of all levels can have meaningful content, I'm not asking for it to be easy or even free but would like to always see a path forward.

Because Kabam currently sees 5* champions as still very special to most players. If they constantly gave out 5*-oriented rewards like alpha 2s and loads of 5* shards, people would get used to them. Instead, they want those rewards to seem special, so they make them part of special events. But the normal rewards don't scale up to them.

Game operators always want a sugar cube in their pocket they can hand out to the players to make them happy, but it has to be an unusual and uncommon thing or it won't have the psychological impact they want it to have. So they deliberately constrain players' abilities to earn those things, because right now they have more value to Kabam as special rewards for special occasions.

As to running out of content to do, that's always a problem for MMO studios. The fastest progressing players will always run out of content to do, because they pace themselves like dogs eating spaghetti. They know that nothing they do will keep up so they try to make content that is so difficult it will force those players to slow down. Even that doesn't always work because some players will just spend their way past the content instead of building up progression to do it in a less expensive way. Kabam even tried to hint at this by explicitly stating that 5.2 isn't intended to be immediately raced through.

Of course, for some players the primary thrill is trying to race through content the instant it lands. But the game can't be designed around them. That's true for all MMOs: you can toss them a bone occasionally, but it won't even be true that they get the same amount of content as everyone else. The focus will be on lower players - the "center of mass" players in the player population. The best you can hope for is that the game develops the far end game at a reasonable pace forward, but "reasonable" for the game probably won't be a reasonable pace for the players waiting there for more content.

This is one of the great unsolved problems in MMO development. You want to keep the top tier players busy. You want them to be rewarded for their trouble. You don't want them accelerating away from the rest of the playerbase. Except in some very special cases, those three things are self-contradictory: you can't get all three. At least, as far as any developer has been able to figure out. The only games I've seen that have partially solved this problem self-select players that are as interested in accomplishing cosmetic things as they are in accomplishing power progression objectives. You can then give them things to do that generate high end rewards that don't make them overpowered relative to the rest of the game. This game is not that kind of game.

LeNoirFaineant

DNA3000 wrote: »

EvilEmpire wrote: »

I don't agree with your theory that the game isn't 5* focused as the culling of god tier champs and challenger rating has made 5*r4 champs a requirement for AW and obviously prestige.

Challenger rating has done nothing of the kind: CR is a round off error in the grand scheme of the game, no matter how much people try to assert it is not. The devs even came out and specifically made an (overdue) statement about challenger rating here - https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/2317/challenger-rating-explained#latest saying essentially what I've been saying all along: challenger rating only affects the DR equation, and that only applies to a fixed set of stats (Armor, Armor Penetration, Critical Hit Rating, Critical Damage Rating, Critical Resistance, Block Proficiency, Block Penetration).

Setting challenge rating aside, it isn't true that 5* champs are a requirement for AW or AQ. It is more precise to say that 5* champs are a requirement to compete at the highest levels of AW and AQ, and that's because other players in other top alliances have them. That has nothing to do with what the game focuses on: it will always be true that you will need the absolute strongest stuff to compete with the other players with the absolute strongest stuff. That has nothing to do with what the game focuses on in its design. Whether the game focuses on 4* champs or 5* champs, to compete with the strongest players you have to have what they have. That's unavoidable.

BW L2 is still good against lower champs. It never crits against higher champs and does less damage than regular attacks. SW regens like crazy on lower content. Almost never on harder content. I don't care what the official line on challenger rating is, the practical reality is much different.