Alliance Quest Mid-Season Map, Rewards, and Glory Store Update - Nov 2019

SettlersofCatan · November 2019

Ridiculous that 1st gets a 100% increase in t5b but 2nd-5th only gets 25%.

Nobody is touching 1st place right now but they're hoping for a massive multi-million dollar whale war between 1st and 2nd.

Not a surprise that Doom is insanely high in prestige and who knows what Silver Surfer's will be. Also not a surprise that a quarter of a random t5c costs $500.

For some of these guys in 1st and 2nd, a sig 200 rank 5 Doom won't even affect their prestige, only rank 2 6 stars do. These guys will each be spending well into the 5 figures for a sig 200 6 star doom just to maintain or compete for first. Congrats Kabam. Well done.

I was getting the itch to come back from retirement but high end isn't worth it anymore unless you spend your life savings and then some trying to boost some arbitrary stats.

Vincentblack · November 2019

RoninMan said:

Vincentblack said:

zeezee57 said:

Vincentblack said:
Kabam keeps increasing the difficulty without raising base rewards. Adding hyperion and switch raised the difficulty with no change to rewards and now this with stun immunity it is an obvious increase in difficulty and again no increase in base rewards. The honor points system doesn't count as an increase in base rewards and unfortunately I feel like it's just more nonsense to go wrong at this point.
The glory store change alone is a massive rewards bump, who cares if its through there or "base rewards" when it all goes the same way. Glory is only earned through AQ and can only be used in the glory store. The t5b change they just made is massive.
Hard to take advantage of that when every change they make is an obvious resource grab either units or glory to buy potions and revives for constantly harder content with the same outdated rewards. So yeah I disagree that they are the same
You’re actually wrong on both accounts. First, the change to the glory store is a very nice change. It reduces the cost of a lot of valuable resources which is by far greater than, say, more glory. Especially considering glory caps at 15,000, I would rather have prices reduced so I can buy more stuff rather than earning more glory and worry about capping out earlier and purchasing stuff I may not want to yet. That already is a nice bonus.

Secondly, you must’ve missed the announcement of increased rank rewards. They bumped up rank rewards for most, if not all, brackets. So Kabam actually did increase base rewards. Unless your definition of base rewards has some other weird definition.

Lulz I did miss that so I admittingly stand corrected. I still don't agree with the glory store stuff being the equivalent to a boost in rewards with the addition of harder content simply because the cost of potions remain the same and its easy to conclude harder content means more of my glory to potions.

Like I said though I stand corrected, it's nice that they bumped rewards and lowered glory and everything but it all is steps behind what's appropriate for the current state of the game, much like eq rewards being the same since they released and when they do update they will still more than likely be a let down. But something is much better than nothing when dealing with kabam so I guess it's a win

Zuro · November 2019

All I wanted was buffed gold crystals

DNA3000 · November 2019

UmbertoDelRio said:

DNA3000 said:

UmbertoDelRio said:

DNA3000 said:

UmbertoDelRio said:
Can you not mess something up for at least a week or so?

Seriously, at least try to understand that this is not just a rant, but actual feedback driven by justified frustration.

Even if that is a visual glitch, without proper communication we can't just assume that. So as far as we know aq will spontaneously start today, which only people checking the forum and people for some reason checking the aq tab will even find out, so there's a good chance that a lot of alliance leaders/officers will need to rush and organize aq possibly after it started.

Next thing is the modifiers. We'll either also get them today, which is another aspect we can't properly organize if we decided to trust your schedule, or we'll simply miss out on the first day of modifier bonus points, which essentially ruins the first round of modified aq.

This is simply ridiculous.
Fortunately the timer was an error and was reset. However, and I'm not one to jump on small things, and I'm not jumping on this small thing, but I have to say I'm not confident that modifiers is going to launch correctly, and this doesn't help at all. I mean, I would bet real money it doesn't launch bug free, but I don't expect software to be completely bug free with every update. I mean I'm actually worried modifiers is going to do something bad. And I should point out there's a competitive element to AQ in the rank rewards, so if modifiers goes south randomly and sporadically, players will be justified in complaining about disrupted rank rewards. If someone can typo the start date for the next cycle, they can typo much more dangerous things.

I'm actually looking forward to using modifiers in general, I'm just a bit apprehensive about the initial launch. With all of the problems recently, I would think everyone would be triple checking everything. So how did the wrong start date get past triple checking everything?
Exactly. At this point releasing anything new into the game, no matter how long they actually planned implementing it, just seems reckless.
The problem is that in my experience, halting an update like this comes with its own risks. When you make system changes in an online game like this one, you're coordinating changes in a lot of moving pieces, and not all of them have a perfectly purely isolated "dev environment." You're changing your own servers, but you're also potentially making changes in your cloud providers (the game partially runs on Google game cloud systems). And you're updating the game client in many cases, and that update might have been in Apple's hands already (it can take them anywhere from two hours to two weeks to clear an update, so updates to the game client often get sent to them well in advance). And then you also have to update things like toolchains - the tools the devs are using to work with AQ in this case.

If it was just a question of pushing or not pushing the new system live, you could just choose to not do that. But it is very likely many things have already been updated and would now need to be reverted. Sometimes this is ultimately not a problem, and sometimes it is. The problem is you don't often know which one this is until you try. And a complete analysis of which one is more risky, go live or revert, can often take more time and resources than doing either.

I don't think this is theoretical either. My recollection is that we have, in the past, had instances in the game where an update was temporarily halted, and that itself caused problems. I can't recall the specifics off the top of my head, but I'll try to remember what they were.
Okay, this might sound extremely naive, but I'm honest enough to say that I don't really know much about software development:

Should you not know your system well enough to at least kinda sorta know what you can do and what you can't do?
Or at least how big of a realistic chance there is for [X] to result in [Y]?

Well, in theory yes. But in practice, this is extremely rare. No one person likely knows what can and cannot be done to the game as a whole. Development is too specialized, too siloed for that. It is up to managers and producers to make judgment calls there. But to be frank, managers and producers generally aren't experts at all the individual development processes under their oversight. At best, they are familiar enough to be able to manage and communicate with those that are.

But that means no one person is really sure what can and cannot be done. Or to be more precise, what can and cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time and effort. This is a problem in the games industry in general. And to be honest in the IT field as well.

I should also point out that knowing "kinda sorta" is only useful during brainstorm sessions and at cocktail parties. When it comes to actually doing, either you're sure or you don't know. Everything you kinda know has a major risk of blowing up in your face. That's often where mistakes happen: when someone kinda thinks something is sorta correct.

CyberWolvz · November 2019

When will free cost AQ week gonna start? Your initial broadcast in the ingame email was 14Nov and we anticipated yesterday yet it suddenly disappeared!

RiderofHell · November 2019

CyberWolvz said:
When will free cost AQ week gonna start? Your initial broadcast in the ingame email was 14Nov and we anticipated yesterday yet it suddenly disappeared!

Tomorrow

Faisaljaved · November 2019

i am quite happy with the aq update .credit where credit is due

Lukey10bo · November 2019

What has happened to the 'History' function in alliance quests? As a Leader it was very helpful to review the activity of members. Please provide an explanation Kabam as I can't seem to find one anywhere on Forum so far.

N_Pool_1 · November 2019

Cool

Alliance Quest Mid-Season Map, Rewards, and Glory Store Update - Nov 2019

Comments