**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
I sincerely hope that Kabam can come up with a solution
1. Yes, I was able to power my way through in the end based on my roster and skill set
2. At my level, I seek the next big challenge and welcome any punishment thrown my way to further push myself, but
3. I have to wholeheartedly empathize with the wider community by agreeing that certain restrictions like gates in 6.2 are just outright restrictive and prevent any player from truly expressing himself by just skill alone. I felt gates truly sucked the joy out of most of 6.2, and when you make a game not fun to play anymore, then what purpose is there in playing said game that’s supposed to allow you to derive fun & joy in the first place?
That’s my 2 cents as an endgame player on this matter. My perspective is derived from personally experiencing & overcoming all endgame content and still feeling that certain aspects are totally unnecessary and unjustified.
Seatin makes some points I think are valid and some I think are not as valid, but I think even he specifically states that he's not a representative player of the game. Most of the problems he's experiencing are problems of his own creation. The game does get repetitive and boring if you spend a fortune buying everything and try to do the content immediately upon release no matter how hard or expensive that is. I mean, that's his job at this point. The number of players Seatin directly represents probably would fit in a Greyhound bus.
I think we do a disservice to Seatin's feedback if we oversimplify and suggest that his problems are anyone else's problems. Some of his problems are impossible to fix. Anyone who tackles the game the way he does is going to run out of things to do, period, and have little to look forward to, period. We need to set Seatin (and everyone like him) aside and ask for what situations is Seatin the canary in the cage, and try to address those for the majority of players. Remember that for every person that says Act 6 is a nightmare, there are at least a hundred that say Act 5 is a nightmare. If you think that everyone who says Act 5 is obviously too hard is just wrong, but everyone who says Act 6 is too hard is just obviously right, you're really part of the problem.
People asking for more - more rewards, more champions, more resources - aren't taking Seatin's experience to heart. His problem isn't that he doesn't have enough of those things, he has all the things. If every single 6* champ in the crystals was a "god tier" champ, everyone would just get to where Seatin is faster. That's a temporary fix, it makes lower tier players progress faster, but accelerates them to the wall quicker. If only Act 6 was less difficult, Seatin would still be bored. He's already beaten it.
The real problem, in my opinion, is that it is the content itself that is insufficiently rewarding. Not in terms of how much stuff we win, but rather in terms of how psychologically rewarding it is to beat it. For example, simply due to the difficulty level many players felt Infinity Thanos was an unfair fight. But for the players for whom the difficulty was appropriate, many felt that beating him was a reward unto itself. The content gave players a psychological reward separate from the in-game stuff rewards. No one piece of content can appeal universally to everyone, but that *kind* of content is very important to the long term health of the game and its players. It is content players look forward to seeing and beating, completely independent of rewards. The problem is that Kabam saves that content for the extremely rare fight, like the Grandmaster fight or Infinity Thanos. Yes: they take longer to design, I get that, but there's a continuum of complexity, and that kind of content has to be the goal. Every fight can't be the Grandmaster, but every fight could have some kernel of Grandmaster or Infinity Thanos genetics (I almost said DNA) within it.
When it comes to burn out, at least in my opinion (In-game) rewards are not the problem. Absolute difficulty is not the problem. Seatin proves you can have all the rewards and beat all the difficulty and still be burned out. But every player can face the same problem as Seatin at different levels of the game. For every player there is a plateau of resource earning and skill progression where, if things don't stall out completely, they do slow down dramatically. For those people, more rewards and lower difficulty doesn't solve anything: it just pushes them to a higher place where they will face the same problems. We know that, because sitting near the very top is someone who spends an almost unlimited amount, has virtually unlimited resources, and can defeat the highest level of difficulty, has nowhere higher to go and still faces the exact same problem as a player stuck on Act 5.1.
Seatin's problems are unique to the kind of player he is. But there's a variation of the problem at all levels of the game. That tells me the problem isn't absolute difficulty and it isn't rewards. Those are just temporary things that just put you into a higher tax bracket in the game. The fundamental problem is the content must be rewarding to play on its own, so that the game offers the right amount of challenge and difficulty at every level of the game. But that would take a fundamental paradigm shift in how content is created for the game. In the current paradigm, weird and interesting fights are the rare exception; they are the culmination of something. They need to increasingly be the meat of the game.
This is of course an oversimplification, but I think the fundamental problem that lies within Act 6, within AW, within a lot of parts of the game, even to some small degree in crystal openings, is that the game is too punishing and not enough rewarding. Act 6's difficulty tends to be more about punishing the player for doing something wrong than rewarding the player for doing something right. Alliance war is 99% punishment 1% rewarding which is why so many players hate it. Even the complaint about high value crystals like 6* or 5* crystals is, in effect, that players feel "punished" for some rolls and insufficiently rewarded for others. These are all different problems, and I'm not sure there's even a good fix for the crystal one, but they all have at their root the idea that players feel more punished for the bad and not rewarded for the good. And I mean that in a mental-state way, not in terms of material rewards.
The goal of the game should be to try to make the players feel good about accomplishing something, not feel bad about failing something. And while those are two sides of the same coin, that doesn't mean you can't skew that coin in one direction. I posted several threads about that very idea in the past.
With the whole gates system and some of those nodes it’s sheer BS or Atleast just the champion boss and some of the incoming nodes @Kabam Miike
Being a F2PP it’s down right complicated to do some of the content even after potion farming!!!
It’s frustrating
I was so disappointed with the results because after so much content completed and so much work to get champions that have no impact on my ability to clear content. The ratio of decent champs to bad ones in 5/6* crystals is demoralizing giving me little hope when doing the mathematical probabilities of a good champ to improve my roster. I guess I should try to finish 6.2 and 6.4... but why? You’re nerfing BW and MS so my roster will suck more for The Champion... and more champions that won’t do anything for me?
Bleh.
(This is after 3 months of Doom featured 5* crystals - 30 or so.. but that’s a post already made but man, back to back to back frustrations isn’t fun)
There of course is another. A way I genuinely feel is far better for the long term health of the game.
I have some friends irl who are devs (not for this game for others) and I've asked them about some things that make their lives difficult when developing and both of them said developing end game content. It's hard because after a time you kind of pigeon hole yourself into a corner. This game has the unique opportunity to avoid that pitfall. I bet if you asked some of the devs designing these act 7 nodes they'd say it is difficult and really stifles their creativity because pigeon holed.
Say for example, kabam went in an entirely different direction. Started over with 2* for act 1, did 3* for act 2 e.t.c all the way up to 6* rank whatever for the final acts.
Think about what you could do. Design entirely new nodes... you could even start stacking those node combinations in later acts. In essence training your players HOW to play around these nodes for the later acts.
Players would feel as though they were progressing and devs would have more creative freedom rather than simply cranking up the numbers. You could make entry contingent upon completing book 1 if that really worries you. I mean possibilities are endless. The opposite csb be said for cranking numbers up.
There are players who will beat whatever you put out within a week. You can't design towards them. They'll always beat whatever you throw at them. You need to design that content for the masses. Design end game stuff separate from story mode. Story keeps players feeling like they're getting somewhere.
What kabam really needs is a game mode that addresses retention. They've already installed the most used (bulky almost all games) method to keep players invested. It's called alliances. They need to address and create a new mode of ava/war that people are interested in. It's near impossible to design story stuff fast enough and of a high enough quality to keep both end game players and the masses happy and satisfied. War on the other hand runs itself once you have an good one.
That's why I think kabam has missed three mark. Just my .02
Communication between developers and their player base at a time like this is important. I enjoy this game and I want it to keep progressing positively, but I’ve always felt Kabam could do more to interact with their player base
Problem ; Why should an endgame player play incursions who has most of 5* champs in the game ?
Solve ; They can add a new crystal guarentees us 5* champs with %20 chance of a 6* champion. That way they can give endgame players a reason to play the incursions.
Problem ; Summoner advancement, weekly calendar they are outdated. They don't meet the needs of players.
Solve ; Summoner advancement rewards can be changed to a solo misison depending summoner's prestige. Higher the prestige,higher the rewards.
It's time to introduce cavalier crystal shards and give them to Cavalier summoners in weekly calendars.
In the last year I would say content has not been as fun but more so designed to be painful. I used to play the game and shoot for itemless. I had to concede this method of play as the game design changed to prevent this from even being reasonably feasible unless you wanted to endlessly rerun. The fights became punishing and designed to just whittle you down through one mean or another. The goal did not keep in mind fun of the player base and that was clear. The challenges shifted to unfair on many accounts.
We love this game but it is turning to a chore verse fun as the content is becoming overly painful and the rewards for that pain is just more pain. P2W is becoming the Norm and you can get so much further by spending than actually playing the game. It’s not a slight advantage to spend tons of money it’s basically the only way to actually get guaranteed progression anymore. People can actively buy there rosters now with cav crystals and these massive unit “deals” they have been rolling out. The rng aspect is intended to drive p2w for players. Even content clearing doesn’t give anything guaranteed to make your account stronger but you can buy it with enough units.
Without a change I don’t think the planned direction of the game holds up in its current form because larger groups of player are contemplating leaving. It’s the worst I’ve seen it in the many many years I’ve played the game. That includes following 12.0 as well.