Further to what I was saying, you're forgetting one aspect of Book 1. It required acquiring Champs to complete it along the way. That's part of the game.
You could fix this problem by adding more champions to the 2* pools. I'm assuming that most people here have all the 2*s available in the premium pool. By increasing the pool, you can introduce new champions that would help with the acquisition of champions. Then, they could be used for Act 1 in Book 2, if it were to have a champion requirement of lower tier.
Considering Book 2 is accessed by completing Act 6, it's nonsensical to restart the same as Book 1, with lower requirements, and still have End-Game Rewards. They've also said themselves that 5 and 6*s will be the focus of Book 2. Whether or not that's on the table is up to them. I already said that I agree a certain amount of ease into the Book would make sense. Right here is where we have a fundamental flaw in these discussions. Expectations exceed what's reasonable. I suggested certain Paths. Now the expectation is becoming making the entire Book a la Variant. I do not agree that it should be completely designed with the same concept. Elements could be worked in. It's still meant to be a step up from Act 6 in some respects. I'm not closed-minded or lacking imagination. In fact, my imagination gave a suggestion on how to integrate elements of it into the current schematic. I just don't agree that it's feasible or reasonable to make it JUST LIKE Variant. TL:DR - It shouldn't be THAT easy.
I totally agree that it shouldn't be that easy, but Kabam has already made those lower tier champions, so why not incorporate them into the fights? I put out an idea for a quest design earlier. You could have 2*s with boosted attack ratings fighting Act 5-ish champions and bosses. The catch would be that the health of the 2* would not be boosted, and the player would have to rely on intercepts instead of parries. You can increase the challenge without increasing the tier requirements of a champion or the attack ratings of the defenders. I agree that it shouldn't be Variant, but it should reflect the creativity of a Variant.
I agree that there could be elements of it, but the entire thing isn't really something that makes sense to me. The other side of that coin is people don't wait to acquire anything. They already have the Champs, and the majority of people on Book 2 are the same people who finsihed Variants the day they were released. No challenge at all, just easy End-Game Rewards without waiting on anything. There's no getting around RNG or waiting from time to time in this game. That's just a part of playing it. Some people may get tired of this process, but that's to be expected now and then.
I think it is important to note here that as probably the first person to use the phrase "progressional content" on the forums, the point to calling content "progressional content" is not that it progresses the story and not that it progresses the difficulty. Rather, progressional content is called progressional content because it parallels core game progress. And at the moment, game progress is dictated by three things in game: levels (to a point), progressional titles (past that point), and roster development. The story arc content is progressional content because the content contains either implicit or explicit landmarks to progress. Because roster development is fundamental to progress in this game, progressional content will, for the most part, require rosters that are further "upward" not restricted "downward" to smaller levels. There can be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions.
The fundamental difference between Variant and the Story arcs is the story arcs must reflect for the most part how rosters progress, which is upward towards higher rarity champions. Content like Variants or the Abyss don't have that requirement, and can make up any restrictions in roster that they want.
The whole reason why 5* and 6* champs are more coveted by players is that they intrinsically stronger than lower rarity champs (in general) and that is only true if you can actually use them that way. That doesn't have to be everywhere, but the one place where that has to be true is in the core progressional content. Because that's the *definition* of progressional content.
To put it another way, if you starting restricting people from using their 5* and 6* rosters in the Story arcs, they would cease to be progressional content. Because you couldn't use your fundamental upward roster growth in it. Then the question would become, what is the core progressional content of the game?
In a perfect world the game would be one long progressional ladder, where completing Act 6 gave you exactly what was necessary to tackle Act 7, then Act 7 would give you exactly what was necessary to tackle Act 8, and so on. But no progressional game is perfect like that (at least no multiplayer one) so there exists non-progressional content to among other things give players a variety of things to do and to pause at one progressional rung of the ladder while they build up the skills and resources to tackle the next rung. The core progressional content is not normally where you make detours in progress, because that's not what it is there for. It is there to drive progress forward. If that is not its primary purpose, it isn't progressional content.
Progressional content doesn't have to get subjectively harder: some games don't do that. But progressional content always pushes progress forward, within the context of that game's progress.
Well I was thinking that if Book 2 is going to be anything like Book 1, the rewards for Act 1 would help the player ultimately complete Act 6, which means a mix of crystal shards and catalysts. If Act 1 was to utilize lower-tier champs, then it would still aim to provide a sense of progression since you're acquiring resources that would help in the future. As you complete Act after Act in Book 2, you eventually gather what you need to take on Act 6, therefore, a progressional trajectory. Now yes, you could just make all the Acts geared towards 6*s, but if you were Kabam, why waste all the work you've done with the lower-tier champs when you could incorporate them in your content as well? Now rosters can progress not just in terms of rarity, but in broadness, which means acquiring more lower-tier characters. This could be solved by adding characters to the 2* pool, similar to how Kabam is adding characters to the 6* pool. Now although some of the champs are going to be too OP in the hands of a beginner, such as 2* Corvus or 2* Ghost, realistically speaking, how long would it take for a player to progress to 3*s? Not very long, so those new 2* champs wouldn't make a big difference anyway. So now, players are still progressing, but progressing by adding lower-tier characters that they can now use in content that can in turn, help build up their roster in terms of higher rarity champs to prepare for Act 6, which would require the best and most rare champions. And since we still are upping the difficulty, the need for better champs and higher rank champs arises, which can be solved by putting the resources needed to rank those champs into the Acts that precede Act 6.
Crystal pools are a recent problem, so Kabam might have that on their plan for the future.
Now I do agree that we should have some sort of Nexus crystal, and I like your idea of a class specific crystal. However, I don't agree with your prices for those crystals. The regular crystals should stay. The Nexus crystals should at least be the price of a featured, and so should all the other specific crystals you mentioned. The game was built on luck. I feel that altering or changing that luck would require more of a sacrifice, and in this case, a higher cost.
While luck may be part of the game, prior to Act 6 it wasn’t what one depended on to complete end-game content. With the terrible content that is act 6/7 beta we see that their idea of new content is niche fights. Requiring a smaller and smaller sub set of champions combined with an increasing champion pool makes this an issue. Why keep playing this game as an end game player if you can’t pull the champs you need to progress?
I’d agree and be fine with 15k shards for Nexus crystals. I do also think they need to increase shards rewards across the board.
Variant 4 keeps being brought up in this thread and that makes sense. It was so fun being able to use app those different champs to clear it. I know most of what I suggested would never happen. While it would make a better game in my opinion, it won’t make Kabam more money. We all know it’s money first, game quality second.
I agree that there could be elements of it, but the entire thing isn't really something that makes sense to me. The other side of that coin is people don't wait to acquire anything. They already have the Champs, and the majority of people on Book 2 are the same people who finsihed Variants the day they were released. No challenge at all, just easy End-Game Rewards without waiting on anything. There's no getting around RNG or waiting from time to time in this game. That's just a part of playing it. Some people may get tired of this process, but that's to be expected now and then.
But did people also not complete Act 6.4 without waiting on anything? Point is, there are always going to be people who can do the content without a problem. That's why we have to keep challenging the players. Now although I get that it's faster to get a 2* than to get a 6*, but wouldn't you still expect those same people to have those 6*s already? Act 7 isn't going to be content that is made for future champions. Act 7 is made so it's doable with the champions we have right now, so while some people might have to wait for the right counter, some people will be able to do it, no problem. But that's why Act 6 is hard. Because you need certain champions. Things get selective as you go on. It's not smart to just continually shrink down the amount of champs you can use in content, since after a while, you will be presented with a problem with no answer. I feel that Kabam should widen the net at first, just like with B1A1, and then slowly shrink the net over time until you get to Act 6. That way, more people are motivated to play. If you just limit the champs right off the bat, people without those champs won't be motivated to play. If you widen the net first, though, you get players who actually want to complete the content, who will be much more willing to try to get that certain champ when the time comes.
the best content Kabam have put in this game to date has been Variant 4
the requirement to use champs from all Star rating levels was excellent and they need more it.
Except it was so easy that almost everyone with a decent roster can explore it.
That's the whole point, and it's the number one reason people aren't happy with the Gates. It makes the content not for everyone. Everyone and their dog got through Uncollected. It's not even a challenge now. All people need to do is look up some YouTube and they can do it within a matter of months of starting the game. It's also worth pointing out that Seatin makes content that caters to a certain demographic learning how to get through content, and that's most likely a motivating factor for the stance against Gates. However, it's not meant for the average Roster. (I don't even want to get into 2*s in Book 2.)
There would have been nothing wrong with kabam making 2* viable in Book 2. In fact it would have been entirely consistent with their constant claims of wanting summoners to use more of their rosters and not just in arenas or niche content like variants
I don't agree with that line of thinking at all. Progression-wise, I don't expect to use lower Champs in progressively higher Story content. While I will agree that the Gates between Act 5 and Act 6 are extreme, I don't see going backwards as something that logically happens. There are many ways to create content for lower, unused Champs. This isn't one of them that I see. To be perfectly honest, it leaves me scratching my head.
Ahh but your vision is too narrow kabam could and probably should have installed progression gates based on roster size. For example a summoner would have to be level 60, have completed (not explored) acts 1-6, have (x) amount of 5* champs and (x) amount of 6* champs before accessing Book 2. They could even take it further and say the PI of your 5* and above roster must be (x) amount. This would ensure players would have progressed far enough to tackle more difficult content while preventing the average player from accessing content meant for end game players.
A very serious buff to rewards would motivate players to progress their roster rather than focus on ranking up a handful of champs to complete content. It also prevents those who are lucky with RNG and those who throw thousands at cav crystals from accessing content too early because even if you get champs you still would have to rank them up plus progress through other content first. Kabam already has a broad progression gate on incursions as well as the monthly AQ.
A progression gate would also give kabam the freedom to start over with Book 2 allowing sufficiently experienced players to use more of their rosters without the worry that new or average players would access it and progress too fast.
There's still going to be a certain amount of waiting for specific Champs. That's part of the RNG structure. I'm sure making it 2* oriented means everyone has everything they need, but there's no logical reason to regress to using 2*s in it. The game is one that's based on RNG. It's been that way for 5 and a half years. The second we start discussing removing that element, we start talking about deconstructing the entire game itself and designing a new one.
Again your thinking is too narrow. If kabam allowed players to use their 1/2/3/4* champs across the first 3/4 chapters Of book 2 while offering rewards meant to build their 5/6* rosters for the latter chapters it would help to combat the RNG. Kabam could easily create node combinations that would make the game challenging even using 1-4* champs variant 4 proved this. Just because the story progresses doesn’t mean kabam has to trap itself in an insane upward spiral of difficulty. Besides what’s the point of forcing players to hold on to their lower star champs on the off chance they’ll have a use for them once or twice a year? Why continue to have them in rewards?
You don't think 3-4 Chapters which use 1-4* Champs and give 6* Rewards is a bit too much? Asking for something along the lines of using Champs on the shelf is reasonable. 4 Chapters of it is pretty much pushing it.
V4 you use lesser rarities and gain 6* shards and rank up gems so
I don't know why people keep comparing Variant to Story. Variant is a special type of content and it isn't even in the same wheelhouse. There may be some ideas that can be used in Story, but the two are mutually exclusive and not at all a reflection of each other.
What exactly do you mean by that? I genuinely don't follow.
Variant 4 is endgame oriented content designed for lower rarity champs. In the confines of suggesting act 7 to work similarly it makes all the sense to refer back to variant 4 to point out the validity of the suggestion.
They don't need to be the same type of content to compare them in this context.
The danger rooms essentially provided the baseline design concept for variant 4 and they had nothing to do with neither variant content nor story content.
Variant was a throwback to an EQ previously released. It's a standalone piece of content that may be designed with End-Game, but it's still a standalone that can be designed more freely. Story has its own continuity and line of progression and Rewards to consider. It's built up over Chapters and Acts, and not as liberally designed as Variants. People may enjoy Variants. That doesn't mean everything can be just like them.
No one is even saying that... It's about the baseline concept of content.
"Like variant 4" is short for "sharing certain aspects of variant 4". In it's core, variants, story content, monthly content, all of them are a map with nodes and enemies.
Just as danger rooms and variant 4 are completely different pieces of content but share inherit base design aspects, act 5 and act 6 are essentially the same type of content , but are wildly different in their design.
There's way more similarities between act 6 and variants as there are between act 5 and act 6.
We're talking gameplay design, not the reason a certain piece of content has to even be in the game.
We're talking about the next level of story content in Book 2. I agree that there is room for elements of the same parts to make it interesting, but 4 Chapters of 1-4*s, as per what began this debate, is not realistic. They're not the same content. People keep comparing them on the basis of the Rewards, but they have very different design goals.
Again ignoring the precedent for lower star champs in the early chapters set in Book 1. Again ignoring that a progression in story does not mean that there has to be a progression in difficulty the way kabam has introduced act 7 in the beta. A challenging and fun experience can be made with lower star champs that can justify end game rewards. You’re either Lack imagination and are too closed minded to the idea or simply unwilling to admit that you are wrong
Considering Book 2 is accessed by completing Act 6, it's nonsensical to restart the same as Book 1, with lower requirements, and still have End-Game Rewards. They've also said themselves that 5 and 6*s will be the focus of Book 2. Whether or not that's on the table is up to them. I already said that I agree a certain amount of ease into the Book would make sense. Right here is where we have a fundamental flaw in these discussions. Expectations exceed what's reasonable. I suggested certain Paths. Now the expectation is becoming making the entire Book a la Variant. I do not agree that it should be completely designed with the same concept. Elements could be worked in. It's still meant to be a step up from Act 6 in some respects. I'm not closed-minded or lacking imagination. In fact, my imagination gave a suggestion on how to integrate elements of it into the current schematic. I just don't agree that it's feasible or reasonable to make it JUST LIKE Variant. TL:DR - It shouldn't be THAT easy.
So the problem is that you equate lower stars to mean that it would be easier to complete. When in reality star level is irrelevant when kabam has the ability tune the difficulty to compensate. Again variant 4 proves this. The difficulty wasn’t great using 1/2/3/4* but there was room to up the difficulty either through attack values or node interactions. Think of it this way 5/6*s are the ceiling right now. To start a multiple act story from the ceiling makes no sense at all to me. Where does that leave room for progression or growth. It’s a terrible idea to start the next book off at the highest level of a players roster. You’re hung up on the fact that I’m suggesting using lower star champs while disregarding the fact that rewards are based on difficulty not what champs you use
I've been in and out of this thread, and I'd like to add more to the discussion. So, after grinidng Uncollected EQ during AQ and AW downtime, today I set out to complete the final path: Spite a.k.a all or nothing. I tanked 6 or mephisto's l3s with Iceman, then moved through the firstating path. I spent my last saved team revive, and after grinding arena for units, I beat the last red Guardian! I felt so achieved. I had gotten one step closer to my second ever 6 star and I had managed to form a 5 star! I open the crystal, hoping for the good 5 star mystic that I'm in desperate need of and I pull:
He's a complete benchwarmer. My AW defense is already set, so he's useless to me. I never really run the 4 star featured arena and my teams are already even. Then I ask myself, was it worth it? Was all of the fustration worth it? I have the 6 star crystal to look forward to, but I have to hope that I don't pull a DIABLO or something like that. It's stuff like that that makes me lose interest in tge game.
Red skull is actually a great example for how much a simple 20% stat increase would do for some of the less desirable champions.
If he would do a bit more damage, especially with his shocks, he would be an amazing utility champ.
The reason why this is not often done is because it often isn't worth it in terms of developer time. The time it takes to tweak the stats might seem low, but creating all new abilities also doesn't take a lot of time. It is the difference between fifteen minutes and a few hours.
What eats up a ton of resources is all the wrapper that goes around a project like this. It takes time to convince your development manager, your producer, your fellow developers that Red Skull should be the next priority. Everyone else has their own. It takes time to convince them that a stat boost actually does the right thing in general, and it is worth pursuing that kind of change. It takes time to review that change: how it would affect RS's offense, how it would affect his performance as a defender, at all levels of the game. It takes time to decide if it should be 10% or 20% or 30%; if it should be a special attack boost or an attack rating boost or an ability boost. Then it takes time to schedule rolling that change into the next set of spreadsheet uipdates. It takes time to test them, and to collect internal data on the change, and validate it seems to be having the targeted effect.
That's how you end up with a champion update taking six to ten months. It is a couple hours of actually making the actual change, and hundreds of hours of everything else. So if the difference between tweaking RS's attack rating or doing a complete update is the difference between eight months and eight months and two hours, would you really do the small tweak? Or would you decide if you're going to burn all that time anyway, you might as well do a more extensive update?
Also, there's the self selection situation. I remember in another game where someone was explaining how long it took to fix an animation, and a player said they didn't need to do all that work, they could just do X and Y and just "settle" for that being good enough. I had to point out that most of the people who thought like him, who were willing to settle for a broken but passable animation, don't decide to become professional animators.
People who think a small tweak to RS would be perfectly fine tend, statistically speaking, to not become game developers. If you're a game developer, and you want to do small tweaks to things that will still take months of operational procedures to get done, and you still are willing to give it a try, you're likely to be completely surrounded by coworkers who fundamentally think you're crazy, because that would run counter to their base personality. Game developers want to develop games. When given the opportunity to create something, they are going to take it. If you're the guy who says "let's just tweak RS attack and call it a day" how often do you think you're going to be assigned the task of updating champs? There are bound to be lots of other developers who want a chance to do something more than that, and they are much more likely to get the next such project. Because you just wasted an opportunity to be a game creator.
kabam please stop putting absurd difficulties in the game ... To conclude act 6 the expenditure is a lot but the potential of the champions 6 stars are not at the maximum is rolling around to add the resources..I spent in the game but it has limits
I've been in and out of this thread, and I'd like to add more to the discussion. So, after grinidng Uncollected EQ during AQ and AW downtime, today I set out to complete the final path: Spite a.k.a all or nothing. I tanked 6 or mephisto's l3s with Iceman, then moved through the firstating path. I spent my last saved team revive, and after grinding arena for units, I beat the last red Guardian! I felt so achieved. I had gotten one step closer to my second ever 6 star and I had managed to form a 5 star! I open the crystal, hoping for the good 5 star mystic that I'm in desperate need of and I pull:
He's a complete benchwarmer. My AW defense is already set, so he's useless to me. I never really run the 4 star featured arena and my teams are already even. Then I ask myself, was it worth it? Was all of the fustration worth it? I have the 6 star crystal to look forward to, but I have to hope that I don't pull a DIABLO or something like that. It's stuff like that that makes me lose interest in tge game.
Red skull is actually a great example for how much a simple 20% stat increase would do for some of the less desirable champions.
If he would do a bit more damage, especially with his shocks, he would be an amazing utility champ.
The reason why this is not often done is because it often isn't worth it in terms of developer time. The time it takes to tweak the stats might seem low, but creating all new abilities also doesn't take a lot of time. It is the difference between fifteen minutes and a few hours.
What eats up a ton of resources is all the wrapper that goes around a project like this. It takes time to convince your development manager, your producer, your fellow developers that Red Skull should be the next priority. Everyone else has their own. It takes time to convince them that a stat boost actually does the right thing in general, and it is worth pursuing that kind of change. It takes time to review that change: how it would affect RS's offense, how it would affect his performance as a defender, at all levels of the game. It takes time to decide if it should be 10% or 20% or 30%; if it should be a special attack boost or an attack rating boost or an ability boost. Then it takes time to schedule rolling that change into the next set of spreadsheet uipdates. It takes time to test them, and to collect internal data on the change, and validate it seems to be having the targeted effect.
That's how you end up with a champion update taking six to ten months. It is a couple hours of actually making the actual change, and hundreds of hours of everything else. So if the difference between tweaking RS's attack rating or doing a complete update is the difference between eight months and eight months and two hours, would you really do the small tweak? Or would you decide if you're going to burn all that time anyway, you might as well do a more extensive update?
Also, there's the self selection situation. I remember in another game where someone was explaining how long it took to fix an animation, and a player said they didn't need to do all that work, they could just do X and Y and just "settle" for that being good enough. I had to point out that most of the people who thought like him, who were willing to settle for a broken but passable animation, don't decide to become professional animators.
People who think a small tweak to RS would be perfectly fine tend, statistically speaking, to not become game developers. If you're a game developer, and you want to do small tweaks to things that will still take months of operational procedures to get done, and you still are willing to give it a try, you're likely to be completely surrounded by coworkers who fundamentally think you're crazy, because that would run counter to their base personality. Game developers want to develop games. When given the opportunity to create something, they are going to take it. If you're the guy who says "let's just tweak RS attack and call it a day" how often do you think you're going to be assigned the task of updating champs? There are bound to be lots of other developers who want a chance to do something more than that, and they are much more likely to get the next such project. Because you just wasted an opportunity to be a game creator.
Perhaps the way to save developer time would be to get the champ right in the first place, no?
Isn’t that part of what the extensive testing process we’ve been told about is designed to accomplish?
It continues to befuddle me that a content creator can play with a champ for a few hours and draw significant conclusions about its utility. And yet champs get pumped out after months of lead time that serve little function in game for anyone beyond a rudimentary level.
Perhaps the way to save developer time would be to get the champ right in the first place, no?
Isn’t that part of what the extensive testing process we’ve been told about is designed to accomplish?
It continues to befuddle me that a content creator can play with a champ for a few hours and draw significant conclusions about its utility. And yet champs get pumped out after months of lead time that serve little function in game for anyone beyond a rudimentary level.
Dr. Zola
That's asking them to predict the future. They couldn't predict that Magneto was going to be bad in the state of the game today. It's difficult to predict how a champion is going to be used, just like I don't think Kabam predicted that Electro was going to be used as a aggr fury cheese. That's why they have the CCP and betas. Whether you like it or not, Kabam ain't a fortune teller.
I’ve had plenty of “why even bother” scenarios come up recently. There is a severe lack of wanting to progress after achieving Cavalier (unless you have that absolute drive and dedication to become an Endgame player). I refuse to even waste my time on The Champion boss. I look at the exploration energy needed to completely finish Act 5 and completely throw my hands in the air. It seems like almost everything beyond this point is either painstakingly long or overwhelmingly frustrating. The one thing that keeps me going in this game is AQ and working together with alliance mates to bring in the best rewards both there, and through other alliance-based content.
the best content Kabam have put in this game to date has been Variant 4
the requirement to use champs from all Star rating levels was excellent and they need more it.
Except it was so easy that almost everyone with a decent roster can explore it.
That's the whole point, and it's the number one reason people aren't happy with the Gates. It makes the content not for everyone. Everyone and their dog got through Uncollected. It's not even a challenge now. All people need to do is look up some YouTube and they can do it within a matter of months of starting the game. It's also worth pointing out that Seatin makes content that caters to a certain demographic learning how to get through content, and that's most likely a motivating factor for the stance against Gates. However, it's not meant for the average Roster. (I don't even want to get into 2*s in Book 2.)
There would have been nothing wrong with kabam making 2* viable in Book 2. In fact it would have been entirely consistent with their constant claims of wanting summoners to use more of their rosters and not just in arenas or niche content like variants
I don't agree with that line of thinking at all. Progression-wise, I don't expect to use lower Champs in progressively higher Story content. While I will agree that the Gates between Act 5 and Act 6 are extreme, I don't see going backwards as something that logically happens. There are many ways to create content for lower, unused Champs. This isn't one of them that I see. To be perfectly honest, it leaves me scratching my head.
Ahh but your vision is too narrow kabam could and probably should have installed progression gates based on roster size. For example a summoner would have to be level 60, have completed (not explored) acts 1-6, have (x) amount of 5* champs and (x) amount of 6* champs before accessing Book 2. They could even take it further and say the PI of your 5* and above roster must be (x) amount. This would ensure players would have progressed far enough to tackle more difficult content while preventing the average player from accessing content meant for end game players.
A very serious buff to rewards would motivate players to progress their roster rather than focus on ranking up a handful of champs to complete content. It also prevents those who are lucky with RNG and those who throw thousands at cav crystals from accessing content too early because even if you get champs you still would have to rank them up plus progress through other content first. Kabam already has a broad progression gate on incursions as well as the monthly AQ.
A progression gate would also give kabam the freedom to start over with Book 2 allowing sufficiently experienced players to use more of their rosters without the worry that new or average players would access it and progress too fast.
There's still going to be a certain amount of waiting for specific Champs. That's part of the RNG structure. I'm sure making it 2* oriented means everyone has everything they need, but there's no logical reason to regress to using 2*s in it. The game is one that's based on RNG. It's been that way for 5 and a half years. The second we start discussing removing that element, we start talking about deconstructing the entire game itself and designing a new one.
Again your thinking is too narrow. If kabam allowed players to use their 1/2/3/4* champs across the first 3/4 chapters Of book 2 while offering rewards meant to build their 5/6* rosters for the latter chapters it would help to combat the RNG. Kabam could easily create node combinations that would make the game challenging even using 1-4* champs variant 4 proved this. Just because the story progresses doesn’t mean kabam has to trap itself in an insane upward spiral of difficulty. Besides what’s the point of forcing players to hold on to their lower star champs on the off chance they’ll have a use for them once or twice a year? Why continue to have them in rewards?
You don't think 3-4 Chapters which use 1-4* Champs and give 6* Rewards is a bit too much? Asking for something along the lines of using Champs on the shelf is reasonable. 4 Chapters of it is pretty much pushing it.
V4 you use lesser rarities and gain 6* shards and rank up gems so
I don't know why people keep comparing Variant to Story. Variant is a special type of content and it isn't even in the same wheelhouse. There may be some ideas that can be used in Story, but the two are mutually exclusive and not at all a reflection of each other.
What exactly do you mean by that? I genuinely don't follow.
Variant 4 is endgame oriented content designed for lower rarity champs. In the confines of suggesting act 7 to work similarly it makes all the sense to refer back to variant 4 to point out the validity of the suggestion.
They don't need to be the same type of content to compare them in this context.
The danger rooms essentially provided the baseline design concept for variant 4 and they had nothing to do with neither variant content nor story content.
Variant was a throwback to an EQ previously released. It's a standalone piece of content that may be designed with End-Game, but it's still a standalone that can be designed more freely. Story has its own continuity and line of progression and Rewards to consider. It's built up over Chapters and Acts, and not as liberally designed as Variants. People may enjoy Variants. That doesn't mean everything can be just like them.
No one is even saying that... It's about the baseline concept of content.
"Like variant 4" is short for "sharing certain aspects of variant 4". In it's core, variants, story content, monthly content, all of them are a map with nodes and enemies.
Just as danger rooms and variant 4 are completely different pieces of content but share inherit base design aspects, act 5 and act 6 are essentially the same type of content , but are wildly different in their design.
There's way more similarities between act 6 and variants as there are between act 5 and act 6.
We're talking gameplay design, not the reason a certain piece of content has to even be in the game.
We're talking about the next level of story content in Book 2. I agree that there is room for elements of the same parts to make it interesting, but 4 Chapters of 1-4*s, as per what began this debate, is not realistic. They're not the same content. People keep comparing them on the basis of the Rewards, but they have very different design goals.
Again ignoring the precedent for lower star champs in the early chapters set in Book 1. Again ignoring that a progression in story does not mean that there has to be a progression in difficulty the way kabam has introduced act 7 in the beta. A challenging and fun experience can be made with lower star champs that can justify end game rewards. You’re either Lack imagination and are too closed minded to the idea or simply unwilling to admit that you are wrong
I think it is important to note here that as probably the first person to use the phrase "progressional content" on the forums, the point to calling content "progressional content" is not that it progresses the story and not that it progresses the difficulty. Rather, progressional content is called progressional content because it parallels core game progress. And at the moment, game progress is dictated by three things in game: levels (to a point), progressional titles (past that point), and roster development. The story arc content is progressional content because the content contains either implicit or explicit landmarks to progress. Because roster development is fundamental to progress in this game, progressional content will, for the most part, require rosters that are further "upward" not restricted "downward" to smaller levels. There can be exceptions, but they are just that: exceptions.
The fundamental difference between Variant and the Story arcs is the story arcs must reflect for the most part how rosters progress, which is upward towards higher rarity champions. Content like Variants or the Abyss don't have that requirement, and can make up any restrictions in roster that they want.
The whole reason why 5* and 6* champs are more coveted by players is that they intrinsically stronger than lower rarity champs (in general) and that is only true if you can actually use them that way. That doesn't have to be everywhere, but the one place where that has to be true is in the core progressional content. Because that's the *definition* of progressional content.
To put it another way, if you starting restricting people from using their 5* and 6* rosters in the Story arcs, they would cease to be progressional content. Because you couldn't use your fundamental upward roster growth in it. Then the question would become, what is the core progressional content of the game?
In a perfect world the game would be one long progressional ladder, where completing Act 6 gave you exactly what was necessary to tackle Act 7, then Act 7 would give you exactly what was necessary to tackle Act 8, and so on. But no progressional game is perfect like that (at least no multiplayer one) so there exists non-progressional content to among other things give players a variety of things to do and to pause at one progressional rung of the ladder while they build up the skills and resources to tackle the next rung. The core progressional content is not normally where you make detours in progress, because that's not what it is there for. It is there to drive progress forward. If that is not its primary purpose, it isn't progressional content.
Progressional content doesn't have to get subjectively harder: some games don't do that. But progressional content always pushes progress forward, within the context of that game's progress.
I agree with your views on professional content to an extent. However Kabam trashes your theory that content isn’t being designed with future champs in mind. In their announcement for the ABYSS they stressed that some champs in the future will have abilities that will make that content easier for players. KT1 highlighted how Red Guardian appears to be the counter to the act 7 sabertooth.
Book 2 does not have to be a direct linear progression of Book 1 for it to add value to the progressional aspect of the content. If the challenge is sufficient it should not matter who you use from your roster. The problem with starting the new book with the top of your roster is that it doesn’t help you grow your roster only to expand it and those are different things.
I've been in and out of this thread, and I'd like to add more to the discussion. So, after grinidng Uncollected EQ during AQ and AW downtime, today I set out to complete the final path: Spite a.k.a all or nothing. I tanked 6 or mephisto's l3s with Iceman, then moved through the firstating path. I spent my last saved team revive, and after grinding arena for units, I beat the last red Guardian! I felt so achieved. I had gotten one step closer to my second ever 6 star and I had managed to form a 5 star! I open the crystal, hoping for the good 5 star mystic that I'm in desperate need of and I pull:
He's a complete benchwarmer. My AW defense is already set, so he's useless to me. I never really run the 4 star featured arena and my teams are already even. Then I ask myself, was it worth it? Was all of the fustration worth it? I have the 6 star crystal to look forward to, but I have to hope that I don't pull a DIABLO or something like that. It's stuff like that that makes me lose interest in tge game.
Red skull is actually a great example for how much a simple 20% stat increase would do for some of the less desirable champions.
If he would do a bit more damage, especially with his shocks, he would be an amazing utility champ.
The reason why this is not often done is because it often isn't worth it in terms of developer time. The time it takes to tweak the stats might seem low, but creating all new abilities also doesn't take a lot of time. It is the difference between fifteen minutes and a few hours.
What eats up a ton of resources is all the wrapper that goes around a project like this. It takes time to convince your development manager, your producer, your fellow developers that Red Skull should be the next priority. Everyone else has their own. It takes time to convince them that a stat boost actually does the right thing in general, and it is worth pursuing that kind of change. It takes time to review that change: how it would affect RS's offense, how it would affect his performance as a defender, at all levels of the game. It takes time to decide if it should be 10% or 20% or 30%; if it should be a special attack boost or an attack rating boost or an ability boost. Then it takes time to schedule rolling that change into the next set of spreadsheet uipdates. It takes time to test them, and to collect internal data on the change, and validate it seems to be having the targeted effect.
That's how you end up with a champion update taking six to ten months. It is a couple hours of actually making the actual change, and hundreds of hours of everything else. So if the difference between tweaking RS's attack rating or doing a complete update is the difference between eight months and eight months and two hours, would you really do the small tweak? Or would you decide if you're going to burn all that time anyway, you might as well do a more extensive update?
Also, there's the self selection situation. I remember in another game where someone was explaining how long it took to fix an animation, and a player said they didn't need to do all that work, they could just do X and Y and just "settle" for that being good enough. I had to point out that most of the people who thought like him, who were willing to settle for a broken but passable animation, don't decide to become professional animators.
People who think a small tweak to RS would be perfectly fine tend, statistically speaking, to not become game developers. If you're a game developer, and you want to do small tweaks to things that will still take months of operational procedures to get done, and you still are willing to give it a try, you're likely to be completely surrounded by coworkers who fundamentally think you're crazy, because that would run counter to their base personality. Game developers want to develop games. When given the opportunity to create something, they are going to take it. If you're the guy who says "let's just tweak RS attack and call it a day" how often do you think you're going to be assigned the task of updating champs? There are bound to be lots of other developers who want a chance to do something more than that, and they are much more likely to get the next such project. Because you just wasted an opportunity to be a game creator.
OK. You know more about that than I do, so I yield the point. Just because I don’t like the answer doesn’t mean that isn’t the answer, and as an adult, I can accept a scenario that makes sense.
I believe that a great deal of the lingering, underlying tension in this game comes from kits in older characters that are lacking 2020-level DPS, but since I won’t quit the game over it, again, I will yield the point.
I've been in and out of this thread, and I'd like to add more to the discussion. So, after grinidng Uncollected EQ during AQ and AW downtime, today I set out to complete the final path: Spite a.k.a all or nothing. I tanked 6 or mephisto's l3s with Iceman, then moved through the firstating path. I spent my last saved team revive, and after grinding arena for units, I beat the last red Guardian! I felt so achieved. I had gotten one step closer to my second ever 6 star and I had managed to form a 5 star! I open the crystal, hoping for the good 5 star mystic that I'm in desperate need of and I pull:
He's a complete benchwarmer. My AW defense is already set, so he's useless to me. I never really run the 4 star featured arena and my teams are already even. Then I ask myself, was it worth it? Was all of the fustration worth it? I have the 6 star crystal to look forward to, but I have to hope that I don't pull a DIABLO or something like that. It's stuff like that that makes me lose interest in tge game.
Red skull is actually a great example for how much a simple 20% stat increase would do for some of the less desirable champions.
If he would do a bit more damage, especially with his shocks, he would be an amazing utility champ.
The reason why this is not often done is because it often isn't worth it in terms of developer time. The time it takes to tweak the stats might seem low, but creating all new abilities also doesn't take a lot of time. It is the difference between fifteen minutes and a few hours.
What eats up a ton of resources is all the wrapper that goes around a project like this. It takes time to convince your development manager, your producer, your fellow developers that Red Skull should be the next priority. Everyone else has their own. It takes time to convince them that a stat boost actually does the right thing in general, and it is worth pursuing that kind of change. It takes time to review that change: how it would affect RS's offense, how it would affect his performance as a defender, at all levels of the game. It takes time to decide if it should be 10% or 20% or 30%; if it should be a special attack boost or an attack rating boost or an ability boost. Then it takes time to schedule rolling that change into the next set of spreadsheet uipdates. It takes time to test them, and to collect internal data on the change, and validate it seems to be having the targeted effect.
That's how you end up with a champion update taking six to ten months. It is a couple hours of actually making the actual change, and hundreds of hours of everything else. So if the difference between tweaking RS's attack rating or doing a complete update is the difference between eight months and eight months and two hours, would you really do the small tweak? Or would you decide if you're going to burn all that time anyway, you might as well do a more extensive update?
Also, there's the self selection situation. I remember in another game where someone was explaining how long it took to fix an animation, and a player said they didn't need to do all that work, they could just do X and Y and just "settle" for that being good enough. I had to point out that most of the people who thought like him, who were willing to settle for a broken but passable animation, don't decide to become professional animators.
People who think a small tweak to RS would be perfectly fine tend, statistically speaking, to not become game developers. If you're a game developer, and you want to do small tweaks to things that will still take months of operational procedures to get done, and you still are willing to give it a try, you're likely to be completely surrounded by coworkers who fundamentally think you're crazy, because that would run counter to their base personality. Game developers want to develop games. When given the opportunity to create something, they are going to take it. If you're the guy who says "let's just tweak RS attack and call it a day" how often do you think you're going to be assigned the task of updating champs? There are bound to be lots of other developers who want a chance to do something more than that, and they are much more likely to get the next such project. Because you just wasted an opportunity to be a game creator.
Perhaps the way to save developer time would be to get the champ right in the first place, no?
Isn’t that part of what the extensive testing process we’ve been told about is designed to accomplish?
It continues to befuddle me that a content creator can play with a champ for a few hours and draw significant conclusions about its utility. And yet champs get pumped out after months of lead time that serve little function in game for anyone beyond a rudimentary level.
Dr. Zola
I will say this: I am not a coder or game designer. I am just a fan of a game. And that same level of befuddlement that you feel grips me when I see lanes of 200K characters with, what, 400K bosses, and SP2s and SP3s coming out between 10-20K.
I am not saying that a character has to hit as hard as a fully ramped-up Proxima Midnight but as the owner of a 5/65 Nova who plays the kit pretty well, let’s just say I am baffled at why his kit’s DPS is like it is
@Redvendetta , would you consider making a new post with that comment? I would love to pin it and see possible input in a major discussion without people having to dig through this already massive thread
I get what you're saying, though. What would be your approach to handle that aspect? From the sound of it there's not much that could be done about the massive disparity between champ quality. At least not in a reasonable time frame.
I would take two steps back to take three steps forward. The problem is it takes too long to make updates. But the reason why it takes too long is because of how they are done. So the solution is both obvious and not so obvious. You have to change how they are done.
No champion is good or bad because of attack rating. Or for that matter because of bleed, or miss, or stun, or whatever. Those are "primitives" in the game, used to build champions. But building champions with discrete abilities and mechanics is like building software by writing it in assembly language. Of course its going to take forever to think about, to implement, and to test carefully. But I don't think about champions in terms of their discrete abilities, and I don't think most other players do either. We think about them in terms of power control and burst damage and ramp up damage and things like that. I would spend time, and it could take a while, building up a set of tools that would allow developers to assemble champions from bigger chunks. Champs would get some ramp up and stun, or power control and healing, or whatever. And then you could spice it up with some discrete mechanics. Kind of like writing a program in Python, but adding some C for some special optimizations.
If a champ is busted, don't look at the little things, look at the big things. Look at the big chunks of what they are supposed to be. If a champ that is power control + healing and some other stuff underperforms, don't spend time looking at the other stuff, look at the power control and the healing. Scale those things according to the scaling rules you formulated when you made those building blocks in the first place. "Heealing" isn't just health recovery whatever: it is designed to work in a few specific ways with specific standard rules. You don't have to follow them religiously, but when it comes to a sudden need to rebalance, the rules are the fast way to do it. And since the rules have, in a sense, been "pre-approved" you can expedite the changes. You're just following a pre-approved standard to slide the champion up or down a scale.
This is a massive oversimplification, but this idea of taking the little things and creating "metablocks" of bigger things that comprise how a champion works is an idea I know will work having seen it work, but it takes a lot of complex analysis to make it work. And then you have to retrofit it throughout the game. That too would take a ton of time, but there are analysis tricks that can accelerate the process. But that ventures into some mathy places.
Again: I want to dispel the notion that all of us who want change just want to break the game with DPS — most of the longtime folks I see posting just want the game to be more fun and to last for as long as possible because we really enjoy the game
What I would like for Kabam to take from this, my perspective only — and people can literally search my post history and see that I consistently defend Kabam’s right and responsibility to make money for its ownership and to pay the salaries of its employees — is that at some point, this game’s pendulum swung too far the other way and needs to shift back toward “fun” and at a bare minimum “character releases must be effective in Endgame content.”
Again: If buffing older characters simply isn’t gonna happen, then the new releases have to be able to clear the content being released in the present and near future.
RNG is a fundamental of the game? OK. Great. But that doesn’t really work with 170-plus characters and niche nodes. The characters released in the present have to meet a standard of combined DPS and utility that allows us to complete the content that is released.
Seriously — what are we supposed to do with Mole Man? AW Defense means nothing to me when I am trying to clear a lane in Act 6 — I am not even in an alliance with other members.
No one is saying every character has to be able to solo every lane. But how does a character get released that simply can’t be used when you are the guys tuning the content?
That is all I am asking for, honestly. The gates and 4-star restrictions and attack values and brutal node combinations maybe — maybe — wouldn’t be so bad if the fights weren’t such that trying to do it with Mole Man or Terrax didn’t seem impossible because of DPS
There is no reason to complete content, or pursue in-game events in the current iteration (from an end-game perspective). Rewards are randomized 5* focused when we've long-since transitioned to a 6* game. As an end-game player, it feels as though we are being held-back from 6* roster progression simply because access to these resources will trivialize content for those who have yet to complete it. What is the point of ranking up champions AFTER you conquer the toughest content?.... why bother in AW/AQ for rewards that are no longer relevant?... The state of the game is demoralizing in current iteration. For the last 5 months, the game has been on motivational life-support (with the exception of the Grandmaster fight which was novel, fun, and refreshing). At the top-tier, many of us simply play out of nostalgia and hope that the major issues are resolved. That hope has dwindled for everyone to varying degrees.
But the resounding frustrations surround rewards, randomization, diluted champion pools (with so many unusable options that only hinder progress and demoralize some of the most loyal "summoners"). This has been echoed on the forums, in chat streams, on nearly every content-creator's platforms.... and this is not a new issue. For YEARS the frustration has been an ever-present feature of this game and has been ignored. Each new underwhelming champion (evidenced by the last 10 released) only further accentuates this problem in the game. Old champions have no use, most new champions have no use. there are only a handful of "fun" champions... and a handful of "useful" champions... and those two subsets have little intersection. Yet the union/intersection of those two subsets are drown in the depths of champions that simply have no purpose whatsoever in MCoC in 2020.
Our voices as players have fallen on deaf ears, our content creators who represent our community have voiced our concerns, and again these major demotivational aspects are left unaddressed. As difficult it has been for all of us to watch great players and friends reach their limit and step-away (especially recent examples like our Alliance-mate Seatin)... it is completely understandable. Even if their purpose is solely for their own mental/physical health, they represent a trend that has been present for far too long... and has gone un-recognized by the game development staff. Long ago, many of us reached our limits of hope... and it is further exacerbated by watching the big dominoes falling all around us (long-time players leaving alliances, content-creators stepping back, players contemplating retirement, game-chats focusing on playing other games during the MCoC stagnation).
I believe that a great deal of the lingering, underlying tension in this game comes from kits in older characters that are lacking 2020-level DPS
I don't personally think that is the case. A lot of the oldest champs that are still highly valued aren't DPS monsters. In fact, the DPS monster of old, Star Lord, is nowadays not highly valued at all. The oldest champs that are still highly valued tend to be the ones with strong situational utility. Think Magik, think Hawkeye, think Vision. In fact, it seems power control - the ability that was the least respected in the old days - is the ability with the longest legs moving deeper into the game.
Even Sparky is held is less regard today than when he was first released, because his damage doesn't come with enough utility. He certainly has more utility than Star Lord did, but champs like Doom, Nick Fury, and Stealth Suit Spidey that have more situational utility tend to be more highly valued.
I think the current meta-view hasn't come all the way to this point yet, but it is continuing to move towards valuing champions based not on their raw ability, but rather their situational value. A champ doesn't have to be the best at anything, what matters is are they good enough in enough situations. Is the champ good against Biohazard, regardless of *how* they are good. Are they good against Act 6 nodes, against AW paths, or on Map 7? In how many different situations that you're going to face in the game is this champ good enough to get on the team. Netflix Daredevil is horrible when judged on that standard. But Star Lord isn't actually all that much better.
it is true that many older champs are deficient in damage as well, and many of the revamps greatly improved their damage. But I think the most successful updates increased damage alongside improving utility. Luke Cage had damage increased, but he also had his indestructible improved and his debuffs ramped up. Venom had some damage increase, but i would say his utility increased far more.
As the game content gets more complex, the kit necessary to be a reasonable attacker also becomes more complex, and I think the early champs simply lack the necessary tools in most cases to serve reasonable functions in a lot of higher content. Pure damage only gets you so far most of the time. I think that's also part of what makes them difficult to update. Many of them don't even have any tools to improve: they might as well have no abilities at all. You're practically creating a new champ, at least in terms of abilities.
I believe that a great deal of the lingering, underlying tension in this game comes from kits in older characters that are lacking 2020-level DPS
I don't personally think that is the case. A lot of the oldest champs that are still highly valued aren't DPS monsters. In fact, the DPS monster of old, Star Lord, is nowadays not highly valued at all. The oldest champs that are still highly valued tend to be the ones with strong situational utility. Think Magik, think Hawkeye, think Vision. In fact, it seems power control - the ability that was the least respected in the old days - is the ability with the longest legs moving deeper into the game.
Even Sparky is held is less regard today than when he was first released, because his damage doesn't come with enough utility. He certainly has more utility than Star Lord did, but champs like Doom, Nick Fury, and Stealth Suit Spidey that have more situational utility tend to be more highly valued.
I think the current meta-view hasn't come all the way to this point yet, but it is continuing to move towards valuing champions based not on their raw ability, but rather their situational value. A champ doesn't have to be the best at anything, what matters is are they good enough in enough situations. Is the champ good against Biohazard, regardless of *how* they are good. Are they good against Act 6 nodes, against AW paths, or on Map 7? In how many different situations that you're going to face in the game is this champ good enough to get on the team. Netflix Daredevil is horrible when judged on that standard. But Star Lord isn't actually all that much better.
it is true that many older champs are deficient in damage as well, and many of the revamps greatly improved their damage. But I think the most successful updates increased damage alongside improving utility. Luke Cage had damage increased, but he also had his indestructible improved and his debuffs ramped up. Venom had some damage increase, but i would say his utility increased far more.
As the game content gets more complex, the kit necessary to be a reasonable attacker also becomes more complex, and I think the early champs simply lack the necessary tools in most cases to serve reasonable functions in a lot of higher content. Pure damage only gets you so far most of the time. I think that's also part of what makes them difficult to update. Many of them don't even have any tools to improve: they might as well have no abilities at all. You're practically creating a new champ, at least in terms of abilities.
You know what? That’s fair.
I don’t need Star-Lord today. I can quibble with a few points, but honestly, your post is fair.
I believe seatins wants act 7 to be pushed back to give players a chance to breathe.
I don't think it's about the timing so much as it's about the actual content (the nodes...etc.). The common refrain about book 2 (act 7) so far is that it is everything you hated about act 6 (super niche fights/paths, ridiculous minis/bosses) on steroids (even more attack and health, even more crazy nodes). It just seems like b/c the developers are forcing themselves to keep coming out with more difficult/challenging content, that the mindset has become "what is the next really hard fight/node/path I can make" instead of "how I can make this unique challenge really interesting/fun/creative". The former mentality results in the highly restrictive "have x champion or else" whereas the latter is captured in fights like grandmaster/nameless thanos.
Comments
I’d agree and be fine with 15k shards for Nexus crystals. I do also think they need to increase shards rewards across the board.
Variant 4 keeps being brought up in this thread and that makes sense. It was so fun being able to use app those different champs to clear it. I know most of what I suggested would never happen. While it would make a better game in my opinion, it won’t make Kabam more money. We all know it’s money first, game quality second.
What eats up a ton of resources is all the wrapper that goes around a project like this. It takes time to convince your development manager, your producer, your fellow developers that Red Skull should be the next priority. Everyone else has their own. It takes time to convince them that a stat boost actually does the right thing in general, and it is worth pursuing that kind of change. It takes time to review that change: how it would affect RS's offense, how it would affect his performance as a defender, at all levels of the game. It takes time to decide if it should be 10% or 20% or 30%; if it should be a special attack boost or an attack rating boost or an ability boost. Then it takes time to schedule rolling that change into the next set of spreadsheet uipdates. It takes time to test them, and to collect internal data on the change, and validate it seems to be having the targeted effect.
That's how you end up with a champion update taking six to ten months. It is a couple hours of actually making the actual change, and hundreds of hours of everything else. So if the difference between tweaking RS's attack rating or doing a complete update is the difference between eight months and eight months and two hours, would you really do the small tweak? Or would you decide if you're going to burn all that time anyway, you might as well do a more extensive update?
Also, there's the self selection situation. I remember in another game where someone was explaining how long it took to fix an animation, and a player said they didn't need to do all that work, they could just do X and Y and just "settle" for that being good enough. I had to point out that most of the people who thought like him, who were willing to settle for a broken but passable animation, don't decide to become professional animators.
People who think a small tweak to RS would be perfectly fine tend, statistically speaking, to not become game developers. If you're a game developer, and you want to do small tweaks to things that will still take months of operational procedures to get done, and you still are willing to give it a try, you're likely to be completely surrounded by coworkers who fundamentally think you're crazy, because that would run counter to their base personality. Game developers want to develop games. When given the opportunity to create something, they are going to take it. If you're the guy who says "let's just tweak RS attack and call it a day" how often do you think you're going to be assigned the task of updating champs? There are bound to be lots of other developers who want a chance to do something more than that, and they are much more likely to get the next such project. Because you just wasted an opportunity to be a game creator.
BRING BACK THE OLD FEATURED CRYSTALS AND ALSO MAKE 4 STAR VERSIONS OF THEM
Isn’t that part of what the extensive testing process we’ve been told about is designed to accomplish?
It continues to befuddle me that a content creator can play with a champ for a few hours and draw significant conclusions about its utility. And yet champs get pumped out after months of lead time that serve little function in game for anyone beyond a rudimentary level.
Dr. Zola
Book 2 does not have to be a direct linear progression of Book 1 for it to add value to the progressional aspect of the content. If the challenge is sufficient it should not matter who you use from your roster. The problem with starting the new book with the top of your roster is that it doesn’t help you grow your roster only to expand it and those are different things.
I believe that a great deal of the lingering, underlying tension in this game comes from kits in older characters that are lacking 2020-level DPS, but since I won’t quit the game over it, again, I will yield the point.
I am not saying that a character has to hit as hard as a fully ramped-up Proxima Midnight but as the owner of a 5/65 Nova who plays the kit pretty well, let’s just say I am baffled at why his kit’s DPS is like it is
No champion is good or bad because of attack rating. Or for that matter because of bleed, or miss, or stun, or whatever. Those are "primitives" in the game, used to build champions. But building champions with discrete abilities and mechanics is like building software by writing it in assembly language. Of course its going to take forever to think about, to implement, and to test carefully. But I don't think about champions in terms of their discrete abilities, and I don't think most other players do either. We think about them in terms of power control and burst damage and ramp up damage and things like that. I would spend time, and it could take a while, building up a set of tools that would allow developers to assemble champions from bigger chunks. Champs would get some ramp up and stun, or power control and healing, or whatever. And then you could spice it up with some discrete mechanics. Kind of like writing a program in Python, but adding some C for some special optimizations.
If a champ is busted, don't look at the little things, look at the big things. Look at the big chunks of what they are supposed to be. If a champ that is power control + healing and some other stuff underperforms, don't spend time looking at the other stuff, look at the power control and the healing. Scale those things according to the scaling rules you formulated when you made those building blocks in the first place. "Heealing" isn't just health recovery whatever: it is designed to work in a few specific ways with specific standard rules. You don't have to follow them religiously, but when it comes to a sudden need to rebalance, the rules are the fast way to do it. And since the rules have, in a sense, been "pre-approved" you can expedite the changes. You're just following a pre-approved standard to slide the champion up or down a scale.
This is a massive oversimplification, but this idea of taking the little things and creating "metablocks" of bigger things that comprise how a champion works is an idea I know will work having seen it work, but it takes a lot of complex analysis to make it work. And then you have to retrofit it throughout the game. That too would take a ton of time, but there are analysis tricks that can accelerate the process. But that ventures into some mathy places.
What I would like for Kabam to take from this, my perspective only — and people can literally search my post history and see that I consistently defend Kabam’s right and responsibility to make money for its ownership and to pay the salaries of its employees — is that at some point, this game’s pendulum swung too far the other way and needs to shift back toward “fun” and at a bare minimum “character releases must be effective in Endgame content.”
Again: If buffing older characters simply isn’t gonna happen, then the new releases have to be able to clear the content being released in the present and near future.
RNG is a fundamental of the game? OK. Great. But that doesn’t really work with 170-plus characters and niche nodes. The characters released in the present have to meet a standard of combined DPS and utility that allows us to complete the content that is released.
Seriously — what are we supposed to do with Mole Man? AW Defense means nothing to me when I am trying to clear a lane in Act 6 — I am not even in an alliance with other members.
No one is saying every character has to be able to solo every lane. But how does a character get released that simply can’t be used when you are the guys tuning the content?
That is all I am asking for, honestly. The gates and 4-star restrictions and attack values and brutal node combinations maybe — maybe — wouldn’t be so bad if the fights weren’t such that trying to do it with Mole Man or Terrax didn’t seem impossible because of DPS
But the resounding frustrations surround rewards, randomization, diluted champion pools (with so many unusable options that only hinder progress and demoralize some of the most loyal "summoners"). This has been echoed on the forums, in chat streams, on nearly every content-creator's platforms.... and this is not a new issue. For YEARS the frustration has been an ever-present feature of this game and has been ignored. Each new underwhelming champion (evidenced by the last 10 released) only further accentuates this problem in the game. Old champions have no use, most new champions have no use. there are only a handful of "fun" champions... and a handful of "useful" champions... and those two subsets have little intersection. Yet the union/intersection of those two subsets are drown in the depths of champions that simply have no purpose whatsoever in MCoC in 2020.
Our voices as players have fallen on deaf ears, our content creators who represent our community have voiced our concerns, and again these major demotivational aspects are left unaddressed. As difficult it has been for all of us to watch great players and friends reach their limit and step-away (especially recent examples like our Alliance-mate Seatin)... it is completely understandable. Even if their purpose is solely for their own mental/physical health, they represent a trend that has been present for far too long... and has gone un-recognized by the game development staff. Long ago, many of us reached our limits of hope... and it is further exacerbated by watching the big dominoes falling all around us (long-time players leaving alliances, content-creators stepping back, players contemplating retirement, game-chats focusing on playing other games during the MCoC stagnation).
1) They couldn’t afford him.
2) Champ descriptions would all be 5,000 words long
Dr. Zola
Even Sparky is held is less regard today than when he was first released, because his damage doesn't come with enough utility. He certainly has more utility than Star Lord did, but champs like Doom, Nick Fury, and Stealth Suit Spidey that have more situational utility tend to be more highly valued.
I think the current meta-view hasn't come all the way to this point yet, but it is continuing to move towards valuing champions based not on their raw ability, but rather their situational value. A champ doesn't have to be the best at anything, what matters is are they good enough in enough situations. Is the champ good against Biohazard, regardless of *how* they are good. Are they good against Act 6 nodes, against AW paths, or on Map 7? In how many different situations that you're going to face in the game is this champ good enough to get on the team. Netflix Daredevil is horrible when judged on that standard. But Star Lord isn't actually all that much better.
it is true that many older champs are deficient in damage as well, and many of the revamps greatly improved their damage. But I think the most successful updates increased damage alongside improving utility. Luke Cage had damage increased, but he also had his indestructible improved and his debuffs ramped up. Venom had some damage increase, but i would say his utility increased far more.
As the game content gets more complex, the kit necessary to be a reasonable attacker also becomes more complex, and I think the early champs simply lack the necessary tools in most cases to serve reasonable functions in a lot of higher content. Pure damage only gets you so far most of the time. I think that's also part of what makes them difficult to update. Many of them don't even have any tools to improve: they might as well have no abilities at all. You're practically creating a new champ, at least in terms of abilities.
I don’t need Star-Lord today. I can quibble with a few points, but honestly, your post is fair.