**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
Progressional content should be about gauging progress. And it should be trying to teach players how to play the game, not gotcha-ing players with surprise content. The Champion requires very specific skills no one has any reasonable way of acquiring before that fight, outside of duels which help but which don't quite prepare players for the real thing.
If the Champion was the last fight in a set of such fights that got progressively harder going back to Act 5, I'd be fine with it. And if the Champion was the first fight on the map, so you could enter, try him, die, exit, and try again until you could gain the skills to beat him, I'd be fine with him also. No one should think the game has to hand you a victory, it can demand you get a stronger roster or a higher level of skill to beat it. But if the game is going to require a skill in the core progressional content of the game that everyone is supposed to be able to do, then there has to be an obvious path to learning that skill. The game either needs to teach us how to beat the Champion before we reach him, or it needs to make the fight itself something we can practice on. And even though I will admit the easy path to the Champion is surprisingly easy within the context of Act 6, it is still hard enough and long enough that the kind of repetitive practice most humans need to learn a skill is not practical in 6.2.6 unless you spend units.
Which is what I did. I tried to do that exit and redo the path thing, but I realized it was hurting my ability to learn from practicing the Champion himself. So I started reviving on the fight not to spend past him, but literally to give myself good practice opportunities so my brain and fingers could focus on and learn that one fight. I think those units were well-spent, in that I learned a lot about how I can, and cannot do that fight. I will, if and when I ever decide to do it again, do better. But that barrier to learning the skills in the first place are, I think, not right for progressional content.
If the dude ambushed you in the middle of the Abyss, whatever. That's end game content and it is intended for the best players in the game to beat. You can assume players with far above average skill and for that matter far above average determination to plow through the content. If the Champion was on a map like Infinity Thanos in a challenge map, I'd not only be fine with him, I probably would actually enjoy the challenge of beating that one fight on that one map. It isn't the fight itself that I find problematic, but the context of the fight. It is a difficult, novel fight with no precursor in a progressional map with a substantive difficulty and energy cost to reach. That combination is what's the problem for me personally.
I consider myself as a bit above average but not a top player and i'm stuck at act 6.2 for very long time.
at least for now Act 6 seems like a wall i won't be able to pass as it doesn't tie to the progression of my champs (available champs, ranks and tricky nodes)
i agree with you that there are enough contests for top players that has the skill or the money to spend, but story quest is something that need to be design for all and with a bit patience to be able to complete it. it doesn't feels like a bit patience will help here, so what are my options? to keep playing arena for years until a release of 8* ?
Some of that is almost certainly true, but I don't think it is the most important issue. The numbers alone don't prove this, but they support the narrative that the content is being balanced not just for players with stronger rosters, but also players with higher skill levels. Which means if you were to somehow magically nerf all of the top performing champions, while this could cause the devs to lower content difficulty it would still be the case that aiming at the skill level of the top players would make the content still too difficult for average players. It is just that instead of being five times harder than they can do, it might be only three times harder. But that's still a problem, just a slightly less severe one.
And the law of unintended consequences says that for every player helped when you nerf the so-called OP champs and thus lower difficulty, you hurt a player who was only able to do the content with those OP champs and the combined change of nerfing their champs and lowering difficulty puts them overall in a worse position.
We do nerf champs that are so far off the scale that there's basically no choice. At least, as Kabam sees it. And I'm fine with that. But while we can argue over whether those champs are really high enough to deserve nerfs, I think almost no one would disagree that below some critical level even if the champ is higher than intended, it is nonetheless not high enough to deserve a nerf. Nerfs on champs that are already released should be a last resort. And if we're going to treat them as a last resort, we can't be using them as the first tool to use to try to moderate content difficulty.
6* AGs and T5c are still massively rare and important items in the game.i just don't see anyway they could nerf the difficulty but not the rewards anytime soon without a massive backlash from those who've finished it already.
We could do the reverse and say anyone who already did Act 6 can go back and grind out easy mode for the easy mode rewards, but that seems kind of pointless to me. it is "fair" in the sense that both groups do the same effort and get the same rewards, but the situation isn't perfectly symmetric. People who do the content the easy way first have some practice before doing it the hard way that the original players didn't have. In this imperfect situation, I think we should acknowledge that obviously if they did it the hard way, they could have easily done it the easy way, and we don't want to force them to go back again. So we retroactively give the players who already completed Act 6 the easy mode rewards automatically, without having to grind them out.
I think this strikes a reasonable balance between giving the early players something for their trouble, without overly rewarding them for doing content quickly. As I mentioned in other posts, I think Kabam incorrectly rewards players for blitzing content as fast as possible (i.e. with Legends titles), when that's the exact wrong thing to do with players who are already blitzing through your content faster than everyone else.
I'm not saying it has to be this way. Kabam could choose to shake up the rewards also. But for purposes of discussion, I think adding rewards to Act 6 for easy mode, and then giving those rewards automatically and retroactively to any player that has already completed Act 6 in hard mode (including parts thereof) feels less like compensating players for design mistakes and more like rewarding players for good play, albeit in an unusual rebalancing situation.
Incursions zone 4 i had Mysterio as a boss and have nodes (Close encounter and Lifecycle). Just the worst at zone 4 sector 7 . How could someone go further.
If kabam could add more of them
They would add aspect of war and do you bleed also to this part. And Mysterio special attacks also cause distance and are time consuming too. Here You Go BOOM ... K.O.
If the guys (and girls) at Kabam only read one post this year (in addition to the general game feedback thread) this should be it.
As op said, average player can defeat a map of 3x stronger enemies. That is true, but yet the difgiculty goes up. And with the current content, there comes a factor I haven't seen in the analysis: ITEMS. The latest content is designed to not be doable w one team. If your 5 champs can defeat lets say 8 3x stronger enemies, for a map with 8 9x stronger enemies you could need 3 teams. Meaning that map like this would cost you 2 full revived teams plus the 1 you start with. The endgame stands firmly on players having to revive, heal and boost like crazy. Which I personally dislike
Some just want to collect their favorite heroes and some like me wants to see what happens to Carina and yes we'd like something fun and exciting while playing through the quests. And I think act 5 captured this really well.
If you want to create stupidly difficult content for end game players, wouldn't it be better to do so with event quests. Sure some event quests might be tailored to both middle and end game players like boss rush and champion challenges while variants and specials like abyss and labyrinth are suited for end game.
How about a 2 month long cavalier difficulty event quest that has the difficulty level around that of act 6 or higher. (That way players get enough time to practice and try to complete it without rushing) with rewards tailored to end game players. The rewards could even be interchanged. First cav eq gives crystal shards and the next would give high tier catalysts.
I think that it’s only recently that the true difference has become apparent - I have to grind a week of arena for units to quest/back out repeatedly until I get it down, the spender can just spend. With the difficulty now at such at high bar you can probably count on one hand the people who have been able to get through all of Act 6 itemless so the speed at which people are progressing is driven financially now, which has the knock on into AQ/AW/ability to grind higher arena scores.
I'm not saying that's what you meant with the comment about people finishing act 6 itemless but it just kinda struck a cord with me
I still can't believe how few 5* sigs are available in game personally. Even if they want to reduce the amount early players have access to, tie them to titles/progression somehow. I legitimately do feel for f2p players when it comes to 5* sigs
I know the pinnacle of any game is always going to be money led. Always has been, always will be. At the moment though with how the rewards are distributed it’s becoming more and more stark. I’m personally not overly bothered about AQ placement, but I would like increased access to sig stones short of dumping Odins on crystals for dupes or £50 offers that pop up periodically. That way at least more players can unlock the potential of their roster and if they’re inclined to run at prestige they can go that route, if they’re after utility instead they can go that way.
I think in all honesty that BG's problem (the one we're touching on here) is not as simple as it sometimes is characterized as. In absolute terms, BG is a good example of the very best that an F2P players can hope to achieve, which is a lot. This doesn't mean every F2P player can do what he does, because BG is in no way typical for F2P players; rather he gives an idea of where the ceiling is when you don't spend. And that ceiling is very, very high. But when people compare BG to "spenders" people sometimes imply that we're comparing BG's F2P play time against cash. But that's not the case, because we don't have an example of someone who just spends and doesn't also grind in the game a lot. Maybe there are such people, but we don't have specific examples to compare.
When we compare BG to the highest progress players, we're comparing F2P grinding verses spending *and* grinding. So of course, no one who does one should expect they are going to beat all the people who do both. The correct question to ask is, if you were to start an account now, and you only wanted to play minimally, how much cash would you have to spend to eventually catch up to BG. And I think it is a lot of cash. In my mind, BG is a good example of how the game treats F2P players fairly: it doesn't put up true paywalls that prevent a F2P player from progressing in any significant fashion. If the best an F2P player can ever hope to achieve is "only BG" I think that's pretty good. But contrawise, you can see spending does matter, because people who spend *and* play have a significant advantage over players who just play. I think BG's situation now is what I would expect it to be in a game that gives F2P players opportunities to succeed, but also gives enough incentives to spending players to keep a healthy amount of income coming in. But that's just my opinion.
I don't think Act 6's difficulty has warped progress across the playerbase too much yet, for the simple reason that the vast majority of players haven't gotten past Act 5 yet. At the moment, we have the very strongest players completing it, the second tier players down working through it (I'm in that tier), and everyone else still trying to get through Act 5 or lower. That's part of the reason why I think there's still an opportunity to make changes: changing the difficulty curve now would help the vast majority of players before they ever reached it. And honestly, while we can also discuss things like should we compensate players already in it if we make changes, let's face it: those of us already in it or past it are the players who least need material compensation. We're the strongest players in the game, relatively speaking, and we'll always have advantages over the rest of the playerbase. If changes help the rest and don't help us, we're all going to be okay. In my opinion sometimes the people at the top have to take the hit so the rest get a better game.
Put it another way. I would give up all my Act 6 rewards if in exchange I could redesign the difficulty of Act 6 for everyone else. I love rewards just as much as the next player, and I wouldn't give up my rewards lightly. But at the end of the day losing the Act 6 rewards wouldn't paralyze my progress indefinitely. Redesigning Act 6+ difficulty in a way that helps 98% of players and helps me exactly zero is a trade I would take in a heartbeat. I'd definitely shed a tear over those Act rewards. But I'd get over it.
If a fight is something I can beat basically every time, even when I make the occasional mistake, then it can probably be beaten by a very skilled and consistent player without spending any items. If they *have to spend* items, then on anything but a great day I'm going to probably be spending lots of them.
So I think *sometimes* when someone complains that a fight can't be done itemless, they don't mean *they* can't do it itemless. I think they are trying to express the idea that the fight can't be done itemless even by extremely skilled players, and if they have to spend anything, the rest of us mortals will probably have to spend too much.
I'm not saying everyone who complains about itemless means this. But often I get the impression that's what they are trying to say. And this echos a complaint much stronger players (and myself) were expressing in the Book 2 beta, that when difficulty gets high enough in the wrong way, it seems like you can't just beat the content with skill, you need luck as well. And that translates into having to burn a lot of items, because no one is always lucky.
In fact, the longer I look at the game through this lens, the more my opinions of every part of the game implementation seem to change to align with it. For example, this post: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/1218037/#Comment_1218037 is I would say a direct consequence of the change in perspective. When I looked at Act 6 5* gates through the eyes of someone calibrating the difficulty for high tier players, the gates made sense to me. When I look again through the eyes of someone seeing the content as intended for progressing players, the gates now make no sense to me.
I'm late to the party in that sense, but when the argument was that the gates penalized average players with smaller rosters, no one made the last hop argument that this should have been a mandatory requirement for any story arc content in the game. Now that I look at it that way, gates in Act 6 but not in, say, Variant content seems backwards. Variant is optional. Acts are core. The Acts should be where everyone gets to use everything they can, within reason. The optional content is where you can make crazy limits, use only 5* or use only 2*. Whatever, the sky's the limit in optional content. At least, that's how I see it now.
If you can get through an entire hardened story/event content itemless, that's taken a ton of planning and more luck than should be expected. Things need to go just right or you'll have to start all over.
When I get through an entire late Act 6 path itemless, it's unintentional and I'm typically nearly dead and dragging 3-4 corpses across the finish line with me and I got lucky with ai more than a few times. Nothing I'd want someone to watch replays of. Typically my number 1 and 2 option stood there like a shrub and got comboed to death immediately and I had to channel true divinity with Plan D. Just because you didn't use any items doesn't mean you skated through it backwards like a boss.