You know what could have prevented this whole situation? Scaling resource acquisition appropriately. I'm sure @DNA3000 could put together a lovely presentation about gold bc and loyalty needs vs availability
Think about it this way. Player A has 1,000,000 gold. Player B has 2,000,000 gold. He donates 1,000,000 to his alliance. He no longer owns the 1,000,000 gold he donated.
Player A and Player B both rank up their champs using the gold they have.
Now, if Player B was compensated with his donations: Player B would get 1,000,000 gold. Now I understand that he earned that gold. But by choosing to donate it to his alliance and therefore surrendering his rights to his gold, he gains an advantage because in the normal setting, that gold would not be used to rank up his champs. Since he made the decision to contribute his resources towards AQ, his resources should not be able to be refunded and used for something that is not AQ related.
Do you see why it's unfair to other players?
He's getting the 1,000,000 gold in the form of tickets. Getting it in the form of gold when suddenly a better conversion rate for units-resources has been offered is fair. Before, you would have to spend over 450 units to get 1.3 mill gold if I'm not mistaken. Now that the conversion rate is improved, you get the opportunity to save the old resources that you couldn't previously. Also, another option would be to give us the gold but only allow us to spend it on tickets. Due to the increase in cost for each ticket increasing when you use the same resource, getting 150 tickets at once for 1.3 mill gold is a loss. You can get more than that if you're willing to stagger it out over 3 weeks.
No, I get that he's getting the 1,000,000 in tickets. I was responding to the people who want resources instead of tickets. I don't think that Kabam should give out resources, such as gold, that could be used in other ways rather than AQ.
Yeah and I'm saying that giving it in the form of gold usable only to buy tickets is still better than giving me tickets. Because I can buy more if I stagger the way I buy it. Also, as I said, the conversion for units-gold(tickets) is more profitable than it was before. Refunding in tickets doesn't take that into account.
Think about it this way. Player A has 1,000,000 gold. Player B has 2,000,000 gold. He donates 1,000,000 to his alliance. He no longer owns the 1,000,000 gold he donated.
Player A and Player B both rank up their champs using the gold they have.
Now, if Player B was compensated with his donations: Player B would get 1,000,000 gold. Now I understand that he earned that gold. But by choosing to donate it to his alliance and therefore surrendering his rights to his gold, he gains an advantage because in the normal setting, that gold would not be used to rank up his champs. Since he made the decision to contribute his resources towards AQ, his resources should not be able to be refunded and used for something that is not AQ related.
Do you see why it's unfair to other players?
Another flaw is the timing. This should have been announced in advance. Someone might have donated to help others in their gold donations. Getting the extra tickets refunded is pointless for him if he has other resources to use for his personal ticket purchase, and the gold could have been used for rankups.
That's on him. He CHOSE to help out his teammate. He could've just saved that extra gold, but he didn't. He signed it over to the alliance.
That's silly. IF I donated 5 mill gold an hour before the announcement was made to help out in donations, it was because at that point in time, the only way to help out was by donating for others. But had I known that this was to occur in a ln hour, I wouldn't have donated. Because I don't need the 5 mill as refund in the form of tickets when I can use other resources or units to buy them. It's all about communication.
I agree that Kabam should've given a big heads up. That would've helped if they announced this a month ago and let us sort everything out in our alliances.
I feel like this wouldn't this wouldn't be as big of a deal if there weren't so many other issues in the game. The developer team is just so out of touch with the player base it seems like an inopportune time to implement this. So much negative PR.
@Kabam Miike why can’t members who have been in the alliance 8 days buy tickets to put in a treasury-style setup? A 665 alliance needs 1500 tickets per week. It’s asinine that the players taking on the harder content and using more items near the full cost of 1500, while players coasting in easier content have no way to compensate them.
Put an expiration date on them if it worries you so much. After all, y’all make everything else in the game expire.
We've been kind of quiet regarding some of the concerns that have been brought up today, but that's because we've been discussing them. We will not be reaching a conclusion on anything today, but we want you all to know that we're not ignoring your feedback.
We will have more information for you all next week, but need time to regroup, and look at your feedback on pain points, and have some discussions.
I think the best solution is to remove all map costs. Would be the most player friendly thing you could do. I don't get why it is still necessary at this point.
The biggest pain point I see is everyone asking to share donations and for me as an alliance leader it would go back to chasing donations and I'm not for that personally. I'm in a map 6/7 hybrid alliance for context.
The fact that this took priority for the dev team and not fixing things like resource acquisition, 6* availability and the poor pool growth of bad Champs being added. People seek alternate solutions when something is inherently bad or flawed, I'm not saying donation dumping is good, but it's a symptom of a larger underlying problem, the lack of attention and focus of a very poorly managed dev team.
I’ve read some of the comments and the counter comments. I have just 2 issues with this new “fix”. 1. This is a “shot gun” method that punishes all alliances for the poor behavior of a minority of alliances at the top. You know who they are. Punish them and don’t force honest alliances like mine to suffer because of cheating at the top. Unfair. 2. Many alliances only run map 5 and lower. Refunding our alliance coffers only 5 months back, with tickets we will never use is not an ethical business practice. We have much more resources than that. I understand that either way we wouldn’t be able to recoup them, so FAIR would be a total compensation for all resources in alliance coffers. Not just 5 months. Fair is fair. If this is about leveling the field then either punish the guilty and keep it how it is, or compensate alliances for the TOTAL amounts in the treasury.
I don’t understand this argument you were never gonna be able use those resources for anything other than AQ anyway. If kabam didn’t switch to tickets and still made map 5 free you still weren’t going to get those resources back. Those resources were lost to you the minute you made the donations.
Hey guys, very happy to continue to receive your feedback, but please remember that you should only be posting from one account. If you create multiple accounts to flood the thread, we will suspend those accounts and remove the posts.
you can fight this by asking members to buy a ticket in order to post something in the forum
I am not sure what’s worse, when they make a change that harms players but don’t realize it or when they openly say they know this will negatively impact many but our goal (increasing revenue and eliminating donation dumps) out weighs the negative.
The only negative I see in this change is for alliances that don’t run the same map for every bg, that’s quite a big issue though
Not that simple.
With treasury system alliances can run AQ smoothly without worrying about individual resources, but now if just one member runs short of resources it would affect whole alliance. And you can't be sure that 30 members will always be able to manage their resources properly, especially in map 7 which required resources are very high.
The only negative I see in this change is for alliances that don’t run the same map for every bg, that’s quite a big issue though
Not that simple.
With treasury system alliances can run AQ smoothly without worrying about individual resources, but now if just one member runs short of resources it would affect whole alliance. And you can't be sure that 30 members will always be able to manage their resources properly, especially in map 7 which required resources are very high.
Resource management is and always has been a major component of this game. That's pretty much MCOC 101
I could be wrong but I think the population of alliances running a mixture of 5 and 6 or 6 and 7 is greater than the population that was having donation dumps.
We've been kind of quiet regarding some of the concerns that have been brought up today, but that's because we've been discussing them. We will not be reaching a conclusion on anything today, but we want you all to know that we're not ignoring your feedback.
We will have more information for you all next week, but need time to regroup, and look at your feedback on pain points, and have some discussions.
I think the best solution is to remove all map costs. Would be the most player friendly thing you could do. I don't get why it is still necessary at this point.
The biggest pain point I see is everyone asking to share donations and for me as an alliance leader it would go back to chasing donations and I'm not for that personally. I'm in a map 6/7 hybrid alliance for context.
Back when everyone had to run the same map, the idea of map costs had a certain logic to it. From a game design perspective, map costs are supposed to create an element of risk for failure: if you can't complete the map you lose the entry costs without getting an offset of rewards. I think that's appropriate for some types of content.
But I think today, it is increasingly difficult to justify the map costs. Or rather, not the costs themselves but the problems they cause. And I'm not even talking about the maps being expensive. There's the problems other's have been mentioning, and I think are even more important than high costs. You have map costs creating a wedge between players. It is one thing to have some players do map 5 and some do map 6 and everyone get the same rewards. The map 6 players are doing harder content, but I think most players can set that aside. Now you have the map 5 players doing an easier map *and* spending less on entry fees, but still getting the same rewards. This seems to be Yet Another Way in which Kabam is making alliances the problem and not the solution. If people are contemplating quitting *because* of alliances, the thing all online games use to increase player engagement, you've failed on both a cosmically massive and comically massive level as a game developer.
I have never been all that excited about map costs. If the map is too expensive, do a cheaper map. But when the game starts setting the players against each other with map costs, then that's when it is worth considering if they are more trouble than they are worth at any expense. We're all supposed to be working together and reaping the benefits together in alliances. Not because I'm some hippy dippy MCOC love child, but for the simple pragmatic reason that the only reason for alliances to exist, in my opinion, is to hold players together in a game with millions of players. We can't really know or care about a million other players. But we can know and care about thirty alliance mates (okay: twenty nine). This is why AW MVP doesn't offer rewards, and should never offer rewards. We should not be seeing each other as the enemy. In my opinion anything that pits alliance members against each other, or encourages alliance members to think things aren't fair in an alliance, should have an existential reason for existing. I can think of good game design reasons for AQ maps to have costs, but I can't think of an existential reason for them to do so.
And I'm worried Kabam's solution to this will be to no longer give the same rewards to everyone. Which sounds fair, in the sense that asteroid strikes are fair.
The only negative I see in this change is for alliances that don’t run the same map for every bg, that’s quite a big issue though
Not that simple.
With treasury system alliances can run AQ smoothly without worrying about individual resources, but now if just one member runs short of resources it would affect whole alliance. And you can't be sure that 30 members will always be able to manage their resources properly, especially in map 7 which required resources are very high.
Resource management is and always has been a major component of this game. That's pretty much MCOC 101
I agree with you a decent amount of your posts but you are an all AQ and no AW player so your opinion is somewhat skewed just like mine is. Please don't act lie you speak for all end game players . You have an arrogance about you.
The only negative I see in this change is for alliances that don’t run the same map for every bg, that’s quite a big issue though
Not that simple.
With treasury system alliances can run AQ smoothly without worrying about individual resources, but now if just one member runs short of resources it would affect whole alliance. And you can't be sure that 30 members will always be able to manage their resources properly, especially in map 7 which required resources are very high.
Resource management is and always has been a major component of this game. That's pretty much MCOC 101
Kind of. But throughout my time with MCOC I've never known a single alliance that everyone manage his resources properly every week. Always had some short of gold or bc or loyalty. And for many alliances there are always trading systems to make up for this.
I believe many will have to drop out to lower map because of this. Not my concern though but it will definitely happen.
I’ve read some of the comments and the counter comments. I have just 2 issues with this new “fix”. 1. This is a “shot gun” method that punishes all alliances for the poor behavior of a minority of alliances at the top. You know who they are. Punish them and don’t force honest alliances like mine to suffer because of cheating at the top. Unfair. 2. Many alliances only run map 5 and lower. Refunding our alliance coffers only 5 months back, with tickets we will never use is not an ethical business practice. We have much more resources than that. I understand that either way we wouldn’t be able to recoup them, so FAIR would be a total compensation for all resources in alliance coffers. Not just 5 months. Fair is fair. If this is about leveling the field then either punish the guilty and keep it how it is, or compensate alliances for the TOTAL amounts in the treasury.
I don’t understand this argument you were never gonna be able use those resources for anything other than AQ anyway. If kabam didn’t switch to tickets and still made map 5 free you still weren’t going to get those resources back. Those resources were lost to you the minute you made the donations.
You might want to re-read that and pay attention to the end of the post. Epic fail.
Not sure how even at this time something like this can be communicated with zero heads-up. Every so often when the community gets riled up we get the standard “we’re going to communicate better” line only to have things like this happen again and again. You can’t keep preaching open communication when it’s been anything but.
What is even the point of charging an entry fee for aq.....you have 30 people in 3 bgs all coordinating with different timezones and daily global changes. The “cost” should be the difficulty plain and simple.
I'm just waiting for someone to call me not an end game player even though I have 100% Act 6 but not done anything in abyss. Not my fault i have 30 r5* but still havent pulled a 5/6* corvus, ghost, aegon, NF, cmm, doom, HT, CAIW, Sym supreme, and a bunch of other champs.
The only negative I see in this change is for alliances that don’t run the same map for every bg, that’s quite a big issue though
Back when I ran higher AQ, I used to be able to donate for a fellow alliance member who was falling short. Under the new system, that would now be impossible. It might be just an extension of making sure no one can donate for anyone else to combat donation bots, but it is still a downside of the change that I don't think was thought through.
Also, any alliance that saved up donations in a treasury but then decided to step back from higher maps temporarily will have that treasury destroyed but the players would be getting nothing in return, as they wouldn't have any donation history to turn into tickets. In fact, any alliance that was running higher maps but was balancing donations and map costs precisely would also be getting nothing back, which means any work they've done over the years to build up a treasury buffer for a rainy day is also now being wiped out with no compensation.
The only negative I see in this change is for alliances that don’t run the same map for every bg, that’s quite a big issue though
Not that simple.
With treasury system alliances can run AQ smoothly without worrying about individual resources, but now if just one member runs short of resources it would affect whole alliance. And you can't be sure that 30 members will always be able to manage their resources properly, especially in map 7 which required resources are very high.
Resource management is and always has been a major component of this game. That's pretty much MCOC 101
I agree with you a decent amount of your posts but you are an all AQ and no AW player so your opinion is somewhat skewed just like mine is. Please don't act lie you speak for all end game players . You have an arrogance about you.
Uh, you realize I'm in the alliance that placed 4th in AW last season now right?
Every time Kabam tries to fix an issue it seems like the main focus is Kabam's bottom dollar. With this new AQ change they are primarily stopping donation dumps. That is completely reasonable but they have obviously not taken the time to see the other issues their new system will have on the game. It's disappointing to see a company so clearly not care about the players and only care about profits. Kabam needs to find a better balance between encouraging spending (which is necessary to keep the game running) and letting players have fun and enjoy the game. It's so obvious how profit sensitive 99% of their actions are.
So how does this have anything to do with their bottom dollar? Donations don't cost real money...
Comments
Put an expiration date on them if it worries you so much. After all, y’all make everything else in the game expire.
The biggest pain point I see is everyone asking to share donations and for me as an alliance leader it would go back to chasing donations and I'm not for that personally. I'm in a map 6/7 hybrid alliance for context.
With treasury system alliances can run AQ smoothly without worrying about individual resources, but now if just one member runs short of resources it would affect whole alliance. And you can't be sure that 30 members will always be able to manage their resources properly, especially in map 7 which required resources are very high.
But I think today, it is increasingly difficult to justify the map costs. Or rather, not the costs themselves but the problems they cause. And I'm not even talking about the maps being expensive. There's the problems other's have been mentioning, and I think are even more important than high costs. You have map costs creating a wedge between players. It is one thing to have some players do map 5 and some do map 6 and everyone get the same rewards. The map 6 players are doing harder content, but I think most players can set that aside. Now you have the map 5 players doing an easier map *and* spending less on entry fees, but still getting the same rewards. This seems to be Yet Another Way in which Kabam is making alliances the problem and not the solution. If people are contemplating quitting *because* of alliances, the thing all online games use to increase player engagement, you've failed on both a cosmically massive and comically massive level as a game developer.
I have never been all that excited about map costs. If the map is too expensive, do a cheaper map. But when the game starts setting the players against each other with map costs, then that's when it is worth considering if they are more trouble than they are worth at any expense. We're all supposed to be working together and reaping the benefits together in alliances. Not because I'm some hippy dippy MCOC love child, but for the simple pragmatic reason that the only reason for alliances to exist, in my opinion, is to hold players together in a game with millions of players. We can't really know or care about a million other players. But we can know and care about thirty alliance mates (okay: twenty nine). This is why AW MVP doesn't offer rewards, and should never offer rewards. We should not be seeing each other as the enemy. In my opinion anything that pits alliance members against each other, or encourages alliance members to think things aren't fair in an alliance, should have an existential reason for existing. I can think of good game design reasons for AQ maps to have costs, but I can't think of an existential reason for them to do so.
And I'm worried Kabam's solution to this will be to no longer give the same rewards to everyone. Which sounds fair, in the sense that asteroid strikes are fair.
I believe many will have to drop out to lower map because of this. Not my concern though but it will definitely happen.
What is even the point of charging an entry fee for aq.....you have 30 people in 3 bgs all coordinating with different timezones and daily global changes. The “cost” should be the difficulty plain and simple.
Also, any alliance that saved up donations in a treasury but then decided to step back from higher maps temporarily will have that treasury destroyed but the players would be getting nothing in return, as they wouldn't have any donation history to turn into tickets. In fact, any alliance that was running higher maps but was balancing donations and map costs precisely would also be getting nothing back, which means any work they've done over the years to build up a treasury buffer for a rainy day is also now being wiped out with no compensation.