Variant 7 is way too easy

For completion, at least. But looking at all the nodes, exploring Variant 7 looks easy as well.

Anybody else feel the same way?

Comments

TheTalents

If Kabam needs to bring the original act 7 out to stop all the crying about it being too easy at this point I won't complain. I will represent for the end game community and ask for it back because clearly this is what everyone wants. Just make sure the rewards match the effort.

IKON

The issue is that one persons fun is another persons boring.

BitterSteel

You’re confusing hard with fun.

High attack =/= fun

Niche content that needs quake and ghost =/= fun

Challenging content that makes you think, strategise and doesn’t punish you too much without rewarding = fun

GroundedWisdom

Yes it's fun. One thing Google has taught me is that some people are into pain. XD

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KnightZero

What exactly would you classify that as? There are lanes in Act 6 that follow what you say. But there are lanes that are niche as well.
And when Act 6 got reduced attack values, most of the endgame players started complaining that it's too easy. Don't understand what exactly is challenging content. V7 isn't challenging as such I agree, but what is? Some say Act 6 pre nerf. But that was just boring in terms of attack values. But those same people count reduced attack values as easy.

BitterSteel

I fully admit different people find different things fun, for me, I enjoyed the vast majority of act 6. I get why others didn’t, and fully accept that.

act 6 really challenged me as a player, how to intercept, how to improve my skills.

As a general rule, I didn’t like niche fights that were like ah well I’m gonna have to ghost this. I didn’t know how to quake when I 100%ed act 6 and in a way I’m glad, as I know I would have used her a hell of a lot.

I think the reduction in attack values was a good idea, but I don’t think many of the fights needed changing personally. The nodes were largely challenging, the biggest problem was you could play perfectly and block damage killed you. Parrying too much killed you etc

Llessur

chapter one was easy I just went double archangel but chapter two is hard because I have no bleed counters that are high enough level no high techs besides a g99 and that havok is just dumb because I need armor ups to counter but that armor up gives him too much power gain. not complaining but there is still a cap. I am cavalier for reference

TheTalents

So give an example. I play the game just as much as you do and I don't understand what you want Kabam to do. Make it make sense because when you just say too easy to me that translates to I want the original act 7.

TitoBandito187

I don't hate act 6 because it's too challenging. I hate act 6 because it's 10 paths each, has class and * gates and a few dumb node combinations that just take your life if you can't ghost or quake it. It is a slog of a journey and so many empty nodes at 3 energy a piece is just one other reason to hate it more.

I'd be up for act 6 level pre nerf fights, if and only if

-they limit the # of paths to 5 runs per chapter (6 tops but that still gets boring)

-make the paths boss rush style with no wasted energy nodes

- have some nodes that benefit the player for working in their skill or counters (like variant to an extent) so it's not all punishment

- scale the rewards accordingly with nexus selectors for t5cc and champ crystals

Variant 7 is on par with the other variants which the dev diaries already addressed. It was fun and rewarding enough for the effort. I'll take too easy over too hard any day if the rewards are the same. Why struggle more if you're not getting more for the effort?

KnightZero

I understand. But that's where the disparity comes. You agreed with change in attack values. Others felt that the same nodes for 90% of the fights but reduced attack values made Act 6 'too easy' and not worthy for 6*. So what is?
Everyone will always have a different view. People say that nodes are what makes it challenging. But they complain if attack values are reduced. It's just a never ending cycle.

Pseudouber

Let me guess. I bet everyone saying that it's too easy have invested hundreds or thousands into their account and have completed Act 7 as well. Have a robust Roster with a bunch of maxed out 5* and R2 or R3 6*s. Or if FTP have been playing for like 4 or 5 years to get here. Do you want content that never gets played unless you have been playing the game for like 4 years lol. I do think they should make an Abyssal difficulty for these though for everyone who wants it harder and want to spend units on content with better rewards.

Wicket329

Please read the thread you are commenting on. I know that I personally have written out several examples of content that I found challenging and enjoyable. I believe @BitterSteel has as well. I will, yet again, provide a brief overview of some of the content I have mentioned earlier on this thread and elsewhere:

Abyss Darkhawk, Bishop, Korg, and Karnak. These fights either taught me something new, or tested a skill like intercepts, timing, slow-rolling combos, etc.

Grandmaster, the whole fight but specifically the final enrage phase which encouraged multiple rapid intercepts.

John Mulaney Challenge. Not perfect, but still enjoyed it quite a bit and would be happy to see more of it.

Big Head Mode: this is just fun and I want more of it, thank you.

DNA3000

Some people were saying the original Act 71 beta was too easy in the beta. I don't think even that would do it. To be frank, if I didn't originally perceive the first 7.1 beta as oppressively difficult, the very top tier players aren't going to either.

There's two versions of the "too easy" complaint. The first one is "I'm a mobile gaming god and I can do everything playing with my feet." And some of them might even be telling the truth. But they have to understand the game devs have to balance the game for mortals. It can no more target any significant amount of content at that level of skill than they can adjust the amount of ability description text to my reading speed.

The other one is a different kind of complaint that is more understandable. Many players need aspirational content. They need both content that is so hard they cannot even do it, so they can work up to it (of course, they generally need it to be *just* out of reach so they can reach it on reasonable time scales) and they also generally need commensurate rewards to make the chase worthwhile.

This kind of content is actually not unreasonable to make on its own. Making content only a tiny percentage of players will ever be able to play is impractical: dev time is not unlimited. But making aspirational content is more justifiable, because even though only a tiny percentage of players could do it today (that number might even be zero) eventually over time a larger and larger percentage of players will be able to do it. Whether they actually do it or not is a separate question, but at least all that dev time isn't going into something almost no one will play.

The problem here is the rewards. For rewards to look reasonable to most players, it has to be, if not proportional to, then at least scale in some way with the difficulty. And the game balance problem for developers is that the rewards have to be high enough to entice the top tier players gunning for it today, but those same rewards have to be reasonable in a year or two when much less strong players will eventually reach it and attempt it. In theory someone might think that the same rewards should work fine for both groups, but in practice that's not true. Sometimes those rewards are way too high, sometimes they are anemically way too low, depending on how long it takes before a certain kind of player feels comfortable tackling that content.

There's also the separate issue of any rewards you try to give the first wave of people tackling that content become very problematic for the devs trying to manage when the progress ladder extends upward. cf: Abyss rewards.

While the first type of complaint probably has no solution, the second one I think can theoretically be addressed to a point. I can think of two ways to tackle that one, although whether the playerbase will accept them is a separate question. The first solution is to introduce very high difficulty content like the Abyss, say, but layer time limited objective rewards on top of it. So the intrinsic rewards for the content are balanced for the long term, but for players strong enough to tackle it when it launches, which means they cannot readily adjust to or try to "outlevel" it, there are bonus rewards for pushing to complete it immediately. This allows you to balance rewards for the initial case where the content is explicitly tuned to the strongest players that exist at the time it is launched, and the downstream case where players are, or at least can be much stronger than that (and thus the difficulty will be lower).

The second possibility is what I originally suggested for Act 6. Although I made the case very strongly that Act 6 (and Act 7 beta) difficulty was completely broken compared to the game's progress curve, I did not suggest nerfing it. Since the devs already went through the trouble of making that content, it seemed counter-productive to spend time basically removing higher difficulty content from the game. Rather, I suggested layering into Act 6 an "easy mode" completion option to prevent it from being a roadblock to player progress. If it is not a roadblock to progress, its difficulty can be almost anything because players now have an opportunity to do it whenever they want to. It becomes more optional. The mechanism I suggested was to use boosts explicitly crafted to lower the difficulty in that content in specific ways, such that if you use them the game detects this and disqualifies you from the higher tier rewards, but that's just a technical detail. There's lots of mechanisms that would ultimately do the same thing.

Instead of having to make easy content and hard content, which is time consuming and limits how much the devs can make of either, you just make hard content and then you pseudo-nerf it with player options, which is much easier and quicker. This allows the devs to spend more time on hard content than would otherwise be practical. It doesn't completely solve the problem of balancing the rewards, but it offers a partial solution to eliminating the problem of one-size-fits-all rewards.

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Berjibs

For me this variant isn’t even fun. It boring. The fun stopped for me at v4 and I’m nowhere near “endgame” or a whale, just an ex map 5 player with a very average roster.

What boss from the last 3 variants was in the least bit challenging, memorable or fun? They make cav eq bosses look like abyss collector.

TheTalents

I missed your earlier post. I just don't like people throwing things out there without solutions, after reading your examples we definitely agree. You're literally into complicated fights from what I'm gathering. So new node interactions that makes you adjust your style of play? Okay we agree on this as well. I didn't enjoy the darkhawk abyss fight though but it did help me approve my skill and attention to detail for sure so I can appreciate that as well.

Berjibs

To be constructive I’m missing fights I want to do again. Fights I would repeatedly run with zero rewards just because they are challenging or fun. Not asking for beyond old act 6 punishment just something technically engaging, a bit of node timer spinning plates, an exercise in intercepts or counter attack timing and spacing, a problem to solve where the solution is not literally spelled out for you and neatly gift wrapped within the global Boost.

Stuff like:

Champion
Grandmaster
Hydra Adaptoid
Bane xbones
Abyss cyclops
Cav eq Jane foster
Nameless thanos
Show up surfer
Cav eq void
Variant 2 venom
Variant 4 electro

For me there’s been nothing exciting in variants lately just cheese upon cheese all nicely laid out on a plate with full instructions and bosses that are more vanilla than the path fights.

TheTalents

I'm okay with your suggestions as well. I'm in camp #2 by the way. I'm an aspirational content kind of guy. I never intended to finish abyss until I had a r4 Aegon but things got so slow I stacked up to 20k units so I finished Abyss because it was convenient. I'm a much better player since I learned quake and turned my alliance into a top 30 Alliance but I'm just saying that Kabam realistically could crank out the original act 7 pretty easily. We got all of act 6 in practically a year and they all released within 3-4 months for each chapter. Making that style of content available with better rewards is probably the easier solution but I think yours sounds better.

@Wicket329 had the best suggestion but the type of content he wants takes a lot of thought and I don't think the devs can make it at the level of consistency that we would want.

BlackTuran

I've been playing since March of 2020, I have explored 7.1 and 6.1, more than halfway done with exploring 6.3. When I finish a path in 6.1 or 6.3, I feel a sense of accomplishment because it took a few tries, strategizing, team building, etc. When I explored 7.1, I felt no such thing, as it was just mindlessly going through easy paths, even though I had less than 10 r5's at the time. Oh, also, I haven't spent money on this game other than the 10$ offers from the black friday deals which didn't land me anything account changing

TitoBandito187

Some of those fights are nice to tackle based on skill. Great examples of skill based fights.

That said, what champs did you use for the bosses in V7 though? Did you choose to use your best champs / cheese counters?

Or did you take someone like Sentry, JoeFixit, OG Cap, OG spiderman, or electro to give yourself more of a challenge against the Venom boss? His powergain could be managed by baiting specials, but the AI doesn't always cooperate so you still have to be on your toes. And that is a fairly tricky SP2 to evade every time. With a usable champ, but not the stun cheese ones, it does open up the fight to be more challenging and skill based, even if not at the highest caliber.

I understand when people counter the suggestion of not using lower 4* champs to challenge themselves since we work so hard to develop our rosters (although it's still a viable option for those really looking for a challenge), but using less optimal 6* R1/R2 or 5* R3/R4 or just less spicy possible options is a legit way if making the fight more challenging whikle actually using more of our roster to challenge ourselves.

Ultimately, if the player has a great roster, with the best counters, big rank ups and chooses to use them to make it as easy as possible, they're part of their own perceived problem. They just refuse to admit to it (not talking about you personally, just in general for those complaining it was too easy.)

People complain it's not challenging, but then bring all the cheese options to make it as easy as possible. That makes no sense at all.

DNA3000

Developers hate wasting dev time. Maybe in a year or two we could ask for OG 7.1 to be released as variant content.

LeNoirFaineant

That's interesting. I've thought they were getting progressively easier but thought it might just be roster progression. I wonder how many of the people who disagreed with you have actually tried this. I'm guessing the number is zero lol. They ought to be getting progressively harder to keep up with roster progression.

LeNoirFaineant

Remember when mid tier players used to complain every time a new variant came out? They stopped doing that a few variants ago. We need to make variants great again lol

LeNoirFaineant

Lots of FTP end game players out there, and roster progression is faster than it's ever been. Also, shouldn't there be content that takes a long time before you can complete it? Without that, what's the point of staying in the game?

Wicket329

Something I’ve tossed around on a few forum posts over the last couple weeks is taking the Summer of Pain idea and making it into a kind of Seasonal EQ. It would run for three months, and it would be pinnacle content. Don’t know how many quests Kabam would want to make it, but whatever floats their boat to justify giving players three months with it. The final quest would be like the Infinity War quests where it’s just one big bad boss waiting for you.

Now I already hear what you’re saying, that’s a lot of dev time and resources, and you’re right. Developing four of these big boys per year would be a Herculean effort for sure. Which is why I suggest that they repeat. Spring EQ will always be Spring EQ. If you weren’t able to beat it the first time it came through, that’s okay! It’ll be back next year and you’ll be in a far better place to tackle it. Minor tweaks can be made year to year if it’s starting to feel dry or there were particular aspects of it that just didn’t meet design intent, but the goal would be that once it is set, then there’s no need to invest further dev resources into it and now we’ve got a self-refreshing piece of pinnacle content.

Rewards could be done either through the standard Completion/Exploration paradigm or Kabam could use path rewards to further target player difficulty. You want big rewards? Take the hard path. You’re just trying to play through to see the boss? Okay, here’s an easier path with some 5* shards on it. There’s a lot of potential here, in my opinion. If Kabam wanted to get *unnecessarily fancy* with it, there could even be a Seasonal EQ Currency that drops on paths. But that’s probably excessive and over complicated.

Anyway, those are my ideas for creating content that (hopefully) addresses the valid concerns of @DNA3000 and @TheTalents , if y’all have any critiques or other ideas, I’d love to hear them.

DNA3000

It is a step in the right direction, but it also kicks the can down the street without directly addressing the problem. The problem is that the top tier players have an almost unlimited capacity to get stronger. What is currently holding them back is a lack of content to get stronger for. For Season of Pain to be useful as aspirational content it has to be something that is at least approachable, so there's a path to eventually beating it. And if there's a path, the top tier players will quickly find it. I wouldn't make the same mistake the devs have consistently made in underestimating them.

But then you have the same problem again, only at higher magnitude. What do you do with the Season of Pain series when 99% of the players can't even begin to scratch the surface of it, but the top tier players are bored repeating it (or can't repeat it because the rewards are not repeatable)? You could just keep tweaking it higher but keep the lower difficulties as difficulty tiers, but then you have the problem of difficulty tiers proliferating and causing problems. And the separate problem of how you manage the situation of one player doing multiple difficulty tiers and overstacking the rewards.

Some people think more difficulty tiers is always better, because the more you have to more likely it is some difficulty tier more closely matches any particular player. But there's a counter-problem. If you want difficulty tiers to act as aspirational goals to achieve, they can't be too many of them too close together. Because then each jump upward offers very little benefit by itself. If the jump between tier 3 and tier 4 is big, there's an incentive to make the jump. But if you're deciding whether to move up from tier 187 to 188 out of 300, the incentive dilutes for a large percentage of players. We already see this now where many players do not attempt to fully explore all the content: they complete it and then move on because the incremental benefit of exploration compared to completion is lower. In absolute terms all exploration rewards (generally) are better than completion so you wouldn't think this would be a problem, but given the higher amount of effort required combined with the fact that exploration rewards *look* like only a small incremental jump from completion causes their value to depreciate. Having too many difficulty tiers can have the same effect.

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BigPoppaCBONE

I think they could copy the Incursions model but populate it with the greatest hits fights. That's two-thirds of the heavy lifting done already. It could start out on an easy zone with a light ramp up and end with the insanity zone that starts steep and has a brutal node difficulty ramp up where for the masochists there's more clockwatching than a herd of Novas #JusticeForNova #EarlyJuneForTheRealNovaBuff? and you need to figure out the patterns. Kabam, you guys can use that as long as you stop the Andy Kaufman performance art gag and release the real Nova buff.

MSRDLD

This community is the worst