Please don’t release another rarity
butter_ball20
Member Posts: 142 ★★
With r4 materials just coming out, some players are starting to question what’s next. The game has to go on somehow, but I don’t think the community will be happy chasing the same champs all over again.
6 stars were teased in summer 2017 when rank 5s weren’t possible, released in January 2018, and players weren’t happy. This resentment trickled down well into 2020 when the community still felt alienated over 4 star bans in story content and lacked the basic champs needed for Act 6, among other things.
Kabam’s done an amazing job addressing player concerns with their roadmaps, quality of life improvements, removing links in AQ/AW, and adding AQ tickets and dual class crystals, but if the next big thing is chasing the same champs all over again, I don’t think that will go over very well at all.
I’m not a game developer and acknowledge that chasing champs is probably the whole point, but I’m not sure we can stomach another rarity. These types of games have to constantly progress , but is there any way to do it without resetting everyone’s work?
6 stars were teased in summer 2017 when rank 5s weren’t possible, released in January 2018, and players weren’t happy. This resentment trickled down well into 2020 when the community still felt alienated over 4 star bans in story content and lacked the basic champs needed for Act 6, among other things.
Kabam’s done an amazing job addressing player concerns with their roadmaps, quality of life improvements, removing links in AQ/AW, and adding AQ tickets and dual class crystals, but if the next big thing is chasing the same champs all over again, I don’t think that will go over very well at all.
I’m not a game developer and acknowledge that chasing champs is probably the whole point, but I’m not sure we can stomach another rarity. These types of games have to constantly progress , but is there any way to do it without resetting everyone’s work?
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Comments
At that point they might as well come out with MCOC 2
7*’s are probably inevitable if this game is meant to be around forever but increasing the champions allowed to bring on a quest might be a nice buffer moving towards that point.
You wouldn’t need to adjust existing content either.
I may only be Cavalier but I've been playing this game since 2016 and I've invested quite a lot of time into it, so if Kabam decided they were going to continue maintaining MCOC but switch focus to MCOC 2, I would probably be pretty bummed that all my effort was coming to an end, but I also don't know how happy I'll be if five years from now I'm opening another 8* Iron Patriot in my fruitless quest for the right champs to get through Variant 19. I think they can keep MCOC fresh without just launching a new game entirely, but the solution probably isn't endless power creep and will require something more creative that I can't think of because I'm not a game designer.
You say 80% will quit if 7* are added, i absolutely disagree, I think 80% would quit if progression stagnated and there was no challenge in the game anymore
If all champs had 100 points that could be put into attributes and you chose where they go at the start of the quest, it could make things pretty interesting.
Champs might have a few more viable uses.
However, most of them make the game pretty unpalatable for new players to join, which ultimately causes the game to enter a long term decline. Part of what keeps a game like this fresh is a constant influx of new players, and the fact that every rarity tier has partially "reset the clock" on player progress makes this game a lot more attractive for newer players. There is no perfect balance between allowing veterans to keep building up without progress depreciation and letting new players have at least the theoretical notion that they can join today and catch up with the majority of players tomorrow.
The one sure thing is leaning too much in one direction tends to be fatal, but you never know when you've done it until it is too late.
I can absolutely guarantee that the 80% number is not just a wild exaggeration, but completely disconnected from reality. I would be amazed if the number was 8%. 80% of the player community doesn't even have mature 6* rosters to even care. For the vast majority of players, 7* champs would be an overall net benefit.
You'd think having no significant 6* champs would mean those players wouldn't care either way, but that ignores the fact that if and when 7* champs arrive the game would also make 6* and 5* champs even easier to get. So for those that don't have mature 6* rosters or even 5* rosters, 7* champs would generate major progress acceleration as a side effect to anyone not yet working on maxing out their 6* roster yet.
And of the players near the top, many of them had no real problem sticking around and investing in 6* champs knowing that 6* champs just displaced 5* champs at the top, and therefore you have to assume that most of them with a brain would believe that one day 7* champs would do the same to 6* champs. And let's face it, many whales explicitly spend to buy separation from the pack, and anything they can spend money on that would make them higher than the competition is something they would welcome in the game, even if they grumbled about it. It is true there are probably many spenders whose goal is to "buy everything" and they would not be happy if their everything suddenly became nothing. But players spending for advantage are probably more common, and they always want ways for their spending to generate a relative difference among peers. Expensive 7* champs would be another way for their spending to create a gap between them and other mature top tier players.
So even 8% would be a complete surprise. I doubt if even 1% quit after 6* champs arrived, and I would not bet a nickle on a measurable net percentage of players quitting if 7* champs arrived.
Imho, before 7*s get released, we need some new content where they'd make sense to be used
The day one players will only get prestige and war fuel. But for those players, that still matters. Six months later the tier 2 players, where I probably am, will be getting R4s and for us that increase in power would still be meaningful. And then a year or two later, the average players will be getting those R4s to help them in things like Act 6 and 7, where they still struggle even with boosted R3s (if they even have them).
There will never be a lot of content that requires the highest tier champs played by the highest skilled players. So whether they introduce rank 4s tomorrow or a year from now, the one thing I can guarantee is that there won't be content that "needs it" at that time. It is the champs that come out first, and the content second. Or to be more specific, it is the content that comes out first, targeted at strong but not the strongest players who destroy the content with whatever roster they have. Then the champs come along that the majority of everyone else needs to chase to tackle that content.
To be candid, the highest tier everything is not meant to be used it is meant to be chased. Nobody cares if there's no content that "needs" R4s. That is immaterial. What matters is does anyone want to chase them. I suspect the R4 materials in the Spring Cleaning were in part an experiment to datamine how many players want to chase them so badly they would spend to get an almost meaningless amount of R4-related fragments. If that number is infinitesimally small, they know when people complain we're "overdue" for R4, that's an empty complaint. Conversely, if a lot of whales went after those offers then the devs know that the complaint "no one cares about R4 yet" is equally empty. The devs now have a better idea which of those more likely represents the state of the top.