**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
The downside of having 6* champs in the basic arena is that we will still face 6* r3 squads with suicides or 6* r5 teams with our weaker 4/5* rosters. For the, maybe, small point benefit of lower rank 6* I don't personally feel it is worth the presence of these really strong opponents.
If you want to reduce the value we get from using 6* in basic but keep the longer cool down time over 5* then please consider just removing the ability to use 6* from the basic arena so we don't have to face them as opponents.
If we compare the new updated arenas with those of pre shangchi arena than whale players have got much more benefit than the non-whale players as they are now able to get the 6* featured champs in the featured arenas and also have the edge in getting 6* basic champs. While the non whale players have only been little benefitted by the rank rewards. If kabam accepts your suggestion than it will become a case where few hundreds of whales will be hugely benefitted while thousands of others will be totally ripped off their units and the rank rewards. Whales have their own featured arenas and they should be happy about it since no one can challenge them their when it comes to rank rewards. Let the non whale players also have their basic arenas where they can challenge the whales.
Featured Arena: Same milestones, same effort, now have the ability to compete for a 6 star rank reward.
Basic Arena: Same milestones, same effort, now have the ability to compete for a 6 star rank reward and focus all ammo on this arena (6 stars) if you want this character. If you are "going for it" this is a cheaper refresh rate as there is no incentive to refresh 6 stars as well, so you can refresh 5 stars at 10 units a pop for the same competitive impact.
Trials arena. The feedback I am seeing doesn't seem to take into account you are comparing this to all 3 of the 4 star basic / 3star / 2 star arena. If you were doing ALL of these arenas, this is a positive total round count. You also have the ability to use normal and big boy 3 star and 4 star arena boosts to lower the round count significantly.... note if you were doing the 2 star arena previously you were unable to boost your points and lower the round count.
If your expectation was lower rounds and more rewards, this isn't it.
If your expectation was a reasonable reduction in total rounds required and throw in some grandmaster shards or ability to compete for a 6 star character, this accomplishes it and this is a well thought out response to that expectation.
One other note, I've seen significant complaints about shallow lower star rosters. If that is the case you weren't doing the 2-3-4 star arenas before. You can't expect to be spoonfed some rewards now that you weren't earning before. That's not a reasonable expectation.
1: change the milestones to be less stretched apart.
2: if #1 is not doable then raise the multiple to x4 or at least x5.
Even though the 6* arena points reduction is only for the basic arena we really didn’t ask this. It’s almost like that’s the cost for changing the milestones.
It is true that in some sense the Basic arena removes a large advantage from players with large 6* rosters. The way I see it, the arena structure offers a counter-balancing benefit, although not every player will see it as such. It looks like we have two 6* arenas, but we actually have four. We have a basic arena with low 6* advantage. And we have a featured arena with high 6* advantage. But we also have the case where the Featured champ is much more desirable, and the case where the Basic champ is much more desirable.
So there are four arena possibilities, and every cycle we get one pair of these four possibilities:
Highly Desirable Featured, Less Desirable Basic
Highly Desirable Basic, Less Desirable Featured
Most players can't grind for in every cycle for every champ. They have to decide which arenas to put their effort into. They now have four possibilities: monster grinders will probably tend to aim for the Highly Desirable Featured. More moderate grinders have a shot at the Less Desirable Basic. And then we have the weird ones: the Highly Desirable Basic and the Less Desirable Featured. Someone with a small roster but willing to commit a lot of units to the grind might have a better shot at the Less Desirable Featured, because the top grinders will be elsewhere and if you're commited to spending a ton of units it doesn't matter if you have a hundred 6* champs or three. Three will do. Conversely, if you're someone that wants to compete for highly desirable champs but you don't have a huge 6* roster but you do have a lot of time, your odds of being competitive are higher in the Highly Desirable Basic arena when that particular situation comes along.
Having these extra strategic options for players to consider is something I'm personally interested to see what players make of. In general, I tend to favor game design elements that offer wider strategic options to a wider set of players. And since the top tier rank rewards in the 6* arenas are competitions, what's "fair" is somewhat arbitrary. You could argue that players with larger rosters should have an advantage, but you could also argue that players who put in more time should have an equally large advantage. The new arena structure contains possibilities for both player positions. As these are not wildly unreasonable positions to take, having the arena acknowledge both, even if coincidentally, is not a bad thing in my eyes.
There were some players who were perfectly fine with the basic structure of the arenas, but just wanted smaller milestones. These were players that wanted all of the benefits of the changes without any of the deficits, and were fine with throwing everyone else under the bus in the process. I don't think this was given all that much consideration.
The structural problem was that in reducing the number of arenas from five to three, the new arenas were balanced around the point scoring capabilities of the highest rarity usable within them/ That was 6* champs for both 4/5/6 arenas and 4* champs for the Trials. The devs could not simply lower the milestones in the 4/5/6 arenas because that would then make those milestones, and the units contained within them, far too easy to get. Changing the multiplier is just another way to do the same thing.
The original arenas has one arena balanced around 6* scoring, one balanced around 5* point scoring, one balanced around 4* scoring, and so forth. If both 4/5/6 arenas left scoring alone, their milestones would not be allowed to change. They couldn't balance the basic milestones around 5* scoring but allow 6* champs to obliterate those milestones. They could just tweak both arenas downward slightly to make the overall grind for top grinders more or less identical to what it was in the OG arenas for comparable units, but then that would make everyone else significantly slower. The only way to spread the benefits out across a wider group of players was to go back to the drawing board and redo the structure of the arenas. That included changing the basic to be more balanced around 5* scoring, so it would have comparable performance to the old 4* featured arena, which necessitated eliminating the ability for 6* champs to stomp all over those lower milestones.
As I said when the previous iteration came ou: there were lots of things in that version of the arenas that would benefit me personally, but I didn't want those benefits paid for on the backs of more casual and lower progression players, because to me that's not what the purpose of the arena is. Yes, there's a competitive element to it in the rank rewards, and personally I'm fine with the absolute top grinders beating each other up for those however they please. But the arena was always best when it functioned as a moderate past time from the core game, where players of all progress levels could build up some grindable currency (units and battlechips in particular, and gold as a side reward) and champion shards. The prior iteration shifted a lot of that benefit upward, and depleted it from lower progress players. To put it bluntly, we have to give that back so everyone can get a better arena. What everyone else had to pay for us to get those benefits was far too high, and far too inappropriate of cost shifting.
You might disagree, or even dismiss these concerns completely, but those are the debates that happen internally at Kabam, and for that matter any game dev team working on games like this. Ultimately, that's what progress gates are for: they exist to partition the playerbase so that the devs don't have to worry as much about reward appropriateness issues across too wide of a segment of players.
Short answer is: if Collected players were allowed to grind the 4/5/6 Basic and Featured arenas, the rewards in them would be lower for everyone.
Again, this is just from my initial perspective. Will have to wait til June 10th to see what I really think about it.
The Basic arena is being tuned to be roughly comparable to the original 4* featured arena, which did not allow the use of 6* champs at all. Imagine taking the old 4* featured, and adding 5* and 6* champion prizes to the rank rewards. That's more or less the updated Basic arena. That's a huge win for players. The biggest difference is in that situation 6* champs would be unusable, and in the Basic they are usable but with identical base value as 5* champs.
Usable but without higher base value cannot be worse than not usable at all. So the new Basic will be basically the old 4* featured with higher rewards, if you pretend 6* champs are unusable.
And with 6r3 deathmatches. That's the part people are taking issue with. It completely changes the complexion of the fights early on, and make it significantly harder to get to infinite streak if you have no 6r3s, like 95+% of players.
Personally, I hate playing my 4* champions because they are very old so not fun to play, and I don't want to waste my t4cc and t4b (that we need to rank up our 6*s to rank 2 by the way) to rank up 4*s to r4 or r5.
Plus, let's be honest, because of the reload timer, you cannot get as many points as you used to in the pre-Shang-Chi arenas.
You give more points by using 1 and 2*s champs, but don't forget that they still give few points because of their low prestiges. So why did you top the arena at 4.4M? This is too much.
Positives as I see them:
0. Reducing the milestones.
1. Basic Arena: can still get the milestones done with my 5* champions. Since 5* and 6* champs have the same base points, this incentivizes use of 5* champions in this arena. I'm OK with that. This means I can use my 6* champions only for the Featured Arena.
2. Featured Arena: I can now takle the larger milestones with only my 6* champions.
3. Trials Arena: It's OK. The higher units at lower milestones mean I can get some good number of units without grinding all the milestones (I never did this even in older Arenas).
Negatives:
1. Trials arena milestones seem to be a bit too high. Is it too much to ask for less grind and higher units? Can't the "balance" favour the players? I doubt anyone but the most hardcore arena grinders did all the previous arenas.
Anyone, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Thanks