**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
I’m sure Kabam has programmatic code to detect bots/apps; every game does. But that code base is constantly battling the coders of bots attempting to predict and circumvent those detections.
The fact of the matter is bots still exist. And bots have no problem investing more time to meet a requirement where a human won’t.
There had to be a better solution than what we got.
What we got eliminated legitimate grinding and merely slowed down cheaters.
I did the thing with alts gifting to main for years, constantly aware of the following
1) Gifting may not return
2) Kabam at any point could decide gifting to main accounts was disallowed and doing so would risk your account
3) The requirements to gift could change at any time
Anyone with alts planning to gift to main should actually be happy they're not worse, requirements are very doable.
You say there had to be a better solution, so what's yours? How would you prevent mass exploitation of these easily accessible units?
Let's say you're in charge of fixing this for Kabam, you've been asked to think up some requirements to stop any player to be able to get lots of units for free, very easily.
Here's the problem, it is easy to get 2 units in 6 hours - what requirements will you put in place to stop that being easily exploitable? And to make something clear, Kabam have set out that they want something to be in place to stop this exploitation, so "no requirements" isn't a good enough answer.
Personally, I think it is definitely a huge shame those sorts of players won't be able to gift. But in my view, and clearly in kabam's otherwise they wouldn't be doing it, it's just being caught in the net thrown in to catch real, game damaging exploitation.
It isn’t my job to come up with solutions. I don’t know all the data points available. I don’t have detailed knowledge of methods to catch and punish cheaters. Any solution I, or anyone here, come up with will be based on incomplete information.
What players can do, is estimate how this affects their experience with the game. Including time spent and a reasonable effort vs reward.
If you want ideas. Sure. How about an account needs to spend 2000 units over the life of the account to be eligible? That negates the Act 1-3 speed run gains but still allows them to be eligible.
How about adding a receiving limit based on units spent. Cap at say 25 GGC and if account also gifts a specified number of GGC they unlock the next tier allowing them to receive up to say 50. And so on. Doesn’t affect whales and prevents an account getting 100s without doing anything.
The point is, slapping a 5x multiplier to the time required doesn’t actually fix anything. It also kicks the can to next year. Are we going to do this all over again next year when all these alts meet the requirements and are sitting on 300k units? With this solution we are.
So I would expect anyone who is saying this is unfair would have a suggestion that doesn’t just shift who it affects to someone else. Which I do actually think you’ve done (first person to actually suggest something that’s not lower the level).
Now, an account needing to spend 2000 units would mean people who spend on alts throughout the year collecting daily unit offer would have to waste 2000 units worth of money. So that’s someone else screwed over.
But your idea on a cap of receiving intrigues me, I don’t want to just brush off any suggestion straight away so I’m gonna have a think about that and see if I think it would work. From my early thoughts on it:
Pros : it would affect someone who grinded copious amounts of alts, you would only be able to grind up 3 or 4 alts without grinding equally on your main.
It would allow people to have 3 or 4 alts as unit farming throughout the year that you buy unit cards for. Any more than that wouldn’t work though, which I feel is a necessary evil of this method.
Cons: it wouldn’t stop people selling these accounts for black market units. E.g grind 50 alts and sell them to 50 different people and gift to each of those accounts
It could affect content creators who subs want to gift, but as long as it’s not too low a limit it shouldn’t be too bad.
It could affect the member in your alliance that doesn’t want to spend but you all want to gift something to. Having the right limit would solve that.
Overall, I’m not sure if all of this would work better than the level 40. As at least the level 40 one does something to combat black market units by making the time investment less worth it for exploiters. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, a way to solve that issue, or maybe I’m missing something huge that blows this system apart.
But it does have potential, and if refined, I think it could be used next year. There’s almost no way a system like this could be thought up, tested and be ready for 3’weeks time.
But I agree with you on the point that this only solves anything for this year. Anyone who has an alt now would have all year to get to level 40 by next gifting event. So by then there will need to be a different system, maybe the one you suggested here.
It is when players venture into judging the design directly ("the devs must be lazy or incompetent to do that") or guestimating alternatives ("there must be an easier and better alternative") that they put themselves into a position of presuming expert knowledge or informed judgment, and then their assertions can be subject to a higher standard, which they might (and probably will) fail.
As to your suggestions: This isn't a bad idea in principle, but as stated this also penalizes players who play normally. We assume that everyone would want to spend units immediately on the gifting event. But that's not true. A player playing an alt might want to save the units, and slowly grind up to 40 whereupon all those units would be usable next year (assuming the rules remain similar). If someone rolls a second account and actually wants to play it as a second account, they will eventually get to level 40, whether that's now or later. Forcing them to spend all their units, even if they otherwise wouldn't, would be a unit penalty on those accounts.
There is a modified version of this idea, where the player only has to spend enough units to a) reduce the *profit rate* for new accounts to be low enough to be acceptable, and b) be low enough that any "normal" player would likely spend them anyway. For example, most "normal" players are likely to spend at least some units on masteries. Dexterity, for example. If we limit the unit spend requirement to what would be required to add the Dexterity mastery, that might bring the net unit gain down to an acceptable level. I haven't thought about the numbers carefully, but you're not the first person to come up with this idea. But to be workable, the numbers have to be very carefully analyzed. It must be high enough to actually matter, but not so high that it overpenalizes alts with a unit tax. I don't at the moment know what that number is, and without a target, it is difficult to judge such a proposal.
2000 is way too high though.
This does affect the whales. A whale might decide to spend a ton of money gifting to themself. You do that by buying tons of units on an alt and then gifting back to your main. Your limit would prevent that. As one of the purposes of the gifting event is a whale spending opportunity, this would negatively impact one of its core reasons for existing (increasing player engagement and expanding player interaction being two others).
Nobody's suggestions "fix" anything. You can't judge the developers choices on the basis of whether they fix the situation completely, then compare them unfavorably to alternatives that equally fail to fix anything. The changes being made attempt to mitigate the problematic situation, and they do that. I would prefer alternatives which in my opinion are better, but that's not the same thing as saying the changes do nothing. They clearly do something. They make it harder to create and use farming alts. If they didn't, no one would be here complaining.
And yes, we probably are kicking the can down the road. But it gives us a year to come up with a more refined solution. It gives me a year to advocate for alt-unit currency, which might be impractical to implement on short notice but might be more practical on longer time scales. Also, the early game is likely to be completely different in a year, because the low Act compression is likely not the end of early game acceleration. The whole idea of early game rewards and early game progress could be completely rethought by then.
I'm not a fan of deferring problems into the future, but sometimes it is the only way to deal with the problem in front of us.
In-game spenders get more stuff than non-spenders. They get to bypass gameplay and grind gates to get ahead of F2P players. In that sense they have a distinct advantage.
Outside the game economy spenders pay to play this game. F2P players get to play the exact same game for free. In that sense F2P players have a distinct advantage.
The principle behind F2P gaming is the spenders support the game financially so everyone else can play for free. In exchange they get advantages non-spenders get to encourage them to spend.
This is 100% fair, because the spenders are free to spend or not spend, and the free to play players are free to play or not play. If the spenders think the advantage they get is unfair, they can choose to not spend. If the free to play players think the advantage spenders get is unfair, they can go find a game that is supported by magical unicorns on rainbow treadmills.
To answer your question directly, what's the better deal: $100 for 3100 units or 20 hours of gameplay to get 3100 units? The answer is, whichever one you decide to do, that's the better deal for you. If you think $100 is the better deal, you
shouldwould spend the $100. If you don't spend the $100 and do spend the 20 hours, then by definition you've stated by your actions that 20 hours of game play is worth less to you than $100.1-) Gifts could only be exchanged between alliance members, with a minimum time of 2 months.
2-) Could exchange gifts with friends, as long as they have at least 1 year of friendship
Or a 3rd option: Who receives gifts, would need to have spent 5k of units in the event