**WINTER OF WOE - BONUS OBJECTIVE POINT**
As previously announced, the team will be distributing an additional point toward milestones to anyone who completed the Absorbing Man fight in the first step of the Winter of Woe.
This point will be distributed at a later time as it requires the team to pull and analyze data.
The timeline has not been set, but work has started.
There is currently an issue where some Alliances are are unable to find a match in Alliance Wars, or are receiving Byes without getting the benefits of the Win. We will be adjusting the Season Points of the Alliances that are affected within the coming weeks, and will be working to compensate them for their missed Per War rewards as well.

Additionally, we are working to address an issue where new Members of an Alliance are unable to place Defenders for the next War after joining. We are working to address this, but it will require a future update.

The recent direction of content design and the game in general

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Comments

  • naikavonnaikavon Posts: 297 ★★★
    DNA3000 said:

    I'm far more concerned over whether or not playing the game is interesting or fun than what the devs are trying to bribe players with to get them to play. I understand that's definitely not the case for probably even most players but I wanted to get that out there before this turns into moaning about rewards.

    The game picks the players and the players pick the game. Eve Online is a horror show to most players who don't play Eve Online, but the Eve Online players deserve to have a game like Eve Online. A game has to be careful to attract the kind of player that wants what it wants to deliver. If a game attracts a critical mass of players that want something different, you have problems. You either have to abandon the game's direction and get yanked by those players, possibly to the detriment of all the other players, or you have to continue the game's direction to the point of generating discontent among a core group of players.

    I know what Eve Online wants to be. I generally had an idea of what World of Warcraft wanted to be, I had an idea of what Star Trek Online wanted to be, what Star Wars the Old Republic wanted to be (as weird as that was on paper), what Rift wanted to be, what City of Heroes wanted to be, what The Secret World wanted to be. I can't say I know what MCOC wants to be. The challenge curve and the progression curve don't point to who the game targets.

    You can say that a game should appeal to a wide range of players, and that's true. A game can be friendly to a wide range of players. But it has to target somebody. I don't know who that is. Most of the people who like the casual on-ramp of content aren't the kinds of people who would like the more challenging stuff. Most of the people attracted to the high challenge stuff don't like the time it takes to get there, and not enough effort is concentrated into that stuff to make enough of it for those kinds of players.

    Most of the game is concentrated on moderate challenge stuff, but those aren't necessarily the people who consistently whale out on an F2P game and can financially support it. Without getting deep into game design theory, I think the problem here is that this game has no classical end game. It has end game tier content. But it doesn't have an actual end game. End games are not just hard content. They function outside the realm of normal resource and progressional balance, and are not subject to the requirements of typical player gameplay. And the game says this to the players explicitly so there's no confusion.

    The interesting thing about most end games of progressional games I've seen is that the rewards aren't all that good in absolute terms. They can't be, because end game players are too powerful to be handed super powerful rewards constantly: they can't be gated from them by content difficulty. Instead of being large, they tend to be specifically relevant to end game players only. You can't get them anywhere else, you can't use them anywhere else. That exclusivity makes them incomparable to rewards in the rest of the game, and makes them pursuit goals for end game players. This can only work when there is an actual end game.
    I agree with this so much on so many levels. This is the impetus behind my make alliance war better stuff. It can exist outside progression and is really the only thing that keeps end gamers interested consistently. It doesn't require much in the way of management and resources once established. It runs itself.


    It's hard for all the reasons you mention to keep making content suitable to end gamers. It's just not practical in most cases.

    Now, to be fair, I've wracked my brain trying to come up with a good concept for alliance wars and its certainly not an easy thing to do given the current constructs. If only they had followed through on alliance bases then.... we could have had something.
  • naikavon said:

    DNA3000 said:

    I'm far more concerned over whether or not playing the game is interesting or fun than what the devs are trying to bribe players with to get them to play. I understand that's definitely not the case for probably even most players but I wanted to get that out there before this turns into moaning about rewards.

    The game picks the players and the players pick the game. Eve Online is a horror show to most players who don't play Eve Online, but the Eve Online players deserve to have a game like Eve Online. A game has to be careful to attract the kind of player that wants what it wants to deliver. If a game attracts a critical mass of players that want something different, you have problems. You either have to abandon the game's direction and get yanked by those players, possibly to the detriment of all the other players, or you have to continue the game's direction to the point of generating discontent among a core group of players.

    I know what Eve Online wants to be. I generally had an idea of what World of Warcraft wanted to be, I had an idea of what Star Trek Online wanted to be, what Star Wars the Old Republic wanted to be (as weird as that was on paper), what Rift wanted to be, what City of Heroes wanted to be, what The Secret World wanted to be. I can't say I know what MCOC wants to be. The challenge curve and the progression curve don't point to who the game targets.

    You can say that a game should appeal to a wide range of players, and that's true. A game can be friendly to a wide range of players. But it has to target somebody. I don't know who that is. Most of the people who like the casual on-ramp of content aren't the kinds of people who would like the more challenging stuff. Most of the people attracted to the high challenge stuff don't like the time it takes to get there, and not enough effort is concentrated into that stuff to make enough of it for those kinds of players.

    Most of the game is concentrated on moderate challenge stuff, but those aren't necessarily the people who consistently whale out on an F2P game and can financially support it. Without getting deep into game design theory, I think the problem here is that this game has no classical end game. It has end game tier content. But it doesn't have an actual end game. End games are not just hard content. They function outside the realm of normal resource and progressional balance, and are not subject to the requirements of typical player gameplay. And the game says this to the players explicitly so there's no confusion.

    The interesting thing about most end games of progressional games I've seen is that the rewards aren't all that good in absolute terms. They can't be, because end game players are too powerful to be handed super powerful rewards constantly: they can't be gated from them by content difficulty. Instead of being large, they tend to be specifically relevant to end game players only. You can't get them anywhere else, you can't use them anywhere else. That exclusivity makes them incomparable to rewards in the rest of the game, and makes them pursuit goals for end game players. This can only work when there is an actual end game.
    I agree with this so much on so many levels. This is the impetus behind my make alliance war better stuff. It can exist outside progression and is really the only thing that keeps end gamers interested consistently. It doesn't require much in the way of management and resources once established. It runs itself.


    It's hard for all the reasons you mention to keep making content suitable to end gamers. It's just not practical in most cases.

    Now, to be fair, I've wracked my brain trying to come up with a good concept for alliance wars and its certainly not an easy thing to do given the current constructs. If only they had followed through on alliance bases then.... we could have had something.
    Hypothetically speaking, one possibility could be to leverage Relics. When those arrive and mature, you could make Relics that had one effect in the normal game and a special effect in alliance war fights. A Relic could increase stun debuff duration by 5% in the normal game, say, but change your stun debuffs to passives in war (that's just an example, and possibly an overpowered one). The people who like war as an end game activity would kill each other to win it, while everyone else could completely ignore it. It would not unbalance normal content, because it would have no big effect in normal content. Things like the Grandmaster's Gauntlet would not need to be made harder to compensate for it, so it wouldn't change the PvE balance of the game in any way.

    That kind of thing is what I'm referencing when talking about traditional MMOs. That was one way they dealt with end game players. Give the end gamers something to fight over that they can beat each other up with, but that didn't completely break the rest of the game. It is super powerful, but only when the end gamers compete with each other. It splits the game into the normal game where everyone is on a similar level, even the top players of the game, and an end game where the top players tower over the normal players because they expend the effort it takes to dominate that part of the game.

    I don't think alliance war is all by itself enough to really make this work, but maybe I'm wrong.
  • TheTalentsTheTalents Posts: 2,254 ★★★★★
    DNA3000 said:

    Besides the bugs which is the obvious biggest issue with the game right now. I have to say I have a huge problem with T3 alpha and T6 catalyst only being collected in a significant amount through spending. It is not fair to the f2p guys that are being let go due to prestige that have no shot of being top 20. I understand top 20 is an elite class of player but more opportunities for those catalysts would be really helpful at the moment. R4 champions shouldn't be only limited to spenders.

    F2P games can support themselves in three ways. Well: four actually. They can sell cosmetic items to a playerbase that monetizes vanity. We are not that kind of game, so that's out (I'm not saying MCOC can't sell cosmetics: I'm saying it cannot support itself primarily by doing so).

    The three other ways are: sell exclusive resources impossible to get any other way. Sell resources that are ridiculously time consuming to get any other way. Sell resources that everyone gets much later than they do. For the most part, MCOC is the third type. We sell champion crystals that allow spenders a chance to get a champion before anyone else. We sell packages that have very high tier resources in quantities impossible to get anywhere else *Eventually* that changes. T4CC used to be impossible to grind for except in the top AQ alliances and with spending. Now they are trivial to get (for players of high enough progress). T5B and T5CC used to be that way also, and now it is T6B and T3A. This will eventually change. But at the moment, spenders have a very large advantage over F2P players when it comes to gathering the top tier rank up resources for the highest rank up in the game. That's necessary given the current monetization model.
    I don't believe it is necessary to the degree it is currently going on. So until we're able to have 5 r4 champions and the most right now possible is one, nothing is game breaking. The issue with R3 champions is that we had access to it very fast from a spending perspective so getting a top 5 r3 champions happened really quickly.

    If Kabam just gave out more chances and still gave access to more amounts through spending I'm fine with that. But for F2p you only have Carina, and acts 7.1-7.3 with very few inconsequential rank 4 material. I'm very close to R4 myself. I messed up when I listened to others saying they didn't buy the r4 material for spring cleaning, (all lies in the top 20 and Kabam introduced the first r4 far earlier than I thought) but I think more opportunities should be there for people who can't spend quite as much.
  • TheTalentsTheTalents Posts: 2,254 ★★★★★
    DNA3000 said:

    thepiggy said:

    Tens of thousands of dollars on a broken game. This should be a warning for people.

    Lol, nowhere in anything I said did I say I regretted anything I put in to this game. I said I was disappointed with the direction it seems to be taking. Those two points are wildly different.
    You may not regret it which is fine but I could think of way more things to put $30,000 into.
    Some people spend that much in PC gaming, shoes, clothes, cars, sports cards, and motorcycles. It's different for everyone.
    Your comparing a car, which has resale value and is a basic everyday necessity for most people and sports memorabilia which goes up in value to a video game with no value after it’s done.
    First of all, no one needs a thirty thousand dollar car to get them from point A to point B and in the vast majority of cases its resale value drops every second from the instant it drives off the lot.

    Second, I spent about $10k on my last trip to Japan. It has no resale value. That included a pair of first class round trip tickets which paid for about sixteen total hours of comfort. I spent about $900 on one dinner for a group of us because I wanted everyone to try this A5 steakhouse. I was happy to do it, and the enjoyment everyone had for two hours was more than enough return on investment.

    Once you get past basic living expenses, which admittedly many people struggle to achieve, the only thing you can spend money on is quality of life. Whether that's video games or vacations or donating money to save the whales, everyone has their own set of priorities. I don't judge, and I don't accept judgment either.
    Well said. Just say I wish I had enough money to spend on a video without hurting my way of life. That is all he is really saying.
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