**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
When I did my Act 6 exploration (which was well before any changes were made to the content), 6.1 and 6.2 weren’t difficult. They were just ungodly long. That’s the only thing that could justifiably be altered still.
This is one of those things where it wouldn’t make sense as an intentional lie. What benefit would the company gain from making this promise knowing they had no intent to follow up on it? It makes far more sense that this was an instance of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing, which happens not infrequently because the Dev team and the Comms team are separate entities. Things get lost in the telephone game.
1. I don't recall the developers specifically saying they were going to reduce attack values in 6.1 and 6.2 specifically, and if they did that was likely a misstatement, since the attack values in 6.1 and 6.2 were (as far as I recall) originally comparable to Act 5 values (it was health values that scaled higher in Act 6.1 and 6.2 than Act 5, and attack values soared far above Act 5 in 6.3 and 6.4 in my calculations).
2. The developers said they would give more player agency in champion crystals and they did. Dual class crystals were one way. An increase in Nexus-style crystals was another way. For high progression players they also released the 10-champ Nexus and just recently the 2020 selector crystal. That's plenty of additional options, actually.
3. Everyone perceives difficulty and the grind differently, but the progression curve for reaching 6* R3 is in relative terms pretty consistent with the rest of the game. Cavalier players have a lot of access to one-time T5CC rewards, from the Variants to Act 6 and 7 to the Abyss, depending on their skill level. They also get access to, on average, about 20% of a T5CC per month from monthly quest and side quest content. Assuming they do not spend on any offers anywhere, the time frame to get an R3 from scratch is less than a year even with below average luck. And that ignores one-off events like Summer of Pain. As to R4, that's currently the highest tier rank up in the game: it is going to be extremely difficult to do without spending or grinding in top tier content or both for a while. That's deliberate, and not a "botch." That's a necessity to prevent the power growth from exhausting the 6* rarity too quickly and forcing either 7* champs or some other higher tier progression point to be added to the game.
And please, explain how it is "poor design" that a new rank up requires two new resources. I seem to have that chapter missing from my game design handbook. If all you have is "track from 4-stars" then why aren't you complaining about the poor design choice to make R3s require only one T5CC? Maybe the devs should correct that mistake and make it require at least three.
The reason why you cannot extrapolate naively like that is because there is no continuous pattern to the rank and rarity tree. The problem is that 5* champs overlap 4* champs at 5* rank 3, but 6* champs overlap 5* champs at rank 2. Since rank up costs have to accommodate two different design pulls - resources used for comparable rank ups and resource escalation within a rarity - you're not going to find continuous consistent patterns from 3* to 4* to 5* to 6*.
Also: you're wrong. 4* rank 2->3 requires T1 Alpha catalysts and T3C catalysts: both of those are the first time those catalysts are used in a rank up.
No one has been a bigger advocate for more communication with the devs. No one. But if this is the result of that communication, then it has all been for nothing, because we don't deserve it.
People are allowed to be upset. I think you are over reaching with calling them liars.
Saying something and then not doing it or communicating updates is lying. Communication has always been Kabams Achilles Heel. They don't communicate enough, they don't take customer feedback well. It's not hard to keep players happy. Fix bugs, over communicate and work with the customers. Maybe spend some of that revenue into quality control testing as nearly every champion released is bugged. Pretty simple solution.
Maybe it’s harsh to say it was a lie, but making big promises just before big paydays, then having to be absolutely harassed in the forum to admit you’ve changed course months later…that’s not good communication or expectation management. And that’s what happened.
As to the game design piece…
Going to 4r3 - t3b, t3cc and t1a
4r4 - add t4b
4r5 - add t5cc
5r2 uses t4b, t3cc and t1a.
5r3 adds t4cc
5r4 adds t2a
5r5 adds t5b
Going to 6r2 mirrors 5r5. 6r3 adds t5cc.
Introducing two new resources and rolling them out in random mismatched quantities when they can literally only be used for one thing right now? Makes no sense.
I mostly have no beef with the t5cc numbers. Because we’re talking about a singular resource, if Kabam had arbitrarily changed the design to require a different number, I believe they would’ve adjusted quantities accordingly. If it took 3-4 t5cc to do a rankup, the variants would give out a fully formed one instead of 25%. These 2% crystals might be a mix of 5’s and 10’s.
The only “complaint” I’d have about t5cc is that I might rather have two extra 6r3 than one 6r4. It depends on how future content evolves.
Iirc they later said that the values in act 6.1&2 are fine as it is and will not be changed
6.1.5 Crossbones still has 12,000 attack IIRC.
Look, I’m not here complaining about relics and wish crystals. Those were remote, and the more distant something is, the more chance that a change is needed. These nerfs were promised and almost immediately reduced in scope without explanation or advisement.
I know there’s a game to grow and promote, but if there are gonna be “roadmap updates” where members of the game team Pat themselves on the back so hard they separate their shoulders, there needs to be some accountability for clear promises that were abandoned.
Someone could naively believe that meant that the attack values in 6.1-6.3 would also be scaled down by 40-60%, but that doesn't make sense. If that was the case, no one would say that. They would just say that all attack values would be scaled down by 40-60%. No one says I'm going to reduce this by 40%, and all of these things will be scaled down from that value accordingly, when they intend to scale everything down equally. "Scaled down from that top value" means the attack values in 6.1-6.3 would be adjusted to make sense given 6.4's adjusted values. For example, if this now meant that 6.3 attack values were higher than 6.4, that doesn't make sense: 6.3 should be equal to or less than 6.4, and 6.3 would need to be lowered.
6.3 originally had +500% attack, and 6.4 originally had +600% attack. That's been reduced to +300% attack in both cases. This reduces 6.3 attack values by 33% and 6.4 values by 43% (whomever wrote '40-60% was probably thinking about the reduction in the attack boosts, not the attack values). Given those values, what should the attack boost values in 6.1 and 6.2 be? They should be equal to or lower than +300%, and they already were: 6.1 has +200% attack and 6.2 has +250% attack. They were already scaled down relative to 6.4. 6.3 and 6.4 were so absurdly high they were completely disconnected from 6.1 and 6.2, and for that matter from everything else except for the OG 7.1 beta that never went live. So even after 6.3 and 6.4 were hammered, 6.1 and 6.2 were fine and didn't need to be lowered for them to "scale down" from 6.4. They already did that properly.
When you are attempting to communicate, you have to presume honest dealers. You can't realistically communicate with someone holding a dictionary and a calculator and looking for opportunities to call you a liar. You don't talk to such people at all. You assume the listener is going to put in at least as much effort comprehending as you do speaking. A reasonable recipient would say "that makes sense: 6.4 was lowered and everything else was brought more or less in line. It might not have been what I was expecting, but it still makes sense given what was said."
"They said they were going to reduce attack values and they didn't so they lied, cf: Websters" is honestly something I have to think long and hard about whether to respond to at all, because it is undeserving of a response from anyone, player or developer.
The last time around, I thought there was valid issues to discuss, and positive motion forward to be had. And I think positive motion forward did happen. The devs have stumbled a lot since then: I see them making a lot of both genuine mistakes and unforced errors. But I see them trying: trying to make content at a much higher rate than they were originally doing so, trying to make changes to improve the game that don't always succeed, but often do, and even trying to communicate more with the players than the nothing we used to get. I want what Kabam is trying to deliver, I just want them to do it a whole lot better than they have been.
I don't see the player community trying nearly as hard. It is all rights and deserves. We have a right to complain, we deserve more than what we get. Those are the complaints of children. What are we doing to make it better? We're not developers (at least not of this game) but that doesn't mean we can't make a better environment to encourage improvement, or make a worse environment to discourage it. At the end of the day, you're part of the problem or you're part of the solution. You have the right to be either. But you deserve the one you pursue.
Personally I'm not happy with the state of the game. All my log ins today were just to move in AQ (I still have variants to explore and 7.3 to complete but the general state of the game and the bitter experience with Cav eq leaves me with no motivation to do any of them)
However, I cringe every single time I see all the "deserves" and "rights". A lot of people here act like Kabam is a corrupt politician or something they can drag to the court to answer for all their "mistakes" and "lies" (Terrible analogy but it's the best I could come up after waking up)
Anger, disappointment, joy, any type of reaction towards the game, it's progress, and how it functions should be able to be displayed in any way possible.
*Spends 10K a month on MCOC...gets everything. rushes to complete content 2 days after release for "first!" content. Whines about the game being boring.* Super hard to take him seriously.
And spending isn't as big a factor as you think it is, they're plenty people who don't spend and have everything done in the game. For them the only thing is AW which is either bugged or stale and AQ with it's outdated glory store.
If you can't see it from his perspective that's fine, doesn't make anything he's said less valid though
Yes, spending affects the company. What it doesn't do is give us entitlement to decide what the company does. We're leasing permission to use their product as they choose to present it. We claim no ownership. That much is in the ToS. Does it matter what we say and how we feel? Obviously. They've also gone out of their way to take our feedback into consideration. That's what's not being acknowledged. They do communicate, and no one wants the game to function more than them. It's their livelihood. However, spending money doesn't permit us to demand perfection, and it doesn't give us the right to ignore their efforts. If we expect and give no respect in return, there's a term for that.