VERY IMPORTANT SIG STONE PROBLEM
Mrddr
Member Posts: 108 ★
This is by far the biggest problem of FTP endgame players like myself. Prestige is unfortunately very important and I can't get better at it. The only source I can get sig stones right now is cav monthly eq and just 10 random stones! This is not making me happy.
18
Comments
Kabam, let's get this problem fixed ASAP.
Using a rank 4 Omega vs 5/65 will be laughable. That’s why sig stones for FTP is an issue.
Almost everything is doable by free to play players. None of the content is paywalled. Almost none of the champions is paywalled. None of the progression tiers is paywalled. Everything that a player that spends infinite cash can get a free to play player can eventually get for the most part. As a result, spending doesn't have a huge impact on 99% of the players in the game, in the sense that their spending is optional, and other people's spending is only somewhat impactful.
Where it has the greatest impact is on the highest competitive tiers of the game, which come down to top tier war and top prestige AQ. And it isn't easy to engineer the perfect balance here. The people who say F2P people should get "enough" and the spenders should get "more" are either deliberately or unintentionally glossing over the fact that more in this game has rapidly diminishing returns, and time is a thing that exists.
When we say that F2P should get something, that's a meaningless statement. Rewards don't matter in this game, reward rates matter. If the game allows F2P players to get X in a month, it allows them to get at least 2X in two months and 12X in a year - probably more due to inevitable reward inflation.
Meanwhile, the difference between five and none is huge, but the difference between 6 and 1 is not as big, and the difference between 12 and 4 starts to become very small. So whatever edge we give spenders, no matter how much they spend that edge actually narrows over time. We talk about the gap between spenders and F2P getting bigger, but that's true only from a very narrow perspective. In a practical sense, the gap between spenders and F2P gets smaller over time, punctuated by moments when it momentarily gets much larger (when new progression rungs appear and the spenders can leap ahead of everyone by jumping into them faster - in effect being in the "5 vs zero" zone).
Sig stones and prestige are one of the very few places spending has a significant advantage. Having higher rank ups matter increasingly less in terms of actual power, because rank ups are decelerating. The gap between 6r3 and 6r2 is vastly smaller than the gap between 5r5 and 5r4. The gap between 6r4 and 6r3 is even smaller. In lower and intermediate war, the difference between r2 and r3 is not large; it really only matters in the highest tier most competitive wars where individual deaths still matter, and in top tier AQ where prestige matters.
Seriously erode that, and what's left? We all made a deal with the devil, and in my opinion we're one of the few game communities out there that came out ahead. Whatever other problems this game has, it is extremely friendly to free to play players. They can do almost anything eventually. They can get almost anything eventually. I think we take that for granted like it isn't amazing, but it is. Most free to play games that are heavily monetized are not like that. This happens because 90% of the time when spenders spend here, they don't get much for their cash. They don't impact the rest of the game much. But they need to have advantages somewhere, and where ever that is, F2P players will lag. Not a little, but a lot, because lagging a little isn't sustainable. Lagging a little depreciates quickly to lagging unnoticeably. This game shifts most of that advantage to the highest competitive areas of the game, where it is almost impossible to prevent spending from generating an advantage anyway. It takes the one place where spending imbalances are inevitable and concentrates the spender advantage there.
Would the game be better if it didn't do that? I don't know, but I suspect it wouldn't be for the vast majority of players. It is not easy to make monetization work right for a game (cf: MROC) and I think monetization is, with all due respect to the people who have been pointing out issues with it over the years, one of the few things Kabam has gotten basically dead right from the start, and still gets dead right today. Spending is optional, and most players don't notice its effects. Only at the highest tiers of competition do you really see it, and those are places where frankly players should expect to not be shielded from what everyone else is doing. If your competition is doing it, you either do it yourself, or you fall behind. That's what competition is.
For everyone else, its just a question of time. Nothing you don't have today won't be available tomorrow. And in my opinion waiting is a very, very, very, very small price to pay to have a game so friendly to non-spenders as this one is.
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At the moment sig stone availability is making 6* champions considerably less useful than 5* champions in many cases. Out of the 6* that I have maybe 30 need high sig levels and so their 5* counterparts are more useful to me at the moment, and have been for the better part of two to three years now, which is crazy considering we're probably going to see the first F2P R4 6* with the conclusion of Act 7.
I'm not saying that we need to be able to max sig 6* on a whim, I think that sig stones are an excellent paywall without being game breaking, but they should be more readily available than they are now.
Omega Red 4/55 has 22352 health and 1805 attack (data from auntm.ai)
5/65 has 30179 health and 2437 attack
R2 has 32779 health and 2647 attack
R3 has 38887 health and 3140 attack
R4 has 44500 health and 3593 attack.
In proportional terms, a 5/65 has about 35% more health and attack than a 4/55. That's the power differential most players are accustomed to (it is about that for almost all rank ups prior to 6* r3). It is a pretty big jump: if the goal is to defeat an opponent before you die, the 5/65 will live longer and deal more damage per second while alive: the net overall difference is about 82% - in other words, a 5/65 will deliver 82% more damage before it dies than a 4/55. That's almost twice as much.
Compared to 5/65, an R2 has about 8.6% more health and attack. Its effective damage output (before dying) is thus about 18% more than a comparable 5/65. That's a small but perhaps noticeable increase. That's the jump moving from 5* to 6*.
An R3 has 18.6% more health and attack than an R2. That rank up is worth, in this context, about 41% more power. In other words, the jump from R2 to R3 is about half as powerful as the jump from 4/55 to 5/65, the kind of jump that informs most players' intuition about rank up power increases.
The jump from R2 to R4 is even smaller: about 14.4%, translating to an effective power jump of about 31%. In fact, the two rank jump from R2 to R4 is proportionally similar to the one rank jump from 4/55 to 5/65: R4s have about (using these numbers as representative) 36% more health and attack than an R2 (I don't believe this to be a coincidence).
The overall jump from 5/65 to R4 (again, considering sig to be equal for this comparison) is about 47% more attack and health, which translates to a power increase to about 216%, or +116% (compared to the 82% jump from 4/55 to 5/65).
Now the question becomes: how does sig levels and awakened abilities factor in. An interesting question is where the break even point is for awakened ability performance between 5* and 6* champs? That's a really difficult question to answer in general, because it depends on the champ, as well as how you play the champ. But we can answer the more specific question: at what sig level does a 6* OR's death field equal or exceed the death field damage of a max 5* (since we're talking about the benefits of high sig). At sig 200 OR 5/65 death field deals 1949.6 dps. A 6* R2 need 182 sigs to reach that damage. 6* R3 needs sig 149. 6* R4 needs sig 127.
Which brings up an interesting point. This comparison between "spenders" and "non-spenders" is not binary. There are a range of spending that happens in the game. If we're talking about the degree to which sig stone scarcity is impacting this situation, it is working both ways. If you don't have 6* sig stones you'll be at a disadvantage to the player who has an unlimited number of them obviously, but for most players, even spenders, who are constrained on 6* sig stones, the scarcity of sig stones is actually keeping 6* champs from being universally more powerful than 5* champs. Even an R4 OR needs 127 sig levels just to equal the death field damage of a sig200 5* OR. That's a lot of sigs, and that's just one champ. How many champs can most spenders take that high? Probably not many.
At some point, at the extremes, the biggest spenders saturate most of the limits in the game. But making 6* sig stones universally more available isn't necessarily going to have the benefits many are implying. It won't necessarily reduce the performance gap, it could increase it by giving more players enough sig stones to get "over the 5* threshold" of performance and make those R3s and R4s more universally superior, while still leaving the rest of the players behind.
There's a lot of moving parts to this situation.
I think the biggest difference between the past and now is not structural, it is velocity. Things are just happening faster than they used to. To wit, not only are things happening faster, they rate at which things happen faster is also happening faster. The whales were always ahead, but when everyone is swimming in molasses even a huge lead won't look big. But now we're skydiving. The guy that jumps out first is gone after only a five second head start. It is the same head start, and it takes the same amount of time to catch up, but it is going to look way worse.
I might be completely wrong, a lot of this is very incomplete numerical data and anecdotal intuition, but that's my feeling on what's going on.
To oversimplify a bit, if the game is designed to give the top players (and specifically the top spenders) six months lead over the second tier players and a year lead over the main group of upper players, it doesn't have to be much stuff when everyone is earning slowly and the rate of earning increase is slow, but it has to be a lot more if the earning rate is faster or the rate of earning acceleration is higher. If you balance the lead based on today, that balance will be wrong in a much shorter window of time. At some point that lead transitioned from getting an effective quantity of things first to getting things first period.
I'm going to just toss this out there under the heading of "things are more complex than we normally give them credit for." As I said, I'm not a whale, but I'm not free to play either. I spend, and so I do get sig stones in some quantity; not like the big boys, but I get them. But because I am not in the prestige race, I never spent any of them on prestige. They just kept piling up. So when I decided to sig up the two champs I really wanted high sig on for performance reasons - Hercules and Namor - I had them. If I was in the prestige race, I probably would have burned them all on something else. Not being at the very top means I don't get as much rewards, and not being a whale means I am not getting the big bags of stuff. But being a "second tier" players gives me more flexibility to be efficient, and that means the whales can't get as far ahead of me as the raw numbers might suggest (at least up to a point).
I don't think this is remotely accidental. The very top players are, to use an aerodynamic analogy, burning afterburners to keep up with each other. And that means they are burning fuel far less efficiently. And that serves to reduce the gap between them and everyone else. That efficiency penalty is good for the game as a whole, but it is bad for F2P players that attempt to compete. Not only do they have to compete with less fuel, they literally have to wastefully light their fuel on fire to do it.
Maybe that's a possible reason behind the differing experiences. The highly competitive F2P players are having extreme difficulty trying to stay within 10% of the top because competition is necessarily inefficient which puts them at a severe disadvantage, while I'm having comparatively speaking no trouble staying within 25% of the top because I'm basically just drafting behind them.
If this is true, and again this is a severe oversimplification (and I'm mostly typing this off the cuff), almost anything you do to help the top F2P competitors try to close the gap within that 10% is also going to automatically help a lot of people like me close that 25% gap even more, because we will always be able to use those resources more efficiently. Which might have a greater depreciating value on spending. Because I don't think most top tier players would care a lot if an F2P player like Brian closes the gap with them in half, but it might be more discouraging for a goof like me to close the gap on their spending by more than half.