**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.
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Alliance war has anti-rewards (and it is as bad as it sounds)
This is part three in my series: farming disagrees by discussing alliance war. If you haven't already seen the previous two, they are here:
Alliance War revives should be free (and also heal to 100%)
The Hidden cost of managing alliance war potions
I'm pretty sure you'll either love them or hate them, but you probably won't have no opinion:
This time, I'm going to take an even bigger leap into the wild blue yonder and ask the question: what's different about war costs? Why do people care about potions and revives in war more than anywhere else? We use potions and revives in solo content, and they aren't necessarily always cheap. And people do complain often about the strength and cost of solo potions. But not to the degree they do about alliance war potions. We also use them in AQ and complaints there are not nearly as high, so it isn't just that AW is an alliance mode. No, I believe AW is unique, and because it is unique we can't think about potions and revives in the same way. I mention several thoughts about how they are different in my "Revives should be free" post linked above. And for many people, alliance war is the mode they care about the most, which automatically means they care about its costs the most. But in my opinion there's another way in which alliance war costs are different, that I believe deserves additional thought by Kabam. In a sense, potions and revives are anti-rewards in alliance war.
What do I mean by this? Well, first of all, most game modes in MCOC have no entrance cost. There is no cost to participate. You can play without spending at all, and when I say "you" I mean anyone: not just the best players, not just the ones that have the mad skilz. Anyone can just pick up the game and play. You might have to pay to play more, play faster, or go higher. You can pay to improve your play, but not to play at all. But at least when there is a cost to play, it is a generally predictable cost. If you choose to play an AQ map with an entrance fee, you know what that fee is in advance. If you choose to grind arena, you know what the gold costs are per arena round. If you choose to compete for the featured champ, you have a pretty good idea of how many units that will take. These costs, when they exist, are known up front. The player can factor them into the game experience, and decide in advance if the costs are worth the experience. You might pay these costs later, like by using a health potion, but by factoring in them ahead of time the pain of actually spending those things isn't that bad when it happens. They are perceived as upfront costs.
That's not true for alliance war. The costs are not known in advance for most players because war is unpredictable. You don't know what fights you will face when you enlist in war. You don't know how strong the opponent will be. You might have a vague idea based on tier, but defensive placements can vary wildly within a tier. You might not even know which paths you will be asked to do. Players are going in without knowing, and without being able to factor up front, the costs of war. So while you can factor in the cost of units for an featured grind, and you can even factor in the cost of potions in AQ because AQ tends to be repetitive (so you can roughly estimate how expensive AQ will be for you based on prior experience), war's costs are not upfront costs and can't be factored into the experience ahead of time. Instead, war's costs simply land on the player dynamically, and often somewhat randomly.
It would be like if last week you grinded arena and got a random reward box that contained the featured champ, and next week you grinded arena and got a random reward box that contained negative one million gold that just automatically deducted from your inventory, just because. Similarly, in a sense war doesn't have an entrance fee, war has random penalties - negative rewards.
What's more, these random negative rewards are not easy to escape. In AQ, an alliance can choose to run higher maps in some groups and lower maps in other groups. The alliance has some ability to give its members some ability to select their difficulty and thus their costs. Players have agency to step up or step down almost everywhere in the game: in solo quests, in end game content, and even to some degree in alliance quest. But they have almost no agency to choose their costs in alliance war. If you're in an alliance and the alliance chooses to do war, you're in or you're out. You can choose to participate or not, if the alliance allows for players to not participate or they don't run all three groups - which incurs a gigantic season bracket penalty (it is better for an alliance with 18 members to run three groups of 6 than two groups of 9 much of the time, even with the sizeable per group disadvantage, because of how points work). Moreover, your alliance mates can make war harder for you by just winning, and advancing in tier. You have to go along. They can't help you like they can in AQ, by giving lower players an easier map while the stronger pursue a harder one. The primary agency for players to decide whether to incur war's costs or not is often to quit the alliance or not. And that's awful.
If you believe alliances are really just toggle switches for players to decide which AQ map and which AW tier they want to be in, then all's well. But I don't think that's a healthy view of alliances. As I've mentioned elsewhere, from a game design perspective, alliances are supposed to allow players to group with other players they want to play with. They are intended to promote engagement. When players think of alliances as completely interchangeable containers of expendable non-entities, they can't function as engagement tools. They really become disengagement tools.
There are always going to be advantages and disadvantages to running heterogenous alliances, I get that. But alliance war places extra pressure on them that I don't think is necessary or healthy for the game. And it does so because alliance war is a game mode where there is a lot of intrinsic pressure to participate, but participation comes with unpredictable and potentially high costs that cannot be factored into the cost/benefit analysis of participation, and can't be easily avoided even if you could predict what they were. And that makes AW consumable costs different for that game mode than in any other, and why we can't treat them like we do all others. We can't just say everything has costs, because nothing else has these kinds of costs, and we can't just say "step down if it is too hard" because that's also made difficult by design.
There is nothing that gets under people's skin more than what they perceive to be forced costs. The whole *idea* of free to play gaming tries to acknowledge that. You can play the game for free, and then you *choose* what to spend on. If you spend, that's entirely your choice. And spending on war is not literally forced: I'm sure many people will try to point that out. But the structure of the game makes it far less perceptually optional, and those perceptions are what matters when it comes to trying to design an engaging game. If people *perceive* something to be hostile, it doesn't matter if it is or it isn't. It'll be avoided, whether that is a game mode, or an entire game.
To be clear, I'm not saying everyone sees things this way. I'm saying I believe this is a component of how many people perceive things, and it plays a role in how players react to monetization changes for alliance war.
TL;DR: All of the content of the game generally has no entrance costs to participate, or has predictable costs that can be factored into the choice of whether to participate or not. But war's costs are unpredictable and cannot be factored in ahead of time, and they are much harder to escape at all, so they feel less like participation costs (which are sometimes bad) and more like unpredictable random expensive penalties, which players perceive as being forced costs (which is much worse). This makes war consumable monetization far more hostile in feeling than anywhere else in the game, and I believe this suggests the devs need to tread much more carefully when monetizing the consumables of that game mode.
Postscript: I believe it is only in alliance war that so many people consistently say they spend more on it than it is worth, and yet keep on doing it. People say they grind arena even though they hate it, but no one says they grind arena even though they get less from it than what they spend on it. I think what people have been saying for years is what I'm saying now, only, you know, with four thousand fewer words.
Alliance War revives should be free (and also heal to 100%)
The Hidden cost of managing alliance war potions
I'm pretty sure you'll either love them or hate them, but you probably won't have no opinion:
This time, I'm going to take an even bigger leap into the wild blue yonder and ask the question: what's different about war costs? Why do people care about potions and revives in war more than anywhere else? We use potions and revives in solo content, and they aren't necessarily always cheap. And people do complain often about the strength and cost of solo potions. But not to the degree they do about alliance war potions. We also use them in AQ and complaints there are not nearly as high, so it isn't just that AW is an alliance mode. No, I believe AW is unique, and because it is unique we can't think about potions and revives in the same way. I mention several thoughts about how they are different in my "Revives should be free" post linked above. And for many people, alliance war is the mode they care about the most, which automatically means they care about its costs the most. But in my opinion there's another way in which alliance war costs are different, that I believe deserves additional thought by Kabam. In a sense, potions and revives are anti-rewards in alliance war.
What do I mean by this? Well, first of all, most game modes in MCOC have no entrance cost. There is no cost to participate. You can play without spending at all, and when I say "you" I mean anyone: not just the best players, not just the ones that have the mad skilz. Anyone can just pick up the game and play. You might have to pay to play more, play faster, or go higher. You can pay to improve your play, but not to play at all. But at least when there is a cost to play, it is a generally predictable cost. If you choose to play an AQ map with an entrance fee, you know what that fee is in advance. If you choose to grind arena, you know what the gold costs are per arena round. If you choose to compete for the featured champ, you have a pretty good idea of how many units that will take. These costs, when they exist, are known up front. The player can factor them into the game experience, and decide in advance if the costs are worth the experience. You might pay these costs later, like by using a health potion, but by factoring in them ahead of time the pain of actually spending those things isn't that bad when it happens. They are perceived as upfront costs.
That's not true for alliance war. The costs are not known in advance for most players because war is unpredictable. You don't know what fights you will face when you enlist in war. You don't know how strong the opponent will be. You might have a vague idea based on tier, but defensive placements can vary wildly within a tier. You might not even know which paths you will be asked to do. Players are going in without knowing, and without being able to factor up front, the costs of war. So while you can factor in the cost of units for an featured grind, and you can even factor in the cost of potions in AQ because AQ tends to be repetitive (so you can roughly estimate how expensive AQ will be for you based on prior experience), war's costs are not upfront costs and can't be factored into the experience ahead of time. Instead, war's costs simply land on the player dynamically, and often somewhat randomly.
It would be like if last week you grinded arena and got a random reward box that contained the featured champ, and next week you grinded arena and got a random reward box that contained negative one million gold that just automatically deducted from your inventory, just because. Similarly, in a sense war doesn't have an entrance fee, war has random penalties - negative rewards.
What's more, these random negative rewards are not easy to escape. In AQ, an alliance can choose to run higher maps in some groups and lower maps in other groups. The alliance has some ability to give its members some ability to select their difficulty and thus their costs. Players have agency to step up or step down almost everywhere in the game: in solo quests, in end game content, and even to some degree in alliance quest. But they have almost no agency to choose their costs in alliance war. If you're in an alliance and the alliance chooses to do war, you're in or you're out. You can choose to participate or not, if the alliance allows for players to not participate or they don't run all three groups - which incurs a gigantic season bracket penalty (it is better for an alliance with 18 members to run three groups of 6 than two groups of 9 much of the time, even with the sizeable per group disadvantage, because of how points work). Moreover, your alliance mates can make war harder for you by just winning, and advancing in tier. You have to go along. They can't help you like they can in AQ, by giving lower players an easier map while the stronger pursue a harder one. The primary agency for players to decide whether to incur war's costs or not is often to quit the alliance or not. And that's awful.
If you believe alliances are really just toggle switches for players to decide which AQ map and which AW tier they want to be in, then all's well. But I don't think that's a healthy view of alliances. As I've mentioned elsewhere, from a game design perspective, alliances are supposed to allow players to group with other players they want to play with. They are intended to promote engagement. When players think of alliances as completely interchangeable containers of expendable non-entities, they can't function as engagement tools. They really become disengagement tools.
There are always going to be advantages and disadvantages to running heterogenous alliances, I get that. But alliance war places extra pressure on them that I don't think is necessary or healthy for the game. And it does so because alliance war is a game mode where there is a lot of intrinsic pressure to participate, but participation comes with unpredictable and potentially high costs that cannot be factored into the cost/benefit analysis of participation, and can't be easily avoided even if you could predict what they were. And that makes AW consumable costs different for that game mode than in any other, and why we can't treat them like we do all others. We can't just say everything has costs, because nothing else has these kinds of costs, and we can't just say "step down if it is too hard" because that's also made difficult by design.
There is nothing that gets under people's skin more than what they perceive to be forced costs. The whole *idea* of free to play gaming tries to acknowledge that. You can play the game for free, and then you *choose* what to spend on. If you spend, that's entirely your choice. And spending on war is not literally forced: I'm sure many people will try to point that out. But the structure of the game makes it far less perceptually optional, and those perceptions are what matters when it comes to trying to design an engaging game. If people *perceive* something to be hostile, it doesn't matter if it is or it isn't. It'll be avoided, whether that is a game mode, or an entire game.
To be clear, I'm not saying everyone sees things this way. I'm saying I believe this is a component of how many people perceive things, and it plays a role in how players react to monetization changes for alliance war.
TL;DR: All of the content of the game generally has no entrance costs to participate, or has predictable costs that can be factored into the choice of whether to participate or not. But war's costs are unpredictable and cannot be factored in ahead of time, and they are much harder to escape at all, so they feel less like participation costs (which are sometimes bad) and more like unpredictable random expensive penalties, which players perceive as being forced costs (which is much worse). This makes war consumable monetization far more hostile in feeling than anywhere else in the game, and I believe this suggests the devs need to tread much more carefully when monetizing the consumables of that game mode.
Postscript: I believe it is only in alliance war that so many people consistently say they spend more on it than it is worth, and yet keep on doing it. People say they grind arena even though they hate it, but no one says they grind arena even though they get less from it than what they spend on it. I think what people have been saying for years is what I'm saying now, only, you know, with four thousand fewer words.
30
Comments
War is high pressure and every death is a letdown for 29 other players.
You touched on this topic quite well.
alright
Anyway, it's funny that I read these topics despite not caring for War at all
Basically, my post now has a zombie agree.
No thanks
I know how many potions I'm going to use on average in AQ because I've done those maps literally over a hundred times. Experience tells me that. And while I cannot always predict precisely how much potions I will need for some new piece of solo content, I also am free to exit and try again if I die or get hit too many times.
But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that every single time a player used more than a couple potions in war, that was not an expected cost. And the higher you go, the more likely it is that potion usage is a surprise, because those players are the higher skilled players that have more control over the parts of the game that are controllable. That leaves only accidents and surprises as the primary source of potion usage.
I'd be willing to be if any just up and left their alliance and move to one 3 tiers lower... they wouldn't need a single item / so few that the little bit of loyalty earned would cover them.
I don't think this is what players want... its just an extreme example.
Kabam has always stated that their intention is to make AW difficult enough that you may not be able to explore it. To borrow from Rocky IV... "If you die, you die". We as a community have made AW exploration an expectation of most alliances (or at least any bothering to comment on threads like this), so there is pressure to use items.
What sets alliance events (AQ/AW) different is you can't screw up and start over. You need to push through. With AQ, if you die, sure it sucks and you revive, but you can strategically say try to push with Hercules on 1% health through your entire path, maybe screw up once, and use 1 item.
In AW... you "can't" (really shouldn't) do that. The scoring system penalizing the death effectively forces you to heal up. It Is these health potions that are the issue. Bringing Corvus, taking a rough first fight to get your first charge knowing you likely may need to revive is simply not an option... but in AQ, We had an alliance member do it every single AQ. They would join, get the evade charge.... do what they could, die, and let someone else who stood a chance push through on the shared fight. If you propose that to your AW leader... they will either think you are joking, or seriously consider the longevity you should be staying in the alliance.
If Kabam want to make it "If you die, you die"... and have these prices. Fine. Set the item use count to say 5. You are enforcing the type of mode you are setting out to, however players won't go bankrupt trying to keep up with the jones.
In the Competition bracket, which alliances would have to a) opt-in to, and b) qualify for by having high enough rating the wars would be more complex, more difficult, more strategic, and yes, more expensive. But the top rewards would also be determined by tournament-style matching. No more dumping rating to get easier matches, and no more matching against the same alliances over and over. You'd have either elimination (single or double) or some multistage round robin competition to decide top prizes. Tournament style matching in particular fixes the matches at the start (no jumping around rating), and we'd be matching high and low seeds, so if you try to dump rating to get a better match up, you will instead find yourself matching against the top seeds.
This kind of agency, where alliances can decide whether to compete in the Casual league or the Professional one, is something I think is workable. Moreover, the two different competition groups can be independently tweaked for different purposes: the lower group's wars would be tuned to encourage participation, while the higher group would be tuned to enhance competition, because we don't need to encourage participation there: those guys already want to compete at the highest levels. We just need to get out of their way.
If I remember correctly, you can only use a limited amount of items in war. Therefore, you can estimate upper bound at very least. Based on your own war performance, you can probably go even further and have a more precise expectation. Also you can limit yourself to spend only what you got for free. So yeah, strongly disagree