The issue is, why is it any time Kabam makes a change we have to wait for you or someone to try and explain what the positive reasoning *might* be behind their choices. Where is the transparency or explanation? Why is it a theory posited by you, instead of an explanation by them?
There's a certain irony to asking me this question. But while in general I agree with you that communication could be much better almost everywhere, in this case maybe author's intent isn't the best thing to come directly from the author. Maybe the developers want players to make up their own minds about how the loyalty store alters their approach to war without being told there's a specific choice that was intended to be the "right one." Maybe it is more important for players to decide what the loyalty store means to them, than it is to inform players what the devs are hoping will happen.
I can say whatever I want, because if a player decides not to believe I'm right, they are free to do so. And I may in fact be completely wrong about the developer's intentions. But your agency becomes significantly impaired in an inescapable way if you're told by the designer what you're supposed to do with the design.
First of all, it's nice to have something valuable to spend loyalty on. Power boosts change is bad and unnecessary, as we had it limited anyway, but not the end of the world. Personally I can't remember when I used pretty boost before eop warlock Potions are an issue only for high tier wars, so my guess is they how to see more units spent on potions.
Overall new things are good (even though expensive), old things became a little worse
The issue is, why is it any time Kabam makes a change we have to wait for you or someone to try and explain what the positive reasoning *might* be behind their choices. Where is the transparency or explanation? Why is it a theory posited by you, instead of an explanation by them?
There's a certain irony to asking me this question. But while in general I agree with you that communication could be much better almost everywhere, in this case maybe author's intent isn't the best thing to come directly from the author. Maybe the developers want players to make up their own minds about how the loyalty store alters their approach to war without being told there's a specific choice that was intended to be the "right one." Maybe it is more important for players to decide what the loyalty store means to them, than it is to inform players what the devs are hoping will happen.
I can say whatever I want, because if a player decides not to believe I'm right, they are free to do so. And I may in fact be completely wrong about the developer's intentions. But your agency becomes significantly impaired in an inescapable way if you're told by the designer what you're supposed to do with the design.
This I tend to agree with. We all have the freedom to consider what we think are the motivations for these things, but it's more often than not less guided than that. I believe they provide options. Some options involve making choices, and those choices usually relate to certain balancing limitations, but it's really not about encouraging people to do much of anything other than play how they choose within the framework.
The issue is, why is it any time Kabam makes a change we have to wait for you or someone to try and explain what the positive reasoning *might* be behind their choices. Where is the transparency or explanation? Why is it a theory posited by you, instead of an explanation by them?
There's a certain irony to asking me this question. But while in general I agree with you that communication could be much better almost everywhere, in this case maybe author's intent isn't the best thing to come directly from the author. Maybe the developers want players to make up their own minds about how the loyalty store alters their approach to war without being told there's a specific choice that was intended to be the "right one." Maybe it is more important for players to decide what the loyalty store means to them, than it is to inform players what the devs are hoping will happen.
I can say whatever I want, because if a player decides not to believe I'm right, they are free to do so. And I may in fact be completely wrong about the developer's intentions. But your agency becomes significantly impaired in an inescapable way if you're told by the designer what you're supposed to do with the design.
I think the pushback is because most people don’t like making choices. One of the hardest things to do everyday has always been answering the question, “What’s for dinner?”
People tend to want others to tell them what to do cause it’s the easier way out. If you want to rank high in AW, max boost and pot to full each fight. It’s easy.
But with the loyalty store changes, everyone contemplating that choice will have to ask themselves, “Every pot I spend is 20k loyalty further from that 6* AG that I could have sooner, should I? Or should I just die and 40% revive for 1 loyalty? But what about my death count?” etc questions.
When we're talking about making choices between using all Loyalty to run Wars, or saving for Mats, that's a choice. Not everyone is going to run high Tier Wars.
I had to stop and re think this argument when I realized I'm in agreement with grounded wisdom, but facts are facts and an enormous part of this game is resource management and deciding where you want to use your resources.
Precisely. That's exactly my point. Which means we can't choose to buy them if we're choosing to dedicate those Resources to Wars. That's not a bad thing. That's choices.
I agree with you dude. And ironically, I'm seeing some people complaining about this loyalty issue who always bash on people who complain about lack of gold. Literally some same people who always bash on those low on gold and tell them to better manage their resources are upset about loyalty which again, is 100% about resource management.
People choose where they use loyalty, you do not have to use it on war, so it is 100% a choice and resource management issue.
That’s a different argument altogether.
People who complain about gold (typically) don’t use all avenues provided to maximise their intake (arena / incursions).
The argument here is the value of competing to achieve the highest rank possible in AW doesn’t make sense when you can literally ‘do worse’ in the season and get better rewards with your loyalty. In effect Kabam are devaluing an entire game mode, from a competitive standpoint.
And there’s also the second argument that the cost of items in the loyalty story aren’t balanced with the amount of loyalty we’re given in rewards, which is another issue, but just as important imo.
The issue is, why is it any time Kabam makes a change we have to wait for you or someone to try and explain what the positive reasoning *might* be behind their choices. Where is the transparency or explanation? Why is it a theory posited by you, instead of an explanation by them?
There's a certain irony to asking me this question. But while in general I agree with you that communication could be much better almost everywhere, in this case maybe author's intent isn't the best thing to come directly from the author. Maybe the developers want players to make up their own minds about how the loyalty store alters their approach to war without being told there's a specific choice that was intended to be the "right one." Maybe it is more important for players to decide what the loyalty store means to them, than it is to inform players what the devs are hoping will happen.
I can say whatever I want, because if a player decides not to believe I'm right, they are free to do so. And I may in fact be completely wrong about the developer's intentions. But your agency becomes significantly impaired in an inescapable way if you're told by the designer what you're supposed to do with the design.
This I tend to agree with. We all have the freedom to consider what we think are the motivations for these things, but it's more often than not less guided than that. I believe they provide options. Some options involve making choices, and those choices usually relate to certain balancing limitations, but it's really not about encouraging people to do much of anything other than play how they choose within the framework.
Man this is some word salad right here
How is that word salad? Let me reiterate.
They don't make us do anything. We make our own choices.
This is the most dumb update kabam ever did. I really hope they changed there minds otherwise they will take all fun from wars which is mostly what keep game going.
I feel like one thing is getting lost here when people talk about choices. Clearly this game is all about choices, and choices can be difficult; we know this. The issue at hand is that Kabam has radically changed the incentives around whether and how to participate in AW.
I’m not a competitive war player so I can’t say what kind of impact this may have. But people who are annoyed about this, they’re not annoyed about choice; from what I can see, they’re annoyed at the way these changes seem to skew incentives away from top-tier war.
First of all, it's nice to have something valuable to spend loyalty on. Power boosts change is bad and unnecessary, as we had it limited anyway, but not the end of the world. Personally I can't remember when I used pretty boost before eop warlock Potions are an issue only for high tier wars, so my guess is they how to see more units spent on potions.
Overall new things are good (even though expensive), old things became a little worse
saying you haven’t used class boosts is enough to tell us you don’t play wars competitively. Competitive wars require some class boosts.
The problem with the potions are that they are prohibitively expensive. Unless you are spending quite a bit of money on units or grinding crazy amounts and not buying other stuff with units, you can’t afford to buy them. It’s a horrid change bc of the cost of potions and the rarity of loyalty.
This sort of change makes the war mode really expensive in units terms and really pay to win but there are no really compensation to it.
I mean, I do agree with loyalty store having the rankup 4 materials so a couple lower tier allies can also got them but this makes you choose between one of these 2 things:
- spend a lot (I mean a FREAKING LOT) of units in war resources so you can try to reach higher war season rewards then save ALL your loyalty for the materials; - not spending a single thing and not caring if you win, loose, finishes whichever tier it is... And buying the resources with the loyalty (that you'll probably wont get assuming you will loose a bunch of times playing like this).
Just some numbers to exemplify it. Even if you are an ally like gt40 that manages to win 11 out of 12 wars in tier 1 per season, you will only get something like a 1kk loyalty. To buy any rankup materials those guys would need to spend a bunch in units... How exactly Kabam thinks this makes war seasons attractive to players at all?
If they let us sell potions/boosts for loyalty, that would solve a big problem. I have bought around 500k worth of potions that are sitting in my inventory.
Wait until they update season rewards to include loyalty and it will make more sense while bringing back the incentive.
I think a big reason for the blowback on this is that they didn’t lead with the season reward buff or release them simultaneously. It probably would’ve saved everybody a lot of heartache if Kabam had made the announcement of “Next season, along with updated War Rewards, we will be releasing a new Loyalty store.”
Would it have solved the problem completely? No, there will always be pushback on change. But it probably would’ve been smoother than this.
Updating the store before the rewards is encouraging not to be competitive in AW… and considering Loyalty is AW currency, I don’t understand how they’re rewarding people that don’t even play war, because now they can use all the loyalty received from compensation to upgrade their rosters, and committed war players who have already used most of their loyalty on keeping their alliances competitive, won’t be able to get those goodies… Imo, Kabam should boost the rewards first, including a big boost to loyalty received for playing and winning wars, and then, after making sure their loyal war players are capable of buying some of those goodies, they can proceed to update the loyalty store.
Not sure if this was covered early on, not yet, or weren’t worried…has there been any word on whether kabam will consider bumping up the daily loyalty cap from the Alliance help tab? It feels to me that would be a good place to start with making sure there is some small buffer to the issue at hand.
Loyalty store looks awesome. I’m super bummed that I bought unstoppable colossus a couple weeks ago. I literally said to myself “what else will I ever spend this on?”. Couple weeks later this comes out :’(
People tend to want others to tell them what to do cause it’s the easier way out. If you want to rank high in AW, max boost and pot to full each fight. It’s easy.
But with the loyalty store changes, everyone contemplating that choice will have to ask themselves, “Every pot I spend is 20k loyalty further from that 6* AG that I could have sooner, should I? Or should I just die and 40% revive for 1 loyalty? But what about my death count?” etc questions.
It’s much tougher psychologically imo.
(Love the loyalty store update though.)
If you could choose between pushing in war and using all loyalty towards potions and boosts WHILE STILL getting equivalent rewards in ranked season rewards as a "reward" for your efforts OR not pushing and collecting loyalty and getting these rewards from loyalty store, then yes.. it would be a choice between pushing in war or not pushing. But as is, there is no incentive to push. There is no choice. the "choice" is between pushing in war, spending hours fighting in a competitive way to get outdated rewards OR relax, do no stress wars, and get better rewards.
People tend to want others to tell them what to do cause it’s the easier way out. If you want to rank high in AW, max boost and pot to full each fight. It’s easy.
But with the loyalty store changes, everyone contemplating that choice will have to ask themselves, “Every pot I spend is 20k loyalty further from that 6* AG that I could have sooner, should I? Or should I just die and 40% revive for 1 loyalty? But what about my death count?” etc questions.
It’s much tougher psychologically imo.
(Love the loyalty store update though.)
If you could choose between pushing in war and using all loyalty towards potions and boosts WHILE STILL getting equivalent rewards in ranked season rewards as a "reward" for your efforts OR not pushing and collecting loyalty and getting these rewards from loyalty store, then yes.. it would be a choice between pushing in war or not pushing. But as is, there is no incentive to push. There is no choice. the "choice" is between pushing in war, spending hours fighting in a competitive way to get outdated rewards OR relax, do no stress wars, and get better rewards.
This change makes no sense.
Yeah I agree with you. It makes no sense to push for war if pushing means spending all loyalty.
I guess, at least for next season, the war ratings will shift towards each alliances’ equilibrium rating instead of the grossly inflated ones shown now, aided by boosts and pots.
It’s most likely that a new AW season rewards is in the works and it includes some mechanism that isn’t introduced in the game yet, hence the later update to it.
Personally I think most people can’t see the forest for the trees on the issue of r4 mats. 6 months ago we were begging kabam to make r4 mats more available to the average player and kabam has done just that. Like one person said it’s about choices but everyone complaining don’t realize we didn’t even have these choices a few months ago. The game is moving in a positive direction for once.
Once again, this encourages hoarding, just what Kabam said they were trying to solve with the trade in store in December. Thanks! I have 4.4M in loyalty so I will continue to hoard things!
Well I'm glad I've spent 1.7 million of my 2 million loyalty the last few seasons for gold 3 rewards to see this roll out. I don't even have enough loyalty to buy potions for the upcoming season let alone R4 Mats. We're not even getting enough loyalty after a war match to buy a team potion that's worth anything. So out of touch with the player base it's unreal.
Comments
I can say whatever I want, because if a player decides not to believe I'm right, they are free to do so. And I may in fact be completely wrong about the developer's intentions. But your agency becomes significantly impaired in an inescapable way if you're told by the designer what you're supposed to do with the design.
Power boosts change is bad and unnecessary, as we had it limited anyway, but not the end of the world. Personally I can't remember when I used pretty boost before eop warlock
Potions are an issue only for high tier wars, so my guess is they how to see more units spent on potions.
Overall new things are good (even though expensive), old things became a little worse
People tend to want others to tell them what to do cause it’s the easier way out. If you want to rank high in AW, max boost and pot to full each fight. It’s easy.
But with the loyalty store changes, everyone contemplating that choice will have to ask themselves, “Every pot I spend is 20k loyalty further from that 6* AG that I could have sooner, should I? Or should I just die and 40% revive for 1 loyalty? But what about my death count?” etc questions.
It’s much tougher psychologically imo.
(Love the loyalty store update though.)
People who complain about gold (typically) don’t use all avenues provided to maximise their intake (arena / incursions).
The argument here is the value of competing to achieve the highest rank possible in AW doesn’t make sense when you can literally ‘do worse’ in the season and get better rewards with your loyalty. In effect Kabam are devaluing an entire game mode, from a competitive standpoint.
And there’s also the second argument that the cost of items in the loyalty story aren’t balanced with the amount of loyalty we’re given in rewards, which is another issue, but just as important imo.
Let me reiterate.
They don't make us do anything. We make our own choices.
Clear enough?
I’m not a competitive war player so I can’t say what kind of impact this may have. But people who are annoyed about this, they’re not annoyed about choice; from what I can see, they’re annoyed at the way these changes seem to skew incentives away from top-tier war.
*cries while using sig 20 UC in arena*
The problem with the potions are that they are prohibitively expensive. Unless you are spending quite a bit of money on units or grinding crazy amounts and not buying other stuff with units, you can’t afford to buy them. It’s a horrid change bc of the cost of potions and the rarity of loyalty.
I mean, I do agree with loyalty store having the rankup 4 materials so a couple lower tier allies can also got them but this makes you choose between one of these 2 things:
- spend a lot (I mean a FREAKING LOT) of units in war resources so you can try to reach higher war season rewards then save ALL your loyalty for the materials;
- not spending a single thing and not caring if you win, loose, finishes whichever tier it is... And buying the resources with the loyalty (that you'll probably wont get assuming you will loose a bunch of times playing like this).
Just some numbers to exemplify it. Even if you are an ally like gt40 that manages to win 11 out of 12 wars in tier 1 per season, you will only get something like a 1kk loyalty. To buy any rankup materials those guys would need to spend a bunch in units... How exactly Kabam thinks this makes war seasons attractive to players at all?
Would it have solved the problem completely? No, there will always be pushback on change. But it probably would’ve been smoother than this.
Click or no?
Thoughts?
This change makes no sense.
I guess, at least for next season, the war ratings will shift towards each alliances’ equilibrium rating instead of the grossly inflated ones shown now, aided by boosts and pots.
It’s most likely that a new AW season rewards is in the works and it includes some mechanism that isn’t introduced in the game yet, hence the later update to it.