**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
These are valid points and I get that. I also understand you need to keep the ones who spend hooked and engaged in order to keep the game running. No complaints there. I’m not one of those people though and would be considered mid game with my 1 r4 and lacking skill or time to do certain content. So for me, this feels like climbing up the mountain, feeling like I’m reaching the top soon in regards to collection, but then as I get closer and let out a breath of relief, the clouds move showing yet more to the mountain and a more annoying terrain to go through.
May not be the best analogy, but it’s the one that comes to my mind. I also know I don’t have to stop collecting 6*s anytime soon, but for me personally, I get that mindset of why try for the lower tier when I can try for the higher tier one. Not everyone will have that but that’s how I focus on things.
I’ll agree, with 7s, I may be able to tackle content in currently not able to with ease. That’s fine and certainly a win and what I thought with 6s. It just goes down to the time and resources trying to collect the champs for that roster and having to go through another round of is it groot or is it usable.
I get that 7s are important and where coming soon, I just didn’t want it to be now and was more hoping for only an ascension program first and then in another year maybe 7s. It feels rushed to me like the last two progression titles and doesn’t sit well as well as my main issue with this, the thought of starting collection over again.
Now to be fair, the game has been getting stagnant for me for awhile now especially with all the bugs, issues, and aq and aw in general. So I’m already coming from a negative bias. with that and where I am at progression wise, this news of 7s and such really isn’t targeted at me and doesn’t get me excited.
Thanks for reading my rant.
* No real content to challenge depth of 6 stars yet
* Difficulty seems to just go by increase in health pool and attack values, and fighting higher rarity champs. Want more innovative fights like EoP, SoP, even Gauntlet
* Still need to find better ways for champ acquisition. "Wish crystals" anyone? - I still want to acquire champs for all rarity.
* More and more champs being added and with the added rarity means less chance of pulling desired champs
* While they focus on this new rarity, plenty of areas in the contest remains stale. No update to gold crystals, awards remains stale, ISOs from dupes still the same as 4 stars. Paragon still gets 3 stars from cav crystals..and many others
* Plenty of champs still sitting in bench on people's rosters and doesnt really have real value.
Whilst I do get that roster reset is necessary for progression and health of the game. But I feel its still too soon to have this introduced.
[Edit
More runting here..maybe less peaceful comment
So we have just R4d and R3d a lot of champs and now you're telling me 7 stars will come out already? My time and resources spent on getting those champs to where they are feels wasted since I havent really had time to use them fully! ****]
Without getting too deep in the weeds, rarities exist because of champion dilution. The more champions that exist, and more importantly the more champions that players have, the harder it is to make new champs that are meaningful to chase after. When a player has only ten champs, the odds of the next champ they acquire being useful to them in a meaningful way is very high. When they have two hundred champs, the odds are increasingly low. New rarities exist to periodically reset the chase at the top.
So really, the question is not "when will players need 7* champs?" The question actually is "at what point do players stop needing 6* champs?" And the answer to this question is a complex one, because different players need champs for different reasons. At the very top, players are chasing new champs for things like prestige, or marginal utility for war or battlegrounds. The people who have everything don't need something in particular, they need something different. Anything that will give them a marginal advantage over their peers.
The players just below them don't need 7* champs. In fact, they'd be happy if they were not introduced, because they are just getting comfortable with their 6* rosters. That's the problem. They are getting comfortable, and approaching the point where they don't need anything. The game needs players to need things, so that they either become more engaged with the game to grind for them, or spend money on them, or both. The game treats them like people on an exercise plan that is getting just easy enough that they no longer break a sweat. Time to ratchet up.
The players below *them* still need everything. They need stronger champs. They need more champs. But they are also completely out of the race at the top. They struggle for everything, and aren't generally competitive at the top of the game. These players need things, but if the game remained static would likely never get them. They would always be beaten out by the players above them, and they would always find content just a little too difficult for them. These people would probably eventually quit the game because they would get permanently stalled. But these players get a life line. All the stuff that is hard for them to get today, and would be hard for them to get forever, gets easier to get over time, because eventually the players at the top move on to the next thing. In doing so, they make room for these players to move up. What was originally hard, because it had to be hard, because otherwise the players at the top would get too bored, can now get easier because those people are no longer the target.
We tend to think about progression ladders like ladders. Players climb them. But that's actually not entirely accurate, because in progressional games the players climb up, but the ladder also drops down. At any one moment in time there are players who have a certain roster strength and a certain skill level, and that combination will get them only so far, and no farther. Over time, their roster will grow and their skills will grow, but even this is different for all players. For some players, their growth rate is sufficient to make meaningful progress in the game. For others it isn't. If the game itself didn't keep ratcheting upward, and making room for easier progress below, the game would have one fixed progression path. Everyone above the requirements moves on, everyone below gets stuck and quits. But with upward progressional expansion, fast players reach the top, slower players keep pace behind them, and the slowest players can still eventually be pulled forward with the game.
This is the fundamental role of the rarity system. It is about the global state of the game as a whole, not about what any one particular player wants or needs. Probably the biggest misconception about rarities is that they are supposed to be added when enough players need them to complete content. Actually, almost the exact opposite is true. It would be more correct to say they get added when players stop needing things, not when they start needing things. And then there's a trickle down effect that impacts everyone else differently, in a way difficult to replicate with something other than the rarity system.
I personally believe the powers that be ask something like "how can we make more profit" then someone says by "milking the whales" then they ask "how do we milk the whales more" then someone says "obviously by giving them a shiny new toy that will make all their previous purchases near obsolete", which leads the powers that be to tell the developers to implement this.
Okay, maybe that's not a word for word conversation, but don't be surprised if it's very close.
Wolverine: hey guys and gals, look what I found! A new kind of treasure chest but with 7* on it. What could be inside?
Bang! Smash! Claw! Claw!
Wow! Fancy gloves! Hmmm. +546.7 crit rate. Not bad.
Hyperion: Gloves? Are those the … ? Yes they are! The long lost Gloves of Light! With these I can hit harder! +1245.5 crit rate and my personal furies gain 20% potency! Alright!
Wolverine: WTF?! How come you get all that extra bonus?
Hyperion: Class specific. Here, try this belt. It’s yellow and feels warm. Maybe it double or triples your regen rate?
Wolverine: You get fancy gloves and I get a belt that looks and feels like urine?!
This is like starting the game from zero over and over again, in a greedy attemp to get money from us, nothing else.
Dr. Zola
Wondering why something completely different doesn't happen is just weird to me. It is like wondering why the game keeps using normal words in their in-game descriptions instead of inventing their own language, or why we have monthly content instead of inventing all new game modes every month, or why Act 8 comes after Act 7, when a completely different kind of content could follow it instead.
It isn't the *only* way. It just is the way it is, and this was decided at the birth of the game. We don't innovate new ways to put gas and brake pedals in cars, because the benefits of standardization vastly outweigh any possible benefit that any such innovation might provide. Maybe, just maybe, there's a better way. Maybe, just maybe, doing it differently will cause some people to enjoy driving more. But it is just not worth it.
If the devs have to invent a new thing to come after six instead of seven, they would be spending all their time inventing new things to come after six. And there would be no real difference in the game: the thing would still do everything seven stars do. They would still reset the chase in the same way. They just wouldn't be able to leverage existing champs.
Or you could get even more radical, and try to completely invent a whole new progression scheme from scratch, every time. However, if that's what they decided to do at the beginning of time, not scale rarity, but invent entire new progression tiers from scratch, I can guarantee the game wouldn't exist any more. The odds of them inventing workable schemes completely incongruent with the current rarity system that just happened to work, every single time, are such that the game probably wouldn't survive long enough to see whatever five stars were supposed to be.
There's a reason almost all such games add, but rarely subtract (and shifting progression away from the natural evolution of rarity steps to something completely different is identical to deleting seven stars and adding something to replace them - or presumably earlier than seven stars). The cost to do so is ridiculously high, and the odds of repeated success are extremely low. No one would bet real money on such an operational strategy.
Or to put it more simply, the reason why you don't see this is anyone with the power to decide to do this would never risk it, and anyone with the creative capability to risk it would never be allowed to do it.
I can think of lots of ways to add to the progression ladder besides just extending the rarity system to seven stars. However, none of them have benefits worth the cost.
That's like an unpaid intern at a major company bragging about how they are changing things for the better and getting so much experience when in fact they spend most of their time using the copy machine and getting coffee for the paid employees.
This would be a very easy thing for Kabam to prove wrong, and I’m sure if someone was claiming they spoke to the devs when they didn’t, one of the moderators would drop a message saying it’s untrue. Kabam do not allow people to masquerade as Kabam staff, it can get you banned on the forum. If DNA was lying, we’d know about it. It’s a pretty hefty negative if someone is running around claiming they’ve spoken to the developers and giving false information.
I don’t think DNA is claiming to have influence over more than the free revives, “make a very expensive thing free” is clearly referring to the expensive revives.
And although posts he make might get some attentions, kabam has said many times they listen to the data. If his argument goes with he data they have them that's why the change is made.
Why do you think the BG changes recently happened, because people were complaining? Maybe a very small part is that, but they looked at the data they saw people aren't playing it as much as they expected and they saw people werent spending as much on it as they wanted. The data drives the decisions, that's not just kabam, that's any profitable company.
Data isn't the only thing that drives their decisions. They have focus groups outside of betas as well to gain feedback. I've been part of one with DNA and some others who are in the CCP now (before the CCP existed) and there have been others outside of that. There is also the Summoners Sanctum surveys that are sent out as well, plus the various threads here on the forums.
Not sure if you remember but the forums directly changed the course of AW when, for whatever reason, Kabam decided to get rid of defender diversity. The feedback was so overwhelming because of defensive rankups that they reversed course and kept it. There have been other times as well that the feedback from the forums changed the plans of Kabam like-
Nerfing Act 6 into oblivion.
Increasing rewards in Act 7.
OG Gully buffed like 19 times.
Hood changes
Now, 2 of those examples aren't exactly things to be proud of given that Act 6 content was pretty unique and needed some level of skill to complete and with how easy Act 7 is, rewards bump wasn't really needed that badly but the forums made it happen.
Kabams decisions aren't solely based on data. They do get a lot from these forums whether you'll admit it or not. And if you think the decision to change BG's already is based on playing data and no the amount of negative feedback they've received due to the pay to play aspect of the mode, then you'd be very much on the wrong side of things.