**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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Yes, players should be allowed to make bad decisions. But SOMETIMES, game design needs to do that for them.
Is $2.5-4 million gold a month good? Is it hard to do? We can each do the math to figure out what that buys for rank-ups, but is that a reasonable amount of rank-ups? And does a normal person collect enough catalysts to even complete that many rank-ups each month?
Selling ISO is a horrible value, why? No mention of how much ISO a person in earns each month or how that relates to the rank-ups a person would like to complete. There is also no argument for why $10MM gold is more useful for rank-ups/level-ups than being spent on the rank-up gem and crystals last year.
Sorry, just didn’t do it for me. But in your defence, it is a very difficult balance to fully analyze.
Full disclosure, I have about 23 million gold, so I am biased in that I would have loved to see gold offers. But I also realize gold doesn’t come easy. I sell 99.9% of my basic ISO and I buy the Sigil most months. Very little arena grinding, though.
Selling ISO is a horrible value, because if you look at the figures of ISO spend I provide - a great deal of it is required to rank up champions, and if you don't want to spend more gold, then you need to spend the same class ISO. The gold gain you'd get in return is not worth what you'd sell it for. I thought that was self-explanatory, but. That's why it's bad.
If the post didn't do it for you, I do suggest a re-read, since it seems like I'm re-iterating most of my points.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/283812/thanks-kabam-for-the-deadpool-s-gold-trade-offer
There were lots of threads this year hoping the offers would come back which would be odd for something that was so detrimental and made people furious. You would think there would have been at least one counter thread asking Kabam to not bring them back. Anyway, your take on the offers is interesting but I think it is overstated. The people for whom these offers would be detrimental don't manage their gold. The same people who are out of gold and spent 10 million a year ago would still be out of gold if they hadn't purchased the offers. Would they be better off with a few more R2s and R3s than whatever they got from the offers?
What about the grinders who hold 50+ million.... Yeah terrible idea...
It comes down to resource management and a lot of players do it very poorly...
If u had 10 million gold exactly last year.. bought every offer and didn't have the resources to rank up or level up thats on you...
As someone else said.. or gave an example of.. it was a terrible idea then to put up offers for 99.99 dollars 3x.. cause i might have to pay rent?... My phone bill?...
Your argument about complaints about last year's Gold Offers is completely countered by (A) People who were happy with gold offers last year, and (B) People who are complaining about the lack of gold offers this year.
Your experience does not necessarily extrapolate to the majority of the playerbase.
I am also (recently) Paragon, and I am sitting at 59 million gold. I don't grind Arena. I have thousands of various Golden crystals that I can't be bothered to open. The rate of champion acquisition, and rank up material acquisition, means that I am not going to blow through my gold in any meaningful way.
In essence, arguing that Gold offers are bad based on your personal experience and anecdotal evidence, is not a very good argument if there are plenty of other accounts who do not have a gold problem.
Its called resource management
Yes, it does take a lot of gold to rank up champions as Dragon mentions. And yes, all players don't have huge gold surpluses and are thus strongly bottlenecked by those gold costs. But you are correct that just because players are short of gold, doesn't mean gold offers are intrinsically bad. Just because everyone can't participate, doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. In fact, we would fully expect that most players wouldn't have enough gold to participate at all.
But they are not the problem.
The fundamental question is: is there a gold problem or not? To be more specific, are the players who are short of gold actually short of gold due to their own playing choices, or is there an intrinsic economic balance issue with gold? This is a somewhat objective and somewhat subjective question that comes down to design intent. If the game design intends the average player to do a certain list of average activities in a certain amount of time and the gold such a player is likely to acquire is not enough to make that activity rate sustainable, there's an economy problem. But if there is no such bottleneck for a reasonably chosen activity rate, and the players who are short of gold are just impatient, then there is no gold shortage issue. Everyone is short of something, and for some people it happens to be gold. And if they want to concoct some wild made up argument for why gold shouldn't be the shortage they suffer, they can have a ball but the game doesn't nor shouldn't care.
These two situations are fundamentally different when it comes to the gold offers for one simple reason. If there is an actual legitimate gold shortage economic situation that deserves balancing attention, then the gold offers cannot return in their original form. I say cannot, not should not. They cannot for the simple reason that the whole purpose of those offers is to induce players with gold surpluses to spend them on enticing rewards. But across the continuum of players between having no gold and having ludicrous amounts of gold, there are a lot of players on the boundary. They don't have a gold shortage, but spending a lot of it on gold offers will place them dangerously close to having a shortage, or tipping them over the edge into having a shortage. The game designers cannot simultaneously incentivize this kind of activity and also attempt to address economic gold shortages. Cannot not should not because the gold offers simultaneously alter the economic data on gold in the game and alter the player psychology surrounding gold expenditures. Doing this while simultaneously attempting to address gold economy problems makes the entire process untenable.
I don't know if the gold question is settled. I don't know if the players short of gold have a problem the game should fix, or if it is just the players fault. But while that question is unsettled, and while we know what the impact of gold offers tends to be (players jump in with both feet whenever they feel they can), those offers are dangerous. I don't have the data to prove it, but I bet the developers do.
Gold offers do not hurt players with no gold. They do not hurt players with tons of gold. But they do offer a choice to a range of players in the middle, between getting the shiny in the offer or preserving gold for rank ups to avoid bottlenecks. Players who choose incorrectly won't just suddenly break their accounts in some datamineable way. Instead, the problem will be more subtle: they will be forced to level up and rank up much, much slower than they otherwise would. This alters the psychology of gameplay in a way that is difficult to tackle directly. You just create a lot of hidden unhappiness with the way a fundamental aspect of the game works.
There is literally no amount of unhappiness over the gold trade event that compares to that sort of problem. You can't say well, players are unhappy anyway so it was the wrong choice. The difference is between a bunch of players ranting about something no one will care about in a few months and an existential deceleration threat to the game.
Dragon outlines the magnitude of the gold flows in the game. But the core of the problem is not that rank ups are expensive, it is that adding another gold sink like the gold trades places a significant wedge of the playerbase into a situation where they must choose between a fundamental game progress bottleneck and a reward explicitly designed to be deliberately extremely enticing. And from a economical balance design perspective, that's nonsensical. Not because it directly harms players, even though it does, but rather because it harms the game itself. The only time you present such decisions to the player is when both the game and the players mutually agree if the player makes the wrong choice, they'll live with it. And gold shortage is one where the clear evidence is the players won't live with slower progression than they feel entitled to.
2. “Let's start with the obvious. It's a good thing there were no gold offers.“ I don’t want to full quote because those people annoy the heck out of me on long posts. While this may follow your line of thinking, clearly it is not “obvious” because of the previously stated massive thread of people wanting a better event (and most seem to think that gold offers would have achieved that).
3. Your seem to have multiple arguments, so I’ll break them up into more bitesize chunks for my commentary. "I'm Paragon...I cannot keep up with gold spend.... I cannot keep up with the resources I have coming in. It took stepping down to a lower tier alliance, stopping my rank ups for a couple of weeks, and grinding arena, to swing things in the other direction. For someone who does not grind arena or does not do EQ? It's almost impossible to swing the gold gain in the other direction unless you are already sitting on a surplus of gold."
Your biggest argument seems to be that there is an overall shortage of gold available in the game. While I have heard that from a lot of players, it seems like the wrong mindset to have, or at least like you need to qualify your terms better. You can still play on a functioning account and enjoy almost all gameplay aspects of the game if you were to never rank up another champion. While content might get out of your skillset eventually, there is nothing (other than peer pressure or super specific nodes) that require a specific champ to be ranked up for normal gameplay. This highlights the point that if you only ever ranked up champs that were absolutely essential to get past certain pieces of content (I'll eg. a throwback of 1* Hulk here for that Variant lane), you would likely only use a small fraction of the gold that you actually use. This matters because "lack of gold" really refers to "less gold than I need to rank up the champs that I *want* to rank up". After you say that the gold spend is a problem for you, you then state a simple solution. Maybe people who have a gold "problem" are actually functioning in a higher demand (for gold) environment than would be ideal for their account and personal preference. Either you play at a more balanced level, or you are forced to run into challenging aspects of the game (not having as much gold as you want).
4. "The gold offers are different, in the same way that July 4th resource influx is different, and Black Friday resource influx is different. It's a forced deficiency (which players might chase even when they shouldn't due to FOMO - to the severe detriment of their account) in many ways that ends up taking any positivity with the event and turning it sour in the longer term." You say forced deficiency to describe the manner of there being exclusivity in rewards because of their cost (it appears). You then describe (and had before) about players making bad decisions on their accounts, like that isn't their fault, but instead a "horrible" event imposed on them by Kabam. If the offers were reasonably balanced to the same level of unit offers, how much of a difference is there really? I could argue all day the benefits of using units for clearing content, but if an offer comes up a large number of Summoners consider to be of good value, would it be a horrible thing for them to buy it? No. It is a resource that got them a given result that they wanted. This all comes back to the idea of offers being horrible because they are not the theoretically/optimally best idea for all players.
5. "...this is an instance where game design needed to step in to help player decision making (because players can never be trusted to make 'good' decisions and that has to be factored in) to prevent a really bad experience a few weeks down the line." Where does this stop? By this logic, Kabam should immediately cancel about 90% of their unit deals because basically every popup offer after opening crystals (like 1 T1A for 200 units or equally ridiculous offers) is creating a "horrible" environment for players, giving them terrible deals with the chance that they might actually take them. I get annoyed at those deals, but I do not disagree with them on principal because if someone is willing to pay 200 units for a T1A, clearly they must really think it is worth it.
6. The gold deals are a vaguely comparable situation to the trade-in store last year, although I had a very different experience with each. I had plenty of built up gold and not enough champs that I wanted to spend it on, or catalysts to use, so I bought the deals (and as a player that is not willing to spend real dollars anymore, who doesn't grind arena, these were by far the best and most impactful deals I have ever been able to partake in). When the trade-in store came around, I took a few of the smaller worthwhile deals, but I wasn't able to utilize the bigger value-trades because I did not have the proper AGs in my stash. While I felt some FOMO, I was not actually mad that the deals were offered as they were, but that I could not take advantage of the best of them. Does that mean the deals were terrible? No, they just were a surprise event that utilized an item that had never really been avilable as currency for better items (in my eyes). What I was annoyed at was that there was no precedent set for me to save up gems that I did not need to use, since even though I never really use 4* champs (and basically never awakened a 5* in the previous year because I had to use them for content), I used the gems so they would not go to waste.
The event was not horrible to release, but it would have been better for many Summoners if it had been even hinted at by Kabam before. Similar to the gold deals, and even the major upgrades to the Loyalty store recently. Seemingly, by your logic, the changes must have been horrible because people playing the highest level of war use all their loyalty to buy AQ/AW boosts (not sure how prevalent this actually was, but take it as an example) and thus were not able to enjoy the other rewards offered. Instead, I (and I know many others) saw that while the release was handled horribly, the actual store was an amazing addition.
7. You also make a big deal about selling iso for gold. This is, and has always been a terrible deal. Players making terrible resource-management decisions because of a deal does not reflect on why the deal should exist. If Kabam offers amazing unit deals on Cyber Weekend and I go into debt to buy them, that does not mean the deals were horrible, but that I made a bad decision about an offer that might have been pretty reasonable for others.
I have lots of thoughts, sorry for the long post.
Are you seriously trying to argue that it doesn’t matter how much gold gain is realistic for most people? And the only thing that matters is your own gold gain? Not a good start. If it’s easy to earn 5 million gold, for example, then it completely changes the math. I would have thought that was obvious.
And if your gold gain is not enough to keep up with your own rank-ups, who cares? They only care is if it’s a similar situation to their own. And you provide very little info for people to tell if that’s true. Or if you’re being realistic on the number of rank-ups you make each month.
The “point” that I think you’re trying to make is that it’s very hard to have a gold surplus each month. Well then show that! Don’t just say it and expect people to trust your biased opinion. That’s called a statement, not an argument.
I’ll leave the second paragraph alone since all you really said is, “selling ISO is bad because it’s bad.”
Maybe you should re-read MY post.
1. Like you say, how much rank ups does 5 million gold allow for? Most players don't know, and won't calculate. They will rely upon experiential intuition. In other words, they will guess. Most players do not, and cannot quantitatively budget for this, and thus cannot actually make a decision based on the objective data.
2. Because of this it doesn't matter what that rate is. What does matter is, what ever it is, it won't be enough. Because most players will judge this "by feel" they will use subjective gauges of whether or not they are leveling "fast enough." And the problem with all subjective evaluations involving rates and significant amounts of time is that people becomes attuned to them. Every rate that seems fast or even adequate will seem subjectively slower over time. So no roster progressional rate will seem subjectively reasonable indefinitely. The subjective evaluation will then climb up the ladder from "my rank up rate is sad" to "there's a gold problem" for most players that have gold as a bottleneck irrespective of the numbers. The subjective psychology of the situation will mean whatever was adequate today will be inadequate tomorrow.
Throwing gold offers into the game will be throwing gasoline into a fire for this specific range of players, in a way that has no similar analog for other kinds of offers. For example, there are no cash offers that will improve your short term game experience at the expense of your long term game experience. The kinds of choices the game presents that offer this sort of choice are extremely limited in scope and context.
They could have offered gold on the unit packs, where 5x $5 dollar offers or 5x $5 dollar piggy banks netted the player 5-7.5m gold and a gold arena or milestones on the Oversaturated Market event covered the rest.
That would have been more enticing than what was on offer in the unit deals and actually having a proper participatory event would have been nice rather than it seeming like just another unit sale (especially with a better one due next month). It would have also killed two birds with one stone giving those strapped for gold a chance to buy it for rank ups.
The other matter is removing something that all players could participate in and replacing it with nothing. If it was removed on the basis of it being detrimental to the player, communicating that and replacing it with something (arena, solo event or something else) would have been a better move.
The resource cost last year may have limited the number of participants but I'd wager that there were more players engaged with the event than this year. Whilst if the event had been a repeat I'd argue that there would have been an increase in engagement based on the expectation and time available to farm in game resources.
I understand the issues that you and Dragonfei have raised but the way it's been framed (along with the spending comparison) makes it seem like the gold shortage is something beyond Kabam's control.
They could up the participation and negate gold flow issues by offering the gold deals along with a way to get the gold to afford it during the event. If the player doesn't want to grind they could taylor the unit deals to that.
The added bonus of that is having something a player can interact with whilst also making the event somewhat unique. Maybe have DotD as a gold event, Chinese New Year loyalty etc.
This event didn't offer that and just came off as a unit sale which I think risks player burnout and disenfranchisement by repeating the same thing with no variation. There's also the matter of some reverse price anchoring as it doesn't compare favourably to Cyber Weekend and it's far to close too it to stand on its own as just a unit sale.
TLDR: they don’t hurt anyone but can help some people so why not have them
Make the gold offers 1 gold each.
I was looking forward to the gold offers, since I have absolutely no use for all the gold I am accumulation
a) are more selective over who they rank
b) aren't sitting on a huge pile of t3a's & t6b's
9x R4 champs you say? So that's like 27x t3a/t6b consumed? I should be so lucky.