Removal of Revive Farming and the Apothecary Discussion

DRTO · March 2023

"This frenzied revive farming trivializes difficult content like Carina’s Challenges and Eternity of Pain because Summoners simply spam revives. For us to allow what is effectively a loophole for these challenging pieces of content, we would have to dilute rewards given from that content, and that is not something we want to do.

Without these changes, we risk having to cancel development on upcoming high difficulty content currently in the works."

This is just bs reasoning tbh. Because this doesn't stop someone spamming revives if they simply buy the units to buy the revives. I really don't think Kabam has any issue with that. So it's an issue that summoners prepare for difficult quests by grabbing a good supply of revives from other quests but if they just buy units and spam buy revives it's completely fine? Revive farming is a part of the game, everyone makes sure that they have the necessary resources before they tackle difficult content so why is there a need to remove free revive farming if money revive farming is perfectly acceptable in your view? Terrible decision by Kabam.

Pikolu · March 2023

Mauled said:

Pikolu said:
It was a change we all expected and honestly 48 energy for a guaranteed level 1 revive 6 days a week isn't bad. What I think is bad is the potion drops. A level 3 potion is pretty worthless considering we get a ton of those from just RoL which is 1 energy.

What I'd like to see is having the hard quest progression tuned so TB+ or Cav+ players get a level 4 potion minimum, preferably a level 5 or 6 potion.
Part of me expected this to happen eventually, but when you look at the content they put out it’s very disappointing.

EoP 3 for most players couldn’t be completed in 30 revives. I’m playing with T1 players and most of them were averaging 50/challenge because the challenges were so limiting. The translation here is that if we were to complete one of those challenges with the live changes it would cost you 800 units and you’d only be able to do 1 challenge per month while you waited for your stash to replenish, and oh by the way, spend 30% of your daily energy on a revive, not genuinely fun content.

100% agree, my cheapest EoP run was still 42 revives. The thing I loved about revive farming is that it took the pressure off me from dying because why should I care when I have 100+ revives in stash? Revive farming, while being OP, removed a lot of stress of the game for me so I could enjoy the game more. I actually enjoyed (to a certain extent) doing the Carina Challenges because it didn't matter too much if I died.

I do want to eliminate any confusion with my original post, I really dislike the decision kabam made on changes to revive farming because that means hard content is going to be stressful again for me. I understand the why, but I think they only should have gotten rid of it if the game inputs were working fine, then it'd be much more understandable.

Alternatively, like someone already mentioned, they should just add a revive limit to any hard content they don't want us to just revive spam. If they do that, then the fights better be reasonable and not have the dumb hit counter or enrage countdown we see in abyss and labyrinth. The fights should all be solvable with anyone if you have the skills for it, not just because they can output enough damage in the time interval alloted.

GinjabredMonsta · March 2023

There wasn’t enough heads up for this and while I can understand the reasoning and that in the long run, this could provide toned down content, it seems drastic and almost punishing. They should at least make the apothecary title based or something to provided relevant consumables

willrun4adonut · March 2023

Money not being spent now. It's not much, but here goes my $10 a month sigil.

Disbanded_pens · March 2023

Pitchforks at the ready.

RayMonDx · March 2023

I love to see one of kabam employees doing carina challenges vol.3 with farming one revive and one potion per day!

Angryneeson52 · March 2023

RayMonDx said:
I love to see one of kabam employees doing carina challenges vol.3 with farming one revive and one potion per day!

Considering most käbam employees are cav level players, no chance.

FiiNCH · March 2023

DNA3000 said:

FiiNCH said:

DNA3000 said:

37v417 said:
What a disgusting money grab. Shame on you, you vultures.
How much are you planning on increasing your spending after this change? Because I wasn't planning on spending more because of this change. How exactly is this going to make money? Who's going to be spending more?
People trying to complete content with no access to farming revives perhaps..
Just "people?" Sure, but which people who don't have access to farming revives? Everyone keeps saying this is a cash grab. But how many of them are actually planning on spending cash because of this cash grab?

It can't be a cash grab if no one actually spends on it. And while I'm sure someone somewhere will spend something, it won't be an effective cash grab unless a large number of players spend.

I don't think this has anything to do with monetization, because there is simply not enough money on the table. The problem is a much more direct problem with top tier content balancing.

Content in this game is balanced in large part on a curve. Which is to say, the more players who complete it, the easier it is. The fewer players that complete it, or the more players that attempt it and fail, the harder it is. That's the definition of content difficulty. It isn't hard because it looks hard on paper. Its hard if we can't do it.

If we all go into EoP with a hundred revives, we're going to tear through it like it is tissue paper. This shows up in the game data as a massive imbalance between the rewards and the measured difficulty of the content. This means one of two things: EoP-like content must now have much lower rewards, or EoP-like content must be diesigned vastly harder until the content is measured to be difficult enough to be appropriate.

The devs can't just "let us use the revives" because they can't just make the content and then let us do whatever we want to it. That's not how games like this are maintained. If we use tons of consumables to beat the content, the content will have to adjust to that.

So what's it going to be? Eventually have all end game content *only* doable with hundreds of revives, and if you don't farm hundreds of consumables it will just be impossible for you? Or have end game content have trivial rewards appropriate to the fact that pretty much everyone sails through it? Or reduce the flow of otherwise practically unlimited consumables and allow content to be balanced around players having a more manageable amount of consumables to throw at the content.

This problem is independent of monetization and has nothing to do with it. Whether Kabam makes more, less, or the same amount of money, they still have to solve this problem. Exponentially increase the difficulty, logarithmically lower the rewards, or reduce unlimited consumable farming. You have to pick one. And as someone who used to farm potions and revives enough to actually know the statistical average return of those maps accurately, of those three options I dislike the third one the least.

I won't like seeing my revive farms disappear. But I think I would like seeing all future end game content be designed in such a way that neutralizes that advantage even less. Once it gets hard enough that even the top tier players are going to need hundreds of revives to complete it, what are players like me supposed to do? We'd be locked out completely. But that's where this ultimately goes, if it is left unchecked.

Sorry @DNA3000 - I don’t agree with your logic here.

As someone said earlier, if Kabam want us to (in their words) ‘stop spamming revives’, then why don’t they put an item limit on quests. They’ve removed the ftp farming option but kept the pay to win option. So it appears they don’t want us to stop spamming, they just want us to pay for it.

oldfootnewshoe · March 2023

This change will not have the effect you desire. Whales gonna whale. The rest of us will skip this content, and when we fall behind, stop playing. The fun police wont win this one.

Worknprogress · March 2023

Mackey said:
Something I'm genuinely curious about in particular is this ..... "This frenzied revive farming trivializes difficult content like Carina’s Challenges and Eternity of Pain because Summoners simply spam revives" ...

OK, I get my head around that to some.extent or other but I am.still able to go and spend an obscene amount of money on units and buy revives that I can "simply spam" ..... so that's is no reason to be doing it, it's just an excuse (not even a plausible one). And this company (and their white knights) wonders why we don't trust what they say. They're quite literally.lying to our faces while asking for money

They should have just come out and said what they really meant.

"Revive spamming has become far too efficient at finishing content, bc we massively screwed up and released Herc as he is. Since we're far too cowardly to address the actual problem, that we also created, we will instead create yet another problem and make difficult content even more expensive to finish, therefore making sure to perpetuate the thing we don't like (revive spamming with Herc), bc now it will still be the most efficient way to finish content and will be even worse for anyone not wanting to do that and use other champs."

Spiral · March 2023

This change is a complete joke. Another money grab no matter how they justify it. Why do they update things like this but not things like the item cap in the inventory?

nOux · March 2023

Hey Kabam, its time to balance out removal of revives farming by making inputs worse than it is right now (which is almost impossible), speed up Ai even more and reduce their recovery timings, let mods keep their rewards and play the game without any fear that they will be banned.

But all seriousness are you doing any % speedrun this game to its grave? Because surely it looks this way.

Pans · March 2023

For how much kabam complained about fixing the iso and gold problem due to the "game economy" they sure can't seem to realize how this decision will tank the game economy especially for f2p players. And for kabams comment on people revive spamming hard content to get through it, did they just forget the 4star labyrinth carinas challenges

Malchaeis · March 2023

Let's see how many people feel this way.

#1 Feels like a purely monetary reason.
#2 Here's what we deemed a "reasonable" amount of revives.... felt like we were being talked down to or patronized.
#3 Acting like you care... we don't want you relying on RNG and spending needless energy. Here's a way to get a single revive......
#4 Sadly probably just going to lead to more people relying on mercs or modding.
#5 Going to gives moderators headaches with the amount of people demanding revives cause of bugs or glitches.
#6 I give it less than a month before I start seeing revive "deals" in the unit store.
#7 Probably have upset more people by doing this than they calculated.
#8 Will have at least 1 troll saying git gud lmfao!!

neb · March 2023

If they made the inputs work properly I’m sure revive spamming would be reduced. This is such a tone deaf decision.

Fitnesscw · March 2023

Grinding revives shouldn't be nerfed. Period. I could see if it was like 10 energy for a revive grind but it's literally 40 energy for 1 revive? Maybe? Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 full energy refills to get 1 single revive. This is just disgusting

Axew · March 2023

Kabam can’t seem to take a hint. The game is already broken and input issues are out of control, if anything we should bump up the drop rate of revives in these quests instead of limiting how many we get per day. If you want to make this change fix the game first, but until that day the revive drop rates should remain the same

This is objectively a greedy, selfish, useless change

Madman_marvin · March 2023

Community: Surely Kabam won’t make things harder on players and find new ways to screw then over, especially since there are so many control issues still.
Kabam:

Aomine_Daiki10 · March 2023

Kabaam has no shame very disgusting move to force spending, how greedy can this lame company be. Like you basically have a community that's spends an exuberant amount of money on this mobile game and you still want more. This level of greed is disgraceful at least have a little bit of shame kabaam.

Omedenn · March 2023

Revives are the only thing to solve their broken gameplay

They don’t know how to solve all the issues the game is facing, but easily shut down some harmless revive farming.

Insane

roastedbagel · March 2023

ILoveDrDoom said:
Lol Kabam so out of touch man, I’ve been able to complete difficult content because of 3.2.6.

I don't think that's how it was intended to exist though...

Also, how many arenas does it take to get 1200 units (30 revives if going off the Carina comparison)? Is it really that much longer than 30 runs of the map? (I'm not arguing this point, I genuinely don't know and am honestly curious on those numbers)

Disbanded_pens · March 2023

Why not just shorten the process and sell the paths for tens of thousands units each in the store? /s

johnlaw3742 · March 2023

auto popping 4 hour crystals will probably be the next move

DNA3000 · March 2023

FiiNCH said:

DNA3000 said:

FiiNCH said:

DNA3000 said:

37v417 said:
What a disgusting money grab. Shame on you, you vultures.
How much are you planning on increasing your spending after this change? Because I wasn't planning on spending more because of this change. How exactly is this going to make money? Who's going to be spending more?
People trying to complete content with no access to farming revives perhaps..
Just "people?" Sure, but which people who don't have access to farming revives? Everyone keeps saying this is a cash grab. But how many of them are actually planning on spending cash because of this cash grab?

It can't be a cash grab if no one actually spends on it. And while I'm sure someone somewhere will spend something, it won't be an effective cash grab unless a large number of players spend.

I don't think this has anything to do with monetization, because there is simply not enough money on the table. The problem is a much more direct problem with top tier content balancing.

Content in this game is balanced in large part on a curve. Which is to say, the more players who complete it, the easier it is. The fewer players that complete it, or the more players that attempt it and fail, the harder it is. That's the definition of content difficulty. It isn't hard because it looks hard on paper. Its hard if we can't do it.

If we all go into EoP with a hundred revives, we're going to tear through it like it is tissue paper. This shows up in the game data as a massive imbalance between the rewards and the measured difficulty of the content. This means one of two things: EoP-like content must now have much lower rewards, or EoP-like content must be diesigned vastly harder until the content is measured to be difficult enough to be appropriate.

The devs can't just "let us use the revives" because they can't just make the content and then let us do whatever we want to it. That's not how games like this are maintained. If we use tons of consumables to beat the content, the content will have to adjust to that.

So what's it going to be? Eventually have all end game content *only* doable with hundreds of revives, and if you don't farm hundreds of consumables it will just be impossible for you? Or have end game content have trivial rewards appropriate to the fact that pretty much everyone sails through it? Or reduce the flow of otherwise practically unlimited consumables and allow content to be balanced around players having a more manageable amount of consumables to throw at the content.

This problem is independent of monetization and has nothing to do with it. Whether Kabam makes more, less, or the same amount of money, they still have to solve this problem. Exponentially increase the difficulty, logarithmically lower the rewards, or reduce unlimited consumable farming. You have to pick one. And as someone who used to farm potions and revives enough to actually know the statistical average return of those maps accurately, of those three options I dislike the third one the least.

I won't like seeing my revive farms disappear. But I think I would like seeing all future end game content be designed in such a way that neutralizes that advantage even less. Once it gets hard enough that even the top tier players are going to need hundreds of revives to complete it, what are players like me supposed to do? We'd be locked out completely. But that's where this ultimately goes, if it is left unchecked.
Sorry @DNA3000 - I don’t agree with your logic here.

As someone said earlier, if Kabam want us to (in their words) ‘stop spamming revives’, then why don’t they put an item limit on quests. They’ve removed the ftp farming option but kept the pay to win option. So it appears they don’t want us to stop spamming, they just want us to pay for it.

They could just ban items altogether from top tier content. Not only would this eliminate the farming problem, but it would literally dunk on the players claiming that this was a "cash grab."

That's what I would do. Kabam is just reducing farming rather than eliminating it and is continuing to allow players to use items in top tier content because they have more mercy than I do.

As to "keeping the pay to win option" yeah, they still allow people to actually buy things and use things. Because if they don't, the game will die. That's true everywhere. We have random crystals that the whales can just buy hundreds of to guarantee getting what they want. We have inventory limits that the whales can bypass by simply buying unlimited amounts of what they need. We have reward tiers that the whales can just buy their way to the top of. We have constraints on how much rewards flow into the game that the spenders can work around.

Spenders can do more than non-spenders can do, because that's how we encourage them to spend. To say that a game design decision is not valid because spending allows those decisions to be mitigated is simply not understanding how games like this work. *Every* decision can have its validity questioned like this. But game designers still have to design games with design rules nonetheless. They still have to balance their game economies nonetheless. They still have to implement controls and limits nonetheless.

PSYKEOP · March 2023

while they do this to screw players who can't spend it, I wish they had the same commitment to screw the mercenaries who charge to do events, because you can be sure that they do you Lose more money than f2p players who used revive farming as an alternative to difficult content.

allinashes · March 2023

So, will we see significant decreases in the difficulty of things like Carina's, if content is/was being tuned to the availability of revives?

HSS75 · March 2023

One sentence:
"A revive a day keeps the player away"
Honestly one of the best ways to describe this

Removal of Revive Farming and the Apothecary Discussion

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