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Removal of Revive Farming and the Apothecary Discussion
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Youtube Interview Link
That's like me, who doesn't play arena, supporting a nerf to units from the milestones because it doesn't affect me.
Very selfish stance.
Personally, I don’t want them to touch it, but I thought it was at least interesting that they would remove it entirely instead of making a compromise.
#stopBeingGreedy
1.) TOS is soft poopoo in regards to punishments
2.) there is little appetite to try and find you anyways
3.) legitimate pathways have intentional road blocks now.
Or maybe it’s a big brain move to create more modders so they can get more data points and maybe catch one or two.
Off the top of my head:
- Changes to war potions
- Selling specific champs for $
- Catalyst store
- Elder Marks
And many more, I’m sure. We know netmarble had a poor year in 2022 and likely leaning on their cash cow to increase revenue. But this ain’t it.
But hey, let's let them run free, unchecked as they abuse the game and don't use revives.
Meanwhile legitimate players who farm revives and are either ftp or spend money on the game through deals such as Cyber Weekend get taken to the cleaners, in turn encouraging people to consider taking up modding.
Literally the biggest issue in the game right now should be addressing the modders, they affect the game integrity which is the very core of any video game.
Instead no, let's vehemently annoy the player base and push people to leave (via losing intetest), discourage new players from getting through the game as others had done before them or new/old players just turn to modding.
Well done, great thinking. Keep it up.
1 - The potion/revive market has been in dire need of an overhaul for years, but especially in the last year or two since our champions have been hitting R3/4 and now R5. In order to revive and fully heal an un-boosted R4 costs something like 120 units, depending on the health pool, and even more if the champion is boosted. As the potion economy currently stands cases it's actually worth allowing boosts to expire - depending on the boosts you're using -before healing a champion. Using the free potions from 4 hour crystals it takes an average of about 10 crystals to heal a champion from a 40% revive (assuming you're a Paragon), using the lv3 from RoL it takes about 15 or so.
The potion situation being so ludicrous is one of the reasons that revives are farmed in the way that they are: players can't afford to spend the units to heal their champions up, or have the time to spend hours and hours farming RoL for lv3 potions to heal. It's far more efficient to just farm revives and use 20% revives.
Solution: Health potions should be % based, starting with 10% for lv1, up to a 60% heal for lv6.
2 - Difficult content is being designed to make you revive. If you look at AoL upon release that was a piece of content that came with a hard ceiling on the amount of damage that you could do per hit - 85k - and a hard ceiling on the amount of hits you could do, depending on the power level of the champion ~240 hits. Unless you're using someone like Prof X, or Stryfe using a heavy-only playstyle soloing any of the fights was next to impossible, and it still is for many of the champions in the game no matter what their power level is now. This is a design philosophy that has continued into the Carinas Challenges, V1 was full of punitive challenges like the Star Lord challenge which is impossible to do without an enormous amount of revives, V2 isn't quite as bad though the Carina's Challengers challenge is still a revive fiesta. Carina V3 was designed to force you to revive multiple times per fight - there's only one of the Challenges where Peni isn't a total revive fiesta (CMM), for example.
Solution: The design philosophy needs to change. There's a difference between hard and impossible content. Much of Carina V3, AoL (At least on release) is impossible content and people just aren't keen on the idea of spending 2-3k units to do a challenge or a single line in a quest.
if you exit the quest you have no respawn of the revives.
- Omnipotent AI? Check.
- Input issues? Check.
- Larger EQ health pools? Check.
- Crappy grindy rewards? Check.
- Remove system to grind what players need to complete content? Check.
- Belittle the player base with asinine reasoning for all the above? Check.
Basically let’s make ALL the worst decisions we can as a business so our player base is outraged. Sounds like a winning business plan to me. Leadership at its finest. That or this is all a cruel extended April fools joke.
The revive farm is a consequence of negligence of reviewing the potion ecosystem and making sure that a reasonable amount of account potions are available in endgame content. I’m not talking about ground breaking things here but a revive every other quest on a single line that doesn’t refresh would be a huge upgrade. Including heal pots that are relevant to the story content. This doesn’t meant L3 (1500 go revives in TB difficulty, gtfoh with that) but maybe L5s on an Act8 line. Another option would be to changed pots to % based pots, then maybe a L1 might be something of relevance to all players. Rather than less than 1% of a 6star R5 HP… again gtfoh with that.
Additionally it’s a consequence of unreasonable objectives that aren’t designed to be challenging yet fun like EoP but instead are design to consume resources in punishing fashion that requires a level of Masochism to push through, as you know that no amount of skill makes that content possible
Kabam in the opening paragraph in the forum post:
"introducing a new way to earn consumables without having to rely on path RNG."
Also Kabam, in the same forum post, introduced a RNG component to rely on:
Easy - One Path has "a 1% chance of containing 1 level 1 revive"
Hard - One Path has "a 5% chance of containing 1 level 1 revive"
Bonus Question(s):
"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."
Since the beginning, people have earned millions of battlechips in Arenas and cashed them in for units and used the units to buy revives to beat challenging pieces of content. Please explain how this as any less of a loophole, and, if applicable, explain how you plan to either correct what is effectively another loophole or how you plan to dilute the rewards. What's the difference between spending 60 minutes/day in Arena vs 3.2.6? Why is one detrimental to the game and the other is not?
If you want the endgame content to be more challenging, stop allowing people to BUY your broken champs, rank up materials, and sig stones. That certainly makes the game easier.
Additionally, your PR on issues like this is atrocious. You were clearly aware that this would be unpopular, so you throw it in a forum post and throw your moderators to the wolves.
There are a myriad of solutions that could avoid the Herc nuke:
1. Nodes that specifically target a champion (as seen by the practice of targeting Quake).
2. Apply a tag to Herc that results in AAR interactions for these 'difficult' content (such as giving a Blade esque danger sense to the boss).
3. Lock the best rewards behind special objectives (Such as defeat in one try, as seen last month).
#3 seems like the easiest solution that pisses the least people off, and one that already exists. Carina Challenges already do that, in that you have to use certain tagged champions to get those special rewards. Simply design your future content so you can't swap-in and out Hercules for a good amount of the fights.
Players shouldn't conflate the reasons Kabam is removing revive farming with existing champions and difficulty.
1)
This statement is cherry picking imo. Considering the latest piece of content : Carina v3, "spamming revives" is a wrong phase. Carina V3 was downright awful content that forced insane damage on the summoner. The only way to combat this was using revives, and possibly healing up. Even with that, the attack values are so high, one missed parry ends in death. Forcing revives was the intent of this piece of content.
let us look back at previous challenges. Abyss? Hard cap on hits. Unit collector is downright awful to fight.
Carina v1? One of the worst pieces of content ever released with those 4* challenges. "Spamming revives" was the ONLY way to get past these challenges.
Herein comes another assumption. A majority of the summoners aren't like the most skilled folks like MSD/Karatemike and the rest. They do not represent us. We struggle through content designed to mess with us at every turn using every tool possible.
2)
These rewards are a joke. Level 1 potion? Level 2 potion? they are currently irrelevant to even a day1 player. Successful parries do more damage than what these potions heal.
So why this huge disconnect? Why is this huge backlash from the community, especially the low spenders (which includes me), and the f2p community?
The reason lies with the change in the unit spend change.
Years ago, without revive farms, units were seen as a way to spend for revives to complete tough pieces of content. Ive explored ROL/AOL this way. But this started to change with the push for more unit based offers pushed over the past few years. The big weekend sales came in, first with a max of 18k units, and now in the past year, ballooning to over 25k units spend. Then came other important offers like Valentines day/Act offers/Random unit deals.. and now the 1k offers every month to get those 30% boosts (mainly for top tier AW). Offers galore. The only way to get them is farm ALL year long for units, and open your wallet from time to time (which I do). Now, if the push is to use these hard earned units for content, these offers are simply out of reach for people like me. Maybe folks like me aren't worth getting those offers? Possibly. But is it worth it to kabam to alienate folks like me for this?
The alternative options given forward are just too extreme. 1 revive every day is absolutely nothing seeing how tough everest content is. Again, highly skilled players on youtube doing reviveless runs are NOT representative of the community at large.
So what can we do to ease the pain, if Kabam wants to go down this path?
1) Extend Consumable expiry dates. 15 days is nothing. Get it to a few months. 30/60 days at minimum. That will help.
2) Massively increase revive inventory limits. 15 revives (17 with sigil) is nothing. make that 45 so we can store more revives. This would go for potions as well, as well as team consumables.
3) have a second look at the healing situation in the game. Potions are heavily outdated. CHange the system or improve it.
4) heavily buff the Apothecary. 1 revive a day is nothing. 2-3 revives at least.
5) relook at the design for everest content. Making it incredibly punishing is what forces summoners to "spam revives".
I hope these are some points which may achieve some sort of alignment between the community and Kabam.
Resource farming damping is already existing through inventory restrictions and expiry.
Kabam please find a better solution.