**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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Removal of Revive Farming and the Apothecary Discussion
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Doesn’t matter what you think, playtime is still playtime, whether you use auto fight or not. You are choosing to use your device to play MCOC over the millions of other uses a personal computer has, that’s a valuable commodity.
*I know you meant device. I just don't agree with the same stance.
If two weeks is not enough you can do even better than that, because you can cross month boundaries. Hypothetically you could spend three weeks in May doing EQ and BG, then spend the last week grinding revives and then cross over into the first week of June (EQ is not aligned perfectly with calendar months, but you get the idea) and end up with (over) three weeks dedicated to EQ and BG in one month, the same three weeks dedicated to those activities in the following month, and still have a consecutive two week period in the middle where you max out revives and use them on some piece of content. You could only do this every other month, but there aren't really many pieces of content that would likely require that many revives for most players. Anything you could do in say fifty revives you could do every month.
Someone doing this would be sacrificing about 23% of their quest energy grinding for revives.
But I think I can point to the place where I took an off ramp and headed off into the back roads. When I did my analysis of Act 6, I made the argument that whether Act 6 itself was reasonable or not, its exponential difficulty curve meant that the design idea expressed within it was unsustainable. No player could reasonably keep up with such a fast upward difficulty trajectory. And long before it affected the top tier players, it would snag the more average players of the game. But Act 6 is gatekeeper content: it gates progress to the next stages of the game. It can't indefinitely roadblock average players because if you roadblock 85% of your players from future progress in a progressional game, you're in effect putting a permanent ceiling on a large percentage of your target audience. That's a recipe for a game death spiral.
The logical thing to do is to make sure that content like Act 6 is hard enough that it can be a challenge for high skill players who run into it early in their progress - when their rosters are much weaker - while average and below average players can "outlevel" the content by reaching it slower (and thus having more time to build up roster) and if necessary "park" there until they amass enough strength to plow through it. Its not perfect, but that offers the best compromise for core progressional content that has to be reasonably interesting at release, but must ultimately cater to a very wide audience eventually.
That argument doesn't work for Everest content. Everest content is not intended to be core progressional content, and it has completely different difficulty requirements placed upon it. So what's the equivalent argument for Everest content? I believe this ultimately turns out to be less of a technical numbers problem, and more of an expectation problem. What's the reasonable expectation for Everest content, given its difficulty role *and* its reward profile?
I don't think there's an "answer" to that question. Instead, I think there's a choice. Its a choice I think should have been made explicitly long ago, but now we're in a situation where we have thousands of people who have all made their own choice, and believe the game should honor it. And they are mutually exclusive choices. Which means the best path forward is not going to be one where everyone is happy, but the one where everyone is the least unhappy. And that may ultimately include the developers (at least hypothetically: I don't get to tell them what to do).
I may be ready to stick my neck out tomorrow. Right now its all a tangle, and I'm trying to reduce the idea(s) to their simplest form that will fit in a forum post.
If this is about profits kabam could offer larger health pots and revives as well as super boosts or hacks to offer an incentive to spend.
Someone time constrained is someone I can imagine focusing on doing the highest tier of monthly EQ they can reasonably handle first. However they distribute their time, this is something that will take up a certain amount of their monthly energy. Last I checked it was about 1435 energy (for the top three tiers). Let's just call that 21 full energy bars to round off, and let's say that's one full energy bar per day for 21 days, spread out over the month. For our purposes, it doesn't matter if they grind it all out on weekends or only do it an hour a day five days a week. We're going to assume that they just don't have time to do much more, at least not with their full attention, so the rest of their energy goes largely unused.
That would be a waste, so they should at least try to do something with it. Especially if they are a casual player, they won't be swimming in materials. At the very least they should dump their energy into the ISO quests. They don't even need to autofight through them, they could explore them once and then use the auto-complete feature. This takes only seconds, and you at least get ISO.
Now suppose this casual player wants to do something like Grandmaster's Gauntlet, or EoP, or Abyss, and they can in fact set aside the time to do it. They want to build up a revive stash for it, so what can they do until they decide to tackle it. At the very least, they could autofight 3.2.6 twice in one day: once in the morning and once before they go to sleep. This would burn 140 energy per day (you might still be able to play the game normally in the middle of the day, but we're setting that aside for now) On average, you'd be earning a little more than 4 revives per day. If you stayed in 3.2.6 for the two weeks, you'd eventually burn 1960 energy, generating about 59 revives. With the fifteen inventory slots, that's 74 revives this player could have saved up for whatever content they were trying to tackle.
This is pretty low effort for someone who isn't really being asked to do much in a particularly dedicated way. Just a few minutes in the morning and a few in the evening, and they don't need to even focus on the game. With autofight behind the wheel, you can do this while drinking your morning coffee or while brushing your teeth before bed. And in this extreme situation, we can still get to 74.
I think the bottleneck here is not that most people can't do this, it is that most players don't realize they can in fact do this. Or they don't realize how what appears to be a small amount of stuff for a large amount of energy piles up very fast. It doesn't seem like it should work, but when you burn 70 energy in the morning and 70 in the evening, you're actually burning 140 of the 230 energy most players will get altogether during the day even if they played constantly. In other words, a player that farms like this with minimal effort is already getting more than half the theoretical maximum.
Item caps have two problems. They eliminate the ability for monetization to work, and they create saturation problems for everyone in general.
A lot of people think this is about money, and it is in part, but not in the way people are describing. They claim this change is because Kabam *wants* players to spend more on revives. But that's not the case. They don't want players to spend on revives: whether players spend on revives or farm revives, the content is trivialized equally. The problem is that in-game farming is a game economy issue that can be directly tackled, while players spending their way through the game is an issue they have to live with as the price they pay - and we all pay - to allow hundreds of thousands of people to play this game for free. Caps on spending leave a lot of money on the table, because the top 20% of spenders are dumping 80% of the revenue on the game. We tolerate this, because if we don't we don't have a game period.
Ignoring spending, if we decide to item cap, what should the cap be? Suppose you're running an EoP path and you item out with the final boss at 2% health. That's going to be super frustrating. The game tends to not item cap except when there's strong reasons to do so. In AQ if you item out your alliance mates might still bail you out, and they don't want alliances doing maps far above their normal capabilities, so item caps are seen as a reasonable balance there. In solo content you're just screwed. And the higher the item cap, the more painful iteming out will be. Imagine if the item cap is fifty. If you item out, not only are you stuck, you've tossed fifty revives down the drain.
The intent of items is not to be content fuel, where players decide they are going to spend X items on the content to beat it. The intent of items is to allow players to recover from mistakes, hiccoughs, or miscalculations. It is risk mitigation. It is supposed to be the cost of the items that acts as a soft cap to using them rather than needing a hard cap. That way players can navigate that choice themselves, and as a result the content becomes (or at least can become) more appealing to a wider range of players in general than if hard caps existed.
To oversimplify, if you die on the first fight of EoP in the first ten seconds, you're probably not going to revive. That's a wasted revive: you'll just restart. The revive has value, and it isn't worth using it here. But if you're in the last 10% of the last fight, you certainly will use that revive. That revive is now paying gigantic dividends regardless of its cost. This sort of calculation is what the game wants players to do, but this sort of calculation only makes sense if the revives actually cost something and actually are limited relative to normal usage.
So hard caps are unappealing for a couple reasons, and hard capping Everest content wouldn't eliminate the wider problem with the revive farms.
Are there issues with the game? Absolutely. Are they doing what they can to fix them? Clearly. No one enjoys the game being bugged. Especially them. It's their livelihood to produce and maintain it.
Just because things aren't optimal for everyone doesn't mean they're not working on them, and it sure as hell doesn't mean they're leaving it bugged to milk people. NO ONE wants the game to be suboptimal. It's not always as easy as "Fix it now!". There are a myriad of devices and moving parts at play. Android alone has about 25,000 different devices and varying OSs, although not all are supported. That's still a significant number. They can't own every device and test every single situation. They do their best.
They're clearly still working on it because they've identified issues with the opt-in Beta. Things still have to keep moving whether they're working perfectly or not.
You're also faced with the fact that not all Players are experiencing issues, and not all at the same time. That adds variables. Plus, the average person doesn't even add information on here. They just say it's broken, and they need to fix it. As tired as people are of posting the info template, there's a reason for it. Everything right down to when it was reported adds information for them to identify these issues.
Beyond that, an exploitable (little e) Resource is never justified by ongoing issues, and it's never justified to keep it going as some sort of "apology".
Dr. Zola
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I really would like to know what eligible % of the playerbase has beaten carinas vol 3. This % is probably very high, not due to the spamming of revives, but to the ease of gathering revives. If the percentage is high, then kabam has to ask themselves seriously if they want the next abyss/EoP/Carinas to just give great rewards that would be valuable to endgame players, or give okay rewards because non-endgame players will also have easy access to those rewards as well.
While it does suck that revive farming is going away, I'd rather see great rewards than watered-down rewards for everest content.
I'm sorry you don't like to hear it, but it's also a choice to save Units until once or twice a year. Some feel it's sacrosanct. Personally, I think the Rewards for Carina's and EoP and the like, would be a better investment than anything they're offering at one time. This game allows people to make their own choices. It's not the fault of the design if those choices don't yield everything.
How exactly and why? What's the difference between an X rated player farming 10 revives for an Y rated content (new players VS 5.2 collector), and an X+n rated player farming 10 revives for an Y+n rated content (paragons vs Carina v3)?
Those, who have completed previous content and challenges, but don't like the grindiness of arena or BG. What should they do? Just abandon the game? Or should they prepare for the next big thing to come. They gather refills in the overflow. Should they just let them expire.
They are engaging in the game. Is that really bad?
Ok maybe 5 revives/day the most, you cannot farm more than that without a stack of refills. A truly outrageous big number indeed.
So again what is the eligibility requirement if you are talking about eligible % of player base?
So over a 24 hour period is 5 revives if you are extremely efficient.
So people farming all those revives, you think it's with free/in-game energy? Or you think they can auto-farm energy in game too?
OF COURSE some people will spend less and some people will spend more, but kabam has full knowledge that the content they create has become a revive spam
If you take the revives off of the lower levels, you're not going to stop people from obtaining revives en masse. They're just going to go back to the arena to farm units, to buy revives.
This solution (removing revives and adding apothecary) will not fix this issue.