**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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Let's just remove story and content.
Let the progression be based on just offers like it is right now.
and worse and less and less fun
got you.
earlier content should be made more of a reason to be done and stay relevant.
slow progression down.
3 quests in 8.3, game is already there to eliminate story, It's already over....
Let them offers rooolllll. Let the whaling begins.
These progression gates were designed with a certain game in mind. Introduction of BGs has changed that paradigm. This was explicitly called out during BG launch, specifically highlighting that players should consider that they will not be able to fully engage in all modes and should plan accordingly. Within this context, there can be an option for progression for players who are not highly engaged with the story mode. It doesn't have to be titles - it can just be a way to continue to grow rosters at a comparable pace to stay competitive in other modes.
One mode of the game already does this - Incursions. The gating factors for incursions is mostly roster based and not tied to story progression. The same can be done for BG, which is probably the main mode which is leading to these discussions.
To use your marathon analogy, the game has many modes, some of which are marathons, some are sprints. It makes limited sense to limit peoples progress on sprints because they don't like marathons.
Pixel offers era has begun.
Gotta Embrace it sooner or later.
Pushing zone 25 every single time for past 9 months. I stand as an example. Also sitting on 100% in all content, Abyss, Carinas 123, all of that, Did map8 since its launch.
Doing all that brought jack$##* in current BG season9.
Story content is irrelevant. It is time to move forward to offers and offers alone.
So what's the solution? To allow Contender players to access the various Paragon stores? To scrap the progression system altogether and just let everyone match against everyone with no restrictions whatsoever?
The story content is there for a reason. It's not to arbitrarily gatekeep you from the next progression tier - it's to guide you to the next progression tier. It's to make sure you're constantly evolving your skills. It teaches you the different nodes throughout. Completing the story content prepares you for stuff like BG. To progress to the highest tiers of the game, you have to have a deep roster and a solid understanding of the game. One of the constant problems we see is that especially new players are progressing too fast with too highly-ranked champions, without having that deep understanding of the game or the depth of the roster to fully prepare them for further challenges. Those things are much more valuable than anything you can buy with money, and you can't buy that with money.
However, I do think there is one thing that Kabam could look at and that's to make Battlegrounds more accessible for lower-progression players. It's possible that they already are since there are (soon?) coming some changes to how BG's Victory Track work so that Uncollected players aren't matched with Paragon players as often as they are currently. Hopefully that makes BG more fun even for lower-progression players. I do think that mode is fun enough that everyone should be able to participate without having to bash their head against the wall because they can't compete with the players they're being matched with.
But then again, it's possible that the reason they can't compete with them is because they haven't learned how the nodes that they are facing works. If you've played the story, no node in BG will surprise you. If you've just bought your way to the top, they still might and you will have a harder and significantly worse experience in the game mode.
If someone is in BG content and able to easily crush TB players as a Cav, then literal completion (not even exploration) of the necessary story content to reach the next progression level should not be difficult for them. It is the equivalent of asking someone who is interested in running the Boston marathon to at least be able to finish the local 5k, then finish a practice half-marathon at the time of their choosing beforehand. It is certainly a challenge for non-runners, but should be simple for someone with the skills to qualify for the Boston marathon.
You mention that with the introduction of BGs that Kabam even highlighted the fact that people should consider not being able to play every mode. That has literally always been the case to a degree, and if completing the requisite story content to match your progression to your skill level takes up so much of your time that you cannot also participate in BGs, then you may have reached your current maximum progression level corresponding to your level of skill. Not everyone can do every aspect of the game to their desire, thus you have to pick and choose what is valuable for you to complete and what you enjoy. Most people don't do story content for the fun of it but because it represents the best scaling of difficulty in the game, and because of the rewards it offers. If you hate story content but want progression, then blast through completion and make your way to BGs for the "fun" fights.
Also, you claim that BGs should be like incursions.....but it already is. Players are not gated in BGs through incursions, but through the depth of their rosters and their skill in champion knowledge/fighting. The gating factor for *BGs* is almost entirely roster (and practical skill) based and not directly tied to story progression except for the fact that people who progress farther in story content get the requisite rewards (while increase their rosters, but are not the only way to do so). BGs is still a great way to get rewards at a lower progression level, and while the store prices are influenced by progression, that just provides more incentive to enjoy the spoils of victory through story quests (actively increasing the enjoyment of those that can make it through them).
Besides trying to get the next progression when it comes out, actually drove me to keep pushing and got me back into the game a few times
And before you try to convince the devs to adopt your choose your own adventure design philosophy, it would be instructive to consider why they changed progression gating from just completing content to completing content milestones *and* roster prerequisites. If you don't know why they did that, you won't understand why the odds of them adopting a rainbow progression matrix are almost zero.
If I refer to your earlier comments, you indicate that only story is balanced for progress (I assume that means fights get harder over chapters). But story is also littered with fights which I'll politely call as niche (e.g. GM). These fights while interesting as a standalone challenge do little to advance the player's skills in other parts of the game. While they can be done itemless by a small portion of the player base, their main function appear to be as a resource drain or just a hard stop to progression. Most of us have spent hour/day/weeks (depending on how good we are) practising those fights and dumped a bunch of potions and revives on them. Lot of us have brute forced this content, hoarding resources and units to get it done. The mechanics of those fights aren't really seen anywhere else, for the most part. Beating GM or Kang didn't do much to my skills in BG. Don't get me wrong, they are some of the best content in the game but they appear like a tax than actually a measure of progress.
So, in the current setting of the game, where units are valued far more (because deals are more plentiful and larger) and there are multiple time sensitive parts of the game (BGs use energy) and resource farming has been reduced, the opportunity cost of spending a lot of time on the roadblock fights is much higher. This is hardly reflected in the forum voices, because the forums have a much higher proportion of end game players. Before last year, there were 2 big sales (July 4th and CW) and a gifting event which many of the forum users used alts for. 36K units covered all of that. This year J4 alone was 36K units.
You've talked about your alt in the forums - in the context of it being easier for weaker rosters to progress through lower VT tiers in BG. You highlight how your knowledge of the game makes it easier to beat similar accounts etc. By all measures you've had enough time to spend on the account. Reading your posts it felt like the account was still Cav. It's not lack of skills or time that is stopping you from taking that account to TB or Paragon. You could have spent the time you spent on BGs this season alone and you'd have cleared all story content. You didn't because you thought the time was better spent elsewhere.
There is a lot of assumptions here, probably some (or most) are extremely wrong. I get the argument that the best path to progress for new players is story content. I recommend that to most people. But the game is very different from what it was 4-5 years, even what it was 2 years ago. I don't think forum users / end game players realise how tedious Act 5 and 6 are in the current setting. That was endgame content when they cleared it, it is mostly a chore now. They were perfectly acceptable progression gates then, they probably aren't now despite the changes to those acts.
First of all, Battlegrounds has special requirements on it that no other mode (not even alliance war) has. It must maintain a minimum participation density, or the turnstile mechanism that performs real time match making would not work properly. The longer it takes to find matches, the less likely most players will want to participate. We don't care how many people are playing the monthly EQ at 2am Eastern. We do care how many players are searching for matches. Because of that, Battlegrounds is designed to strongly encourage participation. That's the only reason the VT itself even exists. BG would function perfectly fine - even better as a competition - if it only was composed of the GC. The GC is the pure competition mode. VT is balanced between rewarding and incentivizing participation alongside competition. In fact, it skews more towards participation than competition in the early rungs of VT.
If BG was a progress gate, the developers would have to balance incentivizing participation and properly gating progress. In the current progressional ladder model, progress is gated behind two roughly independent requirements: completing content of a certain proscribed difficulty and duration, and gaining sufficient resources to expand roster both upward and outward in a particular way. For BG to replace the content requirement, we would have to define a specific metric for reaching *both* difficulty and duration parameters in a roughly congruent way. But what's the appropriate way to judge difficulty? We have UC players making it all the way to GC based almost entirely on match maker preferences and random match chance. It is simply not hard enough to reach GC for BG to gate anything.
We could change that, but only by reducing the incentivization for participation. And that's dangerous, because turnstile game modes are subject to death spirals. If you mess with them and cause a drop in participation, this can have irreversible downward effects on participation: its hard to find match, so I don't bother anymore, so there's fewer people looking for match, so its harder to find match. The devs know this (all devs know this) so they would be extremely unlikely to take such risks without some exigent reason for doing so.
All this assumes some reasonably simple progress model, which is blatantly impossible or too risky to even attempt. It does not preclude more complex models. Gaining such and such rungs or such and such ladder in such and such seasons under such and such circumstances. Anything can be made up with some mathematical model or other. But beyond some horizon, this becomes impractical for another reason: it becomes too complicated for players. The argument is often "if players don't understand it they can just ignore it" but that's not true. Players can only ignore the parts of the game they don't want to interact with up to some point. The *apparent* complexity of the game is not one of those things easy to ignore, because ironically when players don't understand the complexity of the game, they can't *know* if it safe to ignore.
What's MCOC? Its a fighting game, right? That's the obvious first impression. However, it is also wrong. There were many arguments about this on the forums and in the player community in general. Its a fighting game, so why do I have to manage resources? Its a fighting game, so why do I have to read all this ability stuff. I just want to punch things. This game is broken because it doesn't do what it is supposed to do, and what it is supposed to do is let me quickly log in and punch things. Once players get their first impression of anything, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to shake. As someone that has played more games than I can count, I could tell from day one even way back when that MCOC was not a fighting game. It had fighting, but it was a collection game with fighting. And as I played it, I realized it was as much of a resource management game as it was a fighting game. In fact, MCOC had more in common with MMOs than with any fighting game I'd ever seen. I made that argument repeatedly in the past. But I realized back then that this was somewhat of a fools errand, at least back then. The first impression was simply too strong, and the non-fighting game components still too underdeveloped back then. Today, I don't get quite as much push back on that one any more, even though I'm still making the same identical argument. The last eight years offers overwhelming evidence of what the game's design and trajectory is. But there are still people who believe that trajectory is wrong, because it doesn't match their own first impression of what the game is.
You can add whatever progress models you want. But they won't just be take it or leave it options. They will change the way the game is perceived in a particular way. Whether you want to do that is an independent decision from whether any particular progress model works at all, and whether it is worth the required resources to implement. To convince the devs to do something like this, you not only have to convince them it is a good idea, not only that the rewards for doing so will exceed the resource cost and the opportunity cost of developing it (while they are doing this, other things won't get done), you also have to convince them that the way this changes the game's nature is itself worth it.
Think Colossus. To me, the 1* Colossus decision was irrational. However, that's because it wasn't a rational decision. It was a values decision. Someone decided that this was a good idea, because it fit with their design aesthetic. And those are not arguments you can generally win.
1. "story is also littered with fights which I'll politely call as niche (e.g. GM). These fights while interesting as a standalone challenge do little to advance the player's skills in other parts of the game."
Really? You're using the GM as an example of a niche fight presumably to say that skills necessary to defeat him have no place in the rest of the game.... skills like dexing, blocking, hitting into block, being aggressive, baiting special attacks, dealing with timed phases, etc? You claim that their main function is as a hard progression stop or a resource drain, which they might be *if you haven't progressed to a certain level of skill*. Almost every fight can be bought past with an apropriate champion and buckets of cash, but what makes it progressional content is how the difficulty of not just boss fights but nodes, linked nodes, node combinations with champions, etc increase as you progress through the content. You then go on to explain how much these tougher fights forced you to practice game mechanics in order to beath them, but say that these mechanics don't really exist anywhere else and you didn't gain any skills through those fights. While these boss fights involve a lot of specific combinations of abilities for the boss, your champs still only have a specific set of moves. You still only have your specific set of champions to choose from. The process of you practicing those moves in specifically different ways than the standard 5-hit combo is one of the main points of providing content that cannot just be punched through. You learn how to play differently, improve your reflexes, improve your champion knowledge and roster, which is all a part of "progression". People who spend 3000 units to get through the GM have progressed less than those that do it itemless, but then you get into the whole system of revives and their purpose that could really get us bogged down.
2. "the opportunity cost of spending a lot of time on the roadblock fights is much higher."
Unit values will always inflate, so it's not like roadblocks were any less enjoyable "back in my day". The whole point of progressional content is that it provides increasing challenge that you cannot always fight through. If you are good enough at the game and have a roster strength comparable to a TB player, then the progressional milestones to get to TB level *should not be a road block to you*. By nature of a challenge and milestone aceivement, the players that are TB have already made it past that hurdle, and all of the backlash on this thread is because new players shouldn't have access to things that they have not invested the opportunity cost to receive. For instance, while some people (OP) complain that a new player should be able to buy a 6* for 1USD (just for the sake of explanation, I don't really pay attention to cash deals) just like Paragon players since the value of the dollar should be the same. The problem with that is that Paragon players have invested much more effort (money, time, practice, networking for a better alliance, whatever) to get to where they are than your average Act 4 summoner (literally can't even tell you what those lower progression titles are).
3. You claim that DNA could have cleared "all story content" instead of just making the way through the VT to GC this season and that "You didn't because you thought the time was better spent elsewhere."
I thought that the whole discussion was started because being Paragon (or any higher progression tier) inherently provided more value? It's not a given that the goal of an alt is to speedrun the game for the best value deals. BGs with a low level account sounds like a lot of fun tbh and I'd rather do that with random and low ranked champs.
4. "I don't think forum users / end game players realise how tedious Act 5 and 6 are in the current setting. That was endgame content when they cleared it, it is mostly a chore now. They were perfectly acceptable progression gates then, they probably aren't now despite the changes to those acts." I might argue that you also are making some assumptions here. I don't remember anyone thinking Act 6 was ever a blast (multiple nerfs ago) outside of the GM fight. It was most definitely a chore then, but a necessary one. I don't think you really backed up your claim that it has changed, just purely stated it. To combine this with your earlier point of the resource drain of story content, it was far greater comparatively when Act 6 came around (or before) and that was some of the most endgame content in game. It has become far easier, which doesn't seem to back up your claim that it is just "tedious" yet also somehow a "roadblock".
And before anyone else says anything... No no Conq or any other progression lvl offers.. Paragon like only... U don't get to choose stuff you can use right away .. U will buy stuff that you will use in the far far away future only!!...
Rofl
Maybe I'll put it in a different way, Act 6 is tedious for me, because I don't want to touch it again. If I started an alt now, I would stop at Cav and then just focus on other modes. Act 6 is a roadblock for emerging players, because they've never been through it before. Which was ok when TB was the pinnacle of the game. Now there is Paragon and maybe in six months or so, we'll have another title (and hopefully 8.3 and 8.4). Act 6 being one of the major gates for roster progress isn't an ideal situation then.
I had skills like dexing etc. well before I did the GM fight. The practice for GM fight was just that, practice for GM fight. Then I moved on and never thought about it again. Hasn't impacted my gameplay anywhere else. Honestly, where I really learnt to fight smartly was AW/AQ, because I realised that I was costing my alliance by not being as good as I can be. I called those fights "niche", because that's what they are. They are interesting, they probably deserve their own showcase, but they shouldn't be gatekeeping player progress on the roster side.
MCOC is a collection game and a resource management game. It doesn't make sense to create a major barrier to champion collection and resource acquisition in the middle of the story content (Act 6 is no longer endgame content).
Yeah it’s cool to have “titles” in the game but there can be other paths to progression in the game that measure skill, like placing in Battle grounds. One can argue getting into the Gladiator Circle is harder than finishing Story Mode.