Potential Delay to v44.1 Launch
We are currently working through some issues that may affect the release window of v44.1. This means that the update may not release on Monday as it usually does. We are working to resolve the issue holding us up as quickly as possible, but will keep you all updated, especially if the delay results in any changes to the content release schedule.
We are currently working through some issues that may affect the release window of v44.1. This means that the update may not release on Monday as it usually does. We are working to resolve the issue holding us up as quickly as possible, but will keep you all updated, especially if the delay results in any changes to the content release schedule.
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We're not being dismissive. What we see all the time in these threads is people claiming there's a gold shortage and their first rebuttal is "Don't tell me to do arena". You've lost the argument right there if you're not willing to accept the fact that if you want more gold, you have to do more for it. People that claim there's a shortage just want Kabam to hand them millions in gold for nothing because they think they should get a champ and be able to take them from Rank 1 to 4 without issues.
I think I can compete with a deck of a few rank 5's and 7*s, plus loaded with rank 4's by just having a few rank 4's and a handful of rank 3's in my deck. Players can absolutely expect to compete, that's why the game bottlenecks T6CC from higher level accounts. They want to allow new players to compete, and they can do that without allowing new players to have everything a 6 year account has.
As I said previously, I don't think players targeting T6CC have any sort of unintentional gold shortage. That includes new accounts that try to rush their way to the second highest rank currently available. I don't think players taking champions to rank 2 in order to address the importance of roster diversity should have the same bottleneck, especially not when it completely shuts down all reasoning to complete content.
But if Kabam makes it easier for a newer accounts to rank up champions so they are competitive with me, what are Kabam going to do for my account so I can be more competitive with with those who have more than I do? I personally don’t expect Kabam to do anything. Realistically if anything I expect the gap to widen come cyber weekend unless I open up my wallet.
The answer to how you catch up with longer established accounts is to play the game more than the accounts you are chasing are currently playing. Or buy deals. If I’m in a race against someone who has a head start and we run at the same pace it’s impossible for me to catch up unless I run faster (play the game more) or get in a car (buy deals). If you think Kabam should help you catch up by providing more gold, what should Kabam do for the person being chased? Why should their account be left stationary and miss out. What’s my incentive to play if every new account can catch up with mine in 6 months? Although with Cyberweekend coming up, they probably can, but then that’s your option if you want it.
I’ll be honest, throughout the thread there’s been a plethora of ways provided in which gold has been shown to be available. I genuinely find it hard to believe that most of these areas are being completed if rank ups are being done in measured way but gold is still an issue. I don’t see how anyone can say they are doing everything in the game to get gold, whilst being realistic with their rank ups and still feel gold is the issue. For me it’s either over ranking up or under playing the game that doesn’t just mean do arena.
And I really hope no one arguing there isn’t enough gold is sitting on any unopened Uncollected gold crystals. There’s about 3m gold for every 100 of them.
You also mentioned buying deals, but I personally believe the Gold bottleneck mostly exists to the extent it does to stop whales with new accounts from being able to compete as quickly as they'd like. We very rarely see Gold available for purchase, I believe that's why. But that's just what a Gold shortage is. You can argue that it might not currently exist, but I'd argue that I'm doing everything I can and still feel gold is an issue.
Do I think that champion acquisition is unbalanced especially for newer players who don't understand the game? Yes. Newer players assume since they're getting all these champs so quickly, they should have the gold or cats to take them up immediately. Resource management isn't taught in this game. it's mostly taught here on the forums. Alliances tend to be echo chambers that allow the mentality of things like gold shortages, T1A shortages, T6CC shortages, etc... to continue to exist.
Again, those of us that say we have no gold issues, have valid points. You dismiss them because they aren't solutions YOU want to hear. You don't want to be told that arena is a solution. You don't want to be told that you'll have to pace your rank-ups. You want to be told what you want to hear. You only want people to come to these threads and be like "year, there's a shortage". You want your echo chamber to play to satisfy your bias. You want them to tell you how bad Kabam is with their economy.
You keep mention wanting to compete, but really competing at it's core comes down to time/money and skill. The more skill you have, the less time or money you would need, but at the end of the day, those willing to put in the most time or the most money win the competition. What would be a fair way for newer accounts to compete against accounts that have already put in the time?
As Hippo already mentioned, Gold crystals should scale with progression. I understand why they might be hesitant, but it's really strange to have those few outliers. Aside from that, putting Gold crystals in the BGs store as the second most overpriced material could help. I think making them overpriced would force players to make real decisions about resource management. I haven't had any real reason to buy anything from the BGs store aside from 5* shards when I'm a little short on ISO at the end of a Level Up event. I would be more than happy to dedicate every single Trophy Token to Gold, as I already do with my Glory
Another source could be more Gold from content. Exploring 8.2 gives enough catalysts to take a champion to rank 4, plus a 3-4 gem, plus 2 T5CC crystals and a fully formed T6CC in the form of selectors. It also gives 3 million gold, which isn't even enough to take one champion from rank 1 to 3. Those rewards are amazing, but the content isn't worth doing without Gold. The same goes for all of EoP. My roster is still growing, I have to dedicate resources to ranking the right champions for content. The investment isn't worth the rewards unless there's enough Gold in them. Finishing EoP wouldn't even let me make use of the resources I currently have available.
For me, what’s being seen as a gold shortage is pretty much a spending problem. This month Kabam has made 4.4m available across 4 weeks of the incursions event, 3.5m from the side quest stores, 225k per day about 6.8m per month as minimum from the daily solo milestones in gold and golden crystals, Thronebreaker difficulty 2.55m, if you buy the first 3 levels of gold from the Glory store another 1.17m That’s 18.4m in gold this month from just these areas. That doesn’t include gold from any other MEQ difficulty, 7 hour solo event, summoner advancement, summoner engagement, AQ, AW, any act content, any Everest content or even Arena.
So either people aren’t completing the content and not actually earning gold or they don’t understand the important resources management part of the game and have a spending issue.
You can keep calling it a spending problem or saying it's all about player expectations, but my engagement has dropped off a lot due to this bottleneck. I have no reason to spend even an hour a day playing this game just waiting for stores and quests to reset in order to participate in the modes I actually enjoy. If you don't see that as a problem, that's fine, there's no point trying to convince you.
Can you at least consider some stuff they told you or accept theres a lot of ways to get gold in the game even if you dont want to do them? Why is this thread still up?
Except they do. A player with millions of gold and no way to use it has the same massive resource imabalance, it is just pointing in the opposite direction. They have tons of gold, but insufficient catalysts to use that gold on. They are suffering from a shortage no different than the players short of gold.
The problem is that players with a lot of gold are seen as "rich" and thus have "first world" problems, while the players with little gold are seen as poor and thus have the "real" problems. But really, its just that the game expects you to spend ISO, cats, and gold to rank up champions, and no one lands on the perfect mix of activities where they all perfectly cancel out. Everyone spends all of those things until one of them runs out (or they have some other active resource management strategy where one of them becomes the limiting factor first).
The devs don't "intentionally" point to specific players and dictate that they will be short gold or cats or whatever. They don't play god on individuals. They design the overall economy, spread the resources out across all the game activities to incentivize engagement with the game, and leave it up to the players to decide which resources to target and how. The fact that there are low activity players and high activity players that are capable of at least roughly balancing those resources out says that there is enough of everything in enough places that it is *possible* for a player to "shop around" as it were and get what they need to keep things in rough balance by adjusting their resource management and game play. If you don't do that actively, then your resources will balance out by chance: sometimes closely, and at other times wildly incongruently.
This *is* deliberate, because this is the foundation of player agency. If players could play however they wanted and still get more or less what they wanted in the ratios they wanted, that would mean gameplay decisions would have no real effect (except possibly to get more of everything). Instead, the game rewards active resource management. But there's a price. The only way to reward players who fight well is to have a death penalty. If you don't fight well, you die. Not dying is the reward for good play. Resource imbalance is the penalty for not managing resources well.
To put it another way, it isn't shortages that are deliberate. It is the fact that player resource balance is a function of the player's decisions that is deliberate. The chips then fall where they fall.
You could argue that the gold only exists behind paywalls, but that's also provably false in several ways. First of all, while I do spend I don't tend to spend on the things that would generate a lot of gold, and I've had a lot of gold for almost my entire playing time in MCOC. I haven't always spent. More importantly, the vast majority of MCOC players don't spend cash. Therefore, if gold was globally short in the non-spending game economy, the vast majority of players who do not spend cash would then be subject to that economic limitation and thus the vast majority would have a gold problem. But that's certainly not the case.
I keep posting gold numbers, but the attitude seems to be the numbers don't matter because the problem exists, so it must exist regardless of the numbers. The numbers say the gold is there in the economy to be gotten. The problem therefore lies either with how the players interact with those rewards, or their expectations for how much gold they actually expect to have. Just because two players claim to have a gold problem, doesn't mean it is the same problem. I've seen people complain that because they "need" to rank up lots of champs for Battlegrounds to be competitive, they "need" enough gold to do that, and anything else is a problem.
That's not a game economy problem.