**WE ARE NO LONGER Temporarily Reverting Tier 1 War Ban System**
After further discussion, the game team has made the decision not make adjustements to the ban system.
The previously proposed fix would have resolved the issue for Summoners who are on the cusp of T1/T2 play, and negatively impacted Alliances more securely in T1. Instead, we recommend that cusp Alliances switch to Manual Placement to your members to place the allotted 5 Ban Champions limit there.
Apologies for the back and forth, and for any confusion.
After further discussion, the game team has made the decision not make adjustements to the ban system.
The previously proposed fix would have resolved the issue for Summoners who are on the cusp of T1/T2 play, and negatively impacted Alliances more securely in T1. Instead, we recommend that cusp Alliances switch to Manual Placement to your members to place the allotted 5 Ban Champions limit there.
Apologies for the back and forth, and for any confusion.
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We're talking hundreds in terms of some Players and thousands upon thousands overall. They have that data, and have had it all along. This isn't just some punishment or diversion to spend. It's a move to keep control over the content they can put out that adequately challenges Players. Many people reference 12.0 whenever they want to elude to a boycott, but not many remember or understand the reasons for those changes. The game wouldn't have continued because the Devs were in a corner with the content they could produce. The old system and the old Champs made it impossible to put anything out those Champs and their percentages couldn't cut through like butter. I'm actually surprised that here we are some years later, and people still can't understand how no Dev wants to lose control of what they can put out.
It was an unreasonable farm. If people saw the numbers, I'm quite sure it would be hard to argue.
But seriously those 4* Labyrinth Carina challenges need to get revisited.
They have the worst reward to effort ratio in the game by a mile.
The rarity restrictions need to get removed (f.e. complete LOL with only SL in your team at any rarity), or at least be upgraded to 5*.
These objectives are a disgrace for the game, and are only damaging the game's image at this point.
I have done all 3* Carina challenges, and most of other ones.
But despite the completionist inside me want to do these 4* Labyrinth challenges too, the logical part of me prevents me of putting my self on such a torture.
And that's coming from someone who explored Variant1 early with 4*s and low ranked 5*s, and had explored Act6 before it's massive nerfs.
These challenges need to change, and similar ones should never come back.
They aren't challenges, they are pure item sinks no matter your skill level 🙂
Units only come into the discussion because some players contend that since you can buy revives with units, the devs must not actually care about revive usage, they only care about money. But that ignores the context of how the game is developed.
Just handing out all the champions would trivialize champion collection so the devs don’t do that. But anyone willing to spend enough money can always have all the champions. So does that mean that they don’t actually care about whether everyone has all the champions or not, they just care about selling them?
No, that’s not what that means. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t be able to buy units with money. In games that are supported by subscriptions and not microtransactions, it would be impossible to buy such currency and yet they still restrict resources just like MCOC does, because the reasons are independent of monetization. But we don’t live in that utopia.
Most players don’t spend. 95%+ of all players who play the game live in a world where there is no unit store, you can’t buy anything with cash, and the only way to use anything in the game to do anything in the game is to earn it in the game. The cash stores literally don’t exist for them, because they don’t spend and will never spend a cent.
The game supports itself on the less than five percent who spend. But the game has to work just as much for the 95% who don’t spend as for the 5% that do.
Outside of cash, the unit economy is very strictly regulated. And the units available are balanced against the opportunities to spend those units. That balance pre-exists the arrival of the Necropolis. Anyone who chooses to spend units on the Necropolis is incurring the opportunity cost of not being able to spend those units on the other opportunities for them. That’s factored into the design of the Necropolis, and the overall revive economy.
The short answer to why the revive farms were nerfed is simple: revives trivialize difficulty and difficult content. This is would be true whether units existed or not, whether cash microtransactions existed or not. That is the fundamental reason for the change, period. The unit economy only enters into the discussion when players ask “but why not this, or that, or the other thing? Why not all these other options I would prefer instead?” Those questions get into the territory of holistic game economy design. To answer those questions, you have to dive into all the parts of the game design those questions touch. But none of that changes the fact that the actual cause of the revive farm nerfs, the actual driving imperative for making the change, is that revive farms trivialize difficult content, period. Without that cause, the devs would not have looked to change anything. The *obvious* change is to get rid of them, because they are obviously problematic. You only need to discuss the unit economy or the issues of monetization and content completion or the revive/energy balance if you decide to not take the obvious avenue to resolve the issue and attempt to do unobvious things, to search for alternatives to the obvious. And when you do, that’s when it takes knowledge of how the rest of the game economy and design works to answer all of the “why not” questions.
It would be impossible to address them all in an announcement addressing the question “why are we doing this?” Because none of those things are the reason.
Those challenges were created at a time when revive farming existed, and players were able to theoretically expend a practically unlimited amount of revives to complete challenge content. To the extent that people say those challenges are just resource sinks, they are half right. They are resource sinks, but that resource sink is necessary to make them challenges at all. It takes a high level of skill to reduce the amount of resources required to a manageable amount. Unfortunately, they can also be completed by any level of skill if someone is willing to dedicate ludicrous levels of resources to complete them, because ludicrous levels of resources is, or at least was, an achievable possibility.
I have zero doubt those challenges were completed by players without spending any cash, and in some cases without spending any units either. Will that still be possible after the revive farm nerfs? I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t bet against it. That’s the whole purpose of challenge content, to be a challenge. A challenge everyone knows they can do is not a challenge.
Let’s address the elephant in the room here. Arena is boring af and takes way too long to get units that way. If we can’t farm revives we are going to buying them. No one in their right mind is going to be farming arena for units to then burn them on revives
We can’t compare the 2 as like for like and Kabam should stop doing that as well.
They removed a very easy way to get revives which no one really knew was out there until the YouTubers showed us due to necropolis.
Now it’s gone and anyone who used it and isn’t willing to spend will likely taper off and stop playing. Kabam won’t care though anyway as those players didn’t spend anyway. They only real losers are the players as the community will shrink and the game will shrink a bit.
If you asked the community (there have been a few threads here and there), the drop rate of Revives appears to a lot lower - I think I've had just 1 or 2 revives in the last three months, since the chests were introduced. And that's with me clearing every level of every Event Quest; exploring 3/4 of them.
Hopefully your team can access hard data - it would be great if you could look at/share any findings.
On the positive side, I should point out that whilst revives have been lacking, the chests have been giving out a lot more Iso-8; and at least a modest number of healing potions.
it’s also not true that people didn’t know about farming until necropolis. they removed farming in acts 1-3 early last year before necropolis was even announced, and when they did that they specifically said they would be monitoring other revive farming spots and removing them when they felt was necessary.
I would suggest a permanent option for buying pot bundles like the one that expired yesterday with the 500 unit price, specially for those whom have only done 1 path in necro for the road to the crypt rewards and are now looking to finish the rest of the paths and lack the resources ( revives and hp pots ) so I think you should consider making that offer a permanent deal which i believe you wouldnt mind since its bought with units, i would love to hear your take on this
The amount of free revives people were able to get was asinine, to say the least.
1) fix apothecary. One L1 revive for L1. One L2 for L2. Two per day total can’t possibly be gamebreaking.
Or 2) bring back that revive package you just offered for 500 units on a permanent basis, with a purchase limit of 1 per week. That basically allows for 3 purchases before stuff would be expiring.
Or 3) make a major adjustment to storage limits. If Kabam is going to A) limit inventory, and b) make overflow expire in two weeks, then designing content that inherently requires more than the storage limits allow is less than just.
All kidding, I agree that there really shouldn’t be a limit, if people want to spend on it, then that should be their choice, but it limits the usage of “free units “ I guess
I'm not going to jump into using units to buy up revives and just keep doing what I did which is to save those units for CM and any big event unit deals. As a result, my account has improved because of this.
When inputs issues are going on, or when trying to get a dragon man to dex for 14 sec while he's powering up to an sp3 and end up getting blasted in necrophisis it's not worth it to spend units on revives in my situation.
If they plan to raise the units to purchase deals on CM, so be it, then I'll just grind the arena for units however disappointing the drop rates are.
I rather have my units than go into a frenzy mode of buying units when comes time for CM.
I want the Valiant title but not at the expense using units.
It's true we have the choice to choose to spend units on revives to advance our account or to spend units elsewhere. I choose to spend units elsewhere on the game.
More props to those who took advantage earlier on in November to farm to get that Valiant title. For me, it isn't important to get that Valiant title. Whether it this week or next year or 5 years later getting a Valiant title for my OWN account isn't important.
Again, I'm content not being Valiant nor in a rush, for the extent of this game, Paragon maybe the highest level that I'll ever attain in this game, which suits me just fine, and I'm fine watching other people's account advance on.
What kind of changes are you proposing, and what players would that positively/negatively impact?
Current State:
People who currently grind Arenas: It may be boring, but some players like spending a few hours grinding for BCs while they watch a movie. Other players find it boring, but are grinding to obtain the featured champion.
People who don't grind Arenas: They may find it to boring to do. They may think that they won't put up enough points to obtain the Featured champion, so there is no point. They may not be needing units since they obtain it elsewhere or buy units.
If Kabam made it less boring, that might entice more players to do arena; but that could negatively impact players who do arena for Champion acquisition.
Since Kabam has made it their official position (whether you disagree with it or not) that they want some level of Unit control in the game, if Kabam made it more rewarding (more battlechips) but as a consequence reduce reward acquisition in other content, then that could negatively impact the above players, as well as the players who don't grind arenas because they used to be able to obtain stuff in other content.
It is the same thing as champions getting buffed. Players are excited by champions becoming better, but then the drawback is that when that buffed champion is a defender, it can be much harder now (look at Red Skull). Unintended or intended consequences of change need to be thought out.
“This has not prevented F2P players from finding great success in the game, and has been the case since the beginning of the game, including most of the game's lifetime that occurred before farming was possible.”
This is just untrue. People revive farmed like crazy before auto-fighting was a thing. They just manually replayed the content instead of auto-fighting it. The majority of F2P players who completed Abyss, for instance, did so through revive farming methods, because it was the most efficient way to spend their in-game time and in-game energy. This also creates another problem for Endgame Content. There is ZERO point to completing Abyss now. The rewards are too outdated. I can get equivalent rewards (arguably better rewards actually), with less/no cost, by 100% TB Monthly EQ. My original plan was to 100% Necropolis and then start on Abyss, spending a small amount of units here and there on it. But there is no point now. At 40 units a piece, and we’ll say 100 revives in Abyss, you’re valuing Abyss run rewards at 4,000 units each. It’s not worth it at all. This is not a criticism of the content. I love the content. I just think the Kabam team’s expectations are unrealistic/unreasonable. A different course of action that would’ve given the same results as your self-described “pre-farming days”, would be to just disable auto-fighting in Act 5 and below. It would require actual input and play by the community, while still giving the ability to physically get the revives. Another solution would be to increase the inventory caps. This would allow people to save up enough revives for Endgame Content runs.
Exactly, I mean thats the best course of action for kabam specially when a content of this size is released, you either encourage people to buy the packages or “farm” with the apoc and solo quests and wait until you have decent amount plus the stash.
They can literally “force” people to spend units on these packages if they want to finish the content early and then people with higher skill wont need to buy the packages and spend units and people with low skill such as myself compensate that lack of skill with units spend.
Not to mention for the story mode and not just special content
Win win for everyone, specially Kabam
Let’s say you just finished a path of necropolis and completely blew your stash. Now you need to rebuild it. Assuming you want to grab about 80 revives worth to brute force with Aegon, and that your stash is completely empty. You now have to spend 34 days of doing the apothecary to get the maximum 34 level 1 revives without any expiring.
For level 2 it’s the same, One daily from the 22h events for 34 days. On average you’d probably get another 3 level twos from the apothecary rng on average in 34 days. That leaves you with 71. If you get the 4th milestone of the 22 events you’d get 25 units x 34 days for 850 units in total to easily cover the last 9 revives needed.
This is a great amount of revives, but it takes a month and some change to get that many. I like the suggestion I’ve seen others make with adding a lvl 2 revive to the hard difficulty and moving the lvl 1 over to easy. I don’t understand why some don’t like this idea and am genuinely curious why. It’s not game breaking, it’s reasonable, it helps out pretty much everyone, what’s the downside?