Why do Kabam not update the "antiquated crystals"
Grinchhh
Member Posts: 73 ★
As the title says I am sort of confused, kabam has been wanting people to get rid of older crystals for a while to clean up their database, when they aren't doing themselves any favours by keeping the outdated crystals still grabbable. it almost feels a bit hypocritical, that they are keeping the outdated, nonbuffed versions of the crystals so people get those instead of the buffed ones, because aren't they just bloating the database as well? but since it is beneficial for them, they are just keeping it there. some of the examples being, paragon crystals from legends celebrations, paragon crystals from shooting stars quest and etc
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And if they updated crystals, players would never open another crystals again out of fear of missing out on the crystal being updated.
Kabam didn't have to offer updated crystals at all. They could have just offered *different* crystals (which actually they are), or they could have done nothing. They chose to improve the reward value in some places and not other places, because every time they change rewards anywhere, they have to analyze whether that will have the desired impact on the economy as a whole.
To put it another way, the antiquated crystals allow Kabam to offer incremental benefits in some places without having to perform impact studies on the game economy everywhere those crystals were appearing. The alternative is not that the players would get the better rates everywhere, the alternative is that players would get the better rates *nowhere* until they had the time to fully analyze the impact everywhere and adjusted the new drop rates accordingly.
It benefits *the players* when the devs can make incremental improvements in rewards that have less impact on the game economy and thus take less work to implement. Because the alternative is not that the players get more benefit everywhere, it is that they get less benefit less frequently.
The most recent example of this type of economy design constraint leaking out to the players was the Super Daily Event. The devs wanted to take a lot of different small reward sources and combine them into one single event that they could then reduce the amount of work involved in analyzing and updating. The Daily Super Event was almost universally liked by the player base, and the *reason* why it took so long for us to get those benefits was because those rewards were scattered into a ton of little places each of which were not worth the time it would take to analyze and update. Kabam explicitly stated that one of the long term benefits of the Super Daily Event was that it was more likely to be updated more frequently and become more progression relevant as a result.
One more thing. Kabam doesn't benefit by offering less stuff. That's a naive view of game design. It is not like they are trying to offer as little stuff as possible to force players to spend as much as possible. That's literally impossible to do for any length of time in a microtransaction supported free to play game like MCOC, because most players don't spend money. If you design your game like that, you will not have players for very long. As Kabam Crashed said recently in a live stream, his goal (when designing the monetization of the game) is to sell as little as possible while still making his revenue targets. This is so that as much of the game economy budget can be earned in the game through game play. They would *prefer* if players earned things in the game more than they bought them. Selling is just the necessary evil the game must do to survive.
Better rewards = more incentive to play = more fun overall = more spending = happy devs = better game
Right now the juice is barely worth the squeeze. If the AI issues are a major problem to fix (as evident by the countless reply posts saying so) then the game's economy has officially broken since the AI difficulty has increased without the benefit of increased rewards.
Make it right by either (a) reverting the AI back to what it used to be, you know, when these rewards actually felt rewarding, or (b) beef up the rewards across the board to reflect the beefier AI that's dominant across the board.
Game economy and AI difficulty are two sides of the same coin...