I went from playing only this game 24/7 to play like 5hs a week, there is nothing to do in game and grinding arena or incursions it's pointless based on the rewards
notice how you always hear about outcome inequality but you never hear about effort inequality..hmm.
maybe the complainers should try spending $50k a year on the game and see what it's like..
Good luck getting anybody to feel bad for someone who KNOWINGLY and WILLINGLY chooses to spend $50k a year on one of the single worse depreciating assets this side of a scratch-off lottery ticket...
Not gonna happen...
Also, to your point, spending $50k a year on a game takes as much effort as spending $1...
It's literally a tap of a button...
nice. you admitted that the newest resources suffer from massive deprecation.
next you might retract your earlier statement that it's unjust that whales are light years ahead.
wouldn't it be nice if everyone spent so that kabam wouldn't monetize the way they do and everybody could "get to mars"?
The problem is having to face an AI that's rapidly increasing in difficulty, while fighting champs who are rapidly increasing in difficulty, and earning relatively the same stagnant rewards that we've been getting for years now; The overall difficulty has rapidly and substantially increased across all game modes, yet the rewards have largely remained the same...
AI difficulty - AI hasn't affected me personally, but yes they don't use specials and wait out power stings, etc. but it's something we all have to deal with.
difficult defenders - yes....bullseye, serpent, and enchantress. and onslaught, photon, and maestro before it but the latter 3 aren't broken anymore and the former 3 will have the same fate. community overcomes.
"same stagnant rewards for year" = not true. noticeable buff to glory when it happened, solid buff to BGs, big buff to AW.
"increase difficulty, rewards have largely remained the same" = incorrect, see above. but also rewards will probably get buffed soonish after cyber monday and gifting. also asking for better stuff will needlessly accelerate the game. why do we want 8*s faster?
we complain no matter what. if they slow down on rewards we complain and if they speed up we will eventually cry about 8 stars.
i'm not shilling for them but let's let kabam handle it. they've been responsible with the economy, nothing too out there so far although personally i wish they'd go slower because at this rate we're getting the next rarity faster than last time...
Can you tell me what buff to glory you're mentioning? Nothing changed in AQ except raids in more than a year, last bg update was more than 6 months ago and they have other parts of the game requiring more attention, but there are still some aspects not perfect there, like the circuit rewards honestly have so much useless relic stuff that should be updated, relics are dead but at least giving some materials to r3 the 6 star relics can still excite some players. War has good rewards only for plat 1+ alliances. Then I have no idea why u keep mentioning 8 stars, there are still 3 ranks for 7 stars before they're maxed out and we still have a long way ahead before we can even think about those, and buffing some outdated game modes means nothing on 8 stars but yeah thet can't change too much but still ignoring some stuff for so long eventually makes something die. You're definitely trying to defend kabam but you know they're not perfect like you think they are, and made many mistakes over the years, like last year banquet event. Like the current state of the monthly events is really sad, we all used to be excited to play the new monthly content while right now is just not fun and not rewarding and many stopped playing it and I hope they don't let it die like it looks like they're doing. I know crashed said they're working on an update but in this game it means little to nothing until we see something.
the stores:
-the last buff to the glory store was in january, so it's a little stale but what players conveniently keep forgetting is that in november they buffed the heck out of the daily crystal which gives a ton a good stuff and players used to get two of them a day! why do players pretend this never happened?
-battlegrounds store got updated in late feb/early march. let's think of an update plan...they're definitely weren't going to update it before july 4 because that would be too soon and they won't update it before cyber monday either because that would only devalue their offers. so why is everyone shocked and outraged? why would kabam devalue one of the biggest sale days of the year for no reason? a buff will happen just not now.
-war got buffed in december and another big boost just recently.
-they also introduced the trader's outpost.
i keep mentioning 8 stars because players keep asking for higher quantities of stuff and that only means devaluation and when you get devaluation they're forced to bring out the next rank faster which speeds along the entire rarity. give us more means inching towards 8s even faster and guess what, players will cry and moan about that too.
kabam isn't perfect but they clearly know how to run the game cause we're all still here, but these posts are just the same old general stuff we've been hearing for a decade.
"i'm tired of _____" "the state of the game" "i feel this and that"
all of this will be FORGOTTEN in a few months. they'll have cyber monday, gifting, and i'm guessing a giant 10 year anniversary event where everyone gets high on crystals and free goodies and appreciation posts will be all over the forum, they'll buff a store or two, and then a certain period later we'll return back to our semi-annual "State of The Game" programming. it's so boring.
Not gonna comment on these, but EQ needs a difficulty and rewards buff.
As an end game player I do see value in both opinions however ultimately I see much more of Emilia's points favourable. I believe the traction this post has gained warrants his opinion and the amount of agreement in his favour apposed to the dislikes in opinion for krashed’ opinion just goes to show that sometimes the players are bringing up points that need to be discussed because there is truth to the topic.
While I fear like usual most of anything said here will fall on complete deaf ears because let’s face it, kabam will always know best, I have noticed a lot of higher end players falling out of love with the game and certain modes because of the repetitive, non rewarding, tedious nodes and game modes and certainly somewhat feel the same way. It speaks volumes that a huge chunk of the player base aswell as 90% of the content creators for the game are all backing the same opinions of wanting to see changes to a lot of rewards all over the game and make things just less of such a stagnant tedious grind, I fear although we will never see the day, there needs to come a point where kabam acknowledges that okay maybe not everything the community says is always going to be correct but if majority are telling us change needs to happen, maybe we do need to change certain things.
Arena - I think scaring your community and player base into not wanting to see change to certain game modes is incredibly unhealthy, stating if change was to happen it wouldn’t be for the benefit of players and taking away a F2P element from the game or making it harder for those players. Do I think the rewards in arena need a buff… no not necessary, do i believe the process could be made more engaging, fun, less time consuming… absolutely. I also feel kabam are playing with a very sharp double edged blade when it comes to this because they do not realise if they was to diminish this aspect of the game the amount of players that would just leave, lose interest and feel betrayed would ultimately cost them a lot more money and players than they care to admit which is why this change hasn’t already happened.
Summoners sigil - I really don’t understand why this hasn’t already had a change for the better, it’s way long overdue and you want peoples hard earned money for next to nothing in return, there’s no benefit to this store, like… at all. Kabam like to often point out that your time is not a currency or valuable to them, yet expect us to essentially invest our money in their game but let’s face it… without us there is no them, without us, there is no profit.
EQ - I’m not even going to get started on the complete repetitive, boring lack lustre of what this game mode is, let’s all hope and pray the changes coming are for the better.
I could cover other topics but I feel a lot of what has already been said sums those up well in regards to war especially the store… I’d like to see more accessibility to health potions, boosts etc without having to use up my entire loyalty stash every war.
Let’s hope this glory store change comes in sooner rather than later and it’s actually somewhat decent I guess.
Well, when Kabam upgraded the Loyalty store in it s current state last time, they assured us that in due time, it will contain 7* sig stones. And now they look to make players completely lose their interest in War. Nice meta.
If these store updates affect game economy and 7* lifecycle atleast buff sigil benefits and arenas.
Reason being there are only two things that keep a game successful.
Purchases and time spent
Buffing sigil benefits makes spenders to stick and tempt non spenders to spend.
Buffing arenas makes f2p spend more time in game and they will have enough units to reinforce roster and stay meta competitors for spenders in modes such battlegrounds.
If these store updates affect game economy and 7* lifecycle atleast buff sigil benefits and arenas.
Reason being there are only two things that keep a game successful.
Purchases and time spent
Buffing sigil benefits makes spenders to stick and tempt non spenders to spend.
Buffing arenas makes f2p spend more time in game and they will have enough units to reinforce roster and stay meta competitors for spenders in modes such battlegrounds.
Personally, I do want less milestones for the same units in summoner trials (4* arenas)
I’m really not sure why it takes them so long to update certain rewards. Store updates should just happen regularly every 6-8 months. Currently they update stores like once every 2 years, and for the first 3-4 months the stores feel valuable, but then it gets outdated so quickly that I can stop caring about the store after those first few months.
Gc placement also rewards should’ve been buffed 6 months ago, there’s no point in grinding past uru 3 from a time/rewards perspective. Considering bgs is mcoc’s biggest gamemode you’d think they’d want to encourage participation and competition as much as possible, and yet the rewards directly behind the competitive aspect of the gamemode are the most outdated in the entire gamemode. It’s such an easy, highly beneficial fix that I don’t get why they’re not on top of keeping these rewards relevant.
Sq I don’t mind. I appreciate that it’s simple and not too grindy, and the rewards match the effort level. My only complaint has been them adding niche nodes like do you bleed and thunderstruck in a game mode they know a lot of people will want to just cruise through with their random team. I don’t want to plan ahead for an sq path when I already have to do that in other areas of the game. EQ I personally enjoy but still having to 100% tb eq for the gauntlet feels excessive at this point in time. I think they should reduce the requirement to just completion, at least for valiants maybe.
If the explanation for mediocre champ releases is that they’re trying to reverse or slow down power creep, then why the hell did they make someone like juggs a 7* lol. They also haven’t shyed away from making powerful defenders that egregiously power creep the old defenders, so I don’t think they’re doing this sheerly for the sake of managing power creep. My best guess is they want to alter the balance of offense to defense by making defense more powerful and more impactful from a meta defining perspective. (which I disagree with fundamentally but that’s a separate topic) There have been a few good offensive standouts in the 2024 release pool and it’s getting better with count and Shathra, but meta relevant attackers used to be the rule instead of the exception.
I share your frustrations with certain areas of the game and even though I do enjoy the game as a whole, I still feel it could be much better.
I’ve seen the devs talk about how much they regret releasing champs like Juggs as 7* in the discord. I think they messed up and my theory was that they were trying to backtrack (and we also get a lot of anti-Juggs metas probably for that reason). But yeah, 100%.
I want to like the game more so bad, but they fumble the easiest things. I was even willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when it came to the AI but it’s been like 3 years now. They haven’t fixed a single thing, just promises that never come to fruition or outright denial of the issues. I spent 3 minutes per SoS fight baiting specials like cmon. It’s so absurd that’s even the good content like that is ruined by the AI
I mean 10 years on, we still get random disconnects in fights (quest and AW in particular)
Leaving BGs disconnect alone since that's another whole can of worms.
It's unbelievable that they are saying that because of BG store got updated that means BG GC rewards also got updated and it's fair to get T2 Alloy as a C1 rewards. Not sure why they are trying to kill game mode with their stinginess. If we compare C1 rewards to daily/weekly/monthly deals and convert it in monetary value max it's value would be 60$. So nobody cares about the rewards at the top, people only play because of competition. It's sad to see a company being this much tone-deaf really.
It's unbelievable that they are saying that because of BG store got updated that means BG GC rewards also got updated and it's fair to get T2 Alloy as a C1 rewards. Not sure why they are trying to kill game mode with their stinginess. If we compare C1 rewards to daily/weekly/monthly deals and convert it in monetary value max it's value would be 60$. So nobody cares about the rewards at the top, people only play because of competition. It's sad to see a company being this much tone-deaf really.
I understand you like the game mode very much it definitely need something. I. Not sure it aloy it need. Considering there ain’t given new relics for over year
Before I provide an update, I just want to say that players tend to look at the game economy different than we do. We look at it holistically - are players who are engaged in the game progressing? The answer right now is definitely yes. Think about your own accounts compared to a year ago. If you play the game regularly I guaranteed you have made substantial progress, regardless of how much you are spending.
A larger portion of rewards have been focused on events this year. We do this because we see a clear signal that it drives more player engagement than focusing those rewards into our regular modes. That doesn't mean they will never be updated, but it does mean more of the baseline reward budget is going to come from special events and things like the Daily Super Event.
With that said, here are some specific updates:
Loyalty Store - I have said elsewhere that it will not be updated. Introduction materials into the Loyalty store did not increase engagement in AW. The purpose of Loyalty moving forward will be to purchase AW consumables and maybe access the Loyalty 7-Star crystal (I say maybe because right now I am thinking about AW rewards structure changes and I think we might deprecate that system as well). Eventually we will probably remove the rank up materials etc. in the store.
Glory Store - This is the next store up for an update, should not be too long.
Battlegrounds - Battlegrounds as a whole remains one of the most rewarding modes in the game. We will continue to stagger reward updates to the different channels. I will say that a good portion of the GC rewards budget is in Trophy Tokens, so I don't agree with this take that it's been a year since GC rewards were updated. Updates to the BG store are also updates to GC rewards.
EQ and SQ - Rewards are fine for the level difficulty. We have some large changes planned for these modes we are working on that will help us scale both difficulty and rewards in the future.
Arenas - I said in a different thread, you don't want us to update Arenas. It would almost certainly result in lower Unit yields per time spent than the current tuning.
Solo Shards - I see this one a lot, solo shards are a deprecated currency for end game players. The crystals will not be updated. Why are there solo shards in the Daily Super Event then? Because when we took them out the CCP asked us to put them back in. But I'll just state it plainly, they are not an end-game currency and never will be.
I think that's what I can provide updates on right now, but for those calling for dramatic updates across the game, ask yourselves: do you really want the game's economy to be moving faster than it currently is? Do you want the 7-star lifecycle to be cut shorter, for us to introduce new ranks sooner? Because that would be the result of us updating every mode in the game to include end game rewards.
Thanks for the info. Any chance of update on the Black ISO market?
Before I provide an update, I just want to say that players tend to look at the game economy different than we do. We look at it holistically - are players who are engaged in the game progressing? The answer right now is definitely yes. Think about your own accounts compared to a year ago. If you play the game regularly I guaranteed you have made substantial progress, regardless of how much you are spending.
A larger portion of rewards have been focused on events this year. We do this because we see a clear signal that it drives more player engagement than focusing those rewards into our regular modes. That doesn't mean they will never be updated, but it does mean more of the baseline reward budget is going to come from special events and things like the Daily Super Event.
With that said, here are some specific updates:
Loyalty Store - I have said elsewhere that it will not be updated. Introduction materials into the Loyalty store did not increase engagement in AW. The purpose of Loyalty moving forward will be to purchase AW consumables and maybe access the Loyalty 7-Star crystal (I say maybe because right now I am thinking about AW rewards structure changes and I think we might deprecate that system as well). Eventually we will probably remove the rank up materials etc. in the store.
Glory Store - This is the next store up for an update, should not be too long.
Battlegrounds - Battlegrounds as a whole remains one of the most rewarding modes in the game. We will continue to stagger reward updates to the different channels. I will say that a good portion of the GC rewards budget is in Trophy Tokens, so I don't agree with this take that it's been a year since GC rewards were updated. Updates to the BG store are also updates to GC rewards.
EQ and SQ - Rewards are fine for the level difficulty. We have some large changes planned for these modes we are working on that will help us scale both difficulty and rewards in the future.
Arenas - I said in a different thread, you don't want us to update Arenas. It would almost certainly result in lower Unit yields per time spent than the current tuning.
Solo Shards - I see this one a lot, solo shards are a deprecated currency for end game players. The crystals will not be updated. Why are there solo shards in the Daily Super Event then? Because when we took them out the CCP asked us to put them back in. But I'll just state it plainly, they are not an end-game currency and never will be.
I think that's what I can provide updates on right now, but for those calling for dramatic updates across the game, ask yourselves: do you really want the game's economy to be moving faster than it currently is? Do you want the 7-star lifecycle to be cut shorter, for us to introduce new ranks sooner? Because that would be the result of us updating every mode in the game to include end game rewards.
I think this answer you gave is assinine and also you found lots of ways to avoid the main topic. 1st let's be clear that just because you say something doesn't mean it's ok or right. Just because you said the loyalty store will not be updated doesn't mean that it shouldn't be. There's a 6 star for sale for 1.6 mil and the 7 star costs 1.5. And if you looked at it holistically then you should realize that you could just up the star lvl on the Unstoppable Colossus by 1 so that the 7 star is 1.6 mil and alot of people would be happy. That is probably all that store needs! But saying that because it didn't improve the amount of people playing war basically just forget it, well ...that is a real crappy way to look at it! What about the people that do actually like war? Is it just about the numbers? Yeah glory store needs an update and it shouldn't be to long LMAO it's been forever already and we've all heard that BS b4. Eq and SQ are fine for the lvl of difficulty??? What does that mean ? That the rewards are bad because you make it to easy? Well make it harder! Why does a valiant have to put up with there only being a paragon lvl and paragon rewards. This has been the same argument when there wasn't valiant and there wasn't a paragon difficulty. Then u finally introduced something a little spicier then messed it all up with higher more powerful champs. Is it really that hard for you game team people to make the content and rewards relevant to every player? I don't make video games but its almost as if everyone that works at kabam only works there part time. Is that true? Do they not hire full time employees? I'm going to skip to solo shards and your response cause they are a way to get boosts and stuff and I just don't understand your take. I do understand that they aren't really a currency but still they could add a higher lvl crystal and I know that there was that BS crystal with ISO in it but that crystal is garbage. Why not make it so that there's a valiant crystal with 7 star boosts and no xp boosts? Would that be that difficult ? Is there some kind of reason you can't introduce 7 star arena boosts? Or a reason why there has to be valiants opening a crystal and getting an XP boost? Arenas you said some BS about nerfing the unit gain but Sunday arenas don't have units . Is there some kinda reason that you couldn't update sunday's only? How about the catalyst one? Instead of t1 alpha arena how about making it a way to get t4 alpha or base the rewards on progression title so that valiants can do cat arenas for t4a and uncollected gets t2a. They are outdated! I'd rather you update them and nerf the unit rewards then leave them as is, if that's what you have to do.
And I'd like to see what happens if the game economy moves a little faster because you update the rewards a little. I don't think it will change much except that the people at lower lvls might feel better about doing stuff that they otherwise wouldn't do. I don't think spending money should be the only way to get t4a normally or 7 star sigs. I would like to awaken my maestro! Also you tested that super daily event to see how the players liked it and all that so what's taking so long to make it permanent? It's not rocket science, it's better...hit the button! Or is that like the glory store update? Also RELICS??? What's up with relics? Kabam said it was going to be awhile B4 another 1 came out but that was awhile ago and nothing... It was never implied that they would just be ended and if that was the case I'm sure alot of players that have all the relics are sitting on tons of relic crystals. Personally I still have about 25 5 star nexus relics that I bought . I will be very upset with kabam if they don't make new ones soon.
You are part of the reason Kabam doesn't look at our feedback as much as they should.
Your feedback to this date has been that only the players are to blame for all the game bugs, economy issues and anything else that is wrong with the game/world. They should never raise complaints, express frustration or be in anyway critical of any part of the corporate/team that is responsible for maintaining and developing the game. Only the player base is fair game for trolling, misdirections and random pontifications, in which you also see yourself as a victim.
Thank god they don't listen to your feedback anymore than they already do.
Not sure why they are trying to kill game mode with their stinginess.
Historically speaking, Kabam seems extraordinarily bad at killing any part of the game, including Battlegrounds. The current rewards seem to be incentivizing an awful lot of Battlegrounds play.
Now, you might be thinking that you aren’t playing because of the rewards, you’re playing in spite of them. But that doesn’t prove the rewards should be higher, it just proves you don’t need incentivizing at all, and the game designers can spend those valuable rewards elsewhere.
Crashed alludes to the fact that economy designers think about rewards differently than players. I think the biggest single difference is players think of rewards as being rewards *for* doing content, while designers think of rewards as incentives *to do* content. Players think the more effort they put in the more rewards they should get while economy designers think the less effort players collectively put in the more incentives that might require.
This is of course a pretty big simplification, but this is not just how every economy designer thinks about rewards (in a game like this). It is how they *must* think about rewards if they expect to have a job next year. Simply pouring rewards into things players are already doing is a positive feedback loop. Nothing survives positive feedback loops for long.
Not sure why they are trying to kill game mode with their stinginess.
Historically speaking, Kabam seems extraordinarily bad at killing any part of the game, including Battlegrounds. The current rewards seem to be incentivizing an awful lot of Battlegrounds play.
Now, you might be thinking that you aren’t playing because of the rewards, you’re playing in spite of them. But that doesn’t prove the rewards should be higher, it just proves you don’t need incentivizing at all, and the game designers can spend those valuable rewards elsewhere.
Crashed alludes to the fact that economy designers think about rewards differently than players. I think the biggest single difference is players think of rewards as being rewards *for* doing content, while designers think of rewards as incentives *to do* content. Players think the more effort they put in the more rewards they should get while economy designers think the less effort players collectively put in the more incentives that might require.
This is of course a pretty big simplification, but this is not just how every economy designer thinks about rewards (in a game like this). It is how they *must* think about rewards if they expect to have a job next year. Simply pouring rewards into things players are already doing is a positive feedback loop. Nothing survives positive feedback loops for long.
What you are saying is that OP is right and they do want us to play less. Or at least that in this context, we are all playing too much to justify a rewards increase? If we wanted better rewards, we should play less?
The game has become too much about new defenders and nodes and very specific counters for those defenders and nodes. The champs released for that month are specifically to counter the new node or be the defenders on the new nodes, along with a limited handful of older far less desirable champs. The older champs suddenly get a 20% saga boost and become the champs of the hour until the saga ends and then they again become meh champs 20% weaker than they were the day before the saga ended. Items used up on them and we stop using them and talking about them. Everybody? Anybody? Still using nightcrawler these days?
There have probably been more posts and comments about the game economy in the last six months than there have been posts / comments about all of the 2024 champs combined if you remove Serpent. We can debate what’s wrong with the individual champs, but when you have months and months of newly released champs that aren’t inspiring, the game has a major problem.
Before I provide an update, I just want to say that players tend to look at the game economy different than we do. We look at it holistically - are players who are engaged in the game progressing? The answer right now is definitely yes. Think about your own accounts compared to a year ago. If you play the game regularly I guaranteed you have made substantial progress, regardless of how much you are spending.
A larger portion of rewards have been focused on events this year. We do this because we see a clear signal that it drives more player engagement than focusing those rewards into our regular modes. That doesn't mean they will never be updated, but it does mean more of the baseline reward budget is going to come from special events and things like the Daily Super Event.
With that said, here are some specific updates:
Loyalty Store - I have said elsewhere that it will not be updated. Introduction materials into the Loyalty store did not increase engagement in AW. The purpose of Loyalty moving forward will be to purchase AW consumables and maybe access the Loyalty 7-Star crystal (I say maybe because right now I am thinking about AW rewards structure changes and I think we might deprecate that system as well). Eventually we will probably remove the rank up materials etc. in the store.
Glory Store - This is the next store up for an update, should not be too long.
Battlegrounds - Battlegrounds as a whole remains one of the most rewarding modes in the game. We will continue to stagger reward updates to the different channels. I will say that a good portion of the GC rewards budget is in Trophy Tokens, so I don't agree with this take that it's been a year since GC rewards were updated. Updates to the BG store are also updates to GC rewards.
EQ and SQ - Rewards are fine for the level difficulty. We have some large changes planned for these modes we are working on that will help us scale both difficulty and rewards in the future.
Arenas - I said in a different thread, you don't want us to update Arenas. It would almost certainly result in lower Unit yields per time spent than the current tuning.
Solo Shards - I see this one a lot, solo shards are a deprecated currency for end game players. The crystals will not be updated. Why are there solo shards in the Daily Super Event then? Because when we took them out the CCP asked us to put them back in. But I'll just state it plainly, they are not an end-game currency and never will be.
I think that's what I can provide updates on right now, but for those calling for dramatic updates across the game, ask yourselves: do you really want the game's economy to be moving faster than it currently is? Do you want the 7-star lifecycle to be cut shorter, for us to introduce new ranks sooner? Because that would be the result of us updating every mode in the game to include end game rewards.
As someone who plays at a high level in both bgs and aw, I feel like it would be good to give feedback from my perspective on all these areas:
Loyalty Store - ok with that, loyalty being used to buy consumables to then get the aw rewards is fine, it’s obviously not intended as a store you directly buy rewards from
Glory store - stated a rewards buff is coming, so I’m willing to let it slide. But most of the commenters are correct, glory store is not good value for valiant players even when it was updated really, and especially now around 6 months onwards
Battlegrounds - ok this is where opinions differ wildly. The argument of Gc rewards having trophy tokens as a large part of the budget is problematic for 2 reasons:
1. The bgs store is outdated for the people who push high in GC. For example I currently have 13 r3s, with only 1 being “bought” (aka 12 f2p). Bgs store gives you access to a r2 champion approximately every 3-4 weeks (unless you get insanely lucky with the t6cc crystals), which realistically is not cutting it. Adding some amount of t4a into the store would at least give those Gc trophy tokens some value, as you can slowly convert them to t4a (or just blast through some like usual). However in conjunction with this it may be good to increase the cap on tokens as a c4+ player needs to blast through some tokens even if they don’t want to just so they don’t overflow from VT next season.
2. Bgs rewards still incentivise playing more over skill HEAVILY. Let’s look at the current solo and alliance rewards for example. The person who gets 1st in solo event gets arguably better rewards than the person who gets 1st in GC. The Titan shards, 7 star shards are the exact same, and the solo event also gets some 7 star sigs, a very desirable resource atm. GC winner does get trophy tokens, but as already said the value of these have gone down significantly. In addition, the alliance event currently offers 1.5 t4a to the alliance that PLAYS the most, in theory not even the ally that wins the most. Yes the ally that comes first is likely to be the ally that won the most matches, but it is theoretically possible for an ally to come 1st overall without winning a single game. And then get better rewards than the number 1 most skilled player that season???
So as a player who pushes myself, what I take away from this is that my skill in bgs is not valued, it’s how much I spend on marks to get those number 1 scores in solo/ally events. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the solo/ally events, the problem is with the GC rewards that desperately need a buff to incentivise skilled gameplay. If you are not in a bgs pushing alliance but put up a 100% win rate c1 season, you will get less rewards than if you got your friend to start and account, pour money into marks and just sit there while the matches are played. And far far less rewards too. That is terrible economy design, plain and simple.
EQ and SQ - Again stated that something is coming to revamp it, which is good. Just one thing to state though, EQ has always had ok rewards for the difficulty, as it has never been difficult for a high tier player. The problem is the time investment.
Even if I say use cgr and mega blast every single path, it would still take me a few hours to get through all of it (and approx 20 refills if I did it all in one go but obviously I’d stagger it). And the rewards for a valiant player that are useful? 100 dust (which is depreciating fast but still useful atm), and some little bits of 7 star shards and t6cc. It is not a good time investment to do this content for most players.
Coincidentally, all the rewards I stated as useful all are in the paragon gauntlet, which obviously requires 100% thronebreaker eq. So for a valiant player, thronebreaker eq itself has 0 value (you could argue gold and iso, but 99% don’t struggle with this). It is solely to unlock the paragon gauntlet. Which is kinda stupid if you think about it. It would be like if we still had to do road to the labyrinth to unlock labyrinth of legends, even though both sets of rewards are outdated? But that’s the situation we are in. Hopefully the revamp is good long term and not just decent rewards for a month or two.
Arenas - I’m a pretty decent arena grinder myself, heavily f2p so they are a good source of units for me. There’s just one counter point I’d like to say about the whole “you don’t want us to update arenas” topic.
I’ll be honest, it sounds like a threat to players, which is an odd thing for a company to do, threaten players with worsening the rewards. And I’m not the only person who feels this way, discussions with my alliance mates and other people on line/discord shows consensus is pretty much the same. Funnily enough though we have had this kind of threat before! Anyone who is able to remember back to the nerfing of 3.2.6 and the whole revive situation will remember pretty similar wording about “diluting rewards from content.” It is interesting to me that Kabam goes down this line of response, not even as a one off, but on multiple issues in multiple areas of the game. I’d be intrigued on a response to that in particular, unsure if I’ll get one though.
The reason I find the “nerfing” of arena rewards a concerning line of reasoning is due to how the game has evolved. There’s more to do in the game than ever nowadays, and while Kabam has said in the past that we are not meant/forced to do everything and that time is not a valued resource/commodity from players, there is evidence that conflicts this. The saga chase tickets/crystals are usually strewn across many game modes for example, suggesting they want players to play many modes. Extra login calendars and side quest being locked weekly suggests that they do value your time on a daily level, otherwise these incentives wouldn’t exist. The other reason I think a nerf would be bad is due to how offers have changed. I’ll start this by saying I know Kabam want you to spend units on revives, and that unit offers are put out to generate revenue from people buying units on the spot. However the number of unit offers has increased exponentially over the years, the easiest example being cyber and J4 increasing from 18/21k units max to now being 36k units minimum (I say minimum as 1. Cyber last year had approx 45-50k worth of stuff and 2. The extra solo event with a champion is at around 36k). This doubling of units needed has not been met with a doubling of units available ingame, so f2p or minimal spenders have to grind harder nowadays going above and beyond if they want to keep up with others. Nerfing time for unit acquisition would only make this problem worse, and take the game more towards heavy spender advantage like back in 2023 July 4th.
Just keep it as it is, but do look into champion acquisition from arena, as it has dramatically changed over the last few years. To me it feels like a 7 star arena should be very very close, feels about that point in the game cycle.
Solo shards - no issue, useful for boosts but I agree not an endgame currency
Any feedback on these points is welcome, obviously perspectives may differ from say a player who pushes just war or just bgs or some other mixture of modes, and I’m interested to see other perspectives.
Not sure why they are trying to kill game mode with their stinginess.
Historically speaking, Kabam seems extraordinarily bad at killing any part of the game, including Battlegrounds. The current rewards seem to be incentivizing an awful lot of Battlegrounds play.
Now, you might be thinking that you aren’t playing because of the rewards, you’re playing in spite of them. But that doesn’t prove the rewards should be higher, it just proves you don’t need incentivizing at all, and the game designers can spend those valuable rewards elsewhere.
Crashed alludes to the fact that economy designers think about rewards differently than players. I think the biggest single difference is players think of rewards as being rewards *for* doing content, while designers think of rewards as incentives *to do* content. Players think the more effort they put in the more rewards they should get while economy designers think the less effort players collectively put in the more incentives that might require.
This is of course a pretty big simplification, but this is not just how every economy designer thinks about rewards (in a game like this). It is how they *must* think about rewards if they expect to have a job next year. Simply pouring rewards into things players are already doing is a positive feedback loop. Nothing survives positive feedback loops for long.
the problem with players still playing despite the state of the rewards and the store is more of a show of how competitive the mode is over rewards first and then how much enjoyment it provides.
I don't have the concept of having a pooled reward to share out in different game modes and stores but the problem is that has never really worked and the 'pooled reward' we are still getting is from at least last year with how little rewards have generally been updated. on the flip side having events/ story progression with massive milestone is a boosts to players that isnt locked behind the sweatiest alliance war, bgs and prestige for aq (if that's still a thing).
Looking at how kabam has historically distributed rewards and buffs to rewards/store, it's always been rotating across gamemodes, up untill this year with a focus on splitting where to get them has failed horribly with it's positive feedback loop we've been using since the game first started. it's lasted 10 years probably it's time to change it or watch it burn.
In summary the economy we see in the game is a disappointing in the value, balance of the stores and currencies,
Not sure why they are trying to kill game mode with their stinginess.
Historically speaking, Kabam seems extraordinarily bad at killing any part of the game, including Battlegrounds. The current rewards seem to be incentivizing an awful lot of Battlegrounds play.
Now, you might be thinking that you aren’t playing because of the rewards, you’re playing in spite of them. But that doesn’t prove the rewards should be higher, it just proves you don’t need incentivizing at all, and the game designers can spend those valuable rewards elsewhere.
Crashed alludes to the fact that economy designers think about rewards differently than players. I think the biggest single difference is players think of rewards as being rewards *for* doing content, while designers think of rewards as incentives *to do* content. Players think the more effort they put in the more rewards they should get while economy designers think the less effort players collectively put in the more incentives that might require.
This is of course a pretty big simplification, but this is not just how every economy designer thinks about rewards (in a game like this). It is how they *must* think about rewards if they expect to have a job next year. Simply pouring rewards into things players are already doing is a positive feedback loop. Nothing survives positive feedback loops for long.
Good thing I already quit the game then, by your logic hopefully more people quit so they have a reason to buff those garbage rewards and stores.
😂 sorry just thought it was better to lay it out like the Kabam response for easier cross reference.
It was still very well articulated, and I agreed with basically everything. The annoying part is I doubt they’ll read most of the replies here, and even if they do who knows if they’ll actually take it into account.
Arena - I think scaring your community and player base into not wanting to see change to certain game modes is incredibly unhealthy, stating if change was to happen it wouldn’t be for the benefit of players and taking away a F2P element from the game or making it harder for those players. Do I think the rewards in arena need a buff… no not necessary, do i believe the process could be made more engaging, fun, less time consuming… absolutely. I also feel kabam are playing with a very sharp double edged blade when it comes to this because they do not realise if they was to diminish this aspect of the game the amount of players that would just leave, lose interest and feel betrayed would ultimately cost them a lot more money and players than they care to admit which is why this change hasn’t already happened.
In 3+ years our rosters have exploded in number, rank, and rarity which makes grinding the 6* featured easier than ever. and milestones in the 6* basic is more convenient just because we have more champs lying around, even if the points in that arena is still restricted.
you want it to be less time consuming but that's exactly what's happened. rough ballpark here but it might take 120-150 less rounds over 3 days to get top 1-5% in both 6* arenas and all milestones in the 4* than it did 3 years ago (i get it 6* shards are less valuable now but still).
and the dev is telling us that if we want a buff, they're going to rebalance it back to those numbers...which means a ton more grinding for everyone else for no reason.
"what do you mean no reason, won't we get more rewards like 7* shards?". no, there's a fixed reward budget so they'll just cut and paste whatever we get from other areas of the game that we already do (and spend much less time doing!), like sidequest, etc...so in a sense there's no reward benefit either.
“We tried new items in loyalty store, but have made no efforts to make Aw less bug-ridden and worthless. It didn’t increase engagement to shock so now we won’t do anything”
You sound like petulant children - “you don’t want us to touch arenas cuz we will have to make them worse”
Get outta here, I wish this company could hire a single competent person to speak on their behalves.
Comments
While I fear like usual most of anything said here will fall on complete deaf ears because let’s face it, kabam will always know best, I have noticed a lot of higher end players falling out of love with the game and certain modes because of the repetitive, non rewarding, tedious nodes and game modes and certainly somewhat feel the same way. It speaks volumes that a huge chunk of the player base aswell as 90% of the content creators for the game are all backing the same opinions of wanting to see changes to a lot of rewards all over the game and make things just less of such a stagnant tedious grind, I fear although we will never see the day, there needs to come a point where kabam acknowledges that okay maybe not everything the community says is always going to be correct but if majority are telling us change needs to happen, maybe we do need to change certain things.
Arena - I think scaring your community and player base into not wanting to see change to certain game modes is incredibly unhealthy, stating if change was to happen it wouldn’t be for the benefit of players and taking away a F2P element from the game or making it harder for those players. Do I think the rewards in arena need a buff… no not necessary, do i believe the process could be made more engaging, fun, less time consuming… absolutely. I also feel kabam are playing with a very sharp double edged blade when it comes to this because they do not realise if they was to diminish this aspect of the game the amount of players that would just leave, lose interest and feel betrayed would ultimately cost them a lot more money and players than they care to admit which is why this change hasn’t already happened.
Summoners sigil - I really don’t understand why this hasn’t already had a change for the better, it’s way long overdue and you want peoples hard earned money for next to nothing in return, there’s no benefit to this store, like… at all. Kabam like to often point out that your time is not a currency or valuable to them, yet expect us to essentially invest our money in their game but let’s face it… without us there is no them, without us, there is no profit.
EQ - I’m not even going to get started on the complete repetitive, boring lack lustre of what this game mode is, let’s all hope and pray the changes coming are for the better.
I could cover other topics but I feel a lot of what has already been said sums those up well in regards to war especially the store… I’d like to see more accessibility to health potions, boosts etc without having to use up my entire loyalty stash every war.
Let’s hope this glory store change comes in sooner rather than later and it’s actually somewhat decent I guess.
Reason being there are only two things that keep a game successful.
Purchases and time spent
Buffing sigil benefits makes spenders to stick and tempt non spenders to spend.
Buffing arenas makes f2p spend more time in game and they will have enough units to reinforce roster and stay meta competitors for spenders in modes such battlegrounds.
Leaving BGs disconnect alone since that's another whole can of worms.
Just saying
Thank god they don't listen to your feedback anymore than they already do.
Now, you might be thinking that you aren’t playing because of the rewards, you’re playing in spite of them. But that doesn’t prove the rewards should be higher, it just proves you don’t need incentivizing at all, and the game designers can spend those valuable rewards elsewhere.
Crashed alludes to the fact that economy designers think about rewards differently than players. I think the biggest single difference is players think of rewards as being rewards *for* doing content, while designers think of rewards as incentives *to do* content. Players think the more effort they put in the more rewards they should get while economy designers think the less effort players collectively put in the more incentives that might require.
This is of course a pretty big simplification, but this is not just how every economy designer thinks about rewards (in a game like this). It is how they *must* think about rewards if they expect to have a job next year. Simply pouring rewards into things players are already doing is a positive feedback loop. Nothing survives positive feedback loops for long.
The champs released for that month are specifically to counter the new node or be the defenders on the new nodes, along with a limited handful of older far less desirable champs.
The older champs suddenly get a 20% saga boost and become the champs of the hour until the saga ends and then they again become meh champs 20% weaker than they were the day before the saga ended. Items used up on them and we stop using them and talking about them.
Everybody? Anybody? Still using nightcrawler these days?
Between the game economy and constant AI issues, that trend will continue for me.
Loyalty Store - ok with that, loyalty being used to buy consumables to then get the aw rewards is fine, it’s obviously not intended as a store you directly buy rewards from
Glory store - stated a rewards buff is coming, so I’m willing to let it slide. But most of the commenters are correct, glory store is not good value for valiant players even when it was updated really, and especially now around 6 months onwards
Battlegrounds - ok this is where opinions differ wildly. The argument of Gc rewards having trophy tokens as a large part of the budget is problematic for 2 reasons:
1. The bgs store is outdated for the people who push high in GC. For example I currently have 13 r3s, with only 1 being “bought” (aka 12 f2p). Bgs store gives you access to a r2 champion approximately every 3-4 weeks (unless you get insanely lucky with the t6cc crystals), which realistically is not cutting it. Adding some amount of t4a into the store would at least give those Gc trophy tokens some value, as you can slowly convert them to t4a (or just blast through some like usual).
However in conjunction with this it may be good to increase the cap on tokens as a c4+ player needs to blast through some tokens even if they don’t want to just so they don’t overflow from VT next season.
2. Bgs rewards still incentivise playing more over skill HEAVILY.
Let’s look at the current solo and alliance rewards for example. The person who gets 1st in solo event gets arguably better rewards than the person who gets 1st in GC. The Titan shards, 7 star shards are the exact same, and the solo event also gets some 7 star sigs, a very desirable resource atm. GC winner does get trophy tokens, but as already said the value of these have gone down significantly.
In addition, the alliance event currently offers 1.5 t4a to the alliance that PLAYS the most, in theory not even the ally that wins the most. Yes the ally that comes first is likely to be the ally that won the most matches, but it is theoretically possible for an ally to come 1st overall without winning a single game. And then get better rewards than the number 1 most skilled player that season???
So as a player who pushes myself, what I take away from this is that my skill in bgs is not valued, it’s how much I spend on marks to get those number 1 scores in solo/ally events. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the solo/ally events, the problem is with the GC rewards that desperately need a buff to incentivise skilled gameplay. If you are not in a bgs pushing alliance but put up a 100% win rate c1 season, you will get less rewards than if you got your friend to start and account, pour money into marks and just sit there while the matches are played. And far far less rewards too. That is terrible economy design, plain and simple.
EQ and SQ - Again stated that something is coming to revamp it, which is good. Just one thing to state though, EQ has always had ok rewards for the difficulty, as it has never been difficult for a high tier player. The problem is the time investment.
Even if I say use cgr and mega blast every single path, it would still take me a few hours to get through all of it (and approx 20 refills if I did it all in one go but obviously I’d stagger it). And the rewards for a valiant player that are useful? 100 dust (which is depreciating fast but still useful atm), and some little bits of 7 star shards and t6cc. It is not a good time investment to do this content for most players.
Coincidentally, all the rewards I stated as useful all are in the paragon gauntlet, which obviously requires 100% thronebreaker eq. So for a valiant player, thronebreaker eq itself has 0 value (you could argue gold and iso, but 99% don’t struggle with this). It is solely to unlock the paragon gauntlet. Which is kinda stupid if you think about it. It would be like if we still had to do road to the labyrinth to unlock labyrinth of legends, even though both sets of rewards are outdated? But that’s the situation we are in. Hopefully the revamp is good long term and not just decent rewards for a month or two.
Arenas - I’m a pretty decent arena grinder myself, heavily f2p so they are a good source of units for me. There’s just one counter point I’d like to say about the whole “you don’t want us to update arenas” topic.
I’ll be honest, it sounds like a threat to players, which is an odd thing for a company to do, threaten players with worsening the rewards. And I’m not the only person who feels this way, discussions with my alliance mates and other people on line/discord shows consensus is pretty much the same.
Funnily enough though we have had this kind of threat before! Anyone who is able to remember back to the nerfing of 3.2.6 and the whole revive situation will remember pretty similar wording about “diluting rewards from content.” It is interesting to me that Kabam goes down this line of response, not even as a one off, but on multiple issues in multiple areas of the game. I’d be intrigued on a response to that in particular, unsure if I’ll get one though.
The reason I find the “nerfing” of arena rewards a concerning line of reasoning is due to how the game has evolved. There’s more to do in the game than ever nowadays, and while Kabam has said in the past that we are not meant/forced to do everything and that time is not a valued resource/commodity from players, there is evidence that conflicts this. The saga chase tickets/crystals are usually strewn across many game modes for example, suggesting they want players to play many modes. Extra login calendars and side quest being locked weekly suggests that they do value your time on a daily level, otherwise these incentives wouldn’t exist.
The other reason I think a nerf would be bad is due to how offers have changed. I’ll start this by saying I know Kabam want you to spend units on revives, and that unit offers are put out to generate revenue from people buying units on the spot. However the number of unit offers has increased exponentially over the years, the easiest example being cyber and J4 increasing from 18/21k units max to now being 36k units minimum (I say minimum as 1. Cyber last year had approx 45-50k worth of stuff and 2. The extra solo event with a champion is at around 36k). This doubling of units needed has not been met with a doubling of units available ingame, so f2p or minimal spenders have to grind harder nowadays going above and beyond if they want to keep up with others. Nerfing time for unit acquisition would only make this problem worse, and take the game more towards heavy spender advantage like back in 2023 July 4th.
Just keep it as it is, but do look into champion acquisition from arena, as it has dramatically changed over the last few years. To me it feels like a 7 star arena should be very very close, feels about that point in the game cycle.
Solo shards - no issue, useful for boosts but I agree not an endgame currency
Any feedback on these points is welcome, obviously perspectives may differ from say a player who pushes just war or just bgs or some other mixture of modes, and I’m interested to see other perspectives.
the problem with players still playing despite the state of the rewards and the store is more of a show of how competitive the mode is over rewards first and then how much enjoyment it provides.
I don't have the concept of having a pooled reward to share out in different game modes and stores but the problem is that has never really worked and the 'pooled reward' we are still getting is from at least last year with how little rewards have generally been updated.
on the flip side having events/ story progression with massive milestone is a boosts to players that isnt locked behind the sweatiest alliance war, bgs and prestige for aq (if that's still a thing).
Looking at how kabam has historically distributed rewards and buffs to rewards/store, it's always been rotating across gamemodes, up untill this year with a focus on splitting where to get them has failed horribly with it's positive feedback loop we've been using since the game first started. it's lasted 10 years probably it's time to change it or watch it burn.
In summary the economy we see in the game is a disappointing in the value, balance of the stores and currencies,
you want it to be less time consuming but that's exactly what's happened. rough ballpark here but it might take 120-150 less rounds over 3 days to get top 1-5% in both 6* arenas and all milestones in the 4* than it did 3 years ago (i get it 6* shards are less valuable now but still).
and the dev is telling us that if we want a buff, they're going to rebalance it back to those numbers...which means a ton more grinding for everyone else for no reason.
"what do you mean no reason, won't we get more rewards like 7* shards?". no, there's a fixed reward budget so they'll just cut and paste whatever we get from other areas of the game that we already do (and spend much less time doing!), like sidequest, etc...so in a sense there's no reward benefit either.
we REALLY need to stop asking for this.
You sound like petulant children - “you don’t want us to touch arenas cuz we will have to make them worse”
Get outta here, I wish this company could hire a single competent person to speak on their behalves.