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.
Can someone explain to me something? Most of the new content and such, or even BGs have relic shards and rank up materials as rewards... Why are we being rewarded relic materials when there hasn't been a single new relic or even a mention of making new relics? @Kabam Crashed mentioned the depreciation value of "Solo crystals", yes we get it too much out there to even consider buffing them. Aren't relic shards pretty much going in the same route at this point? i got a good ammount of shards with no intention to open cause I don't care about duping the relics I already have...
I look at solo objective/objective crystals, Loyalty store and Sunday arenas as the most outdated things in the game. They're awful, the reason as players we're progressing so well is stuff like SoS, Everest content, events and Story. Definitely not any of the stores or objectives.
I don't expect t7b and t4a readily available but t6b and t3a is still valued way to high in stuff like the BG and Glory store ,the loyalty store is useless to anyone above uncollected and Sunday arenas just don't offer anything to anyone past act 4.
“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.
i wish players would try and understand how the game generally works instead of getting rude with the devs.
there's a fixed rewards budget. we can't change it. we can't ask them to change it. they decide when to open the taps on resources based on their release schedule and all we can do enjoy the game.
there's no magical rewards genie that can appear out of nowhere to make our "game experience better". that task is on the devs and they've done a good job the last 10 years which is why we're still here.
i can't understand the reasoning behind some of these posts...
yes, the loyalty store for rank up resources is horribly out of date. 750k for a t6b that we can get from a daily crystal is atrocious. same with 6* AG and the rest, but so what??
this store existing in it's current state isn't a slap to the face or an insult and they're not out of touch. the intention of was to increase AW participation and since that didn't work they diverted resources elsewhere. we're getting "the latest and greatest" stuff, but just somewhere else.
people literally believe that because this specific store is old (and other areas of the game like sunday arenas or summoner advancement), that they're somehow shorting us or ripping us off. they're not. we're always getting the "best stuff" and the economy is moving along exactly as how they've planned it.
with respect to arenas....we're grinding hard currency faster than we did 3 years ago...in a f2p game where units generally keep their value over time. why wouldn't the devs go back to the way it was??
we're already getting units a bit easier than we should....and y'all want them to revise arena????
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?
If your game play is sufficiently reward driven that you would withhold actually playing the game in the hope you could manipulate the economy designers to change the rewards in your favor, I don't think you're the target audience for the game in the first place. You won't be here long enough for that strategy's success rate to matter one way or the other.
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.
No, I hope that the people who quit leave behind people with more reasonable reward expectations.
People quit all the time, and while I don't specifically cheer for specific people to quit, I don't mind at all that the people who quit over Kabam introducing 5* champs to the game quit, because the game was better off without such people playing it. In the long run, the game is healthier with a playerbase willing to accept extensions to the long term progressional ladder. I don't mind the people who quit over Kabam introducing 6* champs to the game, who actively stated here on the forums that they thought Kabam "learned their lesson" with the introduction of 5* champs. I think the game is better off without those people either.
People quit over the difficulty bump when they introduced Masters tier difficulty, they quit over the introduction of the Labyrinth of Legends, they quit over many different iterations to Alliance War, over not having enough gold in the game, over increasing the number of cash offer bundles Kabam sold during Cyber Weekend. They quit over Battlegrounds. And when they quit, they leave behind players who actually want to play this game, and aren't holding out hope for a game that only exists in their own heads that they think is the holy grail of great games that they just can't convince a game developer to make for them.
Kabam doesn't get everything right. I have as many published concrete suggestions to improve or correct the game as anyone else. But that doesn't mean I would trade the Kabam dev team for any group of people here on the forums. If I woke up tomorrow and found out MCOC was going to be run by a player run steering committee, I would probably be making plans to reactivate my lifetime subscription to Star Trek Online.
the same players who voted for colossus and shang chi are now telling us they want an arena buff....lol
???? This is like saying the same people who order pizza got an oil change in their cars...
maybe players who saw more value in shang chi than kate bishop shouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to other areas of the game.
How is voting for a 7* release related in budgeting rewards?... People who voted for Colossus or Shang shouldn't have an opinion about rewards? Is that what you are trying to say?....
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.
No, I hope that the people who quit leave behind people with more reasonable reward expectations.
People quit all the time, and while I don't specifically cheer for specific people to quit, I don't mind at all that the people who quit over Kabam introducing 5* champs to the game quit, because the game was better off without such people playing it. In the long run, the game is healthier with a playerbase willing to accept extensions to the long term progressional ladder. I don't mind the people who quit over Kabam introducing 6* champs to the game, who actively stated here on the forums that they thought Kabam "learned their lesson" with the introduction of 5* champs. I think the game is better off without those people either.
People quit over the difficulty bump when they introduced Masters tier difficulty, they quit over the introduction of the Labyrinth of Legends, they quit over many different iterations to Alliance War, over not having enough gold in the game, over increasing the number of cash offer bundles Kabam sold during Cyber Weekend. They quit over Battlegrounds. And when they quit, they leave behind players who actually want to play this game, and aren't holding out hope for a game that only exists in their own heads that they think is the holy grail of great games that they just can't convince a game developer to make for them.
Kabam doesn't get everything right. I have as many published concrete suggestions to improve or correct the game as anyone else. But that doesn't mean I would trade the Kabam dev team for any group of people here on the forums. If I woke up tomorrow and found out MCOC was going to be run by a player run steering committee, I would probably be making plans to reactivate my lifetime subscription to Star Trek Online.
You realize some of us have been playing this game since release correct? Our expectations here aren't unreasonable ones, we know how the game works because we've been playing it for years, you're just biased.
Right, but the difference is those complaints were absurd ones indeed, hence back then you didn't have a single veteran player complaining about them. These however are not, there's even a top Battlegrounds player on this same thread complaining about rewards as well and he's right. 90% of the stuff in that Valiant BGs store is insignificant for the most part once your account is that big, and it has been for over 6 months now this isn't a new thing that people just decided to start complaining about last week.
Nobody here is telling them exactly how to change things or run their game, we're simply pointing out rewards are outdated for Valiant players which they are whether they want to accept it or not.
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.
It isn't a threat, it is a statement of fact. And they aren't threatening to worsen rewards, they are implying that if they touch arenas they will return arena rewards to normal.
Arenas are unique in that they allow players to theoretically grind an unlimited amount of the most valuable and flexible resource in the game: its premium currency aka units. This is not normal in free to play games: in fact it is practically unheard of. I keep saying I haven't seen this anywhere else, and people keep saying sure it does, then can't provide any examples that don't immediately fall apart under inspection. Because it simply doesn't exist.
When the arenas were last updated, they were tuned to having a specific unit/time reward earning rate. Arenas had to be tuned by rate, because they are open ended. With most content, there's a reward cap, and no matter how fast you are or how much you do, there's a limit to how much rewards you can get. With the arenas, there is no limit. There is only a limiting rate.
That rate was very carefully negotiated between the designers and the CCP members who participated in analyzing the proposed changes. I won't divulge the precise back and forth details, but I will say that I and at least one other CCP member spent a significant amount of time presenting very detailed analyses about how fast players would reasonably be expected to grind arenas, and thus where the margins were to improve the unit rewards in theory. We pushed that position right to its limits. It released as good as it could possibly be.
Well, roster inflation and other factors have changed things dramatically since then. In particular, players are much faster grinding those arenas. Much, much, much faster. If they were balanced today, they wouldn't be nerfed in the sense that the actual rewards would be reduced, they would be nerfed in that they would be balanced around the same criteria they were originally balanced, but factoring in the current strength of player rosters. We are much stronger now and thus much faster, so hitting the exact same targets would force the arena milestones to become much higher.
We're being allowed to squeeze more and more units out of the arenas, completely outside the margins for which they were originally designed. The devs have been convinced to look the other way for now. But you cannot presume that just because they aren't taking action, they are required to ensconce those improvements as the norm.
If you don't believe they wouldn't, or that there's some "customer-is-always-right" pressure that would force them to avoid it, look to the lower tier EQ maps. When they were revamped, they were revamped according to the rosters that players have now, not the rosters players had years ago when the progression curve was much shallower. We used to presume Proven players would be bringing 3* champs to content, now we presume they are bringing 5* champs. And the content is balanced accordingly.
Interpreting these kinds of statements as a "threat" is precisely why we have so little frank discussion about the game economy in public settings. It is a touchy subject, and full of nuance, and far more likely to start fights than prevent them. If Crashed can't say "if you want us to look at this, be prepared to have this happen as well" in an honest fashion, there's no possibility of having a genuinely honest discussion about the game economy. I've had many discussions with Crashed about the game economy. When he says "if we do this, we'll also be forced to do that" that is the most important and valuable information he can ever give me, and I treat it as such. Because not every game economy designer will tell you these things directly.
the same players who voted for colossus and shang chi are now telling us they want an arena buff....lol
???? This is like saying the same people who order pizza got an oil change in their cars...
maybe players who saw more value in shang chi than kate bishop shouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to other areas of the game.
How is voting for a 7* release related in budgeting rewards?... People who voted for Colossus or Shang shouldn't have an opinion about rewards? Is that what you are trying to say?....
i'm a big arena grinder with a developed roster. you'd think i would be in favor of an arena change like being able to use 7*s in the lower arenas and whatnot or more rewards on sundays. i'm not. any change would be bad for me and horrible for most others.
we have it good right now. if the devs do a deep dive on the numbers and do a revision, they will do a cut and paste job on the "rewards" (what we gain in arena we lose from somewhere else, meaning no net gain) while making us grind a ton more. more work for no discernible difference, so why ask for it?
i haven't seen a good argument for an arena buff yet.
😂 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.
I have read every comment in this thread, because I do genuinely care what players think and take it into consideration every day when I am making decisions about the game.
In going back and reading my initial reply, I realize I was unfair to the OP because I didn't actually address the topic of this thread. Do we actually want our players to play less? That's a complicated and nuanced question, but I will try my best to answer it succinctly.
In the three years since I joined the game team, one of the most common topics in the community has been burnout. There have been various points in those three years where players have very clearly told us we are demanding too much of them and their time. Our game is becoming bigger and more complex, and a large portion of our core player base is aging, which comes with new responsibilities. At the same time the global economy has deteriorated -- people are working longer hours and have less time for pursuits like mobile games. You can see this clearly in industry trends, with the rise of hyper-casual games that ask very very little of players dominating the mobile space.
So the "time economy" of our game has become a very core concept for the design team. We want players to log in and play our game every day, ideally multiple sessions a day. But we know there are significant groups of our players who we shouldn't push to do more than that. And we also know that it's a very fine line between creating a set of rewards that feels good, and one that feels mandatory for our end game players. I would argue for some of our players those two things are actually synonymous.
So the answer to the question "Do you want players to play less?" is it depends, but in some cases yes we do want players to play less. You can see this for example very clearly with the direction we have taken with Incursions. Rather than update the baseline rewards, we have created a special challenge Sector that only runs once every ~3 months. That is how often we want most late game players to play Incursions, which is less than we had been asking of them in the past.
At any rate thank you all for taking the time to provide feedback, especially those who did so respectfully. Today is a holiday in Canada, but tomorrow I plan to talk with the economy team about making some tweaks to our plans based on feedback in this thread, and I'll try to move that Glory store update forward ASAP.
😂 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.
I have read every comment in this thread, because I do genuinely care what players think and take it into consideration every day when I am making decisions about the game.
In going back and reading my initial reply, I realize I was unfair to the OP because I didn't actually address the topic of this thread. Do we actually want our players to play less? That's a complicated and nuanced question, but I will try my best to answer it succinctly.
In the three years since I joined the game team, one of the most common topics in the community has been burnout. There have been various points in those three years where players have very clearly told us we are demanding too much of them and their time. Our game is becoming bigger and more complex, and a large portion of our core player base is aging, which comes with new responsibilities. At the same time the global economy has deteriorated -- people are working longer hours and have less time for pursuits like mobile games. You can see this clearly in industry trends, with the rise of hyper-casual games that ask very very little of players dominating the mobile space.
So the "time economy" of our game has become a very core concept for the design team. We want players to log in and play our game every day, ideally multiple sessions a day. But we know there are significant groups of our players who we shouldn't push to do more than that. And we also know that it's a very fine line between creating a set of rewards that feels good, and one that feels mandatory for our end game players. I would argue for some of our players those two things are actually synonymous.
So the answer to the question "Do you want players to play less?" is it depends, but in some cases yes we do want players to play less. You can see this for example very clearly with the direction we have taken with Incursions. Rather than update the baseline rewards, we have created a special challenge Sector that only runs once every ~3 months. That is how often we want most late game players to play Incursions, which is less than we had been asking of them in the past.
At any rate thank you all for taking the time to provide feedback, especially those who did so respectfully. Today is a holiday in Canada, but tomorrow I plan to talk with the economy team about making some tweaks to our plans based on feedback in this thread, and I'll try to move that Glory store update forward ASAP.
o7
Thank you for settling this, also any news on updating the BGs store?
the same players who voted for colossus and shang chi are now telling us they want an arena buff....lol
???? This is like saying the same people who order pizza got an oil change in their cars...
maybe players who saw more value in shang chi than kate bishop shouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to other areas of the game.
How is voting for a 7* release related in budgeting rewards?... People who voted for Colossus or Shang shouldn't have an opinion about rewards? Is that what you are trying to say?....
i'm a big arena grinder with a developed roster. you'd think i would be in favor of an arena change like being able to use 7*s in the lower arenas and whatnot or more rewards on sundays. i'm not. any change would be bad for me and horrible for most others.
we have it good right now. if the devs do a deep dive on the numbers and do a revision, they will do a cut and paste job on the "rewards" (what we gain in arena we lose from somewhere else, meaning no net gain) while making us grind a ton more. more work for no discernible difference, so why ask for it?
i haven't seen a good argument for an arena buff yet.
Maybe the fact that we are at a time that arenas should have 7*?... And you talk about arenas as if it was the only topic being discussed.
the same players who voted for colossus and shang chi are now telling us they want an arena buff....lol
???? This is like saying the same people who order pizza got an oil change in their cars...
maybe players who saw more value in shang chi than kate bishop shouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to other areas of the game.
How is voting for a 7* release related in budgeting rewards?... People who voted for Colossus or Shang shouldn't have an opinion about rewards? Is that what you are trying to say?....
i'm a big arena grinder with a developed roster. you'd think i would be in favor of an arena change like being able to use 7*s in the lower arenas and whatnot or more rewards on sundays. i'm not. any change would be bad for me and horrible for most others.
we have it good right now. if the devs do a deep dive on the numbers and do a revision, they will do a cut and paste job on the "rewards" (what we gain in arena we lose from somewhere else, meaning no net gain) while making us grind a ton more. more work for no discernible difference, so why ask for it?
i haven't seen a good argument for an arena buff yet.
Maybe the fact that we are at a time that arenas should have 7*?...
If you want to use your 7s, no one will be able to use their 4s and 5s anymore, because they will be triggering deathmatches.
If you want the arenas to award 7s but only use 6s, good luck. I had better success literally convincing Kabam to give away war revives than do that.
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.
It isn't a threat, it is a statement of fact. And they aren't threatening to worsen rewards, they are implying that if they touch arenas they will return arena rewards to normal.
Arenas are unique in that they allow players to theoretically grind an unlimited amount of the most valuable and flexible resource in the game: its premium currency aka units. This is not normal in free to play games: in fact it is practically unheard of. I keep saying I haven't seen this anywhere else, and people keep saying sure it does, then can't provide any examples that don't immediately fall apart under inspection. Because it simply doesn't exist.
When the arenas were last updated, they were tuned to having a specific unit/time reward earning rate. Arenas had to be tuned by rate, because they are open ended. With most content, there's a reward cap, and no matter how fast you are or how much you do, there's a limit to how much rewards you can get. With the arenas, there is no limit. There is only a limiting rate.
That rate was very carefully negotiated between the designers and the CCP members who participated in analyzing the proposed changes. I won't divulge the precise back and forth details, but I will say that I and at least one other CCP member spent a significant amount of time presenting very detailed analyses about how fast players would reasonably be expected to grind arenas, and thus where the margins were to improve the unit rewards in theory. We pushed that position right to its limits. It released as good as it could possibly be.
Well, roster inflation and other factors have changed things dramatically since then. In particular, players are much faster grinding those arenas. Much, much, much faster. If they were balanced today, they wouldn't be nerfed in the sense that the actual rewards would be reduced, they would be nerfed in that they would be balanced around the same criteria they were originally balanced, but factoring in the current strength of player rosters. We are much stronger now and thus much faster, so hitting the exact same targets would force the arena milestones to become much higher.
We're being allowed to squeeze more and more units out of the arenas, completely outside the margins for which they were originally designed. The devs have been convinced to look the other way for now. But you cannot presume that just because they aren't taking action, they are required to ensconce those improvements as the norm.
If you don't believe they wouldn't, or that there's some "customer-is-always-right" pressure that would force them to avoid it, look to the lower tier EQ maps. When they were revamped, they were revamped according to the rosters that players have now, not the rosters players had years ago when the progression curve was much shallower. We used to presume Proven players would be bringing 3* champs to content, now we presume they are bringing 5* champs. And the content is balanced accordingly.
Interpreting these kinds of statements as a "threat" is precisely why we have so little frank discussion about the game economy in public settings. It is a touchy subject, and full of nuance, and far more likely to start fights than prevent them. If Crashed can't say "if you want us to look at this, be prepared to have this happen as well" in an honest fashion, there's no possibility of having a genuinely honest discussion about the game economy. I've had many discussions with Crashed about the game economy. When he says "if we do this, we'll also be forced to do that" that is the most important and valuable information he can ever give me, and I treat it as such. Because not every game economy designer will tell you these things directly.
Probably should have been more clear in my wording for “nerf” and that’s my bad. I realise they wouldn’t actually remove units, that would create a whole new issue in itself but that’s not going to happen. I was meaning in the sense of it’s a “nerf” because the time needed for the same rewards would be increased. Yes, back to the previous level, but still a nerf really because now ur time in arena is worth less per minute/hour/whatever unit of time you wanna use. It’s a different kind of nerf to the usual decrease in resources or if you’re talking about champions, damage and/or utility. I still think it would be a bad thing to do due to the whole “time as a resource” topic. Crashed has just replied to another comment saying that the time economy is now a big factor in a wide range of decisions, which I think is a good thing as the game expands. As he said, burnout is very real, especially as this game gets bigger and bigger and would require more hours to do every area of content. If they did return the time needed in arena for milestone to the previous amount, it would make 3 groups of players imo:
1. You either don’t care for arena or will get all milestones anyway (probably me). Basically the change doesn’t affect you much, maybe more annoying if you are the “I’ll get them anyway” type player
2. Increased time in arena for a player that does everything will lead to more frequent burnout. Obviously this is the summoners choice really to do everything, but we can’t be blind to the fact that some will try to do everything either to “keep up” or just cause they’re a grinder.
3. Players with limited time will not be able to get max units now leading to less engagement with unit deals, and ultimately leading to people being driven away from the game as they feel they can’t keep up
Obviously group 2 and 3 here are bad overall for the game in a sense of wanting to grow the player base, but it’s a very possible scenario if arenas are reverted.
That’s why I only advocate for a look at rank rewards. Should there be more units? Absolutely not, let’s not even go into changing that cause then J4 and cyber would move to 54k or something silly. But do the rank rewards need looking at? Probably yeah, otherwise arenas will become stagnant and become an arena bot paradise again like they used to be, if no attention is paid to them.
I have to say, I don't consider myself a Kabam apologist, but I absolutely agree with everything @Kabam Crashed and folks like @DNA3000 have been saying in this thread.
They are giving out some incredible information. They are giving you a "peek behind the curtain", with key insights into the challenges and competing objectives that factor into the decisions that they make.
Anybody who feels that these folks are just "making excuses", or trying to antagonize you, or threatening you: you're really doing yourself a disservice if you're missing out on the point of these posts. I think everybody following this thread would be well served by rereading these posts, because they are extremely insightful about a decision making process that you will otherwise never get to see.
the same players who voted for colossus and shang chi are now telling us they want an arena buff....lol
???? This is like saying the same people who order pizza got an oil change in their cars...
maybe players who saw more value in shang chi than kate bishop shouldn't be taken seriously when it comes to other areas of the game.
How is voting for a 7* release related in budgeting rewards?... People who voted for Colossus or Shang shouldn't have an opinion about rewards? Is that what you are trying to say?....
i'm a big arena grinder with a developed roster. you'd think i would be in favor of an arena change like being able to use 7*s in the lower arenas and whatnot or more rewards on sundays. i'm not. any change would be bad for me and horrible for most others.
we have it good right now. if the devs do a deep dive on the numbers and do a revision, they will do a cut and paste job on the "rewards" (what we gain in arena we lose from somewhere else, meaning no net gain) while making us grind a ton more. more work for no discernible difference, so why ask for it?
i haven't seen a good argument for an arena buff yet.
Maybe the fact that we are at a time that arenas should have 7*?...
If you want to use your 7s, no one will be able to use their 4s and 5s anymore, because they will be triggering deathmatches.
If you want the arenas to award 7s but only use 6s, good luck. I had better success literally convincing Kabam to give away war revives than do that.
To be honest I wouldnt even dare to ask for a 7* champ arena., in 10 years they were never able to punish bots consistently. Now rewarding 7* shards I would like that.
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.
It isn't a threat, it is a statement of fact. And they aren't threatening to worsen rewards, they are implying that if they touch arenas they will return arena rewards to normal.
Arenas are unique in that they allow players to theoretically grind an unlimited amount of the most valuable and flexible resource in the game: its premium currency aka units. This is not normal in free to play games: in fact it is practically unheard of. I keep saying I haven't seen this anywhere else, and people keep saying sure it does, then can't provide any examples that don't immediately fall apart under inspection. Because it simply doesn't exist.
When the arenas were last updated, they were tuned to having a specific unit/time reward earning rate. Arenas had to be tuned by rate, because they are open ended. With most content, there's a reward cap, and no matter how fast you are or how much you do, there's a limit to how much rewards you can get. With the arenas, there is no limit. There is only a limiting rate.
That rate was very carefully negotiated between the designers and the CCP members who participated in analyzing the proposed changes. I won't divulge the precise back and forth details, but I will say that I and at least one other CCP member spent a significant amount of time presenting very detailed analyses about how fast players would reasonably be expected to grind arenas, and thus where the margins were to improve the unit rewards in theory. We pushed that position right to its limits. It released as good as it could possibly be.
Well, roster inflation and other factors have changed things dramatically since then. In particular, players are much faster grinding those arenas. Much, much, much faster. If they were balanced today, they wouldn't be nerfed in the sense that the actual rewards would be reduced, they would be nerfed in that they would be balanced around the same criteria they were originally balanced, but factoring in the current strength of player rosters. We are much stronger now and thus much faster, so hitting the exact same targets would force the arena milestones to become much higher.
We're being allowed to squeeze more and more units out of the arenas, completely outside the margins for which they were originally designed. The devs have been convinced to look the other way for now. But you cannot presume that just because they aren't taking action, they are required to ensconce those improvements as the norm.
If you don't believe they wouldn't, or that there's some "customer-is-always-right" pressure that would force them to avoid it, look to the lower tier EQ maps. When they were revamped, they were revamped according to the rosters that players have now, not the rosters players had years ago when the progression curve was much shallower. We used to presume Proven players would be bringing 3* champs to content, now we presume they are bringing 5* champs. And the content is balanced accordingly.
Interpreting these kinds of statements as a "threat" is precisely why we have so little frank discussion about the game economy in public settings. It is a touchy subject, and full of nuance, and far more likely to start fights than prevent them. If Crashed can't say "if you want us to look at this, be prepared to have this happen as well" in an honest fashion, there's no possibility of having a genuinely honest discussion about the game economy. I've had many discussions with Crashed about the game economy. When he says "if we do this, we'll also be forced to do that" that is the most important and valuable information he can ever give me, and I treat it as such. Because not every game economy designer will tell you these things directly.
That’s why I only advocate for a look at rank rewards. Should there be more units? Absolutely not, let’s not even go into changing that cause then J4 and cyber would move to 54k or something silly. But do the rank rewards need looking at? Probably yeah, otherwise arenas will become stagnant and become an arena bot paradise again like they used to be, if no attention is paid to them.
if they buff shards, they don't want players getting them as easily as they do now (bigger accounts are basically hitting 12m with just one run of their 7s), so they'd need to bump milestones higher, which means more rounds...
isn't it better they keep those rewards in the sidequest or wherever they would get them from instead of making us do more work?
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.
It isn't a threat, it is a statement of fact. And they aren't threatening to worsen rewards, they are implying that if they touch arenas they will return arena rewards to normal.
Arenas are unique in that they allow players to theoretically grind an unlimited amount of the most valuable and flexible resource in the game: its premium currency aka units. This is not normal in free to play games: in fact it is practically unheard of. I keep saying I haven't seen this anywhere else, and people keep saying sure it does, then can't provide any examples that don't immediately fall apart under inspection. Because it simply doesn't exist.
When the arenas were last updated, they were tuned to having a specific unit/time reward earning rate. Arenas had to be tuned by rate, because they are open ended. With most content, there's a reward cap, and no matter how fast you are or how much you do, there's a limit to how much rewards you can get. With the arenas, there is no limit. There is only a limiting rate.
That rate was very carefully negotiated between the designers and the CCP members who participated in analyzing the proposed changes. I won't divulge the precise back and forth details, but I will say that I and at least one other CCP member spent a significant amount of time presenting very detailed analyses about how fast players would reasonably be expected to grind arenas, and thus where the margins were to improve the unit rewards in theory. We pushed that position right to its limits. It released as good as it could possibly be.
Well, roster inflation and other factors have changed things dramatically since then. In particular, players are much faster grinding those arenas. Much, much, much faster. If they were balanced today, they wouldn't be nerfed in the sense that the actual rewards would be reduced, they would be nerfed in that they would be balanced around the same criteria they were originally balanced, but factoring in the current strength of player rosters. We are much stronger now and thus much faster, so hitting the exact same targets would force the arena milestones to become much higher.
We're being allowed to squeeze more and more units out of the arenas, completely outside the margins for which they were originally designed. The devs have been convinced to look the other way for now. But you cannot presume that just because they aren't taking action, they are required to ensconce those improvements as the norm.
If you don't believe they wouldn't, or that there's some "customer-is-always-right" pressure that would force them to avoid it, look to the lower tier EQ maps. When they were revamped, they were revamped according to the rosters that players have now, not the rosters players had years ago when the progression curve was much shallower. We used to presume Proven players would be bringing 3* champs to content, now we presume they are bringing 5* champs. And the content is balanced accordingly.
Interpreting these kinds of statements as a "threat" is precisely why we have so little frank discussion about the game economy in public settings. It is a touchy subject, and full of nuance, and far more likely to start fights than prevent them. If Crashed can't say "if you want us to look at this, be prepared to have this happen as well" in an honest fashion, there's no possibility of having a genuinely honest discussion about the game economy. I've had many discussions with Crashed about the game economy. When he says "if we do this, we'll also be forced to do that" that is the most important and valuable information he can ever give me, and I treat it as such. Because not every game economy designer will tell you these things directly.
That’s why I only advocate for a look at rank rewards. Should there be more units? Absolutely not, let’s not even go into changing that cause then J4 and cyber would move to 54k or something silly. But do the rank rewards need looking at? Probably yeah, otherwise arenas will become stagnant and become an arena bot paradise again like they used to be, if no attention is paid to them.
if they buff shards, they don't want players getting them as easily as they do now, so i'm guessing they'll need to bump milestones higher, which means more rounds...
isn't it better they keep those rewards in the sidequest or wherever they would get them from instead of making us do more work?
That’s just straight up not what I said. I said rank rewards specifically, meaning the milestones being at 1 point or 6283764 points doesn’t matter, it will be determined by the number of players playing arena. Don’t touch the milestones at all, it’s not even a debate that they are very good per time spent, but any arena past the milestones isn’t worth it as 6 star champ usage is dropping heavily unless the champion is very very op.
It isn’t worth it for end game players to keep playing arena past the milestones , but I imagine growing accounts appreciate the opportunity to get a 6* they may otherwise not get for some time, if ever.
If they did return the time needed in arena for milestone to the previous amount, it would make 3 groups of players imo:
1. You either don’t care for arena or will get all milestones anyway (probably me). Basically the change doesn’t affect you much, maybe more annoying if you are the “I’ll get them anyway” type player
2. Increased time in arena for a player that does everything will lead to more frequent burnout. Obviously this is the summoners choice really to do everything, but we can’t be blind to the fact that some will try to do everything either to “keep up” or just cause they’re a grinder.
3. Players with limited time will not be able to get max units now leading to less engagement with unit deals, and ultimately leading to people being driven away from the game as they feel they can’t keep up
Variations of these kinds of arguments were actually made when the arenas were originally revamped, even more forcefully than you are here. They turned out to be, if not completely false, at least much less impactful than they were suggested they would be. The devs would remember that experience.
Remember we're not talking about a novel situation that hasn't happened before. We're talking about returning the arenas to a similar reward/time situation they were in when they first launched in their current form. My interpretation of what happened is that while many players complained, the data (at least my data collected from my own arena participation) suggests participation remained relatively steady, and as roster inflation took hold the arenas very slowly got easier over time, and it was the direction of the arenas and not their static state that influenced players to stop complaining about it (above the baseline complaints we will always have surrounding anything grind related). Subconsciously or otherwise, players cared more about the fact that they were getting a little bit more rewards for a little bit less time over time
I do want to address the grind thing, and the arenas connection to the issue of grind and burnout. As Crashed mentions, burnout is a thing. He came along during the period of time when Kabam was coming to grips with Dungeons, and the burnout related discussion surrounding Act 7 beta. Burnout was *the* holistic game issue at the time. So you'd think that arenas of all things would be a problem, as arenas are the single longest running game mode that players have complained about burn out for.
I think arenas are a unique legacy, Yet Another Reason we want to tread lightly around it. It would be trivial to eliminate burnout in the arenas: cap the number of rounds you can do. Or cap rewards at the top milestone. Eliminate the open ended competition for rank rewards. All horrible things, but they directly tackle the issue of burnout in the arena.
The arena is the *one* place where the game allows for open ended grinding, and it is tolerated by Kabam specifically because it is the one and only place where such gameplay is allowed to exist. It is strongly discouraged everywhere else. Incursions tops out. Even Battlegrounds has practical limits on how many matches you can do in a season and still be rewarded for it. Arena is the exception. During the closed beta for Battlegrounds, I recall being told when I made a suggestion about it that Battlegrounds was not going to become another arena.
No matter how many rounds it takes to get the milestone rewards in the arena, there is a practical limit to grinding the arena, *except* for rank rewards. Rank rewards are still the one place where there is literally no cap on effort: it is the players themselves that can bid infinite work for rewards. And I think that's why rank rewards are the part of the arena where the devs are most cautious about revisiting.
I would bet anything that if Kabam could go back in time, they would delete the arena from their design docs. Its great for the players, especially the free to play players, and it offers a lot of amazing opportunities for players with the time to take advantage of it, but the arenas are also the Hercules of the game modes. You have to design around it for all eternity, because you can't remove it, but you also can't ignore it.
And this bears repeating. Players often ask "why can't the devs just [blank]." Like just keep sprinkling rewards here and there and hope it was small enough to not cause problems. But that's just not how this works. If you want them to change anything, they have to look. And once they set their eyes on something, they will see what their eyeballs see. And once they see, they have to do something about what they see. You can ask them to look. You can't tell them what to ignore when they look. Asking the devs to "just throw some shards in there and call it a day" is asking them to design with their eyes closed. Don't look, don't think, just put some shards there and trust me it will be fine.
They can't do that. If we want them to look, we have to accept they will act not just on our suggestions, but what their eyes see, through the lenses of what the game balance requirements of the game are today.
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.
It isn't a threat, it is a statement of fact. And they aren't threatening to worsen rewards, they are implying that if they touch arenas they will return arena rewards to normal.
Arenas are unique in that they allow players to theoretically grind an unlimited amount of the most valuable and flexible resource in the game: its premium currency aka units. This is not normal in free to play games: in fact it is practically unheard of. I keep saying I haven't seen this anywhere else, and people keep saying sure it does, then can't provide any examples that don't immediately fall apart under inspection. Because it simply doesn't exist.
When the arenas were last updated, they were tuned to having a specific unit/time reward earning rate. Arenas had to be tuned by rate, because they are open ended. With most content, there's a reward cap, and no matter how fast you are or how much you do, there's a limit to how much rewards you can get. With the arenas, there is no limit. There is only a limiting rate.
That rate was very carefully negotiated between the designers and the CCP members who participated in analyzing the proposed changes. I won't divulge the precise back and forth details, but I will say that I and at least one other CCP member spent a significant amount of time presenting very detailed analyses about how fast players would reasonably be expected to grind arenas, and thus where the margins were to improve the unit rewards in theory. We pushed that position right to its limits. It released as good as it could possibly be.
Well, roster inflation and other factors have changed things dramatically since then. In particular, players are much faster grinding those arenas. Much, much, much faster. If they were balanced today, they wouldn't be nerfed in the sense that the actual rewards would be reduced, they would be nerfed in that they would be balanced around the same criteria they were originally balanced, but factoring in the current strength of player rosters. We are much stronger now and thus much faster, so hitting the exact same targets would force the arena milestones to become much higher.
We're being allowed to squeeze more and more units out of the arenas, completely outside the margins for which they were originally designed. The devs have been convinced to look the other way for now. But you cannot presume that just because they aren't taking action, they are required to ensconce those improvements as the norm.
If you don't believe they wouldn't, or that there's some "customer-is-always-right" pressure that would force them to avoid it, look to the lower tier EQ maps. When they were revamped, they were revamped according to the rosters that players have now, not the rosters players had years ago when the progression curve was much shallower. We used to presume Proven players would be bringing 3* champs to content, now we presume they are bringing 5* champs. And the content is balanced accordingly.
Interpreting these kinds of statements as a "threat" is precisely why we have so little frank discussion about the game economy in public settings. It is a touchy subject, and full of nuance, and far more likely to start fights than prevent them. If Crashed can't say "if you want us to look at this, be prepared to have this happen as well" in an honest fashion, there's no possibility of having a genuinely honest discussion about the game economy. I've had many discussions with Crashed about the game economy. When he says "if we do this, we'll also be forced to do that" that is the most important and valuable information he can ever give me, and I treat it as such. Because not every game economy designer will tell you these things directly.
That’s why I only advocate for a look at rank rewards. Should there be more units? Absolutely not, let’s not even go into changing that cause then J4 and cyber would move to 54k or something silly. But do the rank rewards need looking at? Probably yeah, otherwise arenas will become stagnant and become an arena bot paradise again like they used to be, if no attention is paid to them.
if they buff shards, they don't want players getting them as easily as they do now, so i'm guessing they'll need to bump milestones higher, which means more rounds...
isn't it better they keep those rewards in the sidequest or wherever they would get them from instead of making us do more work?
That’s just straight up not what I said. I said rank rewards specifically, meaning the milestones being at 1 point or 6283764 points doesn’t matter, it will be determined by the number of players playing arena. Don’t touch the milestones at all, it’s not even a debate that they are very good per time spent, but any arena past the milestones isn’t worth it as 6 star champ usage is dropping heavily unless the champion is very very op.
my bad, i missed that.
the thing is, if they're going to spend valuable dev resources looking into arena, they're going to do a top-down numbers based audit of the whole thing. probably involve multiple departments or something and be costly. since we're already getting more units for our time than originally intended, we can be sure they will rebalance that too...
Comments
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.
@Kabam Crashed mentioned the depreciation value of "Solo crystals", yes we get it too much out there to even consider buffing them. Aren't relic shards pretty much going in the same route at this point? i got a good ammount of shards with no intention to open cause I don't care about duping the relics I already have...
I don't expect t7b and t4a readily available but t6b and t3a is still valued way to high in stuff like the BG and Glory store ,the loyalty store is useless to anyone above uncollected and Sunday arenas just don't offer anything to anyone past act 4.
there's a fixed rewards budget. we can't change it. we can't ask them to change it. they decide when to open the taps on resources based on their release schedule and all we can do enjoy the game.
there's no magical rewards genie that can appear out of nowhere to make our "game experience better". that task is on the devs and they've done a good job the last 10 years which is why we're still here.
i can't understand the reasoning behind some of these posts...
yes, the loyalty store for rank up resources is horribly out of date. 750k for a t6b that we can get from a daily crystal is atrocious. same with 6* AG and the rest, but so what??
this store existing in it's current state isn't a slap to the face or an insult and they're not out of touch. the intention of was to increase AW participation and since that didn't work they diverted resources elsewhere. we're getting "the latest and greatest" stuff, but just somewhere else.
people literally believe that because this specific store is old (and other areas of the game like sunday arenas or summoner advancement), that they're somehow shorting us or ripping us off. they're not. we're always getting the "best stuff" and the economy is moving along exactly as how they've planned it.
with respect to arenas....we're grinding hard currency faster than we did 3 years ago...in a f2p game where units generally keep their value over time. why wouldn't the devs go back to the way it was??
we're already getting units a bit easier than we should....and y'all want them to revise arena????
People quit all the time, and while I don't specifically cheer for specific people to quit, I don't mind at all that the people who quit over Kabam introducing 5* champs to the game quit, because the game was better off without such people playing it. In the long run, the game is healthier with a playerbase willing to accept extensions to the long term progressional ladder. I don't mind the people who quit over Kabam introducing 6* champs to the game, who actively stated here on the forums that they thought Kabam "learned their lesson" with the introduction of 5* champs. I think the game is better off without those people either.
People quit over the difficulty bump when they introduced Masters tier difficulty, they quit over the introduction of the Labyrinth of Legends, they quit over many different iterations to Alliance War, over not having enough gold in the game, over increasing the number of cash offer bundles Kabam sold during Cyber Weekend. They quit over Battlegrounds. And when they quit, they leave behind players who actually want to play this game, and aren't holding out hope for a game that only exists in their own heads that they think is the holy grail of great games that they just can't convince a game developer to make for them.
Kabam doesn't get everything right. I have as many published concrete suggestions to improve or correct the game as anyone else. But that doesn't mean I would trade the Kabam dev team for any group of people here on the forums. If I woke up tomorrow and found out MCOC was going to be run by a player run steering committee, I would probably be making plans to reactivate my lifetime subscription to Star Trek Online.
People who voted for Colossus or Shang shouldn't have an opinion about rewards? Is that what you are trying to say?....
Right, but the difference is those complaints were absurd ones indeed, hence back then you didn't have a single veteran player complaining about them. These however are not, there's even a top Battlegrounds player on this same thread complaining about rewards as well and he's right. 90% of the stuff in that Valiant BGs store is insignificant for the most part once your account is that big, and it has been for over 6 months now this isn't a new thing that people just decided to start complaining about last week.
Nobody here is telling them exactly how to change things or run their game, we're simply pointing out rewards are outdated for Valiant players which they are whether they want to accept it or not.
Arenas are unique in that they allow players to theoretically grind an unlimited amount of the most valuable and flexible resource in the game: its premium currency aka units. This is not normal in free to play games: in fact it is practically unheard of. I keep saying I haven't seen this anywhere else, and people keep saying sure it does, then can't provide any examples that don't immediately fall apart under inspection. Because it simply doesn't exist.
When the arenas were last updated, they were tuned to having a specific unit/time reward earning rate. Arenas had to be tuned by rate, because they are open ended. With most content, there's a reward cap, and no matter how fast you are or how much you do, there's a limit to how much rewards you can get. With the arenas, there is no limit. There is only a limiting rate.
That rate was very carefully negotiated between the designers and the CCP members who participated in analyzing the proposed changes. I won't divulge the precise back and forth details, but I will say that I and at least one other CCP member spent a significant amount of time presenting very detailed analyses about how fast players would reasonably be expected to grind arenas, and thus where the margins were to improve the unit rewards in theory. We pushed that position right to its limits. It released as good as it could possibly be.
Well, roster inflation and other factors have changed things dramatically since then. In particular, players are much faster grinding those arenas. Much, much, much faster. If they were balanced today, they wouldn't be nerfed in the sense that the actual rewards would be reduced, they would be nerfed in that they would be balanced around the same criteria they were originally balanced, but factoring in the current strength of player rosters. We are much stronger now and thus much faster, so hitting the exact same targets would force the arena milestones to become much higher.
We're being allowed to squeeze more and more units out of the arenas, completely outside the margins for which they were originally designed. The devs have been convinced to look the other way for now. But you cannot presume that just because they aren't taking action, they are required to ensconce those improvements as the norm.
If you don't believe they wouldn't, or that there's some "customer-is-always-right" pressure that would force them to avoid it, look to the lower tier EQ maps. When they were revamped, they were revamped according to the rosters that players have now, not the rosters players had years ago when the progression curve was much shallower. We used to presume Proven players would be bringing 3* champs to content, now we presume they are bringing 5* champs. And the content is balanced accordingly.
Interpreting these kinds of statements as a "threat" is precisely why we have so little frank discussion about the game economy in public settings. It is a touchy subject, and full of nuance, and far more likely to start fights than prevent them. If Crashed can't say "if you want us to look at this, be prepared to have this happen as well" in an honest fashion, there's no possibility of having a genuinely honest discussion about the game economy. I've had many discussions with Crashed about the game economy. When he says "if we do this, we'll also be forced to do that" that is the most important and valuable information he can ever give me, and I treat it as such. Because not every game economy designer will tell you these things directly.
we have it good right now. if the devs do a deep dive on the numbers and do a revision, they will do a cut and paste job on the "rewards" (what we gain in arena we lose from somewhere else, meaning no net gain) while making us grind a ton more. more work for no discernible difference, so why ask for it?
i haven't seen a good argument for an arena buff yet.
In going back and reading my initial reply, I realize I was unfair to the OP because I didn't actually address the topic of this thread. Do we actually want our players to play less? That's a complicated and nuanced question, but I will try my best to answer it succinctly.
In the three years since I joined the game team, one of the most common topics in the community has been burnout. There have been various points in those three years where players have very clearly told us we are demanding too much of them and their time. Our game is becoming bigger and more complex, and a large portion of our core player base is aging, which comes with new responsibilities. At the same time the global economy has deteriorated -- people are working longer hours and have less time for pursuits like mobile games. You can see this clearly in industry trends, with the rise of hyper-casual games that ask very very little of players dominating the mobile space.
So the "time economy" of our game has become a very core concept for the design team. We want players to log in and play our game every day, ideally multiple sessions a day. But we know there are significant groups of our players who we shouldn't push to do more than that. And we also know that it's a very fine line between creating a set of rewards that feels good, and one that feels mandatory for our end game players. I would argue for some of our players those two things are actually synonymous.
So the answer to the question "Do you want players to play less?" is it depends, but in some cases yes we do want players to play less. You can see this for example very clearly with the direction we have taken with Incursions. Rather than update the baseline rewards, we have created a special challenge Sector that only runs once every ~3 months. That is how often we want most late game players to play Incursions, which is less than we had been asking of them in the past.
At any rate thank you all for taking the time to provide feedback, especially those who did so respectfully. Today is a holiday in Canada, but tomorrow I plan to talk with the economy team about making some tweaks to our plans based on feedback in this thread, and I'll try to move that Glory store update forward ASAP.
o7
And you talk about arenas as if it was the only topic being discussed.
If you want the arenas to award 7s but only use 6s, good luck. I had better success literally convincing Kabam to give away war revives than do that.
I was meaning in the sense of it’s a “nerf” because the time needed for the same rewards would be increased. Yes, back to the previous level, but still a nerf really because now ur time in arena is worth less per minute/hour/whatever unit of time you wanna use. It’s a different kind of nerf to the usual decrease in resources or if you’re talking about champions, damage and/or utility.
I still think it would be a bad thing to do due to the whole “time as a resource” topic. Crashed has just replied to another comment saying that the time economy is now a big factor in a wide range of decisions, which I think is a good thing as the game expands. As he said, burnout is very real, especially as this game gets bigger and bigger and would require more hours to do every area of content. If they did return the time needed in arena for milestone to the previous amount, it would make 3 groups of players imo:
1. You either don’t care for arena or will get all milestones anyway (probably me). Basically the change doesn’t affect you much, maybe more annoying if you are the “I’ll get them anyway” type player
2. Increased time in arena for a player that does everything will lead to more frequent burnout. Obviously this is the summoners choice really to do everything, but we can’t be blind to the fact that some will try to do everything either to “keep up” or just cause they’re a grinder.
3. Players with limited time will not be able to get max units now leading to less engagement with unit deals, and ultimately leading to people being driven away from the game as they feel they can’t keep up
Obviously group 2 and 3 here are bad overall for the game in a sense of wanting to grow the player base, but it’s a very possible scenario if arenas are reverted.
That’s why I only advocate for a look at rank rewards. Should there be more units? Absolutely not, let’s not even go into changing that cause then J4 and cyber would move to 54k or something silly. But do the rank rewards need looking at? Probably yeah, otherwise arenas will become stagnant and become an arena bot paradise again like they used to be, if no attention is paid to them.
They are giving out some incredible information. They are giving you a "peek behind the curtain", with key insights into the challenges and competing objectives that factor into the decisions that they make.
Anybody who feels that these folks are just "making excuses", or trying to antagonize you, or threatening you: you're really doing yourself a disservice if you're missing out on the point of these posts. I think everybody following this thread would be well served by rereading these posts, because they are extremely insightful about a decision making process that you will otherwise never get to see.
isn't it better they keep those rewards in the sidequest or wherever they would get them from instead of making us do more work?
Remember we're not talking about a novel situation that hasn't happened before. We're talking about returning the arenas to a similar reward/time situation they were in when they first launched in their current form. My interpretation of what happened is that while many players complained, the data (at least my data collected from my own arena participation) suggests participation remained relatively steady, and as roster inflation took hold the arenas very slowly got easier over time, and it was the direction of the arenas and not their static state that influenced players to stop complaining about it (above the baseline complaints we will always have surrounding anything grind related). Subconsciously or otherwise, players cared more about the fact that they were getting a little bit more rewards for a little bit less time over time
I do want to address the grind thing, and the arenas connection to the issue of grind and burnout. As Crashed mentions, burnout is a thing. He came along during the period of time when Kabam was coming to grips with Dungeons, and the burnout related discussion surrounding Act 7 beta. Burnout was *the* holistic game issue at the time. So you'd think that arenas of all things would be a problem, as arenas are the single longest running game mode that players have complained about burn out for.
I think arenas are a unique legacy, Yet Another Reason we want to tread lightly around it. It would be trivial to eliminate burnout in the arenas: cap the number of rounds you can do. Or cap rewards at the top milestone. Eliminate the open ended competition for rank rewards. All horrible things, but they directly tackle the issue of burnout in the arena.
The arena is the *one* place where the game allows for open ended grinding, and it is tolerated by Kabam specifically because it is the one and only place where such gameplay is allowed to exist. It is strongly discouraged everywhere else. Incursions tops out. Even Battlegrounds has practical limits on how many matches you can do in a season and still be rewarded for it. Arena is the exception. During the closed beta for Battlegrounds, I recall being told when I made a suggestion about it that Battlegrounds was not going to become another arena.
No matter how many rounds it takes to get the milestone rewards in the arena, there is a practical limit to grinding the arena, *except* for rank rewards. Rank rewards are still the one place where there is literally no cap on effort: it is the players themselves that can bid infinite work for rewards. And I think that's why rank rewards are the part of the arena where the devs are most cautious about revisiting.
I would bet anything that if Kabam could go back in time, they would delete the arena from their design docs. Its great for the players, especially the free to play players, and it offers a lot of amazing opportunities for players with the time to take advantage of it, but the arenas are also the Hercules of the game modes. You have to design around it for all eternity, because you can't remove it, but you also can't ignore it.
And this bears repeating. Players often ask "why can't the devs just [blank]." Like just keep sprinkling rewards here and there and hope it was small enough to not cause problems. But that's just not how this works. If you want them to change anything, they have to look. And once they set their eyes on something, they will see what their eyeballs see. And once they see, they have to do something about what they see. You can ask them to look. You can't tell them what to ignore when they look. Asking the devs to "just throw some shards in there and call it a day" is asking them to design with their eyes closed. Don't look, don't think, just put some shards there and trust me it will be fine.
They can't do that. If we want them to look, we have to accept they will act not just on our suggestions, but what their eyes see, through the lenses of what the game balance requirements of the game are today.
the thing is, if they're going to spend valuable dev resources looking into arena, they're going to do a top-down numbers based audit of the whole thing. probably involve multiple departments or something and be costly. since we're already getting more units for our time than originally intended, we can be sure they will rebalance that too...