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.
As impractical as it obviously would be, I wish everyone had a chance to work with the devs on one thing. One piece of content, one game mode improvement, one champion design. Actually make decisions that actually get implemented in the actual game having to work through the actual process of idea to deliverable.
And then see how the player community reacts to it.
Unfortunately, that's an impossibility. The best that's ever going to happen is the few of us that get the opportunity to interact with the developers share their experience with the larger player community, so they get the benefit of seeing how the sausage is made (to the best extent possible) and what the real world challenges are. That's why I've been doing that for years now, actually going back to before I had significant interactions with *this* team and leveraging the experiences I've had with *other* dev teams for context.
Its a mostly thankless exercise, which is probably why few actually do it. My position is that if one person actually learns anything for every hundred that dismiss it, its still worth it. But I'm sure a lot of people in a position to contribute to such a discussion take one look at how I and even Crashed are treated and nope themselves right out the door.
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.
I feel like the situation is slightly different compared to the past though. Whilst the past provides good data for it not being that bad in reality, the major arena change to the summoner trials and 2 6 star arenas pre-dates many of the things we have today (I believe). Nowadays there is the addition of battlegrounds, saga chase tickets/crystals/tokens, incursions revamped and having some monthly events etc.
Pretty much there’s a lot more to do nowadays, whereas when they was originally changed there was EQ and SQ, war and aq realistically. So increasing the time needed in arena back to the previously intended would have a higher chance of burnout than when it was changed originally. At least that’s how I see it, new data may show a different result if it actually occurred, but I doubt we would ever see that.
In terms of the unlimited grind aspect, if somebody is burning out cause they are putting say 100m up in featured arena every rotation, that’s kinda their own fault. If someone is experiencing burnout just trying to get the milestones, that’s a bit different and unintended (not that arena being unlimited is intended to cause burnout, but the milestones obviously shouldn’t be intended to cause burnout).
Tbh, arena is not my main issue with the game economy atm, I included it in the post to address and give feedback on all the areas mentioned. The easy solution is disregard my feedback on arena and do nothing, and realistically I wouldn’t be that mad (in a few years time, that opinion could change, but obviously time will do that).
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
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.
Let's leave my gameplay out of this. If you want a straight answer, my gameplay is not driven by rewards. I am happy enough playing at whatever level I play, only optimised for my game experience. I might spend a few hours on the game some days and none at all some others. The main thing I take seriously is doing my part for my alliance, other than that I not particularly bothered about the pace at which I progress. I also support the game to the extent I can. I don't recall ever asking for higher rewards or easier content or better champs.
You are one of the few people with an inside track to the game. You are also the one who made the assertion that rewards are incentives *to do* content and the player base would need to reduce efforts they put in currently to justify an increase in those incentives. These are your exact words
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.
I only asked if we should play less to get better rewards, because that's what you seemed to be suggesting. Your response was somewhat personal and that I should leave the game?
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.
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
not saying you're wrong on BGs rewards being outdated, but if they updated the BG store before cyber monday, it would devalue their offers really badly.
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
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.
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
not saying you're wrong on BGs rewards being outdated, but if they updated the BG store before cyber monday, it would devalue their offers really badly.
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
Oh yeah I absolutely agree with you that this is likely what they are holding out for. But seeing as it’s been over a year now (due to confirmation of no change with realm season), they had time after J4 and chose not to. That seemed like the perfect time to change it and they missed the chance.
😂 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
I appreciate the well thought out reply, and I genuinely appreciate the fact that you did take the time to read every post, it’s refreshing & relieving to hear. Because of that I also feel I should apologize for the slightly snarky remark and assumption that I made. There’s been quite a few recent decisions from Kabam that I have disagreed with and it led me to losing a bit of faith, hence the comment I made. But like I said it’s great to know that you took the time to read the community feedback and that now gives me confidence in the fact that even if our feedback isn’t acted upon it’s at least heard.
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.
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
not saying you're wrong on BGs rewards being outdated, but if they updated the BG store before cyber monday, it would devalue their offers really badly.
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
Oh yeah I absolutely agree with you that this is likely what they are holding out for. But seeing as it’s been over a year now (due to confirmation of no change with realm season), they had time after J4 and chose not to. That seemed like the perfect time to change it and they missed the chance.
after july would be too early, doing it now would hurt cyber. earliest reasonable time is after cyber monday or even after gifting.
it sucks but there's a going to be times in the cycle where the rewards aren't that great and all we can do is wait. it's frustrating but that's the nature of the game.
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.
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
not saying you're wrong on BGs rewards being outdated, but if they updated the BG store before cyber monday, it would devalue their offers really badly.
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
Oh yeah I absolutely agree with you that this is likely what they are holding out for. But seeing as it’s been over a year now (due to confirmation of no change with realm season), they had time after J4 and chose not to. That seemed like the perfect time to change it and they missed the chance.
after july would be too early, doing it now would hurt cyber. earliest reasonable time is after cyber monday or even after gifting.
it sucks but there's a going to be times in the cycle where the rewards aren't that great and all we can do is wait. it's frustrating but that's the nature of the game.
The store isn’t the main issue here, after July 4th would have been too early I agree (although even that is debatable cause it would be around 5 months since update). It’s the GC ranked rewards that haven’t been updated in over a year. Crashed mentions that they continue to stagger the reward updates, but that’s simply not true as GC hasn’t been updated in line with store and solo/alliance events. The argument of “updating bgs store is an update to Gc rewards” isn’t really good either, and in the most respectful way, has been laughed out of the top bgs chats on line for being ridiculous.
I know there will be points where a store will suck, I’ve been in this game long enough to see this cycle enough times now. But the GC rewards seem to have broken out of the cycle and have been in the sucking stage for 6-9 months now which is kinda wild. Usually stores/reward sera will suck for 1-3 months and then get brought back in line
😂 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
I appreciate the well thought out reply, and I genuinely appreciate the fact that you did take the time to read every post, it’s refreshing & relieving to hear. Because of that I also feel I should apologize for the slightly snarky remark and assumption that I made. There’s been quite a few recent decisions from Kabam that I have disagreed with and it led me to losing a bit of faith, hence the comment I made. But like I said it’s great to know that you took the time to read the community feedback and that now gives me confidence in the fact that even if our feedback isn’t acted upon it’s at least heard.
Hope you had a great holiday night.
This exactly. Also I didn’t expect to get a literal answer to my title lmao but I’ll take it. Still appreciate the response from Crashed and if this thread does anything, I’ll be happy
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.
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
not saying you're wrong on BGs rewards being outdated, but if they updated the BG store before cyber monday, it would devalue their offers really badly.
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
Oh yeah I absolutely agree with you that this is likely what they are holding out for. But seeing as it’s been over a year now (due to confirmation of no change with realm season), they had time after J4 and chose not to. That seemed like the perfect time to change it and they missed the chance.
after july would be too early, doing it now would hurt cyber. earliest reasonable time is after cyber monday or even after gifting.
it sucks but there's a going to be times in the cycle where the rewards aren't that great and all we can do is wait. it's frustrating but that's the nature of the game.
The store isn’t the main issue here, after July 4th would have been too early I agree (although even that is debatable cause it would be around 5 months since update). It’s the GC ranked rewards that haven’t been updated in over a year. Crashed mentions that they continue to stagger the reward updates, but that’s simply not true as GC hasn’t been updated in line with store and solo/alliance events. The argument of “updating bgs store is an update to Gc rewards” isn’t really good either, and in the most respectful way, has been laughed out of the top bgs chats on line for being ridiculous.
I know there will be points where a store will suck, I’ve been in this game long enough to see this cycle enough times now. But the GC rewards seem to have broken out of the cycle and have been in the sucking stage for 6-9 months now which is kinda wild. Usually stores/reward sera will suck for 1-3 months and then get brought back in line
they updated the BG store in feb and the solo rank rewards in april. i know the last GC rank reward update was last october but it's still changes to the economy. understandably frustrating but good changes will happen soon hopefully.
“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????
just for the single reason of making the game mode fun before rewarding, why should the game mode be so focused on the rewards before being fun and interactive.
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.
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
not saying you're wrong on BGs rewards being outdated, but if they updated the BG store before cyber monday, it would devalue their offers really badly.
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
I have a really hard understanding the constant justification that cash deal rewards and the basic store economy has to be tied to themselves. take for example introduction of t7a, being introduced at 2 with every sale, and the stores not even getting the catalysts for at least 2 sagas. by that time obviously kabam isn't going to make it available for 2 per month, but like half per month while the value on the deals is still same.
because we're selling the best rewards in the best quantity doesn't mean we can't even make them available to the general playerbase.
Ya, I’ve been feeling the burnout too, planned on maybe taking a break after getting deathless she hulk. On that note, no deathless objective should be battlegrounds related because that is just not unique. They should always be placed in some type of innovated solo content imo
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.
😂 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
Can you give me an answer on how much the economy team actually values the relic rewards in the bg circuit rewards? Those things have been really depreciated with the changes to the bg store and now you can buy the relic rewards for c1 for just a few thousands bg tokens and I don't understand why those get improved or straight up removed, it's just funny that getting c1 you still get for example 3 t3 basic alloy which you are worth 0 now.
😂 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
I appreciate the well thought out reply, and I genuinely appreciate the fact that you did take the time to read every post, it’s refreshing & relieving to hear. Because of that I also feel I should apologize for the slightly snarky remark and assumption that I made. There’s been quite a few recent decisions from Kabam that I have disagreed with and it led me to losing a bit of faith, hence the comment I made. But like I said it’s great to know that you took the time to read the community feedback and that now gives me confidence in the fact that even if our feedback isn’t acted upon it’s at least heard.
Hope you had a great holiday night.
This exactly. Also I didn’t expect to get a literal answer to my title lmao but I’ll take it. Still appreciate the response from Crashed and if this thread does anything, I’ll be happy
The only thing that probably won't improve is gameplay. No amount of rank up mats or a generous game economy is going to resolve all the AI and input issues and make the game nearly as playable and enjoyable as it was. And it seems that's why the subjects of AI and gameplay mechanic issues weren't addressed.
I just turned 48 and I'm dumb as a box of hammers when it comes to most of these types of things but I think its a salute...and yes, I stared at it for 10 minutes so thats all I've got.
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.
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
not saying you're wrong on BGs rewards being outdated, but if they updated the BG store before cyber monday, it would devalue their offers really badly.
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
I have a really hard understanding the constant justification that cash deal rewards and the basic store economy has to be tied to themselves. take for example introduction of t7a, being introduced at 2 with every sale, and the stores not even getting the catalysts for at least 2 sagas. by that time obviously kabam isn't going to make it available for 2 per month, but like half per month while the value on the deals is still same.
because we're selling the best rewards in the best quantity doesn't mean we can't even make them available to the general playerbase.
cash funds the game and ingame stores and content close the spending gap to maintain a healthy game balance.
limit supply throughout the year, open the taps on july 4 or cyber monday so the deals look great, make tons of money, relatively soon after buff the ingame stores so nonspenders can survive, toss in content that narrows the gap a little more (crucible can be done for free and gave a 2-3 gem, necropolis cost 500 revives 10 months ago), rinse and repeat...
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.
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere. Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
not saying you're wrong on BGs rewards being outdated, but if they updated the BG store before cyber monday, it would devalue their offers really badly.
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
Oh yeah I absolutely agree with you that this is likely what they are holding out for. But seeing as it’s been over a year now (due to confirmation of no change with realm season), they had time after J4 and chose not to. That seemed like the perfect time to change it and they missed the chance.
after july would be too early, doing it now would hurt cyber. earliest reasonable time is after cyber monday or even after gifting.
it sucks but there's a going to be times in the cycle where the rewards aren't that great and all we can do is wait. it's frustrating but that's the nature of the game.
The store isn’t the main issue here, after July 4th would have been too early I agree (although even that is debatable cause it would be around 5 months since update). It’s the GC ranked rewards that haven’t been updated in over a year. Crashed mentions that they continue to stagger the reward updates, but that’s simply not true as GC hasn’t been updated in line with store and solo/alliance events. The argument of “updating bgs store is an update to Gc rewards” isn’t really good either, and in the most respectful way, has been laughed out of the top bgs chats on line for being ridiculous.
I know there will be points where a store will suck, I’ve been in this game long enough to see this cycle enough times now. But the GC rewards seem to have broken out of the cycle and have been in the sucking stage for 6-9 months now which is kinda wild. Usually stores/reward sera will suck for 1-3 months and then get brought back in line
they updated the BG store in feb and the solo rank rewards in april. i know the last GC rank reward update was last october but it's still changes to the economy. understandably frustrating but good changes will happen soon hopefully.
The issue I have with this is they both have something in common.
It’s more obvious with solo rank rewards, no skill is actually required to score high, you could lose every match and keep spamming marks to get up there. Sure winning gives you approx triple points, but it’s not a requirement, whereas to score high in GC ranked it is.
Now the bg store might seem that it’s a skill based change, and whilst that’s technically true, the skill level required is quite low especially as the season goes on. Let’s just use getting through the VT for example. Combined with an active alliance (again, not skill based), you can net around 100k tokens a season I believe (haven’t done the exact calculations but I believe it’s close to this if you combine VT and ally milestones). This is enough to get a decent chunk of the useful stuff in the bgs store, as there’s only really 4/5 good items for valiants (unless you’re in a pinch and really need say t5cc).So the store isn’t majorly skill based either, as the only requirement to get a lot of good stuff out of it is complete VT, which thousands of players do each season.
As a player who has pushed up to 800 points in GC before, I can barely get much more high quality rewards due to weekly caps, and have to eventually spend on less great items. Therefore the tokens from GC rewards don’t really have that much additional value, as I could get most of the stuff anyway. That then leaves the shard rewards (not even gonna mention the relic stuff, everyone knows those rewards are really bad but relics are in a weird spot atm). The number 1 skilled player for the season gets a single 7 star and half a Titan. That’s it. If someone has the roster to get to c1, those rewards are horrendous.
Players should be individually rewarded catalysts and other items like sigs, additional shards for their individual achievements in GC, not just how many matches they played this season with the paid currency. Every single good item is in a non-skill based area of bgs, so it’s very clear that our skill is not valued.
An easy example to help fix this? The battlerealm brawl last year. The winner got a 2-3 rankup, some rare/exclusive champs at the time (I think it was cheeilth?), and even every player who got to the top 8 got a solid reward. That’s great! A 2-3 gem (or catalyst equivalent) for c1-c4 players would not be game breaking in any way. But it would mean your skill in bgs is valued, and gives a reward incentive to push for the top. We’ve already clarified that the top pushing people aren’t fully rewards driven, that’s well known, but if we was actually rewarded for our skill, the competitive aspect would be secured. I have seen people slowly drop off the c4+ push as it’s not worth it, but they didn’t do it straight away. If the rewards continue to never be changed, the withdrawal would be slow over time, but is happening. For example Andrewtheruff stated just last week that after his 5th c1 title, he’s not pushing c1 anymore. Another high level player withdrawing.
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.
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.
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Hey Crashed. Thanks as always for the info. Can I ask for one clarification though? You mention you don’t think an economy change in arenas would ultimately benefit the players and I certainly understand your point for the ones Monday to Saturday. However, would it be possible to tweak just Sunday and maybe throw in som 6* shards or a couple units. I can imagine that would be game breaking
If they go back to touch the sunday arenas, they're going to touch the normal ones too
opinion or fact? what insider info do you have?
When the arenas were refactored from the original four to the current three arena structure, I was one of the people in the pseudo working group of CCP players giving feedback to Kabam about the changes, and helping to analyze different variations of the changes and reward structures.
If they go back to look at the Sunday arenas, they will almost certainly do so as part of a holistic review of all arenas. There are things I can say about the process and things I probably cannot directly comment on, but one thing I will say is the devs were very open about the thought process during that exchange. Not only what the requirements and limitations were surrounding the arena refactor, but even *why* an arena refactor was happening. While I cannot speak for the devs and they are free to change opinions whenever they want, the fundamentals of game development and game economy design don't change.
Every property of the arenas, from the rewards to the champs you're allowed to use to the milestone point structure are all interconnected. When we tried to change any one of them during the arena redesign, we ended up changing all of them to match, or having the change rejected because it would require changing all of them to match. And the arenas need to fit within the large game economy, which itself places constraints on things (re:units).
Collectively, the arena reward availability is *far higher* than it was intended to be, due to a variety of inflation effects. I say that as someone who knows what the original constraints the arenas were designed to fit in were, and I don't think I'm giving away any super secret idea there. Even Crashed has hinted in live streams that arena rewards are living outside the lines at the moment.
The devs could sprinkle a few rewards into the Sunday arenas and call it a day, but they won't because they have better things to do than do some small thing no one will appreciate. They could do a complete overhaul but I doubt they would do that without some compelling reason to do so. One compelling reason to do so would be to do that as part of a complete overhaul of the arenas to update them for modern roster strength. That would allow them to also review what the rewards and commensurate appropriate roster strength would be for a hypothetical new set of Sunday arenas.
You don't want them to do that. You really really don't.
5. The reality after 10 years of game play is that there are currently more frustrations than there have ever been.
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.
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.
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.
You cooked, ate, and left no crumbs here. That person has always been ready to attack anybody who dares to mention faults with the game.
…for the love of god update the Sigil store..for Valiants there is no use in buying it after you have the witch..
As far as everything else…I have played this game for 10 yrs and one thing remains constant..when progress is too slow you can quit for a year or 6 months and just keep checking back in until the next gate has been been opened for your progress.. and you will be fine. BG’s (p2w) may be the new exception because there comes a point where your skill cannot match a bigger roster and best way to keep up with those big rosters is to spend and always keep playing so you get big and stay big too.
Otherwise, On one hand throttling the economy and progress does keep the gap between spending and free to play closer because the leading edge players that spend are buying the crumbs of the shiny new thing dangled in front of them 250 shards of the next shining thing or the top tier war AQ rewards chasers are doing the same (chasing crumbs of new stuff) , but in reality when the economy/stroes/rewards update comes 1 yr later and that new thing becomes more freely available , the free2play person catches right back up because the game then gives the same new shiny thing away at 1000k, 1500k shards or whatever to catch folks back up to the spenders…it’s genius…it’s the best smoke and mirrors illusion ever but it does keep the gap smaller than more frequent store/economy updates.
not burning through the ranks is one thing but when speed bumps feel like never ending school zones folks will go on another road.
Reality is the side effect of when everything is severely throttled for too long and the economy/progression is being choked off heavily like it is right now..folks lose interest so, the result is actually less engagement and more incentive to take a break and let the game progress/economy and stores catch back up to where the player is more devoted to play again = more player breaks more players moving on to other games/sources for entertainment
Let’s just hope Kabam can find the right balance on the throttles to keep players in the game and engaged enough to keep the lights on before they blockbuster themselves thinking they have it right when clearly the current plan is missing the mark here…hopefully players do return after such breaks when these choke points in progress and the economy loosen up a bit to keep things interesting
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.
I only asked if we should play less to get better rewards, because that's what you seemed to be suggesting. Your response was somewhat personal and that I should leave the game?
That was not what I said. What I said was that while it is theoretically possible for a player to conceive of the strategy of playing less to manipulate the devs into increasing rewards to reincentivize play, that strategy requires a player to have their gameplay be governed either predominantly by or solely by strategic transactional effects.
The devs presume the players play however they want to play, and they can use incentives to shift game play in small ways. They do not presume this is a contest for control of the game where the players will change gameplay not for normal player reasons but specifically to influence their decisions directly. They do not design for such people, and would ignore such signals if they recognized them as happening. In all likelyhood, they would try very hard not to reward such behavior, as that would be counterproductive to the long term health of the game. Which means: players who think like this and think this would be successful and have the will to actually try it would find the game get progressively hostile to them.
I never said you should stop playing the game, because to be blunt I don't believe you would actually change your behavior in this way, nor would you be able to find enough players to make a noticeable attempt. I'm saying *if* you did and *if* you were to find such a group of players, you'd probably discover that the same game design forces that would ordinarily trigger economy decisions in your favor would not happen, and could in fact happen in the exact opposite direction. And that would probably cause you to leave the game on your own accord, because that's a self-defeating downward spiral.
Tbh, arena is not my main issue with the game economy atm, I included it in the post to address and give feedback on all the areas mentioned. The easy solution is disregard my feedback on arena and do nothing, and realistically I wouldn’t be that mad (in a few years time, that opinion could change, but obviously time will do that).
To be clear, I addressed arena because it is something I have very specific things to say, and because many people not just you bring it up. I did not single out the arena to discount the rest of your comments: I simply think Crashed did a better job addressing them than I could.
Ironically, I would think it would be the older players that would recognize the ascii salute. I didn't think in the age of emojis that younger players would recognize that.
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And then see how the player community reacts to it.
Unfortunately, that's an impossibility. The best that's ever going to happen is the few of us that get the opportunity to interact with the developers share their experience with the larger player community, so they get the benefit of seeing how the sausage is made (to the best extent possible) and what the real world challenges are. That's why I've been doing that for years now, actually going back to before I had significant interactions with *this* team and leveraging the experiences I've had with *other* dev teams for context.
Its a mostly thankless exercise, which is probably why few actually do it. My position is that if one person actually learns anything for every hundred that dismiss it, its still worth it. But I'm sure a lot of people in a position to contribute to such a discussion take one look at how I and even Crashed are treated and nope themselves right out the door.
Pretty much there’s a lot more to do nowadays, whereas when they was originally changed there was EQ and SQ, war and aq realistically. So increasing the time needed in arena back to the previously intended would have a higher chance of burnout than when it was changed originally. At least that’s how I see it, new data may show a different result if it actually occurred, but I doubt we would ever see that.
In terms of the unlimited grind aspect, if somebody is burning out cause they are putting say 100m up in featured arena every rotation, that’s kinda their own fault. If someone is experiencing burnout just trying to get the milestones, that’s a bit different and unintended (not that arena being unlimited is intended to cause burnout, but the milestones obviously shouldn’t be intended to cause burnout).
Tbh, arena is not my main issue with the game economy atm, I included it in the post to address and give feedback on all the areas mentioned. The easy solution is disregard my feedback on arena and do nothing, and realistically I wouldn’t be that mad (in a few years time, that opinion could change, but obviously time will do that).
My main area of concern is bgs. There’s no nice way to phrase it, but bgs economy is in a dire way right now for the skilled Gc pushers. Line chats about it have just become people laughing about how bad it is, as the other solution would be to post rant vids on YouTube but that gets nowhere.
Some people misinterpret it as bgs dying, but the opposite is true. Bgs is thriving because of the community through YouTube and line. I’ve made many friends in the very highest level of the game through playing them in Gc, interacting in line and on streams, and it’s fun! But despite all that fun, we can all communally see that if we was all solely promoted by rewards, we would not be playing bgs at all atm, or at the very least not playing the way we do (skill based).
You are one of the few people with an inside track to the game. You are also the one who made the assertion that rewards are incentives *to do* content and the player base would need to reduce efforts they put in currently to justify an increase in those incentives. These are your exact words I only asked if we should play less to get better rewards, because that's what you seemed to be suggesting. Your response was somewhat personal and that I should leave the game?
major sales cause economy changes first and then the non-cash stuff gets updated after it.
But seeing as it’s been over a year now (due to confirmation of no change with realm season), they had time after J4 and chose not to. That seemed like the perfect time to change it and they missed the chance.
Hope you had a great holiday night.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/361217/battlegrounds-season-16-meta-and-valiant-store-introduction#latest
after july would be too early, doing it now would hurt cyber. earliest reasonable time is after cyber monday or even after gifting.
it sucks but there's a going to be times in the cycle where the rewards aren't that great and all we can do is wait. it's frustrating but that's the nature of the game.
Crashed mentions that they continue to stagger the reward updates, but that’s simply not true as GC hasn’t been updated in line with store and solo/alliance events. The argument of “updating bgs store is an update to Gc rewards” isn’t really good either, and in the most respectful way, has been laughed out of the top bgs chats on line for being ridiculous.
I know there will be points where a store will suck, I’ve been in this game long enough to see this cycle enough times now. But the GC rewards seem to have broken out of the cycle and have been in the sucking stage for 6-9 months now which is kinda wild. Usually stores/reward sera will suck for 1-3 months and then get brought back in line
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/364076/battlegrounds-season-17-nodes-solo-event-and-ranked-reward-updates#latest
take for example introduction of t7a, being introduced at 2 with every sale, and the stores not even getting the catalysts for at least 2 sagas. by that time obviously kabam isn't going to make it available for 2 per month, but like half per month while the value on the deals is still same.
because we're selling the best rewards in the best quantity doesn't mean we can't even make them available to the general playerbase.
@DNA3000 thanks for your contributions.
@Kabam Crashed thanks for your posts, and responding to people's frustrations calmly.
One question, and maybe I'm giving myself away as part of the game's "aging population" here, but wtf does this mean?
limit supply throughout the year, open the taps on july 4 or cyber monday so the deals look great, make tons of money, relatively soon after buff the ingame stores so nonspenders can survive, toss in content that narrows the gap a little more (crucible can be done for free and gave a 2-3 gem, necropolis cost 500 revives 10 months ago), rinse and repeat...
It’s more obvious with solo rank rewards, no skill is actually required to score high, you could lose every match and keep spamming marks to get up there. Sure winning gives you approx triple points, but it’s not a requirement, whereas to score high in GC ranked it is.
Now the bg store might seem that it’s a skill based change, and whilst that’s technically true, the skill level required is quite low especially as the season goes on. Let’s just use getting through the VT for example. Combined with an active alliance (again, not skill based), you can net around 100k tokens a season I believe (haven’t done the exact calculations but I believe it’s close to this if you combine VT and ally milestones). This is enough to get a decent chunk of the useful stuff in the bgs store, as there’s only really 4/5 good items for valiants (unless you’re in a pinch and really need say t5cc).So the store isn’t majorly skill based either, as the only requirement to get a lot of good stuff out of it is complete VT, which thousands of players do each season.
As a player who has pushed up to 800 points in GC before, I can barely get much more high quality rewards due to weekly caps, and have to eventually spend on less great items. Therefore the tokens from GC rewards don’t really have that much additional value, as I could get most of the stuff anyway. That then leaves the shard rewards (not even gonna mention the relic stuff, everyone knows those rewards are really bad but relics are in a weird spot atm). The number 1 skilled player for the season gets a single 7 star and half a Titan. That’s it. If someone has the roster to get to c1, those rewards are horrendous.
Players should be individually rewarded catalysts and other items like sigs, additional shards for their individual achievements in GC, not just how many matches they played this season with the paid currency. Every single good item is in a non-skill based area of bgs, so it’s very clear that our skill is not valued.
An easy example to help fix this? The battlerealm brawl last year. The winner got a 2-3 rankup, some rare/exclusive champs at the time (I think it was cheeilth?), and even every player who got to the top 8 got a solid reward. That’s great! A 2-3 gem (or catalyst equivalent) for c1-c4 players would not be game breaking in any way. But it would mean your skill in bgs is valued, and gives a reward incentive to push for the top. We’ve already clarified that the top pushing people aren’t fully rewards driven, that’s well known, but if we was actually rewarded for our skill, the competitive aspect would be secured.
I have seen people slowly drop off the c4+ push as it’s not worth it, but they didn’t do it straight away. If the rewards continue to never be changed, the withdrawal would be slow over time, but is happening. For example Andrewtheruff stated just last week that after his 5th c1 title, he’s not pushing c1 anymore. Another high level player withdrawing.
As far as everything else…I have played this game for 10 yrs and one thing remains constant..when progress is too slow you can quit for a year or 6 months and just keep checking back in until the next gate has been been opened for your progress.. and you will be fine. BG’s (p2w) may be the new exception because there comes a point where your skill cannot match a bigger roster and best way to keep up with those big rosters is to spend and always keep playing so you get big and stay big too.
Otherwise, On one hand throttling the economy and progress does keep the gap between spending and free to play closer because the leading edge players that spend are buying the crumbs of the shiny new thing dangled in front of them 250 shards of the next shining thing or the top tier war AQ rewards chasers are doing the same (chasing crumbs of new stuff) , but in reality when the economy/stroes/rewards update comes 1 yr later and that new thing becomes more freely available , the free2play person catches right back up because the game then gives the same new shiny thing away at 1000k, 1500k shards or whatever to catch folks back up to the spenders…it’s genius…it’s the best smoke and mirrors illusion ever but it does keep the gap smaller than more frequent store/economy updates.
not burning through the ranks is one thing but when speed bumps feel like never ending school zones folks will go on another road.
Reality is the side effect of when everything is severely throttled for too long and the economy/progression is being choked off heavily like it is right now..folks lose interest so, the result is actually less engagement and more incentive to take a break and let the game progress/economy and stores catch back up to where the player is more devoted to play again = more player breaks more players moving on to other games/sources for entertainment
Let’s just hope Kabam can find the right balance on the throttles to keep players in the game and engaged enough to keep the lights on before they blockbuster themselves thinking they have it right when clearly the current plan is missing the mark here…hopefully players do return after such breaks when these choke points in progress and the economy loosen up a bit to keep things interesting
Maybe 1000s of people didn’t vote because they don’t want to create a social media profile.
The devs presume the players play however they want to play, and they can use incentives to shift game play in small ways. They do not presume this is a contest for control of the game where the players will change gameplay not for normal player reasons but specifically to influence their decisions directly. They do not design for such people, and would ignore such signals if they recognized them as happening. In all likelyhood, they would try very hard not to reward such behavior, as that would be counterproductive to the long term health of the game. Which means: players who think like this and think this would be successful and have the will to actually try it would find the game get progressively hostile to them.
I never said you should stop playing the game, because to be blunt I don't believe you would actually change your behavior in this way, nor would you be able to find enough players to make a noticeable attempt. I'm saying *if* you did and *if* you were to find such a group of players, you'd probably discover that the same game design forces that would ordinarily trigger economy decisions in your favor would not happen, and could in fact happen in the exact opposite direction. And that would probably cause you to leave the game on your own accord, because that's a self-defeating downward spiral.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯