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.
Specifically, you're referring to the higher tier rank rewards. When people talk about "BG rewards" in general I think they are fine. It is the ranked rewards they usually (but not always) mean.
If you ask me if the BG ranked rewards "make sense" in a risk/reward/effort sense, I'd say probably not. But if you ask me if they should be changed, that's where things get tricky, for the same reasons I outlined involving arenas.
GC is not a tournament. It requires a ton of skill to progress to the top, but there's also a grind component to it. Someone with less skill but willing to grind more can, in theory, progress higher, because random chance still plays a role. The higher the rank rewards, the more incentive there is to grind.
As it stands, for the players who are actually placing in Celestial now, its hard to get there and stay there. For the lower tier GCs, it is vastly harder, because they are not as good, so relatively speaking it would be far harder for them to manage to outpace the competition at the top, which is why they currently don't. For me, happy to cruise into the bottom tiers and coast there, it is astronomically hard: it would take enormous amounts of time, play, and probably spending to get there, more than I would ever want to spend, and even then the entire season might not be long enough for me to get there.
The rank rewards incentivize pushing higher, but everyone has a natural "limit" on how high they can reasonably get. But take the word "reasonably" out of the equation, and everyone in GC could go higher. Maybe not to Celestial, but certainly higher than they do now. Increase rank rewards, and you increase the incentive to push higher. Increase them high enough, and that incentive can become a compulsion.
The question is: how hard should you push? For the players at the very top, there's no way to incentivize them any more. You can't ask someone to go higher than the top. You can *reward* them for reaching the top, but you can't incentivize a player to reach the top that already reaches the top. You *can* incentivize everyone else to try to push them off the top. Increasing the rewards will make it more rewarding to reach the top, but it can also have the net effect of making it much harder to reach the top because more people will be willing to spend more than reasonable effort to get there.
Those kinds of dynamics always happen in any ranked event. It makes the question of how high such rewards should be a non-trivial question. I'm not saying those rewards are where they should be. I'm saying *any* change is going to have a good side and an unavoidable bad side. The question for the designers is how much do they want to stress out everyone a little bit more to reward the players putting in the most effort already.
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.
Oh yeah 100% don’t worry, I know you didn’t single out arena. If anything it made most sense for us two to debate arena out of all the things I said as it’s the area we have the most matched style in (milestones op).
Maybe it’s “how one perceives it” I took @kabam Crashed comments of “a large chunk of our core player base is aging” in correlation with his comment directly above it. “Many players have made it very clear to us that they feel the game demands too much of them”,.,or something like that. I don’t take it as a salute,.,and i am not offended by it,.,it is simply a reality. He also talks about “player burnout” and the difference between earning rewards that feels fun and earning rewards that feels mandatory. I personally have no issue with not receiving rewards or resources to obtain from the glory store or the loyalty store,..i have missed out on many deathless champ pieces and feel that’s fine because i don’t see them as “mandatory”. I however would take issue with high value rank up resources being available in those stores because then i would feel it “mandatory” to play those game modes in order to keep up,..and also that items such as t4a frags aren’t available in any other of the game mode stores. I think those are much better suited in side quests or say special events,..where anybody can earn those rewards,..not just folks in alliances and not just folks that participate in AQ or AW or BGs or Incursions or all of them for that matter.
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.
Specifically, you're referring to the higher tier rank rewards. When people talk about "BG rewards" in general I think they are fine. It is the ranked rewards they usually (but not always) mean.
If you ask me if the BG ranked rewards "make sense" in a risk/reward/effort sense, I'd say probably not. But if you ask me if they should be changed, that's where things get tricky, for the same reasons I outlined involving arenas.
GC is not a tournament. It requires a ton of skill to progress to the top, but there's also a grind component to it. Someone with less skill but willing to grind more can, in theory, progress higher, because random chance still plays a role. The higher the rank rewards, the more incentive there is to grind.
As it stands, for the players who are actually placing in Celestial now, its hard to get there and stay there. For the lower tier GCs, it is vastly harder, because they are not as good, so relatively speaking it would be far harder for them to manage to outpace the competition at the top, which is why they currently don't. For me, happy to cruise into the bottom tiers and coast there, it is astronomically hard: it would take enormous amounts of time, play, and probably spending to get there, more than I would ever want to spend, and even then the entire season might not be long enough for me to get there.
The rank rewards incentivize pushing higher, but everyone has a natural "limit" on how high they can reasonably get. But take the word "reasonably" out of the equation, and everyone in GC could go higher. Maybe not to Celestial, but certainly higher than they do now. Increase rank rewards, and you increase the incentive to push higher. Increase them high enough, and that incentive can become a compulsion.
The question is: how hard should you push? For the players at the very top, there's no way to incentivize them any more. You can't ask someone to go higher than the top. You can *reward* them for reaching the top, but you can't incentivize a player to reach the top that already reaches the top. You *can* incentivize everyone else to try to push them off the top. Increasing the rewards will make it more rewarding to reach the top, but it can also have the net effect of making it much harder to reach the top because more people will be willing to spend more than reasonable effort to get there.
Those kinds of dynamics always happen in any ranked event. It makes the question of how high such rewards should be a non-trivial question. I'm not saying those rewards are where they should be. I'm saying *any* change is going to have a good side and an unavoidable bad side. The question for the designers is how much do they want to stress out everyone a little bit more to reward the players putting in the most effort already.
Having experienced the very top end of GC especially in the closing few days, I’m not sure that even a wild reward bump would lead to the grind becoming sickening worse than currently. A decent percentage of the players near the top are queuing every day, many hours a day around their daily lives. I myself have done this some days, if i have a lazy day where I’ve not much to do, I’ll just keep the GC queue open and maybe get a match every 15 or so minutes (especially cause my region and time zone can lead to very very slow queues at some points in the day). In addition the final few days becomes more of a tactical battle really. When to play, who to snipe, is x person in bad form and likely to play worse etc. A change to Gc rewards won’t change that imo, the same tactical battles would play out, and very few people would do a constant grind pushing through it (Bero is one of these few madmen).
Let’s just say for example the rewards change so that top 10 (c4+) are rewarded with a 2-3 gem. Obviously I’ve just plucked that resource out as an example, im not saying it’s the fair and balanced buff but just for arguments sake this is introduced. Class vs generic gem is another argument, let’s just say it’s generic for everyone. At the very highest level in GC, skill will prevail in most matches. I have beaten very top players with close to double my r3 count due to skill, not even draft reliance (I’ve also beaten players/been beaten cause of draft but that’s gonna happen due to law of averages). I don’t think a major increase to rewards would cause a major increase to the grind because the grind is already very strong with 0 reward incentive. Like there’s not much further to go apart from people literally skipping their jobs/uni classes to play more GC. At that point most of the top players would see sense that life comes first (hopefully anyway), so I don’t think it would create a major problem. This combines with the fact that 10 players getting a 2-3 per season will not lead to a widening of the gap from the chasing pack. Going from say 24 r3s to 25 r3s isn’t gonna majorly up your chances against a skilled player with 10-15 r3s. Cascading down the tiers to give the next reward brackets an amount of t4a would have the same impact, not a massive grind increase, as the skilled players who choose to park in c5/c6 will still be skilled enough, and the race for these tiers is still very intense in the closing moments, just obviously less broadcast than c4 and podium due to the amount of people per tier.
If someone was to point blank ask me “hey what do you think is a balanced reward buff?”, my answer would probably be very similar to the example I gave.
C1-4 - 3 t4a (also possible to add little extras of t4a or shards to differentiate c1,2,3 etc)
C5 - 1.5 t4a (very large difference between c4 and c5, usually over 300 points so rewards need to scale accordingly)
C6 - 1 t4a (c5 and c6 point difference usually quite tight)
M1- 0.5 t4a
M2 and below - small amounts of t4a
Obviously I’ve only discussed catalyst t4a here, buffs to the shard amounts, addition of sig stones and sprinklings of t6cc should also be debated in a similar way. I don’t think this reward buff would lead to the unavoidable negative consequence of grind going too out of control, because tbh in some seasons it already feels a bit wild considering the terrible rewards. It could also lead to the c5 bracket slowly closing, as currently there’s usually a 300 ish point difference between 1st and 90th by season end. This makes c4 push harder as you could match a low c5 and BANG -23 or something. Other people have suggested splitting this bracket into 2/3 parts, but that’s a whole other debate that has already been argued for a while across the forums and line chats with devs.
Can the reward budget gurus enlighten us on why the 5th week of SQ has no rewards? Is the budget on that much trouble? Should we get the UN or IMF involved?
Can the reward budget gurus enlighten us on why the 5th week of SQ has no rewards? Is the budget on that much trouble? Should we get the UN or IMF involved?
I think we’ve all earned enough really. Remember those great AQ potions and revives and AQ energy refills we got for the cancelled Raids? Those were awesome!
You should be ashamed to ask for rewards for playing content @BringPopcorn . The reward is in the playing itself.
Can the reward budget gurus enlighten us on why the 5th week of SQ has no rewards? Is the budget on that much trouble? Should we get the UN or IMF involved?
I think we’ve all earned enough really. Remember those great AQ potions and revives and AQ energy refills we got for the cancelled Raids? Those were awesome!
You should be ashamed to ask for rewards for playing content @BringPopcorn . The reward is in the playing itself.
I am not asking for rewards, I am asking the status of the great vault of rewards to understand the state of the budget. We might need a bailout or international aid.
😂 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
why don't you change the incursion layout to be the same as the special incursion? (15 zones and freely choose the first hack)
I've been semi-retired for about three weeks now and I 100% agree with everything said here. This year overall has just been a mess for the game, and in my opinion it is one of the worst years for the game in general.
New releases have never been this disappointing, a couple months ago some were even trying to argue that the best champs usually came in the second half of the year yet September's over and we still have nothing, just more mediocre garbage or mid but nothing good. Even Shathra was a massive disappointment for me, I said I was going to get her pre-release and after seeing gameplay I was so disappointed (once again) I ended up not getting it and it drove me away from the game even further.
Stores are all garbage, I don't care what Crashed has to say (this time), doing AQ and BGs feels pointless (I had to leave my alliance since I stopped playing these game modes) when t6b t3a and t6cc are still this damn expensive. Do they not realize p2w players already have over 15 r3s and that gap is about to get wider after Cyberweekend and Banquet? How are f2p players supposed to keep up when rank up materials in the store are still this ridiculously overpriced even for Valiants?
Game is trash right now, worst state it's been in since I came back three years ago. I'm literally only doing SoS these days and nothing else, probably will fully quit after Banquet and come back when the Cyclops rework goes live lmao.
Well said. As a 9-year player who has been super on and off throughout those nine years, this is arguably the second worst year in the game's history. Progression is a problem for even cavalier/TB especially with these stores. Really concerning to see Crashed's response. Does not give me confidence for what comes after the 10 year anniversary at all.
😂 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
why don't you change the incursion layout to be the same as the special incursion? (15 zones and freely choose the first hack)
Here's what I do. Enter incursions with bottom three 7*s (Let's hope you have like 30/40 of them, else use rank4 6*s.) Start sector 6. Check the hacks. (If you want one, proceed and switch champs each zone. If not repeat.)
I just want one of the two, either strategic or keep it going. And herc handles the rest.
Glad to hear the Glory store is being updated as that's one of the main resources for rank ups, but with the daily special offers having their items being updated shouldn't the next focus be on the Stamp store selectors? Is there any news on if the Stamp store items will be getting an update soon?
Can the reward budget gurus enlighten us on why the 5th week of SQ has no rewards? Is the budget on that much trouble? Should we get the UN or IMF involved?
I think we’ve all earned enough really. Remember those great AQ potions and revives and AQ energy refills we got for the cancelled Raids? Those were awesome!
You should be ashamed to ask for rewards for playing content @BringPopcorn . The reward is in the playing itself.
I agree! 😄 And that compensation for the raid issues was totally relevant - potions, revives, and energy for regular AQ maps. And there's much reward in the playing itself these days - it's called a hyper-friendly AI.
Can someone explain to me something? Most of the new content and such, or even BGs have relic shards and rank up materials as rewards... Why are we being rewarded relic materials when there hasn't been a single new relic or even a mention of making new relics? @Kabam Crashed mentioned the depreciation value of "Solo crystals", yes we get it too much out there to even consider buffing them. Aren't relic shards pretty much going in the same route at this point? i got a good ammount of shards with no intention to open cause I don't care about duping the relics I already have...
Relics are taking a break because of the deathless champions. Well likely get more next year
Can someone explain to me something? Most of the new content and such, or even BGs have relic shards and rank up materials as rewards... Why are we being rewarded relic materials when there hasn't been a single new relic or even a mention of making new relics? @Kabam Crashed mentioned the depreciation value of "Solo crystals", yes we get it too much out there to even consider buffing them. Aren't relic shards pretty much going in the same route at this point? i got a good ammount of shards with no intention to open cause I don't care about duping the relics I already have...
Relics are taking a break because of the deathless champions. Well likely get more next year
Btw if they stop relics I don't mind but what's stopping them from releasing relic rank up materials and awakening gems? They could've attached a relic r3 gem somewhere in bg blitz rewards I really want to rank 3 relics, they should put r3 relic materials in bg store.
The black iso market is so bad. I used to purchase the sigil but in store items are so bad and the limit is mostly 1 per item. I mean it is 9.99 dude. I spent quite a lot in purchasing other stuff but the black iso is just bad. Value is not there
It’s not like they have a choice . The programmers aren’t in charge . Some executive who wants to squeeze every least cent out of the people who actually use real life money is . And the crappier the store and every other mode is the more likely it is for people to spend money . It’s a tale as old as time and if the community wasn’t full of people who are submissive to an insane degree and defend Kabam as if their life depends on it against any criticism no matter how legitimate things might be different ..
Can someone explain to me something? Most of the new content and such, or even BGs have relic shards and rank up materials as rewards... Why are we being rewarded relic materials when there hasn't been a single new relic or even a mention of making new relics? @Kabam Crashed mentioned the depreciation value of "Solo crystals", yes we get it too much out there to even consider buffing them. Aren't relic shards pretty much going in the same route at this point? i got a good ammount of shards with no intention to open cause I don't care about duping the relics I already have...
Relics are taking a break because of the deathless champions. Well likely get more next year
Where they said this?
Crashed said it to BG. Basically the same team that does champions also does relics and with the regular release schedule for champions plus the extra deathless champions there was no room for development on relics (or at least good, well thought out and useful ones)
Can someone explain to me something? Most of the new content and such, or even BGs have relic shards and rank up materials as rewards... Why are we being rewarded relic materials when there hasn't been a single new relic or even a mention of making new relics? @Kabam Crashed mentioned the depreciation value of "Solo crystals", yes we get it too much out there to even consider buffing them. Aren't relic shards pretty much going in the same route at this point? i got a good ammount of shards with no intention to open cause I don't care about duping the relics I already have...
Relics are taking a break because of the deathless champions. Well likely get more next year
Where they said this?
Crashed said it to BG. Basically the same team that does champions also does relics and with the regular release schedule for champions plus the extra deathless champions there was no room for development on relics (or at least good, well thought out and useful ones)
Can someone explain to me something? Most of the new content and such, or even BGs have relic shards and rank up materials as rewards... Why are we being rewarded relic materials when there hasn't been a single new relic or even a mention of making new relics? @Kabam Crashed mentioned the depreciation value of "Solo crystals", yes we get it too much out there to even consider buffing them. Aren't relic shards pretty much going in the same route at this point? i got a good ammount of shards with no intention to open cause I don't care about duping the relics I already have...
Relics are taking a break because of the deathless champions. Well likely get more next year
Where they said this?
Crashed said it to BG. Basically the same team that does champions also does relics and with the regular release schedule for champions plus the extra deathless champions there was no room for development on relics (or at least good, well thought out and useful ones)
I'm glad there was a solid answer provided so that we're no longer left in the dark about additions that Kabam introduced.
This is the 1st month i said I'm not going to waste my time on EQ. As a valiant player, I have to explore throne breaker to access paragon gauntlet. The big problem is having to explore meaningless content for minimal return.
I'm only doing the side quest for Mr. Sinister and only spend on the T3A and T6b. This months bounty format is awful. And you need 3 different "doohickies" to enter into 6 doodad side quests with extremely similar names. WHY?
I think most of us wanting a store update, are simply asking for a slight price change to entice us to gather these various currencies. I for 1 do not expect a 7-Star AG to be added yet.
😂 sorry just thought it was better to lay it out like the Kabam response for easier cross reference.
It was still very well articulated, and I agreed with basically everything. The annoying part is I doubt they’ll read most of the replies here, and even if they do who knows if they’ll actually take it into account.
I have read every comment in this thread, because I do genuinely care what players think and take it into consideration every day when I am making decisions about the game.
In going back and reading my initial reply, I realize I was unfair to the OP because I didn't actually address the topic of this thread. Do we actually want our players to play less? That's a complicated and nuanced question, but I will try my best to answer it succinctly.
In the three years since I joined the game team, one of the most common topics in the community has been burnout. There have been various points in those three years where players have very clearly told us we are demanding too much of them and their time. Our game is becoming bigger and more complex, and a large portion of our core player base is aging, which comes with new responsibilities. At the same time the global economy has deteriorated -- people are working longer hours and have less time for pursuits like mobile games. You can see this clearly in industry trends, with the rise of hyper-casual games that ask very very little of players dominating the mobile space.
So the "time economy" of our game has become a very core concept for the design team. We want players to log in and play our game every day, ideally multiple sessions a day. But we know there are significant groups of our players who we shouldn't push to do more than that. And we also know that it's a very fine line between creating a set of rewards that feels good, and one that feels mandatory for our end game players. I would argue for some of our players those two things are actually synonymous.
So the answer to the question "Do you want players to play less?" is it depends, but in some cases yes we do want players to play less. You can see this for example very clearly with the direction we have taken with Incursions. Rather than update the baseline rewards, we have created a special challenge Sector that only runs once every ~3 months. That is how often we want most late game players to play Incursions, which is less than we had been asking of them in the past.
At any rate thank you all for taking the time to provide feedback, especially those who did so respectfully. Today is a holiday in Canada, but tomorrow I plan to talk with the economy team about making some tweaks to our plans based on feedback in this thread, and I'll try to move that Glory store update forward ASAP.
😂 sorry just thought it was better to lay it out like the Kabam response for easier cross reference.
It was still very well articulated, and I agreed with basically everything. The annoying part is I doubt they’ll read most of the replies here, and even if they do who knows if they’ll actually take it into account.
I have read every comment in this thread, because I do genuinely care what players think and take it into consideration every day when I am making decisions about the game.
In going back and reading my initial reply, I realize I was unfair to the OP because I didn't actually address the topic of this thread. Do we actually want our players to play less? That's a complicated and nuanced question, but I will try my best to answer it succinctly.
In the three years since I joined the game team, one of the most common topics in the community has been burnout. There have been various points in those three years where players have very clearly told us we are demanding too much of them and their time. Our game is becoming bigger and more complex, and a large portion of our core player base is aging, which comes with new responsibilities. At the same time the global economy has deteriorated -- people are working longer hours and have less time for pursuits like mobile games. You can see this clearly in industry trends, with the rise of hyper-casual games that ask very very little of players dominating the mobile space.
So the "time economy" of our game has become a very core concept for the design team. We want players to log in and play our game every day, ideally multiple sessions a day. But we know there are significant groups of our players who we shouldn't push to do more than that. And we also know that it's a very fine line between creating a set of rewards that feels good, and one that feels mandatory for our end game players. I would argue for some of our players those two things are actually synonymous.
So the answer to the question "Do you want players to play less?" is it depends, but in some cases yes we do want players to play less. You can see this for example very clearly with the direction we have taken with Incursions. Rather than update the baseline rewards, we have created a special challenge Sector that only runs once every ~3 months. That is how often we want most late game players to play Incursions, which is less than we had been asking of them in the past.
At any rate thank you all for taking the time to provide feedback, especially those who did so respectfully. Today is a holiday in Canada, but tomorrow I plan to talk with the economy team about making some tweaks to our plans based on feedback in this thread, and I'll try to move that Glory store update forward ASAP.
For all the reasons above, I have said farewell to my Alliance and this game. The game has become an endless treadmill. Endlessly repetitive. I haven't ranked og spiderman since I had to use him as a 2 star. I have him as a 1,2,3,4,5, and six star. Each of those and all of their duplicates represent a waste of time, as does og Capt America, and the list goes on. Yet we open them over and over and over again. And every tier takes more and more resources requiring more and more grinding. I am taking back my time and my life. I am stepping off the treadmill. You guys can have the buggy champs and bugged AI, the 60 FPS and new skins for old champs. There is nothing of consequence that has changed. Quality of life is worse and worsening. Good luck and goodbye!
For all the reasons above, I have said farewell to my Alliance and this game. The game has become an endless treadmill. Endlessly repetitive. I haven't ranked og spiderman since I had to use him as a 2 star. I have him as a 1,2,3,4,5, and six star. Each of those and all of their duplicates represent a waste of time, as does og Capt America, and the list goes on. Yet we open them over and over and over again. And every tier takes more and more resources requiring more and more grinding. I am taking back my time and my life. I am stepping off the treadmill. You guys can have the buggy champs and bugged AI, the 60 FPS and new skins for old champs. There is nothing of consequence that has changed. Quality of life is worse and worsening. Good luck and goodbye!
For all the reasons above, I have said farewell to my Alliance and this game. The game has become an endless treadmill. Endlessly repetitive. I haven't ranked og spiderman since I had to use him as a 2 star. I have him as a 1,2,3,4,5, and six star. Each of those and all of their duplicates represent a waste of time, as does og Capt America, and the list goes on. Yet we open them over and over and over again. And every tier takes more and more resources requiring more and more grinding. I am taking back my time and my life. I am stepping off the treadmill. You guys can have the buggy champs and bugged AI, the 60 FPS and new skins for old champs. There is nothing of consequence that has changed. Quality of life is worse and worsening. Good luck and goodbye!
Comments
If you ask me if the BG ranked rewards "make sense" in a risk/reward/effort sense, I'd say probably not. But if you ask me if they should be changed, that's where things get tricky, for the same reasons I outlined involving arenas.
GC is not a tournament. It requires a ton of skill to progress to the top, but there's also a grind component to it. Someone with less skill but willing to grind more can, in theory, progress higher, because random chance still plays a role. The higher the rank rewards, the more incentive there is to grind.
As it stands, for the players who are actually placing in Celestial now, its hard to get there and stay there. For the lower tier GCs, it is vastly harder, because they are not as good, so relatively speaking it would be far harder for them to manage to outpace the competition at the top, which is why they currently don't. For me, happy to cruise into the bottom tiers and coast there, it is astronomically hard: it would take enormous amounts of time, play, and probably spending to get there, more than I would ever want to spend, and even then the entire season might not be long enough for me to get there.
The rank rewards incentivize pushing higher, but everyone has a natural "limit" on how high they can reasonably get. But take the word "reasonably" out of the equation, and everyone in GC could go higher. Maybe not to Celestial, but certainly higher than they do now. Increase rank rewards, and you increase the incentive to push higher. Increase them high enough, and that incentive can become a compulsion.
The question is: how hard should you push? For the players at the very top, there's no way to incentivize them any more. You can't ask someone to go higher than the top. You can *reward* them for reaching the top, but you can't incentivize a player to reach the top that already reaches the top. You *can* incentivize everyone else to try to push them off the top. Increasing the rewards will make it more rewarding to reach the top, but it can also have the net effect of making it much harder to reach the top because more people will be willing to spend more than reasonable effort to get there.
Those kinds of dynamics always happen in any ranked event. It makes the question of how high such rewards should be a non-trivial question. I'm not saying those rewards are where they should be. I'm saying *any* change is going to have a good side and an unavoidable bad side. The question for the designers is how much do they want to stress out everyone a little bit more to reward the players putting in the most effort already.
I took @kabam Crashed comments of “a large chunk of our core player base is aging” in correlation with his comment directly above it.
“Many players have made it very clear to us that they feel the game demands too much of them”,.,or something like that.
I don’t take it as a salute,.,and i am not offended by it,.,it is simply a reality.
He also talks about “player burnout” and the difference between earning rewards that feels fun and earning rewards that feels mandatory.
I personally have no issue with not receiving rewards or resources to obtain from the glory store or the loyalty store,..i have missed out on many deathless champ pieces and feel that’s fine because i don’t see them as “mandatory”.
I however would take issue with high value rank up resources being available in those stores because then i would feel it “mandatory” to play those game modes in order to keep up,..and also that items such as t4a frags aren’t available in any other of the game mode stores.
I think those are much better suited in side quests or say special events,..where anybody can earn those rewards,..not just folks in alliances and not just folks that participate in AQ or AW or BGs or Incursions or all of them for that matter.
In addition the final few days becomes more of a tactical battle really. When to play, who to snipe, is x person in bad form and likely to play worse etc. A change to Gc rewards won’t change that imo, the same tactical battles would play out, and very few people would do a constant grind pushing through it (Bero is one of these few madmen).
Let’s just say for example the rewards change so that top 10 (c4+) are rewarded with a 2-3 gem. Obviously I’ve just plucked that resource out as an example, im not saying it’s the fair and balanced buff but just for arguments sake this is introduced. Class vs generic gem is another argument, let’s just say it’s generic for everyone.
At the very highest level in GC, skill will prevail in most matches. I have beaten very top players with close to double my r3 count due to skill, not even draft reliance (I’ve also beaten players/been beaten cause of draft but that’s gonna happen due to law of averages). I don’t think a major increase to rewards would cause a major increase to the grind because the grind is already very strong with 0 reward incentive. Like there’s not much further to go apart from people literally skipping their jobs/uni classes to play more GC. At that point most of the top players would see sense that life comes first (hopefully anyway), so I don’t think it would create a major problem.
This combines with the fact that 10 players getting a 2-3 per season will not lead to a widening of the gap from the chasing pack. Going from say 24 r3s to 25 r3s isn’t gonna majorly up your chances against a skilled player with 10-15 r3s. Cascading down the tiers to give the next reward brackets an amount of t4a would have the same impact, not a massive grind increase, as the skilled players who choose to park in c5/c6 will still be skilled enough, and the race for these tiers is still very intense in the closing moments, just obviously less broadcast than c4 and podium due to the amount of people per tier.
If someone was to point blank ask me “hey what do you think is a balanced reward buff?”, my answer would probably be very similar to the example I gave.
C1-4 - 3 t4a (also possible to add little extras of t4a or shards to differentiate c1,2,3 etc)
C5 - 1.5 t4a (very large difference between c4 and c5, usually over 300 points so rewards need to scale accordingly)
C6 - 1 t4a (c5 and c6 point difference usually quite tight)
M1- 0.5 t4a
M2 and below - small amounts of t4a
Obviously I’ve only discussed catalyst t4a here, buffs to the shard amounts, addition of sig stones and sprinklings of t6cc should also be debated in a similar way.
I don’t think this reward buff would lead to the unavoidable negative consequence of grind going too out of control, because tbh in some seasons it already feels a bit wild considering the terrible rewards. It could also lead to the c5 bracket slowly closing, as currently there’s usually a 300 ish point difference between 1st and 90th by season end. This makes c4 push harder as you could match a low c5 and BANG -23 or something. Other people have suggested splitting this bracket into 2/3 parts, but that’s a whole other debate that has already been argued for a while across the forums and line chats with devs.
Should we get the UN or IMF involved?
I think we’ve all earned enough really. Remember those great AQ potions and revives and AQ energy refills we got for the cancelled Raids? Those were awesome!
You should be ashamed to ask for rewards for playing content @BringPopcorn . The reward is in the playing itself.
Enter incursions with bottom three 7*s
(Let's hope you have like 30/40 of them, else use rank4 6*s.)
Start sector 6.
Check the hacks.
(If you want one, proceed and switch champs each zone. If not repeat.)
I just want one of the two, either strategic or keep it going. And herc handles the rest.
The "Disagree" button feels rigged, why all these people disagree on a fact like this ??
Where they said this?
Crashed said it to BG. Basically the same team that does champions also does relics and with the regular release schedule for champions plus the extra deathless champions there was no room for development on relics (or at least good, well thought out and useful ones)
👊🏽
I'm glad there was a solid answer provided so that we're no longer left in the dark about additions that Kabam introduced.
I'm only doing the side quest for Mr. Sinister and only spend on the T3A and T6b. This months bounty format is awful. And you need 3 different "doohickies" to enter into 6 doodad side quests with extremely similar names. WHY?
I think most of us wanting a store update, are simply asking for a slight price change to entice us to gather these various currencies. I for 1 do not expect a 7-Star AG to be added yet.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/380810/it-s-like-kabam-want-us-to-play-more
Thanks
And every tier takes more and more resources requiring more and more grinding.
I am taking back my time and my life. I am stepping off the treadmill.
You guys can have the buggy champs and bugged AI, the 60 FPS and new skins for old champs. There is nothing of consequence that has changed. Quality of life is worse and worsening.
Good luck and goodbye!