EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE CONCLUDED
The Team has identified a fix for the recent Catalyst Offer issue.
Summoners who purchased this offer have been temporarily locked out of the Contest to Clawback any Catalysts bought/used while active, and ensure previously owned resources remain intact.
They will be unlocked once this process is complete, and no further action will be taken on their Accounts - along with a compensation package to those affected for the inconvenience.
Doing this allows us to bring the Game back up for everyone else.
We've removed the affected offer so we can decide later whether or not to bring it back after it's been fixed.
Additionally, all summoners can expect a general compensation package due to this Emergency Maintenance interrupting their play session.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
The Team has identified a fix for the recent Catalyst Offer issue.
Summoners who purchased this offer have been temporarily locked out of the Contest to Clawback any Catalysts bought/used while active, and ensure previously owned resources remain intact.
They will be unlocked once this process is complete, and no further action will be taken on their Accounts - along with a compensation package to those affected for the inconvenience.
Doing this allows us to bring the Game back up for everyone else.
We've removed the affected offer so we can decide later whether or not to bring it back after it's been fixed.
Additionally, all summoners can expect a general compensation package due to this Emergency Maintenance interrupting their play session.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Comments
On the move away from rotating metas with a BGs season, I think that was a good thing. First, it gives more value to rank ups. It’s hard to justify a big rank up for content that’ll only be there for a week or two, but it’s much more palatable for something that’ll be present for a month. Plus, a substantial number of players tend to wait to push in BGs until the end of the season, so Kabam was just burning design space for too few players by rotating through the nodes in the way they were.
EQ is in desperate need of update, no argument. My personal thought has always been like a seasonal EQ that could be more endgame targeted. Bosses for it would be like our seasons of suffering, prizes could be on lanes, lanes could have varying difficulties and activate additional nodes on the boss. But there are lots of different ways to address this area of the game, and I’m sure they’ve got something cooking. They said they were aiming for an EQ update I believe in early 2025.
Non-Raid AQ is also just tragically boring. Way too repetitive. If glory weren’t such an indispensable resource, I’d have dispensed with playing the mode a long time ago. I don’t know how to fix it, but the repetitiveness of it is definitely the pain point.
War’s good, story’s good, Everest is good. They’ve been having some cool ideas and I like seeing how they’re developing. I think the game has also done a very good job in the last year of allowing F2P players access to the same toys that spenders have, with Necropolis being the only way to become Valiant for a meaningful period of time. I hope they continue that kind of rollout, with the first access to something new coming through endgame content before becoming available via spending.
Offers
Content
Special content like AoA or Everest
Holiday events.
Etc...
Each area takes away from the overall budget.
The biggest thing of injecting more rewards into the game means that spenders will need more rewards or else they won't spend. For example: say ftp players can only get 1 r3 in a month from content and spenders can get and additional r3 from spending money. That is a pretty good deal because you get r3s at twice the rate. If ftp get 2 r3s but spenders still get 1, less people will spend over time as they get all the r3s they want. If ftp got 3 r3s and spenders still only got 1, then I bet hardly anyone would be willing to drop more than $50 for their r3s. So if r3s are priced at $50, then that would mean spenders would need r3 gems at a minimum in the $50 bundles at cyber weekend. If r3 gems are in the $50, what could kabam sell at $100 that would be enticing to people? If 7* shards economy was great, then not those, maybe titan crystals but do you really want to be spending that much for a titan if you're getting 7*s quickly? The only logical choice would be t7b fragments which would ensure we get r4s by banquet.
Lots of work and effort go into managing the economy. The people working there know what they're doing and know what is healthy for the game. It takes a lot of time to update rewards for things like BGs and AW, but those are things that are likely looking at updating sometime soon.
Rewards are incentives. Incentives to play, to grind, to compete, and to spend. When you devalue your rewards, you reduce their ability to function as incentives. So all rewards have a useful lifespan as strong incentives before they become just part of the grind. So how quickly to let them flow into the game ironically speeds up the need to supersede them with better rewards, and thus cut short their lifetime as significant value things. When too many players have too many R3s, it’s time to introduce R4s, because R3s stop becoming interesting rewards at the top. This is of course highly oversimplified, because this kind of analysis happens at all progression tiers, but it is most obvious at the top.
This becomes most clear when we talk about champion rarity. The clock is already ticking on eight star champs. Anyone who thinks they won’t arrive is delusional. The slower 7s pour into the game and the slower rank up tiers are released into the game, the longer the lifespan of 7s will be before 8s arrive to begin the process of replacing them at the top of the game. If it happens too quickly, players won’t have much time to spend enjoying their seven star roster before they will have to start all over again building up their eight star roster. How fast this happens is probably the single biggest downward pressure on overall reward flow into the game.
I think Crashed might say Kabam is trying to preserve as much runway for the seven star rarity as possible, to delay the natural disruption of eights arriving. There’s no such thing as softening that transition with 7.4 star champs. It’s always a somewhat painful jump forward.
yes, the daily deals gives the super whales tons of r3s, but cares? they already have 30+ r3s right now, and odds are you won't be running into them in BGs and the most important part is they're paying a very high price for materials will that see a huge drop in value in the near future and kabam will open the r3 taps for everyone else and then force the whales into spending a fortune on r4 materials.
players have been complaining about the spending gap for 10 years and yet the gap is never game breaking because kabam is giving them the least amount of value per dollar that they can.
I wholeheartedly agree that EQ is not worth it … but thats for me. For lower accounts it is still worth it.
And while it would be nice if there was a Valiant EQ, its not like Valiant players are hurting for rewards. I’d hypothesize that Valiant players get more total top level rewards a month, than Paragon players got when Paragon was the top level. Valiant level rewards seem to be shunted to other game modes, like the SQ.
If there was a Valiant EQ that provided one full 7-star and some T6b/T3a … that doesn’t really move the needle for Valiant accounts that complain of a lack of Valiant EQ.
Edit: And a true State of the Game would evaluate the biggest part of the game - new champions, as the monthly two new and occasional buffed old champions are a huge part of what makes the game.
But to return to the topic, I’d say the biggest overarching issue atm is time invested vs rewards. Many of the top players, or even regular valiant players will not struggle with much content nowadays, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It makes the actually challenging content more well received, especially with the nerfing of multiple revive farming spots.
But the thing that a lot of players will be looking at nowadays will be the time invested. Best example is EQ. It just straight up is not worth the time invested for 100 dust and a couple 7 star shards. Many stopped doing it months ago, more and more as the months go by. An increase in difficulty isn’t gonna fix this, but is obviously gonna go hand in hand with a reward increase, which people will care about.
Bgs I’ve made my points clear in previous threads, but it is in a DIRE place for skill based play. Actual playing/investing marks and units is in a fine place.
I know Kabam has said before they don’t expect us to do everything, but human nature is to do as much as possible, which will lead them to want to do everything.
AQ recently updated, it is boring but the rewards are now good cause of the t4a
Incursions is a fun side mode, no issues really especially cause 1/3 months it gets supercharged
Well it could have been closed right away if some people didn't get warned ahead of time, so basically it was a terrible decision.
and the game is actually pretty brutal on the super whales. they spend fortunes on things that everyone else gets for practically nothing a year later, so why worry?
the highest end content like necropolis is less exciting to do 12-16 months later and the rewards are less valuable but it's also easier and cheaper. the only other alternative is to spend a ton of money and get ahead, but you're not really ahead. we have to accept how the game economy works, there's no freebies and shortcuts.
The game has issues, and it also has appealing aspects. At the end of the day we're here because the enjoyment outweighs the frustration, or else we wouldn't be here.
Focus on what you enjoy.
The vast overwhelming majority of players do not spend. Not "are not whales" but literally do not spend a single cent, ever. The game has to work for them, or it doesn't work for more than 90% of all players of the game.
You can think of the game as two games that happen to share space. There is the free to play game, where none of the spending offers exist at all. That game is actually, in terms of how many players play it, the dominant game. And then there's the game that spenders see, where the offers exist. That is a different game, played by somewhat different rules, and it has to be internally economically consistent entirely separately from the other game. That game *is* balanced on the presumption that both the game play rewards and the spending rewards exist, and balanced around guard rails that include what spending can do to that game.
But the degree to which constrains on the free to play version of the game and the spending version of the game interact with each other are kept to a minimum,. Nothing is perfect, constraints from one leak out to the other, but at no time do the devs say "well, players can buy this, so we don't have to give anyone a way to earn that" because that rule would make the free to play game broken.
The problem is that when people see what's achievable without spending, many simply assume that could not possibly be what was intended, because of course we all deserve way way more stuff than that, and so assume the reason must be because the devs intend everyone to spend to get the rest. But that's not the case. I originally come from the MMO world where once upon a time game economies were balanced without microtransactions, because they literally did not exist. Those economy designers did pretty much the same things this game's economy designers do, and faced the same "stingy, out of touch" complaints designers get, but with the difference being no one could blame F2P monetization for those constraints, because it hadn't been invented yet.
Most people want more than what the game opportunities present. In a way, that's deliberate, in the sense that if everyone always got what they think they were supposed to get, rewards would have no incremental incentivizing properties. But if you think you should be getting more stuff than the game provides, the explanation is simple: the devs disagree. No two people are going to agree about that.
That's the real constraint on top tier rewards. You can only hand out so much of it before you devalue them enough to have to introduce new ones, and top tier content doesn't remain top tier content for long. Mid tier content is going to be mid tier content for years, played by mid tier players years from now. But top tier content with top tier progression rewards doesn't just degrade gracefully, because the difficulty/reward curve for top tier rewards is completely different than it is for normal content. It is worth doing when the rewards are the top tier rewards in the game, because top tier rewards have a value all their own, completely separate from their raw value. But once they aren't anymore, the difficulty/reward curve shifts dramatically, and it becomes far less interesting. Developers are thus spending dev time on content with a much shorter shelf life than when they spend it on almost anything else.
The combination of less return on development time combined with running into top tier reward guardrails means there can only be so much of it, and it is much more costly on a relative basis to create it. And then there's the fact that top tier players can keep subdividing the top tier into smaller and smaller slices that impact smaller and smaller numbers of players, but still have the same development costs and even higher reward relevance requirements. The season of suffering content is already targeting maybe 10-20% of the players. Even more difficult content with even higher rewards would be even more difficult to create, more difficult to balance the rewards for, and only benefit maybe single digit percentage players. And the other 90%+ players of the game would have to give up something for them to get it, because there are only so many hours in the day to do that.
All these issues would still exist if this was a subscription based game with no monetizatiion.
Every time a new champion rarity arrives, there are tons of people who threaten to quit, who question why this even needs to happen at all, and who ask the absolutely absurd question "why can't they do something more creative?" And the devs agree: new rarities come with challenges and issues, where players need to rebuild their rosters. But it is also necessary for the games core progression systems to function, so the only thing they can do is slow the need for them. They also have heard players who have said in the past that new ranks released too quickly, no sooner did players rank up champs to a rank when the next rank appeared, giving them no time to enjoy having rosters with champs of that previous rank before it was superceded. That plays into their caution when it comes to game inflation and progression a lot.
You say no one enjoys AQ. I can't address that directly as that's just a hyperbolic characterization, but what I can say is that most players appreciated the devs streamlining AQ. Most players did not want the devs to make AQ more complicated, more intricate, more difficult, or put more pressure on alliances. The uproar when all they did was replace the minions years ago was louder than all other AQ complaints combined. Yes, there are players like yourself constantly complaining about AQ being boring, but I know for a fact the number of players who would complain if it became what I suspect you want would be gigantic, because it has happened before multiple times.
There is tons more end game content in the game than there used to be, in fact the seasons of suffering stuff was intended in part to make it a more regular occurrence. Your contention that the devs are just "lazy" or they would be putting in a lot more end game related stuff belies the fact that they have been adding end game content continuously. They just aren't doing it as fast as you would like them to, but that's just you. There are lots of complaints going in the opposite direction, with players complaining there's too much to do, and not enough time to tackle it all. Burn out is a constantly recurring complaint, and while I believe that is mostly on the players to regulate their own game play, it is ultimately the game itself that suffers if players jump off a cliff trying to do everything. The devs can only add so much content, but they also have to deal with player complaints about how fast they add it.
How do you reconcile the fact that huge numbers of players complain about rarity jumps, but also want rewards to arrive faster than they do now? How do you reconcile the fact that Kabam gets tons of complaints about how boring AQ is, but get eviscerated every time they try to jazz it up (That's in fact why AQ Raids exist and in the form they do). How would you add more high end content while simultaneously dealing with burnout complaints? This isn't Kabam vs the players. This is the players vs the players. How do you pick winners and losers?
I think that has to suck not only for us the player but them as the developers as well. Either way, it’s a huge issue and does not seem like they have a handle on any solution to address it.
We need content like back issues, boss rushes what were fun thrilling and quick to complete.. that made the game fast paced and fun. Where as the content these days are just targeted towards N number of nodes having no sense and long and lengthy. Again that's my perspective as to what I enjoy or used to enjoy playing this game.
We just need to balance the grinding nature vs the fast paced thrill nature of the content being made available