Kabam played smartly, they knew people will show disappointment if they announce these OVERHYPED mid banquet rewards as 10th anniversary. So they delayed it. All knew if TB valiant gets same rewards then once again valiant will get nothing.Regret not investing in cyber weekend. from 2025 onwards I will always go for cyber.
They know there are people that will complain about anything and everything. Predicting that is like predicting sunrise, except sunrise is slightly less certain. The sun won't be there forever.
This is not "anything" or "everything" though, the complains are legit.
Sure. This, by the way, is my serious face. It is very serious. I'm taking this extremely seriously.
You re kabam staff. You would nt agree with the complains by default anyway.
He isn't kabam staff
It's just their default way of attacking people who don't share their opinions. That person has a habit of doing it.
He s a "guardian". He is staff in the general sense.
No. He's a volunteer forum guardian. Has zero do to with being a kabam employee or staff. They get paid. He does not. Get your facts straight if your gonna talk smack.
He helps kabam to communicate things, he s patrolling the forums, Kabam chose him to be a representative of some sort, he is, staff. The End. Open a dictionnary.
He is doing it for free, which is more reasons why he doesn't have to agree with them.
Even for free, if a volunteers doesn't agree with company policy, he leaves or gets fired. Or whatever the word is for fired for free volunteers.
So he gets fired what would be the downside at all? Rofl... He only said people on this community have a serious tendency of complaining... Can you deny that?
No, I agree, but as I said, in this particularly case, people who complain are not in the wrong. In my opinion.
So when are they wrong? Because it's everytime. Every year rewards aren't good enough. They even added the realm rewards on top of everything and those are truly extra and didn't take from the "rewards budget". So if we have all these extra rewards and a chance to obtain or dupe a brand new 7* champion, when is the community wrong for complaining?
People now claim they took away from alliance and solo and put them in realm 🤦
They should go and watch the stream and listen to Kabam Crashed specially say the very words "the realm is in addition and didn't take from the rewards.budget".
Or just, make their own conclusions.
I'm sorry but why should they make their own conclusions when the truth was spoken from an real Kabam employee, not the pretend ones you keep calling us.
There is no other conclusion to make. The realm rewards are extra. They weren't calculated from the months rewards budget. So again, no, they shouldn't make their own conclusions.
Because there s the facts, and there s the word of kabam before the facts' reveal. It s always better to make the calculations yourself when you have the full info, than just believe what the company tells you. Not just in this game, everywhere. Critical thinking.
I think you've twisted yourself around so much you've lost track of what you're even arguing about.
The facts you're talking about are just your opinions. I'm sure you wish they were facts.
The facts are the milestones rewards. I never said that people who say the real event are extra are wrong or not, I haven't done the calculations. But the facts are here now, I can get my own, conclusions. Instead of just beliving blindly the company, in a statement made before the milestones were known.
Kabam played smartly, they knew people will show disappointment if they announce these OVERHYPED mid banquet rewards as 10th anniversary. So they delayed it. All knew if TB valiant gets same rewards then once again valiant will get nothing.Regret not investing in cyber weekend. from 2025 onwards I will always go for cyber.
They know there are people that will complain about anything and everything. Predicting that is like predicting sunrise, except sunrise is slightly less certain. The sun won't be there forever.
This is not "anything" or "everything" though, the complains are legit.
Sure. This, by the way, is my serious face. It is very serious. I'm taking this extremely seriously.
You re kabam staff. You would nt agree with the complains by default anyway.
He isn't kabam staff
It's just their default way of attacking people who don't share their opinions. That person has a habit of doing it.
He s a "guardian". He is staff in the general sense.
No. He's a volunteer forum guardian. Has zero do to with being a kabam employee or staff. They get paid. He does not. Get your facts straight if your gonna talk smack.
He helps kabam to communicate things, he s patrolling the forums, Kabam chose him to be a representative of some sort, he is, staff. The End. Open a dictionnary.
He is doing it for free, which is more reasons why he doesn't have to agree with them.
Even for free, if a volunteers doesn't agree with company policy, he leaves or gets fired. Or whatever the word is for fired for free volunteers.
So he gets fired what would be the downside at all? Rofl... He only said people on this community have a serious tendency of complaining... Can you deny that?
No, I agree, but as I said, in this particularly case, people who complain are not in the wrong. In my opinion.
So when are they wrong? Because it's everytime. Every year rewards aren't good enough. They even added the realm rewards on top of everything and those are truly extra and didn't take from the "rewards budget". So if we have all these extra rewards and a chance to obtain or dupe a brand new 7* champion, when is the community wrong for complaining?
People now claim they took away from alliance and solo and put them in realm 🤦
They should go and watch the stream and listen to Kabam Crashed specially say the very words "the realm is in addition and didn't take from the rewards.budget".
Or just, make their own conclusions.
You forgot the word “up.”
Everyone should do their own homework and work towards their own independent conclusions. But they should be logical, informed conclusions that reflect reality. When people literally make up their own conclusions, picking and choosing what to believe and what to reject based on their own predispositions, they aren’t arriving at their own independent conclusions, they are just throwing random lumps of poo at the walls.
There was a thread whose title basically said rewards need to be fixed because player community was lied to. The OP stated that way more than 50% of the crystal rewards was filler, contradicting what Kabam stated about the banquet rewards earlier.
This is *impossible* to state, because the drop odds haven’t been released yet. So there’s literally no way to know how much of the crystal is “filler” and how much is not, independent of what a player even considers “filler.” This is an invalid complaint on its face, and the person making it could only be assumed to be an irrational malcontent.
Is this thread that bad? No, but it isn’t all that far behind. You have people complaining about rewards when as I said, because the drop rates haven’t been announced yet there’s no way to know what the average player is actually going to get from crystals, the bulk of the rewards most players will get. You have players saying the only reason why they delayed announcing the rewards is because Kabam knew everyone would complain about how awful they are, instead of, say, Kabam doing it because that’s how marketing works everywhere else in the world. You have players saying the banquet was overhyped, which is the thing people always say about everything when the truth is they hyped it in their own heads, they expected vastly more than any reasonable game economy will ever give them, so when someone says “this will be good” that’s already overhyping something that will never be good enough for them.
These are the valid criticisms I’m supposed to be acknowledging? I think not. I’ve been making fun of them for years now, and they are just as invalid now as they have always been.
Time and time again these people are disappointed, and time and time again they expect to not be disappointed the next time, and time and time again they see this as a failure of the game, and not their wildly broken expectations. I often wonder if that’s why some people even play this or other games. It is somehow weirdly satisfying to see that time and time again this game is “wrong” and they are one of the few people smart enough to know that. Constantly being proven wrong is somehow proof they are in fact always right.
Now that I think about it, that actually explains a lot, and not just in this game.
Kabam played smartly, they knew people will show disappointment if they announce these OVERHYPED mid banquet rewards as 10th anniversary. So they delayed it. All knew if TB valiant gets same rewards then once again valiant will get nothing.Regret not investing in cyber weekend. from 2025 onwards I will always go for cyber.
They know there are people that will complain about anything and everything. Predicting that is like predicting sunrise, except sunrise is slightly less certain. The sun won't be there forever.
This is not "anything" or "everything" though, the complains are legit.
Sure. This, by the way, is my serious face. It is very serious. I'm taking this extremely seriously.
You re kabam staff. You would nt agree with the complains by default anyway.
He isn't kabam staff
It's just their default way of attacking people who don't share their opinions. That person has a habit of doing it.
He s a "guardian". He is staff in the general sense.
No. He's a volunteer forum guardian. Has zero do to with being a kabam employee or staff. They get paid. He does not. Get your facts straight if your gonna talk smack.
He helps kabam to communicate things, he s patrolling the forums, Kabam chose him to be a representative of some sort, he is, staff. The End. Open a dictionnary.
He is doing it for free, which is more reasons why he doesn't have to agree with them.
Even for free, if a volunteers doesn't agree with company policy, he leaves or gets fired. Or whatever the word is for fired for free volunteers.
So he gets fired what would be the downside at all? Rofl... He only said people on this community have a serious tendency of complaining... Can you deny that?
No, I agree, but as I said, in this particularly case, people who complain are not in the wrong. In my opinion.
So when are they wrong? Because it's everytime. Every year rewards aren't good enough. They even added the realm rewards on top of everything and those are truly extra and didn't take from the "rewards budget". So if we have all these extra rewards and a chance to obtain or dupe a brand new 7* champion, when is the community wrong for complaining?
People now claim they took away from alliance and solo and put them in realm 🤦
They should go and watch the stream and listen to Kabam Crashed specially say the very words "the realm is in addition and didn't take from the rewards.budget".
Or just, make their own conclusions.
I'm sorry but why should they make their own conclusions when the truth was spoken from an real Kabam employee, not the pretend ones you keep calling us.
There is no other conclusion to make. The realm rewards are extra. They weren't calculated from the months rewards budget. So again, no, they shouldn't make their own conclusions.
Because there s the facts, and there s the word of kabam before the facts' reveal. It s always better to make the calculations yourself when you have the full info, than just believe what the company tells you. Not just in this game, everywhere. Critical thinking.
I think you've twisted yourself around so much you've lost track of what you're even arguing about.
The facts you're talking about are just your opinions. I'm sure you wish they were facts.
The facts are the milestones rewards. I never said that people who say the real event are extra are wrong or not, I haven't done the calculations. But the facts are here now, I can get my own, conclusions. Instead of just beliving blindly the company, in a statement made before the milestones were known.
@DNA3000 do you have data on average distribution of units YOY by Kabam through readily available rewards? (I realize that’s hard to draw boundaries around; probably have to set aside arena as a source.)
In terms of diagnosing the community response, I think several factors are at play. And we all know thinking about several variables at the same time is not the strong suit of this community. But I would say a) rewards are better than last year, but b) however we might quantify the value of the rewards, the unit cost of acquiring the rewards through banquet is rising faster than the value of those rewards.
That’s why I was curious about unit availability. I suspect that even though players might feel that they are “paying more for less or the same value of rewards”, I wonder if Kabam isn’t giving out more units than they used to. Seems like track events, for example, are distributing more units to average players over the course of the year than what we received in prior years.
@DNA3000 do you have data on average distribution of units YOY by Kabam through readily available rewards? (I realize that’s hard to draw boundaries around; probably have to set aside arena as a source.)
You're in luck: after years of thinking to myself "I should really do that" I decided to really do that.
That’s why I was curious about unit availability. I suspect that even though players might feel that they are “paying more for less or the same value of rewards”, I wonder if Kabam isn’t giving out more units than they used to. Seems like track events, for example, are distributing more units to average players over the course of the year than what we received in prior years.
This one is difficult to make absolute statements about, because there are a lot of moving parts. I mean, obviously they can't give out the exact same rewards for the exact same price because even though that's technically identical value, the fact that progression moves upward over time means the *relative* value of rewards drops. A basket of rewards for a Paragon in 2022 is worth, on a relative basis, the same amount as a much larger basket of much better rewards to a Valiant in 2024.
Another problem is that the devs can't change everything everywhere simultaneously. They wouldn't even if they could, and they can't. So if they were to increase units in 2021, then sell more stuff for more units in 2022, is that averaging out to a similar overall ratio, or is that perceived as things got way better in 2021 when there was more units chasing the same stuff, and then a big downgrade when more stuff was added with the same units available? That is literally the situation we're having right now with the Battlegrounds store changes.
My analysis of things is that on the whole, the same relative value of stuff is still being made available for the same relative amount of units, but over time the spending cap has gone up. Players can spend the same amount of units today and get the same or slightly higher relative value, but they can also spend more and get even more on top. Whether it is actually perceived that way is another story.
Availability is one thing, how much players actually get is another. I can tell you how much units are out there to be gotten. What I don't know is how much individual players are actually getting. I know we aren't all grinding out those arena milestones: the arena leaderboards say that much. I know most people aren't autofighting their way through Proven, even though the time expense is trivial and the units stack up over time. Most people just don't want to do that sort of thing. So how much units the average player earns, verses how much they have available to spend on events like this, is very difficult to guestimate.
Although, the realm event itself is going to add some very interesting data points to that guestimate bracket. The previous two realm events have given me previously impossible to get data on player activity and player populations. The realm event is going to be the first open source data that allows even blurry estimates on MCOC spending outside of Netmarble financial statements.
Unpopular opinion: A lot of people upset on this event didn't save enough units for all the milestones
Bingo. I don’t have as many units saved as I burned through them to speed run to Paragon for the 10x10 cutoff. Only person I can be mad at is myself if I can’t make the milestones.
I think one big mistake they make is the “bonus” rewards above the top major milestone in realm. 1,000 titan shards is a joke and won’t incentivize anyone to spend. They could have milked the whales and dolphins with small fractions of a T7 Basic crystal all the way up to making two full T7 basic crystals worth for maybe 45,000 units worth (or more). My guess is you are going to have a lot of people stop at Isophyne and only the ultimate whales chase those top 90 spots.
Unpopular opinion: A lot of people upset on this event didn't save enough units for all the milestones
Bingo. I don’t have as many units saved as I burned through them to speed run to Paragon for the 10x10 cutoff. Only person I can be mad at is myself if I can’t make the milestones.
That’s why I was curious about unit availability. I suspect that even though players might feel that they are “paying more for less or the same value of rewards”, I wonder if Kabam isn’t giving out more units than they used to. Seems like track events, for example, are distributing more units to average players over the course of the year than what we received in prior years.
This one is difficult to make absolute statements about, because there are a lot of moving parts. I mean, obviously they can't give out the exact same rewards for the exact same price because even though that's technically identical value, the fact that progression moves upward over time means the *relative* value of rewards drops. A basket of rewards for a Paragon in 2022 is worth, on a relative basis, the same amount as a much larger basket of much better rewards to a Valiant in 2024.
Another problem is that the devs can't change everything everywhere simultaneously. They wouldn't even if they could, and they can't. So if they were to increase units in 2021, then sell more stuff for more units in 2022, is that averaging out to a similar overall ratio, or is that perceived as things got way better in 2021 when there was more units chasing the same stuff, and then a big downgrade when more stuff was added with the same units available? That is literally the situation we're having right now with the Battlegrounds store changes.
My analysis of things is that on the whole, the same relative value of stuff is still being made available for the same relative amount of units, but over time the spending cap has gone up. Players can spend the same amount of units today and get the same or slightly higher relative value, but they can also spend more and get even more on top. Whether it is actually perceived that way is another story.
Availability is one thing, how much players actually get is another. I can tell you how much units are out there to be gotten. What I don't know is how much individual players are actually getting. I know we aren't all grinding out those arena milestones: the arena leaderboards say that much. I know most people aren't autofighting their way through Proven, even though the time expense is trivial and the units stack up over time. Most people just don't want to do that sort of thing. So how much units the average player earns, verses how much they have available to spend on events like this, is very difficult to guestimate.
Although, the realm event itself is going to add some very interesting data points to that guestimate bracket. The previous two realm events have given me previously impossible to get data on player activity and player populations. The realm event is going to be the first open source data that allows even blurry estimates on MCOC spending outside of Netmarble financial statements.
Good stuff.
The concept of an anchor price is usually thought of in terms of a floor; for this community, it’s more like the anchor price is the annual perceived ceiling — in the case of this event, roughly 15K shards to hit the Isophyne tier in the realm event. So to your point, reward value is probably tracking on a “fair” upward trajectory YOY, but maybe people are reacting strongly to the fact of the 15K.
On a side note, when you step back and think about the overall rewards packages for the season, it’s interesting how the community doesn’t seem to consider the 10x10 supply drop. A huge portion of the active player base is receiving ten six or seven star champs, including one of their showpiece champs for the year. But it doesn’t seem as if that largesse on Kabam’s part is factored into the average player’s current satisfaction…
Well if people would have realistic expectations, the hype would be fine.
I’m really confused by the “they” overhyped thing too. We’ve had threads all week about how silent Kabam has been about the event, but now we get all this talk about how Kabam has been hyping the event? These can’t both be true.
The only official communication about the quality of the event that I can think of prior to today’s reveal was a brief mention on the livestream from Crashed saying that he believes for Valiant players, the SBCs have an approximately 50% filler rate. If that single sentence is considered “overhyping,” then you are just constantly setting yourself up to be disappointed.
Well if people would have realistic expectations, the hype would be fine.
I’m really confused by the “they” overhyped thing too. We’ve had threads all week about how silent Kabam has been about the event, but now we get all this talk about how Kabam has been hyping the event? These can’t both be true.
The only official communication about the quality of the event that I can think of prior to today’s reveal was a brief mention on the livestream from Crashed saying that he believes for Valiant players, the SBCs have an approximately 50% filler rate. If that single sentence is considered “overhyping,” then you are just constantly setting yourself up to be disappointed.
On a side note, when you step back and think about the overall rewards packages for the season, it’s interesting how the community doesn’t seem to consider the 10x10 supply drop. A huge portion of the active player base is receiving ten six or seven star champs, including one of their showpiece champs for the year. But it doesn’t seem as if that largesse on Kabam’s part is factored into the average player’s current satisfaction…
I hope I don’t hit the forum limit on this one.
Something to always remember is this game has a lot of players, and almost none of them comment on the game. There’s like 5000 active forum members out of a population of about a million. Not only do most players not comment, but if you add up all the people that the forum members even know, and could possibly represent, you still end up with a minority of players.
The stuff you see on social media, the stuff you see on the Discord, and the stuff you read here, are not representative samples of the playerbase. They are the self-selected loud mouths, like me. And all things being equal, the majority of people motivated to speak out tend to be the ones with the most complaints. People rarely feel compelled to say “I’m happy.” They are motivated to say “I have a problem.”
Lots and lots of players are happy with the supply drop. But they aren’t going to come here to yell about it. Lots of players are perfectly happy with the banquet. They aren’t going to write essays about it. Even if they wanted to, since most of the vocal players tend to be malcontents (even I’m a malcontent in a sense, just of an unusual form) they often get hammered on the forums or the reddit when they do. We are not especially kind to wide-eyed neophytes.
When the disagree flag was added, I said something that I think is applicable here. When I said I don’t place very much if any stock in the disagree flag, someone asked if that meant the agree flag was equally nonsense. And I said no, there’s a reason for the agree flag to exist that doesn’t apply to the disagree flag. Fundamentally speaking, there’s only one way to agree. If you agree, there’s nothing more to say. Flagging a post with an agree is a clean way of saying “I agree” without having to take up space on the forums to say that. But that’s not true for disagree. If you disagree, saying you disagree says nothing, because there are lots of ways to disagree, and if you don’t say in what way, you’re saying nothing.
If you’re happy, you’re happy. But if you’re unhappy, there’s a million ways to be unhappy. So I get that most feedback is going to come from unhappy people. That’s logical, and it is even desirable. You want to know why people are unhappy. But we have to keep in mind that this can skew the sense of how unhappy players actually are, and what percentage of them are unhappy. Judging how happy the players of MCOC are by hanging out in the forums is like judging how healthy people are by hanging out in the lobby of a hospital.
I have run an alliance of relatively casual players for years now. I have never had a single player quit because of some drama on the forums. Sometimes they quit because they no longer have time for the game. A lot of people started when they were younger and life eventually moves on. Some have quit for issues unique to them. A couple just lost interest gradually. None, and I mean zero have quit over any of the big drama things that supposedly were either going to cause a mass exodus or was “punishing” players.
The average player not only doesn’t care about this stuff, the average player isn’t even *aware* of this stuff most of the time. If you polled the average player about whether they think the 10x10 supply drop makes up for the banquet rewards, over half of them would probably say “what’s a supply drop?”
None of us represents the playerbase, as much as some of us would like to think we do. I like to think I’m at least *exposed* to a wide swath of it, and I try to represent their collective interests when I can. But none of us ever actually represent the average player, because none of us are. The moment we started posting here, we became one of the 1%. Average players with average sensibilities don’t do what we do, because what we do is kind of nuts.
I should get off my soap box and give a more direct reply, before I run out of characters. Yes, most players who voice an opinion about rewards in the game tend to look at individual things. This is good, that’s bad. The designers tend to look holistically. I’ve often mentioned that they have a pseudo reward budget that they allocate to different things. If this has more this has less. It is much more complex than that when the rubber meets the road, because reward budget is not exactly fixed, it is a justified budget (which would itself be a lengthy thing to describe) but in simple terms, the devs see how much stuff we get in a month, in a year. They see what players get when they progress through the game and when they play for a period of time. They try to tune individual events to satisfy individual constraints, but above it all is the overarching collective rewards that matter most, because the bottom line is what the players get overall determines how they progress in the game.
I get why players look at things the way they do: it is directly related to how they are motivated to do anything at all. But I also understand why the developers design the way they do, because there’s no other way. I didn’t invent the idea of a reward budget, nor did I hear about it from the MCOC devs. That’s an idea I brought here from the many other games I’ve played and been involved with, and the econ designers here were like “well, of course.” Because, of course.
Overall okay with the event. Lots of free stuff. The only thing I'm a bit ticked is having T5CC in the superior banquet crystal. I understand the crystal caters for thronebreakers to valiant, but if I open 10 crystals and 5 end up being t5cc will be disappointing. I'm guessing the EOP gauntlent or whatever quest we get thanos will have an R4 reward, so I'm okay with spenders getting their R4s. But seriously, T5CC in banquet crystals? Like I get they are technically used for 7 stars, but I would guess most people would rather have less of T5CC than the other 7* rank up resources.
Overall okay with the event. Lots of free stuff. The only thing I'm a bit ticked is having T5CC in the superior banquet crystal. I understand the crystal caters for thronebreakers to valiant, but if I open 10 crystals and 5 end up being t5cc will be disappointing. I'm guessing the EOP gauntlent or whatever quest we get thanos will have an R4 reward, so I'm okay with spenders getting their R4s. But seriously, T5CC in banquet crystals? Like I get they are technically used for 7 stars, but I would guess most people would rather have less of T5CC than the other 7* rank up resources.
I hear that complaint but I’d say hold off on it until we see drop percentages. Personally, I can say I’ve done a lot of rank ups lately and don’t completely hate pulling a couple t5cc here and there. Just needs to be in moderation.
Overall okay with the event. Lots of free stuff. The only thing I'm a bit ticked is having T5CC in the superior banquet crystal. I understand the crystal caters for thronebreakers to valiant, but if I open 10 crystals and 5 end up being t5cc will be disappointing. I'm guessing the EOP gauntlent or whatever quest we get thanos will have an R4 reward, so I'm okay with spenders getting their R4s. But seriously, T5CC in banquet crystals? Like I get they are technically used for 7 stars, but I would guess most people would rather have less of T5CC than the other 7* rank up resources.
Hypothetically speaking, what would you say would be a reasonable drop rate for the T5CC in the SBC? Like you say, its not a super desirable reward for Valiants, but we do use a few. So let's say that all the rank up stuff, all the catalyst drops in the SBC, was some nice round number like half. Half the stuff in there is cats, half is the other stuff. So let's say you open 50 SBCs. Like you said above, if 25 were T5CC you'd be disappointed, and so would I. But what if 25 of those drops were catalysts in general, and some fraction of those were T5CC. How many out of 25 would you think was "eh, not the best reward, but I can still use them so whatever, its fine."
Overall okay with the event. Lots of free stuff. The only thing I'm a bit ticked is having T5CC in the superior banquet crystal. I understand the crystal caters for thronebreakers to valiant, but if I open 10 crystals and 5 end up being t5cc will be disappointing. I'm guessing the EOP gauntlent or whatever quest we get thanos will have an R4 reward, so I'm okay with spenders getting their R4s. But seriously, T5CC in banquet crystals? Like I get they are technically used for 7 stars, but I would guess most people would rather have less of T5CC than the other 7* rank up resources.
Hypothetically speaking, what would you say would be a reasonable drop rate for the T5CC in the SBC? Like you say, its not a super desirable reward for Valiants, but we do use a few. So let's say that all the rank up stuff, all the catalyst drops in the SBC, was some nice round number like half. Half the stuff in there is cats, half is the other stuff. So let's say you open 50 SBCs. Like you said above, if 25 were T5CC you'd be disappointed, and so would I. But what if 25 of those drops were catalysts in general, and some fraction of those were T5CC. How many out of 25 would you think was "eh, not the best reward, but I can still use them so whatever, its fine."
Hard to say. It’s also counterintuitive to give T5CC a lower drop rate than the other stuffs which arguably I would say are more valuable to valiant than T5CC. Greedily, I would have said T5CC be part of the guaranteed items from the crystals, but I would say ideally not more than 10%, that would be pulling them 5 times in 50 crystals on average. But one can still get unlucky in 10 crystals and pull them more times 🤣.
Overall okay with the event. Lots of free stuff. The only thing I'm a bit ticked is having T5CC in the superior banquet crystal. I understand the crystal caters for thronebreakers to valiant, but if I open 10 crystals and 5 end up being t5cc will be disappointing. I'm guessing the EOP gauntlent or whatever quest we get thanos will have an R4 reward, so I'm okay with spenders getting their R4s. But seriously, T5CC in banquet crystals? Like I get they are technically used for 7 stars, but I would guess most people would rather have less of T5CC than the other 7* rank up resources.
Hypothetically speaking, what would you say would be a reasonable drop rate for the T5CC in the SBC? Like you say, its not a super desirable reward for Valiants, but we do use a few. So let's say that all the rank up stuff, all the catalyst drops in the SBC, was some nice round number like half. Half the stuff in there is cats, half is the other stuff. So let's say you open 50 SBCs. Like you said above, if 25 were T5CC you'd be disappointed, and so would I. But what if 25 of those drops were catalysts in general, and some fraction of those were T5CC. How many out of 25 would you think was "eh, not the best reward, but I can still use them so whatever, its fine."
Hard to say. It’s also counterintuitive to give T5CC a lower drop rate than the other stuffs which arguably I would say are more valuable to valiant than T5CC. Greedily, I would have said T5CC be part of the guaranteed items from the crystals, but I would say ideally not more than 10%, that would be pulling them 5 times in 50 crystals on average. But one can still get unlucky in 10 crystals and pull them more times 🤣.
It isn’t necessarily illogical for lower tier items to have lower drop rates than higher ones. There’s two ways to design a crystal like this. You start with some average value (however you measure that) for the crystal. Then you can do one of two basic things. You can make a list of stuff and assign a drop probability based on the value of that thing: the higher the value the lower the odds. That’s logical, and then you juggle the numbers until the average value ends up being what you want it to be.
The other way is you find the thing in your list that comes closest to the average value you want in the crystal itself. That gets the highest drop probability, and everything else gets lower odds based on how far away it is from the average, like a bell curve. The idea is to concentrate the value of the drops towards the average value of the crystal itself.
So the devs can make T5CC have high odds because it is the most “common” thing. Or they can give it low odds because it is “far away” from the average value of the crystal. We’ll see tomorrow how close the crystal actually is to your ideal drop rate. Personally, I think that’s a reasonable drop rate myself.
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Everyone should do their own homework and work towards their own independent conclusions. But they should be logical, informed conclusions that reflect reality. When people literally make up their own conclusions, picking and choosing what to believe and what to reject based on their own predispositions, they aren’t arriving at their own independent conclusions, they are just throwing random lumps of poo at the walls.
There was a thread whose title basically said rewards need to be fixed because player community was lied to. The OP stated that way more than 50% of the crystal rewards was filler, contradicting what Kabam stated about the banquet rewards earlier.
This is *impossible* to state, because the drop odds haven’t been released yet. So there’s literally no way to know how much of the crystal is “filler” and how much is not, independent of what a player even considers “filler.” This is an invalid complaint on its face, and the person making it could only be assumed to be an irrational malcontent.
Is this thread that bad? No, but it isn’t all that far behind. You have people complaining about rewards when as I said, because the drop rates haven’t been announced yet there’s no way to know what the average player is actually going to get from crystals, the bulk of the rewards most players will get. You have players saying the only reason why they delayed announcing the rewards is because Kabam knew everyone would complain about how awful they are, instead of, say, Kabam doing it because that’s how marketing works everywhere else in the world. You have players saying the banquet was overhyped, which is the thing people always say about everything when the truth is they hyped it in their own heads, they expected vastly more than any reasonable game economy will ever give them, so when someone says “this will be good” that’s already overhyping something that will never be good enough for them.
These are the valid criticisms I’m supposed to be acknowledging? I think not. I’ve been making fun of them for years now, and they are just as invalid now as they have always been.
Time and time again these people are disappointed, and time and time again they expect to not be disappointed the next time, and time and time again they see this as a failure of the game, and not their wildly broken expectations. I often wonder if that’s why some people even play this or other games. It is somehow weirdly satisfying to see that time and time again this game is “wrong” and they are one of the few people smart enough to know that. Constantly being proven wrong is somehow proof they are in fact always right.
Now that I think about it, that actually explains a lot, and not just in this game.
In terms of diagnosing the community response, I think several factors are at play. And we all know thinking about several variables at the same time is not the strong suit of this community. But I would say a) rewards are better than last year, but b) however we might quantify the value of the rewards, the unit cost of acquiring the rewards through banquet is rising faster than the value of those rewards.
That’s why I was curious about unit availability. I suspect that even though players might feel that they are “paying more for less or the same value of rewards”, I wonder if Kabam isn’t giving out more units than they used to. Seems like track events, for example, are distributing more units to average players over the course of the year than what we received in prior years.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/381330/faq-how-to-get-units-in-mcoc
Note: there's one small error that was corrected in the thread below the OP: Proven has 171 units, not 151.
Another problem is that the devs can't change everything everywhere simultaneously. They wouldn't even if they could, and they can't. So if they were to increase units in 2021, then sell more stuff for more units in 2022, is that averaging out to a similar overall ratio, or is that perceived as things got way better in 2021 when there was more units chasing the same stuff, and then a big downgrade when more stuff was added with the same units available? That is literally the situation we're having right now with the Battlegrounds store changes.
My analysis of things is that on the whole, the same relative value of stuff is still being made available for the same relative amount of units, but over time the spending cap has gone up. Players can spend the same amount of units today and get the same or slightly higher relative value, but they can also spend more and get even more on top. Whether it is actually perceived that way is another story.
Availability is one thing, how much players actually get is another. I can tell you how much units are out there to be gotten. What I don't know is how much individual players are actually getting. I know we aren't all grinding out those arena milestones: the arena leaderboards say that much. I know most people aren't autofighting their way through Proven, even though the time expense is trivial and the units stack up over time. Most people just don't want to do that sort of thing. So how much units the average player earns, verses how much they have available to spend on events like this, is very difficult to guestimate.
Although, the realm event itself is going to add some very interesting data points to that guestimate bracket. The previous two realm events have given me previously impossible to get data on player activity and player populations. The realm event is going to be the first open source data that allows even blurry estimates on MCOC spending outside of Netmarble financial statements.
The concept of an anchor price is usually thought of in terms of a floor; for this community, it’s more like the anchor price is the annual perceived ceiling — in the case of this event, roughly 15K shards to hit the Isophyne tier in the realm event. So to your point, reward value is probably tracking on a “fair” upward trajectory YOY, but maybe people are reacting strongly to the fact of the 15K.
On a side note, when you step back and think about the overall rewards packages for the season, it’s interesting how the community doesn’t seem to consider the 10x10 supply drop. A huge portion of the active player base is receiving ten six or seven star champs, including one of their showpiece champs for the year. But it doesn’t seem as if that largesse on Kabam’s part is factored into the average player’s current satisfaction…
The only official communication about the quality of the event that I can think of prior to today’s reveal was a brief mention on the livestream from Crashed saying that he believes for Valiant players, the SBCs have an approximately 50% filler rate. If that single sentence is considered “overhyping,” then you are just constantly setting yourself up to be disappointed.
Something to always remember is this game has a lot of players, and almost none of them comment on the game. There’s like 5000 active forum members out of a population of about a million. Not only do most players not comment, but if you add up all the people that the forum members even know, and could possibly represent, you still end up with a minority of players.
The stuff you see on social media, the stuff you see on the Discord, and the stuff you read here, are not representative samples of the playerbase. They are the self-selected loud mouths, like me. And all things being equal, the majority of people motivated to speak out tend to be the ones with the most complaints. People rarely feel compelled to say “I’m happy.” They are motivated to say “I have a problem.”
Lots and lots of players are happy with the supply drop. But they aren’t going to come here to yell about it. Lots of players are perfectly happy with the banquet. They aren’t going to write essays about it. Even if they wanted to, since most of the vocal players tend to be malcontents (even I’m a malcontent in a sense, just of an unusual form) they often get hammered on the forums or the reddit when they do. We are not especially kind to wide-eyed neophytes.
When the disagree flag was added, I said something that I think is applicable here. When I said I don’t place very much if any stock in the disagree flag, someone asked if that meant the agree flag was equally nonsense. And I said no, there’s a reason for the agree flag to exist that doesn’t apply to the disagree flag. Fundamentally speaking, there’s only one way to agree. If you agree, there’s nothing more to say. Flagging a post with an agree is a clean way of saying “I agree” without having to take up space on the forums to say that. But that’s not true for disagree. If you disagree, saying you disagree says nothing, because there are lots of ways to disagree, and if you don’t say in what way, you’re saying nothing.
If you’re happy, you’re happy. But if you’re unhappy, there’s a million ways to be unhappy. So I get that most feedback is going to come from unhappy people. That’s logical, and it is even desirable. You want to know why people are unhappy. But we have to keep in mind that this can skew the sense of how unhappy players actually are, and what percentage of them are unhappy. Judging how happy the players of MCOC are by hanging out in the forums is like judging how healthy people are by hanging out in the lobby of a hospital.
I have run an alliance of relatively casual players for years now. I have never had a single player quit because of some drama on the forums. Sometimes they quit because they no longer have time for the game. A lot of people started when they were younger and life eventually moves on. Some have quit for issues unique to them. A couple just lost interest gradually. None, and I mean zero have quit over any of the big drama things that supposedly were either going to cause a mass exodus or was “punishing” players.
The average player not only doesn’t care about this stuff, the average player isn’t even *aware* of this stuff most of the time. If you polled the average player about whether they think the 10x10 supply drop makes up for the banquet rewards, over half of them would probably say “what’s a supply drop?”
None of us represents the playerbase, as much as some of us would like to think we do. I like to think I’m at least *exposed* to a wide swath of it, and I try to represent their collective interests when I can. But none of us ever actually represent the average player, because none of us are. The moment we started posting here, we became one of the 1%. Average players with average sensibilities don’t do what we do, because what we do is kind of nuts.
I should get off my soap box and give a more direct reply, before I run out of characters. Yes, most players who voice an opinion about rewards in the game tend to look at individual things. This is good, that’s bad. The designers tend to look holistically. I’ve often mentioned that they have a pseudo reward budget that they allocate to different things. If this has more this has less. It is much more complex than that when the rubber meets the road, because reward budget is not exactly fixed, it is a justified budget (which would itself be a lengthy thing to describe) but in simple terms, the devs see how much stuff we get in a month, in a year. They see what players get when they progress through the game and when they play for a period of time. They try to tune individual events to satisfy individual constraints, but above it all is the overarching collective rewards that matter most, because the bottom line is what the players get overall determines how they progress in the game.
I get why players look at things the way they do: it is directly related to how they are motivated to do anything at all. But I also understand why the developers design the way they do, because there’s no other way. I didn’t invent the idea of a reward budget, nor did I hear about it from the MCOC devs. That’s an idea I brought here from the many other games I’ve played and been involved with, and the econ designers here were like “well, of course.” Because, of course.
The other way is you find the thing in your list that comes closest to the average value you want in the crystal itself. That gets the highest drop probability, and everything else gets lower odds based on how far away it is from the average, like a bell curve. The idea is to concentrate the value of the drops towards the average value of the crystal itself.
So the devs can make T5CC have high odds because it is the most “common” thing. Or they can give it low odds because it is “far away” from the average value of the crystal. We’ll see tomorrow how close the crystal actually is to your ideal drop rate. Personally, I think that’s a reasonable drop rate myself.