**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
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Looks like the thread went off the rails. Classic.
38 plus pages of negative feedback with a whole bunch of people creating accounts for the first time to come and tell Kabam how bad this idea is...
Now? The exact same people who derail most other important threads have managed to completely take this one away from us too. Expect to see this post closed shortly, and we will all just have to live with this terrible change.
Here's a thought... Get this thread back on track, and Mods can basically remove the last 3 pages of garbage that shouldn't be here anyway.
Seriously folks, I know it's hard, but stop feeding the trolls! People come to the forums for information and discussion. It's impossible to make informed decisions if you have to slog through people arguing about who said what and when.
No way, your trying to tell me that those who drop bigger dollars are not increasing there odds?
Data doesn't "lie" but data mining isn't about data, its about mining. Every datamining process has a step vulnerable to throwing the entire exercise off. You have to take a colloquial thing you want to know and translate that into a set of numbers you can extract from your logs. That step is full of pitfalls I've seen go wrong lots of times.
To get this right requires a significant amount of mathematical acumen, a high order mastery of statistics, and a significant amount of prior experience with large data analysis. This is expertise the overwhelming majority of game developers do not have. In fact statistically speaking the average number of developers with this expertise in the average game development house rounds to zero.
For example, suppose for example purposes we decide we want to find the "lowest" performing champions. We could naively decide to select all champions whose usage numbers were far below average and those whose reward earning values were far below average and any overlap between those two lists would be deemed as "low performing." But I suspect Blade would be on that list, because he's so new he isn't used often across the entire playerbase. And if hypothetically people used him in AW more than quests, his actual reward earning value could be relatively low compared to other high value champs. Unless this step is done very carefully, data mining can generate operationally wrong conclusions. Data doesn't lie, but mining can be done wrong.
An example from real life that illustrates the point. In another MMO I played in the past the devs data mined a particular character class being the most common played character class in the entire game. It was the class that players created new characters most frequently. It was the character class that had the most logins. It was the most leveled on average. And yet it was considered underperforming by many players of the game. It took a deeper dive to discover that while that class was the most common across the entire game, it was overwhelmingly common in the lower levels and significantly lagged in the higher levels of the game. It appears the problem with the class was that it was easy to play and did a lot of damage so it was popular with new players and leveled quickly. But it became outclassed at higher levels and many players actually abandoned playing those characters in favor of slower, less easy to play, less direct damage character classes that were far more survivable in the latter part of the game. You had to look at the data very carefully, and in a very detailed way, to see the problem the players were complaining about actually show up in the datamining.
Any champ can be effective in map 2 or Tier 18.
Test it out in hard content and you'll find out who comes ahead. This isn't a debate, it's fact.
Also look at the alliance war forum. The community filled up lots of pages of complaints. There were months of diversity wars before finally kabam made a positive change.
The price of participating on these forums and attempting to voice a reasoned opinion regardless of the emotional level of the discussion thread is having to deal with comments like this from commenters like yourself. Its not a high price and I'm perfectly willing to pay it. But you don't have to read my posts because it takes a trivial amount of effort to eliminate them from your view if you believe my posts are entirely worthless. Just like I don't understand why anyone would invest significant amount of time into a game they hate, I don't understand why someone would subject themselves willingly to content they believe is consistently worthless. That's irrational.
Actually, those two polls would be considered irreparably statistically skewed due to self-selection bias.
That's a reasonable way to judge which champions have the highest performance potential. That's useful for some game balance operations, but in general that's not how MMO developers judge the content they put into their games accessible to a wider player population. A champion is good or bad depending on how it behaves when judged across all of the players taken as a whole, because that's the overall goal of development in the first place.
This sometimes works against the players (some of them) and sometimes for the players. They just don't tend to recognize when the latter happens. For example, this same principle is almost certainly how Star Lord escaped the nerf hammer in 12.0 relatively unscathed. Star Lord does a lot of damage in theory. He does a lot of damage when used by the right players. He doesn't deal that enormous amount of damage on average across the entire playerbase, so the need to nerf him was lower than SW or Thor. Thor dealt ridiculous damage in everyone's hands with 11.0 mechanics (and honestly, I believe the devs incorrectly double-nerfed him and don't fully realize it, nor do most of the players), so he was the larger outlier than Star Lord (and SW was probably the largest outlier).
For me personally, I would have to agree with you on the contents of the first announced crystal. But that was also true for the majority of featured 5* crystals as well. I wasn't going to spend 15k on King Groot or Carnage or Vulture. The question is whether the crystal structure has anything to offer in theory, depending on what the future contents hold. The current 5* featured is not a 20% chance to get someone I want. It is *sometimes* a 20% chance to get someone I want, and most of the time someone I don't want, or at least don't want to spend the extra shards to get.
For the new crystal to have the same chance to pull a desirable 5* champion than the current one approximately has, five out of the twenty four champions have to be "sufficiently desirable" whatever that means for any particular player. Looking back at the release schedule we have had strings of six 5* champions that had several good pulls, the set that had Rogue, Ghost Rider, and Voodoo had three of six, and the set with Hyperion and Gwenpool had two good ones and two decent (Hood, Dormammu). The set added to basic in December contained Iceman, AA, Psylocke, Angela, King Groot, and Nebula. Its a set with two top tier champions and no real complete duds.
Rotating the crystals faster, every month instead of every three months, increases the likelihood that a rolling sequence of six featured champions contains several top tier or near top tier options, and also at least a few strong desirable basic champions to make the odds of pulling a strong champion higher than the current featured crystal.
I don't need every new featured crystal to be packed with highly desirable 5* champions (for me). That's not true with the current crystal now. I'd just like the odds of a few of them out of an entire year happening to land in the general area of my bullseye to be reasonably good. That's the real problem with judging these crystals for me. I can't judge their true value without knowing what the contents are or will likely be. And the first one could simply be bad luck.
The first one has a slightly higher chance to avoid duds, so if that's what you're after it might be interesting. If you're looking for something with the same value as a highly desirable featured 5* crystal, I don't think it gets there. It could, depending on how the new 5* featured champions line up in the calendar and what the curated basic champions look like in future crystals. But if there's only going to be four versions in the entire year, I'm skeptical people will find what they want value-wise in an entire year of featured crystals. That's probably not a good idea. On top of everything else, it gives you fewer options to adjust things if the players reacts badly to them across the entire playerbase.
Well, I do believe it's around 20% to pull the feature, obviously different people have different luck. I used a different strategy for my pulls based on timing, spinning or not spinning made no difference. For me, I watched the alliance feed. If there was some bad luck in a few crystals, I'd open mine next. Maybe it works, maybe not, but I got iceman, stark spidey, and medusa on 1 15k crystal each. So it definitely worked for me lol.
I do agree that there is very little value in any possibility of how this new crystal is designed. In essence, as someone else pointed out, people may have an overload of t4ccs in one particular class, expiring t2as, and awakening gems. With the current chances in the featured, you have a legitimate shot at pulling that champ and using the resources before they expire, adding to your prestige, and basic account progression. No one likes being stuck where they are watching everyone else progress much faster.
I agree, I think it’s pretty great too.
About 15 of those pages are the same 5 people bickering over who said what.
1) They're just learning how to play
2) They don't have access to many champs
It's entirely different if you're talking about using that kind of data to understand account retention or turning F2P into paid.
1. Sampling bias is always bad unless it is controlled. If you don't know in what specific way you're skewed, your conclusions can't be justified, even if the skew direction was intentional.
2. As I mentioned before, you're talking about "effectiveness" to mean "potential" whereas game developers almost certainly do not.
The devs don't really care, most of the time, if you're twice as strong with Blade as I am. They don't care because they don't have to care. You being twice as good as me with Blade won't in and of itself help or hurt the game as a whole. What they care about because they have to care about it, is what Blade is doing now in the hands of all the players that have him, and what will happen when a million players eventually get their hands on him. That can make or break the game, so 99% of the time what matters to them is what actually happens, not what happens in the top tier or what happens with the absolute best players or what is the best that can possibly happen. Short of game-breaking exploitability, what matters is what everyone does with Blade, not what the few best players can do with him.
Keep in mind this is all somewhat moot, because while this academic discussion surrounds @Kabam Miike 's use of the word "effective" it doesn't directly say anything about the intent of the featured crystal. If we all start agreeing on how we will all use the word "effective" or even how we should measure it, it won't change the content of the crystal. They chose those champions for their own internal reasons, and hitting the devs over the head with a dictionary won't change their minds any more than I could change your mind about how good the crystal is by forcing you to redefine the word "good." Even if I get you to change your mind about the word, it wouldn't change your opinion. The word is just a way to express the opinion. You'd change words, not your mind. The devs aren't going to change their minds either. At best, and even this is unlikely, they will just change words.
You totally missed my point even though we're on the same page. Did I say uncontrolled? I specifically said why you would bias a particular way, therefore you would know how you're skewed.
And the reason why "effectivness" is in quotes is because it's such a nebulous concept. I have no idea what their metrics are and neither do you, but it is the term that the Kabam mods used.
Don't go the way of other contrarians on this forum.
Hopefully they’ll only add them after they go through a tweaking process similar to Luke Cage and Red Hulk.