If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
Perfect!
People just dont understand the realm milestones haha.
And @Kabam_Crashed , @Kabam_Pinwheel ,some summoners here want to censor mine and other summoner words that are ok with Banquet and everything we got.
They even had a memory lapse forgetting the 10 amazing received champs
Everyone is entitled to express his/her oppinion.
Not a bunch of summoners crying over rng crystals will stop me/us
THE 10 CHAMPS WHERE NOTHING TO DO WITH BANQUET! ARE YOU GONNA START TALKING ABOUT HOW SIDE QUEST REWARDS 8 YEARS AGO WERE SO GOOD IT JUSTIFIES THIS?
Being one of Royal Familly Mi 6 agents surprises me the way you answer with big Caps, not polite as your answer is seen as you're yellying, as we can read the same way.
10 champs are indeed part of the festivities.
Maybe if they put the champs on every day now, during banquet, nobody would be crying
It's clear that there's something going on behind the scenes, I don't remember Kabam being active on the forum on weekends, and it's almost Christmas too.
We haven't heard the last word on this, future Banquet events and millions of dollars are at stake, it helps to rattle the sabers a bit.
We may not be whales, but without us there's not much for the whales to do. No one is going to spend $250k on an event in the future, if you can be number 1 and spend $25k, or $2,500.
We are talking about the banquet here, and the 10 free champions we received isn't part of the banquet. They are part of the 10th year anniversary but not the banquet. As far as the banquet is concerned, it has been a total failure due to the drop rates from the SBC, over 30% in t6cc fragments?? in what year are they living ??? this isn't 2023
I’m grateful for the 10 free 7-star champions that were given by Kabam. It’s an incredibly generous gesture, and I appreciate the effort to give back to the community. However, I don’t feel that this can adequately compensate for the disappointment surrounding the Grand Banquet event.
While I now have 10 new 7-star champions, the reality is that most of them will likely never even be ranked up due to the extreme resource requirements for 7-stars. This leaves the value of these champions somewhat limited in the grand scheme of things.
Furthermore, I personally spent $200 and 6,000 units on getting 60 Superior Banquet Crystals, and the rewards I received left me feeling underwhelmed.
I ended up with mostly Tier 6 Class Catalyst fragments, a small amount of Tier 7 Basic Catalyst fragments, less than 5000 7-star shards, a Titan Crystal, and the 7-star Champion Trophy Selector. While these rewards might look good on paper, they fall far short of what I was expecting from an event marketed as a “Grand Banquet.” I thought my investment would yield more meaningful rewards, and it’s disheartening that it didn’t.
If I feel this let down after what I received, I can only imagine how others feel who spent less or pulled worse rewards. This doesn’t feel like a Grand Banquet—it feels like a Grand Letdown. I hope future events will provide better rewards and truly live up to the hype.
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
ok, we get you work at kabam…but is this your honest opinion ? From a real player pov ?
Just wanna say Crashed has been incredibly open and honest with the community, above and beyond what is required by his position. He's been very generous with his time especially here on the forums, lets please not impugn his character. You can disagree with his assessment if you do, but please trust that if hes saying it he means it.
This just sounds a bit condescending as if we should feel privileged about him posting here . He was one of those who hyped these rewards so he should also take responsibility to address players who feel scammed . Players spent time and money to get very underwhelming outcomes . Remember it’s the same money that the game runs on and pays the wages of kabam employees . Read the room before making this type of post .
It’s almost like pilot saying he is generous with his time if he trying to explain a delayed flight
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
Perfect!
People just dont understand the realm milestones haha.
And @Kabam_Crashed , @Kabam_Pinwheel ,some summoners here want to censor mine and other summoner words that are ok with Banquet and everything we got.
They even had a memory lapse forgetting the 10 amazing received champs
Everyone is entitled to express his/her oppinion.
Not a bunch of summoners crying over rng crystals will stop me/us
THE 10 CHAMPS WHERE NOTHING TO DO WITH BANQUET! ARE YOU GONNA START TALKING ABOUT HOW SIDE QUEST REWARDS 8 YEARS AGO WERE SO GOOD IT JUSTIFIES THIS?
Being one of Royal Familly Mi 6 agents surprises me the way you answer with big Caps, not polite as your answer is seen as you're yellying, as we can read the same way.
10 champs are indeed part of the festivities.
Maybe if they put the champs on every day now, during banquet, nobody would be crying
Only one of those 10 was worth. The first 9 were there to make you login every day. Those 9 are not worth any rank up/lvl up ressources. In fact they are so bad, Kabam didn’t even flinch to give Spider Man, not once, not twice, but 3 times. They were filler like the fillers we have in the SBC. So go ahead and rank up those subpar champs. I know I won’t
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
In other words, whales and mega-whales will get the rewards no matter what, so maybe we can bleed the average player of any expendable income they may have.
Thank you for the, let's be honest, absolute bare minimum adjustment to the absolute end game milestones in the Banquet milestones. This only helps the few % of players who were going to push that far already, but it does show you’re at least open to listening and adjusting.
This would be an incredible time to start listening harder. There are some inescapable gaps between what your game team is doing and considering “ground breaking good value rewards” and what your customers are TELLING you is incredibly bad value. This gap is immense and I recommend something be done immediately to start closing that gap.
In Kabam Crash’s response to the uproar about the value in the Banquet crystals he says something close to “the game team values rewards differently than the playerbase.” This is a true, and necessary, statement. If players had every single thing we wanted, the game would probably be unplayable (looking at you 7* Herc, Magik, and Quake). That being said, the disconnect between the game team's valuation and the players is beyond the pale of what should be considered acceptable in the Banquet event.
The player's valuation of what 300 units should achieve when spending 300 units in the game absolutely must be taken into consideration - and it very, very obviously was not taken into consideration with this event. For doing 4 runs of 1.1 in Road to the Labyrinth, a Valiant player achieves all Daily Super Event milestones. These rewards include things like half a T6 Basic/T3 Alpha, a full T5 class catalyst selector, 225 Titan shards, 1800 T4 Alpha frags, or a single 7* sig stone, and a bunch of extras. These are the things we get every single day for doing nothing more than putting our phone on autofight and hitting Replay 3 times. This doesn’t even take into account the Battlegrounds store or any other place we can piece these rewards together.
Your team has somehow decided that charging us 300 units for the rewards we get every day for free is somehow “great reward valuation.” 2 T5CC, 2 7* sig stones, 1-5% of various catalysts for 300 units? Talk about an absolutely defenseless level of disconnect. Kabam Crash is 100% right that all the rewards we get are tuned to 7*s and therefore aren’t “useless” but the quantities being offered are nowhere near a 300 unit valuation for a Valiant player.
The team also keeps saying things along the lines of, “the rewards in their entirety is incredibly good valuation.” And again, I would actually agree. But to get all the rewards in their entirety requires spending the equivalent of $500-$600 USD worth of units to get there. You have the data, how many of your players can actually do that? Should the players who can't spend/hoard enough units be left feeling absolutely miserable, worthless, and hating the event because they can’t afford it? What an awful way to treat your players, customers and potential customers.
The player base is not as foolish as we are being told we are by the game team. We completely understand not every single SBC can give an equivalent 300 unit valuation. That being said, when we are going through tens and hundreds of these crystals and coming out feeling overwhelmingly ripped off and like there was next to no value in what we pulled, there’s obvious, drastic action that needs to be taken. For something like the 10th anniversary Grand Banquet Event not a single action or crystal opening should leave us feeling like we didn’t get any value out of it. Not. A. Single. One.
The long term solution moving forward is under absolutely zero circumstance should Valiant players be in the same reward categories as Thronebreakers. That is completely nonsensical. It destroys the value of achieving the Valiant title and requires rewards tuning to be ridiculously pathetic value for Valiant players while TB players get beyond phenomenal returns. Pair Paragons and Thronebreakers together, sure. Under no circumstance should the top tier title player be suffering lessened returns because they are paired with lower-tier players.
I’m not one to go on about compensation, but honestly, there needs to be something significant done to turn around the ongoing player sentiment immediately. The 7* crystals will be appreciated by those who were already going to get them, but it has honestly made player sentiment even worse. There are reports of players vowing to never spend again, wanting a boycott/review bombing to happen, and even those putting the game down for good. You have said to “keep an eye out for the Christmas gift” but that may legitimately be too little, too late. Especially with the complete lack of trust that it will be anything of actual value at this point. You have said “just wait” over and over and every time we have been left disappointed and wanting.
There have been a few suggestions made here that could work well:
*Increase the milestone rewards for those who haven’t reached them and mail the difference to those who have. Simple and efficient.
*Create a new SBC with only the top rewards adjusted by title level and send each player 5.
*Implement a progression based Christmas Calendar that starts Monday and is filled with only the top % rewards to make up for the lacking crystal pulls. Progression based - custom for each progression level.
Again, moving forward, Kabam truly needs to invest in a Valuation Team that understands player psychology for events like this and allows them to put that ahead of what might be considered “fair rewards”. There is nothing more disheartening for a player to open $500 USD worth of units and feel awful for it. See what I did there? You’re going to tell me, “but units are free” and you’re not wrong, but the psychology behind it still leaves a player feeling like they took a massive financial hit. It’s value they could have used elsewhere and been left feeling like they actually got something of equivalent worth.
If you need help, I would be more than happy to help. As a consultant. For a fee. Would probably do it for an equivalent exchange of 3400 units per hour or so.
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
Perfect!
People just dont understand the realm milestones haha.
And @Kabam_Crashed , @Kabam_Pinwheel ,some summoners here want to censor mine and other summoner words that are ok with Banquet and everything we got.
They even had a memory lapse forgetting the 10 amazing received champs
Everyone is entitled to express his/her oppinion.
Not a bunch of summoners crying over rng crystals will stop me/us
Aren't you TB or lower ? Of course you loved the event, it was made for you and we got paired with you 😂 So yes you're opinion on the issue doesn't matter frankly
The superior banquet feel like slightly altered valiant daily crystals and the fact we can't even chose the champions we want within the glorious guardian key event is incredibly disappointing.
Also giving out sig stones for the glorious guardian reworks in the event milestones without the option to select those champs yourself completely undermines the argument for anti-whaling since you can only get enough keys to use them by whaling on Odins.
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
Perfect!
People just dont understand the realm milestones haha.
And @Kabam_Crashed , @Kabam_Pinwheel ,some summoners here want to censor mine and other summoner words that are ok with Banquet and everything we got.
They even had a memory lapse forgetting the 10 amazing received champs
Everyone is entitled to express his/her oppinion.
Not a bunch of summoners crying over rng crystals will stop me/us
THE 10 CHAMPS WHERE NOTHING TO DO WITH BANQUET! ARE YOU GONNA START TALKING ABOUT HOW SIDE QUEST REWARDS 8 YEARS AGO WERE SO GOOD IT JUSTIFIES THIS?
Being one of Royal Familly Mi 6 agents surprises me the way you answer with big Caps, not polite as your answer is seen as you're yellying, as we can read the same way.
10 champs are indeed part of the festivities.
Maybe if they put the champs on every day now, during banquet, nobody would be crying
@peixemacaco sorry if caps came across as rude lol, not my intention, just wanted to make a point
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
Perfect!
People just dont understand the realm milestones haha.
And @Kabam_Crashed , @Kabam_Pinwheel ,some summoners here want to censor mine and other summoner words that are ok with Banquet and everything we got.
They even had a memory lapse forgetting the 10 amazing received champs
Everyone is entitled to express his/her oppinion.
Not a bunch of summoners crying over rng crystals will stop me/us
THE 10 CHAMPS WHERE NOTHING TO DO WITH BANQUET! ARE YOU GONNA START TALKING ABOUT HOW SIDE QUEST REWARDS 8 YEARS AGO WERE SO GOOD IT JUSTIFIES THIS?
Being one of Royal Familly Mi 6 agents surprises me the way you answer with big Caps, not polite as your answer is seen as you're yellying, as we can read the same way.
10 champs are indeed part of the festivities.
Maybe if they put the champs on every day now, during banquet, nobody would be crying
@peixemacaco sorry if caps came across as rude lol, not my intention, just wanted to make a point
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
This seems contradicting. Big spenders already have an enormous gap and advantage that is encouraged by Kabam. Doesn't Kabam create these overpriced 9,500 unit champion bundles, and $100 offers for those who want to spend? Doesn't every major whale event requires THOUSANDS of units and/or dollars to buy the most rare, sought after rewards? So why was banquet different? Maybe they should stop spending?
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
but why did we not even get a good calendar ? since there is always a holiday calendar that gives out gbcs this year its just accolades
Gonna go out on a limb and say the 10 champ calendar WAS the holiday calender. If that's true, I'd take it over what we usually got in the past.
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
We deliberately include as much of the reward package as we can in the events themselves. This year, everything in the SBC can be used on 7-star champions, so there shouldn't be anything in there that is completely useless to players. But the crystals are never going to be the main focus of the rewards, because if they were as TyEdge correctly summarized, it would mean creating an enormous gap between the big spenders and everyone else.
I will pop back into this thread after the event is over to share more comprehensive thoughts like I did last year. But in the meantime, I encourage Summoners to take a breath and look at the total reward package that was available as part of this event. I personally think there is more here for ~15K Units than there was during Cyber Week, and I'm having a blast with my new 7-Star Medusa.
Enjoy the holiday break everyone.
“can be used on 7* champs” does a lot of heavy lifting here.
It's amazing how people keep complaining how bad it is but keep popping them and drop lots of money on it. When you keep doing it kabam see it as a success. If players wouldn't buy the crystals and their income would have been hurt they would have made changes for sure.
1) As the previous years of the Banquet, I sincerely enjoyed to see my teammates getting some 7* champions that were nice to very good. No matter what their titles are/were. That matches with the end of year mindset. And give them motivation to the game (more important as I am in the management of an alliance).
2) I have reached the solo event last milestone. The immediate milestones above (only in the Community event) were not interesting for me (no Weapon X in the selector, too few Titan shards and far above), and so on). A kind of reasonable top, and in the end that was fine.
3) I would have appreciated selectors instead of keys. Even if I understand the reason (invite to spend more for the champion( s ) the player wants), I think that was unnecessary. In the pool I don’t think there were really better champions that the others, nor absolute beast. So no absolute wish (even after a look at their respective spotlight) but a little one : Medusa. With 3 keys, it remains unsatisfied. I will discover my refreshed Sentry, Sentinel and Purgatory soon.
4) Very good idea to disable the champions already pulled. This mechanism would/will be useful for future events and offers.
5) The content of the superior greater Banquet crystal were not nice. As many players, I bought and opened them, knowing the result would be disappointed, and it was. Difficult to reasonably find a balance. In my opinion: - Too low rates on some items - Not enough iso (with so much level up to do on 7* …) - Not enough t6cc shards (getting several 7* on December implies wanting to upgrade them quickly) - Not enough gold (rank and level ups…)
I know that the game follow a pace of progression for the players. So some items cannot be given too easily. And the upgrades are an objective for the couple of weeks and months from now.
6) I would have appreciated to access to the Omega Days pool (more easily if it was in the Banquet). This pool is far more interesting than some others for me (Corvus, Quick, Mole).
Once again, thanks to the MCOC team for the best month of the game until now. It gave me a boost for a couple of months. And happy new year to the MCOC team and the community!
I spent about 3k (unsure of the actual amount, I know 2k was spent and then a good few units after) and with a fairly active alliance, myself at Cavlier, I got
3 7*'s, a good few 6*'s, a lot of materials idk how much of each, a lot of account buffs (hp, atk, mix of both, arena) a lot of potions and energy.
Also a *few* relics.
Personally this Banquet was good being the first one I'm aware enough to experience and plan for.
Though with what the general consensus seems to be, most people are negative towards it.
I would've preferred more nexus' tbh being my only personal nitpick/complaint
If you build the main prizes into the milestones, you spread the value around more evenly and you keep whales from getting a huge windfall.
If the crystals are absolutely lit, megawhales will get more separation from the population as a whole.
just poppin in to say ... uhhh we're supposed to act like there isn't (and was before this banquet) a mega separation from the whales, megalodons from the mere mortals already?? the separation is already quite massive and it continues to be after any kind of spending event.
there's nothing (likely has ever been a thing) to stop this "game economy" from being what it is in favor of said whales and megalogons. and rightfully so. if you spend, I don't have a problem with what you get above or more than those who do not.
Hello. I was able to get a sneak peak at the various analyses our data team is working on this week, so I was able to finish this post ahead of schedule. What you are about to read isn’t so much a post-mortem as it is an explanation of how I personally see the Banquet event, with as much context as I could provide in this type of setting.
I’ll be honest, I went back and forth a bunch of times about whether or not I was going to do this. Part of me wanted to just reference my initial Banquet post and be done with it, because I know no matter what I say some will respond negatively.
Having said that, I do really like thinking deeply about our game and our players, and I have heard from many of you that you do as well, so I decided to go ahead and write this whole thing up for those that might find it helpful.
First, a little bit about me (you can feel free to skip to the next section if you want)
I’m going to keep this brief, but basically I just wanted to say how I see the Banquet event and the game as a whole isn’t the only perspective on our team that matters. I know other members of our team see these things differently. But I am part of the design leadership team and one of the handful of people most responsible for the Banquet Event, so I’m in a position where how I think about the game has a significant influence over how we build it. While you shouldn’t take this post as game team gospel – I didn’t get anything I say here approved by anybody else – you can safely assume that my perspective on how this all works impacts how we develop events like Banquet.
How I see the Contest
Contest of Champions is Kabam’s biggest game (as measured basically any way you choose). It has formed the lifeblood of our company for the last 10 years. It has sustained us through good times and bad. Without it, Kabam as anything close to we know it would cease to exist.
When I think about how we plan the Contest, I think about the distinction Carse lays out in his book Finite and Infinite Games: a finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. I very much see the development of the Contest as an infinite game. In order for us to continue to play this game, we need a number of things: ( this is not an exhaustive list but I think these are the three most important requirements)
A sufficiently large player base to support the game at scale
Enough development resources to keep those players entertained and engaged so they don’t leave the game (what we call churn)
Things to sell to those players so we can make revenue and pay for the development resources
If at any point in time we don’t have any one of these three things, we risk entering a death spiral where a negative feedback loop results in fewer players, which results in less revenue, which results in a smaller team, which results in fewer players …. you get the picture. This is how pretty much every successful mobile game eventually dies.
So I spend a lot of my time thinking about how we can make sure we have enough of these things. I often see posts on the Forums or YouTube videos that say something like “if Kabam made this offer better by adding more of X I would buy it and Kabam would make more money so they are dumb not to do it.” If our goal was to make as much money as possible on every offer, it would indeed be dumb not to follow that advice, but that isn’t our goal. Our goal (or at least my goal) is for us to keep making this game for the next decade and beyond.
The infinite game is really a marathon, not a sprint. It isn’t enough to just think about us having enough players, resources and revenue this year, but we need to think about it for at least the next ~3 years or we definitely would run out of something important be it players, developers or things to sell.
How does Banquet get made?
Banquet planning for this year really started back in 2022, when we were planning the launch of 7-Star Champions. That is when myself and Kabam Numbers (who?)* sketched out the initial plan for the 7-star lifecycle. I have a spreadsheet that shows approximately how much 7-star stuff players are going to be able to earn and buy over time. I think about this in terms of horizontal progression (how many 7-stars a player has and what sig level they are) and vertical progression (what rank those 7-star champions are). Based on extrapolating players’ rosters on those two axes, I can predict approximately when 7-stars will be over and we will need the next thing. If we move faster than planned, the lifecycle shrinks. If we slow things down, the lifecycle lengthens.
In 2023, both horizontal and vertical moved faster than I had initially planned and hoped, so we devised a number of initiatives to slow things down. This is when we decided we wanted 7R3 to last ~14 months, and counting ahead from Necropolis (Nov 2023), that landed the initial release of the next rank in Dec 2024, coinciding perfectly with Banquet.
Coincidentally, early in December our C-Suite asked for a brief about how we build the Banquet event so I have a slide ready to go with the rest of the timeline! (I have changed our real names to our Kabam tags and cleaned up some insider jargon but 99% of this is exactly what I presented to them).
*After seeing him poached by Supercell and moving to Finland I am contractually obligated to pretend I don’t remember Numbers.
How does player sentiment impact the infinite game?
When I first started working at Kabam three years ago, I was hired as an economy designer. One day I proposed an offer to the Live Ops team which they agreed to build and put in the game. I was pretty confident there was a market for the offer that I had uncovered in our data. The day the offer went out, I looked around to see if players were talking about it and was absolutely devastated by what I found. There were threads on the forums talking about how out of touch Kabam was to make such an insulting offer. There were multiple YouTube videos with titles like “Whichever Kabam Employee Made This Offer Should Be Fired!”
The next day I started work expecting to see that I had proposed the first offer in the game’s history to be bought by nobody, and looking at our revenue dashboards I discovered that, not only had the offer been bought by some players, it had significantly overperformed our revenue estimates. It was, for lack of a better phrase, broadly very popular.
That anecdote is just one example of something I have come to learn over the last three years: there is no consistent correlation between player sentiment in our social channels and short-term revenue. Our engaged players are really really good at a lot of things, including our game, but their opinions on how we make money have little to no predictive value.
To be clear I’m not saying players are always wrong. I remember one sale (I think J4 2023?) in which there was a lot of chatter about how Thronebreaker players were getting shafted, and the Thronebreaker offers in that sale did indeed perform well under our expectations. Sometimes players are spot on. But what I am saying is there is no way for us to see player reaction to an offer or sale on the Forums and YouTube and know if those opinions will impact revenue or not.
I have long had suspicions as to why this was the case, and one of the reasons I wanted to wait for the analysis before making this post is because for the first time our data science group is working on exactly this question. There are a few interesting results from that work, but the key finding is pretty simple: players engaged in our social channels are not a representative sample of our player base. This should be obvious to everyone reading this, but I’ll be honest the more I dig into this, the more differences I find between what the Forums, Discord and YouTube talk about and what our average players care about. We make the majority of our revenue from a much more casual group of players that are often not represented in these channels.
Now I just want to pause and be as clear as I can – none of what I have said above means that players’ opinions and suggestions are not valuable. Those of you who frequent this forum know that I read it regularly. I have made many changes to the game based on feedback and suggestions from this group. I have also leveraged your feedback to push for changes with Kabam leadership, which is how I ended up so heavily involved in the anti-cheat side of the game.
The point is when I see a large negative sentiment groundswell like we saw with Banquet this year, I tend to be much more concerned about players churning than I am about revenue. The question is, did we make a large group of players mad enough that it will impact our ability to retain a sufficiently large player base to support the game at scale? I don’t know the answer to that right now, but that’s the main thing I am going to be keeping an eye on for the next few months.
Banquet 2024
So with that context provided, here are my thoughts about Banquet 2024. I’m going to start with the three main things I agree with the unsatisfied Summoners about, and then I’m going to answer a list of frequently asked questions I have seen around various social channels.
The first thing should be no surprise as it’s what I highlighted in my initial post – the crystals just didn’t feel good to open. Last year, I think the crystals were significantly worse. They were full of 6-Star Sig stones and 6-Star Shards that end-game players couldn’t really even use (~54% of drops were things that couldn’t be used to acquire or upgrade a 7-star). I stand by my comment that everything in the crystals this year is useful to end-game Summoners, but I agree opening them didn’t feel very exciting. So the major focus for us next year will be to improve the crystal opening experience. We have some early ideas for how we can do this without exploding the reward budget.
The second thing is the way we handled crystals purchased with Banquet Tickets. We needed to be clearer up front about how this would all work. The way we handled it didn’t result in anybody getting less earned rewards from the events. Had we counted Banquet Ticket crystals as purchased crystals, the milestones in all of the events would have been adjusted to account for the earned Tickets. Players who collected all the earned Tickets would have ended up at exactly the same milestones in the events. The reason we decided not to do this is it would have made the events relatively more expensive for players who didn’t collect Tickets, which we didn’t want to do. However, I understand why it felt like a shady deal, especially for those who purchased Tickets through other offers.
The third thing I already discussed in this post here. Basically, in an effort to make the crystals better I kind of messed them up, and then a decision over the holidays for how to fix it was probably the wrong one. Hopefully the final resolution we ended at, making the insanely cheap T6B/T3A offer available to all Valiant players is a resolution players can accept.
Why did Banquet 2024 cost more than Banquet 2023?
The MCoC economy is really interesting (at least to me), in that it is both deflationary and inflationary at the same time. It is deflationary in that almost everything gets less valuable over time. Players are keenly aware of this as they interact with the game. They know something that costs 1000 Units today will cost 500 Units at some point in the not so distant future. There is a reason every modern economy targets modest inflation – people knowing things will get cheaper over time is bad for business. But deflation is a quirk of most live service game economies that we have to deal with.
However, at the same time the MCoC economy is inflationary in that the money supply (Units) is increasing over time. There are a couple reasons for this. The first is Unit yields have increased. DNA has a good post here in which he estimates Arena Unit yields per hour have roughly tripled in the last four years, and investigations I have conducted have shown similar numbers.*
At the same time yields are increasing, the way players spend Units is changing. As I mentioned above, our veteran players have gotten really really good at the game. A substantial portion of Units earned by players used to be spent on consumables in quests, AQ and AW. Now quests and game modes represent almost no Unit spend for end-game players. So because players are both earning more Units and spending less of them on consumables, it creates inflationary pressure on sales and other offers.
If we designed J4, Cyber Week and the Banquet event so that most players could get the best stuff for free, we would be out of business pretty quickly. So as players earn and save more Units, events will get more expensive.
*It’s true that if you finish every milestone in every Arena, the total ceiling for Units available in Arena is unchanged. However the vast majority of Arena grinders don’t do that. If you are one of the few who does every milestone in every Arena all year long, I suspect you don’t have a problem taking advantage of events like Banquet.
Why don’t you care about Valiant players/why do all progressions get the same thing/why have you devalued my progression?
Of the four major sales events of the year (Spring, J4, CW and Banquet), the Banquet event is the only one without bespoke offers and rewards for the top progression. So to say we don’t care about those players during sales events feels a bit myopic. The truth is probably 80%+ of the game team’s resources are dedicated to end-game players. Most of our quest resources are dedicated to making content for the end-game, most of our champions are made thinking about how end-game players will play them and most of our multiplayer modes are designed with end-game players in mind.
I have seen people suggest that Valiant players were getting Thronebreaker rewards, but that isn’t the case. There were multiple full Rank 3s in this event. That clearly isn’t an event tuned to Thronebreaker players. Generally when we combine progressions in an event like Banquet, we tune the rewards to the highest progression included. In this case, that was Valiant.
As I mentioned in my post-mortem post last year, despite it being somewhat counterintuitive the Banquet Event is one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from end-game players. As both a developer and an end-game Valiant player who spends a fair bit of his own cash on the game, I really like this. In most of our sales events end-game players carry the revenue. I think it’s great that in the Banquet event lower progression players are spending more relative to the total. I think it’s healthy.
I’ll be honest, given the tremendous success of this event in every aspect except social channel sentiment, I don’t see us making any major changes in how we segment players in Banquet beyond what we have already done. So if you are a player whose happiness with an event depends on bespoke rewards and offers for your progression, the Banquet event is the one major annual event that probably isn’t going to be for you.
Why was Banquet 2024 worse than Banquet 2023?
From an objective standpoint, it wasn’t.
As I mentioned above, the SBC this year was clearly better than the GBC last year.
Here are the contents of the solo event milestones last year.
And here are the contents of the solo milestones this year.
Despite the fact that Rank 3s had already been available through content (Necropolis) and offers (Cyber Week), the solo event last year included only a single T6CC, enough for 25% of a Rank 2. This year, nobody went into the Banquet event with a Rank 4, yet there was a full Rank 3 available in the solo milestones. It’s true going to the end of the event was more expensive, but what was available throughout the event is substantially better than what was on offer last year. And this is ignoring the fact that the Realm Event existed, with even more great stuff available through guaranteed milestones including a second Rank 3.
I’m not going to do a full breakdown of the ranked rewards as there is too much to compare, but they are also better across the board. Last year I finished top 600 and got less for my account than I got finishing ~1500th this year.
You said you care about game balance, then why did you do XYZ?
I should have been clearer and more explicit in my initial comment, so I’m going to clarify here. The point I was making was simply this: milestones and ranked rewards are limited, Banquet crystals are unlimited. So from the perspective of managing the game’s economy, it is much easier for us to plan, predict and manage the gap created by the Banquet event if we focus most of the rewards on the limited channels rather than the unlimited channel.
The Banquet event will always create a gap between those who open a lot of crystals and those who don’t. That isn’t going to change.
OK but the top spenders already have every 7-star, why couldn’t the crystals have more of that stuff in them?
Because of what I discussed above. We need to think ahead if we want to keep playing this game for the next 10 years.
From the top spender perspective, yes they have most or all of the existing 7-stars, but what about the champions we are releasing next year? If our top spenders all went into next year with hundreds of Titan crystals ready to go, where does that leave us for our new champion releases? Not in a good spot.
Similarly, what happens if moderate spenders all came out of the Banquet 2024 event feeling like their 7-star rosters were complete? These players (myself included) aren’t going to start spending on large quantities of Valiant crystals chasing new champions. What do we reward them with next year and what do we sell them? What can we possibly do for Banquet 2025 that doesn’t end 7-stars?
We simply aren’t yet at a place in the 7-star lifecycle where every Banquet crystal can include a heap of champion acquisition materials. That would simply leave us no room to grow.
Why did you lie to us?
I do my best to communicate openly and honestly with the community. I’m human, sometimes I make mistakes, but I have never deliberately deceived any of you.
I do have to say I am getting pretty sick of people calling me a liar for things I never actually said. In this case, I have seen a lot of people “quote” me with some version of “The crystals are so crazy that Thronebreaker players will be running around with Rank 3s”. That isn’t what I said. What I said was “we are going to have probably thousands of Uncollected players with a 7-star Rank 3 after this event”. That might seem like semantics, but in this context it’s actually really important because if you actually watch that part of the Live Stream, you will see I’m making the opposite point of what some players claim I was saying. The point I am making is that despite not having access to the new Superior Banquet Crystal, the event is going to be really good for Uncollected and Cavalier players. I am reassuring them of the quality of the rest of the event, everything but the Banquet Crystals!
Now, did we hype up this event too much? Clearly for some of you we did. We thought December overall warranted a lot of excitement. And for what it’s worth, I put my money where my mouth was and spent a decent chunk of cash on the Banquet event, though as I said on the Live Stream, not as much as I spent on Cyber Week sales where I consider there to be better value for money.
Why didn’t the holiday deals launch alongside Banquet?
For at least as long as I have been on the team this is how it has worked, with the holiday deals launching closer to Christmas Day.
Why did you wait so long to announce Banquet details?
Banquet is kind of strange in that it’s basically an offer event and a meta event rolled into one. Historically, we don’t announce any details of offers in advance, whereas we usually announce details of meta events alongside the patch notes for the build they launch in. So there really is no firm precedent for how far in advance Banquet information should be shared. Last year it was earlier, in years past it was later or not at all. I know lots of Summoners wanted details of the Banquet event further in advance, but I’ve also had a few people tell me they would prefer it go live in-game without any spoilers. At this point, we haven’t discussed plans for next year.
Are the Banquet Event and the holiday gift and the 10 champion calendar and ... related?
Yes, they are. Some players are choosing to look at things in isolation, but from a game economy perspective everything available everywhere is related. We tried to plan December so that no matter how many Units or how much money a Summoner was willing to spend, even if those amounts were zero, they would come out of the anniversary with a lot of great stuff. I think we accomplished that. As an end-game player with ~150 7-stars my roster saw some meaningful progression, and I bet the vast majority of players who engaged throughout the month saw gains for themselves as well.
Are you happy with the Banquet Event?
Like last year, my feelings are mixed. This year I am even more sad with how the community responded given the lengths the team went through to make December exciting, especially adding six reworks to our champion pipeline that we didn’t plan going into the year. With the increasing cost of the Banquet milestones, some players were always going to get priced out, but I had hoped that players would look at everything we offered in December and be excited about it. While some of you were, clearly for a significant group of players that wasn’t the case.
Having said that, it’s probably clear based on the performance of the Realm Event that aside from sentiment the event went very well. I don’t have the full data report back yet but I can’t find any piece of data to suggest it was anything but a massive hit. Players opened significantly more crystals than we projected. I know some will say that it’s because players opened their crystals before being disappointed, but the sustained engagement over the entire course of the event doesn’t support that theory for the broad player base. Players continued to buy and open crystals for the entire two weeks. We also had more players in the game than we have had at any point in the last two years, which is an incredible achievement for a 10 year old game.
Final Thoughts
Last year I identified four opportunities for improvement with the Banquet event. This year, the main takeaway for me is that we need to make the crystals more fun. The poor crystal opening experience, alongside the sky-high expectations that we set, clearly created a bad experience for some Summoners. Hopefully this write-up better sets expectations for next year and provides some context for how we make these decisions.
Thank you all for your continued support of the game, and for three of the funnest years of my adult life. I look forward to what’s to come.
Comments
We haven't heard the last word on this, future Banquet events and millions of dollars are at stake, it helps to rattle the sabers a bit.
We may not be whales, but without us there's not much for the whales to do. No one is going to spend $250k on an event in the future, if you can be number 1 and spend $25k, or $2,500.
So keep going, this is not the time to give in.
#justiceforthemcocsociety
While I now have 10 new 7-star champions, the reality is that most of them will likely never even be ranked up due to the extreme resource requirements for 7-stars. This leaves the value of these champions somewhat limited in the grand scheme of things.
Furthermore, I personally spent $200 and 6,000 units on getting 60 Superior Banquet Crystals, and the rewards I received left me feeling underwhelmed.
I ended up with mostly Tier 6 Class Catalyst fragments, a small amount of Tier 7 Basic Catalyst fragments, less than 5000 7-star shards, a Titan Crystal, and the 7-star Champion Trophy Selector. While these rewards might look good on paper, they fall far short of what I was expecting from an event marketed as a “Grand Banquet.” I thought my investment would yield more meaningful rewards, and it’s disheartening that it didn’t.
If I feel this let down after what I received, I can only imagine how others feel who spent less or pulled worse rewards. This doesn’t feel like a Grand Banquet—it feels like a Grand Letdown. I hope future events will provide better rewards and truly live up to the hype.
It’s almost like pilot saying he is generous with his time if he trying to explain a delayed flight
Typical corporate decision.
Thank you for the, let's be honest, absolute bare minimum adjustment to the absolute end game milestones in the Banquet milestones. This only helps the few % of players who were going to push that far already, but it does show you’re at least open to listening and adjusting.
This would be an incredible time to start listening harder. There are some inescapable gaps between what your game team is doing and considering “ground breaking good value rewards” and what your customers are TELLING you is incredibly bad value. This gap is immense and I recommend something be done immediately to start closing that gap.
In Kabam Crash’s response to the uproar about the value in the Banquet crystals he says something close to “the game team values rewards differently than the playerbase.” This is a true, and necessary, statement. If players had every single thing we wanted, the game would probably be unplayable (looking at you 7* Herc, Magik, and Quake). That being said, the disconnect between the game team's valuation and the players is beyond the pale of what should be considered acceptable in the Banquet event.
The player's valuation of what 300 units should achieve when spending 300 units in the game absolutely must be taken into consideration - and it very, very obviously was not taken into consideration with this event. For doing 4 runs of 1.1 in Road to the Labyrinth, a Valiant player achieves all Daily Super Event milestones. These rewards include things like half a T6 Basic/T3 Alpha, a full T5 class catalyst selector, 225 Titan shards, 1800 T4 Alpha frags, or a single 7* sig stone, and a bunch of extras. These are the things we get every single day for doing nothing more than putting our phone on autofight and hitting Replay 3 times. This doesn’t even take into account the Battlegrounds store or any other place we can piece these rewards together.
Your team has somehow decided that charging us 300 units for the rewards we get every day for free is somehow “great reward valuation.” 2 T5CC, 2 7* sig stones, 1-5% of various catalysts for 300 units? Talk about an absolutely defenseless level of disconnect. Kabam Crash is 100% right that all the rewards we get are tuned to 7*s and therefore aren’t “useless” but the quantities being offered are nowhere near a 300 unit valuation for a Valiant player.
The team also keeps saying things along the lines of, “the rewards in their entirety is incredibly good valuation.” And again, I would actually agree. But to get all the rewards in their entirety requires spending the equivalent of $500-$600 USD worth of units to get there. You have the data, how many of your players can actually do that? Should the players who can't spend/hoard enough units be left feeling absolutely miserable, worthless, and hating the event because they can’t afford it? What an awful way to treat your players, customers and potential customers.
The player base is not as foolish as we are being told we are by the game team. We completely understand not every single SBC can give an equivalent 300 unit valuation. That being said, when we are going through tens and hundreds of these crystals and coming out feeling overwhelmingly ripped off and like there was next to no value in what we pulled, there’s obvious, drastic action that needs to be taken. For something like the 10th anniversary Grand Banquet Event not a single action or crystal opening should leave us feeling like we didn’t get any value out of it. Not. A. Single. One.
The long term solution moving forward is under absolutely zero circumstance should Valiant players be in the same reward categories as Thronebreakers. That is completely nonsensical. It destroys the value of achieving the Valiant title and requires rewards tuning to be ridiculously pathetic value for Valiant players while TB players get beyond phenomenal returns. Pair Paragons and Thronebreakers together, sure. Under no circumstance should the top tier title player be suffering lessened returns because they are paired with lower-tier players.
I’m not one to go on about compensation, but honestly, there needs to be something significant done to turn around the ongoing player sentiment immediately. The 7* crystals will be appreciated by those who were already going to get them, but it has honestly made player sentiment even worse. There are reports of players vowing to never spend again, wanting a boycott/review bombing to happen, and even those putting the game down for good. You have said to “keep an eye out for the Christmas gift” but that may legitimately be too little, too late. Especially with the complete lack of trust that it will be anything of actual value at this point. You have said “just wait” over and over and every time we have been left disappointed and wanting.
There have been a few suggestions made here that could work well:
*Increase the milestone rewards for those who haven’t reached them and mail the difference to those who have. Simple and efficient.
*Create a new SBC with only the top rewards adjusted by title level and send each player 5.
*Implement a progression based Christmas Calendar that starts Monday and is filled with only the top % rewards to make up for the lacking crystal pulls. Progression based - custom for each progression level.
Again, moving forward, Kabam truly needs to invest in a Valuation Team that understands player psychology for events like this and allows them to put that ahead of what might be considered “fair rewards”. There is nothing more disheartening for a player to open $500 USD worth of units and feel awful for it. See what I did there? You’re going to tell me, “but units are free” and you’re not wrong, but the psychology behind it still leaves a player feeling like they took a massive financial hit. It’s value they could have used elsewhere and been left feeling like they actually got something of equivalent worth.
If you need help, I would be more than happy to help. As a consultant. For a fee. Would probably do it for an equivalent exchange of 3400 units per hour or so.
Of course you loved the event, it was made for you and we got paired with you 😂
So yes you're opinion on the issue doesn't matter frankly
Dr. Zola
Basically says, see you guys next years 2025 banquet lol
But yes the solution is “open” more crystals witch I agree.
When you keep doing it kabam see it as a success.
If players wouldn't buy the crystals and their income would have been hurt they would have made changes for sure.
1) As the previous years of the Banquet, I sincerely enjoyed to see my teammates getting some 7* champions that were nice to very good. No matter what their titles are/were. That matches with the end of year mindset. And give them motivation to the game (more important as I am in the management of an alliance).
2) I have reached the solo event last milestone. The immediate milestones above (only in the Community event) were not interesting for me (no Weapon X in the selector, too few Titan shards and far above), and so on).
A kind of reasonable top, and in the end that was fine.
3) I would have appreciated selectors instead of keys.
Even if I understand the reason (invite to spend more for the champion( s ) the player wants), I think that was unnecessary. In the pool I don’t think there were really better champions that the others, nor absolute beast.
So no absolute wish (even after a look at their respective spotlight) but a little one : Medusa. With 3 keys, it remains unsatisfied. I will discover my refreshed Sentry, Sentinel and Purgatory soon.
4) Very good idea to disable the champions already pulled. This mechanism would/will be useful for future events and offers.
5) The content of the superior greater Banquet crystal were not nice.
As many players, I bought and opened them, knowing the result would be disappointed, and it was.
Difficult to reasonably find a balance.
In my opinion:
- Too low rates on some items
- Not enough iso (with so much level up to do on 7* …)
- Not enough t6cc shards (getting several 7* on December implies wanting to upgrade them quickly)
- Not enough gold (rank and level ups…)
I know that the game follow a pace of progression for the players. So some items cannot be given too easily. And the upgrades are an objective for the couple of weeks and months from now.
6) I would have appreciated to access to the Omega Days pool (more easily if it was in the Banquet). This pool is far more interesting than some others for me (Corvus, Quick, Mole).
Once again, thanks to the MCOC team for the best month of the game until now. It gave me a boost for a couple of months.
And happy new year to the MCOC team and the community!
3 7*'s, a good few 6*'s, a lot of materials idk how much of each, a lot of account buffs (hp, atk, mix of both, arena) a lot of potions and energy.
Also a *few* relics.
Personally this Banquet was good being the first one I'm aware enough to experience and plan for.
Though with what the general consensus seems to be, most people are negative towards it.
I would've preferred more nexus' tbh being my only personal nitpick/complaint
just poppin in to say ... uhhh we're supposed to act like there isn't (and was before this banquet) a mega separation from the whales, megalodons from the mere mortals already?? the separation is already quite massive and it continues to be after any kind of spending event.
there's nothing (likely has ever been a thing) to stop this "game economy" from being what it is in favor of said whales and megalogons. and rightfully so. if you spend, I don't have a problem with what you get above or more than those who do not.
I’ll be honest, I went back and forth a bunch of times about whether or not I was going to do this. Part of me wanted to just reference my initial Banquet post and be done with it, because I know no matter what I say some will respond negatively.
Having said that, I do really like thinking deeply about our game and our players, and I have heard from many of you that you do as well, so I decided to go ahead and write this whole thing up for those that might find it helpful.
First, a little bit about me (you can feel free to skip to the next section if you want)
I’m going to keep this brief, but basically I just wanted to say how I see the Banquet event and the game as a whole isn’t the only perspective on our team that matters. I know other members of our team see these things differently. But I am part of the design leadership team and one of the handful of people most responsible for the Banquet Event, so I’m in a position where how I think about the game has a significant influence over how we build it. While you shouldn’t take this post as game team gospel – I didn’t get anything I say here approved by anybody else – you can safely assume that my perspective on how this all works impacts how we develop events like Banquet.
How I see the Contest
Contest of Champions is Kabam’s biggest game (as measured basically any way you choose). It has formed the lifeblood of our company for the last 10 years. It has sustained us through good times and bad. Without it, Kabam as anything close to we know it would cease to exist.
When I think about how we plan the Contest, I think about the distinction Carse lays out in his book Finite and Infinite Games: a finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. I very much see the development of the Contest as an infinite game. In order for us to continue to play this game, we need a number of things: ( this is not an exhaustive list but I think these are the three most important requirements)
- A sufficiently large player base to support the game at scale
- Enough development resources to keep those players entertained and engaged so they don’t leave the game (what we call churn)
- Things to sell to those players so we can make revenue and pay for the development resources
If at any point in time we don’t have any one of these three things, we risk entering a death spiral where a negative feedback loop results in fewer players, which results in less revenue, which results in a smaller team, which results in fewer players …. you get the picture. This is how pretty much every successful mobile game eventually dies.So I spend a lot of my time thinking about how we can make sure we have enough of these things. I often see posts on the Forums or YouTube videos that say something like “if Kabam made this offer better by adding more of X I would buy it and Kabam would make more money so they are dumb not to do it.” If our goal was to make as much money as possible on every offer, it would indeed be dumb not to follow that advice, but that isn’t our goal. Our goal (or at least my goal) is for us to keep making this game for the next decade and beyond.
The infinite game is really a marathon, not a sprint. It isn’t enough to just think about us having enough players, resources and revenue this year, but we need to think about it for at least the next ~3 years or we definitely would run out of something important be it players, developers or things to sell.
How does Banquet get made?
Banquet planning for this year really started back in 2022, when we were planning the launch of 7-Star Champions. That is when myself and Kabam Numbers (who?)* sketched out the initial plan for the 7-star lifecycle. I have a spreadsheet that shows approximately how much 7-star stuff players are going to be able to earn and buy over time. I think about this in terms of horizontal progression (how many 7-stars a player has and what sig level they are) and vertical progression (what rank those 7-star champions are). Based on extrapolating players’ rosters on those two axes, I can predict approximately when 7-stars will be over and we will need the next thing. If we move faster than planned, the lifecycle shrinks. If we slow things down, the lifecycle lengthens.
In 2023, both horizontal and vertical moved faster than I had initially planned and hoped, so we devised a number of initiatives to slow things down. This is when we decided we wanted 7R3 to last ~14 months, and counting ahead from Necropolis (Nov 2023), that landed the initial release of the next rank in Dec 2024, coinciding perfectly with Banquet.
Coincidentally, early in December our C-Suite asked for a brief about how we build the Banquet event so I have a slide ready to go with the rest of the timeline! (I have changed our real names to our Kabam tags and cleaned up some insider jargon but 99% of this is exactly what I presented to them).
*After seeing him poached by Supercell and moving to Finland I am contractually obligated to pretend I don’t remember Numbers.
How does player sentiment impact the infinite game?
When I first started working at Kabam three years ago, I was hired as an economy designer. One day I proposed an offer to the Live Ops team which they agreed to build and put in the game. I was pretty confident there was a market for the offer that I had uncovered in our data. The day the offer went out, I looked around to see if players were talking about it and was absolutely devastated by what I found. There were threads on the forums talking about how out of touch Kabam was to make such an insulting offer. There were multiple YouTube videos with titles like “Whichever Kabam Employee Made This Offer Should Be Fired!”
The next day I started work expecting to see that I had proposed the first offer in the game’s history to be bought by nobody, and looking at our revenue dashboards I discovered that, not only had the offer been bought by some players, it had significantly overperformed our revenue estimates. It was, for lack of a better phrase, broadly very popular.
That anecdote is just one example of something I have come to learn over the last three years: there is no consistent correlation between player sentiment in our social channels and short-term revenue. Our engaged players are really really good at a lot of things, including our game, but their opinions on how we make money have little to no predictive value.
To be clear I’m not saying players are always wrong. I remember one sale (I think J4 2023?) in which there was a lot of chatter about how Thronebreaker players were getting shafted, and the Thronebreaker offers in that sale did indeed perform well under our expectations. Sometimes players are spot on. But what I am saying is there is no way for us to see player reaction to an offer or sale on the Forums and YouTube and know if those opinions will impact revenue or not.
I have long had suspicions as to why this was the case, and one of the reasons I wanted to wait for the analysis before making this post is because for the first time our data science group is working on exactly this question. There are a few interesting results from that work, but the key finding is pretty simple: players engaged in our social channels are not a representative sample of our player base. This should be obvious to everyone reading this, but I’ll be honest the more I dig into this, the more differences I find between what the Forums, Discord and YouTube talk about and what our average players care about. We make the majority of our revenue from a much more casual group of players that are often not represented in these channels.
Now I just want to pause and be as clear as I can – none of what I have said above means that players’ opinions and suggestions are not valuable. Those of you who frequent this forum know that I read it regularly. I have made many changes to the game based on feedback and suggestions from this group. I have also leveraged your feedback to push for changes with Kabam leadership, which is how I ended up so heavily involved in the anti-cheat side of the game.
The point is when I see a large negative sentiment groundswell like we saw with Banquet this year, I tend to be much more concerned about players churning than I am about revenue. The question is, did we make a large group of players mad enough that it will impact our ability to retain a sufficiently large player base to support the game at scale? I don’t know the answer to that right now, but that’s the main thing I am going to be keeping an eye on for the next few months.
Banquet 2024
So with that context provided, here are my thoughts about Banquet 2024. I’m going to start with the three main things I agree with the unsatisfied Summoners about, and then I’m going to answer a list of frequently asked questions I have seen around various social channels.
The first thing should be no surprise as it’s what I highlighted in my initial post – the crystals just didn’t feel good to open. Last year, I think the crystals were significantly worse. They were full of 6-Star Sig stones and 6-Star Shards that end-game players couldn’t really even use (~54% of drops were things that couldn’t be used to acquire or upgrade a 7-star). I stand by my comment that everything in the crystals this year is useful to end-game Summoners, but I agree opening them didn’t feel very exciting. So the major focus for us next year will be to improve the crystal opening experience. We have some early ideas for how we can do this without exploding the reward budget.
The second thing is the way we handled crystals purchased with Banquet Tickets. We needed to be clearer up front about how this would all work. The way we handled it didn’t result in anybody getting less earned rewards from the events. Had we counted Banquet Ticket crystals as purchased crystals, the milestones in all of the events would have been adjusted to account for the earned Tickets. Players who collected all the earned Tickets would have ended up at exactly the same milestones in the events. The reason we decided not to do this is it would have made the events relatively more expensive for players who didn’t collect Tickets, which we didn’t want to do. However, I understand why it felt like a shady deal, especially for those who purchased Tickets through other offers.
The third thing I already discussed in this post here. Basically, in an effort to make the crystals better I kind of messed them up, and then a decision over the holidays for how to fix it was probably the wrong one. Hopefully the final resolution we ended at, making the insanely cheap T6B/T3A offer available to all Valiant players is a resolution players can accept.
Why did Banquet 2024 cost more than Banquet 2023?
The MCoC economy is really interesting (at least to me), in that it is both deflationary and inflationary at the same time. It is deflationary in that almost everything gets less valuable over time. Players are keenly aware of this as they interact with the game. They know something that costs 1000 Units today will cost 500 Units at some point in the not so distant future. There is a reason every modern economy targets modest inflation – people knowing things will get cheaper over time is bad for business. But deflation is a quirk of most live service game economies that we have to deal with.
However, at the same time the MCoC economy is inflationary in that the money supply (Units) is increasing over time. There are a couple reasons for this. The first is Unit yields have increased. DNA has a good post here in which he estimates Arena Unit yields per hour have roughly tripled in the last four years, and investigations I have conducted have shown similar numbers.*
At the same time yields are increasing, the way players spend Units is changing. As I mentioned above, our veteran players have gotten really really good at the game. A substantial portion of Units earned by players used to be spent on consumables in quests, AQ and AW. Now quests and game modes represent almost no Unit spend for end-game players. So because players are both earning more Units and spending less of them on consumables, it creates inflationary pressure on sales and other offers.
If we designed J4, Cyber Week and the Banquet event so that most players could get the best stuff for free, we would be out of business pretty quickly. So as players earn and save more Units, events will get more expensive.
*It’s true that if you finish every milestone in every Arena, the total ceiling for Units available in Arena is unchanged. However the vast majority of Arena grinders don’t do that. If you are one of the few who does every milestone in every Arena all year long, I suspect you don’t have a problem taking advantage of events like Banquet.
Why don’t you care about Valiant players/why do all progressions get the same thing/why have you devalued my progression?
Of the four major sales events of the year (Spring, J4, CW and Banquet), the Banquet event is the only one without bespoke offers and rewards for the top progression. So to say we don’t care about those players during sales events feels a bit myopic. The truth is probably 80%+ of the game team’s resources are dedicated to end-game players. Most of our quest resources are dedicated to making content for the end-game, most of our champions are made thinking about how end-game players will play them and most of our multiplayer modes are designed with end-game players in mind.
I have seen people suggest that Valiant players were getting Thronebreaker rewards, but that isn’t the case. There were multiple full Rank 3s in this event. That clearly isn’t an event tuned to Thronebreaker players. Generally when we combine progressions in an event like Banquet, we tune the rewards to the highest progression included. In this case, that was Valiant.
As I mentioned in my post-mortem post last year, despite it being somewhat counterintuitive the Banquet Event is one of our least top heavy events in terms of the percentage of participation coming from end-game players. As both a developer and an end-game Valiant player who spends a fair bit of his own cash on the game, I really like this. In most of our sales events end-game players carry the revenue. I think it’s great that in the Banquet event lower progression players are spending more relative to the total. I think it’s healthy.
I’ll be honest, given the tremendous success of this event in every aspect except social channel sentiment, I don’t see us making any major changes in how we segment players in Banquet beyond what we have already done. So if you are a player whose happiness with an event depends on bespoke rewards and offers for your progression, the Banquet event is the one major annual event that probably isn’t going to be for you.
Why was Banquet 2024 worse than Banquet 2023?
From an objective standpoint, it wasn’t.
As I mentioned above, the SBC this year was clearly better than the GBC last year.
Here are the contents of the solo event milestones last year.
And here are the contents of the solo milestones this year.
Despite the fact that Rank 3s had already been available through content (Necropolis) and offers (Cyber Week), the solo event last year included only a single T6CC, enough for 25% of a Rank 2. This year, nobody went into the Banquet event with a Rank 4, yet there was a full Rank 3 available in the solo milestones. It’s true going to the end of the event was more expensive, but what was available throughout the event is substantially better than what was on offer last year. And this is ignoring the fact that the Realm Event existed, with even more great stuff available through guaranteed milestones including a second Rank 3.
I’m not going to do a full breakdown of the ranked rewards as there is too much to compare, but they are also better across the board. Last year I finished top 600 and got less for my account than I got finishing ~1500th this year.
You said you care about game balance, then why did you do XYZ?
I should have been clearer and more explicit in my initial comment, so I’m going to clarify here. The point I was making was simply this: milestones and ranked rewards are limited, Banquet crystals are unlimited. So from the perspective of managing the game’s economy, it is much easier for us to plan, predict and manage the gap created by the Banquet event if we focus most of the rewards on the limited channels rather than the unlimited channel.
The Banquet event will always create a gap between those who open a lot of crystals and those who don’t. That isn’t going to change.
OK but the top spenders already have every 7-star, why couldn’t the crystals have more of that stuff in them?
Because of what I discussed above. We need to think ahead if we want to keep playing this game for the next 10 years.
From the top spender perspective, yes they have most or all of the existing 7-stars, but what about the champions we are releasing next year? If our top spenders all went into next year with hundreds of Titan crystals ready to go, where does that leave us for our new champion releases? Not in a good spot.
Similarly, what happens if moderate spenders all came out of the Banquet 2024 event feeling like their 7-star rosters were complete? These players (myself included) aren’t going to start spending on large quantities of Valiant crystals chasing new champions. What do we reward them with next year and what do we sell them? What can we possibly do for Banquet 2025 that doesn’t end 7-stars?
We simply aren’t yet at a place in the 7-star lifecycle where every Banquet crystal can include a heap of champion acquisition materials. That would simply leave us no room to grow.
Why did you lie to us?
I do my best to communicate openly and honestly with the community. I’m human, sometimes I make mistakes, but I have never deliberately deceived any of you.
I do have to say I am getting pretty sick of people calling me a liar for things I never actually said. In this case, I have seen a lot of people “quote” me with some version of “The crystals are so crazy that Thronebreaker players will be running around with Rank 3s”. That isn’t what I said. What I said was “we are going to have probably thousands of Uncollected players with a 7-star Rank 3 after this event”. That might seem like semantics, but in this context it’s actually really important because if you actually watch that part of the Live Stream, you will see I’m making the opposite point of what some players claim I was saying. The point I am making is that despite not having access to the new Superior Banquet Crystal, the event is going to be really good for Uncollected and Cavalier players. I am reassuring them of the quality of the rest of the event, everything but the Banquet Crystals!
Now, did we hype up this event too much? Clearly for some of you we did. We thought December overall warranted a lot of excitement. And for what it’s worth, I put my money where my mouth was and spent a decent chunk of cash on the Banquet event, though as I said on the Live Stream, not as much as I spent on Cyber Week sales where I consider there to be better value for money.
Why didn’t the holiday deals launch alongside Banquet?
For at least as long as I have been on the team this is how it has worked, with the holiday deals launching closer to Christmas Day.
Hit the character limit, continued below.
Banquet is kind of strange in that it’s basically an offer event and a meta event rolled into one. Historically, we don’t announce any details of offers in advance, whereas we usually announce details of meta events alongside the patch notes for the build they launch in. So there really is no firm precedent for how far in advance Banquet information should be shared. Last year it was earlier, in years past it was later or not at all. I know lots of Summoners wanted details of the Banquet event further in advance, but I’ve also had a few people tell me they would prefer it go live in-game without any spoilers. At this point, we haven’t discussed plans for next year.
Are the Banquet Event and the holiday gift and the 10 champion calendar and ... related?
Yes, they are. Some players are choosing to look at things in isolation, but from a game economy perspective everything available everywhere is related. We tried to plan December so that no matter how many Units or how much money a Summoner was willing to spend, even if those amounts were zero, they would come out of the anniversary with a lot of great stuff. I think we accomplished that. As an end-game player with ~150 7-stars my roster saw some meaningful progression, and I bet the vast majority of players who engaged throughout the month saw gains for themselves as well.
Are you happy with the Banquet Event?
Like last year, my feelings are mixed. This year I am even more sad with how the community responded given the lengths the team went through to make December exciting, especially adding six reworks to our champion pipeline that we didn’t plan going into the year. With the increasing cost of the Banquet milestones, some players were always going to get priced out, but I had hoped that players would look at everything we offered in December and be excited about it. While some of you were, clearly for a significant group of players that wasn’t the case.
Having said that, it’s probably clear based on the performance of the Realm Event that aside from sentiment the event went very well. I don’t have the full data report back yet but I can’t find any piece of data to suggest it was anything but a massive hit. Players opened significantly more crystals than we projected. I know some will say that it’s because players opened their crystals before being disappointed, but the sustained engagement over the entire course of the event doesn’t support that theory for the broad player base. Players continued to buy and open crystals for the entire two weeks. We also had more players in the game than we have had at any point in the last two years, which is an incredible achievement for a 10 year old game.
Final Thoughts
Last year I identified four opportunities for improvement with the Banquet event. This year, the main takeaway for me is that we need to make the crystals more fun. The poor crystal opening experience, alongside the sky-high expectations that we set, clearly created a bad experience for some Summoners. Hopefully this write-up better sets expectations for next year and provides some context for how we make these decisions.
Thank you all for your continued support of the game, and for three of the funnest years of my adult life. I look forward to what’s to come.
Kabam Crashed