I appreciate the response, and while I don't necessarily agree with your conclusions, I can at least see where you are coming from. I think personally, my biggest issue was that the floor of the SBC's was too low. What with the daily super event providing so much, and the rank up store showing a direct unit translation for the value of the most common drops from the crystal, it felt like unless you actually hit the jackpot, then you were being ripped off. Maybe next year compare what the cost of the least valuable item is in the crystal and try to make it closer to the actual 300 unit cost.
The well thought out response is welcome and helpful. As far as the feedback of Valiant players getting stuck with TB rewards...that wasn't the only way that feedback came through. Many Valiants felt that we got weaker rewards because TB were included. Now, I'll believe you when you say that isn't true, but it doesn't solve the real issue. The real issue is that dollar for dollar, TBs got exactly what Valiants got. If I drop 25k units on an event, I should be able to reasonably expect to get better rewards than a progression two acts behind me, much like we do in nearly everything else.
You can agree and disagree with some decisicions. But this was a very well-worded and comprehensive response that gave a lot of valuable insight. Thank you for the response Crashed!
I appreciate the response, and while I don't necessarily agree with your conclusions, I can at least see where you are coming from. I think personally, my biggest issue was that the floor of the SBC's was too low. What with the daily super event providing so much, and the rank up store showing a direct unit translation for the value of the most common drops from the crystal, it felt like unless you actually hit the jackpot, then you were being ripped off. Maybe next year compare what the cost of the least valuable item is in the crystal and try to make it closer to the actual 300 unit cost.
@Kabam Crashed Thank you for the well thought out and detailed response.
Respectfully, I think what @Ortoun wrote above needs to be your biggest take way for next year.
When a potential item drop from a 300 unit crystal can be routinely purchased by the highest progression level, that represents a major flaws, and where a great deal of dissatisfaction came from.
Please do better next year to ensure that the worst (and subsequently highest percentage drops) represent something of a 300 unit value rather than a -250 (negative) unit value to the purchaser.
Lots to agree and disagree with in that post. The only thing I want to say is a big Thank You to crashed for taking the time to do that analysis and the lengthy write up.
All I can say is, stop giving TBs Valiant rewards or Valiants Tb Rewards. Yes I read the post its supposed to be one way and not the other. Truth is no matter how you phrase it, it still feels one group is limited to what they can get by the other. This is not just about the crystals. The realm events have felt the same way. I am not even being salty about the r4 mats, I am aware of how banquet or gifting has worked all this years. This crystals were just NOT FUN to open. Just a little more 7* or Titan sharss would have made it at least fun. Seeing T6cc pile up was not something exciting to do.
1 thing to point out for the banquet event was that it was dependent on the unit spend by players to get a positive outcome
Meaning bcos the banquet crystal was so bad, opening a small number of crystals was going to get you lousy stuff from the crystals themselves and the better rewards from milestones are higher up and not unlocked if you do not have sufficient points
I was ranked 27,000+ (Top 4% - 5%) with all milestones claimed, I assume 95% of the players who participated probably had worse experience without the higher up milestones unlocked due to insufficient points
“I’ll just take the weekend and enjoy my 7* Medusa” was such a slap in the face for FTP players. I was stuck with 7* Sentry, who quite frankly, is beyond the worst champ out of the six. That comment that was made was so out of pocket. It was ridiculous.
Krashed always brings insight and candidness to his posts. Even if you disagree you have to admit he is honest and does his best to openly communicate. I personally really enjoyed the banquet, but also understand why others did not. It’s not my place to say how other players should feel, especially when they are spending their hard earned cash. When it’s done constructively, I think the forums are a really valuable avenue for communication about strengths and weaknesses in the game. One thing is true, if you are taking the time to be on the forums, you love this game. I think we all want it to be successful for years to come!
Crashed’s post pretty much confirms my thoughts after banquet - spend the bulk of your units on cyber unless you aren’t at the latest progression. You know how the banquet will be going forward. You have now seen the thought process of the event…Plan accordingly.
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.
I'd like to start by thanking you for this amazing post, very much insightful.
Now to this specific topic, I still believe there's one part that is being overlooked. It's the incapability for mcoc players to save units and being patient with them. Lots of units were ready when banquet started. All their patience was used, most people couldn't simply wait another 6 months till 4th of July. So they went for it anyway.
But thanks for the detailed breakdown and inside infos.
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.
Kabam Crashed
I've read every word of your report - you did a good job of explaining everything. I don't agree with everything, but it's us having differing viewpoints and that's okay.
I did spend this year, not because I was engaged, but because I was trapped having spent all my units and effectively it being a sunk cost that rationally, I should've chalked off as a loss.
I think Banquet 2025 I'll get a spreadsheet and calculate what rewards I will earn for units investment and will happily opt-out for the first time, if the return on investment doesn't work for me personally.
Thanks for taking the time to write your evaluation of the event, you did a great job. Here's to a successful 2025 💪
I have to write this. @DNA3000 You have a serious rival.
@Kabam Crashed is not a rival. I have been making more forum posts about the game for much longer than he has, with more numbers and calculations, more charts and tables, and broken the forum post length limit far more times doing it. While Crashed is just, you know, an actual working game design professional who's in charge of stuff and actually makes the game we all play. We're not really competing in the same league there.
As I write this, this is my 20,000th forum comment. For my 20,000th comment, I would like to tell you all a story about my buddy Crashed. Back in December 2023 Crashed asked if I was okay if he referenced some of my forum posts on his next live stream. Of course I said sure. As it turns out, coincidentally the next stream was in part about the 2023 Banquet. Now live streams typically started at 7am my time, so I decided to wake up early to go watch it, because I am not without some level of vanity. About a half hour into the stream, which was a kind of Q&A sort of stream in part, they get to the question: "Why isn't the Banquet event good for me?" In that section both Jax and Crashed referenced my forum posts on the banquet, and Crashed also mentioned my Battlegrounds breakdown post, both in very complimentary terms. Of course, I was half asleep at the time.
So a few hours later I go back and rewatch the stream in its entirety, and that's when I noticed Crashed did something I do all the time. He hedged his compliments. Crashed made two quotable statements about me you could clip out of context. The first one was: "he [DNA] knows what he is talking about most of the time." The second one: "he [DNA] normally knows what he is talking about."
And this is why I get along with Crashed. Even unfiltered, Crashed always strives for accuracy in what he says. Painfully precise accuracy. I'm not saying he always hits the bullseye of course, none of us does. But you can tell he thinks carefully about what he says, and how he chooses to say it. The longer his posts are, the more obvious it is (at least to me) that they are being abbreviated.
For the most part, all of my interactions with the dev team have been respectful and even pleasant. I find them all to be thoughtful and dedicated professionals. But in my opinion, Crashed is unique in both having a widely holistic love of the game from a design perspective *and* a desire to communicate that perspective to us the playerbase. I've learned a lot from our conversations and tried to provide a reasonable return on investment of that time. I think the playerbase doesn't fully appreciate how uncommon it is for game developers with any connection to the game economies to want to share publicly. They have to make the tough decisions of what players get and what they don't get, and that's never going to be a popular job. Most don't expose their thinking to their playerbases for obvious reasons. It is absolutely fine to disagree with specific decisions or specific judgments. But players should keep in mind that most of these decisions in most games everywhere are made completely outside of their view with no way to discern why they are being made. Because if you don't know why someone does something, you can't argue effectively against it.
Many people think the way to change things is to yell, shout, make noise, *force* change by overwhelming the developers. That never works. Ever. You effect change by learning why the devs do what they do, understanding their goals and challenges, and finding alternate solutions to those things that they would in turn find acceptable. And every time a dev dumps their brain onto the forums, we're being given valuable knowledge on how to see things as they do, and doing that is the best way, the only way really to have a productive discussion with them on how to change things for the better.
I have to write this. @DNA3000 You have a serious rival.
@Kabam Crashed is not a rival. I have been making more forum posts about the game for much longer than he has, with more numbers and calculations, more charts and tables, and broken the forum post length limit far more times doing it. While Crashed is just, you know, an actual working game design professional who's in charge of stuff and actually makes the game we all play. We're not really competing in the same league there.
As I write this, this is my 20,000th forum comment. For my 20,000th comment, I would like to tell you all a story about my buddy Crashed. Back in December 2023 Crashed asked if I was okay if he referenced some of my forum posts on his next live stream. Of course I said sure. As it turns out, coincidentally the next stream was in part about the 2023 Banquet. Now live streams typically started at 7am my time, so I decided to wake up early to go watch it, because I am not without some level of vanity. About a half hour into the stream, which was a kind of Q&A sort of stream in part, they get to the question: "Why isn't the Banquet event good for me?" In that section both Jax and Crashed referenced my forum posts on the banquet, and Crashed also mentioned my Battlegrounds breakdown post, both in very complimentary terms. Of course, I was half asleep at the time.
So a few hours later I go back and rewatch the stream in its entirety, and that's when I noticed Crashed did something I do all the time. He hedged his compliments. Crashed made two quotable statements about me you could clip out of context. The first one was: "he [DNA] knows what he is talking about most of the time." The second one: "he [DNA] normally knows what he is talking about."
And this is why I get along with Crashed. Even unfiltered, Crashed always strives for accuracy in what he says. Painfully precise accuracy. I'm not saying he always hits the bullseye of course, none of us does. But you can tell he thinks carefully about what he says, and how he chooses to say it. The longer his posts are, the more obvious it is (at least to me) that they are being abbreviated.
For the most part, all of my interactions with the dev team have been respectful and even pleasant. I find them all to be thoughtful and dedicated professionals. But in my opinion, Crashed is unique in both having a widely holistic love of the game from a design perspective *and* a desire to communicate that perspective to us the playerbase. I've learned a lot from our conversations and tried to provide a reasonable return on investment of that time. I think the playerbase doesn't fully appreciate how uncommon it is for game developers with any connection to the game economies to want to share publicly. They have to make the tough decisions of what players get and what they don't get, and that's never going to be a popular job. Most don't expose their thinking to their playerbases for obvious reasons. It is absolutely fine to disagree with specific decisions or specific judgments. But players should keep in mind that most of these decisions in most games everywhere are made completely outside of their view with no way to discern why they are being made. Because if you don't know why someone does something, you can't argue effectively against it.
Many people think the way to change things is to yell, shout, make noise, *force* change by overwhelming the developers. That never works. Ever. You effect change by learning why the devs do what they do, understanding their goals and challenges, and finding alternate solutions to those things that they would in turn find acceptable. And every time a dev dumps their brain onto the forums, we're being given valuable knowledge on how to see things as they do, and doing that is the best way, the only way really to have a productive discussion with them on how to change things for the better.
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.
Kabam Crashed
Just something to add up, not only the Crystals but also either lower the Milestone so we dont have to spend that much or make every single milestone valuable if its as high as this year
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.
Kabam Crashed
Just something to add up, not only the Crystals but also either lower the Milestone so we dont have to spend that much or make every single milestone valuable if its as high as this year
Yeah. Maybe don't do the limited pool sig stones again as they are worthless until you hit the milestone that let's you actually use them later on.
Can you comment on why sig stones were put in the milestones that were specific to the six champions? That are nearly impossible to use without spending thousands of dollars.
I found this to be thoughtful, insightful and a great example of I don’t always have to agree with people I greatly like and respect and Crashed, I can safely say you have entrenched both thoughts in my mind with this post.
Thanks for treating us with respect and sharing your thought process. It demonstrates a level of care and passion.
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.
Kabam Crashed
I appreciate the insight, and am yet still bewildered by Kabam's ability to continually drop the ball on *something* every year. Like honestly, your main takeaway here is simply that Kabam needs to make crystals more "fun" this year? How does Kabam intend in doing then when, for example, the community has expressed a desire for greater access to champion acquisition materials and yet you've suggested the idea as being unfeasible for the company's long term performance?
By the way, where does that threshold exist? Am I to understand that even a percentage increase in the single digits of champion acquisition materials would have undermined Kabam's data analysis models and financial performance? Put differently, is Kabam really that adverse to throwing the community a bone?
Needless to say, I am one of those players that was disappointed with the event this year. Conversely, I am also a player that heavily invested in the event, hoping that the *next* batch of GBC might be a little better, might give me that meta 7 star champion I was hoping for (confirming your findings, I conceed, that community sentiment does not always predict quantitative performance).
At the end of the day, it's all a bit of gambling for us, I know. WE have the choice the spin the wheel, roll the dice, buy the crystals, hoping to hit the jackpot. And we as a community do need to own that. But as a 10-year veteran of this game, I am baffled by Kabam's constant ability drop the ball on something each year and then shrug and suggest that *next* year will be better.
I think I've had enough of the gambling and buying into Kabam's (and their CCP advocates, to be fair) promotional hype. Not to discount your data analysis, but this event was *personally* disappointing, and I'm no longer interested in financing a game that seems to be consistently broken month to month (defenders blocking my special attacks *mid* attack, for example).
Maybe, as you clarified at the start of your analysis (which was genuinely interesting btw!), it's the difference between finite and infinte games, but at the moment I derive much more satisfaction and enjoyment paying $60 for a PlayStation game that is complete, engaging *and free from error* than constantly fueling this infinite labyrinth that seems to find new, sublime ways to separate players from their time, money, and in game resources.
I will continue playing this game, but now as a Free to Play player. Your machinations, however well-intentioned and data-supported, have lost a paying customer.
Considering to make the Crystals fun to open again is a win for me!
I realy spend Money, normaly, in the Game at Christmas. But this year the realy good (for me good) rewards where Out of Money reach for me. So i stopped buying SBC completely. There was no Point in opening them.
And please do not always compare to 2023 banquet. Compare to the ones with good Feedback and Forum satisfaction.
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.
Kabam Crashed
“We need to make the crystals more fun”. Exactly this,..many formats of this game is oriented towards gambling. People don’t want to drop unit currency or monetary funds on crystals with abysmal drop rates for anything of value,..and small increments at that. Usually during these events players want rank up opportunities maybe mixed with some high end crystal shards. Groupings for event crystals in the future i hope is also considered. How could the Crystals not have rank up mat restrictions with Thronebreakers in the mix of things with Valiant?…it’s just common sense that this would be the outcome. I get rank reward milestones but that’s not really instant value fun,..and kinda took the wind out of the sails of the event. All the same,..thanks for the feedback,.,best regards,..and lets shoot for the stars next time,..in the name of “fun”.
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.
Hit the character limit, continued below.
Sorry for any misspelling i apologize it for this who do read it also for the first time i tried to make space in between test so hav a great day.
I read every word of it I liked it and you’re incredible insight of it. Yes the 10 unit deal was amazing so thanks for that’s I really got so mad when I sow it wasn’t for all but beautiful read up the crystal wasn’t a total failure my opinion I hav 141 7 stars now so obviously it hard to get new 7 star I do think we need to go back to banguet is more fouce one rank up. Then accusation. Again you have the data. I don’t i like open crystal but the fact was 300 unit gav 10 percent of a caslpye. Wasn’t fun for me I land 2615 spots in banguet sad i didn’t spend slightly more but after no tier6 b or tier3 aplha i had to stop it was making it very hard to use my tier 4 aplha i got from cyber the deal with the 10 unit helped. But while that’s said you’re may not mean you’re lied the thing is how you’re presented it in the live stream.
It was very difficult to know if your voice and how it is said after all we all is human beings. We all take it another way. I learned to take everything with a grain of salt’s not only when it you but anyone one the live stream even when it was Jax. Do miss he’s humor. While that’s said thanks for wiret up appreciate it.
Another side question i would love to have more of a Q&A discussion in live stream. Thos hasn’t been happening as much as there use to.
I don’t know how to tag Crashed but I just want to say that such a well written and explained post is a refreshing sight here. And to say thank you. There were times when Kabam posts would be dismissive or just shrouded in attitude or lack of transparency for what felt like no reason. I know it takes a LOT to compose a post like this. Just wanted to take at least a little time to say thank you to Crashed! Don’t have to agree with every word he said to respect the person. My feedback is the crystals “felt” bad kinda like 2023 but in a different way. Between a rock and a hard place in an unlimited spend event. The whales will always get out the tape measure out for these events. It keeps the game alive. And crystals can’t be so good that those whales break the game economy. It’s why other events have purchase limits. But damn those crystal “felt” like a full on waste of 300 units 97% of the time.
It is not a surprise to see so many people agreeing to Kabam Crashed's response. People can reasonate with reason.
However, I feel there are aspects of the game which the developers have undermined/ underestimated. That is because this year, the game has never felt like it a game for passionate collectors. And the "collectibles" aspect is a massive component to the playing experience.
I understand this year's banquet was "slowed down" to keep balance in the game - not explode the r3 economy. Which explains why the reward payout was so low in terms of 7 star shards/ titan shards.
But there is one argument which undermines Kabam Crashed's theory of "retaining players" vs "making revenue".
Why were annual collector crystals added separately, and not added as a reward to the banquet event? I am sure 100% of crystal opening experience if we would have been able to add 1,2,3,4,5 rarity of newer/ rarer champions.
Comments
On the whole, my experience with banquet was better than average player, luck played a substantial part
Here are my individual data,
Net unit spent on banquet event: 20,450
Points in banquet event: 30,555 (Claimed all the milestones that was unlocked by the realm)
Account growth from 6 million to 6.6 million
Highlights of the banquet event: rank 3 sig 200 Medusa, Deadpool, more rank 3 materials, more 7* champions
if it isn’t too much to ask could you just copy paste this in a new announcement post?
Thank you for the response Crashed!
Respectfully, I think what @Ortoun wrote above needs to be your biggest take way for next year.
When a potential item drop from a 300 unit crystal can be routinely purchased by the highest progression level, that represents a major flaws, and where a great deal of dissatisfaction came from.
Please do better next year to ensure that the worst (and subsequently highest percentage drops) represent something of a 300 unit value rather than a -250 (negative) unit value to the purchaser.
I am not even being salty about the r4 mats, I am aware of how banquet or gifting has worked all this years. This crystals were just NOT FUN to open. Just a little more 7* or Titan sharss would have made it at least fun. Seeing T6cc pile up was not something exciting to do.
Obs: Didn't think someone would make a comment/post bigger than @DNA3000, oh well
Meaning bcos the banquet crystal was so bad, opening a small number of crystals was going to get you lousy stuff from the crystals themselves and the better rewards from milestones are higher up and not unlocked if you do not have sufficient points
I was ranked 27,000+ (Top 4% - 5%) with all milestones claimed, I assume 95% of the players who participated probably had worse experience without the higher up milestones unlocked due to insufficient points
I agree with most but the fillers were bad, if you are giving 6 star sigs, dont make it +1 sig in SBCs.
Now to this specific topic, I still believe there's one part that is being overlooked. It's the incapability for mcoc players to save units and being patient with them. Lots of units were ready when banquet started. All their patience was used, most people couldn't simply wait another 6 months till 4th of July. So they went for it anyway.
But thanks for the detailed breakdown and inside infos.
I did spend this year, not because I was engaged, but because I was trapped having spent all my units and effectively it being a sunk cost that rationally, I should've chalked off as a loss.
I think Banquet 2025 I'll get a spreadsheet and calculate what rewards I will earn for units investment and will happily opt-out for the first time, if the return on investment doesn't work for me personally.
Thanks for taking the time to write your evaluation of the event, you did a great job. Here's to a successful 2025 💪
As I write this, this is my 20,000th forum comment. For my 20,000th comment, I would like to tell you all a story about my buddy Crashed. Back in December 2023 Crashed asked if I was okay if he referenced some of my forum posts on his next live stream. Of course I said sure. As it turns out, coincidentally the next stream was in part about the 2023 Banquet. Now live streams typically started at 7am my time, so I decided to wake up early to go watch it, because I am not without some level of vanity. About a half hour into the stream, which was a kind of Q&A sort of stream in part, they get to the question: "Why isn't the Banquet event good for me?" In that section both Jax and Crashed referenced my forum posts on the banquet, and Crashed also mentioned my Battlegrounds breakdown post, both in very complimentary terms. Of course, I was half asleep at the time.
So a few hours later I go back and rewatch the stream in its entirety, and that's when I noticed Crashed did something I do all the time. He hedged his compliments. Crashed made two quotable statements about me you could clip out of context. The first one was: "he [DNA] knows what he is talking about most of the time." The second one: "he [DNA] normally knows what he is talking about."
And this is why I get along with Crashed. Even unfiltered, Crashed always strives for accuracy in what he says. Painfully precise accuracy. I'm not saying he always hits the bullseye of course, none of us does. But you can tell he thinks carefully about what he says, and how he chooses to say it. The longer his posts are, the more obvious it is (at least to me) that they are being abbreviated.
For the most part, all of my interactions with the dev team have been respectful and even pleasant. I find them all to be thoughtful and dedicated professionals. But in my opinion, Crashed is unique in both having a widely holistic love of the game from a design perspective *and* a desire to communicate that perspective to us the playerbase. I've learned a lot from our conversations and tried to provide a reasonable return on investment of that time. I think the playerbase doesn't fully appreciate how uncommon it is for game developers with any connection to the game economies to want to share publicly. They have to make the tough decisions of what players get and what they don't get, and that's never going to be a popular job. Most don't expose their thinking to their playerbases for obvious reasons. It is absolutely fine to disagree with specific decisions or specific judgments. But players should keep in mind that most of these decisions in most games everywhere are made completely outside of their view with no way to discern why they are being made. Because if you don't know why someone does something, you can't argue effectively against it.
Many people think the way to change things is to yell, shout, make noise, *force* change by overwhelming the developers. That never works. Ever. You effect change by learning why the devs do what they do, understanding their goals and challenges, and finding alternate solutions to those things that they would in turn find acceptable. And every time a dev dumps their brain onto the forums, we're being given valuable knowledge on how to see things as they do, and doing that is the best way, the only way really to have a productive discussion with them on how to change things for the better.
My posts still have better graphs though.
I found this to be thoughtful, insightful and a great example of I don’t always have to agree with people I greatly like and respect and Crashed, I can safely say you have entrenched both thoughts in my mind with this post.
Thanks for treating us with respect and sharing your thought process. It demonstrates a level of care and passion.
Have a great weekend
By the way, where does that threshold exist? Am I to understand that even a percentage increase in the single digits of champion acquisition materials would have undermined Kabam's data analysis models and financial performance? Put differently, is Kabam really that adverse to throwing the community a bone?
Needless to say, I am one of those players that was disappointed with the event this year. Conversely, I am also a player that heavily invested in the event, hoping that the *next* batch of GBC might be a little better, might give me that meta 7 star champion I was hoping for (confirming your findings, I conceed, that community sentiment does not always predict quantitative performance).
At the end of the day, it's all a bit of gambling for us, I know. WE have the choice the spin the wheel, roll the dice, buy the crystals, hoping to hit the jackpot. And we as a community do need to own that. But as a 10-year veteran of this game, I am baffled by Kabam's constant ability drop the ball on something each year and then shrug and suggest that *next* year will be better.
I think I've had enough of the gambling and buying into Kabam's (and their CCP advocates, to be fair) promotional hype. Not to discount your data analysis, but this event was *personally* disappointing, and I'm no longer interested in financing a game that seems to be consistently broken month to month (defenders blocking my special attacks *mid* attack, for example).
Maybe, as you clarified at the start of your analysis (which was genuinely interesting btw!), it's the difference between finite and infinte games, but at the moment I derive much more satisfaction and enjoyment paying $60 for a PlayStation game that is complete, engaging *and free from error* than constantly fueling this infinite labyrinth that seems to find new, sublime ways to separate players from their time, money, and in game resources.
I will continue playing this game, but now as a Free to Play player. Your machinations, however well-intentioned and data-supported, have lost a paying customer.
Considering to make the Crystals fun to open again is a win for me!
I realy spend Money, normaly, in the Game at Christmas.
But this year the realy good (for me good) rewards where Out of Money reach for me. So i stopped buying SBC completely. There was no Point in opening them.
And please do not always compare to 2023 banquet.
Compare to the ones with good Feedback and Forum satisfaction.
I belive in the Game and the Gameteam.
Exactly this,..many formats of this game is oriented towards gambling.
People don’t want to drop unit currency or monetary funds on crystals with abysmal drop rates for anything of value,..and small increments at that.
Usually during these events players want rank up opportunities maybe mixed with some high end crystal shards.
Groupings for event crystals in the future i hope is also considered.
How could the Crystals not have rank up mat restrictions with Thronebreakers in the mix of things with Valiant?…it’s just common sense that this would be the outcome.
I get rank reward milestones but that’s not really instant value fun,..and kinda took the wind out of the sails of the event.
All the same,..thanks for the feedback,.,best regards,..and lets shoot for the stars next time,..in the name of “fun”.
I read every word of it I liked it and you’re incredible insight of it. Yes the 10 unit deal was amazing so thanks for that’s I really got so mad when I sow it wasn’t for all but beautiful read up the crystal wasn’t a total failure my opinion I hav 141 7 stars now so obviously it hard to get new 7 star I do think we need to go back to banguet is more fouce one rank up. Then accusation. Again you have the data. I don’t i like open crystal but the fact was 300 unit gav 10 percent of a caslpye. Wasn’t fun for me I land 2615 spots in banguet sad i didn’t spend slightly more but after no tier6 b or tier3 aplha i had to stop it was making it very hard to use my tier 4 aplha i got from cyber the deal with the 10 unit helped. But while that’s said you’re may not mean you’re lied the thing is how you’re presented it in the live stream.
It was very difficult to know if your voice and how it is said after all we all is human beings. We all take it another way. I learned to take everything with a grain of salt’s not only when it you but anyone one the live stream even when it was Jax. Do miss he’s humor. While that’s said thanks for wiret up appreciate it.
Another side question i would love to have more of a Q&A discussion in live stream. Thos hasn’t been happening as much as there use to.
However, I feel there are aspects of the game which the developers have undermined/ underestimated. That is because this year, the game has never felt like it a game for passionate collectors. And the "collectibles" aspect is a massive component to the playing experience.
I understand this year's banquet was "slowed down" to keep balance in the game - not explode the r3 economy. Which explains why the reward payout was so low in terms of 7 star shards/ titan shards.
But there is one argument which undermines Kabam Crashed's theory of "retaining players" vs "making revenue".
Why were annual collector crystals added separately, and not added as a reward to the banquet event? I am sure 100% of crystal opening experience if we would have been able to add 1,2,3,4,5 rarity of newer/ rarer champions.