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.
I'm guessing there were a few different factors that kept sales going even though the crystals sucked and people kept complaining.
For me: I had already set aside money for this. I grudgingly opened enough and used enough units to get what I wanted and then stopped. I wasn't pumped to open them, I was more thinking, "Ugh. Whatever. I might as well finish out these gift cards and cash back on this. As weak as this is, there isn't anything else that I would rather spend this on right now." I ended up not even spending my bigger than last year budget anyway, but Kabam had no way to know that. Just looking at the numbers, I'm sure it looks like I got after it, but I ended up spending significantly less than I intended.
Appreciate the insights and commentary, @Kabam Crashed. My comment would just be that from a game economy perspective, whether any of the contents of the crystals were worth 300 units, or if players can routinely obtain the same or better materials for less, whether units or other in game currency that takes less effort to accumulate than those units.
You discuss how people are saving units at a higher rate, but you could grind out 72 lanes of event quests to not even get the units for a single SBC. The rewards for that effort were extremely low, lower than a round or two of battlegrounds or a day of AQ or even the free daily event, and that disappointment was compounded by the fact that people saved with the expectation of having that work and time investment pay off after a prolonged time.
Maybe the takeaway is that the other modes became too rewarding to incentivize people to play them, and that the value of units (which represent real money or iintense grinding) was diminished. I asked myself if I wanted to spend $100 to hit the Isophene milestone after spending about 12000 units, and the feeling of loss I experienced from the first 40+ was so great I couldn’t do it. It felt like a year of grinding was worth less, in the game economy, than losing 5 battlegrounds matches. I get that money is a shortcut to that time investment, but a couple t5cc and sig stones is not worth a hundred bucks either. I don’t know how you reset those expectations, especially since whales probably wouldn’t tolerate a much slower progression pace that they are experiencing now. But it can’t help to have players feel like their dollars are worth so little.
Kabam Crashed, suggestion at end here (or @KabamPinwheel )
But first, @gamer, why the need to QUOTE the entire LARGER of the original analysis of Crashed's.
Don’t understand why sooo many others are also quoting too, but at least they were all the SHORTER of the 2 segments Crashed made.
If you'd like to repeat your reply (without quote), this page could be condensed some afterwards by having someone remove the big quote.
It's pretty much understood that people commenting now would be commenting on the Analysis. Or just start off with a quick opening.. “(RE: ANALYSIS)” if commentary in general about it. Or people could just quote a small particular paragraph/sentence from it that they want to comment on.
**actually, as someone might have mentioned, perhaps Kabam Crashed could move his long analysis (and all the subsequent follow up by everyone here, over to it's own separate Thread up here, and just putting the link to new thread at the end of this existing 6 page one.)
So someone interested wouldn’t have to try and parse thru 6 pages before finding it.
I hope the banquet event is just different next year. Doubt that happens but it is not a fun event because of what Kabam has to do with the crystals as Kabam Crashed explained. I just feel like after spending and experiencing 2023 and 2024 banquets and getting excited based on what I hear in live streams only to be disappointed by the terrible crysals reminds me of the… fool me once, fool me twice… continue to fool me into oblivion?
Maybe next year when you’re hyping up the Banquet. Pull out this letter you wrote on the forums and read it on the live stream as a reminder to all the valiant moderate spenders out there that still feel like the event stinks. So then we can make an informed decision on if we want to spend.
A few things you didn’t discuss. Most of the rewards were locked in progression, so we’re forced to open the cruddy crystals to hit the milestones. (I did it and it was depressing) we didn’t receive information on drop rates until what a day before? So it feels like while your response is true, and Kabam has an obligation to the game economy. The process, information and hype moving towards the banquet does not align with your statement. The hype alone made it seem like it was going to be the most amazing thing ever (it wasn’t.) my biggest reason for being upset is I simply felt lied to. If you told me the information in your letter before the event I would of had a different perspective.
Kabam Crashed, suggestion at end here (or @KabamPinwheel )
But first, @gamer, why the need to QUOTE the entire LARGER of the original analysis of Crashed's.
Don’t understand why sooo many others are also quoting too, but at least they were all the SHORTER of the 2 segments Crashed made.
If you'd like to repeat your reply (without quote), this page could be condensed some afterwards by having someone remove the big quote.
It's pretty much understood that people commenting now would be commenting on the Analysis. Or just start off with a quick opening.. “(RE: ANALYSIS)” if commentary in general about it. Or people could just quote a small particular paragraph/sentence from it that they want to comment on.
**actually, as someone might have mentioned, perhaps Kabam Crashed could move his long analysis (and all the subsequent follow up by everyone here, over to it's own separate Thread up here, and just putting the link to new thread at the end of this existing 6 page one.)
So someone interested wouldn’t have to try and parse thru 6 pages before finding it.
I noticed that I do also have to say I not the best with the quote how to made it smail and still get the most of it well regardless I tried to make my text more spaced out
That is a very long read, but to those of you who are on the edge of reading it, go for it. I think it’s well worth it, it explains a lot. This proximity between the developers and the players is also really nice to see. Thank you for taking the time to do this, this is very valuable and healthy for the game. I’m excited for what’s to come.
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.
Without numbers I have a hard time believing that "social sentiment" from the forums and YouTube are massively disparate with consumer spending. I would imagine such participants are the most active and most likely to spend in the most amount in the first place.
Whatsmore, the player base and Kabam could be talking past each other here. The players are often complaining about the true VALUE of the offers, deals, or propositions. Yet, Kabam guy here seems to imply that if REVENUE is sufficient within their models and projections, then the deals have value.
Essentially to them, revenue = value. And this does make some sense, as things in a technical sense are worth what someone is willing to pay for them.
However, there are many assumptions and fallacies within this chain of reasoning. Namely, this is simply not an actual free market. Right, the only deals we ever have the option to buy are the ones Kabam deliberately manufactures. And people will pretty much always buy.
As long as the existing deals have the potential for progress (even ridiculously far out milestones or random chance from crystals), and as long as player competetion and artificial scarcity exists, psychologically, you can always assume that people will buy the top stuff no matter what it is.
Obviously, this could segue into a conversation about manipulation, because like I said, Kabam is single handily engineering the entire "market" in what is a closed system. And so whereas the Soviet Union was fumbling around trying to set prices and determine value, in this case, we are not dealing with tangible, finite resources. So really, the only way to tell that there is a disparity here is through player dissatisfaction.
Whatever the case, what I am getting at then is that the players could very well be correct in that the value is terrible and has gone down, while at the same time indulging to some degree in spending / participation. Because they have no other option and no other deals, and something is better than nothing. And so then revenue would not necessarily equal true value.
Another thing to consider is that we obviously don't know what happens to revenue in the counterfactual reality where the deals are both better and worse. How would that effect spending.
They claim to be balancing deals around 7 star longevity and what not for game health, but an additional question to ask is why? I mean at the end of the day, it is just arbitrary. So what if you have to introduce 8 stars early? You already know you are going to anyway, it's not a surprise. At the end of the day, you're just "scaling" things up. It's inevitable, and only really a problem if the disturbution of the highest rated champions and materials are concentrated in too few hands for too long.
TLDR: Kabam has pretty much total control over supply and demand. So when they see revenue as proof that their deals have value, they fail to understand that, intentionally or not, their "market" is inherently manipulated / structured to validate whatever they're doing under that line of thinking.
As FTP for over 6 years, i can say this is very valuable for anyone who loves this game imo. Any player will read this will see how Crashed is transparent about a lot of things that we as players don’t usually get the context for and his comment is very insightful. Thanks for taking time to do it, appreciate it
TLDR: Kabam has pretty much total control over supply and demand. So when they see revenue as proof that their deals have value, they fail to understand that, intentionally or not, their "market" is inherently manipulated / structured to validate whatever they're doing under that line of thinking.
This is, in economic design terms, complete gibberish.
When an economy designer talks about “value” they are using the term either colloquially, or in the game design sense. The goal in every monetization system is not to “create value” in some abstract Econ 101 sense. The goal is the very concrete goal of “making things people are willing to buy.”
The idea that players might be willing to spend but they are spending on things with poor value is nonsensical in this context, because value is relative in the first place. We don’t all value things in the same way, and the game does not specifically try to somehow meet the value judgments of a million separate people. It tries to make things people are willing to spend money on, period. That’s all.
To put it another way, Kabam doesn’t care what the answer to the question “does this offer have good value” is. They care what the answer to the question “do you think the offer is good enough to buy” is. If enough players say yes, and it doesn’t have to be everyone, then the game continues on and the devs are satisfied. Because as Crashed said and as I have often remarked, the goal is not to make as much money as possible. The goal is to make enough to continue on, while selling as little as possible.
The separate argument that the players are a kind of captive audience is equally broken, because the vast majority of players don’t spend. If all of us were somehow forced to spend, or overwhelmingly compelled to spend, you could make the argument that spending is not entirely voluntary. But every player has a choice, and it isn’t a choice between buying from Kabam or buying from some other vendor, it is between spending and not spending, and the vast majority of players choose the latter choice,. This is a priori proof that the playerbase is not a captive audience of consumers, and the players aren’t spending hostages. Players have to be convinced to spend or they won’t spend, and spending offers are designed to do that, and only that, within the limits of the game economy. Any argument that they might succeed at that but fail at “creating value” is ascribing to them a failure to achieve a goal they have no intention of even attempting to achieve.
They claim to be balancing deals around 7 star longevity and what not for game health, but an additional question to ask is why? I mean at the end of the day, it is just arbitrary. So what if you have to introduce 8 stars early? You already know you are going to anyway, it's not a surprise. At the end of the day, you're just "scaling" things up. It's inevitable, and only really a problem if the disturbution of the highest rated champions and materials are concentrated in too few hands for too long.
For the benefit of players who might not have been around for very long, as you apparently have not been, rarity jumps are always disruptive. They have to be, because of their very nature and purpose. We jump to a new rarity when the current top rarity exhausts its purpose for existing, and the purpose for champions to exist at all is to be pursuit targets. The game wants players to want to chase them, and that chase is driven from the top down. The highest rarity is the highest chase tier. But eventually, the ability for the top tier to be a valid chase target drops to an ineffective level. When too many players have too many of them ranked to too high a level, the incremental value of Yet Another one of them diminishes to the point where players will not chase them with the same energy as they originally did. That’s when you release a new rarity: to restart the chase from zero. Everyone has to start chasing everything again. The huge baggage of accumulated roster gets left behind, in terms of chase potential if not utility.
Every time a new rarity is added, there is a call from some players to “fix” the problem that new rarities present: that of making players have to rebuild their hard-fought for rosters from scratch. They propose ideas like promoting lower rarities, or allowing players to reclaim higher rarities if they have the lower ones. They don’t realize the problems they are trying to solve are not bugs, they are features. New rarities are disruptive because the *point* is to disrupt. They tried to mitigate this disruption in various ways in the past: the 5/6 rarity overlap, the 6/7 ascension path. But these are intended to smooth the transition to a degree, not eliminate the need for the chase to start over.
These things are inevitable, but they always cause pain, so the less frequently you do them the better.
I just thought the SBC drop rates for things like Tier 5 class cats was too high.
And I thought the alliance rank rewards could have been spread out further. Top 1 - 10 (rightly so) got great loot top 11-500(?) got the 1-5% tier which was rubbish.
Thanks for those two detailed posts @Kabam Crashed -I understand the argument around economy and the need to keep the 7* cycle at a sufficiently long time period. I made a post about wishing 7r2s and then 7r3s hadnt become available as quickly as they did, compared to how 6* had progressed when the were released due to my worry of that same issue.
I will say, and you admitted to it, I felt the biggest issue this banquet was that the crystals themselves were not fun. Yes a lot of value was loaded into the milestones, but if you got priced out of the top ones in the realm event minimum by the 5000 unit increase then you couldn't fall back on the uual pleasure of crystal openings. Though they had stuff you could use on 7*, it was just not the same (again due to wanting to restrict the rate of champion acquisition) with the high drop rates of t5cc and t6cc coming out of pulls.
I look forward to seeing what ideas you come up with to solve that issue next year.
When an economy designer talks about “value” they are using the term either colloquially, or in the game design sense. The goal in every monetization system is not to “create value” in some abstract Econ 101 sense. The goal is the very concrete goal of “making things people are willing to buy.”
And ostensibly, people buy what has value in a normal market. But as I said, in this case, whether they are actively thinking about it or not, Kabam is literally creating the resources out of nothing and then using quantities to set prices. Aka, trying to set the value.
The idea that players might be willing to spend but they are spending on things with poor value is nonsensical in this context, because value is relative in the first place. We don’t all value things in the same way, and the game does not specifically try to somehow meet the value judgments of a million separate people. It tries to make things people are willing to spend money on, period. That’s all.
To borrow your quote: "This is, in economic design terms, complete gibberish."
Of course on the individual level we value things differently (even this is not universally true though with inelastic goods at what not), on the aggregate we can model behaviors and trends which together form a consensus.
To put it another way, Kabam doesn’t care what the answer to the question “does this offer have good value” is. They care what the answer to the question “do you think the offer is good enough to buy” is. If enough players say yes, and it doesn’t have to be everyone, then the game continues on and the devs are satisfied. Because as Crashed said and as I have often remarked, the goal is not to make as much money as possible. The goal is to make enough to continue on, while selling as little as possible.
A large point of my initial post was that Kabam can get people to buy anything, they could get the invested top dogs to buy 1/100th of a tier 7 catalyst. (And if 2024 banquet was actually in line with previous years, that kind of confirms it). You can argue that its good or bad, innocent or manipulative, but because Kabam creates offers (and resources and their value) in a vacuum with no other alternative, they have near total and absolute control over the economy and the very metrics of evaluation of that economy.
The separate argument that the players are a kind of captive audience is equally broken, because the vast majority of players don’t spend. If all of us were somehow forced to spend, or overwhelmingly compelled to spend, you could make the argument that spending is not entirely voluntary. But every player has a choice, and it isn’t a choice between buying from Kabam or buying from some other vendor, it is between spending and not spending, and the vast majority of players choose the latter choice,.
Strawman. What we tend to think of as the playerbase is of course a kind of "captive audience" in the sense that they in routinely invest their time, energy, and thoughts toward to game. However, I specifically laid out the conditions wherein players, who's identities and interests lie in them being top players, will always by the top offers no matter what they actually are.
This is a priori proof that the playerbase is not a captive audience of consumers, and the players aren’t spending hostages.
Actual nonsense. In what way would that be "a priori" proof? Very curious to see the reasoning there. And I never claimed all the players were spending hostages, see prior explanation.
Players have to be convinced to spend or they won’t spend, and spending offers are designed to do that, and only that, within the limits of the game economy. Any argument that they might succeed at that but fail at “creating value” is ascribing to them a failure to achieve a goal they have no intention of even attempting to achieve.
The players care and take about value though, which is the basis for this entire conversation and disconnect between them and Kabam.
These things are inevitable, but they always cause pain, so the less frequently you do them the better.
Naturally there are differences in category (8 stars to T5 class catalyst) and scale (time) when it comes to these paradigm shifts. My point was simply that an inevitability in 2 years made in 1.5 years can be almost meaningless when a new inevitability replaces it. Does that mean 9 stars today and 10 stars next week and so on? No, but there is undoubtedly much in between the most extreme hypotheticals and the most conservative schemes.
Get rid of the reward budget for things that are not a monthly or daily event but you shouldn't really have one it would be better for everyone without it
Get rid of the reward budget for things that are not a monthly or daily event but you shouldn't really have one it would be better for everyone without it
There is a common misconception that the “reward budget” is a self-imposed limit on the amount of rewards that can be added to the game. As I was the first person to actually use the term ‘reward budget” in the context of the management of the game’s economy, I should probably have done a better job of explaining what it is. This explanation might be different from how Crashed would explain it, but I believe we get to the same place by (possibly) different semantic paths.
The idea of a reward budget comes from the fact that most game rewards suffer from dilution, either in utility or pursuit value or both. To someone with no 7* champs a 7* crystal is highly valuable, but to someone with 200 7* champs that same crystal has much less value. For someone with very few 7* champs a new 7* champ is worth a lot more than it does for someone with a lot of them. Most rewards have an incremental value that decreases the more you have.
On large scales, this means the more rewards you put in the hands of players, the less valuable those rewards become. This is self limiting. Rewards aren’t actually infinite: the game can theoretically add an unlimited amount of stuff to the game and hand it out, but before long none of it will matter to anyone.
The primary purpose for rewards to exist in the game is as an incentive. Players are incentivized to do certain things to get certain rewards. Those rewards must actually have either utility value (they can be used to do things players want to do) or pursuit value (players simply want them, whether they actually get a lot of direct use out of them or not). And diminishing incremental value means (almost) all rewards have a finite ability to be useful in terms of the largest scales of managing the game economy (they do, of course, trickle down from the top players pursuing them to the lower players).
This will happen whether you want it to or not, whether you understand it or not, whether you plan for it or not. The reward budget for the game is the quantitative representation of this reward dilution effect. It is the devs best understanding of how much stuff they can put into the game before the purpose for which those things exist won’t work anymore, and they will need to invent newer things to replace them. It is not an arbitrary limit on rewards. Rather, it is a planning tool to pace the game’s economic evolution within the limits of how effective rewards will be as they give them out.
Man, what REALLY **** irked me is the fact that I had to let 7 tier 4 catalysts expire because the cap is at 3 and you guys took away that subscription that made the capacity higher because my rank is too low to get enough resources FAST enough to rank up my 7 stars before they expired. 7. But that was MY reward from buying and spending money during the banquet- AND YOU CANT EVEN SELL THE ITEMS!!! Something that would’ve helped me a lot in the long run but their capacity was so little that I just had to watch them expire. Actually diabolical. And I had managed to rank up 2 7 stars grinding trying to use the catalysts only to find out the summoner subscription was gone and had expired for me so it didn’t change anything and I didn’t get to save the rest of my catalysts. It’s frustrating.
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
Personally I very much appreciate this response and analysis.
As a player I am fascinated with my own experience. Objectively I understand that my account got a huge boost from this event. I also understand that most of my rewards came from the milestones.
I was even lucky enough to get a 7* Jessica Jones and 1 gifted guardians key from the crystals. Below are the results of my first 50 SBCs (15,000 Units worth)
8 generic 7* sig stones 2 +5 generic 7* sig stones 1 +5 cosmic 7* sig stones
10,500 7* crystal shards
So to sum up for 15,000 Units I got 1 (almost 2) 7* and almost enough resources for a Rank 3. Again, I objectively know that most of the rewards were in the milestones, but when I saw these results I (as an endgame valiant player) was very disappointed. I think I opened up another 50 or 60 crystals with the only noteworthy pull being the 1 Gifted Guardians Key.
Whatever the case is I opened enough to reach top 2-3%
Here's what I didn't get. 0 Limited Champ 7* Selectors 0 Awakening Gems 0 Awakening Gem Shards 0 Titan Shards
I think the main reason for my disappointment was the champion acquisition aspect. I have never pulled 7* Hulkbuster from an Incursions crystal. I have pulled everyone else except him. (In my desperation, I did miraculously manage to pull him from a 7* arcade crystal but he is still unduped). I had gotten lucky enough to pull Shocker and Adam from the 2023 banquet. They are three of my favorite champs and they were among my first 6 Rank 3 7*s. For a whole year I used them unduped waiting for the chance to dupe them. I got really excited when I learned that these champs would be in the limited champ selectors. But then I saw the percentage of pulling them being almost non-existent and my heart dropped. And then I didn't get a single LCS or Awakening Gem.
I saved up as many Units as I could because the 2023 Banquet felt so good to me. I didn't spend any units on cyber weekend or J4 this year because of my expectations for 2024. I thought I would be able to easily get all 6 gifted guardians with the amount of crystals I opened and maybe even dupe a couple. I only ended up getting 4 missing out on Medusa and BPCW.
Again it is so strange to me that I could get so much and yet it didn't feel great. I got max milestones from, the Solo Event, Alliance Event, Realm Event, and pretty high rewards from Solo/Realm Rank rewards and Alliance Rank Rewards.
It seems like spreading out the rewards like butter scraped over too much bread created a disconnect in my mind.
I also value Champ Aquisition/Duping way more than rank up materials because even if at only rank 1 at least I can play the characters I want to use. So it was definitely pretty nice getting a 7* Jessica Jones and 4 of the Gifted Guardians but overall I think the percentages of the Keys, LCSs, AGs, and the amount of 7*/titan shards from the crystals were WAAAAAAAAAY too low.
Overall I must say that this was an objectively very good event and I am very happy with what I was able to get yet it didn't feel very good. (Still so strange that I can feel this way but I don't know how else to explain it)
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.
Kabam Crashed
Thank you for the breakdown and yes I did read every detail. Overall for December I was not unhappy, but in some ways I do feel we were mislead. If I had known we would not get full points for tickets for crystals in advance I might have saved more money over the span of the tickets and used it on banquet for more points. That should have been made clear when it was announced. Yes you’ll get the crystals but they won’t give you full points equal to buying a crystal in event. Just a suggestion. That was miscommunication number one. Number 2 when the crystals were discussed it was insinuated they would be insane and that the realm event would be cherries on top. Crystals were very underwhelming to open and very depressing to see junk drop from 99% of my crystals for my account. Had it been made clear yeah this may not be the crystal for everybody to grow your accounts but the realm event is gonna be bonkers then I think there would have been less player backlash. I know not every crystal can be a winner, but if you’ve seen my luck being here since launch day on my account you would know I know that. My luck sucks but it seemed even more horrible when I opened banquet crystals than usual. Be upfront and try to let everyone know what to realistically expect. Miscommunication or lack of communication has been a major backlash issue for kabam for years. Jax may have spoiled us as he stayed on top of issues. Almost 2 weeks of watching the post go quiet from kabam side really frustrated the player base. Anyways I’m in 10 different directions right now. As a player who has played since launch day and myself want to see my time not wasted I appreciate that you think of the long term. I just ask that going forward the team communicates clearly and timely. That would make me a happy player. If a event will have junk but a realm event is gonna be insane tied with it just tell me and I will feel like I know what I got into when I decided to start spending. Also there is a disconnect between players and the team and I will let you continue to watch and hopefully see for yourself where that disconnect lies because us saying it will just get forum hate. It has to be something you see for yourself, but if you peruse the topics you’ll see the problem without me saying a word. I appreciate your time breaking down your thoughts and I look forward to hopefully some better more concise communication in the future so that we have a happy game team and majority player base. Cheers.
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.
I'm guessing there were a few different factors that kept sales going even though the crystals sucked and people kept complaining.
For me: I had already set aside money for this. I grudgingly opened enough and used enough units to get what I wanted and then stopped. I wasn't pumped to open them, I was more thinking, "Ugh. Whatever. I might as well finish out these gift cards and cash back on this. As weak as this is, there isn't anything else that I would rather spend this on right now." I ended up not even spending my bigger than last year budget anyway, but Kabam had no way to know that. Just looking at the numbers, I'm sure it looks like I got after it, but I ended up spending significantly less than I intended.
Exactly ! And that is why I keep repeating I really don't like the current trend of claiming data is king. You can make it say whatever you want and interprete the way you see fit. Crashed is clearly overlooking the theory and roots of why sales kept going.
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.
I'm guessing there were a few different factors that kept sales going even though the crystals sucked and people kept complaining.
For me: I had already set aside money for this. I grudgingly opened enough and used enough units to get what I wanted and then stopped. I wasn't pumped to open them, I was more thinking, "Ugh. Whatever. I might as well finish out these gift cards and cash back on this. As weak as this is, there isn't anything else that I would rather spend this on right now." I ended up not even spending my bigger than last year budget anyway, but Kabam had no way to know that. Just looking at the numbers, I'm sure it looks like I got after it, but I ended up spending significantly less than I intended.
Exactly ! And that is why I keep repeating I really don't like the current trend of claiming data is king. You can make it say whatever you want and interprete the way you see fit. Crashed is clearly overlooking the theory and roots of why sales kept going.
Data is the only thing that matters at the end of the day. None of what you are saying means anything because the data is unchanged. The sales keep going because something about the event’s structure worked and they kept making money. This banquet was clearly a success for them, and future banquets will likely follow the same setup. The “theory” is literally completely useless.
I don’t even know how you interpret unchanging numbers to work in your favor.
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.
I'm guessing there were a few different factors that kept sales going even though the crystals sucked and people kept complaining.
For me: I had already set aside money for this. I grudgingly opened enough and used enough units to get what I wanted and then stopped. I wasn't pumped to open them, I was more thinking, "Ugh. Whatever. I might as well finish out these gift cards and cash back on this. As weak as this is, there isn't anything else that I would rather spend this on right now." I ended up not even spending my bigger than last year budget anyway, but Kabam had no way to know that. Just looking at the numbers, I'm sure it looks like I got after it, but I ended up spending significantly less than I intended.
Exactly ! And that is why I keep repeating I really don't like the current trend of claiming data is king. You can make it say whatever you want and interprete the way you see fit. Crashed is clearly overlooking the theory and roots of why sales kept going.
Data is the only thing that matters at the end of the day. None of what you are saying means anything because the data is unchanged. The sales keep going because something about the event’s structure worked and they kept making money. This banquet was clearly a success for them, and future banquets will likely follow the same setup. The “theory” is literally completely useless.
I don’t even know how you interpret unchanging numbers to work in your favor.
From a sale perspective yes I agree. It's just that if you consider the event a win solely based on that, then Crashed will be sad (to quote his reaction to this year event reception by the community) and have another disappointment in the way the 2025 event will be received by the community. My analysis doesn't go further than that.
The community is now aware of how the event is built and will have to plan accordingly. Kabam is also aware of the community reactions to such event. There will be no more surprises.
@KabamCrashed, when will you update the rewards for event quest? As a valiant player 10k 6* shards and 1xt5 alpha Cc is well uselles to us. Traders outpost is also heavily outdated. I mean, i didnt push this far just to stop playing here, because there are no worthy resources to chase on a day to day basis (apart from super daily event).
Great retrospect @Kabam Crashed. Read the whole breakdown and while it might not be what everyone wanted, its a fairly balanced and reasonable take on banquet. Personally I found the 2024 banquet solid. Getting 3 new 7stars, rank3s and a 7* awakening gem for all milestones is great even for endgame valiants. But opening the crystals themselves was definitely disappointing.
With that said, I have 2 pieces of feedback for future banquet events:
Specify the drop rates for each item drop instead of a range of item quantities, mainly how 7* shards can drop between 1.5k and 15k but we don't know what chance we have of specifically getting 15k shards. This certainly contributed to some disappointment for me when first opening the crystals. Most of the drop rates were concise but the 7* shard and titan shard ranges were broad. If we know the odds of 15k 7* shards are like 1-2%, atleast it gives us a clearer picture of what to expect beforehand and keeps false expectations in check.
Secondly, giving us information about how many units will be required to complete banquet milestones in advance (ideally when cyber sales start). I don't necessarily mind unit inflation itself but the fact that banquet comes less than a month after cyber means we already have to plan unit spending carefully between these two. And unlike banquet, the spending requirements of july 4th and cyber offers remain more or less the same and players know how many units to save up in advance while for banquet it changes yearly and we don't know how many units we'll need until the event starts. Ideally, we should know how many units we will require for banquet before cyber weekend offers, so we can distribute our units better between the two, plan out how many cash offers to buy in cyber if we want to fill up units for banquet, or how much arena to grind (which i would personally wanna keep to a minimum during holidays).
Thank you @Kabam Crashed for that fantastic, informative, insightful writeup.
I'm sure my own data point doesn't count for much in your ocean of data, but i can say that my own personal experience was very much in line with your analysis. I found the crystals themselves to be disappointing, but the event milestones that they unlocked were fun an impactful to my roster. And the other December events were all fun and impactful to me as well.
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 post and your commitment to the community.
Being a programmer, I will point out one thing — data has nothing to do with people’s emotions.
Every event needs to be judged on its own merit.
Upgrading the old champs has the same effect of overestimating the value of glorious guardians (or w/e the batch with Prof X and Shocker was called).
The main source of disappointment with these crystals IMO was that on average, you couldn’t even R2 1 7* champ with the worst case RNG. That basically means you have 7* Jessica on an account t that doesn’t appreciate her, and an end game account that ends up with 10% T7CC.
I understand that the RNG is a foundation of this game and I don’t expect everyone to walk away with a 7* Jessica — but really, “economy” shouldn’t have been a factor in a historic milestone as a 10 year anniversary.
Additionally, even though the banquet was supposed to be progression agnostic. You have to understand people’s frustration in getting items they could have gotten for free in a week.
I will admit that I didn’t realize how scarce T5CC was before the event, but we get it for free with the daily event.
I cannot say with certainty what makes the banquet event exiting, but I will leave you with this — if someone wanted to rank up a champ they were excited about, they would have done so before December. If they haven’t ranked up the champ by then, they don’t care about that champ.
First of all, thank you @KabamCrusher for the long analytics and the explanation of your standing. Now, 2 points to make the crystals more "fun":
1- As many stayed, the quantities of the rewards inside the crystal need adjustment. When a player get the more valuable stuff, like 7* shards or 7* sig stones, 1 sig stone or 1500 shards are not an enticing number, not something the player will get and say "yes, 300 units well spent, I ll open more". We need at least packs of 5 sigs as a minimum, (we NEEDED actually, next year I don't know were the progression of the game will be, we may need 10), and 5k 7 star shards at least. And half a t6cc as a minimum. And btw, Raids need a whole t6cc as a potential reward, not half.
2- The new "special crystal with champions" system was NOT good. A middle spender or ftp player never got to the point to awaken at least one of the new champions, because the gem was too high in the milestones, and the gatcha system doesn't allow to dupe by chance, someone had to spend at least $300 to do that. Plus, in that regard, having specified sig stones as low rank milestones is completely useless if you haven t spend to acquire the Awakening gem, and many people ended up with 50+ useless sigs on their stash, who knows for how many months or years.
1 important thing to note is that the negative forum feedback is in English
Many spenders of the game aren't English users, some are from China, South Korea etc
So the spending went up even when the though the response to the banquet crystals was overwhelmingly negative
Kabam won't let you know how much each region contributed to the revenue of Kabam bcos that's business privacy but I can say confidently English using region is just a slice of the entire revenue pie
We can reference the box office takings for a MCU movie, the US box office is just a slice of the total box office takings, overseas box office takings usually is the bigger slice
Comments
For me:
I had already set aside money for this. I grudgingly opened enough and used enough units to get what I wanted and then stopped. I wasn't pumped to open them, I was more thinking, "Ugh. Whatever. I might as well finish out these gift cards and cash back on this. As weak as this is, there isn't anything else that I would rather spend this on right now." I ended up not even spending my bigger than last year budget anyway, but Kabam had no way to know that. Just looking at the numbers, I'm sure it looks like I got after it, but I ended up spending significantly less than I intended.
You discuss how people are saving units at a higher rate, but you could grind out 72 lanes of event quests to not even get the units for a single SBC. The rewards for that effort were extremely low, lower than a round or two of battlegrounds or a day of AQ or even the free daily event, and that disappointment was compounded by the fact that people saved with the expectation of having that work and time investment pay off after a prolonged time.
Maybe the takeaway is that the other modes became too rewarding to incentivize people to play them, and that the value of units (which represent real money or iintense grinding) was diminished. I asked myself if I wanted to spend $100 to hit the Isophene milestone after spending about 12000 units, and the feeling of loss I experienced from the first 40+ was so great I couldn’t do it. It felt like a year of grinding was worth less, in the game economy, than losing 5 battlegrounds matches. I get that money is a shortcut to that time investment, but a couple t5cc and sig stones is not worth a hundred bucks either. I don’t know how you reset those expectations, especially since whales probably wouldn’t tolerate a much slower progression pace that they are experiencing now. But it can’t help to have players feel like their dollars are worth so little.
But first,
@gamer, why the need to QUOTE the entire LARGER of the original analysis of Crashed's.
Don’t understand why sooo many others are also quoting too, but at least they were all the SHORTER of the 2 segments Crashed made.
If you'd like to repeat your reply (without quote), this page could be condensed some afterwards by having someone remove the big quote.
It's pretty much understood that people commenting now would be commenting on the Analysis.
Or just start off with a quick opening.. “(RE: ANALYSIS)” if commentary in general about it.
Or people could just quote a small particular paragraph/sentence from it that they want to comment on.
**actually, as someone might have mentioned, perhaps Kabam Crashed could move his long analysis (and all the subsequent follow up by everyone here, over to it's own separate Thread up here, and just putting the link to new thread at the end of this existing 6 page one.)
So someone interested wouldn’t have to try and parse thru 6 pages before finding it.
Maybe next year when you’re hyping up the Banquet. Pull out this letter you wrote on the forums and read it on the live stream as a reminder to all the valiant moderate spenders out there that still feel like the event stinks. So then we can make an informed decision on if we want to spend.
A few things you didn’t discuss. Most of the rewards were locked in progression, so we’re forced to open the cruddy crystals to hit the milestones. (I did it and it was depressing) we didn’t receive information on drop rates until what a day before? So it feels like while your response is true, and Kabam has an obligation to the game economy. The process, information and hype moving towards the banquet does not align with your statement. The hype alone made it seem like it was going to be the most amazing thing ever (it wasn’t.) my biggest reason for being upset is I simply felt lied to. If you told me the information in your letter before the event I would of had a different perspective.
Whatsmore, the player base and Kabam could be talking past each other here. The players are often complaining about the true VALUE of the offers, deals, or propositions. Yet, Kabam guy here seems to imply that if REVENUE is sufficient within their models and projections, then the deals have value.
Essentially to them, revenue = value. And this does make some sense, as things in a technical sense are worth what someone is willing to pay for them.
However, there are many assumptions and fallacies within this chain of reasoning. Namely, this is simply not an actual free market. Right, the only deals we ever have the option to buy are the ones Kabam deliberately manufactures. And people will pretty much always buy.
As long as the existing deals have the potential for progress (even ridiculously far out milestones or random chance from crystals), and as long as player competetion and artificial scarcity exists, psychologically, you can always assume that people will buy the top stuff no matter what it is.
Obviously, this could segue into a conversation about manipulation, because like I said, Kabam is single handily engineering the entire "market" in what is a closed system. And so whereas the Soviet Union was fumbling around trying to set prices and determine value, in this case, we are not dealing with tangible, finite resources. So really, the only way to tell that there is a disparity here is through player dissatisfaction.
Whatever the case, what I am getting at then is that the players could very well be correct in that the value is terrible and has gone down, while at the same time indulging to some degree in spending / participation. Because they have no other option and no other deals, and something is better than nothing. And so then revenue would not necessarily equal true value.
Another thing to consider is that we obviously don't know what happens to revenue in the counterfactual reality where the deals are both better and worse. How would that effect spending.
They claim to be balancing deals around 7 star longevity and what not for game health, but an additional question to ask is why? I mean at the end of the day, it is just arbitrary. So what if you have to introduce 8 stars early? You already know you are going to anyway, it's not a surprise. At the end of the day, you're just "scaling" things up. It's inevitable, and only really a problem if the disturbution of the highest rated champions and materials are concentrated in too few hands for too long.
TLDR: Kabam has pretty much total control over supply and demand. So when they see revenue as proof that their deals have value, they fail to understand that, intentionally or not, their "market" is inherently manipulated / structured to validate whatever they're doing under that line of thinking.
When an economy designer talks about “value” they are using the term either colloquially, or in the game design sense. The goal in every monetization system is not to “create value” in some abstract Econ 101 sense. The goal is the very concrete goal of “making things people are willing to buy.”
The idea that players might be willing to spend but they are spending on things with poor value is nonsensical in this context, because value is relative in the first place. We don’t all value things in the same way, and the game does not specifically try to somehow meet the value judgments of a million separate people. It tries to make things people are willing to spend money on, period. That’s all.
To put it another way, Kabam doesn’t care what the answer to the question “does this offer have good value” is. They care what the answer to the question “do you think the offer is good enough to buy” is. If enough players say yes, and it doesn’t have to be everyone, then the game continues on and the devs are satisfied. Because as Crashed said and as I have often remarked, the goal is not to make as much money as possible. The goal is to make enough to continue on, while selling as little as possible.
The separate argument that the players are a kind of captive audience is equally broken, because the vast majority of players don’t spend. If all of us were somehow forced to spend, or overwhelmingly compelled to spend, you could make the argument that spending is not entirely voluntary. But every player has a choice, and it isn’t a choice between buying from Kabam or buying from some other vendor, it is between spending and not spending, and the vast majority of players choose the latter choice,. This is a priori proof that the playerbase is not a captive audience of consumers, and the players aren’t spending hostages. Players have to be convinced to spend or they won’t spend, and spending offers are designed to do that, and only that, within the limits of the game economy. Any argument that they might succeed at that but fail at “creating value” is ascribing to them a failure to achieve a goal they have no intention of even attempting to achieve.
As an aside: For the benefit of players who might not have been around for very long, as you apparently have not been, rarity jumps are always disruptive. They have to be, because of their very nature and purpose. We jump to a new rarity when the current top rarity exhausts its purpose for existing, and the purpose for champions to exist at all is to be pursuit targets. The game wants players to want to chase them, and that chase is driven from the top down. The highest rarity is the highest chase tier. But eventually, the ability for the top tier to be a valid chase target drops to an ineffective level. When too many players have too many of them ranked to too high a level, the incremental value of Yet Another one of them diminishes to the point where players will not chase them with the same energy as they originally did. That’s when you release a new rarity: to restart the chase from zero. Everyone has to start chasing everything again. The huge baggage of accumulated roster gets left behind, in terms of chase potential if not utility.
Every time a new rarity is added, there is a call from some players to “fix” the problem that new rarities present: that of making players have to rebuild their hard-fought for rosters from scratch. They propose ideas like promoting lower rarities, or allowing players to reclaim higher rarities if they have the lower ones. They don’t realize the problems they are trying to solve are not bugs, they are features. New rarities are disruptive because the *point* is to disrupt. They tried to mitigate this disruption in various ways in the past: the 5/6 rarity overlap, the 6/7 ascension path. But these are intended to smooth the transition to a degree, not eliminate the need for the chase to start over.
These things are inevitable, but they always cause pain, so the less frequently you do them the better.
I just thought the SBC drop rates for things like Tier 5 class cats was too high.
And I thought the alliance rank rewards could have been spread out further. Top 1 - 10 (rightly so) got great loot top 11-500(?) got the 1-5% tier which was rubbish.
I will say, and you admitted to it, I felt the biggest issue this banquet was that the crystals themselves were not fun. Yes a lot of value was loaded into the milestones, but if you got priced out of the top ones in the realm event minimum by the 5000 unit increase then you couldn't fall back on the uual pleasure of crystal openings. Though they had stuff you could use on 7*, it was just not the same (again due to wanting to restrict the rate of champion acquisition) with the high drop rates of t5cc and t6cc coming out of pulls.
I look forward to seeing what ideas you come up with to solve that issue next year.
Of course on the individual level we value things differently (even this is not universally true though with inelastic goods at what not), on the aggregate we can model behaviors and trends which together form a consensus. A large point of my initial post was that Kabam can get people to buy anything, they could get the invested top dogs to buy 1/100th of a tier 7 catalyst. (And if 2024 banquet was actually in line with previous years, that kind of confirms it). You can argue that its good or bad, innocent or manipulative, but because Kabam creates offers (and resources and their value) in a vacuum with no other alternative, they have near total and absolute control over the economy and the very metrics of evaluation of that economy. Strawman. What we tend to think of as the playerbase is of course a kind of "captive audience" in the sense that they in routinely invest their time, energy, and thoughts toward to game. However, I specifically laid out the conditions wherein players, who's identities and interests lie in them being top players, will always by the top offers no matter what they actually are. Actual nonsense. In what way would that be "a priori" proof? Very curious to see the reasoning there. And I never claimed all the players were spending hostages, see prior explanation. The players care and take about value though, which is the basis for this entire conversation and disconnect between them and Kabam. Naturally there are differences in category (8 stars to T5 class catalyst) and scale (time) when it comes to these paradigm shifts. My point was simply that an inevitability in 2 years made in 1.5 years can be almost meaningless when a new inevitability replaces it. Does that mean 9 stars today and 10 stars next week and so on? No, but there is undoubtedly much in between the most extreme hypotheticals and the most conservative schemes.
The idea of a reward budget comes from the fact that most game rewards suffer from dilution, either in utility or pursuit value or both. To someone with no 7* champs a 7* crystal is highly valuable, but to someone with 200 7* champs that same crystal has much less value. For someone with very few 7* champs a new 7* champ is worth a lot more than it does for someone with a lot of them. Most rewards have an incremental value that decreases the more you have.
On large scales, this means the more rewards you put in the hands of players, the less valuable those rewards become. This is self limiting. Rewards aren’t actually infinite: the game can theoretically add an unlimited amount of stuff to the game and hand it out, but before long none of it will matter to anyone.
The primary purpose for rewards to exist in the game is as an incentive. Players are incentivized to do certain things to get certain rewards. Those rewards must actually have either utility value (they can be used to do things players want to do) or pursuit value (players simply want them, whether they actually get a lot of direct use out of them or not). And diminishing incremental value means (almost) all rewards have a finite ability to be useful in terms of the largest scales of managing the game economy (they do, of course, trickle down from the top players pursuing them to the lower players).
This will happen whether you want it to or not, whether you understand it or not, whether you plan for it or not. The reward budget for the game is the quantitative representation of this reward dilution effect. It is the devs best understanding of how much stuff they can put into the game before the purpose for which those things exist won’t work anymore, and they will need to invent newer things to replace them. It is not an arbitrary limit on rewards. Rather, it is a planning tool to pace the game’s economic evolution within the limits of how effective rewards will be as they give them out.
As a player I am fascinated with my own experience. Objectively I understand that my account got a huge boost from this event. I also understand that most of my rewards came from the milestones.
I was even lucky enough to get a 7* Jessica Jones and 1 gifted guardians key from the crystals. Below are the results of my first 50 SBCs (15,000 Units worth)
7* Jessica Jones
2,520 t7bc fragments
2 full t6bc
11,400 cosmic t6cc
34,200 mutant t6cc
28,500 science t6cc
39,900 mystic t6cc
5,700 skill t6cc
1 full skill t6cc
11,400 tech t6cc
2 mystic t5cc
2 skill t5cc
2 tech t5cc
2 t4ac
2 t3ac
A lot of Iso
8 generic 7* sig stones
2 +5 generic 7* sig stones
1 +5 cosmic 7* sig stones
10,500 7* crystal shards
So to sum up for 15,000 Units I got 1 (almost 2) 7* and almost enough resources for a Rank 3. Again, I objectively know that most of the rewards were in the milestones, but when I saw these results I (as an endgame valiant player) was very disappointed. I think I opened up another 50 or 60 crystals with the only noteworthy pull being the 1 Gifted Guardians Key.
Whatever the case is I opened enough to reach top 2-3%
Here's what I didn't get.
0 Limited Champ 7* Selectors
0 Awakening Gems
0 Awakening Gem Shards
0 Titan Shards
I think the main reason for my disappointment was the champion acquisition aspect. I have never pulled 7* Hulkbuster from an Incursions crystal. I have pulled everyone else except him. (In my desperation, I did miraculously manage to pull him from a 7* arcade crystal but he is still unduped). I had gotten lucky enough to pull Shocker and Adam from the 2023 banquet. They are three of my favorite champs and they were among my first 6 Rank 3 7*s. For a whole year I used them unduped waiting for the chance to dupe them. I got really excited when I learned that these champs would be in the limited champ selectors. But then I saw the percentage of pulling them being almost non-existent and my heart dropped. And then I didn't get a single LCS or Awakening Gem.
I saved up as many Units as I could because the 2023 Banquet felt so good to me. I didn't spend any units on cyber weekend or J4 this year because of my expectations for 2024. I thought I would be able to easily get all 6 gifted guardians with the amount of crystals I opened and maybe even dupe a couple. I only ended up getting 4 missing out on Medusa and BPCW.
Again it is so strange to me that I could get so much and yet it didn't feel great.
I got max milestones from, the Solo Event, Alliance Event, Realm Event, and pretty high rewards from Solo/Realm Rank rewards and Alliance Rank Rewards.
It seems like spreading out the rewards like butter scraped over too much bread created a disconnect in my mind.
I also value Champ Aquisition/Duping way more than rank up materials because even if at only rank 1 at least I can play the characters I want to use. So it was definitely pretty nice getting a 7* Jessica Jones and 4 of the Gifted Guardians but overall I think the percentages of the Keys, LCSs, AGs, and the amount of 7*/titan shards from the crystals were WAAAAAAAAAY too low.
Overall I must say that this was an objectively very good event and I am very happy with what I was able to get yet it didn't feel very good. (Still so strange that I can feel this way but I don't know how else to explain it)
I don’t even know how you interpret unchanging numbers to work in your favor.
My analysis doesn't go further than that.
The community is now aware of how the event is built and will have to plan accordingly.
Kabam is also aware of the community reactions to such event. There will be no more surprises.
With that said, I have 2 pieces of feedback for future banquet events:
Specify the drop rates for each item drop instead of a range of item quantities, mainly how 7* shards can drop between 1.5k and 15k but we don't know what chance we have of specifically getting 15k shards. This certainly contributed to some disappointment for me when first opening the crystals. Most of the drop rates were concise but the 7* shard and titan shard ranges were broad. If we know the odds of 15k 7* shards are like 1-2%, atleast it gives us a clearer picture of what to expect beforehand and keeps false expectations in check.
Secondly, giving us information about how many units will be required to complete banquet milestones in advance (ideally when cyber sales start). I don't necessarily mind unit inflation itself but the fact that banquet comes less than a month after cyber means we already have to plan unit spending carefully between these two. And unlike banquet, the spending requirements of july 4th and cyber offers remain more or less the same and players know how many units to save up in advance while for banquet it changes yearly and we don't know how many units we'll need until the event starts. Ideally, we should know how many units we will require for banquet before cyber weekend offers, so we can distribute our units better between the two, plan out how many cash offers to buy in cyber if we want to fill up units for banquet, or how much arena to grind (which i would personally wanna keep to a minimum during holidays).
I'm sure my own data point doesn't count for much in your ocean of data, but i can say that my own personal experience was very much in line with your analysis. I found the crystals themselves to be disappointing, but the event milestones that they unlocked were fun an impactful to my roster. And the other December events were all fun and impactful to me as well.
Being a programmer, I will point out one thing — data has nothing to do with people’s emotions.
Every event needs to be judged on its own merit.
Upgrading the old champs has the same effect of overestimating the value of glorious guardians (or w/e the batch with Prof X and Shocker was called).
The main source of disappointment with these crystals IMO was that on average, you couldn’t even R2 1 7* champ with the worst case RNG. That basically means you have 7* Jessica on an account t that doesn’t appreciate her, and an end game account that ends up with 10% T7CC.
I understand that the RNG is a foundation of this game and I don’t expect everyone to walk away with a 7* Jessica — but really, “economy” shouldn’t have been a factor in a historic milestone as a 10 year anniversary.
Additionally, even though the banquet was supposed to be progression agnostic. You have to understand people’s frustration in getting items they could have gotten for free in a week.
From Karatemike’s video (
I will admit that I didn’t realize how scarce T5CC was before the event, but we get it for free with the daily event.
I cannot say with certainty what makes the banquet event exiting, but I will leave you with this — if someone wanted to rank up a champ they were excited about, they would have done so before December. If they haven’t ranked up the champ by then, they don’t care about that champ.
1- As many stayed, the quantities of the rewards inside the crystal need adjustment. When a player get the more valuable stuff, like 7* shards or 7* sig stones, 1 sig stone or 1500 shards are not an enticing number, not something the player will get and say "yes, 300 units well spent, I ll open more". We need at least packs of 5 sigs as a minimum, (we NEEDED actually, next year I don't know were the progression of the game will be, we may need 10), and 5k 7 star shards at least. And half a t6cc as a minimum. And btw, Raids need a whole t6cc as a potential reward, not half.
2- The new "special crystal with champions" system was NOT good. A middle spender or ftp player never got to the point to awaken at least one of the new champions, because the gem was too high in the milestones, and the gatcha system doesn't allow to dupe by chance, someone had to spend at least $300 to do that. Plus, in that regard, having specified sig stones as low rank milestones is completely useless if you haven t spend to acquire the Awakening gem, and many people ended up with 50+ useless sigs on their stash, who knows for how many months or years.
Many spenders of the game aren't English users, some are from China, South Korea etc
So the spending went up even when the though the response to the banquet crystals was overwhelmingly negative
Kabam won't let you know how much each region contributed to the revenue of Kabam bcos that's business privacy but I can say confidently English using region is just a slice of the entire revenue pie
We can reference the box office takings for a MCU movie, the US box office is just a slice of the total box office takings, overseas box office takings usually is the bigger slice