Pulse Check

After talking to a couple of alliance mates and seeing some scattered comments around on various social media platforms, I wanted to do a community pulse check to see how people were feeling about the game recently.
Personally, I would normally play all the time and would grind the arena a lot to save up a bunch of units, do content as soon as it comes out, etc. But I don't even think I've logged on more than a handful of times since the last livestream to do a couple of things or even at all in the last 24 hours, and to be honest. I don't really have a desire to do so at the moment. Never in my life did I think an addiction could be broken so quickly or I could be so put off from something I loved so quickly. For more of my thoughts if you care, see my last thread about the kneejerk reaction thing or whatever i called it.

What are we feeling, everyone? Keep it civil, please.

(And for anyone who is frothing at the mouth to derail this.
1. Yes, Kabam is a business and needs to make money.
2. No, I don't have a problem with that, and I have personally spent way too much on this game.)

Comments

Almccarthy

I dont know about everyone else but I log in for 5 minutes midweek do my aq/aw paths then logoff, on a weekend I do nothing, im 100 points in gc and thats enough because there's no insentive to push further. It's frustrating.

KabamDORK

I can understand the frustration around this as a player. We'll work harder to push for these acknowledgements moving forward as they aren't always as clean cut a singular problem that we can flip a switch on. As an aside, has the Trello board been any help at all in seeing acknowledged bugs and issues? We've created a newer one and sunsetted the old one from last year.

KabamDORK

I'll take that to the team and see what we can do.

KabamDORK

Yet..

BigBlueOx

The last I saw it… no, a number of the common complaints never make it there. Devices running hot, intercepting not working, lag, AI moving in between frames or ignoring them outright were not listed

Darthbane3141

This could not be more wrong, and maybe this is your opinion, but you haven't even completed act 6, so your opinion from the perspective of a valiant player does not remotely matter. The game is riddled with bugs, we don't want our rank ups so we can complete everest content, most of us want them for Battlegrounds and I just want them for roster building. Battlegrounds rewards have not been updated in over a year, and a lot of rewards are so outdated I don't feel like doing anything. Overall, the game is not fine in the slightest and there needs to be some serious thinking if Kabam wants their game to last more than a year longer.

Frumpy_geezer

I don't see these on the Trello board. Not the intercept issue or the recovery time. Or most of the things people mention. It does seem like bullseyes special 1 isn't supposed to be able to be dexed though. That's on there.

https://trello.com/b/nRszBz9Q/mcoc-community-bugs-and-issues-tracker

BringPopcorn

Let it go, keep it clean. Its useless.

Darthbane3141

You're right, I don't even know why I tried to argue. It is entirely pointless

KabamDORK

Understood, I'll see what I can do about getting some official acknowledgement or at least updates on when that can happen.

BigBlueOx

Maybe you could let us know what it takes for a bug to get acknowledged?

KabamDORK

A bug is a bug for the most part. If it's something that is supposed to work and isn't working consistently, repeatable, or just flat out broken, it's not too difficult to get those in the works and acknowledged. Other times, it might be an issue, but can't be easily reproduced, or it's not consistently reproduced, so there may be other factors at play that are unknown and would need further investigation. So acknowledgement isn't as easy in that situation.

This isn't particularly about this issue, but just wanted to offer some context as an example as to how some of these decisions are made.

EgyptOverseer

FOMO is waning, definitely. Peak FOMO was in the deathless chase, but this Eidol chase feels like a big underwhelming one judging by how little people use the first Eidol even though it was technically free and the chase was the dupe.

startropics

you're not wrong. there should be a lot more excitement for the mode and it could be so much more.

the thing is, whenever they buff one mode the others are going to look worse in comparison. like this..

...and they generally have to wait for rewards to get accelerated through major deals first before changing in game stuff. it's a shame they've left BG rank rewards untouched for so long but it looks like a difficult balancing act.

Darthbane3141

I'm reading over what I wrote, and I now realize it was super rude and uncalled for. I apologize.

BringPopcorn

Asked to let it go, not recant. Its all true but its useless 🤣

Darthbane3141

I'm just apologizing for kinda yelling at Peixemacaco for being a low progression. All the stuff about the game is true.

mgj0630

Hey @KabamDORK thanks for checking in on this.

I'll open by saying that I personally find the Trello board useless.

Now to add some color as to why...

1) There's clearly a discrepancy between bugs reported here on the forums, and what makes it to Trello. I just took a look, and I don't see anything up there regarding the number of incinerates being applied on Galan's sp2. I'm fairly certain that bug still exists.

2) There's no way of knowing what's being done with a bug.
2a) When it's "Under Investigation" what does that mean? There's no way for us to tell if it's assigned to someone, and what that person has done in an effort to fix the bug.
2b) When it's under "Unable to Reproduce" it's pretty clear what that means, but again, there's no clarity. What was done in an effort to reproduce it? Perhaps if that information was there, the community could chime in and provide greater detail for devs to reproduce it.

3) How are bugs prioritized? When there's 30 bugs for "Champs", we can't tell what's a higher priority.

The company I work for uses JIRA for bug/issue tracking. It addresses all of the issues I described above. I'm not suggesting you guys need to use that, but those are critical to proper bug tracking. Simply listing a bug on the Trello board doesn't provide any transparency to what's actually being done about them.

Herbal_Taxman

Quiet while the grown folks are talking.

SummonerNR

While I don’t know what internally Kabam uses, I’m sure it has got to be something other than just the outside-facing Trello Bug Tracker.

One on my old companies used to use (I believe, and very apply named, if I recall correctly) Bug Tracker.

Could assign bugs to developers (or they could assign themselves, etc), prioritize them, track their status, etc, and tracking the software files changed as part of a bug, making it's way back into the Version Control System (of checking out specific software files being worked on, and checking them back in with the changes, etc) used for building the software, etc, etc.

But that is NOT something that would have had an outside-facing interface for customers to be able to access.

And I'd probably bet that a company would NOT want to allow Trello (or any outside interface) to be able to access their development systems, software, or internal bug tracking system.

mgj0630

I completely agree, they shouldn't expose code that's being changed. Apologies if that was implied.

But I would imagine they could explain in a bit of a layman's terms what they're doing. Even if they couldn't, it's still more about insight to process.

My biggest gripes are with the lack of clarity regarding if a bug is actually assigned to someone, and the priority of the bug.

For example, a fundamental bug in a champs kit (back to Galan with this example) should be a higher priority than something like sound effects (I think I saw a bug on trello about hit sounds not being in sync with the visual action).

One of those should clearly be a lower priority than the other.

ItsClobberinTime

"Don't derail the thread"
*proceeds to talk about invisible woman*

jcphillips7

As a 10-yr veteran, I'm at a bit of stand-still. I still log on daily and get excited for...most new content, but then I see threads like this and it makes me second-guess my enjoyment. And honestly, my enjoyment is just getting the latest end-game reward/offer and juicing my roster up.

I see numerous BG complaints, which are valid, but as for myself...I barely touch the mode outside of procrastinating at the last minute to get close to the 300k mark. I have a roster that makes the majority piss their pants, and I forfeit-win my way into GC, play a few matches and then I'm done. I always intend to try and compete competitively, but when it comes down to it, I have no desire to put forth the time to even try when it can take upwards of 9-10 minutes per match/matchmaking sometimes. I have a full-time job, a backlog a mile long on my Playstation, as well as enough shows to watch/keep up with a new episode or two with my wife every evening. And why bother? Whatever progress/rewards I'd have to dedicate so much time to could be easily outweighed tenfold by the next webstore track that takes me all of 30 seconds to add to my account.

For instance, the only thing I'm looking forward to at the moment is Titan reset Tuesday to go for Zola (pretty much own everyone else), the Ordeal gauntlet, and then the 18th when the Bastion web track comes out. I mean, I play high tier AW, so I guess an extremely deep roster helps with that, and you've got your weekly AQ/Raids....but other than that, there's not a lot going on. It kind of bums me out that the only way I can really get joy, or a renewed spark out of this is dropping $$$$ on what seems like an every-other-month thing now (I miss when it was really just July 4th/Cyber Week), as drastic new changes/content are few and far between.

KabamDORK

While I can't fully go into specifics, yes you're right, there is a difference between what is reported on the Forums and what makes it to the Trello board, but there is a reason for that. We try not to put issues that we know will be resolved quickly on the Trello board. So internally if we report an issue and we know it will be resolved in a day or two, we'll make a post on the Forums and discord to let people know it's on the way. More long standing bugs like the ones you see currently on the board that require a longer amount of time for a fix, like multiple build releases for example, will live there so people can track the progress on what is happening.

As for more transparency on the status of the bugs, I can look into seeing if we can peel the curtain back a bit more, but for now I imagine it will remain as is for the foreseeable future.

Furrymoosen

@KabamDORK since you're in here...

Can you shed any light on what it looks like for the team to test things ahead of the launch of new updates or content? It seems pretty consistent that every update comes with bugs, and new content is kinda right there with it.
Is there a team that tests things pre-launch? If not, is there any conversation around implementing such a team to do that work?
It feels like we as players are the ones that have to discover all the bugs (which to an extent makes sense), but the bugs we find ourselves discovering are often things that someone barely needs to do more than login to the game to find. If people were testing, or properly testing, content and updates before launch, it would probably cut the bugs that go live in half or better.

BigBlueOx

This would make for an interesting live stream presentation

Nemesis_17

The endgame content looks great, and yet I have no motivation to do it. Just am less hyped for everything

Eakomo

The current state of the game feels like how mcoc was in during 2017-2018 with kabam figuring out how to fix the bugs and issues they've added and trying to improve content, with the same of the game reverting to how bad it used to be instead of being an improvement.

we have new champions with heavy vfx that instead of learning from the issues of darkhawk are even worse than him, yes I see you dust and others,

eq back to the same old bad place where the current title and progression is far ahead than what it offers

arena never changes and is too time consuming and to be honest frustrating to farm

and to add to it, the state of playing the game is downright awful.
the AI is inconsistent, buggy, all over the place. the performance while playing the game is so bad
and then add to it new end-game content and it's a **** show.

to more matters in the game as it is now. many game modes haven't had thier rewards or even structure looked at to be improved for the better. incursions consumables is so laughably ignored.

we get new updates with relics, mini champion crystals that have basically been ignored for the new shiny thing of constant sales and champion hunts with sales that makes them so redudant.

all in all the game is in not so good of a state but not yet fully unplayable.

Gamer

The Galen has ben fixed

ItsClobberinTime

It really all boils down to rewards @KabamDORK I left the game about five months ago because the game was getting incredibly stale for me, I thought after some time I'd come back to a game that felt fresh once again but when I came back I came back to BGs with the same terrible rewards, same expensive prices and even less competition in GC due to the lack of reasons to grind BGs. It's absolutely baffling to me that in today's economy it is still this expensive to get materials for (not even r3 7*) r2 7* when there are whales with multiple r4 7* already out there, I'm not saying you guys shouldn't be making events p2w cause you should, but you shouldn't be letting the gap between p2w and f2p start to get bigger and bigger when it was already a pretty noticeable gap. It basically forces everyone to start spending if they want to get somewhat closer to that level (and I say somewhat because yes for obvious reasons whales will always have the biggest rosters and that's completely fine that's not the argument here).

Just to give a few examples here:
T6 basic and t3 alpha came to the game what 3-4 years ago? Why is the highest progression title still being forced to pay 2k tokens for not two or three fully formed catalysts but just one tiny fully formed t6b or t3a went you need 8 of each for one r3?
There are people with over 100 7* already, why are 1k 7* shards still 3.5k tokens each?

That's just the BGs store, let's go to milestones now:
15k 6* shards and a 6* nexus make up half the milestones when most endgame players no longer use 6* these days because r3s and r4s are for obvious reasons better, 6* are irrelevant for endgame players nowadays it's that simple. If you guys didn't want it to happen so soon then maybe you shouldn't have made p2w events so huge.

Now let's go to GC rewards themselves:
Why on Earth are half the rewards for literally every league just relic shards and alloys? There is a reason you guys haven't worked on new relics, and there is a reason not a single soul on these forums has complained about them.

Let's go over to SQ now cause this was really the last straw for me:
20 t2 dust (again 6* completely irrelevant for us at this point) and two 5% t6cc crystals? Really? Last year I though SQ was a chore, and somehow five months later it feels even more like a chore than it did before when I first left the game.

Anyways for me it's the rewards mostly, I can get past AI being annoying, I have in the past but this whole rewards situation while you bombard us with p2w events is just too frustrating for people to not say anything and stay silent.
Finally I just want to leave these two videos here cause these are exactly my thoughts and they explain it a lot better than I can with far more depth:

https://youtu.be/VbvncmXpzRA?si=lBOC552jigshzj4x

https://youtu.be/qTZKDTBEUX4?si=mGewjJj8ruCiatqO