Titan Cadence Troubles

With the current Titan pool rotation cadence being 90 days per pool, and every champ in the crystal going through three cycles before hitting the basic pool, it takes nine months for a champion to enter the basic.

For the champions who have already been released but just miss the Titan pool rotation, which today is Jean Grey and Bastion, it takes a full year for them to go from release to basic pool. Honestly, that’s ridiculous.

Not only is it much slower than the cadence was for 5/6* champions to go from featured to basic, it also results in the Titan pool becoming extremely boring. For an active endgame player, they will likely open a lot of Titan crystals. It’s not fun seeing the same champs in that crystal for so long.

I could go on about this for some time, but ultimately… it’s just bad. It’s really, really bad. Please make some kind of change to this, because this is an awful aspect of champion acquisition.

Comments

N8buckeye08

Let’s posit that the average late game player averages 1 Titan a month and 5 basics. If your goal was to pull Champ X out of a Titan, it’s 6.25% chance. The chance of pulling Champ X out of a Basic at least once in 5 attempts is ~4%.

Let’s reframe that… now that the Titan window has moved from 6 to 9 months, that means that there are 3 more attempts in a Titan vs. 15 in a Basic. Odds of at least 1 pull of Champ X in 3 Titans is ~17%. Odds of at least 1 pull in 15 basic crystals is ~11%.

@DNA3000 feel free to check my math lol.

Anyways, we should be thanking our lucky stars they extended the window. My guess is those with gripes have some confirmation bias after their opening today and/or aren’t pushing endgame content to get Titans regularly.

Wicket329

Your guess would be inaccurate, as I’ve 100% every piece of content in the game except for the original LoL Carina’s Challenges (because they are bad), and will likely clear out the Ordeal this weekend. I’m not even that unhappy with my Titan pulls today, they were extremely okay. I definitely am on the higher end of the bracket for how many crystals get opened in a month (all AW loyalty tokens to basic shards since I have the full loyalty pool and occasional top ups from the BG and Sigil stores).

I don’t like the Titan pool cadence because it is boring and takes forever. I hunted Spider-Punk for the entire time he was in the pool and missed him, but it was fun to chase down every Titan shard I could get. I blitzed through the Necro Carina’s Challenges to scrounge those shards together, and pocketed all of my basic materials I gathered for months in case I missed him in the Titan (which turned out to be the right move, because I ended up getting Punk out of the second to last basic crystal I had). No matter how long the rotation cycle is, there will always be champs you just get unlucky for and miss. And while having to wait six months isn’t a great feeling, it’s a timeline we’re used to in this game.

It shouldn’t take as long or longer for a champion to be released into the basic pool as it does to make a full human. That’s just silly.

Buttehrs

This just sounds more like whale moaning tbh. We get it. You got nearly every available 7* there is. What else can kabam do to please except give you an exclusive 7* literally no one else has.

Wicket329

If it was whale moaning, wouldn’t I *want* the extended Titan pool? Because I have the best chance of pulling the champ there since I’m buying up all the Titan offers? I spend on the game, yes, but I don’t come close to whale status.

The person I was responding to was saying I was unhappy because I wasn’t doing enough. Now you’re saying I’m doing too much. I know I don’t speak for the community, but I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that a nine month gestation period in the Titan pool is too long. This is not a ridiculous complaint, even though you’re trying to frame it like one.

There are still basic pool champs I want to pull/dupe, some of them having been in the pool for a very long time. I was perfectly content with the six month cadence. I actually really liked it when Kabam announced it, I loved that every two months we’d see an update to the basic pool compared to how the featured 5*/6* crystals work. I also recognize that Kabam has its own concerns and may have needed to make the change for good reason. I’m just saying that they should explore other options that move us back to that six month cadence, because nine months for a pool in the Titan crystal is too long.

Buttehrs

What exactly could they do differently though? They can't shorten the cadence because they'd run out of old champs. They can't lengthen it because yall pull the same champ too many times. And now it also comes across as an RNG complaint because you'll pull all but 1 or 2 of the champs your looking for. Kabam can't win here. They are finding the best happy medium that they can think of. Unless your cool with re using old champs as "sub featured" once they've used em all up.

Harryatomix

My Nexus luck was good, got to pull Count and Spiral

Wicket329

You seem to misunderstand the point of this thread. I’m not a game developer. I have precisely zero experience building out game economies or things of that nature. I am not about to sit here and pretend like I have the solutions to this problem.

What I can do is say “hey, this is an aspect of the game that feels bad. I hope the devs do something to make it feel less bad!” That’s all I’m trying to do here. If you disagree that this is a pain point, that’s fine! You can hold that opinion! But it’s weird that you keep trying to be dismissive of the point by saying it’s “whale moaning” or an “RNG complaint” when I’ve been very clear that the pain point is simply that nine months per champion is too long to be in the crystal.

altavista

I also agree that the new Titan cadence doesn't feel as good to me as the old Cadence. I understand the argument about 'diminishing number of old champions' and 'making 7-stars last longer before 8-stars', but it still doesn't help feeling less excited by crystals.

I'm sure a lot of players were excited to open Titan crystals yesterday, more than were excited to open the Titan crystal last week. So, you can bank on a big surge of players being excited to open Titan crystals every 3 months. So across a year, that is 4 'excitement surges' with the next cadence.

With the old cadence, there would be a big surge of players opening Titan crystals every 2 months. So across a year, that is 6 'excitement surges'.

And then conversely, a player who hates INSERT-champion in the Titan crystal, would have to try and avoid opening a Titan crystal for 9 months (6 months in the old cadence), or open Titan crystals and feel devastated pulling that champion. So that is an extra 3 months of delayed gratification, or and extra 3 months of feeling crappy by your pulls.

This is all subjective, and I know that the old cadence was unsustainable. But I can definitely say that I am not a fan of the new model.

Herbal_Taxman

These are great points from Wicket and Alta. I’m in the same boat — passionate about the game, etc. But I’m also just a customer. If I have an idea to improve something, I’ll certainly share it. But if I don’t, it’s not my responsibility to know how to fix it. I would just echo the sentiments that the new system feels worse than the old one, which itself didn’t feel great.

I’m not interested in wringing my hands about some hypothetical game economy problem or the 8 star apocalypse coming in two years or three years. I would like to have more fun more often in the near term.

Graves_3

Demon and buttehrs always try to put the onus on the summoners to come up with a solution under the pretext of calling the feedback constructive. Constructive feedback is exactly what wicket wrote in the OP. Delineate what seems to be wrong and give reasons on why. It should be up to the developers and game economists to come up with solution. Not the regular players.
I too echo the same sentiments mentioned in the OP. Hope there is some positive change based on this thread.

Buttehrs

That kind of complaint is exactly that though. Rng or whale moaning simply because you have to understand why it is the way it is. And your also offering ZERO solutions. Only complaining. So yea, it comes off as extremely moaning and complaining simply to do that.

BringPopcorn

Done the content, it just seems Titan Crystal availability is not as fast as pool changes, even to buy outside of big events. I am not sure that's a good thing or not 🤷

Graves_3

When you go to a doctor, do you just tell them you have a fever/stomach ache/vomiting? Or do you tell them they need to just give you some specific medicine or remove your appendix/gall bladder?
It should not be the expectation for the person who is bringing a problem to the developers attention to also give a solution.

Pikolu

I strongly disagree. The main complaint isn't whale moaning or complaining about rng. The main complaint is that 9-12 months for champions to cycle from titan pool to base pool is what feels bad.

If it was whale moaning, they'd complain that nothing is good in the crystals. As a matter of fact, whales are hit one of the worst by this because they're buying prerelease bundles and if they get 4 out of 6 new champions, then the titan crystal has no value.

If it was rng complaints, we would be complaining that they got rulk 10 times in a row. However I did not see that as the main complaint.

Ftp players probably suffer the most from the current cadence. If a ftp wants Jean gray or Bastion and aren't willing to shell out thousands of units on their crystals, then they need to wait until June to even get a chance of getting them. They also don't get titan crystals very fast so most who don't save wont get many shots at the titan before they go into the base pool in March 2026.

These are valid complaints that are held by a large majority of people I know and interact with. The system feels bad and it is difficult to offer a solution from the ignorant side as a customer. I can tell kabam that this feels bad and my only suggestion is make the titan pools 2 rotations of 9 champions. However I am not sure how that will affect the runway or future sales events in the game. So instead I just let them know that this feels bad and why it feels bad, then I allow the professionals to look at it who have a way better understanding of these things and have them decide if it is an issue or not. They might be fine with that in the which case it is just sucks to suck for us. That's the way it is.

Wicket329

I’m terribly sorry, I thought that I was on the forums for Marvel Contest of Champions. You know, the place where players of the game can come to communicate their feelings about various aspects of the game with the development team so that they can understand the sentiment of the community? I didn’t realize I had wandered into a job application instead, one where I was expected to already know Kabam’s internal data to inform a potential solution.

Also, shouts out to @Pikolu for the clear explanation of why this demand on a random user is absurd.

DNA3000

Players are under no obligation to come up with solutions to the issues they don’t like or believe are problems. They aren’t game designers and chances are any solution they come up with will be flawed or unworkable anyway. It is up to the game designers to find solutions to problems, if they decide it’s actually a problem.

The only time it is appropriate to call out a player for a lack of good ideas is when their complaint is not about the game it is about the developers and their work process itself. If someone says “I think the rewards in incursions should be buffed” that’s just an expression of a preference about the game and they are entitled to express it without being overly criticized about it. But if they say “I think the rewards in incursions should be buffed and the devs must be lazy because it would be so easy to do” then they are making a judgment about game design and they can be asked to explain the basis of that judgment, and called out for being an idiot if it is not well founded.

As to that last part, there’s a fundamental split between players who want to play the game for as long as possible and those that want the best possible experience now regardless of the cost. There is a perspective that goes better to have a great game for a year than a good one for ten. I can always move on to another game when it’s over.

As a customer, that’s a reasonable perspective, and there are people who try to build such games. However, this is not one of those games. The devs of MCOC are concerned about the future of the game and have to balance current needs with future stability. So while it is fine to express the notion that things feel bad now, sometimes the devs will have to consider at least some of that the price of having a game later.

How they decide to balance the two is what they get paid to do. And as I said, players have no responsibility to factor this into their feedback, as long as that feedback is about their personal preferences for the game. The moment it becomes about how games are made, and why their preferences should be honored by game designers, that’s when their credibility on that subject becomes up for discussion.

Basically, we’re all authorities on what we want. But few of us are authorities on whether what we want is in fact a good idea to have. It is important to recognize the difference, not only when giving feedback, but also when criticizing feedback. People should be free to say how they feel, as long as they are in fact saying how they feel. It’s fair to say that what they want might be problematic as part of reasonable discussion, but they should still be allowed to express their thoughts relatively unfettered.

World Eater

Players do not design the game. We aren’t paid or obligated to offer a solution to any game problem. This idea that you can only make a complaint or post unless you offer a solution to said problem, is rubbish. If Kabam wants to pay me for my time, energy and input , then I’ll offer ideas to solve whatever problem.