Alliance Quest Miniboss and Sentinel Refresh - April 2018 - Discussion Thread [Updated April 13]

Summoners,

We've just announced a small refresh of Alliance Quests that will start April 2nd. This will include new Minibosses, and a farewell to our Symbioid friends!

Read all about it, then ask your questions!

UPDATE:
We've just posted an update in regards to your feedback on Alliance Quests. This post includes some adjustments to Sentinels and Alliance Quests that will be coming with the next series (Starting April 18th). Take a look right here: http://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/62626/upcoming-adjustments-to-alliance-quests-april-18th-2018

Comments

Yarah_Dahile

Ad0ra_ wrote: »

khehmist wrote: »

My interpretation of this is that “We’re looking to see if people are actually quitting the game or reducing purchase rates. If they are, we’ll figure out how little we need to change to keep our revenues up.”

How close was I Adora?

Not at all close, but you don't know me, are feeling frustrated about something you don't like happening to a game you want to really enjoy, and don't want to take my words at face value. I understand all of that. It makes me a bit sad, but I get it. The team will continue to look at both data and player feedback to make an informed step forward.

I hope you have a good evening, regardless If you have more specific thoughts about an improvement you'd like to see to address your main frustrations with the changes, feel free to add them. If you've already posted those, thank you!

Thanks Ad0ra_

We all appreciate that it’s been taken notice of by a response. I think we all were worried that we were being ignored or put in the whingers bin. Hehe

Has impacted a lot greater than anticipated. I think we all prefer that it waited until a full refresh. Love the idea of fighting sentinels. But geez!!

Hope you and the team have a great weekend and hopefully something is in place soon.

Yarah_Dahile

Just to add - I think tone down the analysis charges. Maybe bump it up to 30 or 40.

Oh and the nullify on mystic sentinels, don’t allow them to nullify abilities from a block unless it’s from a special which is unblockable. I have been getting nullified when blocking basic attacks.

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Ruhengeri

@Kabam Miike Parry is broken and dash back is bugged. Why not focus on fixing what’s broken first before adding more difficulty to the game?? The New change to AQ is 100% unfair to us loyal players. Especially since rewards weren’t updated.

Repto23

[/quote]

Not at all close, but you don't know me, are feeling frustrated about something you don't like happening to a game you want to really enjoy, and don't want to take my words at face value. I understand all of that. It makes me a bit sad, but I get it. The team will continue to look at both data and player feedback to make an informed step forward.

I hope you have a good evening, regardless

If you have more specific thoughts about an improvement you'd like to see to address your main frustrations with the changes, feel free to add them. If you've already posted those, thank you! [/quote]

First thank you @Ad0ra_ for answering our concerns in some way. I know it's not your fault and unfortunately you have to deal with us 😅
BUT
An improvement I'd like to see is champion abilities working proporly. Mainly Nebula should be disabling all Sentinel abilities once she is above 8 or so Electro charges since they are robots. However they still gain analysis charges and active incinerate, power drain or unblockable specials. Same with Medusa, her Armor shatter should be stoping the charges building up like they were in the last event quest or if I were to duel someone that has Sentinel.

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Yarah_Dahile

Stop reading into the response. They have finally responded to the thread, it’s a step in the right direction. I’m happy with that currently. If you feel that reducing your spending will get you heard more, then do what you must. Others probably are already or leaving. I know a few that are retiring at the end of this AQ and going casual.

Just Don’t make them regret talking to us.

Yarah_Dahile

Mcord117 wrote: »

All due respect, and I do not desire to shoot the messenger, your company damn well knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. Spin is spin and I get its your role. I respect that. This is meant to drive revenues which is to be expected as you work for a for profit company. It just appears to me as short sided because you have fooled no one and are likely damaging revenue long term by continuing to violate the faith of your player base

well you’d think they know what they are doing. But previous mistakes make - they should have beta tested this beforehand. Or more simply - delay it for a full new season. We would have survived until then

ShadeZero

Our alliance hasn't even done map 5 yet since the change and our members are dropping like flies in map 3. Those sentinels are complete bull. Immunity, unblockable specials, slow fights with awkward and defensive AI combined with their high armor rating. Even the minibosses are more difficult. We shouldn't have to bring multiple armor break champs, while still hoping to bring champs that regenerate, or just be screwed over.

GroundedWisdom

khehmist wrote: »

Ad0ra_ wrote: »

Hey everyone! Wanted to drop in and let you know that we are paying close attention to everyone's feedback about the new changes to Alliance Quests. We understand that these updates have caused a shakeup to Summoner’s existing strategies and rosters. As we've noted previously, although our intention was not to explicitly increase the difficulty of the new Sentinel fights compared with the previous Symbioid encounters, we understand that the new abilities and immunities they possess require a pretty sizable change in approach, or outright prevent some older strategies.

The Game Team is keeping a close eye on the data behind the scenes to get a complete picture of how these changes have affected players across all tiers of the game. This information goes hand in hand with the important feedback everyone has given here on the forums and will help us as we move forward. Please be patient as we review this round of Alliance Quest data and determine where action may be needed.

And, as always, please be mindful of the forum rules when posting. We want to hear your feedback and criticism, but it must be provided in a clear, constructive way.

Thank you for your passion!

My interpretation of this is that “We’re looking to see if people are actually quitting the game or reducing purchase rates. If they are, we’ll figure out how little we need to change to keep our revenues up.”

How close was I Adora?

Why did you repost this? That's not what she said at all.

Morgan210805

What kabam are monitoring is not our concern it’s monitoring how much extra we’re spending on potions and revives and they will be rubbing their greedy little hands together. Bonuses alround Mr kabam me thinks. Turnover up 40% players enjoyment down 40%

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GroundedWisdom

Jesus take the wheel.

MobAB

This is just another way for you to make money. A complete disregard for the average player. Total nonsense on the upgrade in AI and the unbelievable sentinels IMUNITY to everything. Bad move. Maybe you should fix the lag first, with all the money you made on the first season of war.

Milkthewhales

Another lazy cash grab by Kabam. They could be bothered to change the symbiods fight but couldn't be bothere'd to adjust rewards, sounds about right.

Job half done @Ad0ra_ @Kabam Miike

If your gonna make a change take the time to do it right or not at all. After all the debacles with the bad updates you've pushed out you'd think you'd have figured that out...

Oh and what happened to the famed increase in comm/transparency and beta testing with this one...

Maybe the real issue is revenue's have dropped with the release of drop rates? Is that why we've been seeing so many deals on a nearly daily basis also?

Troy_Elric123

OnlyOneAboveAll wrote: »

D14rock wrote: »

Has anybody even mentioned the fact that kabam clearly stated that they didn't want AQ to be the focus anymore and they wanted AW to be the game mode everyone focused towards for the better rewards. Why then am I spending more pots in each of the first 3 days of AQ than I ever do in AW, even against a really good defense?.... it can't be just because I'm not used to sentinels.. i have fought plenty of them in master and uncollected eq on 2 different a count and they near as bad the AQ ones.. you tell us to use class advantage to bear them.. exactly what skill champ can i use against science sentinel on heal block path? Or right there as garnet any bleed immune skill Champs... and the only science champ I can use against the mystic sentinel on that same path is LC.... give me a break?! Of course there are other bleed immune champs, but how many of them have strong armor break to counter not being able to have a class advantage? Ultron has armore break.. used him.. he sucks too..So you guys had to go ahead and rush this new map out even though it wasn't ready or even the end of the season yet and just lazily switched syms out for a sentinel of the same class when they don't even fit with a path..

Hulk, Captain Marvel, Storm, Crossbones, SpiderGwen, Thor and many more Destroy the sentinels.

U dont get to chose the champs u get rand whatever they say about AW being the focus then why dont they give t4cc and upgrade items as war rewards ? the things u get from AQ itself is like 1 in 100 for one upgrade item. and now they just made it even harder to do. Plus the season rewards are a joke for a 3 month war which eats up all resource and time that could be spend otherwise
purely nonsensical move from kabam

Mirage_Turtle

Since Kabam is supposedly monitoring the feedback, I'll throw my 2 cents in.

The Sentinels are objectively harder than the symbioids to fight. That's an undeniable fact. The problem the community is having is that the logical avenues would have been to leave AQ the same until a large update (including an update to the rewards) could be rolled out OR to increase the rewards along with rolling out this soft update until a large update could be completed. Even a small bump in rewards would have probably reduced activity in these complaint threads by 50%. Instead, the team decided to take the worst of both worlds and increase the difficulty while maintaining rewards, which is effectively a big slap to the face of the collective community.

When the symbioids were still around, I would often mix up my teams to keep things fresh. I'd brought just about every champ you can think of into AQ and I was able to deal with the symbioids. Admittedly, I haven't had to use any additional resources to deal with the Sentinels, but they have successfully killed several of my champions since the rollout. As I stated, these guys are objectively harder to kill than the symbioids.

I'm in the camp that would much rather see unique champions on every path. Adaptoids used to fill the map back when there weren't enough unique champs to fill the board. Now you've got plenty of champs to fill the boards. Get rid of Adaptoids/Symbioids/Ultron Drones/Deadpooloids/Sentineloids completely and just fill the map with the dozens of champs who aren't currently represented at all in AQ.

Northwestbrosef

So, since y'all will be reviewing this round of aq, any chance yall will disable the next round to take a good look? That would be nice so we wouldn't be wasting potions on a broken mode that we have to play or lose our ranking.

rischio

Most of us work for a living and we know everyone makes mistakes.
The developers thought that this was going to stay at the same level of difficulty? that's fine, just admit now it is not. And if you can compensate for the mistake it will be great.

Thanks the mods for reading all this s**tload of ranting and sorry for making you sad.
I emphasize with you gals and guys, luckily I'm not in your shoes!

Said that, I hate sentinels for all the well stated reasons of 32 pages of comments, I'm not going to add more.

Said that, I'm going to make a few proposals. Quite obvious I admit, but still I like it more than just saying "please roll back time and don't do it the way you did".

- Remove the third bar of power. They cannot shoot S3 anyway (luckily) and it only serves them to shoot our arses twice in a row.
- Reduce the rate at which they analyze: either reduce the amounts, increase the thresholds or do not consider multiple instances of the same repeated move more than once. Class disadvantage has also become NOT an option because of the extra boost they get ON TOP of the regular advantages.
I understand that the intent was to have the players adopt a different play style, but there are moves you simply CANNOT avoid (like dashing back twice to avoid their specials) They increase the analyze counter even if you dash back several times, which you have to do to bait those bloody specials, or even if you block a combo.
- Rethink the mechanics of the different sentinel classes. For one: the green one debuffs you when you KO it, which is often the way to apply armor breaks (i.e.: Hyperion S2. The Sentinel melts you after two or three S2s). If armor break "melts them", then please let us use it.
- Reduce health, or armor or both. They are double immune and armored as tanks, it takes forever to take them down. On top of this attack decreases with analyze charges.
- Increase the points they award when they die. at least let us climb the rewards ladder a little higher, even if you do not want to adjust the rewards (which you should, anyway...). The way you did you actually REDUCED them.
- Give us full retrocession tickets with ISO and gold, especially since the sentinels are going to stay with the next season. You cannot just say: "yeah, they are immune, but you know what? use another champ!" because most of us spent their hard earned resources in ranking up, guess who? champions that were useful WHEN we ranked them. We do not read the future and we did not get enough advance warning to prepare. I for one, ad just ranked my Archangel to R4 spending a ton of everything which is now totally useless and I do not have resources to rank up Medusa.
- Provide dummy duel targets for practice. The lucky ones that have sentinels as main champion DO NOT have the same thing. Not even close. Basically the only practice we can make is by crushing on them DURING AQ, which means without any chance to retry without spending our hard earned resources.

Good luck and hold tight, the storm will be over and everyone will be OK.

Pennsyltucky

The most frustrating thing about this is that its driven 6 veteran people of my alliance into retirement because there's no sense in getting this angry with the game that's supposed to be fun...

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NEO

I feel my alliance has given up on AQ. We only had 10 of 30 members join on day 5. We used to have all 30 join eagerly to take on the old AQ. We are a 9.4 million alliance with 200k-650k members.

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crystaldsmith

MCoC is the most successful mobile game ever, profiting over $25 million a month. They are slated to hit $1 billion a year within the next 5 years.

A company that large can certainly be smart enough to figure out how stupid these AQ changes are?

Certainly you could have more moderators, and PR people to at least make us feel like you care.

Certainly you can afford to sweeten the pot with some better rewards.

Business is about profit, yes, but here's this wild concept. You can listen to your customers, satisfy the bulk, and still make a profit.

I refuse to spend a single cent now that I clearly see how greedy you are. If it causes me to uninstall the game, so be it.

Logansdad_16

I’m sorry but the sentinels are a joke. The skill one is harder than dormannu boss and I consider myself a decent player. Kabam I think this has been a terrible move and purely aimed at getting people to spend of resources.

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LBS

@OnlyOneAboveAll
Please forgive me for my yesterday’s message... I was literally angry with those changes, angry with Kabam and I wrote a bad message in reply to yours
That was no my willing to hurt you...
Sorry again...

Saiyan

DNA3000 wrote: »

Ad0ra_ wrote: »

As we've noted previously, although our intention was not to explicitly increase the difficulty of the new Sentinel fights compared with the previous Symbioid encounters, we understand that the new abilities and immunities they possess require a pretty sizable change in approach, or outright prevent some older strategies.

I'm rather stunned by this passage because it continues to imply that Kabam believes the Sentinels are not intrinsically harder, they just require a different skill set. That's like saying the Collector is not more difficult than a Symbiod, the Collector just requires a different skill set to defeat. It makes the entire notion of "difficulty" a meaningless concept. I'm not sure how to have a rational conversation around the difficulty problems surrounding the AQ changes, if by the time we agree upon a reasonable definition of the word "difficulty" it will be our grandchildren taking over the debate.

How has no one read this man's reply? They STILL think it's not harder and instead just different.

How is the Skill Sent somehow able to shrug of Armor Shatter and all other debuffs not harder than the Skill Sym who shrugged them off only after being hit?

How is the Mystic Sent having MD 5 not harder than a simple power gain Sym?

How the bloodclat is the Science Sent able to LOWER/TURN OFF DEXTERITY not harder than the science Sym which all he used to do was Poison you if he hit you? Also on the topic of the Science Sent, no one seems to really give this one enough shine and focus more on the Mystic and Skill one but this fool can strike you with a special even if you perfectly evade to do having Void's ability to lower Dex. Not harder right Kabam? What's the solution? Play slower, wait for it to go then go back in? In a 3 min fight I'm to wait 15 seconds?

I really love this game. This game is the first and ONLY Mobile game that I've ever really played and turned my attitude on Mobile games but Kabam, you're slowly making me regret that. I've been playing since late 2016 and seriously. How can you sit there are still say things aren't harder?