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

JacobAbolari3738

olá venho mostra minha insatisfação com o jogo a respeito dessas m5 adicionado sentinelas que estão num nível de muito apelação, não sou contra mudanças acho até legal e necessário para o jogo mais aparti do momento que são feitas mudanças bruscas vocês altera a qualidade do jogo prejudicando vários jogadores,eu mesmo tinha o prazer de entra e jogar todos os dias mais com essas alterações que fizeram perdi até o prazer jogar não só eu mais vários jogadores,já cometeram esse erro outra vez nefando vários campeão e pagaram muito caro por isso deixando muita gente insatisfeito ,por favor aguardo resposta se vai contínua assim ou vai te mudanças para volta ser aquele jogo agradável de jogar.

Apocalypse189

Here's how I see this

I agree the AQ needed updating because let's be fair, the lack of alphas and items in milestones is annoying mostly everyone. Yes they're available from Glory store but you're allowed limited amounts from there.

The addition of these Sentineloids have caused massive divisions between alliances and I politely ask you this. Why change the General Opponents? The symbioids were doing fine. Tbh there should have been Zealots as opponents as Dormammu enslaved them to work for him.

Now the Rewards are ok but tbh there needs to be some other way to gain the relevant rewards for that bracket. So for example atm all brackets have the same rewards but different milestones. Maybe add another way to get extra rewards by knocking out mini bosses and bosses with specials or Debuffs. That imo will make the whole mode more appealing and essentially more fun because atm it's not fun at all with these Sentineloids defeating every champion you throw at them.

All in all, once these Sentineloids have been adapted to and more beatable. I'm sure AQ will change and maybe even be more fun.

I'm not asking for a backlash against your decision to make this game more taxing, but am just asking for you to consider what the faĺlout might be when AQ finishes later tonight because I'm sure there will be players who feel exhausted just fighting in a Alliance Quest this week.

ItsTheBroski

Kabam doesn't even let you evade/dodge Sentinels special 2 with most champions lmao.
@Kabam Miike You guys seem to never respond to most posts so I hope you guys see this one loud and clear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVBysJ_NcM0

Kenshio

is it just me or sentinels animations and their size is really annoying ?
and i can feel some delay in animation and their actual movements ...

Amonthir

Their animations are a bit weird, and their fighting style is too. #RealChampsPlease

CoatHang3r

ItsTheBroski wrote: »

Kabam doesn't even let you evade/dodge Sentinels special 2 with most champions lmao.
@Kabam Miike You guys seem to never respond to most posts so I hope you guys see this one loud and clear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVBysJ_NcM0

Read the science sentineloids abilities. When he is knocked down he places debuffs on you that hamper your ability to use dexterity and evade. These are also placed when you are tagged by his specials.

Jesse0013

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!

Adora, the reason over 99% of the community wont take your words, or any other Kabam spokesman, at face value is because your team doesn’t listen to the community. We have collectively requested bugs be fixed, some more than 6 months. We have requested more difficult, yet fair content. We have requested better rewards for increased difficulty. All Kabam likes to do is make it about their bottom line.

IF or WHEN Kabam makes a minor step to listen to the community, we make take your words for what you are trying to say. I agree, there are a lot of folks here that complain to complain. But Kabam has gone to far and your “reviewing data” means the community will continue to take it in the shorts. I have seen a lot of options that could show that Kabam is trying to see things from the communities standpoint. Lower/stop map costs while you review. Lower potion cost while you review. Turn off Sentinel Awakened ability while you review. Just a few minor things that could go a long way.

Crine60

They gave us halls of healing so some may have been willing to use some of those potions on unfair AQ content. Kabam will look at that and say, "well we did say it would take some time to adjust so the fact that players are playing AQ and using resources means they are willing to stick through what we did." That is not at all the same as when we don't have free potions to use!

Acidskie

Mother thread directed us to post here, so here goes.....

I'm going to start by saying my feedback is for Kabam. Not anyone else. If your feedback is different from mine, then present your feedback to Kabam directly, as I am, and kindly refrain from trying to engage me in a discussion or argument based on your different opinions/perspectives. Respectfully, I have no use for them as I'm not here to argue with anyone and just want to give my feedback to those who maintain the game that we all are trying to enjoy.

Secondly, I appreciate Kabam's attempt to re-energize AQ. It has been a little stale and your efforts do not go unnoticed. I also want to say thank you for the addition of other new game content like the boss rush challenges, rifts, Uncollected, etc. These are fun.

Tertiarily, I want to say thank you to Kabam for the increased rates of obtaining 4 and 5* heroes.

Based on my observations within my alliance, what I'm hearing from others in chats, and my own opinion, I'd like to offer the following feedback:

1) AQ as a whole is harder now and that isn't really debatable. It's the first week and as a whole the community will adjust, but this fact is a clearly observable. I've seen it in the amount of KO's during the first 3 days of AQ for an alliance who consistently didn't have any until days 4 & 5. I'm sure you can review some logs to compare KO rates, item use rates, etc and the data will bare this out as well.

2) We play the game to have fun, not be frustrated. And it is clear that the majority of your player base is frustrated with the AQ changes. While there are some here defending the changes, make no mistake that they are the minority. In my alliance, we only have one individual who doesn't have a negative opinion of the AQ changes. So while you have a lot of people here providing negative feedback, there are very likely another 10+ people for every one of them who are just expressing it within their alliances. Simply because they don’t post it here doesn’t mean it’s any less real or impactful to them.

3) The AQ changes are lowering many peoples' willingness to play. I'm seeing this in my own alliance and I'm reading it from those in others. AQs are taking longer to complete, officers are having to tag people far more often to encourage movement, etc. This is stemming from more than a few things, but the root of this is the negative impact and frustration the AQ changes are causing. From the general need to utilize different champs to the need to change play style. Long term players who were strong in AQ even on days 4 & 5 are now struggling during the first 3 days. These struggles continue even after making changes in their AQ teams.

4) Limited energy and the energy refresh rate have nothing to do with skill in AQ. These are artificial challenge factors that only create hardship on players. I am of the opinion they add no in-game value and provide no revenue to Kabam. They interferes with players' real life schedules (Work, Family, etc) and create additional frustration for alliance leaders/officers. Finding 30 people who are all in the same time zone/have the same play time isn’t easy. Not everyone can always join at the same time. Not everyone sleeps at the same time. Lost energy leads to frustration. Finding 30 players with similar skillsets is very difficult already. Attempting to coordinate the work of 30 people, over the course of a 24 hour event, for 5 out of 7 days a week while trying to manage energy limits makes AQ a grind unnecessarily. Further, it promotes account sharing/piloting.

5) Outside of the recent AQ changes, the #1 thing I hear players express concern about is a lack of gold and other resources. There are Players being forced to hold T4CC fragment crystals, full T4CC crystals, etc because they are maxed out on CC and either lack the gold to rank people up or are short on items like T4BC and T1A. On this note, I commend you for the recent boost to some of these resources though. The monthly calendar and the Glory store are excellent examples of Kabam providing new avenues for the community to acquire T4BC, T1A, T2A, and even T4CC. Having said that, gold is still lagging behind. With as much time as AW, AQ, Story, and Event Quest take up (not to mention all the other great new content), many do not have time to grind in Arena for gold.

6) Kabam has added additional content that consumes energy, but has not increased a players maximum energy or lowered the energy refresh rates to keep pace.

Having expressed the above issues, I also want to offer some possible solutions. I’m not here to grip. I’m here to make things better. I feel these are a few things Kabam can do to help with this:

1) Lower the challenge rating of sentinels by lowering the rate at which they gain charges and/or lowering some of their abilities, reduce the number of sentinels in AQ, and potentially look at altering their game play.

2) Keep your ears open to your fan base and mold the game, within reason, around the feedback they provide. You have to make money but you need the players to do so.

3) See #1 and also evaluate the difficulty of the new mini bosses now that some core AQ heroes are less effective and potentially going to be left off the roster going forward.

4) While I’d love to see a removal of energy from AW, AQ and Event quest completely, I know that’s not the case. I believe Kabam can make AQ less of a grind by increasing the max energy from 5 to 7 and lowering the refresh timer. This would show that this content is about skill and not about trying to micro manage the schedules and work output of 30 people who are potentially spread all across the world. AW doesn’t appear to need any energy adjustments.

5) There are potentially many ways to help put more gold in the pockets of players so they can continue to rank up champions. This could be done by increasing gold earned from events, fights, and story/EQ exploration by a factor of X-XX%. Another would be to have a weekly gold rush event as has been mentioned before.

6) Increase max energy, lower the 6 minute energy refresh timer, increase the amount of energy that can be recovered through the Help function, and/or eliminate the consumption of energy expended to move on path segments that have already been explored (like you currently do for AQ and AW)

In finishing, while these are not universal issues and solutions that apply to every player, I believe they apply to the majority. My feedback freely given (even though it takes a lot thought, time, and effort to do so) in the hopes that we can continue to have a great MCOC game and community. Thank you.

unknown

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IJsmuts

we hit 70m and stayed in expert tier by 8 places....

Karakanli

First results of Kabams AQ Changes:

We reached 106kk Points this AQ session - approx as usually.

BUT: we finished 250 Spots higher in the session Ranking... what would this tell a straighforward thinking expert at Kabam?
Maybe the players declined in skill? Or the sentinels are still „new“? Or that People give a damn **** on the new AQ, the old bad rewards and either quit playing Map 5/6 or quit the game completely.

Great work guys!

Speeds80

The forums are flooded with recruitment requests, seriously, your games out of balance kabam, damage control needed Asap

DNA3000

IJsmuts wrote: »

we hit 70m and stayed in expert tier by 8 places....

Karakanli wrote: »

First results of Kabams AQ Changes:

We reached 106kk Points this AQ session - approx as usually.

BUT: we finished 250 Spots higher in the session Ranking... what would this tell a straighforward thinking expert at Kabam?
Maybe the players declined in skill? Or the sentinels are still „new“? Or that People give a damn **** on the new AQ, the old bad rewards and either quit playing Map 5/6 or quit the game completely.

Great work guys!

We scored about ten million less and rose about 200 rankings relative to our average ranking from the previous three weeks, which was relatively stable. From what I can gather with the limited data points I have, I estimate that the bottom half of the expert tier (from about ranks 1500-3000 or so) probably scored about 20% - 25% fewer points this week. That's a massive sudden drop in points, consistent with the average expert tier alliance failing to complete about 4 or 5 BG-maps.

I believe some of this is the Sentinels and some of this is the Nightcrawler minibosses, but I have good reasons to believe the bulk of it is due to the Sentinels. It only takes one or two good NC players in a BG to dispatch the miniboss, even if everyone else isn't good at him. But the Sentinels are a problem on every path. Even players clearing them could be significantly weakened by them, making them more vulnerable to other nodes or Nightcrawler himself. It only takes a couple players getting wiped on Map 5 to make stage 3 an order of magnitude more difficult to complete. And even when maps are being completed, losing 100% means losing the extremely valuable crystals that come with full explore.

While scores could be down 20%, I suspect *rewards* across the board are down by a lot more.

Whether Kabam says this was intentional or not is really besides the point. This was predictable by anyone who judged the difficulty increases reasonably. It was certainly predictable by me, as I predicted the difficulty increase was high and would impact alliances strongly. That wasn't a lucky guess.

TyEdge

Our AQ score dropped from 104m last week to 84m this week. Six players quit our alliance.

One of the problems with war seasons is that people will wait to move until it ends, and many alliances will get screwed in the weeks that follow.

Karakanli

DNA3000 wrote: »

That wasn't a lucky guess.

No, it was a very educated one! 😉

Blitzkilla420

who will save us?

Farwey

Just remove sentinels and set anythor champ, isnt to hard

RagamugginGunner

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!

So despite hundreds of post from people who actually play the game, you're not going to admit that you made AQ harder? lol, that's amazing.

Badrose

Beside the fact that I don't have any particular problem with the sentinels (but OMG members of my ally have!), what I don't understand is why kabam never understand what they are doing in advance.

The minute they announced the sentinels, just like many other announcements, we said THIS IS PURE BS! Didn't need a genius to understand the damage you were going to make, a basic understand of the game mechanic was enough.

Now, after the ton of heat they've (everytime) got, we get the same answer: "The Game Team is keeping a close eye on the data". In "few" weeks, next answer will be something like: "It's not easy to adjust things, be patient" and then, after months of people quitting and/or spending more, things will be finally reverted or upgraded to a new level with some increase in stupid shards.

Meanwhile, 4 members and 2 longtime officials from my ally are gone.

Thank you.

kbean3

https://youtu.be/LrymveRuuWk

Game froze when sentinel hit me with sp2

Špooder

But it looks interesting to play with different Enemys...i think there are many counters for sentinel...

Polderpommie

I have no issue with change. It was needed. But I’m not happy with this so far. I’m sure we’ll adapt, but the question is still how long for? If it’s just for a few weeks, at least I’ll be able to make ranking decisions (or not) for the new challenge. If it’s for the foreseeable, I’ll definitely need to rank certain champs up first. It’s the uncertainty of it all.
I realise that the halls of healing were intended to soften the blow of it all. At zero energy, it was great to stock up, but it was still very time consuming. I managed to do most of it, but not everyone did.
The sentinels are just such a drag to fight. The rewards were already pretty meagre for the effort put in, so now it's a real slog to get 30 ppl motivated to get through a week of it all.

Stephen_Lynch

My alliance is a 15 million rated alliance we have been doing map 5x5 for past year 100% every time. You added Sentinels and all of a sudden we struggled to get through the first section without using pots and day 4 had a BG not finish. We also have had 4 people quit the game and 5 more waiting until the end of our war we are in to finish. But no you didn’t make it harder. You just killed Wolverine because he heals too much and you don’t get enough people buying alliance pots. Be honest @Kabam Miike this is a way to increase difficulty. I know there are counters. But symbiods don’t need counters. There for you did increase the difficulty and you know you did. Get rid of the stupid sentinels. They are annoying as hell. I did the halls of healing everyday and stocked up knowing it was going to be rough. I maybe use 1-3 pots on day 4 and 5. I use all 15 pots day 2 and 3. Only fights I lost on were sentinels that can hit me even when I’m blocking and all there many other annoying abilities.

Legendsend

Ok so my alliance members are dropping like flies, officers and regular members... gold 1... don't know if I'll still be playing this but I wonder if we will do as good this war season after this ****. These are ppl we've bonded with... this is sad... truly sad... If i wasn't an officer I probably would have left already too

unknown

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Farwey

Morgan210805

Twittwit wrote: »

I don’t know what you guys expected I find sentinels easy one in duels other in aq day 5

Unfortunately not everyone has 6*

Morgan210805

Thanks ka-scam I’ve lost 8 members of my alliance due to sentinels really appreciate all your hard work. 🤬🤬🤬 @Kabam Miike

Blitzkilla420

bump. i am a paying customer and i need some answers on this. allys are losing members because day 5 of aq is unbearable when fighting these over powered sentinels