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

BigDaddyJoe

Could it be that this iteration of map5 be tougher than last week or could it be I’m just sucking more now than my last year of running the same map5 consistency 5 days week and not “ever” losing a champ on the first tier? @Kabam Miike come on dude I run path 4 straight up the gut with a R4 5* IM duped at 180 something and today the Red sentinel busted through my block (missed the evade somehow) causing me to catch fire...got me to about 20%. Next fight GP backed me in the corner (she wouldn’t unload her L1) hit me with L2 bam 💥 my IM dead first time ever first tier. Admit it, this is way harder than prior and pls don’t ban me I’m trying to get some answers, sincerely BD

DNA3000

kmbell81 wrote: »

DNA3000 wrote: »

Midnightfox wrote: »

Clap clap. Kabam always outdoing themselves on bugs. Guess what since it’s not beneficial to the players they are gonna keep it all aq. Yay! Now if that bug had benefitted us the game would have went down for emergency maintenance and be fixed promptly. This is why people are walking away and no one trusts anything the mods say. Ridiculous that as always we have to bend over and take it.

To be honest, I think if the bug deleted an unoccupied node the devs would be similarly slow to make changes even though that would be a small net benefit.

There's a germ of truth to the notion that bugs that benefit the players are acted upon faster than bugs that hurt the players. How fast and how dramatically the devs take steps to address a bug generally involve what that bug's overall impact on the game is, especially in terms of resource management. A bug that hands tons of resources to the players is going to have a much higher priority than a bug that withholds resources from players. And that's because of a simple if harsh truth: when the game has an exploitable bug that can convert into tons of resources allowing that bug to persist will rapidly unbalance the game because players will quickly gravitate to that exploit if left unchecked. But when a bug exists that withholds resources from the players, all that tends to do is globally slow everyone down, which isn't as big a threat to game balance.

Game developers don't explain this very well, or at all. And it translates into honestly predictable suspicions surrounding their motives when they act to stamp out bugs in obviously different ways for different bugs that have nothing to do with the effort involved to address them.

The last event that had paths that didn’t work as intended was the Bautista challenge. It was initially constructed in a manner that was a major benefit to the players.

The developers hotfixed it in under four hours.

This time, they are saying that an incorrectly constructed path that makes playing more difficult and time intensive cannot be fixed for at least a week.

Thus proving my point, if you reread my point.

But players only remember the self-confirming examples. An example of a bug that benefitted the players that persisted for a long time was the unstoppable bug in LoL. And in an ironic twist when they eventually did fix that bug many players said that since the bug was there for a long time it was the new norm and the devs should not have changed it.

Which means, if a bug benefits the players and the devs fix it quickly, that's a problem. But when they fix it slowly, that's also a problem. No one counts all the times bugs that benefit the players are fixed slower as counterbalancing the notion that player benefitting bugs are always fixed quickly, because those are situations are just refactored into being bad for the player in a different way.

1SunnyD

OK so I'm only an average casual player but got myslef onto map 5 aq after a year of playing.
Play everyday but cant dedicate my whole life to game
But now Sentinels destroying the fun of game for me
Having to spend all my hard earned units and glory to get past them
Fair enough enough one sentinel on a path but 2!
Limits my choice of champ as go for class advantage then have to spend all units on health and all for no more rewards!

Then on top of that after a month of saving 5* shards I get a kingpin and all my 5* pulls have been useless so far.

So to sum up I am rubbish at AQ now so wont be able to get the good rewards and even if I do get 5* crystal chance of a getting a decent champ is is low! Plus chance of duping even a rubbish champ to make them half decent is even lower!

Thanks Kabam for making this game not worth it!

I'm not asking to game the game easy but either increase rewards or return to symbiod difficulty as at least that was fair!

BillLisBack

Here we are day 3 and the pain is real again.

I don’t know what to say, I’ve always given you the benefit of the doubt but you guys really are the worst.

Like others I’m spending resources just to try to keep up so now I can’t use those elsewhere. Also, I have 12/17 5*s sitting at rank 1 because I can’t get enough resources to rank them. But they now have to wait even longer because I need to rank 4*s I hadn’t planned to to counter these sentinels and Morningstar. And oh yeah, no additional resources. As I said previously all pain and no gain. Pretty lousy way to do things.

Lrrrr

@Kabam Miike @Kabam Wolf and all others. Do any of you actually care what your community wants? What is your goal, is it to create a game designed to be enjoyable, thus more profitable? Or, to milk to profits as much as you can and move on to the next game? There is an outcry from community members against the sentinel’s, but you fail to give any meaningful response. If you read the tech news, game designers make mistakes all the time, it happens. But, most designers respond to their communiy’s concerns.

Please stop burying your heads in the sand and stop giving scripted responses. Why does collecting data matter, if your customer base is unhappy with the change? Read your customer base and address their concerns in a meaningful way. Sentinels are not fun, they are not an improvement. I personally enjoy the new mini roster on map 5. The sentinels are too much and feel you all are too proud to admit it was a mistake and fix the problem. Over 1,000 peple on this post and most are against the changes. Wise up and invest in the community, I hope this message is taken seriously.

DNA3000

BillLisBack wrote: »

Here we are day 3 and the pain is real again.

I don’t know what to say, I’ve always given you the benefit of the doubt but you guys really are the worst.

Like others I’m spending resources just to try to keep up so now I can’t use those elsewhere. Also, I have 12/17 5*s sitting at rank 1 because I can’t get enough resources to rank them. But they now have to wait even longer because I need to rank 4*s I hadn’t planned to to counter these sentinels and Morningstar. And oh yeah, no additional resources. As I said previously all pain and no gain. Pretty lousy way to do things.

I know it will probably be seen as heresy by some to say this, but I've been thinking that this AQ change may justify granting RDTs. I don't say that lightly: I am generally against using RDTs to respond to every little change that happens to the game. But here the logical argument for RDTs is pretty compelling to me. AQ was changed, and it was changed significantly, and it was changed in a way most people will agree poses a new challenge to players to adjust their play, both in terms of their skills and in terms of the champions they bring to AQ. I think most players would agree and the devs would agree that's a reasonable statement to make.

But AQ changed very suddenly, relative to the time it takes to save up rank up resources. If the actual intent was for players to look at their roster and reexamine the strengths and weaknesses of their champs, Kabam should realize that it can take weeks or longer for the average player to save the resources to rank up champions even if they already possess them. If the meta-game aspect of the change was to re-evaluate roster, players need to be able to actually make changes to their roster based on that re-evaluation. And if it is going to take a very long time to do that, then the meta-game isn't actually playable by most of the players. They can't always do what the devs expect them to do: use different champs.

This sounds like precisely the situation RDTs are useful for. When the devs themselves make an explicit change to the game that they actually *want* the players to think about, strategize around, and potentially re-evaluate their rosters for, they either need to make the change gradual enough for players to respond through rank ups, or they need to temporarily speed up the rate at which players can make roster rank up changes. That's what RDTs do: allow players to change their minds about roster and adjust quickly, rather than at the normal rate rank up materials are earned. Directly nerfing a champion in a materially harsh way is one situation where an RDT might make sense. But asking the players to re-evaluate their roster to deal with all new content that it is difficult to opt out of is in my opinion another such situation.

Primmer79

DNA3000 wrote: »

BillLisBack wrote: »

Here we are day 3 and the pain is real again.

I don’t know what to say, I’ve always given you the benefit of the doubt but you guys really are the worst.

Like others I’m spending resources just to try to keep up so now I can’t use those elsewhere. Also, I have 12/17 5*s sitting at rank 1 because I can’t get enough resources to rank them. But they now have to wait even longer because I need to rank 4*s I hadn’t planned to to counter these sentinels and Morningstar. And oh yeah, no additional resources. As I said previously all pain and no gain. Pretty lousy way to do things.

I know it will probably be seen as heresy by some to say this, but I've been thinking that this AQ change may justify granting RDTs. I don't say that lightly: I am generally against using RDTs to respond to every little change that happens to the game. But here the logical argument for RDTs is pretty compelling to me. AQ was changed, and it was changed significantly, and it was changed in a way most people will agree poses a new challenge to players to adjust their play, both in terms of their skills and in terms of the champions they bring to AQ. I think most players would agree and the devs would agree that's a reasonable statement to make.

But AQ changed very suddenly, relative to the time it takes to save up rank up resources. If the actual intent was for players to look at their roster and reexamine the strengths and weaknesses of their champs, Kabam should realize that it can take weeks or longer for the average player to save the resources to rank up champions even if they already possess them. If the meta-game aspect of the change was to re-evaluate roster, players need to be able to actually make changes to their roster based on that re-evaluation. And if it is going to take a very long time to do that, then the meta-game isn't actually playable by most of the players. They can't always do what the devs expect them to do: use different champs.

This sounds like precisely the situation RDTs are useful for. When the devs themselves make an explicit change to the game that they actually *want* the players to think about, strategize around, and potentially re-evaluate their rosters for, they either need to make the change gradual enough for players to respond through rank ups, or they need to temporarily speed up the rate at which players can make roster rank up changes. That's what RDTs do: allow players to change their minds about roster and adjust quickly, rather than at the normal rate rank up materials are earned. Directly nerfing a champion in a materially harsh way is one situation where an RDT might make sense. But asking the players to re-evaluate their roster to deal with all new content that it is difficult to opt out of is in my opinion another such situation.

If a whole new AQ season started, and rewards were changed, and maps were changed, I doubt there would be any "reasonable" call for rank down tickets.

That being said, my vote is still no for RDTs but Kabam needs to do something.

Speeds80

Yeah I’m with DNA here, I don’t like the idea of rdts, but as I’ve said before the mid level up and coming players are the ones who got screwed by this change, the ones who have relied on one good champ to get them through, there’s a guy in our alliance who’s uncollected and only has 5 r5 equivalents, kid plays great but you just ruined him to our alliance because he can’t do 5x5 with r4s and the two champs who used to get him through are useless now

kmbell81

This change is an significant increase in difficulty and effectively a decrease in rewards.

Sentinels are difficult enough to fight when the game is working correctly. These days, the game usually is not. The combination of more difficult encounters and the myriad of bugs, glitches and broken game mechanics the player base has complained about for months but the developers refuse to fix leaves us with an AQ that is now basically unplayable on day 3.

In the circles I run with, people are talking about other games. Bluntly put, this feels like a money grab and the current product is not worth the time, effort and money Kabam is trying to milk out of the players.

Primmer79

@DNA3000 @Speeds80 How about this as a proposal? IF there are RDTs, (which idk, i hope we don't get those, but they have another fix) they are for the mid level players. AKA we don't need 5* RDT. We get 2 4* and 2 3* RDT and call it a day.

DNA3000

Primmer79 wrote: »

DNA3000 wrote: »

BillLisBack wrote: »

Here we are day 3 and the pain is real again.

I don’t know what to say, I’ve always given you the benefit of the doubt but you guys really are the worst.

Like others I’m spending resources just to try to keep up so now I can’t use those elsewhere. Also, I have 12/17 5*s sitting at rank 1 because I can’t get enough resources to rank them. But they now have to wait even longer because I need to rank 4*s I hadn’t planned to to counter these sentinels and Morningstar. And oh yeah, no additional resources. As I said previously all pain and no gain. Pretty lousy way to do things.

I know it will probably be seen as heresy by some to say this, but I've been thinking that this AQ change may justify granting RDTs. I don't say that lightly: I am generally against using RDTs to respond to every little change that happens to the game. But here the logical argument for RDTs is pretty compelling to me. AQ was changed, and it was changed significantly, and it was changed in a way most people will agree poses a new challenge to players to adjust their play, both in terms of their skills and in terms of the champions they bring to AQ. I think most players would agree and the devs would agree that's a reasonable statement to make.

But AQ changed very suddenly, relative to the time it takes to save up rank up resources. If the actual intent was for players to look at their roster and reexamine the strengths and weaknesses of their champs, Kabam should realize that it can take weeks or longer for the average player to save the resources to rank up champions even if they already possess them. If the meta-game aspect of the change was to re-evaluate roster, players need to be able to actually make changes to their roster based on that re-evaluation. And if it is going to take a very long time to do that, then the meta-game isn't actually playable by most of the players. They can't always do what the devs expect them to do: use different champs.

This sounds like precisely the situation RDTs are useful for. When the devs themselves make an explicit change to the game that they actually *want* the players to think about, strategize around, and potentially re-evaluate their rosters for, they either need to make the change gradual enough for players to respond through rank ups, or they need to temporarily speed up the rate at which players can make roster rank up changes. That's what RDTs do: allow players to change their minds about roster and adjust quickly, rather than at the normal rate rank up materials are earned. Directly nerfing a champion in a materially harsh way is one situation where an RDT might make sense. But asking the players to re-evaluate their roster to deal with all new content that it is difficult to opt out of is in my opinion another such situation.

If a whole new AQ season started, and rewards were changed, and maps were changed, I doubt there would be any "reasonable" call for rank down tickets.

That being said, my vote is still no for RDTs but Kabam needs to do something.

Had Kabam announced that the next season of AQ was going to start in, say, June 1 and at that time they were going to change the Syms to Sentinels and the minibosses accordingly, I think that is a far enough advance warning that I would not consider RDTs to be appropriate. There would be plenty of time to practice and adjust both in terms of twitch play and in terms of strategic roster rank ups. But the players were actually given twelve days, and that was while the Sentinel itself was still a relatively new champion. This is a judgment call, and I'm just expressing which way my own judgment falls.

DNA3000

Primmer79 wrote: »

@DNA3000 @Speeds80 How about this as a proposal? IF there are RDTs, (which idk, i hope we don't get those, but they have another fix) they are for the mid level players. AKA we don't need 5* RDT. We get 2 4* and 2 3* RDT and call it a day.

I think you might be seeing RDTs as "compensation" for the change in difficulty and are trying to moderate their strength. But I'm not thinking about them as compensation. I'm making the assumption that part of the actual intent of the change in AQ was to encourage players to look at their roster - their entire roster - and re-evaluate which champions to use for AQ. IF that assumption is true, then the correct thing to do would have been to announce the change well in advance. Then normal game play would have allowed players to rethink their rosters and plan to rank up new champs. That takes time, but if the change was announced far enough in advance there would be a reasonable amount of time. But my contention was that less than two weeks is not enough time for most players to change their AQ teams if rank ups are necessary. If the devs want players to actually rank up different champions - if that is part of the actual intent of changing AQ in this way - then they need to make the resources available to do that. But it would probably not be reasonable to expect the devs to just give away a lot of rank up resources. RDTs allow players to shift resources from one champion to another to make those rank up materials equally available.

Restricting them to only 4* champions is in effect saying that when the devs made the change they intended players to rank up different 4* champions to deal with the new difficulty, but the devs explicitly wanted to force players to use whatever 5* roster they had without any change. But that seems to run counter to the most logical goal of the change: to force players to reevaluate their *entire* roster, particularly what they currently consider their strongest and most valuable AQ champs.

BitterSteel

Speeds80 wrote: »

Yeah I’m with DNA here, I don’t like the idea of rdts, but as I’ve said before the mid level up and coming players are the ones who got screwed by this change, the ones who have relied on one good champ to get them through, there’s a guy in our alliance who’s uncollected and only has 5 r5 equivalents, kid plays great but you just ruined him to our alliance because he can’t do 5x5 with r4s and the two champs who used to get him through are useless now

Just out of curiosity how does he usually cope with poison and bleed immune champions in quests, and secondly, I don’t ask this next question to prove some point I have, I’m interested, if he were given 5 rank down tickets which of his r5 equivalents would he rank down and what 5 r5 equivalent champs does he have?

Cheers.

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GroundedWisdom

I don't agree that Tickets are warranted either. The content was changed, not the Champs. That continues to be my stance. What I suspect, and I could be wrong, is that they're waiting to analyze all Maps as they cycle before they consider any adjustments.

kmbell81

teekq wrote: »

Still no words from kabam yet eh?

Their silence tells us everything we need to know.

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DNA3000

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

I don't agree that Tickets are warranted either. The content was changed, not the Champs. That continues to be my stance.

That's oddly dogmatic, but technically speaking my suggestion doesn't require rank down tickets. It is really asking for rank up tickets. Whether you want to force players to rank something down to use them is entirely up to the devs. If they want to give out rank up tickets because RDTs are inappropriate I would be fine with that also.

GroundedWisdom

DNA3000 wrote: »

GroundedWisdom wrote: »

I don't agree that Tickets are warranted either. The content was changed, not the Champs. That continues to be my stance.

That's oddly dogmatic, but technically speaking my suggestion doesn't require rank down tickets. It is really asking for rank up tickets. Whether you want to force players to rank something down to use them is entirely up to the devs. If they want to give out rank up tickets because RDTs are inappropriate I would be fine with that also.

That's the same effect. Providing the means to accommodate Rosters based on content changes. Rank Down, Rank Up, same effect. Even more adverse because it comes at no cost to Ranking. I.E. Swapping.

Speeds80

@BitterSteel Wolvie against immune syms on day 5 was a good fun fight, I used to take that path cos it was doable but a fun challenge, try him against any sent on day 5, (I’m talking 13k-14k) I’m quite certain wolvie will time out, this is due to their abilities and build more so than just their immunities. Considering the powergain sym beats my 4/55 blade if I make a slight mistake from constant l2 block damage, I know how wolvie would fare there, to be clear I have actually proposed that rdts be for players under a certain level, they have used total pi as that decider before for compensation so I propose under 300k players get a couple rdts, and yeah not necessarily 4* only but possibly r3-r2 5* as well?
I don’t enjoy the sentinel fights at all, so many times a day , but I can handle them, I genuinely think that they will put new people off the game, getting into aq is a full tipping point for people to stay in the game and I really think these fights in all their awkwardness will be putting people off at a very early stage, our very solid alliance lost several members this month to retirement from sheer frustration at the game, one of our friends 15k alliances just folded in half. I know it’s happening, I agree it’s the bugs, it’s the increased energy costs, it’s several factors, but all of these things are so glaringly obviously taking away from the games playability I really feel kabam needs to get their **** sorted ASAP, the game is really worse to play now than ever,

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Ruhengeri

These sentinels are too defensive they block like mordo on power gain 😡. That makes for a boring long fight in which you end up taking too many blocked hits. They also do too much damage when they hit you while you block. I think of the AI should be adjusted to be reasonably more aggressive and their damage output may need to be nerfed a bit. This would allow players to have a more enjoyable experience in aq! Defensive enemies are less predictable, harder, and less fun to fight!

Usedup

Well it’s been fun. I have two accts that I have spent real money on. I’ve finally reached my Kashbam limit. Mid season revise adding bs minis and sentinels and not changing rewards. Never mind the fact that you haven’t done anything to fix the “ random”(if random meant at the worse possible time) block drop/evade freeze. Now I have to use units in aq. For 325 t4c frags and 500t4b frags. I don’t think so Kashbam. I’m through. As players we build our rosters to deal with the content. Then without changing rewards or providing(Kashbam squirms) rank down tickets so we have a chance to adapt you are just screwing us over. Enough is a enough.

Nathanparker

Maybe I'm missing something but, can somebody tell me how is it possible that I can lose 10% health of my 4 star r5 Hyperion to a tech sentinel while I'm blocking? It seems a little exvesive
Of course, the laging, the instant recovery of the AI after a combo (of course, only the AI gets this awesomes bugs) and the unresponsive controls helps a lot to lose more health
keep up the great work

Harcourtmaze

Nathanparker wrote: »

Maybe I'm missing something but, can somebody tell me how is it possible that I can lose 10% health of my 4 star r5 Hyperion to a tech sentinel while I'm blocking? It seems a little exvesive
Of course, the laging, the instant recovery of the AI after a combo (of course, only the AI gets this awesomes bugs) and the unresponsive controls helps a lot to lose more health
keep up the great work

It’s the unresponsive controls and the unpredictabability of the sentinel ai that I found so disgusting

DarkestDestroyer

DNA3000 wrote: »

BillLisBack wrote: »

Here we are day 3 and the pain is real again.

I don’t know what to say, I’ve always given you the benefit of the doubt but you guys really are the worst.

Like others I’m spending resources just to try to keep up so now I can’t use those elsewhere. Also, I have 12/17 5*s sitting at rank 1 because I can’t get enough resources to rank them. But they now have to wait even longer because I need to rank 4*s I hadn’t planned to to counter these sentinels and Morningstar. And oh yeah, no additional resources. As I said previously all pain and no gain. Pretty lousy way to do things.

I know it will probably be seen as heresy by some to say this, but I've been thinking that this AQ change may justify granting RDTs. I don't say that lightly: I am generally against using RDTs to respond to every little change that happens to the game. But here the logical argument for RDTs is pretty compelling to me. AQ was changed, and it was changed significantly, and it was changed in a way most people will agree poses a new challenge to players to adjust their play, both in terms of their skills and in terms of the champions they bring to AQ. I think most players would agree and the devs would agree that's a reasonable statement to make.

But AQ changed very suddenly, relative to the time it takes to save up rank up resources. If the actual intent was for players to look at their roster and reexamine the strengths and weaknesses of their champs, Kabam should realize that it can take weeks or longer for the average player to save the resources to rank up champions even if they already possess them. If the meta-game aspect of the change was to re-evaluate roster, players need to be able to actually make changes to their roster based on that re-evaluation. And if it is going to take a very long time to do that, then the meta-game isn't actually playable by most of the players. They can't always do what the devs expect them to do: use different champs.

This sounds like precisely the situation RDTs are useful for. When the devs themselves make an explicit change to the game that they actually *want* the players to think about, strategize around, and potentially re-evaluate their rosters for, they either need to make the change gradual enough for players to respond through rank ups, or they need to temporarily speed up the rate at which players can make roster rank up changes. That's what RDTs do: allow players to change their minds about roster and adjust quickly, rather than at the normal rate rank up materials are earned. Directly nerfing a champion in a materially harsh way is one situation where an RDT might make sense. But asking the players to re-evaluate their roster to deal with all new content that it is difficult to opt out of is in my opinion another such situation.

Champs ranked up for AQ can still be used in all other content. Can still be used in AQ, just for instance wolverine can’t bleed a sentinel. He can still KO one and regen

1captainbob2

Sentinels are a cash cow for Kabam ! They don’t act glitchy in a normal quest so it’s clearly a way of getting the loyal players of this game to spend more cash ! If they had the same characteristics as the normal quest not the alliance quest ones I wouldn’t care !!!!!!! STOP RUINING WHAT WAS A GREAT GAME KABAM

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Speeds80

Pfft, wolverine has sat on my bench since sentinels came in, he’s too slow at killing means charges add up and the fight is just long and boring and timeouts are lame, I would rank him down in a flash. he’s never been in my quest team, but he used to be aq mvp. the annoyance is I need my top fighter now for aq, that’s 5 days a week I can’t use him for questing, before this I had a good balance as war is every second day, so starky could do eq on defense days. now I get to do one run between aq days and then wait 2 hours to finish that run or buy another energy refill thanks to the stupid 76-90 energy paths in eq. Also dropping starky out of my war team kills my blade synergy