**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
Ah, that's a much different question.
With some conditions, I'd still keep my answer the same. Yes, because if change isn't consistently and constantly introduced, stagnation occurs. Now would I do it frequently? Hell no. Maybe once every 12-18 months.
By forcing that big a change - while it'll hurt in the short term, in the long term of the game, I think it benefits them to keep us changing and doing things differently. The only thing I'd say against doing something like this is that people who have forged friendships with their alliances aren't going to want to change, and that resistance might be a reason not to do it in the first place. But then again, people are always resistant to change.
So, yes. Because change is healthy and good, even if it doesn't feel like it in the short term.
-Now, I also work in a corporate world and understand the reasoning...except this change was done durine the middle of an AQ season. I am not upset as I have been playing since December 2014 and have seen a wide range of changes and updates. I do agree that Kabam is changing quickly, but every alliance and players have different champs to assist in the progression of the game. Not every player is as agile to learn fron the challenges. I feel that with the change ...coupled with the inconsistent game play like (block, parry and evade) have made the community upset.
Next, for the quick response to say apologize to our community. ..not for the Sentinel-loids but for the change during the middle of the AQ season. A change during the middle of the season is like a change in job title's and responsibilities but with no pay raise. It would be a bit of a sour taste in my mouth to add more challenging content without the rewards.
If the introduction of the class sentinels was offered at the end of the AQ season and we as the community had 2-4 weeks to prepare for the adjustments. But at the same time we knew there was going to be much better rewards for the change in difficulty similarly to the end of the next AQ season. ..then I feel everyone would be happen happier with the change. That is why by offering 3 rank down tickets, one for each star rating of a five, four and three star champ to assist with this unexpected challenges.
Lastly, any change can happen in a few weeks or several months ...no matter the size of the company. I agree that Kabam is still learning and we need to thank Kabam for its efforts. Also thank @Kabam DK , @Kabam Rose @Kabam Miike @Kabam Vydious @Kabam Loto @Kabam Zibiit for their efforts. Together we can make Kabam MCOC a much better experience.
Chicano509
*Reads.......reads....continues rea 😪🌃*
Sammee
a nice post but nope i disagree with you as we the players are NOT to blame. if kabam simply TESTED, like a beta, the aq changes before instead of letting us test it for them we wouldnt have a problem in the first place.
Kabam should have fixed this asap and to their credit they did and i say thank goodness NOT thank you
also why cant they work this fast on the bugs then? its been over a year since cm's sp2 worked properly not to mention the clear blocks dropping, double dashing back and dex issues still present for months.
why arent these being fixed just as fast?
Can you describe in what way this change is beneficial to either the players or the game. You mention stagnation, but here we aren't talking about content stagnation, we are talking about alliance stagnation. In what way does an alliance "stagnate?" If the players themselves become dissatisfied with an alliance for any reason, up to and including that they are bored in it, they themselves always have the option to leave it. So when you shake up an alliance you aren't causing people to leave an alliance they want to leave most of the time, you are causing people to leave an alliance they would otherwise not want to leave. In what specific way does that benefit either the game or the affected players?
When we allow players to group together of their own volition, there are objective, quantifiable benefits to the game we can theoretically measure. For example, many studies have shown that membership in an MMO guild - an alliance in our case - improves engagement and retention. Meaning: players in groups play the game more and stay with the game longer than players that are not in groups and play solo. While I don't have specific numbers for MCOC, that seems to be true in every study of MMO gaming I've seen, which makes it likely true in general.
Periodically shaking up alliance memberships from outside rather than from the players' own actions would almost certainly act to counter that. People would have less attachment to their alliances and that would almost certainly reduce the beneficial effects of engagement and retention. That directly affects the game's bottom line financially, and it is also a proxy of how good a game you're running. If players are playing less and quitting faster, we would tend to accept that as the definition of a game being not as good as before.
So if we were discussing the merits of this change prior to it being implemented, I would say on one side of the scale you're potentially damaging engagement and retention, both of which are generally harmful to the game. Balanced against that, what would you present as counter-balancing those problems? Change is only healthy and good if it has healthy and good effects. What would those effects be?
Like throwing 30 drug addicts into a crack house. They enable each other.
Sorry about the analogy Kabam but it's fitting. The psychology is the same. Alliances help retain players through enabling their addiction.
Fine....how about 30 lone gambling addicts get together and form a gambling club. Their addictions are likely to grow not diminish. They'll encourage each other to continue gambling and anyone who wants to leave is pressured to stay. Sad, but predictable human psychology.
If that is how you feel, you should also believe all ethical game developers should remove all rewards from their games. Because rewards just enable addiction. If you like the game, you shouldn't need any rewards from it. Not units, not new champions, not rank up resources, not even leaderboards. All just psychological hooks to get you addicted to a game.
This is the only award I'll give Kabam.
They placed these new bosses and sents in to make AQ harder without upping the rewards. They never gave a good explanation as to why they did it. Sorry but giving them any praise is ridiculous.
This change was the straw that broke a lot of backs. So many people got fed up and quit and retired. That's the only reason Kabam took action.
I don't know what to think about this.
But I'll say this about F2P games in general:
They're designed to addict players and keep them addicted.
Because right now I can't think of many good reasons that many of us play the same old repetitive arena match thousands of times of month. It must have a giant payoff that makes people do it.
I've been corrected...so half of the games life she's been broken. Nice.
Many F2P games are in fact designed in part to addict players to playing the game. But that's true for many things. That's the main reason television shows use cliff hangers. Most people consider those kinds of tactics to be reasonable ways for content creators to try to hold the attention of their audience.
Why people do repetitive things is not as simple as there must be a gigantic payoff or they must be psychologically addicted. People lift weights, they run, they knit. You could argue that there's some payoff there, getting stronger, getting in better shape, getting a nice scarf. But the truth is many people simply like having a past time that they enjoy, even though each individual second of that past time isn't always terribly interesting on its own.
Personally, I'm someone with very long time horizons. I don't mind starting projects that will take months, years, even decades to complete. I don't mind playing a game where the rewards build up over long periods of time. That's actually always been my attraction to conventional MMOs in the past. I could play this single player game here, or I could log in to this other MMO and everything I do adds up over time. To me personally, that's the attraction of a game like MCOC. Every day every minute I play is accumulating progress of some kind. But of course everyone else has their own reasons for playing, and some of them may have less healthy reasons for doing so. But I don't think that's a necessary outcome.
That's not to say some games don't go the extra mile to addict players. But I don't consider MCOC to be a particularly bad actor in this regard.
2. I laughed at "I can't finish AQ with 3 champs intact, even though I don't need revives" -> sounds like the difficulty is spot on!
3. KABAM'S fault is doing this mid-season. They should just have waited until everything for the new season was ready. Then have 2 weeks of free AQ, collect data, adjust, and let the season really start
4. Communication about this was actually pretty good, even though the decision to inplement the changes now was a poor one.
On a side note, here have been numerous threads of sentinels and the changes to AQ which have all been closed down and redirected to the main thread, yet this one somehow remains open.
Funny that.
Ok humour aside
I've stayed quiet about the sentinel issues, But I disagree with this..
I read the sentinels abilities, I understood them. Players continuously voiced their concerns only to have them shot down with responses such as..
It's not more difficult it's just a change you need to adjust to..
How do you know it'll be more difficult, they melt at armour break champs..
If you take a champ that can be beaten by anyone and replace them with a champ that requires a "class advantage" (your words) or an armour break champ, Then it's clear the difficulty has been increased.. If they're immune to bleed and poison alone the difficulty has increased but then add the sentinels abilities on top of that and it's 100% clear the difficulty has been increased.. (plus someone needs to tell the skill sentinel he's meant to melt at armour break, he clearly missed the memo) No increase in rewards their not ready to do anything like that.. Just able to change all the champs for harder ones hmmm...
Then you commend them for pushing a fix to an issue they coursed, Laying 100% of the blame on the players? Helllll Nooo.. Once players started quiting the game it was obvious a fix was coming as instead of a positive effect on revenue it would begin having a negative one..
No matter how much sugar you attempt to pour on to this issue the salt is still overpowering..
Example: You suffer a budget cut, The best way to solve this is reduce the workers wages by 6% do you tell the workers that?.. No.. Instead you cut all overtime and 50% heath benefits.. The workers go crazy.. They complain.. Threaten to strike.. Hand in notice.. After the storm, You tell them you have a new solution. After looking at the budget again if they agree to a 6% cut in wages you can immediately reinstate overtime and 100% of the heath benefits.. The workers aren't happy about it but it's better then the situation they were in so accept it with much less complaining..
Kabams fix means Sentinels (still tougher then the previous champs) are still in AQ with no reward increase.. But players will be more likely to accept them now..
Anyone asking for kabam to compensate them shouldn't be belittled.. They most likely will get nothing but they still have the right to ask for it given they ARE NOT 100% to blame..
The real problem here is self entitlement of the players and the pink glasses that players wear looking in the mirror.
This game is not supposed to be easy. Its not supposed to be faceroll content. U are not meant to finish everything easily from the get go. People here complain about everything, not enough easy content , not enough hard content. Content that used to be easy last month is harder now...
The game is so popular because it offers struggling content, because u have to play/grind a lot for ur rewards. If there is no struggle there is no appreciation for having overcome that struggle and earned the rewards.
Instead of people complaining about sentinels they should have focused on how to beat them and maybe dedicated their next 1-2 rankups for them, perhaps alliances should have reshuffled paths accordingly instead of throwing tantrums like children. And like children u got what u wanted because you cried loud enough- they are needed. But as majority of spoiled young ones - that is not enough, you want some sort of compensation for not beeing able to get over yourselves and actually try and overcome the new obstacles.
P.s - only thing kabam did wrong here was that they missed the perfect time of starting new aq season. Due to war beeing on break. And there would be a lot less backlash should there would be a new carrot dangling in front of players faces.
Act 6 will be harder that act 5 and will have better rewards to reflect that. Updating AQ maps with harder enemies should go hand in hand with updating rewards to reflect the increase in difficultly. It’s not rocket science.