New 6* Featured Crystal Discussion
Madman_marvin
Member Posts: 667 ★★★★
Some really good champs in this interation. However, the garbage champs are extremely bad. Hulkbuster is the ultimate 6* trash champ lol
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That said some of the “good” category rely a lot on dupes so....
Maybe if a crystal contains an option that is so unacceptable that you'd quit if you got it, that's not a crystal you're supposed to buy. Resource management is a part of the game players have to accept, and that includes making strategic decisions on which crystals to buy with shards.
The bad part is that these champs are going to be stuck in the basic crystal after 90 days... That is my big problem at least. Still waiting on a 6* champ that I can actually use... It's so dumb the RNG with these crystals.
There’s only 2 crystals you can buy with 6* shards, a basic or featured. Eventually those champs will migrate into the basic and you’ll pretty much have no choice but to open a basic or take a shot at the newest featured pool which will probably be IP, She Hulk, Colossus, and DD Flix. So how would you advise proper “resource management”? Wait until the game dies and you don’t get the disappointment? Sounding better by the day.
To put it bluntly, yes. If all available options are so horrible to you personally that you would quit the game if you ever pulled any of them, I would advise finding something else to play. I mean that literally. That's not a problem with the game, and it is not something the game is going to change just for you. It means this game is not for you. I wouldn't subject myself to that sort of thing if they paid me to play the game, much less do it for free.
For everyone else, I would advise going for the option with the best overall gain, or alternatively the one with the least worst case scenario, whichever one is more psychologically palatable.
Pulling one of those champs wouldn’t be cause to quit the game. But if I have pulled 5 horrible 6* and my 6th is Hulkbuster, a champ I have pulled 9 times as a 5* and only from featured crystals, then yes I would greatly consider quitting the game. The problem is they know what champions are trash and seldom used except in arena, yet they continue to flood crystals that can take 4 months to achieve with it. I don’t see why they don’t just add another option like a 30k or 50k crystal that guarantees good champs.
Setting aside the question which champs are the good verses bad ones, the simple fact is that games that give players rewards they *don't* have control over end up retaining players better than games that do give players control over what they get. The more control you give players, the more they exercise that control to try to optimize getting their first choice, and then second choice, and then third choice rewards. The more they have a lot of their top choice rewards, the more their game play becomes about getting their lesser choice rewards, and that's a diminishing engagement proposition. Basically, the more random the rewards are, the more players continue to have something to pursue over longer periods of time. If you've ever been to Japan and seen those literal walls of gatchapon machines, you've seen this principle in action.
Now, getting back to the "good" vs "bad" champions. They do in fact know which champions are used more and less through datamining. But I think you're assuming that what you or I believe the "good" champs are, are in fact the same ones that ever single one of the millions of players that play this game agree on. That's guaranteed not to be true. Different players disagree on which champs are more useful. Many players don't even *pursue* the champs that are the most useful, but rather which ones are the ones they like playing the best, or like looking at the best, or were their childhood favorite. Every player values something different. If the game even tried to engineer the reward system to favor the "good one" that would only be true for a subset of the population. The game designers don't want that to happen. They almost certainly datamine which champs are used by which players in different subgroups, and the crystals contain scatterings of champs across all those players. If you care about performance, you aren't going to be pursuing Hulkbuster, I think we can all agree. But that doesn't mean there aren't lots of players who we never hear from that do in fact pursue Hulkbuster for whatever reason. The game has to have something for them as well.
These crystals almost certainly include different champs that are appealing to different subgroups of players, and that means many or most won't be appealing to players from other groups. For a game designer, this is a double-win. You're more likely to have at least something that is appealing for a wide range of players, and yet you're also more likely to have every opening contain only a moderate random chance of having something high on an individual players priority list.
The bottom line is that game developers do all of this because it works. Because games that do this attract and retain more players for longer, and games that don't, don't. We players *say* we don't like this, but we only support games that do. We burn through games that give us what we want quickly, then abandon them. We are the evolutionary pressure that creates these games, and so long as we continue to do so, that's how games will continue to evolve towards.
While I can’t necessarily disagree with you about the retention, I still the model needs to be tweaked. I will admit I’ve been coming back to this game for 4 years now even though I really hate the RNG aspect of it. But I have taken several breaks in between because the game is very frustrating with its RNG. Sure, maybe the compulsive aspect of gambling keeps people coming back but I think you could argue the other side, that very poor RNG and pulling champions you don’t want repetitively has caused many players to quit. Maybe it’s true that demographic is much smaller than the ones compulsed by gambling but it’s still worth looking at.
You mention that there are multiple demographics, ones that collect based on performance, ones that collect based on aesthetics, and ones based on just nostalgia of their youth, but there is absolutely no denying that there is a universal agreement about which champs will get you through content and which won’t. Having Blade, SS, GR, Corvus, and Hyperion is certainly going to net you more rewards than Hulkbuster, Antman, Civil Warrior, Rhino, and She Hulk (or at the very least way more efficiently). If Kabam were to release a Marvelous Crystal instead of a regular 5* Heroic Crystal for completing Champion Clash, do you think it would be game breaking? Absolutely not. I am only speaking for myself in saying that it has been months since I have pulled a 5* worth ranking from a Heroic/Featured 5* Crystal and it wears you down. My only feedback is to give the players a Marvelous Crystal once a year maybe to reinvigorate those people like me sick of continuing to pull champs that do them no good. Time is better spent elsewhere.
If you’re at the point in the game where you are opening 6* crystals, you know who the “good” and “bad” champs are. There isn’t any debate over the fact that Ant-Man and HB are two of the worst champs you could ever pull. Also, no one here is asking for control over the outcome of crystals... We’re just asking why all the universally acknowledged trash champs are filling up the 6* crystal. It’s bad enough that it takes 4 months just to grind out one 6* crystal, and far worse when that crystal rewards you with a champion that cannot be used in the game.
No, but that's not a particularly interesting claim. If something *is* game breaking that's a reason to not do it. But just because something isn't game breaking that isn't a reason to do it. If someone came to your job and asked you to do something you were not doing and didn't have a specific reason to do, and they asked you if it would destroy the company to do it, you probably wouldn't be impressed by that question.
We know as a matter of historical fact, that random rewards increase engagement and control over rewards decreases engagement. Some balance between the two is necessary, but it can be very subjective to know where that balance point is. Once the devs make a decision on where that balance point is, it probably isn't meaningful to ask if nudging it a little this way or that would be game breaking. No one reward is likely to be game breaking. The question is how much risk you want to take.
Speaking of your "Marvelous Crystal" if Kabam decided to offer something like that as a one-time limit-one (or something) purchase at Christmas, or next anniversary, or whatever I wouldn't be surprised. It would be a one time offer so it wouldn't have a huge impact on the reward system balance, it would be an obvious special out of the ordinary opportunity which has some value to earning positive feelings from the playerbase, and it would shake up player's rosters in a way similar to the cinematic crystals which would have some interesting ripple effects throughout the game (like suddenly seeing three times the number of IMIW's on defense).
I think something like this is actually a bit more likely than offering it as the reward in something like CC Chapter 2. Contrary to what many players think, it isn't in Kabam's best interests to go overboard with rewards like that in the top end content. It is precisely those players who have the largests earning ability for things like 5* and 6* crystals that you don't want to give too much control over rewards to. In fact, this is one of the primary reasons why RDTs are so highly constrained. RDTs are an interesting reward in the mid tier of the game, but they are literally game breaking in the end game, in terms of resource reward balance.
Speaking of the worst champ in existence. This makes #10.
Where'd you get that number? I see only 13-14 good ones with some of those requiring a dupe. You must be counting someone like Storm, DD or MK as "useful"