**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.
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Kabam's best move would be to cut seasons in half again to two weeks and eliminate the off season. That would allow allys to choose to sacrifice a season's worth of rewards if they want to tank or a break from AW. This would be great for people because the rewards wouldn't be soo huge that missing a season wouldn't be game changing and if you run into a tanking ally you get free season points along with the shards. Win win.
We the players are not responsible for coming up with solutions. Sure many people can offer suggestions and feedback, but all the purpose of those suggestions are is to spark the devs into crafting their own solution they see best fit for the problem. Our feedback can identify and notify devs of problems which is very helpful but usually ends there.
There’s a reason the most common complaints amongst ALL games is “devs need to listen to their players more”, it’s because the devs generally know a lot better than the players do. Sure sometimes they could listen MORE, but this game would’ve been dead long ago if they took and ran with every ‘popular’ idea the community comes up with.
So you're saying the players who play MCOC many times more than the devs, do NOT know a lot better than the devs do? Oh please. And what "popular idea" from the community would kill the game? (aside from RDT)
As a side note, is tanking during a season frowned on. If the last three wars of a season you are locked in a plat regardless if you win or lose, and just skip paths and get the boss kill to maintain current spot while saving items and units. Is that unethical or just smart game play?
I would agree with eliminating Off-Season and having a break, but I don't think 2 weeks is long enough for a Season. The trouble with that is the Rewards would have to be cut as well. Seasons have already been reduced quite a bit, and there's really only so much you can water it down before it's no longer the competition it is.
Dilly dilly!
All wars are competitions. Whether both sides choose to fight as hard in every war is completely separate.
That's true to an extent, but it is not even the most important factor. The most important factor is that all players seem to think there's far wider consensus than there actually is. I've had first hand experience with this, where I see the feedback from the developers' perspective and not the players' perspective. Most consensus is illusory. Sometimes this is because players live in an echo chamber of like minded people. But sometimes this is because players see superficial consensus and deliberately don't want to explore or emphasize the points of disagreement.
Players often see the situation as the players vs the developers, and if any sort of agreement arises they want to emphasize that agreement to promote a unified front "against" the developers. But just under the surface that unity breaks down. Consider the "unified" protests against 12.0 where a lot of players agreed there were problems but once you got past that, there wasn't *any* agreement on what the specific problems were or what the best way to resolve them is. Same thing was true when the developers began mucking with Alliance War in 14.0. It is easy for a group of people to agree that someone else is wrong, but it isn't easy for all of them to agree on what would be right.
The problem isn't that developers don't listen to the players. It is that the players generally don't listen to the players, and when they ask the developers to listen to the players they have absolutely no idea what that actually means. When they ask the developers to listen to "the players" they actually have one very specific player in mind.
Completely separately, where knowledge and experience comes into play is that players with no actual game development experience think they can just guess at it. Actually, on the internet that's generally true about everything. But most times those guesses are so awful, so ridiculously off base, so incredibly naive, that the only reasonable thing to do is to ignore them completely. In every game I've played where I've participated on the forums, there have always been people who think or imply the content of the game is "programmed." That's an eye-roller right there. Anyone who says "why can't the developers just reprogram this champion to behave in this completely different way from all other champions" for example. Because that's impossible? Good luck trying to explain that to some people. Same thing goes for people who think Kabam can just spend more money on "servers" and everything will be magically faster and better. These people will obstinately stick to their guns, or waffle a "that's not the point" excuse, but again: the only reasonable thing to do is to simply ignore such feedback.
The proper thing to do, when you don't actually know, is not to guess. It is to provide feedback at the level appropriate to your knowledge level. A lot of players, and especially the most vocal, hate doing that. They hate simply expressing their subjective feedback without trying to inject a lot of extra made-up knowledge, and it turns their feedback into gibberish the devs are compelled to ignore. The sad part is: you can try to tell people not to do it, but the people most likely to do it are also most likely to ignore that feedback, which locks them into perpetually being ignored.
It does however mean you’ll get a real war in during the off season. If a real war is the goal without WR adjustments maybe it would be possible to have off season wars with two options.
One option would be ranked and the other called something like skirmish. The skirmish would award everything current off season wars do excluding a change in WR for the match. This would leave ranked matches to those who wish to improve their ranking but good luck finding a match where someone isn’t manipulating thier rating.
It isn't tanking. "Tanking" usually refers to the practice of deliberately losing, because losing somehow provides some long term strategic advantage. For example, losing during the offseason to lower rating so that future opponents are weaker, hoping the increased points scored against those opponents makes up for any deficit due to ratings loss.
Deciding not to fight at full speed because you're at a point in the bracket where wins can no longer help and losses can no longer hurt isn't tanking, because you aren't deliberately trying to lose. You're simply playing at less than maximum effort because you no longer care if you win or lose.
Of course, it can be very difficult to tell the difference from the outside, because this is primarily a difference of intent rather than action. But strictly speaking, choosing to stop spending on the last war or two because you don't need to win to preserve bracket isn't generally considered tanking. You'd still probably place the best possible defense, and you'd probably still try to play as best you could within reason. But you might also choose to use it as a practice opportunity, letting players who normally don't attack certain nodes have a shot at it to get better. That could cause your attack bonus to plummet, but that's entirely reasonable and entirely not anti-competitive on its own.
I'm not sure that addresses the problem in question, because any alliance that wanted to manipulate rating would deliberately choose rated wars, because the intent is to lose and drop rating.
I still think using win/loss record to select opponents does a lot more to mitigate the effects of war rating manipulation. Record matching seems to wipe out the advantages of ratings manipulation fairly quickly, and at the very top where manipulation has the greatest effect it seems to reduce the advantage to almost nothing.
That's your opinion. But you can't force an alliance to fight at any particular strength, so if they choose to not spend, and then they choose because they don't spend to divert a player to a mandatory path and off an optional one, you can't accuse them of deliberately trying to lose, especially when in the literal sense they aren't trying to lose. They are just not trying as hard to win. There's a fundamental difference between deliberately trying to lose and just not trying hard to win. You can call not trying hard enough "tanking" but then everyone tanks. I'd bet real money your alliance doesn't try as hard as humanly possible to win every war.
I do not agree that devs generally know a lot better than the players do, since the Summoners play MCOC a lot more. I am curious to know what "popular" idea from the community would kill the game aside from RDTs?
Trading champs/cats, class specific crystals, God tier crystals, 1 million shards for completing a daily quest for zero energy, multiplying eq/war rewards by 10, AQ energy timers reduced/capacity raised to a million, etc...
Granted a lot of that is hyperbole but you get the gist. This place is littered with terrible short sighted ideas
this is exactly like a top tier sporting team benching it star players and giving the rookies a go.
as there is no concern over a win or loss.
still give it all a red hot go but just not as much pressure.
its like why spend units and use resources when a win or loss makes no difference to season standing?
at t6 it is harder to do that as 3 Win or Losses are all the flex in the bracket. we cant lose to many otherwise we may drop to t7.
as far as coding and game balance goes they do.as they actually know the code behind the game. they know the code that runs the game.
and whilst there are some player that know alot.
just look around at the all the stupid questions and suggestions you see from players who know nothing bout anything and would destroy game balance if they had their suggestions made reality.
Actually, RDTs are a really good thing to focus on. Most of these players that play the game more and supposedly know more can't even guess at *why* RDTs are so problematic. And that's because playing the game is not the same thing as understanding why the game works or doesn't work. Playing the game is to designing games as driving cars is to designing cars.
Game players can only have informed opinions on the parts of the game they directly experience and understand. They might have an informed opinion on, say, how strong or weak Sentry is in certain kinds of content. But they don't eve *see* how the reward systems in the game work, or how they are intertwined with the monetization systems, or how progress curves are managed, so their opinions about these things is basically random guesses.
I'm not sure if any of those ideas would kill the game, although most would probably not be good for the game in the long run. But the singular idea that is most commonly promoted that would definitely have significant long term bad effects on the game is removing randomness from the rewards. It is one thing for someone to be philosophically against random rewards: that's a preference, and I understand it. But anyone who thinks completely removing the randomness from the rewards, particularly champion rewards, wouldn't hurt the game is almost certainly wrong. There's a reason why random lootboxes have become so popular over the last twenty years, and it isn't because they don't work. They may be good, they may be bad, they may be pure unadulterated evil, but the one thing they most definitely are is effective.
If this game was identical in all other respects except that players had specific, explicit ways to target the champions they wanted that was both reliable and relatively straight forward (and didn't take an inordinate amount of time) I'd bet real money the game would either have a tiny fraction of its current playerbase or be dead.
On that we agree. As frustrating as it is to go through 10+ featured 5* crystals before getting someone you might want let alone the one champ you want most, I understand why it is how it is. That's the sole reason featured crystals were changed to begin with. If the crystals were kept the same with the amount of shards available today, you could just about guarantee getting any specific champ you targeted. I think that's terrible for the game and I think the initial blade crystal showed that. You had 90%+ of summoners in an alliance with blade as their top champ and a synergy Tema built around him. It left next to no room for adapting to new defenders added that he wasn't suited for.
I think some things are overly monetized in this game (unfortunately that's just the current gamib landscape whether mobile or pc) but I just don't think guaranteeing people get what they want in this type of game works in the long run
Hmm... well I for one am onboard for rank down tickets especially as a once a year thing like Kabam did for Christmas. The reason being is that the meta is shifting, so a lot of the old champs that we are working with are not suitable counters to the champions we are facing now. So I believe a once a year thing would not break the game.
I’m not sure how you are in the game, but don’t you think that players who grind, are part of the “End Game” of MCOC would have a better idea as to how the players should get rewarded, instead of getting “bread crumb” like awards? Of course, there are others who want all the 5* shards, t2a, and t5b in the world (which can’t happen), but an increase in awards would be nice (like Solo Events, Monthly EQ, Dungeons, Daily Quests maybe?)
Why should you be able to rearrange your roster yearly bc of meta shifts? There is always new content to complete to earn new rank resources. Yes, they aren't always immediately available but they will be eventually.
As the meta of the game changes you rank different champs that fit the current game state. Sure there's going to be periods of time where you can't immediately do that but you will be able to eventually
Well why not rearrange your roster once a year? I’m not saying give 10+ RDTs like they did for 12.0 compensation, but maybe 1-2 per Star level.
In regards to “eventually” getting the new rank up resources - I think that’s where Kabam should improve. T5B can only be found in high level competitive alliance war, some players like myself who are laid back do not want to do that. Where’s the content for us? And T2A - nowadays the top tier alliances get get 1-2 t2a within a months time because of the AQ rewards whereas finishing uncollected + master will grant you less than half of a T2A. I believe progression should be more balanced and rank up materials should be more available with the insane grinding of resources to do map 6.
Well if you want to play at a relaxed level, you get resources at a relaxed rate. If you work less hours you get paid less money usually. You have to decide what level you want to play at and accept that reward rate. If you got the same rewards for sleepwalking through map 3 everyday as map 7 (or even mildly close) why would anyone play at the most competitive levels?
Basically put in the time/effort/or money to progress faster or just accept doing things slower than others.
I tried to convey this with the preceeding paragraph; “It does however mean you’ll get a real war in during the off season. If a real war is the goal without WR adjustments maybe it would be possible to have off season wars with two options.”
And what is a “relaxed rate” in your eyes since you mentioned it? I definitely did not say that those who play map 3 should have equal rewards to map 6/7. I did say progression should be more balanced, especially as a solo player. The game forces you to play with an alliance though there are individual players and it punishes them.