Witness the Great Revival! Act 6 Chapter 1 - Coming March 13th

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Comments

  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,715 Guardian

    DNA3000 said:

    DrZola said:

    DNA3000 said:

    Campo4 said:

    Campo4 said:

    So I can bring a Rank 1 Level 1 unduped 5* Antman to Act 6, but I can't bring a 5/50 Sig 99 4* Archangel.

    In all seriousness, @Kabam Miike would you guys consider gating it by challenger rating instead of star level/rarity?

    i.e. 4* 5/50 and 5* 3/45 and above only?

    My point is, you guys invented challenger rating to essentially say a 5/50 is the same power level as a 3/45. They take similar amount of catalysts to rank, and have similar stats. Yet the way you are gating Act 6 doesn't take this into consideration. You can bring an extremely low level 5*, but not your most powerful 4*.

    I am personally not for any gating, however I think this would be a good compromise. It would be more about making sure players have the right roster for the job, and less about who is getting lucky with 5* pulls.

    I like this. If you are going to gate it at all, gate the content to Challenge Rating >= 90 or 100.
    They aren't gating to power level of the champs, but rather (to oversimplify a lot) the effort required to acquire them. A 5/50 has similar strength to a 3/45, but the 3/45 is much harder to acquire.
    Not hard at all...38 minutes left to get that increased chance 5* Ghost just now. It’s only money.
    Shhh, don't tell anyone but I just snagged one of those crystals without having to spend money. However, it seems harder to get a 5* from them than you thought: mine only had a 3* in it. Maybe I need to try harder next time.
    Wait aren't you building your roster with those. I thoughts how we did it.
    I wouldn't recommend using FGMCs as a primary roster building strategy unless you're willing to spend enormous amounts of money on them. I build my roster through gameplay. I open the occasional FGMC purely for fun. And I never spend actual cash on them.
  • Tasty_Yum_YumsTasty_Yum_Yums Member Posts: 444 ★★★



    At level 50-60, it's easy to forget that for much of an early player’s experience they are bumping into padlock icons all over the quests menu:

    - A multitude of our arenas cannot be played without specific Champion rarities, and to be competitive requires a lot of them.
    - Normal and Heroic difficulty event quests are locked behind levels 12 and 25, respectively.
    - Master was, for a long time, gated monthly behind the 100% exploration of its Heroic counterpart.
    - Uncollected difficulty requires not only reaching level 40, but completion of Act 5, Chapter 2.
    - Even entering Beginner asks you to be level 6!

    You provided examples of padlocks/gates in the past. You know what happened when players reached those milestones... they got an increase in their inventory limits and energy level. Should we expect to see our inventory limits expanded?

  • Timone147Timone147 Member Posts: 1,276 ★★★★
    edited March 2019
    So some feedback is we need better ways to pull the specific champ/champ type that we need for this content. If you want to have the content behind a milestone like this then I think it needs to be less completely luck tied to champs or at least some improvement. I still use some 4* at time(rarely) because even with all the 5* I have I dont have great luck with my pulls. Luckily I have the champs/skill to at min do one clear(hopefully much more lol) but I am missing certain niches in my champs(coldsnap counter for instance).

    I watch people pull top level 5* champs weekly while it takes me months of opening 5* Crystal's to finally get one that is worth something. This game is too luck dependent without a completely open form of loot progression to endlessly gain resource on our time for barriers like this.

    More traditional rpg/mmorpg games allow for grinding to achieve certain goals. Like in destiny luck is a big part of the game... but I can endlessly grind engrams to decode to get what I need eventually. This is not true of 5 and 6 star shards(or any resources really). There is a hard limit to rewards in this game so you cant overcome bad luck without time(not playtime but physical time) which is not a good formula with these champ requirement additions imo. I thought variant was wrong with this and this is even further a step in the wrong direction in the current loot system.

    I get the goal but the system is built to be punishing and alienating as a result because the randomness of the loot structure combined with the hard stop of how much loot you can aquire.
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  • kikiFurieuxkikiFurieux Member Posts: 251 ★★★
    edited March 2019
    The 4 star ban is not the best decision Kabam made that's for sure... If they wanted to put some requirements why not pushing the max level to 70 and say act 6 is for level 70 only? Or they could have based the entry requirement on 100% act 5.
    An interesting thing would have to allow only 1 and 2 stars champs with strong opponents, making act 6 skill based.
    But the 4 star ban is indeed not very wise...
  • LeNoirFaineantLeNoirFaineant Member Posts: 8,675 ★★★★★
    @DNA3000 nice post. I’m not that fussed about it but I wish they would find another solution. I feel like barring a sizable portion of everyone’s rosters for all future story quests is too high a price to pay. Just curious. Having read the explanation do you think this particular gate is a good idea?
  • DrZolaDrZola Member Posts: 9,134 ★★★★★
    We’re all going to laugh when 5* IP is the answer to 6.1.

    Dr. Zola
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,715 Guardian

    @DNA3000 nice post. I’m not that fussed about it but I wish they would find another solution. I feel like barring a sizable portion of everyone’s rosters for all future story quests is too high a price to pay. Just curious. Having read the explanation do you think this particular gate is a good idea?

    It isn't how I would have done it, but that's not an entirely fair criticism. For one thing, while I don't know what specific imperatives the devs are operating under, I would probably have saved any gate like this for whatever follows Act 6 (which I refer to as Act 7, although it might not be called that). The reasoning is that Act 6 is the last chapter of an entire story arc, and it might be more palatable conceptually for whatever happens next to have a more abrupt progress gate controlling access to it. This would also have given more time to get people used to gates like this: eliminating 2* and 3* champs from early Act 6, say, and eliminating CR80 and lower from later Act 6.

    I'm also more in favor of single hurdle gates than lockouts. One idea I think has a lot of merit is an idea I heard Brian Grant mention in a recent stream. He proposed the idea that the 5*/6* prerequisite being something that players could either unlock or somehow mitigate. For example (and this is my thoughts, not his, although there is overlap) you might require the first run through to be restricted to 5* and 6* champions, but perhaps different paths could have keys like Act 5.3 that unlock the ability to use, say, 4* Skill champs, or 4* Spiderverse champs in your team. Alternatively, Act 6 could award Act 6 special currency that you could use in a special store to unlock certain additional types of champs. Since everyone is different, players could work towards unlocking their own specific needs, like (lower level) Quantum champs or Bleed immune champs or whatever. There would be some additional strategy to how you ran different paths to then make additional runs progressively easier, or at least have more options.

    I'm not *opposed* to the straight up 5*/6* gate, in that I think it is just a hurdle to overcome that isn't terrible to overcome. On a *technical* level I think it is fine. But on a *psychological* level, I think players are much more willing to accept hardship if they think they can work through it to get to some better result at the other end. The Act 6 gate probably looks to most players less like a speed bump, or even a hurdle, and more of a constant cost. You can't "overcome" it, and giving players the means to overcome a hurdle tends to make hurdles far less controversial.

    I'm a firm believer that the best game design is invisible. When it works right, players hardly notice it is there. You can't always do that, but it should always be the standard to strive for.

    To answer your question directly, I think the gate is a good idea in the sense that I believe it does things that will ultimately be beneficial to the game as a whole. On the other hand, I think the gate picks a fight with the playerbase that I don't think is a good idea, because I think it could be avoided.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 19,715 Guardian

    An interesting thing would have to allow only 1 and 2 stars champs with strong opponents, making act 6 skill based.

    I think it is worth taking this head on. Not to pick on one poster, because a lot of people have said this, but the reason why this kind of restriction doesn't make sense in this context is because the gate is intended to be a progress gate, not a skill-measuring gate. Limiting the content to 2* champs is limiting the content to champs just about everyone has. Because everyone has them, it isn't a measure of progress.

    Some are arguing that this is a measure of progress, because it takes a lot of skill to do content with lower champs. But that's a different kind of progress, and not the kind of progress being discussed here. Relatedly, some people are asking (partially rhetorically) why *can't* Act 6 be "about skill." It is in part about skill, as is Act 5, and Uncollected difficulty, and lots of other higher tier content. But no part of this game is about pure skill, because this game is a champion collecting game that is built on a foundation of building rosters. Building rosters is a fundamental element of the game that can be a metric for measuring progress. "Skill" is a tool players use to play the game, but it is not a direct measurable quantity for gauging progress quantitatively in this game.

    There are always exceptions, but in general in the core content of the game you won't tend to see the game taking away the highest rarity champs because the very value of those higher rarity champs is that you can use them to make the content easier. The game also rewards skill, but it is not going to reward skill *above* the reward for possessing higher rarity champs.
  • allinashesallinashes Member Posts: 847 ★★★
    I think champ restrictions were probably a hard decision for Kabam. Without them, this content sounds too easy for Act 6. The amount of health and nodes they would have to put would be ridiculous.

    Otherwise big dogs would complain that is too easy and less advanced players would still complain it's too hard and unfair. People without a LoL champ would complain. Corvus users would complain. In short, it would be about what it is now just with different topics.

    No win situation here. Interesting that they gated it this way, but that's likely the rationale.
  • axelelf_1axelelf_1 Member Posts: 775 ★★★

    I think champ restrictions were probably a hard decision for Kabam. Without them, this content sounds too easy for Act 6. The amount of health and nodes they would have to put would be ridiculous.

    Otherwise big dogs would complain that is too easy and less advanced players would still complain it's too hard and unfair. People without a LoL champ would complain. Corvus users would complain. In short, it would be about what it is now just with different topics.

    No win situation here. Interesting that they gated it this way, but that's likely the rationale.

    The rationale is money: sales of exclusive fgmcs, ranking up 5*s we already have 5/50s of (and won't rank higher than r3 as a 5*). It's utter B.S. And so blatantly so. Really stupid move as it's eroding a lot of the goodwill regained since 12.0.
  • Maximus_SpankersonMaximus_Spankerson Member Posts: 445 ★★
    edited March 2019
    With that full page of "explanation", I haven't heard one actual good reason WHY 4*s are being frozen out.
    They alluded to Variant class gates and its intent to force summoners to come up with alternative solutions (ex. Hawkeye for power control), but no good reason, no reason at all was provided for restricting lower rarities in Act 6.

    I am sorry, but that response wasn't just good enough, it wasn't a response at all
  • Nike013Nike013 Member Posts: 1
    I just want to start off by saying I have been a fan of this game for over 3 years and still enjoy playing it regularly. Having said that, this move to ban 4 stars from act 6 play is a complete money hungry decision. Speaking from experience after 3 years of game play completing all of the content that has been put out and over 50, 5 star Crystal's I have maybe 5 usable 5 star champions. I don't like the idea of being punished for not pulling some of the God tier 5 star champions that have been put out. I know as well many people feel the same as well, as anyone that has had the same misfortune that personally have is getting punished. Now I greatly appreciate the rework of both she hulk and spider gwen. Being someone who was unfortunate enough to have both as 5 stars pre-buff. On the behalf of the community, I advise you lift the ban of 4 stars, or provide some sort of compensation to the community for all the time and resources that have been put into ranking and attaining a strong 4 star roster.
  • TyEdgeTyEdge Member Posts: 3,121 ★★★★★
    Champion requirements are an awful decision. First, story mode has never had champion or level bars in any form. This is an awful place to start.

    Second, and most importantly, the reasoning provided is a straight up lie. 5/50 champs have 10% lower attack and health than a 3/45 champ. Because of the prevalence of 4-star sig stones and crystals, it’s much easier to reach a high sig level with those champs. It’s also easier, based on volume of pulls, to obtain high quality champs.

    Finally, with the importance of unique synergies in the game, depriving summoners of the choice of using, say, a 5/50 Spark with 4/55 Blade doesn’t serve any purpose besides creating crystal cash grabs.

    Hey look! There’s a day-long crystal sale. What a coincidence. I’ve only pulled 13 consecutive 3-stars from FGMCs. I’m sure this’ll be fine.
  • Maximus_SpankersonMaximus_Spankerson Member Posts: 445 ★★
    edited March 2019

    I think champ restrictions were probably a hard decision for Kabam. Without them, this content sounds too easy for Act 6. The amount of health and nodes they would have to put would be ridiculous.

    Otherwise big dogs would complain that is too easy and less advanced players would still complain it's too hard and unfair. People without a LoL champ would complain. Corvus users would complain. In short, it would be about what it is now just with different topics.

    No win situation here. Interesting that they gated it this way, but that's likely the rationale.

    Errr... They are restricting RARITIES not RANKS. So while a fully maxed 5/50 4* isn't permitted, a rank 1 level 1 5* is...
  • Brutus2099Brutus2099 Member Posts: 52

    Hey everyone,

    Thank you all for the discussion on this topic. There’s been a lot of constructive feedback and thoughts, and it’s been valuable to us for considerations and internal discussion. We wanted to be clearer with our intentions, and better clarify why we want to do this and how it aligns with our past direction in the game.

    This is not the first time we’ve hard-gated something behind a form of progression. We use gates liberally, oftentimes to prevent players from having frustrating experiences in content beyond their capabilities, but also because we’re game developers and we have some intended play experiences in mind that we--through both iteration and personal gameplay experience--believe smooth out the ride and make the whole thing as enjoyable as possible.

    At level 50-60, it's easy to forget that for much of an early player’s experience they are bumping into padlock icons all over the quests menu:

    - A multitude of our arenas cannot be played without specific Champion rarities, and to be competitive requires a lot of them.
    - Normal and Heroic difficulty event quests are locked behind levels 12 and 25, respectively.
    - Master was, for a long time, gated monthly behind the 100% exploration of its Heroic counterpart.
    - Uncollected difficulty requires not only reaching level 40, but completion of Act 5, Chapter 2.
    - Even entering Beginner asks you to be level 6!

    And this is just looking at the monthly event quests. Dungeons need you to have a sizeable count of certain rarities before you can access the very same ones. Side Quests follow similar locking mechanics to the Monthly Events, and we’ve used gating methods both inter-quest (Dimensional Rifts and their shards) and more explicit (Danger Rooms rarity requirements, the current Recon Missions) to craft a specifically targeted experience or to more tightly tune the content we’re making.

    On the topic of tuning, that is our goal when using more stringent requirements in quests. Back Issues #1 used this explicitly with the Class requirements; we did this so we could build areas in each quest where lesser-used Champions could stand out--Hawkeye’s power drain capabilities in Chapter 1, Quest 1, for example--and be important for strategy where they normally would not. We’re aiming to do similar things in Back Issues #2, with a different approach. (More on that soon!)

    One reason we do this is because of how progression changes over time. Once you’ve achieved Level 60, we lose a numerical value of your time and experience in the game. The gap between a fresh 60 and a veteran 60 can be massive, just like in many other MMO games. One of the best ways we have to continue using those gates as both protective and progression measure is targeting the baseline strength and breadth of your roster.

    Act 6 (and other content) is built with specific challenges in mind. The requirement of 5 and 6-Stars is a broader application of the idea, but it allows us to build a more tightly-constructed experience around a more specific box of playstyles. Making one-size fits all content for an immense player toolbox can lead to things being more watered down and general, rather than the specific moments we can make when we know the lower and upper limits of each player as a matter of fact.

    Lastly, this is permanent content. When we place strict requirements on a Side Quest, it’s a gold rush; there’s only ~30 days to build or enhance a team for the quest in question, and it can be a real crunch to get it done. (I myself am going to have a hell of a time with the Avengers leg of the Recon Missions.) Act 6 is going to be around forever. If you can’t get into it right away, that’s alright. It’ll wait for you!

    Again I appreciate the discussion around this, and when we say we’re taking your feedback we mean it. When there are lots of opinions and discourse around a topic like this, we take it seriously. I’ve already had two meetings today to chat about it with a variety of teams. I hope my points better explain our stance on gating content, and why we feel comfortable doing it here in the way we are.

    @Kabam Goggy @Kabam Miike

    While the response is appreciated it really answers nothing, it dances around the topic completely and shows how out of touch with the player base of your game you really are.

    Whilst we the community can appreciate that some content needs to be gated there are good and bad ways of doing this and not allowing 4* is the worst way of gating content.

    4* heroes form a valuable part of i’d say 90% of people’s rosters and to completely eliminate the use of such champions segregates those people from those that throw bundles of cash at you and creating this rift will damage a great game.

    If this is the path you are going to go down then you need to change many other facets of the game.

    The game is largely based on RNG with your chance to pull a 5* hero from crystals offers and GMC being extremely low and then if you are lucky enough to get a 5* you have further RNG determining what champion you get. When it comes to 5* crystals while garaunteed 5* as you are more than aware there are desirable and less desirable champions.

    If you are making 4* worthless to the player base moving forward then you need to address how people obtain 5* champions. The rewards for everything through the game will need to be adjusted to facilitate your new direction.

    Example:
    PHC need to include 5* and drop out 2*
    All 4* reward shards need to change to 5*
    All 5* reward shards need to change to double or change to 6*

    Let’s not forget ranking up once again is gated behind RNG in that you have to get the right class catalysts to be able to rank champions up and some classes for everyone lag behind others in acquiring said resources.

    With this new gate PHC, GMC, 4* offers are all now worthless for the most part and people will not take up these offers which will hit your bottom line.

    4* arenas have become pointless now? Why bother doing something for a champion that you can use for synergies if you can’t now use it?

    This decision will send a ripple effect through the contest.

    Kabam is a business and we get that but has no one there thought of the obvious? This change will turn more players away from the game than anything else and hit your bottom line.. Did no one in your meetings consider that if the content in Act 6 is THAT hard that if you allow 4* champions the player is already at a disadvantage in tackling the content and that will likely result in more uptake of revives and potion purchases? If you are looking at the bottom line with this change you missed the obvious...

    I think the player base has already indicated a far better gate than 5/6* champions only in things like requiring elders bane or 100% Act 5.

    For you to drop this bomb on your playerbase 1 week before release shows a complete disregard of forethought on your behalf and a lack of understanding of your core players.

    I have generally always been able to find positives in your choices which usually cause community unrest but I’m sorry to say this time I’m at a loss.

    I hope you look at this further and decide on a different way to gate content.

    -Brutus2099
  • Bill0927Bill0927 Member Posts: 39
    Not a fan of blocking champs from story quest just seems like a cash grab if you don’t have the right 5 or 6* champs just by featured gmc’s until u get them even though 95% of the time you’ll pull a champ you can’t use in act 6 and if u pull a champ that isn’t useful then just keep trying. Bad choice kabam it’s not like someone with a 3* roster is getting though act 5 and my 4* Medusa got me though the ultron at then end of act 5 if I had to wait for a 5* I still wouldn’t be though it cause I haven’t been lucky enough from a crystal to pull one yet. Sorry but this along with the sudden bringing back all the features gmc’s reeks of cash grab
  • Bill0927Bill0927 Member Posts: 39
    @kabam goggy question how many korgs will be in act 6 a champ that need such specific counters where you can only use rare 5 or 6* versions shouldn’t be allowed in such content imo because it will put players that don’t have them at a huge disadvantage since with 100+ 5* in the current basic pull the odd of ever actually pulling one are fairly slim
  • Crimson8399Crimson8399 Member Posts: 762 ★★★
    I remember when LoL came out out and I made a post about it making 4* champs less valuable. A mod commented saying 4* champs were still valuable. I argued the power scale would make them less effective and was told while that is correct you could still use them if we chose. That being said, I see no difference between LOL and act 6 based on the notion that 4*s will provide me a worse time because of their strength.
  • MaatManMaatMan Member Posts: 958 ★★★
    wow.
    i went to sleep at 3am.
    woke at 11am.
    just spent 20mins reading 158 posts.

    sad thing is its all the same.
    people are saying the same thing over and over.

    people are just not happy.

    wat i do know is this.

    kabam have just released the perfect test to know wat affect this has on revenue.
    they know the community is pissed.
    so they spam out crystals.
    if they make no $$$$ they know they have really **** up.
    if they make a lot of money they can carry on as it doesnt matter there is unrest as the business model is still doing its job
  • Stagedear85Stagedear85 Member Posts: 774 ★★★
    Lol
  • LeNoirFaineantLeNoirFaineant Member Posts: 8,675 ★★★★★
    @DNA3000 I think you hit a homerun with the unlocking idea. If we could unlock 4*s along the way I think a lot of the objections would fade. This would still gate the quest somewhat while providing additional strategy and removing a lot of the sting.
  • ALCAMIST9ALCAMIST9 Member Posts: 48
    This is a big mistake Kabam not everyone has that Many 5 n 6 star champs like I don’t have a 6 n only 11five stars not really much notice either act 6 next week Kabam if this what’s goin to happen should have made 5 n six stars more available to us
  • RagamugginGunnerRagamugginGunner Member Posts: 2,210 ★★★★★

    I'm wondering if the people complaining about this have done every other piece of content in the game 100% yet. This has been advertised as the final Act to the story. They probably intend it to be done after all other content is completed.

    I can empathize with those with terrible RNG though. I like @Hulk_77 post above about Challenger Rating being a requirement rather than star level.

    I've done everything in the game 100%. Act 5. LOL. Variant.

    I have 101 5* champs

    I have 13 6* champs

    My total hero rating is 1.18M

    My Prestige is 10.2K

    I'm in an ally that\s top 30 in AQ

    Do you consider me worthy enough to voice my hatred of this stupid rule?
    Lol sure. I bet you're ready for Act 6 though despite the gate.
    I'll be done before the weekend. That doesn't mean I don't think it's total BS for Kabam to screw over lower level players.
  • WHOz_R4GEWHOz_R4GE Member Posts: 239 ★★
    If Kabam refuses to remove the 4 star restriction, could they implement class based 5 star crystals. This would atleast allow us a greater chance to target specific holes in our rosters, while still be subjected to RNG.
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