I know that real world trading is an issue, it is in almost every game I know, but why you didn't go for a softer solution?
Instead of 100% removing this functionality you could have put limits to it. For example 600 or 800 units someone is alowed to gift away per month, or having a ballance between units in gifts received/gifts given. Indeed it could be based on Summoner level, the higher your level, the higher your limit. I don't think someone is going to go thru all the process of taking an account to level 50 or 60 to make less than 10 dollars a month.
I also know that this would require some development but I don't think it would need more than a quick sprint.
I think therein lies the problem. As long as you're able to Gift using a profitable Resource, it will be abused.
I'm playing around with some ideas. Naturally, they will be very cautious to reinstate anything. I would be concerned with less. However, it may be possible to reinstate it using Gifting "Chits", or Tickets. These Tickets would be earned through game play, and not purchasable. Now, that doesn't totally solve the issue of people selling services outside the game, but it would be easier to monitor for suspicious activity, using the same means they do for Mods and the like. If you remove the means to use purchasable currency for it, that might be a way to minimize the risk. It might also provide an in-house way of dealing with suspicious behavior that doesn't involve going through third-party transactions.
I saw previous posts where people asked others to be honest and admit they bought the package for the units, or got the badge for other "not out of the goodness of your heart" reasons. While this may be true of most (no idea the numbers here, but I AM slightly jaded) I personally bought the package for the badge so I could on occasion gift to my alliance, my fiance, my sons, and on rare occasions random friendly people from Global Chat. I may be a rarity, but there ARE users out there who are just generally nice.
I honestly wish kabam stuck to the 300 units because this sets more precedent for a whine fest over things showing kabam wont stick to their decisions if you whine enough
A company trying to appease upset consumers? Yeah what a dangerous precedent
The more you give the more people will want to take. Its greed, really human nature in a way. But yea I dont like when people cave and issue apologies for their choices. Stand by what you say
Granting people An equal sum of what they believe they are owed is hardly giving, the vast majority of people who bought the badge felt that they were stiffed. Kabam thought about the situation and agreed. There is nothing wrong with reassessing your position. Also Empathy is a pretty good trait in the human race, you should try it out 👍 or alternatively go and get a massage or something, might loosen you up a little
You ruined yourself with your comment. You said what they "believe". Theres a difference in what you believe and what is reality. A big difference. The reality is you are getting double the amount of units for this which they don't have to do and in my opinion don't need to do. But just because you believe you are owed something, doesnt make it fact.
You’re ruining yourself by continuing to pour over comments looking for retorts. Give it a spell ol’ sport. What’s done is done as I’m sure youve said to numerous people on the forums in the past 👍
I honestly wish kabam stuck to the 300 units because this sets more precedent for a whine fest over things showing kabam wont stick to their decisions if you whine enough
A company trying to appease upset consumers? Yeah what a dangerous precedent
The more you give the more people will want to take. Its greed, really human nature in a way. But yea I dont like when people cave and issue apologies for their choices. Stand by what you say
Granting people An equal sum of what they believe they are owed is hardly giving, the vast majority of people who bought the badge felt that they were stiffed. Kabam thought about the situation and agreed. There is nothing wrong with reassessing your position. Also Empathy is a pretty good trait in the human race, you should try it out 👍 or alternatively go and get a massage or something, might loosen you up a little
You ruined yourself with your comment. You said what they "believe". Theres a difference in what you believe and what is reality. A big difference. The reality is you are getting double the amount of units for this which they don't have to do and in my opinion don't need to do. But just because you believe you are owed something, doesnt make it fact.
You’re ruining yourself by continuing to pour over comments looking for retorts. Give it a spell ol’ sport. What’s done is done as I’m sure youve said to numerous people on the forums in the past 👍
I would like to know what is being done to Omni, as several big "whales" are in there who somehow always seem to have dozens of Odins to spend somehow on youtube videos. If I recall this isnt the first time they've been caught in ILLEGAL activities.
If history tells us anything 7 day ban and they keep everything
The problem with banning in this circumstance is that the bans would most likely ban "mules" and not the "ringleaders" because the people operating the fraud would, if they have any brains at all, insulate their valuable accounts from the activity, making it difficult to prove a connection.
If I were the kind of person that would do this, I would create an independent untraceable botnet to harvest and sell resources, take the cash and buy iTunes gift cards, and apply them to my main account. The money is now completely untraceable and laundered, and there's no connection between the account I care about and the botnet which is composed of accounts that I don't care if they get banned. In fact, I would presume they would get banned, and the object of the game would be to extract the resources quickly enough to make it profitable before time ran out.
This game has been played, and replayed, for decades in online games.
I know that real world trading is an issue, it is in almost every game I know, but why you didn't go for a softer solution?
Instead of 100% removing this functionality you could have put limits to it. For example 600 or 800 units someone is alowed to gift away per month, or having a ballance between units in gifts received/gifts given. Indeed it could be based on Summoner level, the higher your level, the higher your limit. I don't think someone is going to go thru all the process of taking an account to level 50 or 60 to make less than 10 dollars a month.
I also know that this would require some development but I don't think it would need more than a quick sprint.
I and others mentioned unlocking gifting with certain metrics, and that is a partial way to address the issues. But gifting limits don't work when it comes to exploitive behavior. If I'm selling resources in-game, I'm not doing it with one single account that could get banned and shut me down. I'd be doing it with a large auto-created constellation of accounts. Whatever limit you make, I'll just make more accounts to ensure that I can transfer any volume I want. If I want to sell 10,000 units of value per week, I just need fifty accounts to do that (under the limit you specified). Meanwhile, a normal player that just wants to gift large alliance potions to their friends could hit the limit instantly with a single transaction and then be locked out for the rest of the month (the last time I gifted someone something, it was about 700 units worth of alliance potions).
I honestly wish kabam stuck to the 300 units because this sets more precedent for a whine fest over things showing kabam wont stick to their decisions if you whine enough
A company trying to appease upset consumers? Yeah what a dangerous precedent
The more you give the more people will want to take. Its greed, really human nature in a way. But yea I dont like when people cave and issue apologies for their choices. Stand by what you say
Granting people An equal sum of what they believe they are owed is hardly giving, the vast majority of people who bought the badge felt that they were stiffed. Kabam thought about the situation and agreed. Empathy is a pretty good trait in the human race, you should try it out 👍 or alternatively go and get a massage or something, might loosen you up a little
Show.me how you were wronged and owed units? You bought 850 got 850. They added 300 more ..
Just trying logic here you spent 30 dollars and now get a 60 dollar value.. but why?
So paying $100.00 is equal to getting 850 units back as compensation? Come on man
I honestly wish kabam stuck to the 300 units because this sets more precedent for a whine fest over things showing kabam wont stick to their decisions if you whine enough
A company trying to appease upset consumers? Yeah what a dangerous precedent
The more you give the more people will want to take. Its greed, really human nature in a way. But yea I dont like when people cave and issue apologies for their choices. Stand by what you say
Granting people An equal sum of what they believe they are owed is hardly giving, the vast majority of people who bought the badge felt that they were stiffed. Kabam thought about the situation and agreed. Empathy is a pretty good trait in the human race, you should try it out 👍 or alternatively go and get a massage or something, might loosen you up a little
Show.me how you were wronged and owed units? You bought 850 got 850. They added 300 more ..
Just trying logic here you spent 30 dollars and now get a 60 dollar value.. but why?
So paying $100.00 is equal to getting 850 units back as compensation? Come on man
Did you not get the Odin's worth of Units with that?
So paying $100.00 is equal to getting 850 units back as compensation? Come on man
How can you say you paid $100 for just the gifting badge? If that's the case by all means you should get it back but that's simply not true. If you spent $100 on an Odin that happened to have a gifting badge in it its the same case as everyone else. You got the units worth and the badge happened to be a free bonus. Kabam doesn't owe you anything. If you don't like it stop playing or stop spending but come on mate you're being ridiculous.
I’m just glad they are taking action on this behavior. I would expect to see more outrage that people are getting items at 40% of legit cost instead of outrage at putting and end to the discrepancy. Kabam has actually listened to feedback and are giving back 850 units, making an effort to stop fraud, and trying to protect the integrity of the contest.
If I need to gift someone I can just send them an iTunes or google play card code, or even use the pay app in phone by text message. But I sure as hell won’t be and have never bought items at a discount, we should all know when things sound too good to be true there is something fishy going on behind the scenes.
Let me me blunt. This won't be a short post. This wants to be a deeper analysis of the current situation of the game after the removal of gifting. I will start with 2 main points:
1)WELL DONE. This was a long plague that despite being beneficial to almost all players, was depending on frauds. HAving them coming from couple people wanting a quick buck or being purely money laundering from Asian, European or any other Region, this needed to stop.
2)At today, there is a ongoing "no spending week" movement. While i do understand the removal of gifts means more issues than goodies for summoners, i can't agree with it. By no means we should support any kind of fraud, and i am referring not to fraud toward kabam, rather fraud moeny being laundered in an online game.
With that said, there ARE problems arising. And what follows wants to be not a flame, but a reasonable critique to the current system and state of the game from resources perspective.
As start, let's be honest and brutal: fraud odins and units HAVE SUSTAINED the game for the last years. By no means summoners would be able to compete for higher AQs, or AWs without Donations being dropped, or potions/revives being purchased at lower price. None but maybe 2% of the current player population would be able to afford the full impact of donations+potions+revives+boosts. With this i am not saying this practice was good, but i'm saying, and stating, that it's been the pillar of the MCoC "society", and without it, there wouldn't be enough sustain ingame for summoners to play like they did last years.
From this, i'm certain that the other side of the medal brought Kabam to record and acquire data on their events which wasn't resembling the true status of the game. With this, i mean having a noticeable lower revenue that probably expected due to people being able to access cheaper units for their accounts. That is a problem for both Kabam and playerbase, as it probably gave Kabam the wrong idea and pushed them towards adding difficulty, weird nodes, and combination of characters or matchups being probably harder than needed to cope up with the unexpected loss of revenue (the so called wallet nodes, bs nodes, and unavoidable dmg nodes). On another side, having this "fake" return of data, my guess is Kabam never really thought or felt like overhauling the POTION/REVIVES system. If summoners were able to clear content in a much easier way then predicted (we're still talking buisness and revenue here ofc) why would they need to add further ways of obtaining said resources. Makes sense. We are all aware that revives were made "casual" and impossible to farm consistently, if not trough milestones. Among them, only 20% and 40% are obtainable ingame. Same goes for potions, where even random drops from content like VARIANT, ACT 5-6 and similar only nets up to a lv 3 potion. Lv3 potions are the highest tier of heals consistently farmable ingame (RoL mainly), and are by far obsolete with the amount of HP r4 and r5 5* have.
With that said, i'd like to take a step further into MCoC structure: MCoC is, and will still be, a FREE TO PLAY game with micro transactions to support the developer. There are many many free to play game which arised in popularity in the gaming community (i won't make names). Every single one of them either gets income from selling "looks" or "boosters". meaning they either give players the opportunity to customize accounts or directly sell them "faster account improvement" in forms like better weapons, better resources, and so on. In MCoC's case, the second one is the leitmotif, where you purchase micro-transactions in order to boost your account and speed up the process of building it stronger. In most of cases, and MCoC is no exception, you sell "TIME". You trade less time spent ingame obtaining those resources in exchange for your money and an istant availability. Which is still in the domain of "fairness".
But here comes the hurdle: NONE, or very FEW of F2P games not only sell "Boosters", but also "basic items". That's where i feel MCoC is responsible, partially, into fueling up fraud units sellers. BY NO MEANS, IN ANY GAME, BASIC ITEMS SHOULD BE BARRICATED BEHIND MICROTRANSACTIONS. And sadly, MCoC is exactly there in terms of HEALING.
We have a potion and revive system ranging from lv1 to lv5. Both for Revives and Heals. That's already two separated items needed to heal. Of those 2 items:
REVIVES: Can't be farmed and appear randomly in quests with low cadency. Rewarded in milestones for individual and ally's events. Of those, only LV1 and LV2 are obtainable ingame. Rest can only be purchased through microtransactions. POTIONS: Random drops from fights in all content, can be farmed consistently in RoL mainly (time consuming), but only LV1, LV2, and LV3 potions are currently available ingame. LV4 and LV5, both team and single ones, can be only purchased through micro transactions. Lv1-2-3 are by now obsolete and will be even more obsolete with the advent of 6* rankups.
And this is a very HUGE deal.
That's exactly the reason why for years the "Black Market" has flourished to those levels. To the point it had to shut down. BASIC ITEMS shouldn't be hidden behind paywalls by no means. But let me rephrase better:
IT'S FAIR TO SELL BASIC ITEMS IN MICROTRANSACTIONS AS LONG AS THE SAME ITEMS ARE OBTAINABLE INGAME FOR THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF TIME INVESTED.
That MUST be the main rule. As i said above, microtransactions are purchases of "TIME", allowing you to skip the "farming" and gaining access to ISTANT rewards.
But what to do when the rewards you can purchase in 1 minute CAN'T be farmed in many hours through ingame content? Players should be rewarded for the time invested ingame being it farming or clearing content. You can't clear content without farming, unless you purchase "boosters" and cut the line, which is fair given you're giving sustain to the developer. But that's a one way situation while it should be a two ways one.
-I will save time purchasing microtransactions for what i need
or
-I will not invest money but my time to gain what i need through ingame free drops.
Putting a CAP, or a BAN, to the level of items being farmable ingame is EXACTLY what made fraud units so abused. If i can't afford 100 bucks for an odin, and there's nothing over lv3 potions to obtain with hours and hours of farming, what should i do, considering what i farm in 10 hours will be ok for 5 fights, given how the content has skyrocketed to new levels as the game progressed? Fraud units answered those demands. From a certain point of view, Kabam is responsible of what happened. Not factoring in this HUGE thing (no paywalls on basic items, again) has brought the game where it is.
That is why closing down gifting was and is A GOOD CHOICHE. but it isn't nearly ENOUGH.
Dear Kabam, i don't have better words to put this in, but right now you're cutting legs to 90% of your playerbase, despite doing the right thing. That's why:
1) Cap on potions levels MUST be revoked, and you need to create "FARMING SPOTS" of different tiers to allow summoners to trade "TIME" for "ITEMS". 2) Revives needs to be farmable at a consistent rate, adjusting difficulty of farming spots based on revive levels. 3) SELLING potions and revives is still ok, as long as you can obtain ingame what you can buy, without bracketing differently. 4) POTION LEVELS AND REVIVES levels need a COMPLETE OVERHAUL: we're at the point 75% of healing is absolutely useless. 5) Have potions SCALE UP with titles, whereas progressing through ACT4, 5, and 6 wih the related titles and higher tier of ingame items obtainable potions and revives scale too.
Else, there gonna be dark days ahead. We all love this game, and the least we want is people boycotting it, or the population getting halved.
PS: the very same argument can be made for donations. Loyalty, battlechips, Gold all need a better farmability, and that too can be tiered with titles and acts progression up to currently cavalier. a node paying up 100 gold for a act 1 new account runner should net 1000 gold in every content for a cavalier running it, for example. Same goes for grey ISO and anything basic in the game.
Hoping to have kept my wall of text decent and respectful, i'd like to hear other's opinions as well as the mods point of view.
I honestly wish kabam stuck to the 300 units because this sets more precedent for a whine fest over things showing kabam wont stick to their decisions if you whine enough
A company trying to appease upset consumers? Yeah what a dangerous precedent
The more you give the more people will want to take. Its greed, really human nature in a way. But yea I dont like when people cave and issue apologies for their choices. Stand by what you say
Granting people An equal sum of what they believe they are owed is hardly giving, the vast majority of people who bought the badge felt that they were stiffed. Kabam thought about the situation and agreed. Empathy is a pretty good trait in the human race, you should try it out 👍 or alternatively go and get a massage or something, might loosen you up a little
Show.me how you were wronged and owed units? You bought 850 got 850. They added 300 more ..
Just trying logic here you spent 30 dollars and now get a 60 dollar value.. but why?
So paying $100.00 is equal to getting 850 units back as compensation? Come on man
If you were looking for the gifting badge you only needed the $30 package.
I honestly wish kabam stuck to the 300 units because this sets more precedent for a whine fest over things showing kabam wont stick to their decisions if you whine enough
A company trying to appease upset consumers? Yeah what a dangerous precedent
The more you give the more people will want to take. Its greed, really human nature in a way. But yea I dont like when people cave and issue apologies for their choices. Stand by what you say
Granting people An equal sum of what they believe they are owed is hardly giving, the vast majority of people who bought the badge felt that they were stiffed. Kabam thought about the situation and agreed. Empathy is a pretty good trait in the human race, you should try it out 👍 or alternatively go and get a massage or something, might loosen you up a little
Show.me how you were wronged and owed units? You bought 850 got 850. They added 300 more ..
Just trying logic here you spent 30 dollars and now get a 60 dollar value.. but why?
So paying $100.00 is equal to getting 850 units back as compensation? Come on man
Did you not get the Odin's worth of Units with that?
Yes but it was also for the gifting badge so I still get screwed. Not a fair compensation. Sorry you’re a kabam fan boy
Dude, I spent 30 dollars for the gifting badge. No clue why you would pay 100
Guess some of you didn’t know it was available in the Odin pack which I purchased. Great that everyone who paid $30 for it but doesn’t help me. Don’t know why y’all are attacking me. I got screwed.
I honestly wish kabam stuck to the 300 units because this sets more precedent for a whine fest over things showing kabam wont stick to their decisions if you whine enough
A company trying to appease upset consumers? Yeah what a dangerous precedent
The more you give the more people will want to take. Its greed, really human nature in a way. But yea I dont like when people cave and issue apologies for their choices. Stand by what you say
Granting people An equal sum of what they believe they are owed is hardly giving, the vast majority of people who bought the badge felt that they were stiffed. Kabam thought about the situation and agreed. Empathy is a pretty good trait in the human race, you should try it out 👍 or alternatively go and get a massage or something, might loosen you up a little
Show.me how you were wronged and owed units? You bought 850 got 850. They added 300 more ..
Just trying logic here you spent 30 dollars and now get a 60 dollar value.. but why?
So paying $100.00 is equal to getting 850 units back as compensation? Come on man
Did you not get the Odin's worth of Units with that?
Yes but it was also for the gifting badge so I still get screwed. Not a fair compensation. Sorry you’re a kabam fan boy
Lol what so you paid 100 dollars for 3100 units got a bonus 850 and you got screwed?
Tell me more.
Tell you more about what? How KABAM are a bunch of thieves?
I honestly wish kabam stuck to the 300 units because this sets more precedent for a whine fest over things showing kabam wont stick to their decisions if you whine enough
A company trying to appease upset consumers? Yeah what a dangerous precedent
The more you give the more people will want to take. Its greed, really human nature in a way. But yea I dont like when people cave and issue apologies for their choices. Stand by what you say
Granting people An equal sum of what they believe they are owed is hardly giving, the vast majority of people who bought the badge felt that they were stiffed. Kabam thought about the situation and agreed. Empathy is a pretty good trait in the human race, you should try it out 👍 or alternatively go and get a massage or something, might loosen you up a little
Show.me how you were wronged and owed units? You bought 850 got 850. They added 300 more ..
Just trying logic here you spent 30 dollars and now get a 60 dollar value.. but why?
So paying $100.00 is equal to getting 850 units back as compensation? Come on man
Did you not get the Odin's worth of Units with that?
Yes but it was also for the gifting badge so I still get screwed. Not a fair compensation. Sorry you’re a kabam fan boy
The Gifting Badge was an added bonus to the Odin you purchased. You purchased the Units, and you received and used them. Now you're expecting the value of what you already received and used, because the Feature was disabled, due to Fraud. Regardless of that, you still got the full value of what you paid for. There's a reason the Odin costs the same without the Badge.
I understand that there are people abusing the system YOU created, but it isn't fair to your loyal rule following players to be punished. I spent my hard earned money on your game, that is always after our money, to get a gifting badge. Like most people, I use it responsibly, Just to have it snatched from me for someone else's mistake. Not ok. Then to make matters worse, you act as if its comparable to 300 units!!! What a slap in the face to us devoted players. I hope more is on the way if we are not getting a refund.
I dont want your refund units, me too, just like the rest, we used CASH. The refund units can only be use back into this ridiculous game, we are not suckers. Refund cash back
Comments
I'm playing around with some ideas. Naturally, they will be very cautious to reinstate anything. I would be concerned with less. However, it may be possible to reinstate it using Gifting "Chits", or Tickets. These Tickets would be earned through game play, and not purchasable. Now, that doesn't totally solve the issue of people selling services outside the game, but it would be easier to monitor for suspicious activity, using the same means they do for Mods and the like. If you remove the means to use purchasable currency for it, that might be a way to minimize the risk. It might also provide an in-house way of dealing with suspicious behavior that doesn't involve going through third-party transactions.
Thank you for the change in heart, Kabam.
Yo Charles, you were an average basketball player. Definitely better as a commentator
@John757 Average?! You’re silly.
If I were the kind of person that would do this, I would create an independent untraceable botnet to harvest and sell resources, take the cash and buy iTunes gift cards, and apply them to my main account. The money is now completely untraceable and laundered, and there's no connection between the account I care about and the botnet which is composed of accounts that I don't care if they get banned. In fact, I would presume they would get banned, and the object of the game would be to extract the resources quickly enough to make it profitable before time ran out.
This game has been played, and replayed, for decades in online games.
@John757 Average?! You’re silly.
Bro I’m just playin 😂
If I need to gift someone I can just send them an iTunes or google play card code, or even use the pay app in phone by text message. But I sure as hell won’t be and have never bought items at a discount, we should all know when things sound too good to be true there is something fishy going on behind the scenes.
1)WELL DONE. This was a long plague that despite being beneficial to almost all players, was depending on frauds. HAving them coming from couple people wanting a quick buck or being purely money laundering from Asian, European or any other Region, this needed to stop.
2)At today, there is a ongoing "no spending week" movement. While i do understand the removal of gifts means more issues than goodies for summoners, i can't agree with it. By no means we should support any kind of fraud, and i am referring not to fraud toward kabam, rather fraud moeny being laundered in an online game.
With that said, there ARE problems arising. And what follows wants to be not a flame, but a reasonable critique to the current system and state of the game from resources perspective.
As start, let's be honest and brutal: fraud odins and units HAVE SUSTAINED the game for the last years. By no means summoners would be able to compete for higher AQs, or AWs without Donations being dropped, or potions/revives being purchased at lower price. None but maybe 2% of the current player population would be able to afford the full impact of donations+potions+revives+boosts. With this i am not saying this practice was good, but i'm saying, and stating, that it's been the pillar of the MCoC "society", and without it, there wouldn't be enough sustain ingame for summoners to play like they did last years.
From this, i'm certain that the other side of the medal brought Kabam to record and acquire data on their events which wasn't resembling the true status of the game. With this, i mean having a noticeable lower revenue that probably expected due to people being able to access cheaper units for their accounts. That is a problem for both Kabam and playerbase, as it probably gave Kabam the wrong idea and pushed them towards adding difficulty, weird nodes, and combination of characters or matchups being probably harder than needed to cope up with the unexpected loss of revenue (the so called wallet nodes, bs nodes, and unavoidable dmg nodes).
On another side, having this "fake" return of data, my guess is Kabam never really thought or felt like overhauling the POTION/REVIVES system. If summoners were able to clear content in a much easier way then predicted (we're still talking buisness and revenue here ofc) why would they need to add further ways of obtaining said resources. Makes sense.
We are all aware that revives were made "casual" and impossible to farm consistently, if not trough milestones. Among them, only 20% and 40% are obtainable ingame. Same goes for potions, where even random drops from content like VARIANT, ACT 5-6 and similar only nets up to a lv 3 potion. Lv3 potions are the highest tier of heals consistently farmable ingame (RoL mainly), and are by far obsolete with the amount of HP r4 and r5 5* have.
With that said, i'd like to take a step further into MCoC structure: MCoC is, and will still be, a FREE TO PLAY game with micro transactions to support the developer. There are many many free to play game which arised in popularity in the gaming community (i won't make names). Every single one of them either gets income from selling "looks" or "boosters". meaning they either give players the opportunity to customize accounts or directly sell them "faster account improvement" in forms like better weapons, better resources, and so on.
In MCoC's case, the second one is the leitmotif, where you purchase micro-transactions in order to boost your account and speed up the process of building it stronger.
In most of cases, and MCoC is no exception, you sell "TIME". You trade less time spent ingame obtaining those resources in exchange for your money and an istant availability. Which is still in the domain of "fairness".
But here comes the hurdle: NONE, or very FEW of F2P games not only sell "Boosters", but also "basic items". That's where i feel MCoC is responsible, partially, into fueling up fraud units sellers.
BY NO MEANS, IN ANY GAME, BASIC ITEMS SHOULD BE BARRICATED BEHIND MICROTRANSACTIONS. And sadly, MCoC is exactly there in terms of HEALING.
We have a potion and revive system ranging from lv1 to lv5. Both for Revives and Heals. That's already two separated items needed to heal. Of those 2 items:
REVIVES: Can't be farmed and appear randomly in quests with low cadency. Rewarded in milestones for individual and ally's events. Of those, only LV1 and LV2 are obtainable ingame. Rest can only be purchased through microtransactions.
POTIONS: Random drops from fights in all content, can be farmed consistently in RoL mainly (time consuming), but only LV1, LV2, and LV3 potions are currently available ingame. LV4 and LV5, both team and single ones, can be only purchased through micro transactions. Lv1-2-3 are by now obsolete and will be even more obsolete with the advent of 6* rankups.
And this is a very HUGE deal.
That's exactly the reason why for years the "Black Market" has flourished to those levels. To the point it had to shut down. BASIC ITEMS shouldn't be hidden behind paywalls by no means. But let me rephrase better:
IT'S FAIR TO SELL BASIC ITEMS IN MICROTRANSACTIONS AS LONG AS THE SAME ITEMS ARE OBTAINABLE INGAME FOR THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF TIME INVESTED.
That MUST be the main rule. As i said above, microtransactions are purchases of "TIME", allowing you to skip the "farming" and gaining access to ISTANT rewards.
But what to do when the rewards you can purchase in 1 minute CAN'T be farmed in many hours through ingame content? Players should be rewarded for the time invested ingame being it farming or clearing content. You can't clear content without farming, unless you purchase "boosters" and cut the line, which is fair given you're giving sustain to the developer.
But that's a one way situation while it should be a two ways one.
-I will save time purchasing microtransactions for what i need
or
-I will not invest money but my time to gain what i need through ingame free drops.
Putting a CAP, or a BAN, to the level of items being farmable ingame is EXACTLY what made fraud units so abused. If i can't afford 100 bucks for an odin, and there's nothing over lv3 potions to obtain with hours and hours of farming, what should i do, considering what i farm in 10 hours will be ok for 5 fights, given how the content has skyrocketed to new levels as the game progressed?
Fraud units answered those demands.
From a certain point of view, Kabam is responsible of what happened. Not factoring in this HUGE thing (no paywalls on basic items, again) has brought the game where it is.
That is why closing down gifting was and is A GOOD CHOICHE. but it isn't nearly ENOUGH.
Dear Kabam, i don't have better words to put this in, but right now you're cutting legs to 90% of your playerbase, despite doing the right thing. That's why:
1) Cap on potions levels MUST be revoked, and you need to create "FARMING SPOTS" of different tiers to allow summoners to trade "TIME" for "ITEMS".
2) Revives needs to be farmable at a consistent rate, adjusting difficulty of farming spots based on revive levels.
3) SELLING potions and revives is still ok, as long as you can obtain ingame what you can buy, without bracketing differently.
4) POTION LEVELS AND REVIVES levels need a COMPLETE OVERHAUL: we're at the point 75% of healing is absolutely useless.
5) Have potions SCALE UP with titles, whereas progressing through ACT4, 5, and 6 wih the related titles and higher tier of ingame items obtainable potions and revives scale too.
Else, there gonna be dark days ahead. We all love this game, and the least we want is people boycotting it, or the population getting halved.
PS: the very same argument can be made for donations. Loyalty, battlechips, Gold all need a better farmability, and that too can be tiered with titles and acts progression up to currently cavalier. a node paying up 100 gold for a act 1 new account runner should net 1000 gold in every content for a cavalier running it, for example. Same goes for grey ISO and anything basic in the game.
Hoping to have kept my wall of text decent and respectful, i'd like to hear other's opinions as well as the mods point of view.
Regards.