General Game Feedback [Merged Threads]

15354565859118

Comments

  • GamerGamer Member Posts: 11,441 ★★★★★

    Early release content is not always finalized content. We share that information with the CCP from time to time to help them get ready for Content they want to make surrounding new additions/changes/content in the Contest.

    This information we shared with the CCP was about content that we've been working on for a while now and is almost ready to share with the world. We'll release all of this information to players as soon as it's ready, and that's not too long from now!
    As long it for the better for the game.
  • ESFESF Member Posts: 2,084 ★★★★★

    Early release content is not always finalized content. We share that information with the CCP from time to time to help them get ready for Content they want to make surrounding new additions/changes/content in the Contest.

    This information we shared with the CCP was about content that we've been working on for a while now and is almost ready to share with the world. We'll release all of this information to players as soon as it's ready, and that's not too long from now!
    That sounds excellent, and I honestly appreciate you guys sifting through the thread(s) and being present

    There isn't a single person who doesn't want a great outcome, and I think this platform can deliver that
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 20,393 Guardian
    DrZola said:

    I get the theory. Paying to get ahead should carry premium pricing.

    And I’m fine with premium offer pricing as long as the offers are even kind of relevant. Recently, most aren’t.

    Crumbs of a crumb that one day add up to a collection of crumbs to eventually rank a single champ a single rank. A single catalyst when the game requires 10 or a dozen or more to register any meaningful impact on a champ.

    Premium pricing is fine. Combining it with a wildly inflated opinion of value is ridiculous.

    Dr. Zola
    It was not my intent to justify premium pricing, actually. It is more a question of value. The fact that you think the value of the offers is irrelevant to you is a part of the whole of designing offers that generate the most revenue possible while offering the least advantage possible in the game.

    For example, a lot of people think it is crazy that Kabam still offers 4* stuff for high prices. But that's entirely correct for an F2P game: of course no end game person would buy those unless they were trying to spend Brewster's millions. So we can say with absolute certainty that that offer generates no impact on the higher game whatsoever. The only people who would buy such an offer are people who a) are still progressing through the lower parts of the game, b) are really impatient, because those things aren't hard to get, and c) made of money.

    We want their money. They aren't going to miss the money. MCOC gets more revenue. And none of us notices any power creep associated with that spending. That's not silly, or ridiculous, or out of touch, or living in the past. That's F2P monetization perfection.

    Whenever the game convinces someone to spend cash and I don't notice any impact on the game, that's the kind of spending I want to see in a game I'm playing. It is one step away from the game setting up a Patreon page.

    Not every offer is like that. Some are designed to entice people to spend, hoping to convert a free to play player into a spender. $0.99 crystals are like that. The Sigil itself is like that. Some are designed to offer the occasional block buster package, like the July 4 offers, because sometimes you have to excite the spenders. But whenever the game can get rich people to spend a lot of money on nothing, they should take every such opportunity to sell "irrelevant" things.

    I think people assume that if Kabam puts out an offer for a toothpick for a hundred dollars, it is because they are deluded into thinking toothpicks are worth a hundred dollars or they are trying to mind control people into thinking that toothpicks are worth a hundred dollars. But that's not the case at all. They are saying, look, its a toothpick. Don't buy it unless you really want a toothpick and a hundred dollars means less to you than a toothpick.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 20,393 Guardian
    ESF said:

    I don’t mind a select group getting information first. I honestly don’t.

    What I would prefer to see happen, if the reception was, indeed, positive, that you release the information to the masses, basically, well, today.

    I would totally understand if it was the opposite, if the reception was chilly. You wait and work on it some more.

    But right now... it’s a weird place that we’re in with the game. Maybe even in the world, without ascribing too much hyperbole.

    But to me, right now, this community could use a little excitement. Maybe even a little hope.

    People just want the game to be fun and they want to feel like the developers want the experience, financial and time investment to be worthwhile.

    I would release information today, but that is just me. I am aggressive about these things. Because if the information is out there, it’s out there. Everyone who is a stakeholder can share in it
    I used to play a game where I used to get a lot of early access information. About a third of it never actually happened, at least in the form I heard about it. Stuff got delayed, stuff got cancelled, stuff got put on the back burner because something came up that made it impractical or impossible to do what they thought they could do.

    I didn't freak out about it, call the developer a bunch of liars or incompetents because they couldn't deliver. Because I understood I was getting information that wasn't ready for prime time yet. The CCP people know this as well, and won't in general react that way if Kabam has to change plans or change course. But there's lots of people who would. It is *precisely* the things they are the most excited about that are the most dangerous to release information about prematurely. Because the players can get super hyped up for it only to be disappointed if anything changes.
  • GroundedWisdomGroundedWisdom Member Posts: 36,927 ★★★★★
    DNA3000 said:

    It was not my intent to justify premium pricing, actually. It is more a question of value. The fact that you think the value of the offers is irrelevant to you is a part of the whole of designing offers that generate the most revenue possible while offering the least advantage possible in the game.

    For example, a lot of people think it is crazy that Kabam still offers 4* stuff for high prices. But that's entirely correct for an F2P game: of course no end game person would buy those unless they were trying to spend Brewster's millions. So we can say with absolute certainty that that offer generates no impact on the higher game whatsoever. The only people who would buy such an offer are people who a) are still progressing through the lower parts of the game, b) are really impatient, because those things aren't hard to get, and c) made of money.

    We want their money. They aren't going to miss the money. MCOC gets more revenue. And none of us notices any power creep associated with that spending. That's not silly, or ridiculous, or out of touch, or living in the past. That's F2P monetization perfection.

    Whenever the game convinces someone to spend cash and I don't notice any impact on the game, that's the kind of spending I want to see in a game I'm playing. It is one step away from the game setting up a Patreon page.

    Not every offer is like that. Some are designed to entice people to spend, hoping to convert a free to play player into a spender. $0.99 crystals are like that. The Sigil itself is like that. Some are designed to offer the occasional block buster package, like the July 4 offers, because sometimes you have to excite the spenders. But whenever the game can get rich people to spend a lot of money on nothing, they should take every such opportunity to sell "irrelevant" things.

    I think people assume that if Kabam puts out an offer for a toothpick for a hundred dollars, it is because they are deluded into thinking toothpicks are worth a hundred dollars or they are trying to mind control people into thinking that toothpicks are worth a hundred dollars. But that's not the case at all. They are saying, look, its a toothpick. Don't buy it unless you really want a toothpick and a hundred dollars means less to you than a toothpick.
    I agree with that statement. Too often we've heard them say that not all Offers are for everyone, and that's more literal than based on preference. Offers are targeted at a variety of levels of progress. Which is why people at later stages of the game can't resolve how something so trivial to them can be so highly priced. To them, it provides no advantage at all. To someone earlier on, it can. The second part of what you said as well is key because I've said for a long time now, spending only saves time. Aside from a select few things which are solely available for purchase, everything else can be acquired over time. That amount of time varies depending on what it is, but there's also a calculated way things are offered. The last part made me chuckle. I wouldn't say they need to have Millions. They would have to have enough disposable income to reasonably justify buying it. Some just do.
  • KDSuperFlash10KDSuperFlash10 Member Posts: 5,869 ★★★★★

    Well that just dashed my hopes a bit. I was hoping that the next big announcement would be about the feedback provided in this thread. Your statement makes me think this is going to be more about new end game content instead. Hope I’m wrong
    Yeah, I do hope that they stayed true to their word and actually had some of their decisions on the future of MCOC influenced by the feedback of the players.
  • DNA3000DNA3000 Member, Guardian Posts: 20,393 Guardian
    DrZola said:

    Your comment suggests the depth to which overvaluation runs in game doesn’t phase you. I would suggest that offers are a symptom, but not the problem. The fact that the team can get away with peddling $100 toothpicks to compulsive spenders doesn’t render such pricing rational or relevant.

    Two things. First, pricing is rational if there's a rational reason for doing it. I just gave a rational reason for doing it. You might not like it, but that doesn't make it irrational. I would do it if I was in charge of monetization, and I favor it as someone on the receiving end, in both cases for rational reasons that in my opinion make the game better than the alternatives.

    In part this is a cultural thing. In Asia, you can't generally get away with low value cash offers. They are considered insulting. But contrawise, pay to win, even pay to play, is considered perfectly acceptable. The cultural norm is spenders should get more than non-spenders, because spending is a perfectly acceptable way to get ahead in a game, just like in life. And there is a strong social stigma against people who spend less complaining about what the people who spend more get. Free to play players should shut up and take what they get, even if literally 80% of the game is behind a paywall. Like, the for-real kind of paywall where spending is the only way to get there, not the pretend paywall where spending gets you there faster, and impatient people complain.

    In Western games, the opposite tends to be true. Pay to win either makes the game marginal, or kills it outright. Paying players can be seen as getting faster, but not overwhelmingly more. That's not my opinion in either case, this is just the way the respective markets work. That's why it is so difficult to make a microtransaction-based game work in both markets without a lot of overhaul. cf: Man Wei Ge Dou, aka the original MCOC Chinese version.

    Second, you can characterize it any way you wish, but it goes both ways. If I'm indifferent to exploiting compulsion, you're ignorant of fundamental game economics and judgmentally insulting to the people who keep your game alive. Characterization is a judgment, not a statement of fact.

    This characterization seems to be the kind of thing people are more bold about when it comes to video games. People who would never tell someone to their face that spending $250 a month on Starbucks is stupid would tell them spending $100 a month on a video game is ridiculous. I once upgraded a flight to Tokyo from coach to first class because I decided I wanted to take a nap on the plane. That was a two thousand dollar nap. I don't recall anyone telling me I was a "compulsive spender" for doing it or that the airline was taking advantage of me. A live concert costs $99, the CD costs $29. Nobody says live concerts are irrational in the face of cheaper alternatives.

    Unless you're buying a gold brick, the value of the things you buy tends to be largely subjective. And you shouldn't judge, or even assume you have any way to evaluate, how someone else judges value.

    To answer your direct question:
    Put the recent $50 Ascendant offer for a T2a and some other scattered cat pieces under your lens. That one falls precisely where? The $50 toothpick?
    Actually I thought about it, because over the long haul T2A is one of my bigger bottlenecks. And I'm neither a compulsive spender or a weak willed individual when it comes to offers. I decided not to, but it was close.

    $50 is a lot of money to a lot of people, but honestly its a tiny fraction of my normal entertainment budget that currently sits mostly untouched, given that these days I'm not really going anywhere. Covid has axed two trips and currently threatening a third. And I was thinking about NYCC before Kabam cancelled.

    But yeah, it is a $50 toothpick. Less, even. I've played games that have eventually shut down. I've spent a lot of money on games that have eventually shut down. I know every cent I spend is not getting me anything material or permanent: it is completely temporary. I am paying for an experience, like visiting the Grand Canyon (although it was a bit foggy that day), and the experience is worth whatever I choose to spend on it. And then, like Kaiser Soze, its gone.
  • TheTalentsTheTalents Member Posts: 2,254 ★★★★★
    DNA3000 said:

    Actually, I think that would be a temporary psychological perk at best. Of course Nexus crystals are "better" than standard Basic crystals, but I don't think they really address the problem. After all, players who pull three times as many 5* champs don't get less burnout, and getting three times the champs is even better than getting a Nexus crystal. To put it another way, if the player that opens one 5* crystal a month has a similar problem to the person that opens ten, the Nexus crystal can't possible do anything more than turn the one a month guy into at best the three a month guy with the same problem.

    I think there's a subtle psychological problem that needs addressing here with a more tailored solution. I don't think the person who pulls one actually has the same problem as the person who pulls ten. I think the person who pulls ten sees the crystal devalued: they are just pulling champ after champ after champ, most of which are only good in the long run for generating shards and maybe sig levels. They are just waiting for the next useful pull, and most aren't. These people are, oversimplified a bit, bored. But the guy that opens one isn't bored. She's invested a huge amount of psychological energy into that one crystal, because it is the only one she's getting for a very long time. If it doesn't hit payday, she's not bored, she's disappointed.

    Nexus crystals help both, but only indirectly. In a sense, the guy pulling many crystals is now, sort of, seeing them three times faster. But they still feel the sense that most champs that come up are not interesting, so they would still get bored. As soon as they acclimated to Nexus crystals, I think they would return to the same condition. And while the Nexus crystal would increase the chance of not being disappointed for the person only pulling one, that chance only goes up by a relatively small amount. Since they are pulling infrequently, even Nexus crystals have a very good chance of making the player disappointed for a very long period of time with just a couple bad openings.

    I think the problem is that the Nexus crystals are too random, not in the general sense, but in the sense that there's no guarantee of variety. I've never seen a Nexus crystal contain two of the same champ. Because that would be silly, so I think Kabam correctly programmed the Nexus to never generate duplicates (if I'm wrong, I apologize here: I've just never seen it myself). But while the champs might not be duplicates, they could still be choices with no real difference. Sometimes I see a Nexus show three choices all of which are basically the same. For example, if all three choices are something the player has max rank, then that choice is *literally* completely worthless. It literally doesn't matter which they pick. That's an extreme case, but it can happen in more subtle ways. Sometimes all three choices are just adding ranks to champs with a couple dups. So in effect, the Nexus crystal becomes sig stones, and sometimes all three choices are champs the player doesn't really care to rank up. So again, the choice is meaningless. I'm not even touching the case where the choices are Deadpool X-force, Magneto, and Iron Patriot.

    A better, but more complex Nexus, would try to mix up the champs categorically. Suppose we made a set of categories of champs. Champs released in the last two years. Champs the player doesn't have. Champs the player has unawakened. Champs in the top 30% of burst damage. Champs with strong healing. Champs updated in the last eighteen months. Etc. Not necessarily guaranteed to be completely free of duds, but more likely to contain useful champs that are useful in *different* ways. And then the Nexus crystal picked three *categories* for its three choices, and then picked randomly for each category. Players would have some chance of awakening a champ they have unawakened. They would have a chance to get a champ they didn't have. They would have a chance to get a recent champ. Not a guaranteed chance, because the Nexus would have to pick the category first. But a reasonable chance. And more importantly, the odds of all three champs offering a genuinely different choice to the player would be much higher.

    I'm not sure I'm explaining the idea clearly, but I hope the basic concept is understandable. I'm not so much advocating for a Nexus with nothing but god tier champs in it. I'm advocating for a Nexus crystal to not contain "duplicates" where we extend the definition of "duplicate" to be not just literal duplicate, but also champs that for the most part might as well be the same thing. Iron Man, Superior Iron Man, and Iron Patriot really should never show up in the same Nexus crystal simultaneously.

    I think this helps both the player pulling one and the player pulling lots. The player pulling one has a greater chance of not being completely disappointed, while the player pulling many has a lower chance of being bored with each crystal, because there's more likely to be significant choice going on per crystal, even if the player is "fishing" for one specific champ out of dozens of crystals. Maybe neither player gets what they want every pull, but they are more likely to get second or third choices. And at least they will feel like their choice is a meaningful choice. Choosing between a new champ and awakening a champ is a meaningful choice, even if neither champ is god tier.
    I think the nexus crystal will be the temporary fix we need in the meantime while Kabam can figure out a solution. I quit the game for 6 months in 2017 and it was because of bad rng. The only reason why I played is being I finally pulled Blade and he was all I needed to stay motivated for quite sometime. Another easy fix is more 5 star sigs. So people can move up in the prestige race and go to more competitive alliances. A top 20 guy joined my alliance recently simply because he doesn't spend enough. I'm in a top 90 alliance for context. How is that fun?
  • CarossyCarossy Member Posts: 1,547 ★★★
    Yo! I don't know if someone already suggested it in all the 56 pages, but I think gold crystals on AQ store should be updated, I know arenas and UC arena crystals are the best option to get gold, but tbh, I ain't that type of person who likes to do arenas, specially when you find deathmatches, hate that.

    My suggestion is to update them according to progression, 'cause in the AQ store there are just the default ones that give minimum 2.4k gold and, let's be honest, not even buying 50 of those are enough to take a 5* r1 champ to minimum r3*.

    Also alliance credits shop (or whatever you call it) should be updated, there are just some class serums, potions or revives at a high cost, boosters are easy to get but the cost should also be reduced according to progression, perhaps (if devs are generous) add cavs (REAL cavs, without 3*), signature crystals, nexus crystals, UC gold crystals and legendary crystals.

    Thank you for reading and I really hope some of this features could be added to the game and not be another proposal that is being ignored :) .
  • This content has been removed.
  • Lvernon15Lvernon15 Member Posts: 11,598 ★★★★★
    edited May 2020
    yeah, I hope this ccp stuff is big
Sign In or Register to comment.