Hey kabam unless you plan on changing loyalty from 1000 a day to 100000 a day and lowering your insane loyalty store prices and time limits literally don’t bother with any changes cuz those are literally the only changes that will fix your horrible mistake
The price of the potions and the ammount of health we receive back is just ridiculous, if you wnat to keep the alliance war alive it´s better to make some changes @Kabam Miike
Nothing to share yet, but the team has been hard at work coming up with some ideas and improving them. Big shout out to the Commentors here and the MCOC Content Creators for giving some great constructive feedback.
In the meantime, we are pushing a fix for the AW Potions in the Loyalty store refreshing ever 2 weeks instead of 7 days, as we intended.
Could you share some of these ideas with the community? After all, we’re the ones who have to play this game and are ultimately the ones who pay to keep the lights on and the computers whirring away.
If innovation rather than reverting to the status-quo is the answer, here are my suggestions:
1 - AW potions and revives should be % based. This means that boosting isn’t going to wipe out your stash if you have to heal a booster champion. It also means that health potion size won’t really need to be addressed as long as there’s a 10, 20, 30% potion for example. Make a 40% one to be unit based if some form of unit cost has to be in the proposal. Likewise revives should reflect this structure.
2 - Massively decrease the price of these potions in the loyalty store. At present we can only get loyalty from helping arena (1k/day), or AW. If you always win AW and are in T1 you can get ~50k loyalty a week. For those who are in lower tiers of war this figure is halved.
3 - Significantly increase our access to loyalty as a resource.
4 - It appears that loyalty is the AW currency, if this is the case we need more as mentioned above, but because of the way AQ ticket structures work many players use loyalty to pay for their AQ entry fee because it’s so expensive to use gold. So AQ entry needs to be balanced a little bit. I’d personally like AQ entry costs removing entirely but that’s not a hill I’m going to die on right now when AW is in real danger.
I don’t think that any of these suggestions are particularly outlandish to be honest and would probably decrease stress in players grinding so that they don’t have to choose between game modes - ultimately you should want players participating in all game modes because they want to.
It seems that the most important aspect is the potions. I would like to point out that while I am happy that r4 materials are increased those are only and exclusively for a very limited number of alliances which will be the same ones on top places of Aq. This will continue continuously because the usual alliances will always be at the top. all the others have nothing left but the misery of materials present in Carina or act 7. a member of these first alliances, between aq and war will be able to make a lot of r4 compared to thousands of player who aldready have done carina and act 7. not only more r4 but also more characters to choose from. I realize that a competition has to reward with adequate awards but so is a dog that bites its own tail. And just top 100 ally seems a bit low to me I would like a system to be introduced in the store so that a player can choose whether to buy the potions he will need to overcome certain challenges in aq or war and reach certain objectives, or take materials. one excludes the other. Or any system that does not increase the gap too much. For years now, the first alliances have always been the same and the players at the top too
In the road map Almost 2 years go we heard about a likely rework to the AW game mode that never happened. Changes like this will continue to push people further away from alliance war.
If you do change the current (much hated) AW potions system in some way then remember to compensate everyone who spent a whole bunch of Loyalty on potions since the announcement... I had to take you at your word and spend a huge amount of my collected Loyalty (and thus my 6* Unstoppable Colossus) to invest in the limited resource of war health and revive potions, in the hope that what I could buy would give a small advantage in war, especially a war where potions were so limited.
Nothing to share yet, but the team has been hard at work coming up with some ideas and improving them. Big shout out to the Commentors here and the MCOC Content Creators for giving some great constructive feedback.
In the meantime, we are pushing a fix for the AW Potions in the Loyalty store refreshing ever 2 weeks instead of 7 days, as we intended.
Just a thought to fix this fast. Reduce the loyalty cost to something like 2k or 3k loyalty for the single level 4 potions and make it refresh daily with a max buy of 5 like it was in glory store. Then you can work on increasing the loyalty we receive etc in the background. It’s not a hard fix to put this right or complicated and then we can all compete in war this next season.
First thing first….this potion idea of yours is terrible lol They’re way too expensive, don’t heal for enough, extremely limited on how many you can buy, AND the resource the buy said potions is extremely limited too. Honestly don’t understand why we needed to separate AQ/AW potions like this anyway but if we’re gonna be keeping it like this though we’re gonna need you to REALLY bump up the loyalty(by a lot) just for us to afford those potions AND the boosts. Rest of it was pretty solid tho…so good job on that bit lol
Uh wtf, change the glory store potions back to alliance potions and not aq potions, unless you plan on giving us an easy access to war potions it’s utterly ridiculous
Wait and see what the loyalty store costs are, if they’re reasonable then it makes sense to separate AQ potions being bought with glory, and AW potions being bought with loyalty
Uh wtf, change the glory store potions back to alliance potions and not aq potions, unless you plan on giving us an easy access to war potions it’s utterly ridiculous
Wait and see what the loyalty store costs are, if they’re reasonable then it makes sense to separate AQ potions being bought with glory, and AW potions being bought with loyalty
Both respective modes have their own currency to buy potions for
Unfortunately I don’t see any mention of an increase in loyalty and that is what worries me
How can you defend them when they have done things like this for years and then take weeks/months even a year to fix things.
Kabam seriously you don’t need to think about what next to do, fix it by taking it back to how it was before because clearly your improvements aren’t what you think they are. @Kabam Miike
It doesn’t matter they’ve made it so you can get 2 potions every week this is still a horrible move. How do you guys think everyone pays for aq tickets? It’s with the damn loyalty that we barely already have. Why do you guys insist on making things harder for us? We are the reason you guys as a company exist. But you still make things difficult. Fix this damn issue. By putting them as they were because this so called new idea doesn’t work.
Been a few days and still don't understand how Kabam figured that removing access to 6K potions was a good idea. Not only were the 6K potions already to low to realistically use for a rank 4 they removed them all together. Then they limited the amount of potions we can buy weekly via loyalty. I would love to hear a response from them breaking down this thought process. Honestly, war has been a drag for most players and the compensation has breathed new life into war as it has allowed more alliances to push and compete. This translates to more sales for kabam as those alliances are more into the game and buying bundles and other deals. If the purpose is to keep the player base interested to grow sales, then Kabam should think about making compensation a standard and this will drive more alliances to push in war. I understand that Kabam was thinking of getting players to use units for war, but if it comes down to spending a fortune to compete in AW or quitting the game. Well in all honesty MCOC is not the only game out there. Kabam should realize that we have options as players. I hope to hear something positive in the next few days as well as an explanation regarding this decision.
I have a theory, and since no one has yet told me if this theory is correct or completely wrong, I'm free to speculate. But I will preface this by saying this is completely speculative on my part. It is educated speculation, but still completely speculative.
I think Kabam thought they were actually *improving* things with this system, but made two huge mistakes. One: their numbers are all wrong. This would not be the first time that happened, and I'm not going too far out on a limb to say it is very common for Kabam to think two when the players are thinking eight. It is rare to see everyone agree on something, but it is pretty clear no one thinks Kabam got this right. How that happened is neither here nor there. The second big mistake is the one I want to speculate about.
If I take my player hat off, set it on fire, and then dance the Mexican Hat Dance on it while my shoes melt, and put my designer hat on, but two sizes too small, and then I squint at the changes, I see something I didn't originally see. I see the potential for a system designer to think things got better. Here's the logic. Originally, we primarily spend one currency on potions (well, two, but I'm not counting units here, the context will be obvious in a second), and the potions are dual use (AQ, AW). This means one currency takes all the burden, and one set of inventory caps limit one shared pool of them. If we split up AW and AQ potions, we now have two separate inventory spaces to hold alliance potions. That means we can hold more of them, and using one doesn't deplete the other. And if we split up purchasing them to both glory and loyalty, we now have two separate currencies we can use to buy them: depleting one doesn't deplete the other.
There's two major problems with this. The first one is the numbers themselves seem more restrictive, but Kabam has already stated there are bugs with those. So let's set aside what the purchase limits and reset periods are. The other problem is that loyalty is so much harder to get, and depletes so much faster, that making AW potions use loyalty doesn't make them easier to get, they've been moved from an easy to acquire currency to a hard to acquire currency. That has to be several steps backwards, and doesn't actually improve our ability to manage them at all.
Which gets back to numbers. It doesn't matter how hard it is to acquire loyalty. What matters is how much of it we have to spend, as a *percentage* of how much we earn. *IF* and this is a big IF, Kabam were to balance AW potion costs based on a more realistic ratio of how much potions the average player buys and how much loyalty they earn, the fact that loyalty is harder to earn itself wouldn't be a problem. We would move closer to the scenario where the two different potion types are now separated from each other in a way that is beneficial, not strangling.
The big mistake that I mentioned was that *if* this was Kabam's intent, it appears they thought this would be obvious, when it is anything but. You have to have system design experience and a Ouija board to see this even on a good day, much less when it is blurred by implementation numbers that seem to be heading in the opposite direction. So I think players were right to assume the worst, that the impact of the changes was intentional, and not unintentional.
It is so unobvious that I believe what Kabam *should* have done was emphasized those benefits in the changes. There are a lot of ways to do that, but clearly the system changes were not attempting to highlight them, if they were intended at all.
All of this requires taking two separate leaps of faith. The first is that Kabam did make numbers errors and are willing to change the loyalty costs and purchase limits in a way that is more consistent with how most players use them. The second is the belief that separating AQ and AW potions was in fact meant to be costs-neutral and more player-flexible, and they just got it incredibly wrong.
I think Kabam has an opportunity here to reset the situation and try to better articulate what the actual intent of the changes were, not just in vague terms but in more specific terms. And see if there's a way to work with the players to change the implementation in a way that the players actually *feel* like they are getting the benefits that the system *could* provide, if that was the actual intent.
Or, you know, they could just say I'm completely off my rocker and staring at tea leaves too hard. In which case, I can put my player hat back on and go back to complaining about how alliance war sucks again.
Quick update for the end of the week: After receiving a lot of feedback here, we went back to look at the data used to make this decision and found that there were certain sources of Loyalty being included that we did not intend to include in our calculations, leading to some pretty inflated values.
We have been hard at work re-tuning the values and exploring our options here. We will have more information and a path forward to share with you all soon.
Unit wise It costs over $10 to heal one champ in war, these costs are out of touch, they’ve needed rebalancing for a long time (ie 6* champs r3 and r4) it’s the base reason why these changes were such a kick in the teeth, The f2p and p2p balance has always been a fine line kabam have needed to tread, and they are miles over the line with this one. If they think the average player is going to start dropping $50 a war. To buy potions and heal a few times (after the potions perceived value have been devalued by being free for the last 6 months) it’s just miles out of touch
Quick update for the end of the week: After receiving a lot of feedback here, we went back to look at the data used to make this decision and found that there were certain sources of Loyalty being included that we did not intend to include in our calculations, leading to some pretty inflated values.
We have been hard at work re-tuning the values and exploring our options here. We will have more information and a path forward to share with you all soon.
Comments
If innovation rather than reverting to the status-quo is the answer, here are my suggestions:
1 - AW potions and revives should be % based. This means that boosting isn’t going to wipe out your stash if you have to heal a booster champion. It also means that health potion size won’t really need to be addressed as long as there’s a 10, 20, 30% potion for example. Make a 40% one to be unit based if some form of unit cost has to be in the proposal. Likewise revives should reflect this structure.
2 - Massively decrease the price of these potions in the loyalty store. At present we can only get loyalty from helping arena (1k/day), or AW. If you always win AW and are in T1 you can get ~50k loyalty a week. For those who are in lower tiers of war this figure is halved.
3 - Significantly increase our access to loyalty as a resource.
4 - It appears that loyalty is the AW currency, if this is the case we need more as mentioned above, but because of the way AQ ticket structures work many players use loyalty to pay for their AQ entry fee because it’s so expensive to use gold. So AQ entry needs to be balanced a little bit. I’d personally like AQ entry costs removing entirely but that’s not a hill I’m going to die on right now when AW is in real danger.
I don’t think that any of these suggestions are particularly outlandish to be honest and would probably decrease stress in players grinding so that they don’t have to choose between game modes - ultimately you should want players participating in all game modes because they want to.
I would like to point out that while I am happy that r4 materials are increased those are only and exclusively for a very limited number of alliances which will be the same ones on top places of Aq. This will continue continuously because the usual alliances will always be at the top. all the others have nothing left but the misery of materials present in Carina or act 7. a member of these first alliances, between aq and war will be able to make a lot of r4 compared to thousands of player who aldready have done carina and act 7.
not only more r4 but also more characters to choose from.
I realize that a competition has to reward with adequate awards but so is a dog that bites its own tail. And just top 100 ally seems a bit low to me
I would like a system to be introduced in the store so that a player can choose whether to buy the potions he will need to overcome certain challenges in aq or war and reach certain objectives, or take materials. one excludes the other.
Or any system that does not increase the gap too much. For years now, the first alliances have always been the same and the players at the top too
If you do change the current (much hated) AW potions system in some way then remember to compensate everyone who spent a whole bunch of Loyalty on potions since the announcement... I had to take you at your word and spend a huge amount of my collected Loyalty (and thus my 6* Unstoppable Colossus) to invest in the limited resource of war health and revive potions, in the hope that what I could buy would give a small advantage in war, especially a war where potions were so limited.
Just a thought to fix this fast. Reduce the loyalty cost to something like 2k or 3k loyalty for the single level 4 potions and make it refresh daily with a max buy of 5 like it was in glory store. Then you can work on increasing the loyalty we receive etc in the background. It’s not a hard fix to put this right or complicated and then we can all compete in war this next season.
Rest of it was pretty solid tho…so good job on that bit lol
@Kabam Zibiit
I think Kabam thought they were actually *improving* things with this system, but made two huge mistakes. One: their numbers are all wrong. This would not be the first time that happened, and I'm not going too far out on a limb to say it is very common for Kabam to think two when the players are thinking eight. It is rare to see everyone agree on something, but it is pretty clear no one thinks Kabam got this right. How that happened is neither here nor there. The second big mistake is the one I want to speculate about.
If I take my player hat off, set it on fire, and then dance the Mexican Hat Dance on it while my shoes melt, and put my designer hat on, but two sizes too small, and then I squint at the changes, I see something I didn't originally see. I see the potential for a system designer to think things got better. Here's the logic. Originally, we primarily spend one currency on potions (well, two, but I'm not counting units here, the context will be obvious in a second), and the potions are dual use (AQ, AW). This means one currency takes all the burden, and one set of inventory caps limit one shared pool of them. If we split up AW and AQ potions, we now have two separate inventory spaces to hold alliance potions. That means we can hold more of them, and using one doesn't deplete the other. And if we split up purchasing them to both glory and loyalty, we now have two separate currencies we can use to buy them: depleting one doesn't deplete the other.
There's two major problems with this. The first one is the numbers themselves seem more restrictive, but Kabam has already stated there are bugs with those. So let's set aside what the purchase limits and reset periods are. The other problem is that loyalty is so much harder to get, and depletes so much faster, that making AW potions use loyalty doesn't make them easier to get, they've been moved from an easy to acquire currency to a hard to acquire currency. That has to be several steps backwards, and doesn't actually improve our ability to manage them at all.
Which gets back to numbers. It doesn't matter how hard it is to acquire loyalty. What matters is how much of it we have to spend, as a *percentage* of how much we earn. *IF* and this is a big IF, Kabam were to balance AW potion costs based on a more realistic ratio of how much potions the average player buys and how much loyalty they earn, the fact that loyalty is harder to earn itself wouldn't be a problem. We would move closer to the scenario where the two different potion types are now separated from each other in a way that is beneficial, not strangling.
The big mistake that I mentioned was that *if* this was Kabam's intent, it appears they thought this would be obvious, when it is anything but. You have to have system design experience and a Ouija board to see this even on a good day, much less when it is blurred by implementation numbers that seem to be heading in the opposite direction. So I think players were right to assume the worst, that the impact of the changes was intentional, and not unintentional.
It is so unobvious that I believe what Kabam *should* have done was emphasized those benefits in the changes. There are a lot of ways to do that, but clearly the system changes were not attempting to highlight them, if they were intended at all.
All of this requires taking two separate leaps of faith. The first is that Kabam did make numbers errors and are willing to change the loyalty costs and purchase limits in a way that is more consistent with how most players use them. The second is the belief that separating AQ and AW potions was in fact meant to be costs-neutral and more player-flexible, and they just got it incredibly wrong.
I think Kabam has an opportunity here to reset the situation and try to better articulate what the actual intent of the changes were, not just in vague terms but in more specific terms. And see if there's a way to work with the players to change the implementation in a way that the players actually *feel* like they are getting the benefits that the system *could* provide, if that was the actual intent.
Or, you know, they could just say I'm completely off my rocker and staring at tea leaves too hard. In which case, I can put my player hat back on and go back to complaining about how alliance war sucks again.
Quick update for the end of the week: After receiving a lot of feedback here, we went back to look at the data used to make this decision and found that there were certain sources of Loyalty being included that we did not intend to include in our calculations, leading to some pretty inflated values.
We have been hard at work re-tuning the values and exploring our options here. We will have more information and a path forward to share with you all soon.
The f2p and p2p balance has always been a fine line kabam have needed to tread, and they are miles over the line with this one. If they think the average player is going to start dropping $50 a war. To buy potions and heal a few times (after the potions perceived value have been devalued by being free for the last 6 months) it’s just miles out of touch