Alliance War revives should be free (not click bait, I'm serious)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,693 Guardian
While everyone's attention is on the alliance war potion situation, I thought now would be as good a time as any to post this one. I've been thinking about this for a very long time (this goes all the way back to before defender diversity) but I have had a lot of time to refine the idea. I'm going to go way out on a limb and make a bold statement: I'm going to *prove* that alliance war revives should be completely free. What do I mean by "free"? I'm not kidding around: I mean that when a player dies in alliance war their champion should revive to full health automatically at zero cost. And I'm going to *prove* that this is not just desirable, it is necessary for the integrity of the game mode. In other words, I'm saying war is broken so long as revives aren't free.
This isn't a suggestion. This is a bug report.
To get from here to there, we first need to discuss potions and revives. So here's my first unobvious but important statement:
Potions and revives don't do the same job in war they do everywhere else.
What do I mean by that? Well let's look at what potions do in regular quest content. You die, you revive, you continue on. You get hit, you take damage, you can use a health potion to get that health back and potentially not die. Either way, you pop a potion or revive, and you continue on. Potions and revives let you continue playing the content, because if all your champs are dead you can't continue. But no matter how many you use, it doesn't matter to the content or to the rewards. You get the same rewards if you use ten revives in the Abyss or a hundred. You get the same rewards in Act 7 if you use ten health potions or a thousand. Potions and revives each offer just one benefit, and it is the same benefit: you get to keep running the content to completion. And completion is all that matters. Whether you use a dozen potions and never die, or you just keep dying over and over again and revive, it doesn't matter. Potions and revives are largely interchangeable, because the benefits are ultimately the same. The only thing that matters is how many of each we have. We need to manage them so we don't run out of them, and of course you can't heal a dead champ, but fundamentally there's no difference between using a tiny revive and then healing up, or using a big revive.
Because of this benefit, the cost of potions and revives in normal content has to be balanced around the way they make all content easier. In effect, they make more rewards reachable by players. They have a reward acceleration value. If potions or revives were completely free and unlimited, practically all content would be trivialized. This places limits on how available potions and revives can be in normal single player content. This is also true to a similar extent in alliance quest. There are different limits on potions and revives, so managing them is harder, but the benefits are the same: whether you heal or revive, all that matters is you complete the content. How you get there doesn't matter.
Alliance war is completely different. In alliance war, unlike in any other game mode, death costs the player. It costs the player by losing attack points, and increasing the chance they will lose the war. It does matter how you do the content. And this changes the role of both potions and revives in a fundamental way. In normal content, you can choose to use potions to regain health, or you can choose to not use potions to regain health and risk needing to use revives. The only thing that matters is resource management: how much of each you have, and how much they cost to replenish. In war, potions are used to prevent handing the opponent points. Revives are used after you've already lost those points to continue fighting the war. They aren't interchangeable. Potions score points. Revives cost points (or rather, you have to lose points to be able to use them).
So what? This leads to unobvious statement number two:
Potions should be monetized. Revives shouldn't be.
I'm sure that even saying potions should be monetized is going to be a controversial idea, especially now. But in this game, every game mode must have a monetization avenue, or it has no way to pay for its own existence in the game. Something has to fund its upkeep, as well as the mindshare it is absorbing from the player community (that could be spent on other things that generate revenue). And while there are probably lots of players who think whales already have an advantage in war, that's irrelevant. That's not a monetization avenue for war, that is riding on the monetization of champion acquisition.
In this game, for the most part we concentrate monetization on the highest tiers of the game. I don't just mean tier 1 war or map 8 AQ. I mean we monetize the players who push the hardest, who want the most, who want it as quickly as possible, and are willing to pay for it now. We don't monetize champion acquisition directly, we monetize champion acquisition now. Eventually, everyone gets every champ without spending: spending on crystals gets them today. We monetize arena grinding, but the vast majority of players get positive resources - even units - out of arena. The only players spending in the arena are the very few pushing extremely hard to win the competition to target specific champions.
Logically, the place to monetize war is on the things that players can use to cause their opponents to lose in tight competitions. Remember, you aren't beating content when you win a war, you take rewards away from other players. The most potent weapons useful to take rewards away from other players should be the things that are the most heavily monetized. That's boosts, and that's health potions. Both reduce the chance of dying, take points away from the opponent, and ultimately work to cause the other side to lose.
But revives don't do that. Every revive has as a prerequisite dying and losing 80 points (up to a point). You can't revive champs that aren't dead, and every dead champ has already surrendered points to the opponent. What's more, dead champs can't surrender any more points. Only alive champs can die. Reviving a champ is basically giving your opponent 80 more points they can take away.
This is an oversimplification, because it ignores roadblocking. If you die and don't revive, you lose all the points beyond that point in your path (unless you have backup). However, those points come at a huge cost to the game: every time this happens, it happens because the game forces a player to stop playing the game. They've been eliminated from that war. And that is an extremely hostile event. Not only is it a general turn off when a game tells a player you're done, but it also applies extreme pressure on the player from their alliance, either explicit or implicit. Its one thing to die: that's often bad enough in a competitive war. But to stop moving altogether and forfeit the rest of the path? That's very rough. The combination of the two is one of the more toxic elements of war in my opinion, and the source of why a lot of people hate participating. They have to spend, or be a complete failure on the board.
Just like everywhere else, revives allow the player to keep playing. But unlike everywhere else, alliance war revives never come for free. They always have a huge cost: you died, you lost points, this ultimately decides who wins and who loses. In this sense, revives are never free. In quest content, if you team wipe, you have the choice to exit and start over. You can choose to burn revives or you can choose to burn energy. You do not have that choice in alliance war. You either revive, or you permanently fail. So in a very real sense, monetizing potions is monetizing competition. Monetizing revives is monetizing participation. Potions are a competitive tactical choice during war. Revives are what you have to buy to participate at all (if you die).
We should monetize competition, not participation. I'm not just making that up because it sounds cool. This is a fundamental principle of free to play games. Free to play games fundamentally follow a basic set of rules. You need to make something valuable that people actually want. If nobody wants to play your game, game over. Then you need to make sure that people can't get all of what they want. If everyone can get everything they want, there's no way to make money, and game over. Then you need to make sure you attract enough players so that the small percentage of those willing and able to spend to get what they want but the game doesn't let them get as fast as they want spends enough to make the game viable. If you don't follow these rules, no game.
The barrier to entry for MCOC is basically zero. Just download it and play. And new players generally don't run into serious barriers to getting stuff either: the game wants them to play and get invested in the game. If the player doesn't find it valuable, there's no way to ask them to pay for anything. The same thing needs to be true for all of the individual game modes. Most of the revenue from alliance war is going to come from the highest, strongest, most invested competitive players, but those players come from the pool of players that play alliance war at all. If alliance war is hostile to new players, it will never get any dedicated ones.
Revives keep players playing. Potions keep players winning. Or at least, that's how it should be, if the game mode is to survive and be sustainable. As it is, I think interest keeps declining because the monetization model for alliance war is broken. And I think ironically it isn't potion costs that are the problem. It is revive costs. If champions were to revive at 100% health every time they died, the following things would be true:
1. Casual players could participate in war risk free. No matter how bad they are at war, they wouldn't have to spend if they didn't want to. They could keep dying, keep handing opponents points, but still finish the war. The barrier to entry for war would be very low, which would encourage participation. A small percentage of those players will eventually become the hardcore competitors of tomorrow.
2. Moderate competitors would have more options on balancing potion use. They could decide to use a potion, or not use a potion and risk dying and triggering the auto revive. They could manage their potion use to maximize their return on that investment, without ever being in a position where they could "run out" of potions. I mean, they could run out, but running out wouldn't prevent them from competing. It would just eliminate that weapon from their arsenal of trying to hold onto as many points as possible.
3. Absolute top tier competitors would still try to use potions preemptively, to maximize their chances of never dying. *But* if they make a mistake and die, they will not have to revive, then burn their entire potion store to try to claw back to high health. If they die, they have already lost those points, but their champ will be back to full health. That means they can continue to use their limited potions strategically, in situations where they would do the most good - recovering chip damage or small mistakes. They would never be wiped out by one bad fight.
Does this "solve" all the problems with war, or even just with alliance war potions? No, it does not, and it isn't meant to. And I'm certain there are lots of players who will hate a change like this. Competitive alliance war is driven by meta game concerns more than the actual game play of alliance war. There are lots of people who are used to the mode as it is and don't want it changed, or only want it changed in ways that align with their perception of the current meta. That's fine: the people who like how war works aren't wrong for liking it, we all like what we like. But I believe war has been broken for a very long time now, and I believe this is one of the fundamental things that has been broken about it. And I don't think war can survive as a game mode indefinitely without dramatic changes to it that reduce its hostility to the majority of players and its almost toxic squeeze on the competition meta. I have no idea if this one change would make war a more successful game mode. The success of the game mode depends on a lot of subjective factors.
All I know is that as I see it the game mode is broken, has been broken for a very long time, and this is an objectively broken element of it. Because revives are expensive, the pressure is on to use potions. But potions can't be cheap because they are a weapon to take rewards away from other players. So the game mode is stuck in an intractable deadlock. This breaks that deadlock.
The obvious objection: Kabam would never go for this, because it would cost them money. In the short term, it would. But the gamble is that it might revitalize the game mode, and save future revenues currently at stake. Clearly, the way things are going now, every tweak and every change risks losing players, because those changes are happening within the backdrop of a wide range of problems that players might accept but haven't forgotten about. I mention some of my thoughts about this here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/2064514/#Comment_2064514 . Short version: potion compensation has ceased to be compensation, it has become the players' solution to the high cost of potions, even though that's not what it was intended for. They've decided it is, and aren't going to be willing to give up their "solution."
If issues like this aren't addressed before compensation ends, I think people complaining about potion costs now will seem like a quaint tussle compared to what's coming. And I think that's more than enough incentive to start looking at dramatic options. Making revives free is dramatic. But I also think it is pedantically logical.
This isn't a suggestion. This is a bug report.
To get from here to there, we first need to discuss potions and revives. So here's my first unobvious but important statement:
Potions and revives don't do the same job in war they do everywhere else.
What do I mean by that? Well let's look at what potions do in regular quest content. You die, you revive, you continue on. You get hit, you take damage, you can use a health potion to get that health back and potentially not die. Either way, you pop a potion or revive, and you continue on. Potions and revives let you continue playing the content, because if all your champs are dead you can't continue. But no matter how many you use, it doesn't matter to the content or to the rewards. You get the same rewards if you use ten revives in the Abyss or a hundred. You get the same rewards in Act 7 if you use ten health potions or a thousand. Potions and revives each offer just one benefit, and it is the same benefit: you get to keep running the content to completion. And completion is all that matters. Whether you use a dozen potions and never die, or you just keep dying over and over again and revive, it doesn't matter. Potions and revives are largely interchangeable, because the benefits are ultimately the same. The only thing that matters is how many of each we have. We need to manage them so we don't run out of them, and of course you can't heal a dead champ, but fundamentally there's no difference between using a tiny revive and then healing up, or using a big revive.
Because of this benefit, the cost of potions and revives in normal content has to be balanced around the way they make all content easier. In effect, they make more rewards reachable by players. They have a reward acceleration value. If potions or revives were completely free and unlimited, practically all content would be trivialized. This places limits on how available potions and revives can be in normal single player content. This is also true to a similar extent in alliance quest. There are different limits on potions and revives, so managing them is harder, but the benefits are the same: whether you heal or revive, all that matters is you complete the content. How you get there doesn't matter.
Alliance war is completely different. In alliance war, unlike in any other game mode, death costs the player. It costs the player by losing attack points, and increasing the chance they will lose the war. It does matter how you do the content. And this changes the role of both potions and revives in a fundamental way. In normal content, you can choose to use potions to regain health, or you can choose to not use potions to regain health and risk needing to use revives. The only thing that matters is resource management: how much of each you have, and how much they cost to replenish. In war, potions are used to prevent handing the opponent points. Revives are used after you've already lost those points to continue fighting the war. They aren't interchangeable. Potions score points. Revives cost points (or rather, you have to lose points to be able to use them).
So what? This leads to unobvious statement number two:
Potions should be monetized. Revives shouldn't be.
I'm sure that even saying potions should be monetized is going to be a controversial idea, especially now. But in this game, every game mode must have a monetization avenue, or it has no way to pay for its own existence in the game. Something has to fund its upkeep, as well as the mindshare it is absorbing from the player community (that could be spent on other things that generate revenue). And while there are probably lots of players who think whales already have an advantage in war, that's irrelevant. That's not a monetization avenue for war, that is riding on the monetization of champion acquisition.
In this game, for the most part we concentrate monetization on the highest tiers of the game. I don't just mean tier 1 war or map 8 AQ. I mean we monetize the players who push the hardest, who want the most, who want it as quickly as possible, and are willing to pay for it now. We don't monetize champion acquisition directly, we monetize champion acquisition now. Eventually, everyone gets every champ without spending: spending on crystals gets them today. We monetize arena grinding, but the vast majority of players get positive resources - even units - out of arena. The only players spending in the arena are the very few pushing extremely hard to win the competition to target specific champions.
Logically, the place to monetize war is on the things that players can use to cause their opponents to lose in tight competitions. Remember, you aren't beating content when you win a war, you take rewards away from other players. The most potent weapons useful to take rewards away from other players should be the things that are the most heavily monetized. That's boosts, and that's health potions. Both reduce the chance of dying, take points away from the opponent, and ultimately work to cause the other side to lose.
But revives don't do that. Every revive has as a prerequisite dying and losing 80 points (up to a point). You can't revive champs that aren't dead, and every dead champ has already surrendered points to the opponent. What's more, dead champs can't surrender any more points. Only alive champs can die. Reviving a champ is basically giving your opponent 80 more points they can take away.
This is an oversimplification, because it ignores roadblocking. If you die and don't revive, you lose all the points beyond that point in your path (unless you have backup). However, those points come at a huge cost to the game: every time this happens, it happens because the game forces a player to stop playing the game. They've been eliminated from that war. And that is an extremely hostile event. Not only is it a general turn off when a game tells a player you're done, but it also applies extreme pressure on the player from their alliance, either explicit or implicit. Its one thing to die: that's often bad enough in a competitive war. But to stop moving altogether and forfeit the rest of the path? That's very rough. The combination of the two is one of the more toxic elements of war in my opinion, and the source of why a lot of people hate participating. They have to spend, or be a complete failure on the board.
Just like everywhere else, revives allow the player to keep playing. But unlike everywhere else, alliance war revives never come for free. They always have a huge cost: you died, you lost points, this ultimately decides who wins and who loses. In this sense, revives are never free. In quest content, if you team wipe, you have the choice to exit and start over. You can choose to burn revives or you can choose to burn energy. You do not have that choice in alliance war. You either revive, or you permanently fail. So in a very real sense, monetizing potions is monetizing competition. Monetizing revives is monetizing participation. Potions are a competitive tactical choice during war. Revives are what you have to buy to participate at all (if you die).
We should monetize competition, not participation. I'm not just making that up because it sounds cool. This is a fundamental principle of free to play games. Free to play games fundamentally follow a basic set of rules. You need to make something valuable that people actually want. If nobody wants to play your game, game over. Then you need to make sure that people can't get all of what they want. If everyone can get everything they want, there's no way to make money, and game over. Then you need to make sure you attract enough players so that the small percentage of those willing and able to spend to get what they want but the game doesn't let them get as fast as they want spends enough to make the game viable. If you don't follow these rules, no game.
The barrier to entry for MCOC is basically zero. Just download it and play. And new players generally don't run into serious barriers to getting stuff either: the game wants them to play and get invested in the game. If the player doesn't find it valuable, there's no way to ask them to pay for anything. The same thing needs to be true for all of the individual game modes. Most of the revenue from alliance war is going to come from the highest, strongest, most invested competitive players, but those players come from the pool of players that play alliance war at all. If alliance war is hostile to new players, it will never get any dedicated ones.
Revives keep players playing. Potions keep players winning. Or at least, that's how it should be, if the game mode is to survive and be sustainable. As it is, I think interest keeps declining because the monetization model for alliance war is broken. And I think ironically it isn't potion costs that are the problem. It is revive costs. If champions were to revive at 100% health every time they died, the following things would be true:
1. Casual players could participate in war risk free. No matter how bad they are at war, they wouldn't have to spend if they didn't want to. They could keep dying, keep handing opponents points, but still finish the war. The barrier to entry for war would be very low, which would encourage participation. A small percentage of those players will eventually become the hardcore competitors of tomorrow.
2. Moderate competitors would have more options on balancing potion use. They could decide to use a potion, or not use a potion and risk dying and triggering the auto revive. They could manage their potion use to maximize their return on that investment, without ever being in a position where they could "run out" of potions. I mean, they could run out, but running out wouldn't prevent them from competing. It would just eliminate that weapon from their arsenal of trying to hold onto as many points as possible.
3. Absolute top tier competitors would still try to use potions preemptively, to maximize their chances of never dying. *But* if they make a mistake and die, they will not have to revive, then burn their entire potion store to try to claw back to high health. If they die, they have already lost those points, but their champ will be back to full health. That means they can continue to use their limited potions strategically, in situations where they would do the most good - recovering chip damage or small mistakes. They would never be wiped out by one bad fight.
Does this "solve" all the problems with war, or even just with alliance war potions? No, it does not, and it isn't meant to. And I'm certain there are lots of players who will hate a change like this. Competitive alliance war is driven by meta game concerns more than the actual game play of alliance war. There are lots of people who are used to the mode as it is and don't want it changed, or only want it changed in ways that align with their perception of the current meta. That's fine: the people who like how war works aren't wrong for liking it, we all like what we like. But I believe war has been broken for a very long time now, and I believe this is one of the fundamental things that has been broken about it. And I don't think war can survive as a game mode indefinitely without dramatic changes to it that reduce its hostility to the majority of players and its almost toxic squeeze on the competition meta. I have no idea if this one change would make war a more successful game mode. The success of the game mode depends on a lot of subjective factors.
All I know is that as I see it the game mode is broken, has been broken for a very long time, and this is an objectively broken element of it. Because revives are expensive, the pressure is on to use potions. But potions can't be cheap because they are a weapon to take rewards away from other players. So the game mode is stuck in an intractable deadlock. This breaks that deadlock.
The obvious objection: Kabam would never go for this, because it would cost them money. In the short term, it would. But the gamble is that it might revitalize the game mode, and save future revenues currently at stake. Clearly, the way things are going now, every tweak and every change risks losing players, because those changes are happening within the backdrop of a wide range of problems that players might accept but haven't forgotten about. I mention some of my thoughts about this here: https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/2064514/#Comment_2064514 . Short version: potion compensation has ceased to be compensation, it has become the players' solution to the high cost of potions, even though that's not what it was intended for. They've decided it is, and aren't going to be willing to give up their "solution."
If issues like this aren't addressed before compensation ends, I think people complaining about potion costs now will seem like a quaint tussle compared to what's coming. And I think that's more than enough incentive to start looking at dramatic options. Making revives free is dramatic. But I also think it is pedantically logical.
74
Comments
Idk if my logic makes sense
Btw they are free, in the sense you can earn them through gameplay like everything else in the game.
They do not seem to be as focused on player concerns or with the functionality of the game, but rather with making nodes more difficult and material more diffult, and the fights longer.
Proof they are not truly seeking solutions to the iso issue! The daily iso quest isn't a solution! The real solution is to do away with 3 stars in Cavalier crystals making the 4 stars the lowest drop. That would solve the iso issue.
As for war and aq supplies? For one they need to give a few out on the alliance team work events instead of those pathetic what? 350 revives? And take garbage like xp up and 3 star arena boosts out of the war crystals and make it exclusively war related items!
We got xp up out the butt! We don't need em dropping from war crystals!
Or signature stones! War items!
If they had a desire to balance this stuff? They could and would!
Also, bringing up an excellent point: should there be a game mode where we aren’t allowed revives?
All corporates to similar stuff where they mean somthing but say something
Eg. Apple's gimmick of being environment friendly whereas it's statistically proven that separate chargers actually increase the environment costs by a lot
At end of the day it's still a compensation & they have already said that it will stop in near future when things get better
Without potions and revives there’d be less need for tie breakers as there’d be a greater spread and diversity of war results, and it would be a more pure competition based on skill and strategy.
But people have gotten too used to 100% completion, and almost treat it like an entitlement or an an expectation, which drives the current appetite for potions and their potential as a source of income.
This has always been one of the things I understand least about their direction in resource economy. AW may not have massive direct expenditure but it has indirect costs at competitive levels that increase based on having more players engaged. More players competing means that going for new defenders or attackers and the resources to rank them become that much more enticing. Participation shouldn't be the gateway, winning should. I just feel that's a bigger win for both players and the devs.
AW has gotten so use to low deaths and 100% exploration at all costs that whenever Kabam designs a node that has a difficult champ/node interaction people non-stop complain until they change it because there’s a greater possibility they will die in AW or might not get 100% exploration. If that exact same node and champ combo was in story quest though the exact same people would be congratulating Kabam on making a difficult fight.
We’re probably in the severe minority but I agree I wish no potions/revives could be used in AW at this point.
I know folks will hate the idea but it’s worth a look at because In the end the biggest alliance are dying 2-5 times per war so this wouldn’t affect them as much as the lower end expert to mid tier alliances. Larger alliances are already spending on topping off regularly. The alliances who are dying 10-25 times a war will see a difference. Not having to spend on revives will also allow resources to be used on potions which a little less costly.
And now you come up with this? Sure the changes to AW potions aren't any good, but this is riddiculous. Or perhaps money by itself isn't now enough to give you what you want?
It’s a video game, so dying in AW is not the end of the world. Deal with it.
We play a mobile video game about superhero’s, we know it’s not the end of the world. That doesn’t stop us improving it though. I’d suggest trying to counter DNA’s points instead of brushing them off with nothing phrases.