Consumables Update: 3-Step Plan and First Look
MCOC Team
Administrator, Admin [en] Administrator › Posts: 593
Hello Summoners!
As discussed many moons ago, our team has been working hard on a Consumables Revamp. We have spent a lot of time considering how best to improve potions in the Contest. The intention of this post is to share with you our process, our findings and our short and longer-term plans.
Before we get into it, we want to make sure that everybody is approaching this information with the knowledge that Potions and Revives are a very important part of the MCoC in-game Economy. The changes we’re sharing with you today were carefully considered and meticulously crafted to protect the future good of the game while also being a major upgrade for players. These changes will make the biggest impact for Summoners who spend their units to heal their roster and we hope you’ll see the value in these changes, making potions more affordable and accessible.
Starting at the Beginning
To provide the best solution, we began by identifying the core problems:
- On a per-unit basis, potions heal far less health than revives do. This is due to the ever-growing health pools of champions, combined with the percentage-based nature of revives.
- Because potions, especially lower-level potions, heal so little health on a per-potion basis, they’re time-consuming and fiddly to use.
- If you have a health boost active, potions are less effective since your health pool is larger now but your potions still heal the same amount.
- Our highest-level potions don’t heal enough health anymore relative to some champion health pools.
A 3-Step Solution
Below is our 3-step plan to mitigate these core concerns in a long-term, sustainable way. The solution is not switching to or adding percentage-based potions - we did consider this option carefully, but we ruled it out as we acknowledged an array of new problems for Summoners it could produce. Ultimately, we determined that the below solution would allow us to move forward effectively without introducing any new issues.
In the interest of transparency, we wanted to give you an overview of the plan, our anticipated dates for when each of these aspects are targeted to ship and our confidence level we have in hitting these dates. If there are delays, we’ll keep you in the loop.
STEP 1 - Potion Cost Adjustment
Target launch date: Early November 2023
Timeline Confidence: High
- Unit prices for questing, Alliance War and Alliance Quest potions are dropping, and in many cases, significantly!
- Moving forward, prices and availability for questing potions are going to be tied to progression.
- Potions will be consistently cheaper in the rework, even for Challenger and Contender accounts.
- Proven-to-Uncollected accounts will gain access to level 5 potions (and level 6 potions through Unit Offers) and all potion Unit prices will drop.
- Cavalier+ accounts will see Unit prices for potions drop again, and will gain access to level 6 and 7 potions through unit offers.
- Because potion prices are now tied to milestone progress, in the future, as champion health pools continue to rise, we will lower potion prices as needed when we introduce further Progression Levels.
- We’re adding Level 6 and 7 health potions and Level 6 and 7 team health potions to questing, Alliance War and Alliance Quest, and Level 5 health potions and Level 4 team health potions to Incursions
- Note: these will be available in Unit Offers only.
- We will continue to update our healing item offers to reflect the lowered base prices - this will likely not all be ready all at once, but rather than delay until all offer updates are ready, we thought it best to give you all the lowered base potion prices as early as possible. We aim to have all updated offers reflect the new base potions quickly thereafter.
Potion Cost Update
STEP 2 - Potions Compensate for Boosts & Glory/Loyalty Costs Update
Target Launch Date: February 2024
Timeline Confidence: Medium-high
- When you have a health boost active, potions will heal that percentage more health while the boost is active
- Prices in the Glory and Loyalty stores will be lowered, though not substantially. Instead, in Alliance War, for each fight completed you’ll gain Loyalty, giving you more access to this resource. We’ve approached the situation from this angle primarily to ensure that the choice of how to spend your Loyalty remains an interesting one.
- We’re adding level 5 single and team potions to the Loyalty Store, and level 4 single and team potions to the Glory Store.
STEP 3 - Quick Heal
Target Launch Date: April 2024
Timeline Confidence: Medium
- Introducing Quick Heal! This will be a convenient, new option that will use the Potions and Revives from your inventory to heal your champions with one tap. This will be a new option in the pre-fight screen, and will also be usable from within the fight screen itself if you want to heal and jump right back in. If you’re out of healing items, there will be a separate Quick Heal option for you to directly convert Units to health/revival at a great exchange rate. This feature will dramatically reduce the number of taps needed to heal your champs, saving you time and effort. This feature will roll out first in questing content, but we will also introduce it to Alliance War, Alliance Quest and Incursions in future.
- Note: the details of this feature are still under discussion
Looking to the Future
The cumulative result of these changes is intended to shift the meta away from always feeling like you have to revive to 20% or 40% health, and to provide more varied options where often it's best to heal your champions a greater amount. This is expected to give viability to a wider range of champions, and lower the stress of fights by giving revived champions more margin of error on the rematch.
Comments
You can get 3 health potions for 29 each and 87 credits total. And one team health potion healing 3 teammates cost 91 credits? So it’s more expensive to heal your team than individually applying the same amount.
Absolutely no changes at all to the ammount healed via the potions, which was what player's were asking since the beginning. Didn't even needed to be percentage based, just a significant increase would suffice.
And everything you did, was to make potions cheaper for units, which no one buys and no one asked for it. And everything is tied to unit offers as well. Units units units ... like how obvious are you trying to be here?
And where's the inventory cap increase that we were also waiting for? Really going to keep it at 25, when it should be like at the very least in the hundreds? You really think people are going to be exploring full paths in everest content with just 25 potions? (stash number doesn't count obviously, shouldn't be considered in the calculations since it's in the stash)
Seriously, what a worthless "update" we got here ...
I appreciate being able to purchase more consumables for the amount it would take me to purchase one now.
I love the compensation for boosts. That's pretty huge.
I like the 'quick heal' option, super convenient and very user friendly. Great quality of life improvement here.
The solution is not switching to or adding percentage-based potions - we did consider this option carefully, but we ruled it out as we acknowledged an array of new problems for the bottom line it could produce.
Fixed it for you
At least currently, this will have zero effect on the "feeling like you have to revive to 20% or 40% health" because there are no changes that address natural potion gain and usage.
The ONLY added value to low level potions any of the above has is the boost compensation, that's it.
Low level accounts will still reach a very early plateau where they level up and rank up champions and low level potions are effectively worthless. That hasn't at all changed. Lvl 3 potions barely do a thing now and they will barely do a thing after this change. Potions of lower values are completely worthless, that doesn't change.
To make it very simple why the community very strongly pushed for percentage based potions:
Lets say I take a 7* R2 Sasquatch to Alliance War because I needed an armor break immune, his base health is 91834. To fully heal him after using a 40% revive I would need a lvl 5 + lvl 7 potion from the table above amounting to 180 units.
But if instead i chose to take 7* R2 Wiccan with a base health of 50667, i'd just need the lvl 7 potion itself with a whole 60 unit difference in cost of healing.
Yes, having a higher base health is technically an advantage or even can be considered a strength towards a certain champ but in return the player just gets punished when it comes to using consumables for them, all changes mentioned above does nothing to address this issue..
Don't get me wrong, it would be much easier to program their step 2 if they were percentage based, but it doesn't fix the fundamental problem of them.
Hopefully we will start seeing level 6 or 7 health potions in that 1k EQ potion and revive bundle. That would be very nice
Please make sure there are redundant confirmation dialogues for this so we don't accidentally spend units to heal when we don't mean to.