R192: Champion Rewards Updates

DAZ0273

I'm not hardcore in any way whatsoever. Unless you count my collection of broken bricks, stone and concrete chunks that I have at the back of my garden.

Daredevil217

pheregas said:

I realize not everyone may be in this situation, but I think we can all just be happy that we got the feeders we've all been asking about for years.

If you realize not everyone is in your situation, then realize that not everyone will just “be happy” with the situation. Especially since we are being “paid” something that as you just alluded to, should have happened years ago. They withheld, withheld, withheld (anniversaries, holidays, etc.) then finally gave out a lump sum of feeders. While nice, the “tax” (lower resources across the board AND less bonus pulls) isn’t worth it to many people. Especially since with BH and saved covers, colorless 3s/4s weren’t the necessity they once were. 5s with lopsided builds? Sure. But we are getting taxed heavy at almost all tiers for a “feature” that really only helps those corner cases. And the worst part is they didn’t HAVE to do it. 

HoundofShadow

That's precisely why it's difficult to quantify the actual losses. It depends on where you are in the game. Generally speaking, it seems that it will affect the top percentile more, rather than the bottom.  Your average players won't know what is 2* or 3* farming. They are very likely going to sell the extra covers of their max champed characters. 

Actually, I'm concerned that they pushed out all but 2 feeders for 5*. Remember that they said they felt that the feeder release rate was too fast? Look what happened with this update.  That's 35 feeders over 25 months. 

ThaRoadWarrior

It's pretty easy to "quantify" the losses - the numbers are there for you already, just harder to "qualify" the losses to determine the impact.

If you aren't hurting for roster slots, you won't necessarily miss the HP as badly as the 2->3->4* transitioners that these changes are purportedly meant to help. I do think the CP losses are going to add up though. In fact, as someone that recently transitioned to 5* play by pulling as I go F2P, I feel explicitly targeted by this CP throttling lol. 

bluewolf

HoundofShadow said:

Actually, I'm concerned that they pushed out all but 2 feeders for 5*. Remember that they said they felt that the feeder release rate was too fast? Look what happened with this update.  That's 35 feeders over 25 months. 

Some thoughts:

1.  Some people try to game the feeders by pushing characters over a cover break (say, 280) and get both the LT and the 5.  Pushing out everyone at one time means double-dipping is pretty much impossible unless you have a big hoard, doubly so with the targeted hero system locking your progress rate down.

2.  Dilution is awful.  No other way around it.  They have done NOTHING on rewards in 2 years....I guess they figure it's high time they  gave us something, even with the tradeoff.

3.  The game is about having goals you can chase....making everyone fed turns many player's idea of "maybe I'll cover Hela someday, but I don't know when that might happen since when will she get a feeder?" to "OK, I can target Magik if I want to get more Helas, or maybe I should chase Cyclops since Cable needs one more...." etc.

Targeted Heroes means you can't speed anything up or get lucky which, if the goal is long term locked in stead progress, is more defined now than ever.

Lastly: 
This is a hit on rewards and they know it.  Making it rain covers mitigates the bad feelings.  If they dripped out feeders one or a couple at a time....say, they did Archangel and Cable now....but you were still losing stuff, a lot more people would probably be upset right now.

Champ rewards get very generous at the top of the 4's.  There are a significant number of players who can very easily coast along, champing everyone, without spending any money at all.  This is not good for the game's longevity, right?  Unless people willingly spend to give back, that's not helping the game and the basic economic model is failing to some degree.  Anyway......if the devs see lots of people building large caches of HP and CP without spending, you can easily see that they are incentivized to try to find ways to reduce the flow and create pressure on people.  If that is part of their goal in all this then giving everyone the big win of a lot of new feeders makes cutting champ rewards a little more palatable.

Vhailorx

pheregas said:

Hey everyone.  To put it simply, I am over the moon regarding these feeder updates.  Not only are we getting most of the 5* tier filled, we are also getting increased 4* progression covers/shards.

Does it matter to me that HP/CP rewards are being shifted around.  Not one bit.  I have asked for years for what we are getting and I, for one, am just going to kick back and enjoy my rewards and look forward to playing around with all my newly champed 5s.

I realize not everyone may be in this situation, but I think we can all just be happy that we got the feeders we've all been asking about for years.

Thank you devs.  Thank you so very much.

-Pheregas

Points for honesty, I guess.  But this seems myopic.  You admit that not everyone is in your situation, but then call on everyone to be equally pleased by this development. 

Personally, I don't think I play enough anymore that this change will have a large impact on me.  But the overall trend of recent changes is to tighten the screws on resources that players can hoard and deploy in multiple ways, and replace them with resources that are fixed on a particular path (i.e., iso, HP, and cp are all going to be harder to get, but we will all have lots of shards spread out amongst the 200+ characters on the game).  That seems like a very bad change (for players) to me.  Even if it will let me champ some mostly-useless old 5*s in the short term.

Vhailorx

HoundofShadow said:

Actually, I'm concerned that they pushed out all but 2 feeders for 5*. Remember that they said they felt that the feeder release rate was too fast? Look what happened with this update.  That's 35 feeders over 25 months. 

  But that was from demi/d3's perspective?  Put bluntly, why should we, as players, care if 5* feeders are pushed out "too fast."?

Warbringa

Projectus2501 said:

To all of you that are saying that the losses are small. This is not true. The losses are BIG. Especially because most of you are concentrating your reasoning in the 2* and 3*. The big loss is obviously in 4* land. I think it is made on purpose because most of the game revenue comes from cp. Reduce this in the "free" economy and players will spend more.

Its always hard to see resources diminish but we need to see the devs perspective. They control the game and they make the decisions. It's their choice and a player can only choose to cope with it or get another hobby. 

As feeders is concerned, this is not a compensation. This is well overdue in the game. It's about time

PS: good communication effort by the devs. I enjoy ice's way of communicating

I honestly haven't even focused on the 4* changes yet as I have only been looking so far at the farm impact which for me is just 2* and 3*.  I believe you though that there is probably a major hit in 4* champ rewards too.

shardwick

HoundofShadow said:

The loss in HP is signifant for those who can flip entire 3* farm once or twice a year. For most players, it's going to take them two to three years or even longer. 

Some are focusing on the losses but they somehow ignored or forgot about the Mighty Tokens gained. Given that 4* champ rewards give a higher value of resources, the amount of "losses" could be reduced by the faster leveling of 4*. An extra two levels per characters could be better or neutral, depending on where your four-stars are. Mighty Tokens also allow you to flip your 3* farm a little faster. 

The total HP loss is 16,450 before taking into account the pull from Mighty Tokens gained. After factoring in MT, I believe it will be much lower than this. However, factoring MTs into 3* farming is beyond my scope because I'm not going to get upset about this loss that will take ms about 1.5 to 2 years to be realised. I leave it to those who flip 3* farm at least once a year.

I'd rather have the hp. I pretty much never buy packs so for me hp goes towards roster slots, 5* shards, pvp shields and maybe a costume bundle.

HoundofShadow

Short answer: Because if players continue to live in a self-centered world, they will continue to be unhappy with any game balances.

Long answer: I believe most players in this forums are working adults and they are aware that this game is not made by a non-profit organisation. Since this game is made by a company (a subsidiary of listed company in fact), decisions are made based on how it will affect them as a whole both in the long run and the short run. Because many decisions made don't affect only the players, but it will also affect the relationships with Marvel/Disney, and other internal and external stakeholders; therefore, they can't simply give out resources that have  business cost tagged to it just because the players say so.

Since they have finance people working on this project, therefore; it is their duty to do their job. If they allow developers to give out resources freely without taking into account how it will affect the business, they are not doing their job.

Because this is how reality works, therefore; if players choose to continue to think that only how they are affected by changes are important and choose to ignore or disregard how other stakeholders are affected by the decisions, then I say they are the one out of touch with reality. And, it won't be surprising why some still can't get this after all these years.

DAZ0273

HoundofShadow said:

Short answer: Because if players continue to live in a self-centered world, they will continue to be unhappy with any game balances.

Long answer: I believe most players in this forums are working adults and they are aware that this game is not made by a non-profit organisation. Since this game is made by a company (a subsidiary of listed company in fact), decisions are made based on how it will affect them as a whole both in the long run and the short run. Because many decisions made don't affect only the players, but it will also affect the relationships with Marvel/Disney, and other internal and external stakeholders; therefore, they can't simply give out resources that have  business cost tagged to it just because the players say so.

Since they have finance people working on this project, therefore; it is their duty to do their job. If they allow developers to give out resources freely without taking into account how it will affect the business, they are not doing their job.

Because this is how reality works, therefore; if players choose to continue to think that only how they are affected by changes are important and choose to ignore or disregard how other stakeholders are affected by the decisions, then I say they are the one out of touch with reality. And, it won't be surprising why some still can't get this after all these years.

All of this is utter nonsense. Not one single player in this Forum is obliged to care about or facilitate Devs bottom line. Either the Devs make content that the playerbase enjoy and come back to. Or they don't. In which case - bye bye Devs.

Vhailorx

Hound, I don't think the game is going to be non-profit (though it would certainly be no problem for me if that happened).

But I don't see why we, as players, need to negotiate against ourselves.  The idea that Demi couldn't possibly just add more rewards to the game without instantly breaking everything is absurd.  There is no reason why we couldn't have bonus heroes + targeted heroes + updated feeders on top of the old champiom rewards. 

If, as IceIX claims, the removed rewards make up only a very small portion of player rewards (and I would really like to see the data on that), then surely they could be retained without destabilizing the game.

No, this is almost certainly a significant nerf to player resource rates that is being obscured by artificially linking it to a much-requested feature, because demi knows players would be irate if they just took away iso/hp/cp.  We shouldn't fall for the bait.  We should praise the good elements and call out the bad ones.

BoyWonder1914

Now that I've had some time to look this over, I hope this is something that's more of a continuous project than a one-time thing every so often. Yes, its great that we got so many feeders, but at the same time, the fact that they aren't slowing down releasing characters any time soon means that in only a matter of time we'll feel hopeless before dilution again.  

@IceIX With this update, you've established the precedent of 3-stars awarding more than 1 4-star character. Is there a reason this wasn't done across the board for all 3-stars? You guys could quite honestly put a serious dent in the dilution problem if you did. And I'm not just saying that, even with the amount of 4-stars in the game now, they could seriously all get a feeder if EACH 3-star feeding 2 characters was the norm now: 

There are 47 3-star characters in the game, and 18 of them will continue only feeding 1 character after this update. You could technically free up 5 more spots if you eliminated the double-feeding: 

1) Beast and Angel both still feed Jean Grey
2) Colossus and Patch both still feed Wolverine
3) Daredevil and Elektra both still feed Elektra 
4) Gamora and Star-Lord both still feed Star Lord
5) Daken and Ragnarok both still feed X-23

That's 23 additional 4-star characters you could still feed, and you don't even need all of those slots to finish off the 4-star roster as it is now! Here's who still needs one: 

1) Mockingbird
2) Agent Coulson
3) Cloak & Dagger
4) Vulture
5) America Chavez
6) Spider-Gwen
7) Nico Minoru
8) Shuri
9) Nebula
10) Ghost
11) Black Cat
12) Prowler
13) Bishop
14) Spider Man 2099
15) Namor
16) M.O.D.O.K.
17) Wolfsbane

So yeah.....someone correct me if I'm wrong, but you could feed every 4-star in the game without even touching the folks that feed a character twice. That doesn't include the Limited Characters, but you could feed them too if you did. 

ThaRoadWarrior

I think it's fair to say that the "bulk" of my cp comes from the progress tree in PVP/PVE, but I also think that there is enough CP coming from champ levels that it matters. I do know that 3*->4* transitioners in my alliance were reliant on the HP that comes from champ rewards to add roster slots though. They were in the habit of walking their BH around to whoever was closest at the 3* tier. And the drop from BH to Shards has already adversely affected their ability to change direction fast enough to do that. 

shardwick

Well, here's the thing. When I play a game it's for my personal enjoyment. Crazy, right? So, though I want the game to do well at the end of the day I personally couldn't care less about some stakeholders and their bank accounts. Sorry, not sorry. 

randomhero1090

shardwick said:

Well, here's the thing. When I play a game it's for my personal enjoyment. Crazy, right? So, though I want the game to do well at the end of the day I personally couldn't care less about some stakeholders and their bank accounts. Sorry, not sorry.

You shouldn't have to care. Most people don't mind spending money on a game they enjoy. The money will come if you have a quality product out there.

ThaRoadWarrior

Out of curiosity - did we pin down when this was going live? I assumed it would be with the Winter Stuff, but so far not so much on iOS.

broll

The loss of ISO, HP, and CP is a bummer, but the change is worth it.

That being said it seems likely the SCL rewards are getting ready to revamped.  The difference from this change has the potential to be made up there.  Let's hope it is.

HoundofShadow

Sure, no one is obliged to care about whatever happened to the devs. But, it's called putting yourself in the shoes of other people or looking at things from different points of views. If the players choose to behave like children throwing temper tantrum because they didn't get enough candies, then it's on them to learn to grow up and behave like an adult. If you see the relationship between you and the devs simply as how much free resources they are giving you without requiring extra effort or money vs how much they are taking away, then you will forever be unhappy with any tradeoffs.

The reason why so many think that it's not going to be gamebreaking adding whatever resources along existing features is because you are not the owner or director in charge of MPQ. If you are in charge of making sure that KPIs are met, you won't be saying stuff like these.

I haven't seen the claim by IceIX. But, players will only believe what they want to see. It doesn't matter whether the devs release the data or not because one thing is for sure, players who are against the tradeoffs will argue against the data and will try all means to invalidate them. We already had a few a sagas where players want to win, such as the definition of "logical feeders", "neutral", "expert players" and "couple" etc.

Vhailorx

broll said:

The loss of ISO, HP, and CP is a bummer, but the change is worth it.

That being said it seems likely the SCL rewards are getting ready to revamped.  The difference from this change has the potential to be made up there.  Let's hope it is.

"Worth it"?  Why are you accepting the framing that the one is only possible in combination with the other?  The two changes are only linked because demi linked them.