@StormCrow you thought much appropriated .
Like 5 finger on hands are not the same. The bots players have upgraded took year to reach with what resources kabam offers and what they get is random not according to what they want for AM . So bring the right bot for the right situation idea sounds failure somewhat.
So the conclusion are simple we cant find new player who can take the high challenges easily
2. Replacement are hard.
3. Can’t kick out players if they cannot do the job with thier bot.
4. Because if 1 player why 17 have to suffer.
5. Minibosses are harder than boss
6. I m not complaints stating the facts
7. I won’t ask to change anything at all
8. Or start making demo videos on how to fight against mods on your YouTube channel .
Some suggestions:
1. Add a Swap feature so that in each AM, the Leader and Officiers have a total of 3 chances to swap two players during the map run. This can encourage players to communicate more often and make adaptive decision during the fight.
2. Disable all lanes currently occupied by other teammates in order to prevent accidental overrun.
Agree on number two there need to be something to prevent accidental.
@StormCrow you thought much appropriated .
Like 5 finger on hands are not the same. The bots players have upgraded took year to reach with what resources kabam offers and what they get is random not according to what they want for AM . So bring the right bot for the right situation idea sounds failure somewhat.
So the conclusion are simple we cant find new player who can take the high challenges easily
2. Replacement are hard.
3. Can’t kick out players if they cannot do the job with thier bot.
4. Because if 1 player why 17 have to suffer.
5. Minibosses are harder than boss
6. I m not complaints stating the facts
7. I won’t ask to change anything at all
8. Or start making demo videos on how to fight against mods on your YouTube channel .
You lost me.... are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me?
Thank you all for the feedback on Map 3 thus far. ...
First off, welcome to the forums I have appreciated your responses in this and other threads thus far as level-headed and understanding.
A couple ideas I had that could ease the pain for some (maybe?).
One -- and this one is not my own idea, but belongs to Dino / JKL of Force:
Can we get some sort of button to back up? Even if there is some sort of penalty to prevent misuse of this... like for instance not refunding the energy when you go backwards and then charging 1 energy to go back to where you were.
I think this would really go a long way to helping restore some confidence in the 6 lanes by snuffing out potential accidental scenarios where someone goes down the wrong path, either due to miscommunication, lag, something on their screen -- whatever it is. In the past this would be an annoyance, now it results in complete failure.
Two -- Maybe Map 3 would be more accepted if you took what was deemed as the "four toughest paths", discarded one lane from each side on Section 2, and effectively allowed players to team up on these more difficult paths. I imagine that no one would complain if you still kept the 3rd buff on the mini boss.
This would keep the difficulty relatively similar to what it is right now, and give people a section of the map where they felt like they were ganging up on the map a bit instead of the other way around.
Finally, I have a question. This is not meant as a complaint, but more just to get the bearings on what you guys are intending by design, as it would help to understand for future suggestions.
Is it Kabam's intention for the lanes to be relatively balanced in difficulty, or is it by design that some lanes are significantly harder than others?
We really appreciate everybody's feedback. I'll try my best to address all the main points that were just brought up:
IT FEELS LIKE I'M PLAYING A SOLO MISSION!
At the moment, yes, it might feel like you're left to your own devices while the mini-bosses are the only time you'll ever cross paths.
Again, we did this intentionally so that all players participating must contribute to the success of the BG. We're trying to strike a balance where all players should be active throughout, but at the same time, players shouldn't feel like the challenges on their lanes are extremely difficult and require backup from others.
Map 3 is supposed to be challenging as it is our only end game social content for the time being and we want to apply some pressure on you guys, but the current tuning does feel a bit aggressive.
IT MIGHT HELP IF WE HAD MORE... HELP?
Increasing the size of an alliance might be a valid long term solution for us to explore later, but at the moment we don't have plans to increase alliances. Before we took on something like that, we have to be absolutely sure that it's the path we want to take (just like Map 3, haha...)
Increasing alliance size has all sorts of implications that we'd have to look into and balance for. We'd have to adjust event rewards, point milestones, look at re-tuning Map 2, balance alliance help, and not to mention what might happen to the alliance ecosystem if we opened up extra slots in bigger alliances. This would cause a bunch of player migrations, which honestly might not be a bad thing, but again, we have to be absolutely sure we want this and not do it as a means to fix one alliance map.
WHAT ABOUT POSITION SWAPPING OR RECALLING?
I feel like having those mechanics might help in specific situations, but it's not a long term fix for the goals we have in mind. We'd like to provide a better experience so that players who come prepared are able to complete their paths, rather than giving them a mulligan because we didn't tune our encounters correctly, or we didn't provide enough clarity with encounter designs.
WELL, YOU BETTER MAKE IT WORTH OUR WHILE!
And we plan to! Just like how we may have been too aggressive in tuning the difficulty of the encounters, it looks like we may have missed the mark on reward tuning. We apologize for that, and believe us, our intention was not to make our players angry!
We see this as a process that is extremely hard to perfect on our first pass, though I do feel like we should have done better, and we're going to make improvements over time. Again, we will be discussing this topic as a team to see how we can make rewards more appealing to everyone here.
THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Okay! Over the next few days, as we continue to discuss the state of Map 3, we will be providing updates for you guys here and try to be as transparent as possible as to what changes we'll be making and why.
You might not agree with everything that we do, but I hope that you feel like we're moving in the right direction. Please continue to voice your feedback here on the forums and I promise I'll do my best to read through everything you post.
So in order to do map3 you excpect people to just give up on the bots most have been building since the game was released. 99% are no where near an r5 and have wasted hundreds of bots to forge into an r4 they may finally have gotten these past few weeks. And now, scrap them, start building new bots, get stuck in the same upgrading-hell a year for it to happen again?
This is just a suggestion, and yes I could just message you this on Line, but you pose a good question, so I wanted to respond and possibly help out others that have this concern as well.
My answer to this would be, you absolutely should not be discarding bots, at least not all of them. In most people's case, save for people at the very top of the game, they have one bot that stands out as their clear "best bot". Whether that means a fully forged bot compared to lesser forged ones, or one bot that is ranked higher than the others, this should be the bot that you are building your team around.
While it is certainly true, that everyone bringing the same bot could be a problem, really this is something that should have been better planned even in map 2 if this is the case for an alliance. It certainly doesn't make any sense for a group that plans to stay together to all level up a bunch of MMs as everyone's top bot, so unless the lack of planning went off the rails, you should be able to still have some diversity and allow everyone to bring their best bot to meet the challenge.
At this point, once you know what everyone plans to bring as their best bot, you can identify where those bots fit in the best for Map 3. Once you have figured that out, its as simple as these players bringing other bots that can compliment their main bot well on these paths. This does NOT mean they will always have great synergy, and does not mean that you will always have class advantage. It also may take some time as your alliance rebuilds a bit, before those secondary bots will be up to snuff, but it certainly is a better move than scrapping all your hard work.
Will this require moving people around in BGs? Extra planning? Some trial and error? Of course... but this is the point of a new challenge. When a new spotlight mission comes out, people try things out, and if they don't work, they try something else out til they succeed. Apply that same methodology to this AM and I think everyone will be excited when you prevail, as a team.
I understand that you have other issues with the map, and hopefully these will get worked out. But, I don't think they are going to change the design so radically that you will be able to just smash your way through this map without making any adjustments to your AM rosters, and attacking things more tactically rather than with brute force.
In the end, I hope that there is enough compromise on Kabam's part that you and your alliance come to enjoy the map, because it has the potential to be a fun challenge when you find the appropriate level and strategy to get Megatron and his minions under your thumb.
@kabam karma how about these bots sitting back & always holding out for s3... its unblockable & you cant bait anything else out of them. Maybe look into the coding of the bots too & stop that. Rush to kill before they can get a full s3 really kills the fun & strategy in playing the game no matter what bot you choose to use
We really appreciate everybody's feedback. I'll try my best to address all the main points that were just brought up:
IT FEELS LIKE I'M PLAYING A SOLO MISSION!
At the moment, yes, it might feel like you're left to your own devices while the mini-bosses are the only time you'll ever cross paths.
Again, we did this intentionally so that all players participating must contribute to the success of the BG. We're trying to strike a balance where all players should be active throughout, but at the same time, players shouldn't feel like the challenges on their lanes are extremely difficult and require backup from others.
Map 3 is supposed to be challenging as it is our only end game social content for the time being and we want to apply some pressure on you guys, but the current tuning does feel a bit aggressive.
IT MIGHT HELP IF WE HAD MORE... HELP?
Increasing the size of an alliance might be a valid long term solution for us to explore later, but at the moment we don't have plans to increase alliances. Before we took on something like that, we have to be absolutely sure that it's the path we want to take (just like Map 3, haha...)
Increasing alliance size has all sorts of implications that we'd have to look into and balance for. We'd have to adjust event rewards, point milestones, look at re-tuning Map 2, balance alliance help, and not to mention what might happen to the alliance ecosystem if we opened up extra slots in bigger alliances. This would cause a bunch of player migrations, which honestly might not be a bad thing, but again, we have to be absolutely sure we want this and not do it as a means to fix one alliance map.
WHAT ABOUT POSITION SWAPPING OR RECALLING?
I feel like having those mechanics might help in specific situations, but it's not a long term fix for the goals we have in mind. We'd like to provide a better experience so that players who come prepared are able to complete their paths, rather than giving them a mulligan because we didn't tune our encounters correctly, or we didn't provide enough clarity with encounter designs.
WELL, YOU BETTER MAKE IT WORTH OUR WHILE!
And we plan to! Just like how we may have been too aggressive in tuning the difficulty of the encounters, it looks like we may have missed the mark on reward tuning. We apologize for that, and believe us, our intention was not to make our players angry!
We see this as a process that is extremely hard to perfect on our first pass, though I do feel like we should have done better, and we're going to make improvements over time. Again, we will be discussing this topic as a team to see how we can make rewards more appealing to everyone here.
THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Okay! Over the next few days, as we continue to discuss the state of Map 3, we will be providing updates for you guys here and try to be as transparent as possible as to what changes we'll be making and why.
You might not agree with everything that we do, but I hope that you feel like we're moving in the right direction. Please continue to voice your feedback here on the forums and I promise I'll do my best to read through everything you post.
I like how you say, "we did this intentionally so that all players participating must contribute", hope it stay like this moving forward. Don't want my hard work go to waste, just because some players did not want to contribute a lot.
Can we get some sort of button to back up? Even if there is some sort of penalty to prevent misuse of this... like for instance not refunding the energy when you go backwards and then charging 1 energy to go back to where you were.
Implementing a feature such as a back button is definitely a viable option. However, this may not 100% solve the problem of selecting the wrong path. Imagine a scenario where you use your back button and for whatever reason, you hit the wrong path again (or a different one even).
I can bring this up with the team (we can also brainstorm other solutions to this problem), and we'll get back to you
Two -- Maybe Map 3 would be more accepted if you took what was deemed as the "four toughest paths", discarded one lane from each side on Section 2, and effectively allowed players to team up on these more difficult paths. I imagine that no one would complain if you still kept the 3rd buff on the mini boss.
This would keep the difficulty relatively similar to what it is right now, and give people a section of the map where they felt like they were ganging up on the map a bit instead of the other way around.
This solution has been suggested a few times and it's definitely something we could explore. However, before we try something drastic like changing layouts, we want to try and fix the experience by first tuning the encounters properly on all the paths.
Finally, I have a question. This is not meant as a complaint, but more just to get the bearings on what you guys are intending by design, as it would help to understand for future suggestions.
Is it Kabam's intention for the lanes to be relatively balanced in difficulty, or is it by design that some lanes are significantly harder than others?
The short answer, is no, we do not intend for different paths to be drastically more difficult from one another.
The long answer is more complicated. Because we wanted a variety of challenges, some encounters will inherently be more difficult than others. Did we want them to be much more difficult? No. While playtesting, we used bots that we felt like were "answers" to these challenges. We felt that Map 3 would be interesting for players to figure out and solve together.
@kabam karma how about these bots sitting back & always holding out for s3... its unblockable & you cant bait anything else out of them. Maybe look into the coding of the bots too & stop that. Rush to kill before they can get a full s3 really kills the fun & strategy in playing the game no matter what bot you choose to use
Hey Daveh911! This is something that we've been looking at as one of our biggest combat pain points. Please pardon the Marvel:Contest of Champions reference here, but I believe this is the best way to frame this (I'm sorry if this is out of context for some of you).
In Marvel, AI behavior is much easier to predict, mostly due to the fact that their options are way more limited (they don't have a 3rd axis or ranged attacks). In fact, if any of you are Marvel players here, they recently released a character that actually increases the likelihood of the opponent using a Special Attack (Stark Spiderman -- I'm not promising a new character here! Please don't kill me, character team).
In Transformers, because of all these extra decisions the AI can make, their behavior becomes seemingly more erratic and things like Special Attacks are much harder to 'bait' out. This is something I can bring up again with our gameplay team. We've already discussed some solutions in the past, but haven't zeroed in on a single solution just yet.
We as players can see ideal bots for paths (ie: Rhinox is the most ideal bleeder for hemophilia path considering the matchups, the mod and his specific skillset).. The problem is balancing mod power so that it is actually feasible to run a gauntlet of 3-4 opponents with one bot.
We as players can see ideal bots for paths (ie: Rhinox is the most ideal bleeder for hemophilia path considering the matchups, the mod and his specific skillset).. The problem is balancing mod power so that it is actually feasible to run a gauntlet of 3-4 opponents with one bot.
I suppose if you really, really gear your gameplay around ranged, Rhinox can work for that lane, but I would argue there are far better bots for the mod. Just a suggestion to take as you will, but I have found far better success by ignoring all class advantage unless it is really just used as a tiebreaker, and solely focusing on using the BEST bot for the mod.
In my experience, Drift and BC are far more reliable bleeders when it comes to bleed %. BC might be the best for this mod... Drift bleeds seem more common, but they are shorter. Also, BC has a high chance to apply bleed on heavy, which is the most "forceful" way possible... i.e. if they are holding up their block and turtling, you can still get a bleed on them.
As for the one bot thing... I think everyone should be trying to bring two bots that are suitable for the lane they are on, so they don't get caught up with "oh crap I KO'd my one good bot for this lane". This would require one or more people to alternate in on the DoT paths (since there are no 2 bots that could really handle more than one of those lanes cleanly), but there are combinations that could work so that you aren't tying your success completely to one bot.
Like I said earlier, I use r4 BC and WB for that lane because my rhinox is r2, and I have no tech sparks... But think about his skillset.
First heavy power locks, giving you time to charge to s1.
His s1 currently triggers a bleed every time, with or without converting an opponent buff.
You can continue to spam heavies to power lock, charging up to an s2 for more bleeds while peppering with ranged.
I have had rounds where neither BC or WB can trigger a bleed in time.. it's uncanny.
I really do think rhinox is the best answer for the lane though. Especially with having RamJet there.. Rhinox will mitigate damage from any mistakes you make.
I just want to add my 2cts here. Map3 isn't what we as an alliance expected. We had several issues through the course of the series, e.g. players pick wrong paths due to lack of the game and pow 100% are gone which results in 1/3 of the rewards are gone as well.
Even in points currently AM isn't worth the time as it lost its teamplay characteristics as written by other commanders already.
On the other side yes it needs 18 similar players to get 3x 100% and if someone quit the game because of frustration with rewards or whatever it hits the whole Alliances. And recruiting isn't the most fun part in the game.
Also Spotlight is pretty frustrating at the moment. Why putting bosses into expert who literally K.O. a bot with 2-3 hits. There is no fun to play that anymore. I came through the whole map spend 65 energy with 5 alive and healthy bots at the Endboss and get killed without even a chance.
The balance between Boss and Map also on AM Map 3 should be adjusted and I hope the update will bring improvements.
I'm honestly a little surprised at the strength of reactions so early on. I've barely had time to digest the my own path in the new map let-alone the whole thing.
Personally, I've been having fun with it. I often take fights with class disadvantage in this map, which I never used to do. I used to go to extremes to ensure no fight in our entire BG would happen without advantage. Now, I use Mirage against Prowl in s2p5, my 4/40 OG handles the Barricade miniboss in *half* the hits I need for the same fight using my r5/30 MM (with class advantage, and 50% higher damage rate), but MM is my best weapon against OG Megs even though there's class disadvantage
Meanwhile, my alliance only really began strategic planning for this map today. We've only just been able to digest who the enemy is. In my own BG we haven't yet had any discussions about changing our roster to ensure we have the right bots, or swapping team members with other BGs to ensure every BG has the right mx of ability, bots, and timezones.
Speaking of timezones, you only need two pairs of players per BG to play at roughly the same time as each other to get through the whole map on schedule. Make sure your BG has two pairs of people who can handle the outer and one of the inner paths on each side of the map - that's the first task you have to deal with for this map. Usually it's an officer's role to make sure of that kind of thing, but it can be anyone who takes the initiative. Once you've done that, the next question is; "can we handle the minibosses?"
Minibosses are the hardest part of this map. Shockwave, Galvatron, & Starscream especially. And Bludgeon is a bit tricky too. I've handled MM with zero damage the last two days and no one in my alliance seems to complain about SW (I asked specifically). Scream really is the bit one - 150% damage and 50% attack as shock x3 for his sp1 is legit intense.
But hey, if you keep dying, there's an obvious/easy solution; just lower the level a few notches! All this talk of how "discourage" everyone is is really weird. It's just a game. Play. Have fun. If you aren't able to beat it at one level, try it a notch or two lower first. Don't get to caught up in rewards or ranks. The rank rewards are always trivial relative to more important things like event exploration rewards
I haven't done the haemophilia path yet, so I'm looking forward to that. I expect my strategy will be "don't get hit", but maybe I'll be able to come up with something even better
BTW, have any of the people raising issues considered adjusting their masteries? There are some that would seriously help with specific paths, and given free re-sets, it's worth a look
Oh, and to the people who said something like, "what if your BG doesn't have anyone that can do burn damage".... seriously? If between 6 of you you can't find a decent burn bot, then you aren't ready for map3. That's nothing to be ashamed of, just keep running map2 until you're ready to face a path that needs a burn bot. Or recruit a new player who can help. It doesn't have to be IH, it can be Mix or even RJ. But if 6 people who presumably all have 3 r4 bots don't have a single IH between them... c'mon
Anyway, I get that I have a different view to most people here. But mainly I think I want to keep using it for more than a couple of days before I decide what I really know about it.
Happy to respond to all your reposts/heckling/replies, but be aware I'm in an Asian timezone, so I may not reply quickly if it's morning in the US
The mini-bosses where the 3 players meet should feel challenging like a boss encounter, encouraging all 3 players to work together before unlocking the next area.
Do you mean kill the bot in front of me so I can move forward, which happens to have a link on it to the mini-boss?
Or maybe working together means sacrificing my bots for the other people?
Maybe the mods could encourage actual teamwork for the fight. For example, the player gets a buff for each other player also standing on the same node... or synergies get shared or buffed.
We want players to dig deep in to their roster
I don't think enough bots have been released yet for this to be realistic or viable. We only have 4 brawlers and 4 scouts, 5 of the others classes and 6 demos. They don't even all have 4* releases.
So if you want a specific effect, there's at best maybe what? 2 choices? Some things only 1 choice? Not even enough diversity to get the right class advantage, so we're forced in to sub-optimal pairings just to jump through mod hoops.
With a rate of only 1 bot per month, I don't think we should be expecting players to dig deep.
This isn't mcoc with almost 70 heroes to choose from. We have like 29-30?
The choice of bots and, in particular, ones with the specific effects, is too shallow. There is no depth to dig.
Paths need to be locked down once they are selected. The overhead view, lag, and other issues have resulted in accidental lane selections in the past which you cannot afford now.
The idea of digging deep into the roster is pretty dumb. As mentioned there aren't enough bots with specific effects let alone the fact that some people may not have even got them yet. This doesn't even mention the inability to level bots. The gold issue was just addressed and now we're expected to look at bots we've never been able to rank. Perhaps if this was from day one it would be viable.
I thought these maps would have a section of solo lanes and be a mix of solo and teamwork. The current layout isn't much fun, feels like another solo mission. I don't mind the minis being difficult but three consecutive sections of solo lanes means someone is usually going to get screwed after taking minis. An interesting idea would be a section of 3 - 2 - 1 lane with increasing difficulty.
I've also found this has kind of killed synergies. What was the point of building a team around synergy if it's virtually impossible to effectively utilize that team on the current map?
Finally rewards. Hyped much? yeah if you cant take level 41. I don't mind the new difficulty scale but rewards need to be adjusted. The t1a should be removed from the AS crystals.
Thank you all for the feedback on Map 3 thus far. I definitely agree that there are some pain points that need to be sorted out with this new AM.
DESIGN GOALS
Before I jump into everyone's concerns, I want to first highlight the goals of our new map:
We want players to dig deep into their roster to find the best bots in order to overcome each path
We want to create new buffs to challenge players with regards to strategy and playstyle
We want to create a map where all players must contribute in order to complete the map
I need to comment on this "we want to create new buffs to challenge players with strategy and playstyle"
I understand that mods are going to be looked at, but I can't stress this enough.. There is no fight strategy against power gain mods!
All it amounts to is "I have to charge relentlessly at the opponent before he charges up his power bar and kicks my ass" because s3 is unavoidable. At the very least, anything but a miniboss should have s3 locked out on a power gain mod, so players have the opportunity to avoid instakill.
Again, NO "strategy" or "playstyle" here... And you upped the battle timer to 5 minutes... which is hilarious in its own right from the perspective of these mods.
Fights on power gain mods have to be about 60 seconds long if they are done correctly and you are lucky.. you don't last much longer than that on them (let alone 5 full minutes) if you aren't being hyper aggressive.
So basically, death by s3 or death by AI countering your rushed attack strategy. Neither is appealing or working to evolve player skills.
And if the AI refuses to throw a special, you're screwed regardless.
Keep this in mind when balancing and tweaking your mods.
This thread is pretty good, Kabam Karma is a legend already (but cannot be tagged?)
Anyway, we are running pretty low difficulty map 3 and we have all been taking different lanes each day to see who does best where etc.
First thoughts are that the left side of the map is WAY harder than the right side. The mods on the right are manageable based on play style and bot choice for sure, but on the left side you need to be a ninja and play perfect or have duped Grim, and/or hope for the AI to fire off specials just to be competitive. Power gain buffs as a mod is just silly - there aren’t enough bots who can reliably control power, and baiting specials without taking hits is far too hard in this environment. I’ve had some fights where the AI has held on to a special for 2 minutes or more - this just does not work if they are gaining power constantly. Stopping them gaining constant power by having to repeatedly hit them and giving them more power to stop the extra power is stupid.
I like that everyone has to take responsibility for an individual lane - it works fine on MCOC, and I am used to it from there so maybe this is why I like it, but the convergence on a miniboss and taking it in turns then picking your next lane is working absolutely fine for us with no grumbles as far as I have seen. We certainly aren’t struggling with this and we are pretty much all using r3 4* (i used a 4/40 3* duped grimlock and managed fine too, but we were starting on a single digit difficulty). The even contribution level is something I actually really really like and had a good discussion about it with our alliance leader. We do need increased points for a miniboss though, as it isn’t reflected. I don’t like the points environment, as I think there are other ways a player can contribute and it isn’t always an accurate reflection of how a player is contributing, but it’s acceptable on this map I think for the most part.
Time wise and energy wise, we are doing just fine as well and have some diversity in time zones - we just communicate periods of absence and adjust accordingly.
Rewards are absolutely dreadful. The quantity of shards does not make it worth it at all. The map is really hard and challenging and to build maybe two crystals by the end of it only to be greeted with a tier 2 team revive isn’t great. I know they contain more than just the revives, but the good stuff is super rare and will still take us ages to eventually get anything good from shards. I think that even playing at difficulty 1 we should be getting 2k shards minimum for 100% 3 groups, then go up from there.
The intent behind the map layout is to encourage teamwork during the bot selection and planning phase. We want players to communicate and choose a variety of bots prior to joining up and not just stick with what is currently strong in the meta (ie. G1 Optimus and Ratchet for synergies).
I understand you need the right bot to properly deal with certain mods. Most of us have invested tons of time, money and millions and millions of gold into building/forging 3 strong bots for AMs. We concentrate on 3 bots because AMs is the hardest content in the game. Now you want us to start building other bots to deal with the new map, I can live with that as that's the nature of map 3. However, it'll take months if not a year before I have anything close to the team of Forged R5s I have now.
What I'm trying to ask is will there be an option later on to transfer forge and also rank down a bot to use the resources to build up another one? T3cs don't exactly come easily and forging is a very tedious process. This isn't just for people with R5s, it can pretty much apply to anyone who has invested time and resources in bots that might not fit this map anymore.
This thread is pretty good, Kabam Karma is a legend already (but cannot be tagged?)
Anyway, we are running pretty low difficulty map 3 and we have all been taking different lanes each day to see who does best where etc.
First thoughts are that the left side of the map is WAY harder than the right side.
This is subjective. Unfortunately the whole thing depends upon the bots in your BGs, which is apparently by design based on the "digging deep into the roster" idea they've stated. The right side can be just as difficult. MM is certainly no joke as the difficulty goes up and the armor lane can quickly become impossible in section 3 without break or ignore. It just so happens that so many people run OP or WB etc. Randomizer also gives one of our best players fits.
Personally I found Power Gain pretty easy because I have r5 Prowl and r4 Mirage so that's why I've stated it's subjective. I take the armor lane though because of the gaps our BG has and I'm making due with UM and Mirage there.
The problem is really the fundamental strategy around team building and ranking is changed with the solo lane approach. Not everyone pulls the right bots from crystals based on RNG (uncontrollable) and people tend to favor certain bots even of those they pulled (OP, IH, MV1, etc.) (controllable). Now it will just take time to adjust.
The biggest issue I have is this "digging deep" theory. Consider shards are reduced and there is only one new bot per month, personally, I think these ideas contradict each other.
I love the difficulty of Map 3, it's obviously catered to the top 1% or smaller than that.
Which is why I think rank rewards should be reworked. I understand the fact of having daily rewards and all. But having good rank rewards that makes the game competitive is what I really loved about mcoc and ftf. Now that their really is no competition I just don't find it fun anymore.
It's entirely possible that I've just been playing one type of game for too long and need to move on. Which is what I'll be doing shortly. Just figured I'd throw my 2 pennies up here as well.
This thread is pretty good, Kabam Karma is a legend already (but cannot be tagged?)
Anyway, we are running pretty low difficulty map 3 and we have all been taking different lanes each day to see who does best where etc.
First thoughts are that the left side of the map is WAY harder than the right side.
This is subjective. Unfortunately the whole thing depends upon the bots in your BGs, which is apparently by design based on the "digging deep into the roster" idea they've stated. The right side can be just as difficult. MM is certainly no joke as the difficulty goes up and the armor lane can quickly become impossible in section 3 without break or ignore. It just so happens that so many people run OP or WB etc. Randomizer also gives one of our best players fits.
Personally I found Power Gain pretty easy because I have r5 Prowl and r4 Mirage so that's why I've stated it's subjective. I take the armor lane though because of the gaps our BG has and I'm making due with UM and Mirage there.
The problem is really the fundamental strategy around team building and ranking is changed with the solo lane approach. Not everyone pulls the right bots from crystals based on RNG (uncontrollable) and people tend to favor certain bots even of those they pulled (OP, IH, MV1, etc.) (controllable). Now it will just take time to adjust.
The biggest issue I have is this "digging deep" theory. Consider shards are reduced and there is only one new bot per month, personally, I think these ideas contradict each other.
I see what you mean. The armour lane doesn’t bother me, but I know it caused someone a problem before. I run new mega so is fine for me. The power gain - 30% when they block is just too much. Even constant gain, one mistake with Prowl and you are taking some damage I guess? If he isn’t duped especially (as mine isn’t) then the need for aggression is counter productive as it builds their power quicker as well and I dunno, it seems way too much to manage (for anyone who doesn’t have a r5 prowl!)
I haven't been on the forums too much, but it's the most active I've seen this place before. Again, thank you everybody for your input. There's a lot that's been posted since last night, so please excuse me for not addressing each one. I think we've been able to understand the fundamentals of what players expect from this content and we're ready to sit down and discuss the details with each other.
I promise to provide an update to everyone by the end of the day, and while we may not touch on every single point that you guys have brought up, know that we are committed to working with you long term to improve this map (and other areas in the game). Afterall, this was created for players like you, who are passionate enough to voice your feedback on the forums. I look forward to sharing our changes with you guys later today
P.S - While this thread has been great, I'll likely start a new topic with our changelist so that they'll be more visible to more players!
Behind the words and sentences, know that Kabam is a business, redesign of map and new mechanics will be too costly for Kabam, likely wont happen in Map 3(lanes are set in stone).
Best to expect is to see numbers tuned and assets rearranged, this is more likely.
My 2 cents difficulty aside, the 6 individual paths are a horrible idea. I get you want everyone to contribute, but trust us. If someone isnt performing on the ams, we will get him out.
The 6 lanes is asking for a lifestyle change. Lets say i got a wedding to go to on a saturday or work, or something that wont allow me to get on much and pull my weight that one day. Now my bg wont get 100% completion and now the whole alliance suffers.
Three lanes on a harder difficulty will require all to participate. If you wanna keep the buffs and difficulty for tougher players fine. But the 6 paths is an issue every alliance has a problem with. This is for fun, not work. Players will not get on much one day. With six lanes the entire alliance suffers. Go back to 3 maybe up to 4, but there is no room to breath with 6.
This i feel is the most crucial fix and most alliances will avoid the map for that reason alone.
Wow, lots of good stuff in this thread and I'll say Map 3 was a lot harder than what I was expecting. This AM has really burned me out and now in just a couple days time I'll be jumping back in is really making me think about taking a break from this grind. The game is fun and I'm a big fan of Transformers but it's just starting to require to much of my time.
Good luck Kabam I'm sure you'll get it figured out.
@kabam karma chameleon, maybe do what they did in MCoC after Kabam completely screwed up with v12.0 and implement small focus groups for the changes.
I know the player base is relatively small still, but perhaps if you consult with the players and allow a few to try the content before you release it, you can get preemptive feedback before mistakes are made? I know you have a testing team and devs etc but lets be honest - their views and opinions are clearly not aligned or suited to the average player if you get so many strong views like this about various things
Hey Daveh911! This is something that we've been looking at as one of our biggest combat pain points. Please pardon the Marvel:Contest of Champions reference here, but I believe this is the best way to frame this (I'm sorry if this is out of context for some of you).
In Marvel, AI behavior is much easier to predict, mostly due to the fact that their options are way more limited (they don't have a 3rd axis or ranged attacks). In fact, if any of you are Marvel players here, they recently released a character that actually increases the likelihood of the opponent using a Special Attack (Stark Spiderman -- I'm not promising a new character here! Please don't kill me, character team
Maybe not a new bot, but a good idea for a new mastery!
Comments
Like 5 finger on hands are not the same. The bots players have upgraded took year to reach with what resources kabam offers and what they get is random not according to what they want for AM . So bring the right bot for the right situation idea sounds failure somewhat.
So the conclusion are simple we cant find new player who can take the high challenges easily
2. Replacement are hard.
3. Can’t kick out players if they cannot do the job with thier bot.
4. Because if 1 player why 17 have to suffer.
5. Minibosses are harder than boss
6. I m not complaints stating the facts
7. I won’t ask to change anything at all
8. Or start making demo videos on how to fight against mods on your YouTube channel .
Agree on number two there need to be something to prevent accidental.
You lost me.... are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me?
First off, welcome to the forums
A couple ideas I had that could ease the pain for some (maybe?).
One -- and this one is not my own idea, but belongs to Dino / JKL of Force:
Can we get some sort of button to back up? Even if there is some sort of penalty to prevent misuse of this... like for instance not refunding the energy when you go backwards and then charging 1 energy to go back to where you were.
I think this would really go a long way to helping restore some confidence in the 6 lanes by snuffing out potential accidental scenarios where someone goes down the wrong path, either due to miscommunication, lag, something on their screen -- whatever it is. In the past this would be an annoyance, now it results in complete failure.
Two -- Maybe Map 3 would be more accepted if you took what was deemed as the "four toughest paths", discarded one lane from each side on Section 2, and effectively allowed players to team up on these more difficult paths. I imagine that no one would complain if you still kept the 3rd buff on the mini boss.
This would keep the difficulty relatively similar to what it is right now, and give people a section of the map where they felt like they were ganging up on the map a bit instead of the other way around.
Finally, I have a question. This is not meant as a complaint, but more just to get the bearings on what you guys are intending by design, as it would help to understand for future suggestions.
Is it Kabam's intention for the lanes to be relatively balanced in difficulty, or is it by design that some lanes are significantly harder than others?
This is a lively thread
We really appreciate everybody's feedback. I'll try my best to address all the main points that were just brought up:
IT FEELS LIKE I'M PLAYING A SOLO MISSION!
At the moment, yes, it might feel like you're left to your own devices while the mini-bosses are the only time you'll ever cross paths.
Again, we did this intentionally so that all players participating must contribute to the success of the BG. We're trying to strike a balance where all players should be active throughout, but at the same time, players shouldn't feel like the challenges on their lanes are extremely difficult and require backup from others.
Map 3 is supposed to be challenging as it is our only end game social content for the time being and we want to apply some pressure on you guys, but the current tuning does feel a bit aggressive.
IT MIGHT HELP IF WE HAD MORE... HELP?
Increasing the size of an alliance might be a valid long term solution for us to explore later, but at the moment we don't have plans to increase alliances. Before we took on something like that, we have to be absolutely sure that it's the path we want to take (just like Map 3, haha...)
Increasing alliance size has all sorts of implications that we'd have to look into and balance for. We'd have to adjust event rewards, point milestones, look at re-tuning Map 2, balance alliance help, and not to mention what might happen to the alliance ecosystem if we opened up extra slots in bigger alliances. This would cause a bunch of player migrations, which honestly might not be a bad thing, but again, we have to be absolutely sure we want this and not do it as a means to fix one alliance map.
WHAT ABOUT POSITION SWAPPING OR RECALLING?
I feel like having those mechanics might help in specific situations, but it's not a long term fix for the goals we have in mind. We'd like to provide a better experience so that players who come prepared are able to complete their paths, rather than giving them a mulligan because we didn't tune our encounters correctly, or we didn't provide enough clarity with encounter designs.
WELL, YOU BETTER MAKE IT WORTH OUR WHILE!
And we plan to! Just like how we may have been too aggressive in tuning the difficulty of the encounters, it looks like we may have missed the mark on reward tuning. We apologize for that, and believe us, our intention was not to make our players angry!
We see this as a process that is extremely hard to perfect on our first pass, though I do feel like we should have done better, and we're going to make improvements over time. Again, we will be discussing this topic as a team to see how we can make rewards more appealing to everyone here.
THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
Okay! Over the next few days, as we continue to discuss the state of Map 3, we will be providing updates for you guys here and try to be as transparent as possible as to what changes we'll be making and why.
You might not agree with everything that we do, but I hope that you feel like we're moving in the right direction. Please continue to voice your feedback here on the forums and I promise I'll do my best to read through everything you post.
This is just a suggestion, and yes I could just message you this on Line, but you pose a good question, so I wanted to respond and possibly help out others that have this concern as well.
My answer to this would be, you absolutely should not be discarding bots, at least not all of them. In most people's case, save for people at the very top of the game, they have one bot that stands out as their clear "best bot". Whether that means a fully forged bot compared to lesser forged ones, or one bot that is ranked higher than the others, this should be the bot that you are building your team around.
While it is certainly true, that everyone bringing the same bot could be a problem, really this is something that should have been better planned even in map 2 if this is the case for an alliance. It certainly doesn't make any sense for a group that plans to stay together to all level up a bunch of MMs as everyone's top bot, so unless the lack of planning went off the rails, you should be able to still have some diversity and allow everyone to bring their best bot to meet the challenge.
At this point, once you know what everyone plans to bring as their best bot, you can identify where those bots fit in the best for Map 3. Once you have figured that out, its as simple as these players bringing other bots that can compliment their main bot well on these paths. This does NOT mean they will always have great synergy, and does not mean that you will always have class advantage. It also may take some time as your alliance rebuilds a bit, before those secondary bots will be up to snuff, but it certainly is a better move than scrapping all your hard work.
Will this require moving people around in BGs? Extra planning? Some trial and error? Of course... but this is the point of a new challenge. When a new spotlight mission comes out, people try things out, and if they don't work, they try something else out til they succeed. Apply that same methodology to this AM and I think everyone will be excited when you prevail, as a team.
I understand that you have other issues with the map, and hopefully these will get worked out. But, I don't think they are going to change the design so radically that you will be able to just smash your way through this map without making any adjustments to your AM rosters, and attacking things more tactically rather than with brute force.
In the end, I hope that there is enough compromise on Kabam's part that you and your alliance come to enjoy the map, because it has the potential to be a fun challenge when you find the appropriate level and strategy to get Megatron and his minions under your thumb.
I like how you say, "we did this intentionally so that all players participating must contribute", hope it stay like this moving forward. Don't want my hard work go to waste, just because some players did not want to contribute a lot.
Thank you! Happy to be here
Implementing a feature such as a back button is definitely a viable option. However, this may not 100% solve the problem of selecting the wrong path. Imagine a scenario where you use your back button and for whatever reason, you hit the wrong path again (or a different one even).
I can bring this up with the team (we can also brainstorm other solutions to this problem), and we'll get back to you
This solution has been suggested a few times and it's definitely something we could explore. However, before we try something drastic like changing layouts, we want to try and fix the experience by first tuning the encounters properly on all the paths.
The short answer, is no, we do not intend for different paths to be drastically more difficult from one another.
The long answer is more complicated. Because we wanted a variety of challenges, some encounters will inherently be more difficult than others. Did we want them to be much more difficult? No. While playtesting, we used bots that we felt like were "answers" to these challenges. We felt that Map 3 would be interesting for players to figure out and solve together.
Hey Daveh911! This is something that we've been looking at as one of our biggest combat pain points. Please pardon the Marvel:Contest of Champions reference here, but I believe this is the best way to frame this (I'm sorry if this is out of context for some of you).
In Marvel, AI behavior is much easier to predict, mostly due to the fact that their options are way more limited (they don't have a 3rd axis or ranged attacks). In fact, if any of you are Marvel players here, they recently released a character that actually increases the likelihood of the opponent using a Special Attack (Stark Spiderman -- I'm not promising a new character here! Please don't kill me, character team
In Transformers, because of all these extra decisions the AI can make, their behavior becomes seemingly more erratic and things like Special Attacks are much harder to 'bait' out. This is something I can bring up again with our gameplay team. We've already discussed some solutions in the past, but haven't zeroed in on a single solution just yet.
Once a player walks through the gateway on a path, it locks down and the other players cannot follow.
And @kabam karma...
We as players can see ideal bots for paths (ie: Rhinox is the most ideal bleeder for hemophilia path considering the matchups, the mod and his specific skillset).. The problem is balancing mod power so that it is actually feasible to run a gauntlet of 3-4 opponents with one bot.
I suppose if you really, really gear your gameplay around ranged, Rhinox can work for that lane, but I would argue there are far better bots for the mod. Just a suggestion to take as you will, but I have found far better success by ignoring all class advantage unless it is really just used as a tiebreaker, and solely focusing on using the BEST bot for the mod.
In my experience, Drift and BC are far more reliable bleeders when it comes to bleed %. BC might be the best for this mod... Drift bleeds seem more common, but they are shorter. Also, BC has a high chance to apply bleed on heavy, which is the most "forceful" way possible... i.e. if they are holding up their block and turtling, you can still get a bleed on them.
As for the one bot thing... I think everyone should be trying to bring two bots that are suitable for the lane they are on, so they don't get caught up with "oh crap I KO'd my one good bot for this lane". This would require one or more people to alternate in on the DoT paths (since there are no 2 bots that could really handle more than one of those lanes cleanly), but there are combinations that could work so that you aren't tying your success completely to one bot.
Love the gateway idea, btw.
First heavy power locks, giving you time to charge to s1.
His s1 currently triggers a bleed every time, with or without converting an opponent buff.
You can continue to spam heavies to power lock, charging up to an s2 for more bleeds while peppering with ranged.
I have had rounds where neither BC or WB can trigger a bleed in time.. it's uncanny.
I really do think rhinox is the best answer for the lane though. Especially with having RamJet there.. Rhinox will mitigate damage from any mistakes you make.
Even in points currently AM isn't worth the time as it lost its teamplay characteristics as written by other commanders already.
On the other side yes it needs 18 similar players to get 3x 100% and if someone quit the game because of frustration with rewards or whatever it hits the whole Alliances. And recruiting isn't the most fun part in the game.
Also Spotlight is pretty frustrating at the moment. Why putting bosses into expert who literally K.O. a bot with 2-3 hits. There is no fun to play that anymore. I came through the whole map spend 65 energy with 5 alive and healthy bots at the Endboss and get killed without even a chance.
The balance between Boss and Map also on AM Map 3 should be adjusted and I hope the update will bring improvements.
Personally, I've been having fun with it. I often take fights with class disadvantage in this map, which I never used to do. I used to go to extremes to ensure no fight in our entire BG would happen without advantage. Now, I use Mirage against Prowl in s2p5, my 4/40 OG handles the Barricade miniboss in *half* the hits I need for the same fight using my r5/30 MM (with class advantage, and 50% higher damage rate), but MM is my best weapon against OG Megs even though there's class disadvantage
Meanwhile, my alliance only really began strategic planning for this map today. We've only just been able to digest who the enemy is. In my own BG we haven't yet had any discussions about changing our roster to ensure we have the right bots, or swapping team members with other BGs to ensure every BG has the right mx of ability, bots, and timezones.
Speaking of timezones, you only need two pairs of players per BG to play at roughly the same time as each other to get through the whole map on schedule. Make sure your BG has two pairs of people who can handle the outer and one of the inner paths on each side of the map - that's the first task you have to deal with for this map. Usually it's an officer's role to make sure of that kind of thing, but it can be anyone who takes the initiative. Once you've done that, the next question is; "can we handle the minibosses?"
Minibosses are the hardest part of this map. Shockwave, Galvatron, & Starscream especially. And Bludgeon is a bit tricky too. I've handled MM with zero damage the last two days and no one in my alliance seems to complain about SW (I asked specifically). Scream really is the bit one - 150% damage and 50% attack as shock x3 for his sp1 is legit intense.
But hey, if you keep dying, there's an obvious/easy solution; just lower the level a few notches! All this talk of how "discourage" everyone is is really weird. It's just a game. Play. Have fun. If you aren't able to beat it at one level, try it a notch or two lower first. Don't get to caught up in rewards or ranks. The rank rewards are always trivial relative to more important things like event exploration rewards
I haven't done the haemophilia path yet, so I'm looking forward to that. I expect my strategy will be "don't get hit", but maybe I'll be able to come up with something even better
BTW, have any of the people raising issues considered adjusting their masteries? There are some that would seriously help with specific paths, and given free re-sets, it's worth a look
Oh, and to the people who said something like, "what if your BG doesn't have anyone that can do burn damage".... seriously? If between 6 of you you can't find a decent burn bot, then you aren't ready for map3. That's nothing to be ashamed of, just keep running map2 until you're ready to face a path that needs a burn bot. Or recruit a new player who can help. It doesn't have to be IH, it can be Mix or even RJ. But if 6 people who presumably all have 3 r4 bots don't have a single IH between them... c'mon
Anyway, I get that I have a different view to most people here. But mainly I think I want to keep using it for more than a couple of days before I decide what I really know about it.
Happy to respond to all your reposts/heckling/replies, but be aware I'm in an Asian timezone, so I may not reply quickly if it's morning in the US
Do you mean kill the bot in front of me so I can move forward, which happens to have a link on it to the mini-boss?
Or maybe working together means sacrificing my bots for the other people?
Maybe the mods could encourage actual teamwork for the fight. For example, the player gets a buff for each other player also standing on the same node... or synergies get shared or buffed.
I don't think enough bots have been released yet for this to be realistic or viable. We only have 4 brawlers and 4 scouts, 5 of the others classes and 6 demos. They don't even all have 4* releases.
So if you want a specific effect, there's at best maybe what? 2 choices? Some things only 1 choice? Not even enough diversity to get the right class advantage, so we're forced in to sub-optimal pairings just to jump through mod hoops.
With a rate of only 1 bot per month, I don't think we should be expecting players to dig deep.
This isn't mcoc with almost 70 heroes to choose from. We have like 29-30?
The choice of bots and, in particular, ones with the specific effects, is too shallow. There is no depth to dig.
The idea of digging deep into the roster is pretty dumb. As mentioned there aren't enough bots with specific effects let alone the fact that some people may not have even got them yet. This doesn't even mention the inability to level bots. The gold issue was just addressed and now we're expected to look at bots we've never been able to rank. Perhaps if this was from day one it would be viable.
I thought these maps would have a section of solo lanes and be a mix of solo and teamwork. The current layout isn't much fun, feels like another solo mission. I don't mind the minis being difficult but three consecutive sections of solo lanes means someone is usually going to get screwed after taking minis. An interesting idea would be a section of 3 - 2 - 1 lane with increasing difficulty.
I've also found this has kind of killed synergies. What was the point of building a team around synergy if it's virtually impossible to effectively utilize that team on the current map?
Finally rewards. Hyped much? yeah if you cant take level 41. I don't mind the new difficulty scale but rewards need to be adjusted. The t1a should be removed from the AS crystals.
I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed.
I need to comment on this "we want to create new buffs to challenge players with strategy and playstyle"
I understand that mods are going to be looked at, but I can't stress this enough.. There is no fight strategy against power gain mods!
All it amounts to is "I have to charge relentlessly at the opponent before he charges up his power bar and kicks my ass" because s3 is unavoidable. At the very least, anything but a miniboss should have s3 locked out on a power gain mod, so players have the opportunity to avoid instakill.
Again, NO "strategy" or "playstyle" here... And you upped the battle timer to 5 minutes... which is hilarious in its own right from the perspective of these mods.
Fights on power gain mods have to be about 60 seconds long if they are done correctly and you are lucky.. you don't last much longer than that on them (let alone 5 full minutes) if you aren't being hyper aggressive.
So basically, death by s3 or death by AI countering your rushed attack strategy. Neither is appealing or working to evolve player skills.
And if the AI refuses to throw a special, you're screwed regardless.
Keep this in mind when balancing and tweaking your mods.
Anyway, we are running pretty low difficulty map 3 and we have all been taking different lanes each day to see who does best where etc.
First thoughts are that the left side of the map is WAY harder than the right side. The mods on the right are manageable based on play style and bot choice for sure, but on the left side you need to be a ninja and play perfect or have duped Grim, and/or hope for the AI to fire off specials just to be competitive. Power gain buffs as a mod is just silly - there aren’t enough bots who can reliably control power, and baiting specials without taking hits is far too hard in this environment. I’ve had some fights where the AI has held on to a special for 2 minutes or more - this just does not work if they are gaining power constantly. Stopping them gaining constant power by having to repeatedly hit them and giving them more power to stop the extra power is stupid.
I like that everyone has to take responsibility for an individual lane - it works fine on MCOC, and I am used to it from there so maybe this is why I like it, but the convergence on a miniboss and taking it in turns then picking your next lane is working absolutely fine for us with no grumbles as far as I have seen. We certainly aren’t struggling with this and we are pretty much all using r3 4* (i used a 4/40 3* duped grimlock and managed fine too, but we were starting on a single digit difficulty). The even contribution level is something I actually really really like and had a good discussion about it with our alliance leader. We do need increased points for a miniboss though, as it isn’t reflected. I don’t like the points environment, as I think there are other ways a player can contribute and it isn’t always an accurate reflection of how a player is contributing, but it’s acceptable on this map I think for the most part.
Time wise and energy wise, we are doing just fine as well and have some diversity in time zones - we just communicate periods of absence and adjust accordingly.
Rewards are absolutely dreadful. The quantity of shards does not make it worth it at all. The map is really hard and challenging and to build maybe two crystals by the end of it only to be greeted with a tier 2 team revive isn’t great. I know they contain more than just the revives, but the good stuff is super rare and will still take us ages to eventually get anything good from shards. I think that even playing at difficulty 1 we should be getting 2k shards minimum for 100% 3 groups, then go up from there.
I understand you need the right bot to properly deal with certain mods. Most of us have invested tons of time, money and millions and millions of gold into building/forging 3 strong bots for AMs. We concentrate on 3 bots because AMs is the hardest content in the game. Now you want us to start building other bots to deal with the new map, I can live with that as that's the nature of map 3. However, it'll take months if not a year before I have anything close to the team of Forged R5s I have now.
What I'm trying to ask is will there be an option later on to transfer forge and also rank down a bot to use the resources to build up another one? T3cs don't exactly come easily and forging is a very tedious process. This isn't just for people with R5s, it can pretty much apply to anyone who has invested time and resources in bots that might not fit this map anymore.
This is subjective. Unfortunately the whole thing depends upon the bots in your BGs, which is apparently by design based on the "digging deep into the roster" idea they've stated. The right side can be just as difficult. MM is certainly no joke as the difficulty goes up and the armor lane can quickly become impossible in section 3 without break or ignore. It just so happens that so many people run OP or WB etc. Randomizer also gives one of our best players fits.
Personally I found Power Gain pretty easy because I have r5 Prowl and r4 Mirage so that's why I've stated it's subjective. I take the armor lane though because of the gaps our BG has and I'm making due with UM and Mirage there.
The problem is really the fundamental strategy around team building and ranking is changed with the solo lane approach. Not everyone pulls the right bots from crystals based on RNG (uncontrollable) and people tend to favor certain bots even of those they pulled (OP, IH, MV1, etc.) (controllable). Now it will just take time to adjust.
The biggest issue I have is this "digging deep" theory. Consider shards are reduced and there is only one new bot per month, personally, I think these ideas contradict each other.
Which is why I think rank rewards should be reworked. I understand the fact of having daily rewards and all. But having good rank rewards that makes the game competitive is what I really loved about mcoc and ftf. Now that their really is no competition I just don't find it fun anymore.
It's entirely possible that I've just been playing one type of game for too long and need to move on. Which is what I'll be doing shortly. Just figured I'd throw my 2 pennies up here as well.
I see what you mean. The armour lane doesn’t bother me, but I know it caused someone a problem before. I run new mega so is fine for me. The power gain - 30% when they block is just too much. Even constant gain, one mistake with Prowl and you are taking some damage I guess? If he isn’t duped especially (as mine isn’t) then the need for aggression is counter productive as it builds their power quicker as well and I dunno, it seems way too much to manage (for anyone who doesn’t have a r5 prowl!)
Good morning everyone!
I haven't been on the forums too much, but it's the most active I've seen this place before. Again, thank you everybody for your input. There's a lot that's been posted since last night, so please excuse me for not addressing each one. I think we've been able to understand the fundamentals of what players expect from this content and we're ready to sit down and discuss the details with each other.
I promise to provide an update to everyone by the end of the day, and while we may not touch on every single point that you guys have brought up, know that we are committed to working with you long term to improve this map (and other areas in the game). Afterall, this was created for players like you, who are passionate enough to voice your feedback on the forums. I look forward to sharing our changes with you guys later today
P.S - While this thread has been great, I'll likely start a new topic with our changelist so that they'll be more visible to more players!
Best to expect is to see numbers tuned and assets rearranged, this is more likely.
The 6 lanes is asking for a lifestyle change. Lets say i got a wedding to go to on a saturday or work, or something that wont allow me to get on much and pull my weight that one day. Now my bg wont get 100% completion and now the whole alliance suffers.
Three lanes on a harder difficulty will require all to participate. If you wanna keep the buffs and difficulty for tougher players fine. But the 6 paths is an issue every alliance has a problem with. This is for fun, not work. Players will not get on much one day. With six lanes the entire alliance suffers. Go back to 3 maybe up to 4, but there is no room to breath with 6.
This i feel is the most crucial fix and most alliances will avoid the map for that reason alone.
Good luck Kabam I'm sure you'll get it figured out.
I know the player base is relatively small still, but perhaps if you consult with the players and allow a few to try the content before you release it, you can get preemptive feedback before mistakes are made? I know you have a testing team and devs etc but lets be honest - their views and opinions are clearly not aligned or suited to the average player if you get so many strong views like this about various things
Maybe not a new bot, but a good idea for a new mastery!