They are spot on, dead centre on the marker with common practices. What you are describing are two possible models, one of which is no longer all that wide-spread.
How exactly content is gated (the precise chances of draws in an RNG-box vs guaranteed draws), and how it is made available to free players isn’t really the point, though. There are necessarily going to be variations, depending on what type of game you are looking at, et cetera.
Yes but industry standard dictates a theme box will always garantee you that theme. Industry standard also dictates not to hold half a cookie in front of free players and pay players
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SEMC isn’t pushing out purchasable items fast enough to generate revenue from long-term players. There is only 135 skins in the game and only 129 available to players who missed the LE. VG has been out for 3.5 years. There should be more skins. Only dropping 2-3 skins a patch is not going to cut it when you have a pool of 38 heroes. They need to up that to 5-6 so they are releasing at least 1 skin for every hero every 6 months.
Or go with the original dota skin model. Oh wait they closed the community door already.
a fast way to produce some skins right now would be exchangable weapons for heroes and color variations on skins.
we also need a change to the sunlight system to favor players owning multiple skins for one hero
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I like how everyone has focused on only the 4th point of this 4 point post, so I’ll reply to all 4 of these
1: Balance. Yeah, that’s very VERY hard to separate from opinion. In my OPINION they need to delete Koshka from the game entirely and ban people for ever MENTIONING her again but that’s due to my personal dislike of the hero and playstyle. Other people will say she’s weak and all. Meanwhile I feel Taka is rather underwhelming and not properly fulfilling his identity as an ASSASSIN not a WARRIOR. His WP build should ALSO focus on assassination. But that’s just how it is. Alpha was another main of mine and she’s always been strong thanks to her ultimate and her health regain. She just got attention very late; she’s been good almost since release. As for the rest they’re kind of staples at this point. Hell, Gwen is free for all newbies and so is her skin.
2: You can barely be toxic in this game aside from deliberately trolling honestly. I have spammed pings at people but it’s typically when they are making a stupid decision and causing trouble for the team, like if they didn’t show up to a teamfight. I spam danger pings depending on how bad I think a situation is (If they’re at Kraken (I DESPISE 5v5) I’ll spam it, probably even after the pings come off CD if my teammates haven’t responded yet) but that’s more of having good intentions. I’m just glad there’s no voice chat because I do have an extremely foul mouth and would prefer that was kept to myself. I do miss the “Buy defense items” ping as well, it was MUCH faster than recommending items in the shop. Was it that badly abused?
3: I’ve had few problems with connection up until recently when 5v5 ranked dropped and suddenly I’m stuttering in Casual matches. It’s frustrating but I’m sure it’s just a bug and strain due to 5v5 mobas being popular.
4: SuperEvilOvermonetization.
HOOOOOO boy, where to start with this one? When they added talents I was incredibly frustrated because I am primarily a free to play player and those talents are extremely important to gameplay in BR and Blitz. And then we have the Opals. “We want these to give you a sense of accomplishment” they say. Hmmmmm, where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, right. From EA-Dice in the single most downvoted reddit post of all time, responding to their decision to lock player progression and gameplay advantages behind randomized boxes. Some food for thought.
Yes a company needs to make money, but if you TRULY want to appeal to fans you need to sacrifice making ALLLLLLLLL THE MONEY. You can make money, I’m not complaining about that. But please stop cramming your microtransactions down our throats. I am NOT paying for a loot box that MIGHT give me a cool skin but just as soon might give like like 10 Opals out of the f—ing 500 that I want for a skin I would like to use. That’s not going to persuade me to support you. I have not made a purchase since chests launched because I don’t condone glorified gambling and will not support companies that choose to include such an exploitative practice in their games. And then the skin revamp came through and damn near ROBBED me of my YEAR of work saving up legendaries and epics for the legendary Alpha skin which I had 90% complete. I was a few rares away from completing it. Then the update dropped. I had to put in a ticket to actually get my blueprint given to me. I had 2500 essence after my entire card collection was dusted and guess what happened? They made the thing cost 5000.
Since the revamp I have acquired exactly ONE blueprint. Worth 300 essence. I am now 1200 essence away from acquiring a skin that I was previously 4 cards away from crafting,(cards that amounted to about 120 essence which I could have acquired easily in the same time period) and the drop rates are PATHETIC. This has just cemented my mentality that this company no longer cares about the players and instead just wants to pull an EA and make ALL OF THE MONEY!!!1!!!11!
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The biggest problem with balancing is how the characters come out. Instead of making it so specific character are designed to counter another specific character while getting rid of the majority of balance changes done in the past we would have a balanced diverse game that actually required strategy, instead of SAWPOINTSHOOTDEAD
Balance:
Koshka is balanced, she is a good jungler not OP.
Alpha, Krul, and Rona= The best way to make all of these heroes balanced is to buff Skye. Buffing skye would make her a more reliable counter pick against her and would make them less ban worthy. The things, a smart Alpha, Krul, or even rona would be able to kill Skye with relative ease. What Happened to Skye as counter pick to Krul, Rona and Alpha? All of them can deal with Skye with quite easily due to the intense amount of CC the 5v5 Meta has. They need to buff Skye in some way to make this more balanced. Nerfing their damage would help a lot too.
Foretress: Nef Movement Speed Boost, Nerf Lifesteal, Nerf his durabilty. This would make him balanced because he still does what he does, just with slightly less impact. He’ll still be very important in dive compositions but he’ll be more of a counter pick than the GO-TO roam as he is now.
Taka is really good right now, but he is counterable.
The Best Mid Laners atm (Celeste and CP Kestrel or SKaarf) are counterable. They are balanced(although nerfing their damage slightly will make everyone’s life easier)
Top Lane(Rona is already put up there so won’t say anything)
Bot(Gwen is balanced right now. You can counter her with the right positioning and frostburn)
Doesn’t Varya have the highest win rate at the top tiers?
the key word here is “purchase/buy”
nowadays, there’s a thing called digital merchandise such as movie or music. you own it in a different way. you can’t freely resell it, reproduce it, etc. but that is still called a digital merchandise…
you can argue but i think we have to agree to disagree here…
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It already is the best mobile moba. Has been for years.
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Delete 5v5
…
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Eh.
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Balance is always a hard issue. SEMC seems to be putting more focus on it in recent patches and I think they will continue to do so.
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Toxicity does need to be addressed but I think it’s a mechanical issue more than a cultural one. And ultimately trying to police people’s feelings and foster a culture is something that kind of has to happen organically, over time, and as a collective. It’s not something that you can really force because people have to want it to some degree.
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Can’t comment on servers because I’m NA and don’t seem to have this issue.
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SEMC doesn’t over-monitize. As many have said, skins specifically should never have been so easy to get in the first place. In fact SEMC under-monetizes in a lot of ways, and that is actually a hindrance to them. There could be paid wallpapers, the ability to order merchandise online, like plushies or figures, allowing fan art to be sold online in a website store with SEMC getting a percentage, more incentives more uses for the in game currencies than just skins, like paid special voicelines or taunts for specific heroes or skins, instead of a package deal, way more skins, mini-game ideas that you can suscribe for, that aren’t a part of the main game.
One idea I was thinking about was an objective based mini-game where you had to race to complete certain objectives instead of fight each other. Onslaught was an interesting idea, like all the other brawl modes besides blitz, but not everything has to be focused on competition between players, and it would give players a way to de-stress from the constant competition, practice tactics without having to actually fight.
I think that eventually brawl modes would become and eben better way for SEMC to monetize as long as they stuck to their guns and didn’t cave to pressure to make them free aside from events and special promotions. SEMC doesn’t really make you pay for much in this game, and speaking for myself, the fact that I have spent some, but not an impressive amount of money on this game, and have almost everything I want in terms of skins, heroes, etc. is a testament to the lack of built in incentive for monetization, and I’ve only been playing for about a year. The balance is tilted out of them monetizing the playerbase and long run, that’s not sustainable. Even if they made a mode where certain new heroes had to be bought with ICE no matter what but they could only be played in that mode, and licensed character brands from other franchises, but it didn’t affect the core game modes, that would be acceptable. Of course this would mean a lot more effort into development and animations, sprites and the like.
SEMC is a small, budding company still anyway. Honestly part of what they also need is a new, more monetized game, probably using a different version of the evil engine somehow. That would help massively in revenue for the company in general, but this is all from the outside. I have no idea what the inner workings really are like so maybe all this had been considered and for one reason or another, hasn’t worked out just yet.
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I would like to repeat my main problem with Vainglory monetization (Edit: Since that is a lot of people’s main focus in this thread) is the fact that they force you to rely almost wholly on glorified gambling simulators as opposed to legitimate business practices that would put them in many people’s good graces. And opals were a REALLY poor move.
To further elaborate here’s an infamous excerpt from the most downvoted Reddit comment of all time:
“The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.” - EA-Dice representative in response to complaints about their choice to push loot boxes. Now, Battlefront 2 was a paid game. Vainglory is free. But that still does not excuse this particular business model. I would happily support the game if I felt I could be guaranteed to acquire the content I want at a reasonable price.
Hell, if they sold an “Ultimate Hero Pack” like Smite’s Ultimate God Pack (another free to play moba that uses a similar dual currency system) I would snap that up in a heartbeat, and this is coming from someone who has all but 6 or 7 heroes (most of whom are heroes I dislike).
Or they could go the route of Pre-Tencent League of Legends, where new champions are purchaseable immediately after release for a higher than normal price of EARNED IN GAME CURRENCY or purchased via the real-money currency. Then the price drops. Also, on release the next OLDEST character drops in price overall (Think if Tony released Vox or Ardan dropped in price) instead of EVERY F- deep breath Got a little heated there. But yeah, instead of every freaking hero costing 8k permanently. And older characters having their prices RAISED, not lowered. That model was so great, and they didn’t use loot boxes, so I felt it was fair to purchase their cosmetic items and support them.
I even at one point owned all the legendary skins (each of which costs approximately $30) because I didn’t care, I loved the game and felt the game devs deserved it for the well-crafted systems they provided. (Also I was younger and more naive with my money.)
My point is, I don’t see the point in purchasing skins from a company that now runs mainly on loot box sales. Since Hextech Crafting was added to League, I’ve stopped playing mostly because the game’s rewards now mainly focus on loot boxes as opposed to tangible things. Even those little icons for your account that only show in lobbies and loading screens in league felt like a better reward than a Vainglory grab bag that MIGHT contain something I want (a skin for my main, double glory boosts) or might contain absolute garbage that I’ll probably never use (AHEM. Anything related to Petal, more f—ing rare talent coins for fortress or Catherine)
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IMHO if SEMC can get 5v5 right, it will begin to pick up popularity with people who play other 5v5 MOBAs via a computer and that will in-turn launch it into the future with promise and purpose. If they don’t make 5v5 engaging and popular, it will die for sure. As of right now, the major issues i see are:
Lack of cutting edge communications/social aspects, (e.g. guild/clan/group interactions, lack of team coms)(maybe Discord support or something)
Matchmaking woes (poorly set up matches, lack of punishment for abusive play)
Lack of meaning in the ranking systems
Hard to find guilds; recruitment and guild-finding is difficult to manage or participate in.
Hero designers need to introduce more raw mechanics. There are several that already exist in other MOBAs and that familiarity is something current PC MOBA users will be looking for.
Continued mobile optimizations: My iPhone 6S+ gets smoking hot and dims the screen every time I try to play 5v5 (even without a case on it).
Hire a ‘real’ game balancing team instead of whoever is doing it now… I recently heard a dev on a stream say that they balance by looking at who’s picked the most and taking the lower ranking heroes and buffing them until they become popular. How pathetic is that? The issue is not that simple.
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Now I know why the balance is so shitty.
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Nivmett’s full time job is live balancing and PBE testing…
I also assume he has some help but I don’t know
His balancing is kinda trash. OP is still OP. UP is still UP. Sometimes a hero is bumped from UP straight to OP and the opposite
And they haven’t changed SAW that he’s pro-friendly not noob-friendly
Seems to me they need to seriously play some pc Moba games and research stats to properly understand what all balancing is
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I believe that a large amount of people, yourself included, underestimate the amount of work it takes to keep every single hero and all items balanced. Right now, there’s a very select few “OP” heroes who most have been slowly nerfed, albeit still not enough. Recognize that Nivmett would rather slowly nerf a hero to balance them to avoid ruining them.
Despite popular belief, most heroes are balanced. The meta keeps changing due to balance changes that have nothing to do with the initial change. One glaring example is Gwen, who is not OP desite what people say. Her proc build was recently highlighted due to the defense nerfs that were enacted to counter other issues. He did not say “Wow, let’s make Gwen OP.”
His job is difficult. His balancing is still better than anything I’ve seen in forums.
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