Managing Scarcity -- Sp4z

[1733954]

A game is made interesting when a player has to decide between two or more choices. One way to do this is via scarce resources.

When I started the game I was perpetually short of stamina pots, mana pots and arena tickets. When I saw a flash arena and a pots/tickets arena I had to choose between them. This made for interesting play. Now I have more pots & tickets than I honestly can ever use.

Similarly, fire tokens have been dropping during city exploration for months now. I have thousands of them and nothing to use them on. I have dozens of GK tokens and no cards to summon with them. I have tens of thousands of tower tokens and nothing to buy with them. I have millions of summon charms, but no need for 1* to 4* cards. And lots of long term players have the comparable or greater resources.

But then the larger, resulting problem is that you don't want to introduce an attractive card into the GK summon pool only to have players blast through dozens of GK tokens to get it quickly. You don't want to add a new card to the exchange shop when players can buy 8 of them easily.

So a new currency, bravery tokens is introduced. And Young Lancelot is available via these new tokens that no one has. As a mechanic that's fine, but it leaves the players feeling a bit ripped off. We went through the tower a time or three a day, farmed a few map pieces here & there. We played the game as it was presented to us, but that time now looks kind of pointless. The tower tokens are useless because we can't buy what we want with them.

So then the goal should be to get us to use those resources instead of hoarding them.

Add summon stones to the exchange shop. If the 6* cards cost 4000 tokens each then a ss ought to run about 100 tokens. Then a player with 20,000 or 30,000 tower tokens might well buy 200 or 300 ss. That's enough to yield a half dozen additional 6* cards in the next summon storm. It's nice to have but not game breaking. Then allow tower tokens to be purchased with 100 summon charms, working out to an exchange rate of 10,000:1 between summon charms and summon stones.

And finally, we need something to buy with our gold. You could run weekly arenas that cost 800 gold per battle. You could sell summon stones for 50,000 gold each.

Run a 2 or 3 day arena every week that requires fire tokens. Every few weeks run an arena that requires 50 tickets per battle.

Introduce an attractive card to the GK pool for 1 day only and watch players burn through their accumulated GK tokens trying to get it.

And once there is a way to use various resources productivily, discourage hoarding. Any tower tokens in excess of 10k are subject to a 5% reduction at the end of every month, and so forth.

Rosen

Like I said in the other thread, Kabam did not introduce the Bravery Token because some people have too many tower tokens. They did that because hackers can get 100k tower tokens in a couple of hours.

Their thinking was this: with bravery tokens (only available through arenas and gem purchases), we can control the problem without actually fixing it.
In short, bravery tokens are a bad fix to a huge problem: hackers (and by hackers I'm refering to the users o that russian "thing").

But Kabam already screwed things up regarding the awakening materials with these 2 single-day events in the tower. Hackers probably have thousands of them by now, while legit players have a 100-200 of them.

A game is made interesting when a player has to decide between two or more choices. One way to do this is via scarce resources.

When I started the game I was perpetually short of stamina pots, mana pots and arena tickets. When I saw a flash arena and a pots/tickets arena I had to choose between them. This made for interesting play. Now I have more pots & tickets than I honestly can ever use.

Similarly, fire tokens have been dropping during city exploration for months now. I have thousands of them and nothing to use them on. I have dozens of GK tokens and no cards to summon with them. I have tens of thousands of tower tokens and nothing to buy with them. I have millions of summon charms, but no need for 1* to 4* cards. And lots of long term players have the comparable or greater resources.

But then the larger, resulting problem is that you don't want to introduce an attractive card into the GK summon pool only to have players blast through dozens of GK tokens to get it quickly. You don't want to add a new card to the exchange shop when players can buy 8 of them easily.

So a new currency, bravery tokens is introduced. And Young Lancelot is available via these new tokens that no one has. As a mechanic that's fine, but it leaves the players feeling a bit ripped off. We went through the tower a time or three a day, farmed a few map pieces here & there. We played the game as it was presented to us, but that time now looks kind of pointless. The tower tokens are useless because we can't buy what we want with them.

So then the goal should be to get us to use those resources instead of hoarding them.

Add summon stones to the exchange shop. If the 6* cards cost 4000 tokens each then a ss ought to run about 100 tokens. Then a player with 20,000 or 30,000 tower tokens might well buy 200 or 300 ss. That's enough to yield a half dozen additional 6* cards in the next summon storm. It's nice to have but not game breaking. Then allow tower tokens to be purchased with 100 summon charms, working out to an exchange rate of 10,000:1 between summon charms and summon stones.

And finally, we need something to buy with our gold. You could run weekly arenas that cost 800 gold per battle. You could sell summon stones for 50,000 gold each.

Run a 2 or 3 day arena every week that requires fire tokens. Every few weeks run an arena that requires 50 tickets per battle.

Introduce an attractive card to the GK pool for 1 day only and watch players burn through their accumulated GK tokens trying to get it.

And once there is a way to use various resources productivily, discourage hoarding. Any tower tokens in excess of 10k are subject to a 5% reduction at the end of every month, and so forth.

Rosen

You brought up a good point.
It would be great if Kabam let players exchange their depreciating items towards the purchase of new and valuable items.
Too many thing depreciate and are left to collect dust in our inventory.
Seems simply enough but... but... but...
Cheaters can still gain from this because they still have more stock than regular players.
Just shows how much of a bane cheaters are.

Don't punish genuine players

Kabam should stop hackers not punishing efforts of genuine players. Why don't they stop rank arenas because of hackers, city event because of hackers then nothing left to play. Don't be idiot kabam, handle hackers but don't punish normal players who is pouring money on your game

Kabam should stop hackers not punishing efforts of genuine players. Why don't they stop rank arenas because of hackers, city event because of hackers then nothing left to play. Don't be idiot kabam, handle hackers but don't punish normal players who is pouring money on your game

The only thing that kabam wants to control, is how many new gem promos they can push upon us. None of our issues are relevant. It's all about how much money they can make for their fiscal quarter. Even cheaters open their wallets, so the more people who play, the more money they can make. It's simple economics. Nothing will ever get done to make gameplay fair again.

The concerns that cheaters get too much of everything are valid, but introducing new currencies or other things that can only be accessed through purchasing will not fix the problems - at some point in time they need to be made available to free players to keep the minimum numbers of players. This then automatically leads to an accumulation of resources in the cheaters vaults.

The solution is stopping access of these "Tools" to the game itself, and that means fixing the game code. Nothing else will change the situation.

I agree Rosen. Items should always feel in-demand. That way players want them and it feels good to obtain them. When you got a lot, it feels awesome! and there should be an event so players can splurge and spend all of those items (because that feels good too!).

Managing items is handled by the game team and the GM team. It's a joint effort to keep them under control and all it takes is one small event for an item to get saturated.

The balancing beam for item counts is constantly swaying and its a juggling act we have to maintain everyday.

Spaz:
1) why did you guys create another token ?

2) are the tower tokens going to become useless from now on ? Should we keep farming day after day ?

3) are you delaying the rotation of the tower shop because of the hackers ?

Spaz:
1) why did you guys create another token ?

2) are the tower tokens going to become useless from now on ? Should we keep farming day after day ?

3) are you delaying the rotation of the tower shop because of the hackers ?

About those heart tokens we still have...

A game is made interesting when a player has to decide between two or more choices. One way to do this is via scarce resources.

When I started the game I was perpetually short of stamina pots, mana pots and arena tickets. When I saw a flash arena and a pots/tickets arena I had to choose between them. This made for interesting play. Now I have more pots & tickets than I honestly can ever use.

Similarly, fire tokens have been dropping during city exploration for months now. I have thousands of them and nothing to use them on. I have dozens of GK tokens and no cards to summon with them. I have tens of thousands of tower tokens and nothing to buy with them. I have millions of summon charms, but no need for 1* to 4* cards. And lots of long term players have the comparable or greater resources.

But then the larger, resulting problem is that you don't want to introduce an attractive card into the GK summon pool only to have players blast through dozens of GK tokens to get it quickly. You don't want to add a new card to the exchange shop when players can buy 8 of them easily.

So a new currency, bravery tokens is introduced. And Young Lancelot is available via these new tokens that no one has. As a mechanic that's fine, but it leaves the players feeling a bit ripped off. We went through the tower a time or three a day, farmed a few map pieces here & there. We played the game as it was presented to us, but that time now looks kind of pointless. The tower tokens are useless because we can't buy what we want with them.

So then the goal should be to get us to use those resources instead of hoarding them.

Add summon stones to the exchange shop. If the 6* cards cost 4000 tokens each then a ss ought to run about 100 tokens. Then a player with 20,000 or 30,000 tower tokens might well buy 200 or 300 ss. That's enough to yield a half dozen additional 6* cards in the next summon storm. It's nice to have but not game breaking. Then allow tower tokens to be purchased with 100 summon charms, working out to an exchange rate of 10,000:1 between summon charms and summon stones.

And finally, we need something to buy with our gold. You could run weekly arenas that cost 800 gold per battle. You could sell summon stones for 50,000 gold each.

Run a 2 or 3 day arena every week that requires fire tokens. Every few weeks run an arena that requires 50 tickets per battle.

Introduce an attractive card to the GK pool for 1 day only and watch players burn through their accumulated GK tokens trying to get it.

And once there is a way to use various resources productivily, discourage hoarding. Any tower tokens in excess of 10k are subject to a 5% reduction at the end of every month, and so forth.

Rosen

++++ for this