Guest Post: KamMCOC – Thoughts on Cyber Weekend 2020

Editor’s Note: Big thanks to Kam from the Podcast of Champions for taking the time to put together his thoughts on the Cyber Weekend Deals and what can be done to fix the issues with Progression Titles in Marvel Contest of Champions. Kam is a thought leader in the community, and I’m honored he asked Frontline to host his editorial. You can follow Kam on Twitter @KamMCOC. – Dano357

After studying, analyzing, and contemplating today’s Cyber Weekend deals (both from my standpoint as a Thronebreaker player, and also putting myself in the shoes of Cavalier players of different levels), here are some of my thoughts.

There exists a group within each progression level, to whom the deals today have been satisfactory, or even more than satisfactory.

To a new Cavalier player, who’s recently beaten 6.1 or even to a low-mid level Cav player the deals today were exceptional. These players are not on the fast track to becoming Thronebreaker. They are still very much working on their 5* rosters and most don’t even have a useable awakened 6* to consider ranking up/awakening/putting sig stones into.

Same can be said about a larger group of Thronebreaker players, but even in that category exists a segment of players who might as well be playing a completely different game, sporting 10+ R3 6*s.

But even within the two groups above, the benefit to paying players that fit the criteria was disproportionately higher than those who’d saved units for the 15k unit offers. This disparity was very clear with the extreme lack of 6* signature stones in the Thronebreaker offers. These sig stones historically being one of the most paywalled resources that’ve been keeping many F2P players from coming close to competing in higher tiers of the prestige race, or even ranking 6* champs that need said stones to function.

And that leaves us with mid-high level Cavalier players.

Players who are almost done with 5*s. Those who have completed and perhaps explored a big chunk of act 6. Those who may have completed the Abyss, or are completely unable to do so because of the still hyper-specific champion requirements for that content.

This massive group of players were put in the worst position of all players with this round of deals. This is the group of players who either due to bad T5cc crystal RNG or bad 6* crystal RNG have been unable to progress to the next progression level. And they were holding out an educated hope based on the July 4th 2020 offers that these deals would help push them towards Thronebreaker.

But that clearly didn’t happen.

These players ended up being offered marginally better cash deals, and significantly worse unit based offers. With their choice to pick between a more 5* or a more 6* focused unit bundle completely taken away from them. If I were speculating, I’d say, some of the unit based offers previously offered to Cav players on July 4th 2020 were in fact meant for Thronebreaker players who at the time didn’t have a progression title.

Many of these players have recently passed up on purchasing T5cc selector cash offers in hopes that Cyber Weekend would actually bring about more valuable goodies along with T5cc selectors. And to have what they once had snatched from them most definitely felt awful.

To mend the current situation, I believe (and I have already brought this up to Kabam via the CCP chats) that the Cavalier offers need to be adjusted as soon as possible. Basically adding a 10% T5cc selector to their Odins, a 5% selector to their Black Panther’s, and a total of 30% selectors to their 15k unit offers. And to send out these items to those who’ve already purchased the deals.

But this issue runs much deeper than that. The progression system in MCOC is broken. Progression titles inevitably cover a group of summoners too large for deals and rewards to actually be satisfactory to a majority. When Thronebreaker was first introduced, Cavalier was way past the point of oversaturation. At the time you had new Cavalier folks who just completed 6.1 using R3 and R4 5s and also folks with dozens of R3 6s, all under the same title.

I suspect that today’s attempt at curbing the progression for large groups of mid-high Cavalier players may’ve been to prevent the Thronebreaker title from becoming oversaturated just yet. And that, inherently, is a good thing. We don’t want another Progression title introduced just yet, but this one with a requirement for 10 6* R3s. Or do we?

Progression seems to be a lesson-never-learned issue with MCOC. Ever since their inception, titles were there to separate players of different progression levels and by doing so, help better cater to their needs and wants. But with a massive game like MCOC, where new players are starting every day and veterans have been playing for almost 6 years, 7 progression titles is nowhere near enough.

Progression needs to stop being reactionary. We need to stop adding new titles when the previous highest title has hit an absolute oversaturation level. And my solution to this: break up the titles.

Going to use the current state of Cavalier as an example:
Cavalier I: New Cavalier players: gained when beating 6.1
Cavalier II: beat 6.1 and have 8 R5 5s or 5 R2 6s
Cavalier III: beat 6.1 and have 20 R5 5s or 13 R2 6s

I’m sure there’s going to be kinks to work out there, like how mix and matching ranks and rarities would function. But you get the idea. The first group there doesn’t need T5cc. They probably can’t use T5cc for months or even a year. While the last group is basically only after T5cc. And these separations would be necessary to implement for all levels of progression. Even in Thronebreaker now there is a massive gap between the top players’ wants and needs and the wants and needs of those who recently became Thronebreaker.

Having to make extra deal tiers, additional login calendars, additions to the Black ISO store, and all the other progression dependent aspects of the game with this new system would obviously put a lot more work-load on Kabam. But for once, this could turn the Progression system from being complacent and reactive, to actually proactive and satisfactory to a much larger group of players.

-Kam