Coliseum Nov/Dec 2018 - Raid and Event Monster Table

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MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 20th November, 2018

Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior & Masta Don

Next events: Crystal Siege (6 days) then Coliseum

Crystal Siege will be 6 days long so that BC can get back onto their normal schedule of events ending on Tuesdays.  The previous event (Serpenta) was shorter so that CS could start before the US Thanksgiving holiday, this will minimize the number of players who are inconvenienced so they can spend time with their families (BC employees can enjoy the holiday with the fewest people having to come into work to start the event). Merging and Traders will be active during CS. They intend to keep bringing these back every second event for us. There won't be any big changes to the functionality to this CS (BC considered this but opted out of it to keep the event stable), it will run as per normal.  There will be some very aggressive promotions at the start of the event though.

Event monsters haven't been decided yet for Coliseum.  It will be based on the bosses that will be used in this Coliseum, plus a couple extra.  The final list of bosses used this time hasn't been finalized yet. Some of these may be from the last Coliseum, some may be from the Coliseum before that, and some may be ones that haven't been used in either Coliseum. Masta Don still hasn't finalized the list. Coliseum will function the same way as last Coliseum, but without all raid monsters having a bonus, only selective ones.  There are five monsters (bosses?) in the coliseum and the monsters having a bonus will be related to these.  Masta Don may do some additional monsters but this has not been decided yet.

Arena? Not this year. Maybe first quarter (Jan/Feb/March) next year?

Leveling system for passives instead of probability? BC has talked about this and the probability system came with the original design of the game. The issue that came up with this is with the UI (user interface), and would have required a UI redesign. Right now BC's UI is more convoluted than it needs to be. Adding in a feature that shows how far along you are for r boosting (or passives?) was too far out there, compared with a simple percentage of success or failure.  That decision was made a long time ago, but that's why it's there.

Evolved mobs in the reward tiers?  This was a feature in the ten day events. When shorter events returned, the unevolved reward monsters returned too.  BC has talked about bringing PE r monsters back in a limited capacity, specifically for Christmas.

Mythic monsters only have better stats than legendaries, can they be made better so that they can be r boosted beyond 99 points?  Mythics are truly the best in game especially once fully leveled up. But being so good, they're also scarce.   BC has had an issue in the game, since the beginning of the game, where some ultras are more powerful than some epics, depending on their actives and passives, and additionally ultras were easier to level up their passives.  So it's one of those things where Mythics are the best in game but they're harder to level up there, whereas legendaries have an earlier cap.

Banning players and duplicate monsters?  BC investigates anything related to duplicate monsters. For example, there were a few players that BC was investigating. They had contacted BC about monsters vanishing from their inventory. BC looked into it and found out that most of these were duplicate monsters. BC looks into these and depending on how long ago trades happened, it can be easy to identify or it can be a lot more work - like forensic accounting of tracking.  BC understands that many players with duplicate monsters ended up with them through trades. This is just how BC is handling it nowadays.  BC isn't actively ban players if they are found in possession of duplicated monsters, as BC doesn't know whether they were scammed or whether they created these monsters themselves. Once BC determines which is which, the players found to be creating these duplicates are then banned.

BC has looked at adding boosters to a trader. They have also looked at, in an ideal world with the necessary server and client capacity, allowing the breakdown of any item into a resource that could be traded for other resources. Essences are a good example of breaking down a monster to be able to craft an egg. Instead BC would be looking at being able to break down any resource in the game into a universal resource and then having a trader for that.  That's on the table but requires a great deal of server and client work and requires a fairly massive overhaul of the game. So it's a high-risk high-investment item, which is why you don't see a lot related to breaking things down or trading boosters.

BC enhances individual rewards on rotation. Sometimes they double the troop rewards, or increased lucky tiers in the individual rewards, or double crystals in the troop reward,  or double the epics in the individual rewards. It's more of a random set up.  Evolved monsters in that reward setup - they're the highest value which is why BC won't use them as tiered rewards.  More players participate when they see evolved monsters in the tiers, which is why they reserve them for special occasions like holidays. BC can possibly look at adding in more rotations, but it's been fairly obvious that players respond best double troop tier prizes and increased lucky tiers.

What is BC doing for players for Christmas? This hasn't been fully finalized as yet. They will be doing something similar to last year with their 12 Days of Christmas promotion.  They may do some extra stuff on top of that.

How many players are currently playing BC?  BC can't exactly answer that. It's kind of a constant churn of players at the moment because BC has been around for so long. When BC does their advertising, they advertise to millions and millions of people, some of whom still play the game or have quit.  It's harder to get players back in those scenarios.  As BC grows, it becomes harder and more expensive to acquire new players, which is why they're seeing everything being very, very flat (regarding their player base).  BC is trying new methods to grow and it's about how effective they are. BC is also looking at their first time user experience to make it more attractive for new players to come in. Right now it's a very, very long route for beginner players to get to the point where they can compete heavily and BC is evaluating that.  Another problem is the way the game operates at a fundamental level, which is that various power degrees of monsters. It is ridiculously difficult for a new player to hit that level.  When everything was created it was balanced around the players at that time.  The balance in the game for new players has been lost as the game has grown. BC is hoping that making changes to their first time user experience will then create a better retention and acquisition of players. This is what BC is doing to help us with recruitment of players down the road. They're focusing more heavily on making sure they don't do anything stupid in the process so that they won't make it very, very attractive for current players to create 12 alt accounts.

Leagues within events?  This is very difficult to do. At best BC may introduce leagues into events late next year. It's just very difficult with the way things were built and the event structure doesn't interact with leagues.  It will require the almost rebuilding how the event leader boards operate.

Get players to join and keep playing because no one wants to trade PE supers anymore?  BC is looking at ways to get new players to join and that's one of the things they're looking at.  PE supers are one of the most fun things for beginners to get because it involves raiding heavily and raiding is naturally fun. But no one wants them for trading because it takes away the fun and also by the time players reach the point where they can trade these, they already have acquired them. BC is looking at stuff like this as well.

4.8.00 release had boonbird and boonhawk event epics that were never used in the game?  This was related to a farming monster that was created and the code for the acquisition of tokens on the monster causes issues. They can't release it until they fix that code with it.

Yes, BC is looking at random energy in the 12 days of Christmas. This is one of the things they are looking at.

Benchmark prizes aren't likely to be enhanced - both from spending a certain amount of energy or acquiring a certain number of trophies.  The reason is that benchmarks are problematic. The players who need them the most, are players on the low end (like new players), and so the early benchmarks are important. But for higher level players, the prizes are insanely easy to acquire because their power levels are massive. It's very difficult to balance benchmarks without it being a system of almost benchmark leagues, where the higher your power rating the harder it would be to obtain the prizes.  BC will definitely not be doing this.

Advancing the story of the game?  BC is looking at, and hoping that this will happen with the Valentine's update.  It's going to be tight though. Masta Don is wanting  to get both new raid and the story enhancement in the same update, but the raid gets the priority and the story may be delayed.  The holiday season will also cause tons and tons of people to take vacations.

Will all new reward monsters be dual element or will we see single elements again?  Masta Don prefers single element monsters himself. But it's hard to sell the idea of new reward monsters that will have less utility than the other new monsters.

Yes, BC has considered a new type of item to help level up passives. What it would be is a new type of special if they add it.

Crystals won't be able to be traded in the near future. This is intentional as crystals gate progression to a point and BC likes to make sure that players can't just load up one account and then second evolve everything.

More endgame content for veteran players?  Introducing very challenging stuff is really hit and miss.  As Masta Don nerfs stuff, the participation level goes way, way higher. What he'd like to do is creating more exclusive challenging content, similar to how Lost Temple was when it was first released.   It's not something that BC is prioritizing as BC is focusing on improving their first time user experience so that new players can catch up with veteran players much quicker.

It's not necessary for players to build dual element teams. Personally Masta Don still uses single element monsters because his monsters are solid and he likes the style of them more. He goes more for aesthetics than power.

Drop rates for event monsters?  They are currently higher than they have historically been.  It may be that the player has had a run of bad luck or it's possible that the pool of event monsters is big and you're looking for a specific one (like WB where you might get a different WB event monster).

BC can look at Cool Luke energy but this probably won't be adjusted anytime soon.

Troop Wars won't be until probably the first quarter next year. It'll likely have to be in January if it's going to come because in February it will be the Chinese New Year CT and then the Valentines raid.

800 million trophy BR benchmarks was too high last time?  BR has had the same benchmarks forever. BR benchmarks are so high because players with full event teams playing against the highest trophy opponent can easily reach these trophies.  BC should have done the trophies for this event differently. 

Historically last year BR's top place was 600 million for the top player, with most not reaching over 400 million?  For most events this year it's been 800 million. Masta Don will take a look at this. Maybe it was something that happened after they added Team Brawl and that one was copied over.

Single event monsters will become really weak soon if new ones aren't introduced?  BC will bring this back to the discussion table and see if they want to bring in a mixture of single and dual element new monsters.  BC has also talked about whether they want to bring in a "fourth" (third) final evolution. This may be a better use of time than creating more new monsters, but right now BC doesn't want to hit that kind of power burst.

More storage?  BC has looked at this quite a bit, especially as many veteran players have their storage filled up. BC will look at it again.

Why can't BC just release single element monsters?  BC can't do this simply because some players prefer single element monsters.   Anytime BC does something there is what is called an opportunity cost.   If he has an artist work on two monsters, he has to make a decision as to making the two monsters that the most players want.  In that case, if he creates both as single element monsters or one single element and one dual element, and only 10% of players want single element monsters, that monster will be a bust. Players won't be enthused, and it will make a mess of things. So they can't do it just for those who are collecting in small niche of monsters.  BC hasn't done single element monsters in a while though, so perhaps they can create a limited batch with a alternating structure.

Stones won't be returning to Dominion because that's an example of when Masta Don listened to one person on stream.

Serpenta leader board shown.  Fifth place on the individual tiers has a name that apparently translates from Korean into "rump meat" in English according to Google Translate and Masta Don.

10 energy per ultimate spin? This is probably something that BC will consider for Christmas.

Will BC have a Black Friday gold sale?  Players will need wait until Black Friday to see... probably.

Serpenta had a lot of bugs?  BC will look at the support tickets and see how many bugs they had.  Masta Don will look into this. Generally when BC has bugs like that it's related to server scaling and so it's very difficult to track down. Masta Don will see how many support tickets were received to see if it was specifically Serpenta bugs for QA to look at or the more likely server scaling issue.

Better top 3 troop rewards?  Masta Don knows about how players in the top troops sell empty places in their troop (and other "shady stuff"), so BC won't be enhancing troop rewards in events.

Mast Don is aware that there have been a lot of bugs. That's why BC hasn't had much time for developing new content.   When the game was originally developed, they spent a lot of time creating new things without necessarily fixing old things.  People at BC didn't listen to Masta Don. They are now paying for it.  BC is working on all the bugs to try to increase stability.

Why is energy hard to accumulate in the game? If a player had quit for a while they might not know that a while back BC had some issues and made some mistakes with sales and also favored newer players a bit more.  What happened was a bunch of hackers and a bunch of alt accounts and alt accounts that farmed up energy like mad. As a result, BC changed spins to odds based for everyone and energy became a bit tighter.  BC was inundated with a bunch of people that were just being bad actors.  Masta Don doesn't blame them as he optimizes everything, and so BC essentially allowed it to happen. BC is looking at this and as BC fixes up all the bugs, and ban hackers, and take care of loop holes, then BC is planning on loosening up on energy.

MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 7th November, 2018

Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior & Masta Don

Next events: Battle Royale (with merging and traders) and then Serpenta ("Sky Boss 3").

Players asked for stones for Dominion so much that Masta Don did it for us. Masta Don suspects that players were apparently trolling him - asking for stuff to get Masta Don to do it, knowing it would be unpopular and get him into trouble. Next Dominion will be back to specials as these are definitely preferred.  (Stone boosters not working was a surprise to BC, and they discovered this during testing that they cannot work with the tower mechanics. BC couldn't do anything about this.)

Tower damage displayed during Dominion on Android?  (Android has a maximum integer value that can be displayed, and often top troops are exceeding this and can't see their actual damage done).  BC will look at this, it's slated for client and server to have a look at.  This is a higher priority over purely visual problems as it has an impact on how the event runs.  

Any updates for people damage capped? Damage cap requires server to take time to fix this. Server is currently working on hacking tools, figuring out how hackers are doing what they're doing, finding hackers and going into their logs to discover what they're doing, and then fixing this. All of this takes time and manpower. This is a priority for now, and comes before damage cap.

Arena isn't coming back soon. BC has started discussing Arena though, which means that it's possible to return in the future. The raid boss mechanic didn't seem that popular and the simulated (not live) PvP, so BC will bring it back in a more interesting way. They're trying to see how they can make it feel more like traditional PvP. It's not in a state to be returned to the game currently.  When it comes back, it will be with corrections and fixes.

Coliseum has been talked about. It could possibly return in December. Team Brawl is currently scheduled for December but this is too close to BR, so they could possibly swap Coliseum in instead.

Pvp sacrifice bug? This has been on BC's list of things to fix for a long, long, long, long time. There have been other problems to fix as a priority lately.  Their primary issues have been: bug and hacking fixes, more frequent updates and monsters and costumes. Avatar grab returning is a priority too.  PvP will be fixed to become fair and fun, but only when PvP becomes a super big priority. 

PvP is boring right now as it's not very rewarded.  Many games have PvP as their primary focus and so they incentivize PvP highly with rewards.  This makes PvP fun because it's an end goal and players are rewarded for doing well in it.  Right now, you're not rewarded much for PvP and this has become a vicious cycle. BC can't put big rewards for PvP while the sacrifice (and other) glitches exist.  But BC can't prioritize fixing these glitches because not enough players play PvP because there aren't big rewards for it.  It's all a vicious cycle. PvP is buggy because it's not prioritized, but it's not prioritized because people don't play it because it's buggy.  BC prioritizes where they can, and it's the things they need to immediately fix, and these are the areas where more players are participating heavily.   Masta Don knows that more people would play if they fixed the bugs, but they need to prioritize on what players are participating in now with their resources, compared with what they want people to have fun doing in the future. 

Next Troop Wars?  Masta Don is considering TW vs Coliseum.  There was very little participation last TW.  It made veteran players very happy, but participation wasn't even close to the next worst performing of all the other events.  If TW can't outperform even a bad event like Team Brawl, and that isn't very popular with players... Coliseum is more likely to run before TW again.  Troop Wars is not dead.  It will be slated in where BC can fit it and when it won't negatively impact the game.  Ideally it could come after a big surge of beginner players so that BC can see how they interact with it too.

Needing to log back into the game after closing it?  There was a bug recently with Android that automatically fixed when Android updated their system (fixed on Google's end automatically). It wasn't a bug with BC but Android itself.  Make a support ticket if this keeps happening to you.

Google login missing?  No, BC didn't take this away. It should still be there.

Missing Monsters? For support stuff, unfortunately support needs to check on these issues themselves.  Recently BC has been hammering down on hackers and tracking people. The problem is that many hackers try to implicate other people through bad trades.  (MiriamRowan's note: It sounds like hackers hack to get good rewards, then trade their monsters away. BC removes the monsters, but it's the innocent recipients of these monsters whose monsters seem to go missing for no apparent reason). It's a bit of an issue, so it's probably taking longer for support to track all that stuff.  Keep on at support and they'll probably get back to you as soon as they can on it.  Support won't literally be ignoring you, but it takes time to check.

Facebook friends gifting issue? This is still on BC's  list to fix.

Leader boards were shown for Dominion FFA.

An event where reward mobs have bonus?  BC has tried this in the past and have received a lot of hate mail for it, mostly from players who have put a lot of effort into creating event teams.  Masta Don wouldn't do that.  BC has instead looked at the overall role of event monsters in the game. BC wants to create other ways for reward monsters to have usefulness without essentially turning them into event monsters.  Event mobs are extremely powerful, beyond reward monsters.  Power levels should ideally be a bit closer. For example, an epic event mob should allow you to excel, but a super event mob shouldn't beat a team with legendary reward monsters.  So it's something that's always come out and there are so many of these monsters out there, and the effort that players have put into actual event teams needs to be considered.

Masta Don is aware that reward monsters are traded to gain event monsters.  If this game didn't have trading, it would save Masta Don many headaches.  But the game does have trading and they thought that trading would be a good idea, and Masta Don is now eternally punished for it. It was introduced so that players could trade to get the right zodiacs for their team. Back then it seemed like an awesome feature. The only repeatable monsters back then were the TW mobs. It was when BC made more repeatable monsters that trading has caused them headaches.

10 energy code was displayed.

Can we Craft bound equipment soon?  Maybe soon....?  It's a feature that Masta Don wants to time in with the Valentine's update during January. This update always includes the Chinese New Year CT event, which is in early February, so the Valentine's update would be before this.

Better rewards?  Masta Don recently compared the leader boards to those that were offered 3 years ago. Inflation has been incredible and the current leader boards are so much better than they used to be.

New land and badges?  BC is talking about this and are considering adding another map zone and another raid zone like Lost Temple. 

Avatar spins?  BC is unique in that you can't win the same item twice. This meant that everyone received everything once and then couldn't win anything more.  Now they're considering offering stones if you receive a duplicate item. Possibly 350 stones, for example.  They could bring back all avatar pieces this way. BC will be looking at the new avatar grabs holistically. They could bring back pieces of old trader outfits or wings from event rewards, for example.    This will make everything a bit more accessible to everybody and bring more value back to the avatar grabs. Exclusivity can create high value for items, but if it's out of reach for the majority of players due to the large power base of veterans. This can hurt newer players as they don't believe they can achieve these items within six months of playing.  BC struggles with this a lot internally.

Currency revamp could come during the Valentine's update.  BC wants to make it so that all monsters can be in the grabs, with increased chances for some monsters.

More than level 70?  BC does have plans for this but it will be matched with when they have the new land ready for us to explore.

Yes, Masta Don acknowledges that BC does have time to create a new land but not to fix PvP.  Most MMO games (like World of Warcraft) have about 70% of their players playing events, and 40-50% playing PvP. There's a weird overlap where 20% of players play both events and PvP, and only 30% of players are exclusively playing PvP.  So events become the focus because this is what the majority of players play. Unfortunately down the road, the more events are the focus, the less and less players play PvP, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.   "In a way, Don killed PvP, but in fairness it was Don's decisions years ago that slowly led to the dying of PvP".  

BC won't nerf sacrifice during PvP as they'd then have to nerf it in all areas of the game. (MiriamRowan's note: nerf = reducing the effectiveness of something in a game). Sacrifice is not often used in events, but some newer players have them in their teams, and so BC won't reduce the ability.

Increase stone drop for farming in LT? Don can add it to the list but it won't be worked on for ages.

Can BC improve servers?  It's not that BC needs to upgrade the servers. Early on BC created their programming quickly but it's not optimized. BC is working on re-optimizing everything to work better with the servers.  They built too many things too quickly ages ago and are now paying heavily for it now.

Don's favourite monsters are all of the phoenix monsters.  He only knows them by their server name: the Dark Phoenix and the other one that was released with the turtle boss.  He's a huge mythology buff. This is his personal bias.

Wrkshp Warrior closed with: Remember to bug Yulun with all your feature requests.