Greetings Summoners!
Last month, Kabam Crashed gave us an in depth introduction to our new competitive currency Radiance. Checkout the full breakdown below so that you are ready to go when you take on our competitive modes!
Radiance
Hi everyone, Kabam Crashed here with another Dev Diary. I am excited to share the details of our plans for Radiance, our new competitive currency. As always, I look forward to continuing this conversation as we implement it across our game modes in the coming months.
Background
As discussed in the Battlegrounds Dev Diary, we are introducing a new currency – Radiance – which will make up the majority of ranked rewards in our competitive modes. The goal of this currency is threefold:
- To make Ranked Rewards in our competitive modes easier to update
- To allow End-Game Summoners to choose which modes they want to play while remaining competitive
- To allow for more accurate planning over the volume of rewards distributed to competitive Summoners
While the introduction of Radiance will result in changes to Ranked Rewards that decreases the sources for currencies like Trophy Tokens, Radiance does not completely replace any existing currencies, at least for the moment.
Glory, Loyalty and Trophy Tokens are more engagement-based currencies that will still have a place in the game (Trophy Tokens, for instance will still be available in the Victory Track). Just to properly set expectations, Radiance will only be available for those who compete at the top of the game, roughly the top 100,000 players in Battlegrounds, Alliance War, and Alliance Quest.
Game Modes
Radiance will first be implemented in Battlegrounds. In the Battlegrounds Dev Diary, I said rewards updates in Alliance War and Alliance Quest will follow later this year. However, in order to do this properly we basically had to work out what the rewards in those modes would look like as we planned Battlegrounds, so we are actually very close to having tuning for those done as well. I’m now anticipating the updates to Alliance War and Alliance Quest by this Summer at the latest.
The updates will amount to enormous reward bumps in Battlegrounds and regular Alliance Quest. Because Alliance War and Alliance Quest Raids Ranked Rewards have been updated much more recently, those modes will see more modest value increases, though obviously there will be a lot more agency over the resources Summoners choose to spend this very valuable currency on.
I’m expecting the tuning of the Ranked Rewards and store will lead to some pretty significant FOMO for Summoners who aren’t competing in these modes. To this I will say, we know there is a gap in our competitive ecosystem right now. I see this as a 2X2 matrix of Alliance vs. Solo and PVP vs PVE vectors. Right now one of those quadrants is empty.
Marvel Contest of Champions Competitive Ecosystem
In my Dev Diary, I mentioned we are working on a new game mode, and that game mode will fill in this missing piece of the puzzle. Like Alliance Quest, it will focus on roster strength as the main driver for success, but it will be a solo ranked experience rather than one that forces you to rely on other Summoners. More details about this mode can be expected later this year.
In the meantime, stretch out those thumbs because I’m expecting our other three competitive modes to see a lot more interest in competitive play.
Radiance Store
So with that out of the way let’s get into the details. The Radiance store will focus on Champion acquisition and Rank-Up materials, but will also feature consumables and other items. Champion acquisition and Rank-Up materials will reset every 35 days, alongside the Battlegrounds cycle. Consumables will reset every 7 days.
There will also be limited purchase items which do not reset. Some of these, like a Mastery Point, and the Deathless Piece Selectors will be available indefinitely. Other items will only be available for one cycle. These single-cycle items will start to appear in the store later this year, after Radiance is added to Alliance War and Alliance Quest.
The Radiance store is going to be the premium store in Marvel Contest of Champions. A lot of lower tier items will not be available. However, should someone for some reason want to spend Radiance on lower tier Catalysts or Alloys, Summoners will be able to exchange Radiance for Trophy Tokens to access the Trophy Token store.
Store Access and Pricing
Many of the decisions related to Radiance were done with ease of update in mind. For this reason, there is no differentiation in pricing for different Progressions. Any Summoner Thronebreaker and above will have access to the full store.
Cavalier and below Summoners will only have access to the Trophy Token trade-in. Another factor is, as I said earlier, only roughly the top 100,000 Summoners will have meaningful access to Radiance. Since there are more than 100,000 Valiant players, we anticipate almost all Radiance will be earned by the top Progression, meaning building out pricing for lower Progressions would have been a waste of resources.
A similar philosophy was applied to store pricing. There are some weird prices, and that’s because we have set up the store so that pricing is entirely formulaic. This means no hand-tuning of pricing, which means it will be much easier to update than our other stores.
Store Updates
Because of the design decisions discussed above, this store will be much easier to update. Our goal is to do so regularly. I’m not going to give a definitive time frame, but I can say we would be targeting roughly 3 to 4 updates every year.
I do want to set some expectations here though. More frequent updates will often mean smaller updates. Don’t expect to see large swings in prices for most items, and many items won’t change in price at all from one update to the next.
Store Curves
Some Summoners will earn 10,000 Radiance a cycle, some will earn 100,000 Radiance a cycle and some may earn close to 1,000,000 Radiance a cycle. The only way to tune it so the Summoner that earns 10,000 can get something meaningful while the Summoner that earns 1,000,000 doesn’t run out of stuff to buy is to apply a curve. However, unlike the curves in the Glory store, which are linear, the Radiance store has curves that are much flatter for the first few purchases with a faster acceleration later in the curve. This means more purchases at close to the base price before large cost increases.
Store Tuning
Battlegrounds Ranked Rewards
Radiance will replace the existing rewards for the Gladiators Circuit. The only things that will remain from the current rewards are the Eidol Essence and titles. Everything else will become Radiance.
In addition to Radiance, we have also added more ranks to the Gladiators Circuit and more spots to the existing ranks. Altogether, these changes represent an enormous value increase for Battlegrounds Ranked Rewards.
Summoners in Each Tier
- Celestial
- 250 Total Summoners in Tier
- Mysterium
- 750 Total Summoners in Tier
- Quantum
- 1500 Total Summoners in Tier
- Arcane
- 2250 Total Summoners in Tier
- Gamma
- 6000 Total Summoners in Tier
- Uru
- 9000 Total Summoners in Tier
Battlegrounds Objective Rewards
In addition to Ranked Rewards, every season of Battlegrounds will launch with three new Objectives. The goal of these Objectives is to get the most competitive Summoners out of the Victory Track and competing in the Gladiators Circuit earlier in the season, which should improve matchmaking and make a climb to the Gladiators Circuit more possible for the average Summoner.
Because of the nature of these Objectives, the number of Summoners chasing them will impact how easy they are to achieve. These are subject to tuning, and we may make them harder or easier to achieve, depending on engagement data from the upcoming Seasons.
Other items
Just a few final things to say before we wrap up this post.
First, the Radiance cap will be 600,000. We will reevaluate this cap after a few Seasons have taken place once Radiance is added to Alliance War and Alliance Quest.
Second, while as I said earlier this will not completely replace any existing Currencies, we are going to work to simplify them. To this end, Loyalty will be returning to a Currency that is used almost exclusively to buy Alliance War consumables. If you want any of the Champion materials currently available in the Alliance War store, now is the time to buy them as we will be removing them later this year (don’t worry, Unstoppable Colossus will remain). We may or may not deprecate the Loyalty Shatter system – we will let you all know once a decision on that subject is made.
Closing
This is just the beginning of our plans for Radiance. Like many of you I will be spending a lot more time in the Battlegrounds in the coming Seasons. I look forward to seeing you all there.