Oprah League Rewards! PVP Season 9 recap.

Look under your PVP Tab... YOU ALL GET ANGEL!

There was no Featured Team on Monday due to the end of PVP.  I was going to post this the same day, but the events of the day were very chaotic and I felt I wanted some time to reason out a response.

So this PVP Season went out with a huge surprise, pleasant to most and unpleasant to the top roughly 1% of the players:  Nearly everyone received the Adamantium League bonus!

For me, this isn't a big deal:  I was once again Adamantium on my accounts, and seeing a bunch of my friends who were on the bubble get rewarded at my season end party event was a blast.  The backlash is very vocal against this, but I think we need to take a moment to look at how Playdom could have potentially addressed this, and then look at how they did.

1. Playdom could have rolled things back and recalculated rewards.
2. Playdom could have issued additional rewards to players in their respective leagues to make their accomplishment "worth something".
3. Playdom admits they screwed up, but does not change the rewards.

The first option is what many people were fearing.  I just got this cool reward, will the company then take it away from me?  Thankfully, Playdom seems to have some grasp of how large a PR nightmare that would be.  The Adamantium league posters are out in force telling them that their current solution was terrible, but they're not even 1% of the overall user-base.  Imagine how loud the other 99% would be.

The second option is the one I'd like to hope they considered before deciding to go with option 3.  I spent significant time and effort getting Adamantium, and as a result I think it would have been nice to receive something for that effort other than a number in my tournament history.  That said, this option would require them to spend some significant time to come up with a reward that was fair and wouldn't just leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth.  Most likely, that reward would have come in the form of CP or Shield Points or something else that's just a minor benefit, and not anything as major as the free hero.  That said, Adamantium was one of the only ways to guarantee that free hero, since some players did not receive the free Oprah Angel.

The third option is honestly the easiest for the company in many respects.  No more hours of developer time have to be spent implementing fixes or trying to do rollbacks, they just continue working on their already-delayed Season 2 content and fix it for next season.  This option also leaves people with a bunch of free stuff, but that seems to be fine for most their users.  The biggest concern is that for the users who were the heaviest spenders on the game, this solution also feels like the worst one.  How they choose to address that (if they do) will be interesting to see.

This also almost feels like an apology for all the players who got their teams ruined by the plethora of bugs introduced with a week left to go in pvp.  Sorry, everyone who used all my budget team recommendations:  They extra screwed over all the best budget characters (except Phoenix, see the recap!).  Hopefully these bugs are addressed before next season.

But enough of the drama!  You've got some sweet new heroes, look forward to my Angel review next week (I haven't had the time to play with him enough this week), the upcoming feature on Shepherd's Staff (if you got that), and a return to the regular content schedule.

Season 9 Recap

My defense team (lvl 100+):  Iron Patriot // White Crown Phoenix

My offense team (lvl 100+):  Iron Patriot // Modern Thor

My defense team (lvl 50 and under):  White Crown Phoenix // Psylocke

My offense team (lvl 50 and under):  Phoenix Five Emma Frost // Psylocke

Overall, my team selection stayed fairly constant once the nerfs to Rescue came in:  I was using Juggernaut // Phoenix Five Cyclops before that, since the combination can pressure the old Rescue teams fairly consistantly.

I noticed a sharp drop-off of Tacticians being used on defense teams near the end of the season at level 100+:  Instead, there were numerous infiltrator teams featuring Phoenix, Nightcrawler, and the like designed to punish those players.  This gave room for me to run Blaster teams fairly liberally, and I had reasonable success with that approach on offense.  With many more players having access to 8 slot blaster coats than before, I imagine we might see a brief uptick of blasters.

I managed to get lucky enough to get my Staff quests done without spending into the ol' gold stash, but I imagine many were not as lucky.  The item seems very reasonable, particularly if you do not possess scrolls, since the healing is good and one way to beat scroll teams is to take enough turns once they blow their scrolls, and win that way.  All in all though, I felt the quest was slightly too discouraging.  I wish that it was less random number generator specific.  Getting ten pvp spin items was very frustrating, even if it did happen for me.

How did your PVP season go?  Were there things you wanted me to cover that I didn't talk about here?  Drop me a line at tactwidow@gmail.com or reply in the comments below and I will try to address your questions!