Also concerning mods, we still have some of them missing. I know that ice icons do not have the higher tiers of mods (not freezing - ice and ice defence)

No, how challengers are unlocked and permanently accessible in the coliseum. I don’t see a reason for that to change.

METROID Ah got you. Agreed.

Jess's guides can help with that. Mod guide: https://subeta.net/forums.php/read/925495 Challenger guide, look under challenger loot: https://subeta.net/forums.php/read/893452

Agreed with Amae. More official information people can access outside of battle forum would help. How many casuals get there is a point to going past 10 wins? Do they know when amulet, tome, scroll piece or mods and which mods will drop?

I think if there is a theme to the current BC, it's that what most casuals say they want is actually available but it isn't communicated to them so they can access it. At least not without diving into the battle forum or battle community.

Whoah Keith, glad so many people have chimed in with the thoughts on this random encounter vibe because they've said what is not very fun and exciting about that idea better than I could. x)

An idea I am more excited about:

The idea of a battle pass is at first a little daunting because it's one of many features that can isolate non-paying users from content and be really discouraging. HOWEVER, Subeta has had a history of being extremely user-friendly, willing to adjust as needed based on user feedback, and giving numerous routes to premium currency without having to pay real-life currency. With all that in mind I think a battle pass could be really exciting. Something like a quarterly pass that has rewards based on wins or winning against certain enemies depending on your max tier? Everyone can have the same reward tiers and maybe gold account users could have a few extra, even if it's just extra sP or two of an item instead of one, or a single bonus item made for the gold account track kind of like we get a single item every month for subscriptions. We've needed more gold account perks and this would be a fun one. The rest can be rewards and loot that every user can access regardless of gold account status. It can change out with the current season swap parts of the site, like Millionaire Center and Special Quest Shop.

I know it's all just spitballing but I am not even remotely interested in having to encounter challengers in the RNG - a lot of us don't have very much luck with the RNG things we already have (and need for achievements) and making battling less accessible by adding in that factor is entirely unappealing. If I wanted to play something like Pokemon...I'd play Pokemon.

I do think there are plenty of QOL things that can be done, however. I know suggestions have been made in the past about streamlining some of the functions of the Coliseum. When doing Battle Quests, I'd love to just be able to click something like "next challenger/fight/level" rather than having to choose the right button, go back to Reischen to see my prize, click another button to go back to the screen to see the next challenger, click another button to challenge them, then click yet another button to actually start the fight - something that would let us click 1 or 2 buttons max to move on to the next fight would be more beneficial to users. Same thing when fighting the same challenger. If the fight again button was maybe like "fight with same pet/setup again" and just immediately started the next battle rather than putting us back to the challenge page that would be great.

Also I fully understand why we couldn't have an all hands on deck against Hydragellos this time around, but I think maybe it would've been more effective to stick it somewhere between the old school version and the stomper in terms of difficulty so that pets in the t11-12 range still had a chance. I've done enough damage as mentioned to get cores before, it was grindy but I did it so that I could get the weapons, but I can't even stand one single fight here despite being almost to t13 now. I feel like it didn't need to be quite at the point it's at and still would've given upper tier folks a challenge to try to get to.

But again, really appreciate the battle community for their attempts to help everyone hit achievements and do the best they can do. It's just disappointing to have worked so hard to be able to participate in this infrequent event and then get a 'haha you're locked out again' situation with it.

[edit] Editing to add - I also think the AP system needs to be looked at. My pet has read almost all of the books on site (I'm less than 700 away from completion and many of those are collection items and past plot items that are super expensive) and my AP is still super low by comparison to what would be useful. Even with (very expensive) stat boosters, needing 16+ points of intel per AP seems awfully high and unbalanced. Especially when they will not go up unless you trigger them by reading a book - what happens when we run out of books?

Also one more bit of QOL - I think that challengers should continue to give out exp beyond 10 wins at a better rate. The challenger gets harder and harder but now the only rewards are the potential of amulets and/or tomes so it's just a grinding slog to keep going against them, requiring more time and effort, but they don't add any experience at all to use. It maybe doesn't need to be at the same rate as the first 5-10 battles but it should be more than 20 points for an impossible challenger.

The aspect that's fun with battling that random encounters takes away is the ability to tinker with your set again and dive right back in. When you're close, sometimes it's just a different weapon with slightly different icons or sometimes a different crystal that takes you to the finish line. If you don't have regular access to your opponents, you take that away.

I know you want to overhaul mechanics of everything on Subeta @/Keith but you've gotta slow down sometimes. Just because it will be on the a new-but-really-new site, doesn't mean you have to be so drastic with changes. Not only are we not the same page with your ideas, but we're not even in the same library.

having all of the CSC opponents make that big of a difference, huh? I'm a collections person first, so I tend to just buy the new one and depending on what I need for collections, I might buy one other opponent. However, all the old ones are 250 CSC a pop regardless of difficulty so it's expensive to catch up, even if I did decide to forgo collections and only focus on opponents. It would be nice if the old ones were priced on difficulty like the new ones but I think there was a specific reason I can't remember.

This also reminds of Throwback Thursday some years back. My pets weren't strong enough to take advantage of it. Some of my pets weren't strong enough to take on plot opponents when they were around. It would be nice to try them again but I'm not holding my breath.

As a somewhat casual battler, for what it's worth, adding an RNG element to being able to fight challengers that currently are Just Available to me would discourage me from battling at all. If I'm in the mood to grind out battles and I have to look at a log and see "oh, I can fight X challenger twice and Y challenger once and Z hasn't challenged me yet at all" I would probably just not bother. And I already use a spreadsheet to track my wins. This just feels like too much of an extra hassle.

As for an actual quality of life improvement, I would love if you could hover or click on the blessing/curse icons to see what they actually mean during a fight. Curses that do damage or blessings that heal I can usually figure out from the text. But a bunch of opponents have blessings that prevent freezing and they all use a different picture to the point that I mostly just figure it out through trial and error instead of looking it up on the forums every time it comes up (and the forum guides are appreciated, but I will not remember the information long-term anyway and it's faster to just brute force it).

And as for the supreme hydragellos, I was also disappointed by this challenger. I can't fight it. Last gelly war, I was able to grind for my first ever core and this year I got my first wins against the stomper and even got to 5 wins (exciting!) but I hope there's a less site-killing solution for this kind of boss fight in the future other than "oh it's a T13 challenger now". I wonder if there's a way to like. set a damage goal on a per-user basis instead of as a global boss. Like you can grind 75,000 damage (or whatever) against this challenger but it doesn't have to be all in one fight. If you want to chip away at it with a weaker pet, you can. I don't know if that's equally hard on the site as the old global bosses were though

Go for the Secret challengers you don't have. It's usually very cheap to get them and there are a lot of them. It's just knowing the trick to find them. Jess has a guide: https://subeta.net/forums.php/read/893452 . Go to the Secret challenger section, click basic information on the challenger and it tells you how to find/activate.

Though I'd never tell someone to not buy all the CS challengers too.

Yeah, I can forsee a lot of improvements to the armory.

I mentioned it in my first post, but one of the important things I've done so far is to take our existing backend system and migrate it to something a little more understandable. That means things like freezing, stealing and healing are all 'tags' on the weapons (that can be easily added / removed - even during the course of a battle!) and scrolls. It should make it way easier to sort through the ones you own and don't own, and see what they do!

(and everyone else who has mentioned it) Yeah, a real bummer, tbh. The system is just so brittle that it can't handle a boss fight the way that we used to do them, which I was never happy with anyway. That won't be as much of an issue on Kumos just because it'll be built from newer foundations (with caching lol) but I'd still like to figure out a way to have 'boss' fights that don't just feel like massive damage sponges. They have to have insane amounts of HP so they don't get defeated by all of the strongest pets on the site in the first hour, but be strong enough that you can't just whittle down the HP yourself.

So, tons of getting hit once, dying (or blocking 100% and then dying the next round), healing, repeating, just so that you can be involved in what is ultimately from my perspective not a ton of fun, and just FOMO driven battling.

Again, if your intention is to make battling more accessible, locking it behind farming ain't the answer. There are so many QoL things to be done to make it more user-friendly but your whole idea seems like a very large step in the wrong direction.

Right now, pretty much all the information a new battler needs is either in user-generated guides or on an offsite fan page. And I mean thank god for Subetalodge, but we shouldn't need to go to another site to figure out a main component of this one. Even something simple like knowing how many times each pet has beaten a challenger is convoluted and hidden. There's no reason it shouldn't be listed on the challenge page. There's also no onsite list of unlockable challengers to check against. Like Darkrai said, we have no idea what these curse and blessing icons in battle are. Everything is hidden and buried and custom coded and just so, so confusing and almost downright hostile to newcomers.

[edit] Also we have like 300 active challengers available. Are you planning to tie each of them to an action or item for us to grind?

I'm just not see the vision of how RNG opponents are going to solve some of these problems.

When I think of Pokemon, I think of all the times I'm hoarding repellents because sometimes, I just need to get somewhere without being bombarded with random encounters. This sucked in Final Fantasy too. Are we going to get annoyed all the time or is there some page we have to try and remember to visit where everybody is waiting to fight us?

What about CSC opponents that a lot of us have spent money on? Are those going to be RNG too? Are we spending money for a chance to fight an opponent or are we keeping those opponents?

I think if you want to breath some new life into opponents, maybe make the RPG optional (with a way to turn them off) instead of the crux of the mechanic. Have standard opponents in the arena but they can also appear 'in the wild' and they can drop more experience, some mod crystals, or something that's still helpful but not unbalanced. Maybe that's also super unpopular and not at all the fix you're looking for but it feels more like we're adding instead of feeling like we're taking something away.

That being said, I personally don't mind the grinding aspect. I have no problem grinding out the 200+ wins on easy challengers to get a tome (and to be fair, a lot of fraggables, which has been really nice as I've been going through opponents lately) so grindy fights have never bothered me [edit] Edited for clarity

That is fair - endless clicking to rinse and repeat doing X damage, heal, try again all knowing that you're just aiming to hopefully hit the right goal number to get what you want is not really fun at all. But it's still more fun than knowing you have 0 chance at all of earning something. I think there's gotta be a middle ground somewhere between the two. I do think (in the future, if there's another war with damage/time/number of battle whatever based to get the core) that it would be beneficial to know in advance what goal you need to actually hit to be eligible/get it as a guarantee. That is the one thing I do appreciate about the change this year is that we know for a fact, if we can get 1 win against it, we can get a core. If we can get 5 wins against it, we can get the Fanciful box. Having to guessing game our way through requirements to potentially get a core was not fun at all before, so having a specific requirement and reward lined up is nice at least!

I know there's downsides as well to up front targets because you run the risk of limiting engagement or people finding ways to cheat the system etc - so I definitely don't blame y'all at all (especially considering that it was all new at the start anyhow so it's been a learn and grow and I do honestly think that what I have seen of the changes over the years, whether they were successful and/or popular, is that you are trying to find ways to make it better overall for us all even when something doesn't end up working)! I figured since there's spitballing for the updated site we may as well lay it all out haha.

Also I really like and hope that adjusting the RNG system on the new site is something that is not going to feel so terrible. I don't think the idea of RNG is bad, but it's definitely not working great for us right now and I am glad you see and agree with that! (also as a funny aside, I posted that and like two pages later I got a SBQ invite RE again lol).

I am definitely with you in finding a way to make it worthwhile to keep going back to things, and I do agree (as do others who've addressed that point) that it isn't great at the moment where most folks are like...whack whack whack until 10 and then they don't touch the opponent again unless there's an achievement. I do hope that wherever it lands, it hits that fine balance of making it worthwhile without folks trying to cheat the system! I literally just a few minutes ago finally got my cumulative 5 wins against Meatslab, the Furious to get my first Baal to make my Cronus and I felt really proud of myself for all the work I put in to get here - so I do think that the system is rewarding, I just hate that it's like....years and years of effort to get to this point (and I still can't defeat the Hydra but I'm trying even though it isn't at all rewarding me anything at this point haha). I get the point about bots though - it's a massive problem on Neo and despite the evidence and folks who are tracking and have identified the botters (and pointed them out to the team and staff), it's one that absolutely makes the game less fun overall and tends to tick off users. I am glad Subeta doesn't have the same level of issue with them, but I get why there's concern and why it's at least even some sort of a priority (wish it was over there haha).

I wonder if, on the new site, it might be possible to earn even a pittance amount of exp for doing some sort of damage even when you die against challengers if that wouldn't also be an issue with botters. Some incentive to keep trying would be nice.

All I can say is if opponents become an RPG random encounter RNG thing, I'll quit. Battling is all I do here. I'm open to whatever else has been mentioned, but will absolutely not budge on the idea of bringing in more RNG focus. I do not like the randomness of the Tempest as it is (never mind that that dang bear won't give me a book I need several copies of), and if battling goes that route with opponents, forget it. Not when I have 22 pets to grind with.

If I want to sit there and battle a brand new released opponent 20 times for the first 10 minutes it's released, then why is that a bad thing? Besides, I have more pets besides one to battle with, all at different stages of growth, so really, I can battle a new opponent with maybe 5 pets, then months later, battle that same opponent again with another 5 pets because the opponent is readily available all the time.

Change isn't always bad, but the fact that there's that "sometimes" aspect, and have seen change ala Neopets conversion of 2007, I have reasons to be wary. I signed up on this site two days after Neopets conversion in 2007. I cannot ever forget that detail of how I got here, all those years ago. Honestly, the site seems to be going into a direction where it's more like....a farm or life simulator or something with crafting and skill trees, things I've seen dozens of times from a Youtuber I follow where he plays tons of them. And I think that's a big risk to take the site in when there's already hundreds of those types of games out there. And they might do well now, but fads come and go. Remember when Rock Band existed? Yeah, do you see it anywhere anymore? No. Because of market oversaturation. Popular 'in' things like Minecraft or Fortnite are all going to go the same way eventually. Everything fades with time.

Sure, pet sites like Neo, Subeta and so on have and are fading or already did. But I think the genre does fine enough and there's ways to keep it going. Grundos Cafe is a Neo clone and does lots of good things. There's some new Subeta-like pet site I've seen on tumblr being posted (remember when tumblr was a thing lol); I forget the name of it, but I remember its art style being a mimic of the Subeta style. There's ways to keep this site going as the genre it currently is apart of, I don't see a reason to change its genre after all these years. You risk not getting or keeping new players and you risk alienating your current userbase who may want nothing to do with this. And I'd hate to see the site close down ultimately because of this gamble. But I'll stick it out as long as I can muster.

Yeah I'm gonna be critical, but that's what I do. I'm with on all of this, you need to slow down. Cause I've got red flags going that something is very off.

The battle system is a scuffed mess with 20 years of scuffed decisions that are impossible to really repair without power creep or a reset. But its a scuffed mess with a loyal fanbase.

If you change something so fundemental as the loop of how we challenge and when we get to interact with opponents, your going to alienate the loyal fanbase, and the large feature with thousands of items devoted to it will become even smaller.

The problem with onboarding new players is the glacial pace of getting through the early game, and the massive backlog of paywalled content that isn't even availible to them on a relavent timeline most of the time. Training times should be slashed, and EXP costs on low Tiers should be slashed so people can onboard into the middle game in a few hours, instead of needing to train for months.

Your new player experience for the BD is terrible, but these ideas seem hellbent on destroying the experience of enfranchised players without helping the new players anyways.

"Honestly, the site seems to be going into a direction where it's more like....a farm or life simulator or something with crafting and skill trees"

If only our crafting and skill tree features had updates.

Like, we have a baking feature but none of the birthday cookies were attached to that? And yet, we had two in the crypts, three in the blue building, two in the crystal shop and so on?

But anyway, back on topic. I don't think reinventing the wheel is the way to go with the coliseum. The system is fine, the people who like it love it the way it is.

Nobody likes RNG and nobody likes grinding the same lower opponents to get stats and loot. So yeah, the battle component part of the site needs to be more engaging for people who are starting.

THESOVEREIGN is right, we need to make it easier to get a battle pet. Because the early tiers are brutal, and people are quickly deciding "this isn't for me" because the grinding portion is too slow.

Adding more RNG and more grinding isn't the way.