Patch R59 Discussion - Live 8/18

Twysta

Unknown

@tokens: well, it's fairly common for traditional cards to have series based on chronological release, I.e. series 1 packs, series 2 packs, etc.

You could have the core heroes which are in every pack, I.e. Spidey, Mags, GSBW, etc. Then Series 1 would additionally have Hulk, Punisher, etc. Series 2, Thor, Cap, etc. Series 3, Daken, Sentry, etc.

Unknown

Anybody who has witnessed the previous character rollouts:

When can we expect them to add Cpt Marvel? Do they only change the tokens during regular updates? So nothing until R60 or can they be released whenever? I'm sitting on a ton of tokens and my roster is too bad to hoard them for another 1-2 months.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Bagman would finally be useful. Switcheroo is a useful power in many circumstances, but few would miss Bagman in their roster.

When you get a team-up this way, it's a 1 time use. Loaned characters cannot be used for 16 hours.

One time use during matches or... within that time frame you can only use that loaned character once after it was sent to you?

SnowcaTT wrote:

Hours vary, I have 4/8/12/24 (I didn't see 16). I can't figure out what determines that, I have a 3* BP that goes out for 24 hours and a 3* Cap that goes out 4 hours, they have about the same number of covers.

Buy back varies depending on those hours also. You can recall them to your roster, 80hp for 4 hours and 180hp for 12 hours (didn't test the others yet).

Put in a request to find these somewhere else (perhaps TU/Boost tab?). I found it confusing at first - if anyone is looking how to use:

Go to match, "fight".
In boosts screen, find trash-can symbol: that's where you can delete your team-ups.
If you have any open slots, then you can press "request team-ups" there.

(Back out of match after that point if you want to).

Regardless of what covers you have on your characters, they have a set time on patrol based on the usefulness of their abilities. LThor will always be 24 hours (I sent a 152 whereas a teammate sent a 454). Also, you can verify the times by clicking through them before sending them off.

Unknown

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

vudu3 wrote:

What it would do is allow D3 to add as many 2*, 3* or 4* characters as they want without warping the odds of getting a cover of a specific rarity. They could add ten 3* characters tomorrow and you'd still have a 14.1% chance of pulling a 3* characters from a Heroic token. However, the chances of pulling any particular 3* cover would from drop from 1.67% to 1.11% (1/90). If the odds of getting a specific cover dropped too much they could easily shift drop rates in Step 1.

Something like this seems like it would make the most sense. However, I have no idea if it's difficult to implement from a technical standpoint.

Based on Ice's comments, I think the internal issue at hand is they don't want to dilute the pool too much such that getting any one cover becomes too rare. Your solution definitely works, but having a .25% chance down the line of getting a cover you need is too low to make the tokens worth it. So chances are that would start to tank sales, which of course is the ultimate driving force.

In the short-term, part of how this could be "fixed" would be to retire a few specific 3*s from the pool, such as Daredevil or Rags.


In the long term, they're probably going to have to raise the price of a Heroic token and sharply cut the percentage chance of getting a 2* out of it. Given that you now get 2*s for winning battles in PVP, the need to get them through Heroic tokens, vs. standard tokens, is greatly reduced.

Unknown

JCTthe3rd81 wrote:

It seems the away time on patrol is based on level.

Nope.

I sent out three to a teammate of mine, which were Modern Hawkeye, a second copy of OBW, and Loki.

Modern Hawkeye was leveled higher than my second OBW but the lend time for the second OBW was 4 hours longer.


Loki, OTOH, was 16 hours.

Unknown

PPPlaya wrote:

Anybody who has witnessed the previous character rollouts:

When can we expect them to add Cpt Marvel? Do they only change the tokens during regular updates? So nothing until R60 or can they be released whenever? I'm sitting on a ton of tokens and my roster is too bad to hoard them for another 1-2 months.

I don't think adding to the token pool requires an actual update. They can do it whenever they want. Usually Ice IX will announce it on the forum, but not always.

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

@tokens: well, it's fairly common for traditional cards to have series based on chronological release, I.e. series 1 packs, series 2 packs, etc.

You could have the core heroes which are in every pack, I.e. Spidey, Mags, GSBW, etc. Then Series 1 would additionally have Hulk, Punisher, etc. Series 2, Thor, Cap, etc. Series 3, Daken, Sentry, etc.

That's certainly a way to do it.


I'm not sure how much in the way of "core" heroes need to be in there, though. I'd probably just divide up the 3*s into groups of 5 and have each set of packs have a 15% chance of a 3* but raising the overall chance of getting that particular hero from 0.7% to roughly 3%.

This could include one pack with 6 heroes in it so that the 2 cover ones like Doom, Loki, and Rags are all lumped together to keep the percentages the same.

Unknown

adamLmpq wrote:

PPPlaya wrote:

Anybody who has witnessed the previous character rollouts:

When can we expect them to add Cpt Marvel? Do they only change the tokens during regular updates? So nothing until R60 or can they be released whenever? I'm sitting on a ton of tokens and my roster is too bad to hoard them for another 1-2 months.

I don't think adding to the token pool requires an actual update. They can do it whenever they want. Usually Ice IX will announce it on the forum, but not always.

It is usually done through the daily content push rather than a software update IIRC.

Unknown

You still have to select TUs again before every match, even if unused. So, no deal for me.

Unknown

saurus wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

Phaserhawk wrote:

The easiest way is to split the cards into seperate packs. You could have a good guy/bad guy pack. When you get a token you can elect to pick the good guy pack or the bad guy pack, although we are rather skewed on good guys. You could just randomly assign characters to pack, either way, segregate them. So lets say for arguements sake we did good guy/bad guy. When I get a Heroic Token, I can either elect to spend it on the Good guys pack or the Bad guys pack, much like a Pvp event token is specific to a certain character allotement, we can do the same for that. It would be a simple fix, and could allow players to chase the cards they need.

I'll make it simpler. They need to remove 2*'s altogether from all packs except standard packs and PVE packs. 2*'s are NOT a reward. Players play hard and do not deserve a slap in the face when they redeem their token(s).

The PVE packs should ONLY have the characters that are buffed/featured in that event.

If just the 3*'s were in a pack (given that most have 3 abilities), the odds of getting the one(s) you want is still not statistically probable and will go down when more 3*'s are added.

Even simpler: Rewards should be rewards!

Edit - Deleted "exception"

The 2 stars were pretty useful to me for the firsty forty five days of play. They might not be much of a reward to people who have been playing for 2+ months, but that doesn't mean they arent a reward otherwise. The rewards are lottery tickets, thats just their nature.

Also, if you only got three stars, they would need to drastically reduce how often they hand out the tokens anyway, so you would get three stars from tokens just as often, considering if they just gave out three star covers like candy the long term play of the game would be drastically reduced.

You would still get 2* from standard and pve tokens. Also 2* from lr and PvP drops, as well as PvP and pve rewards'

They would not need to reduce because if only 3*'s, you'd still only have less than 2% chance of getting a specific cover, and that's not counting 4*'s and new 3* characters. You're looking at about only 1% chance of getting the cover you need/want. This just magnifies how broken the current token odds are with drop rates weighted towards 2* characters.

Again: Rewards should be rewards!

Unknown

Fisben wrote:

SnowcaTT wrote:

Um...any way to un-request? Or set how many to request? I dumped five overpriced ones, tested with a request: it automatically requested all five. Now that text is sitting on top of alliance chat forever?

Even better, I tried to go in to see if there is a way to unrequest the 5 TU's it requests from your alliance and leaves at the top of the alliance chat... If you hit request again, it says you can only make the request every HALF HOUR. Are you kidding? Did they test this thing before it went live???? With 20 alliance members.. and no way to get rid of that stupid pending TU request other than hope that people dump their low level roster slots to make those messages go away??

Nice one..

Time to get the Line app.

TheHueyFreeman

I got a high and low leveled fury TU. Both guys lost their fury for 36 hours. Just be sure you dont plan to use him.

Nonce Equitaur 2

Tavanh wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Bagman would finally be useful. Switcheroo is a useful power in many circumstances, but few would miss Bagman in their roster.

When you get a team-up this way, it's a 1 time use. Loaned characters cannot be used for 16 hours.

One time use during matches or... within that time frame you can only use that loaned character once after it was sent to you?

You don't get to use the character. You get a single random team-up from that character, usable once.

Phaserhawk

They have 3 options.

1.) Retire characters from packs or have a rotating lineup.
2.) Take 2*'s out of the Heroic packs
3.) Segregate characters into Packs. Leave the 3* and 2*'s as is, but have seperate packs for the 3*s

You could just segreate them by colors. A green, blue, red, black etc. pack.

Black you would be able to get characters with black skills, red, red skills etc. and again leave the 2* and 4* as is.

Unknown

Having various character packs doesn't solve the dilution problem, it might help but depending on how it is implemented it would range from slightly helpful to not helpful at all. If it is done one way and characters are sorted into packs and each token you are given already has an assigned pack then the odds of getting what you want are not really any better. If you are allowed to chose a character pack when opening a token then you should be able to steer your RNG away from things you don't need and towards things you do and that would be helpful.

My current imagining would be a line of vending/slot machines you can drop your token into. First one is completely random with a set % based on rarity. Next set of machines are based on color so if you need a red cover you can pick red. Slightly less chance of getting a 3* since you are picking from a smaller field. Feel free to throw in specific groupings Heroes/villains/X-men/Series1/Series2 etc. Shows who is in that machine and odds of getting them. Final row of machines is single featured 3* character. Has a much higher odds of getting that specific character out of your token BUT a much lower odds of 3* overall.

First machine is great for maximizing your value when you need lots of covers for many people. If you like one of the grouped sets feel free to spend your money there while avoiding the ones containing only your maxed characters. And if you have almost everything maxed and a new character comes out you can burn all of your tokens pulling the lever on the Deadpool machine knowing full well that gold background is going to be hella rare, but you can rest well knowing you won't get any more useless Loki covers.

SnowcaTT

Phaserhawk wrote:

They have 3 options.

1.) Retire characters from packs or have a rotating lineup.
2.) Take 2*'s out of the Heroic packs
3.) Segregate characters into Packs. Leave the 3* and 2*'s as is, but have seperate packs for the 3*s

You could just segreate them by colors. A green, blue, red, black etc. pack.

Black you would be able to get characters with black skills, red, red skills etc. and again leave the 2* and 4* as is.

Or they could simply up the percentages of 3* pulls. The Dev's have said several times they are looking at the 2*-3* transition problem that is arising, that transition is getting tougher with more characters being added all the time. They have to make the chance of getting 3*'s more common - expanding PVP to top 100 helps, but only a little bit. Bumping percentage of token pulls would make me hope a bit more, rather than opening it while I think "here is 250 iso". They could make them give Iso/2*/3*, then perhaps the perception of them would't be "all I get is 2*"...it would be "all I get is iso, and 2*'s I sell for iso"

On a side note - I don't want to see 2* percentage go down. I play every event, hit top 100 in everything (as does alliance), play many lightning rounds. In three weeks I still haven't been able to obtain more than three red covers of torchling. Sometimes you just can't get the right one, I'd hate for percantages to drop when I'm looking for them. I remember when I originally was getting OBW, I found a full extra set of purple and blue covers before I found that darned third black cover.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Tavanh wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

Bagman would finally be useful. Switcheroo is a useful power in many circumstances, but few would miss Bagman in their roster.

When you get a team-up this way, it's a 1 time use. Loaned characters cannot be used for 16 hours.

One time use during matches or... within that time frame you can only use that loaned character once after it was sent to you?

You don't get to use the character. You get a single random team-up from that character, usable once.

Never again will I use the patrol feature, waste of time for me to send one character for 24 hours for a one time use. If they're on patrol, that teammate should be able to use it once every match.

Unknown

One thing I suggested: take the 5 villains in the LR packs out, but change the LR tokens so they only have those five villains (at least among 3*s). They could do the same with the hero LRs when the packs need some culling again. I'd also suggest allowing tokens to be traded (maybe 2:1 within a * rating, if they don't want it 1:1), so that you've got an out if you get a useless token (as the LRs would be for a lot of vets).

Unknown

Other similar but possibly functional idea is to have a character of the day(or hour?). A character whose % chance in all tokens is increased while they are featured. All other characters would have slightly reduced odds but if you are really wanting/needing that specific character you can stockpile all your tokens and only open then when that hero is featured for best odds of getting what you want.

make a weird horoscope system behind it so one person's odds are way up. Allies of that person are up slightly, enemies down slightly, nemesis down greatly. But would still be a system the player has ~some~ control over their odds.

There is still a rarity creep going on with chances of specific pulls continuing to go down. I fear the only way to combat that long term is to increase the number of tokens/rewards offered as the number of characters those rewards are fueling continues to increase. Or break down and increase the % chance of 3*s which seems to be something they are reluctant to do.