Event suggestion: Global weekly buffs for the underused

Unknown

To further encourage character and player variety, I suggest global buffs for one certain, random (but underused) character for XX duration, say one week.

Example: Starting next Monday, January 13, until the evening of Sunday, January 19, Marvel Now Magneto gets a +XX% health + XX% ability/tile damage buff. (50%? 75%?) Everywhere. Including in whatever PVE event is happening, whatever PVP event is happening, SHIELD training, prologue, whatever. For the duration of that week. Then at midnight EST on Sunday, he reverts to normal.

Sometime later, whether that be the following week or some weeks later, Modern Bow and Arrow Guy gets that buff. For the entire week. Everywhere. In PVE events that week, prologue missions that week, SHIELD that week, PVP events that week, the works. Then at midnight EST on Sunday, he, too, reverts to normal like Cinderella's pumpkin.

This type of event will have the obvious benefits of:
- Encouraging players to spend time, ISO, and yes, maybe even HP to level / get covers for these characters
- Rewarding players who use less-used characters and keeping them re-engaged, instead of regretting their purchases
- Adding long-term variety to PVP events. Yes, OK, every Tom, ****, and Harry will be running Venom the week he's buffed, but that may mean at least a few players bump out their Magneto or Thor for him.

Edit - "Global." Ah, yes. That's the term I meant to use originally.

Unknown

You probably have to break this up into certain tiers. For example Ragnarok is probably underused overall simply because most people don't have him at a high level, but he's certainly not weak. I'd suggest having 4 brackets:

1 star
2 star
3 star heroes
3 star villians

And I'm not sure what you'd do with the 4 star characters. I guess they should get a buff too.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

You probably have to break this up into certain tiers. For example Ragnarok is probably underused overall simply because most people don't have him at a high level, but he's certainly not weak. I'd suggest having 4 brackets:

1 star
2 star
3 star heroes
3 star villians

And I'm not sure what you'd do with the 4 star characters. I guess they should get a buff too.

If I were running the show, Ragnarok would either never get buffed, or not get buffed until he started falling out of the meta. So in other words, he would never get buffed

This would primarily be for rarely-used characters that are considered "weak." Marvel Now Magneto. Modern Bow and Arrow Guy. Venom. Dark Widow. Moonstone. etc. In other words, choosing which characters get buffed would not be something I would leave only to data mining. There would need to be a significant element of human participation and deliberation/oversight here.

Also, I would definitely buff 4-stars like Invisible Woman. Think of the thousands of HP that huge crowds of people would come galloping in to buy so they could upgrade her!!! I can practically hear the college fund for IceIX's kids growing!!!

Unknown

No, what I mean is if you simply go by 'underused' as a % of players fielding him, Ragnarok obviously won't be very high because a lot of people don't have him at all!

So the 'underused' has to be applied to characters of a given rarity. From what I can tell, the rarity goes from 4 star > 3 star villians > 3 star heroes > 2 star > 1 star, so this needs to be accounted for when deciding who is underused.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

No, what I mean is if you simply go by 'underused' as a % of players fielding him, Ragnarok obviously won't be very high because a lot of people don't have him at all!

So the 'underused' has to be applied to characters of a given rarity. From what I can tell, the rarity goes from 4 star > 3 star villians > 3 star heroes > 2 star > 1 star, so this needs to be accounted for when deciding who is underused.

Ya, as I mentioned, I wouldn't just look at usage patterns (despite my poorly-chosen thread subject line ) or overall card rarity. Doom, for instance, is a fairly rare character to receive, as well as to be seen played in the wild. But does he really need a global buff? Lightning rounds suggest: no. That guy is already beast, so buffing him might not be necessary. So I probably wouldn't put Doom on the list.

This type of event would need human oversight to determine which weakest characters needed the most "love." So it wouldn't just be underused characters, it would also be "weak" characters as determined by arbitrary discussion around the office with IceIX, ElectroBlast, etc.

So again, I would buff Rag in such an event...pretty much never.

Unknown

Doom is okay. Working with marvel now magneto makes him better. It costs 9 blue to make blue tiles into black. There is more power in laying down blue tiles around existing black tiles to convert to black than you would expect. With care you can clear the board and get crazy cascades. Its not hard to get enough ap to get summon demons.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

Doom is okay. Working with marvel now magneto makes him better. It costs 9 blue to make blue tiles into black. There is more power in laying down blue tiles around existing black tiles to convert to black than you would expect. With care you can clear the board and get crazy cascades. Its not hard to get enough ap to get summon demons.

I think Doom is better than OK at high levels. And at high level with Lightning Round-level buffs, he's a scary OP rampaging madman.

Like I mentioned, if there were a series of global buffs to one character or another to encourage players to use weaker/rarer characters, I would probably not include Doom in frequent rotation. That would basically just extend the Doom LRs to a week in length.

I'd be fine with a weeklong global buff to Hood or Loki though. Loki especially, poor guy needs all the help he can get.

Unknown

bumping this up