why "The Hulk" is the best event for a new character ever
loroku
Posts: 1,014 Chairperson of the Boards
Yes, I know they didn't just release Hulk. And no, I wasn't around when they ran it before, so I don't know if it was a "new character release" event or not, but it sure seems like it was set up to be. But it's an amazing model for how to do it, and it makes me think this game really used to be amazing compared to where it is now. So why is this event so good?
1 - Everyone gets a cover. Given the "by the macro numbers and not what's actually fun for individuals" model of FtP this game seems to be stuck in these days, giving everyone a 3* cover would probably make the current overlords faint. But it's a 100% awesome way to make up for the constant release of new characters, plus it encourages people to collect (which I'm guessing most do anyway), and frankly it sells roster slots. It's a great way to reward the community for participating, as opposed to the ruthless grind you have to do for everything else. Absolutely love it; please make all new characters come out this way! (Also: this event is better than the Sentry event because actually getting the cover is possible for anyone, as opposed to having to get through 10 really hard nodes and one nearly-impossible one to get the free cover.)
2 - An entire story just for this. This was really, really great! Sure, I still didn't get to see all of it, but it was generally coherent, fun to read, and had a crazy fun ending with a spoiler for the NEXT story (which I assume won't happen since this is a repeat) - all in all, one of the best storylines since Deadpool's "eff the story and I'll just tell a bunch of jokes" story. LOVE IT! Can you imagine how much better this game would be if they actually made an entire "book" for each new character? Maybe the workload would even force them to back off a tiny bit on new character releases (joy!).
But honestly it can't be that hard - the art is super simple and other than getting the dialog approved by Marvel (assuming that's required) even a little story here and there would be great. I completely skipped Elektra's release but it had a story too, right? We need more of this instead of just a constant stream of storyless whoevers, cranked out as fast as possible so the macro numbers go up.
2 - Only 4.5 days. WHEW! 7 day long events suck because that means you have to try for that much longer in order to do well. Too short means too many people might miss it because they are busy / RL / etc. But About 4.5 days seems to hit a sweet spot - especially when it's over a weekend. Very nice.
3 - Jillions of subs. This doesn't mean as much now that they have watered the sub rewards down to basically nothing, but if the sub rewards were actually rewarding this would make it even more amazing. Plus lots of subs means even the watered-down **** rewards get repeated a lot, AND you get lots of new nodes to grind so it's not so grindy, AND you get new node rewards - which really help the newbies, as opposed to the 10th "20 ISO" in a row from grinding the same nodes over and over. Not sure how the rubberbanding / scaling worked for everyone, but from at least my perspective it seemed well-tuned.
This event still had some drawbacks, true: two required characters, especially when one of them cannot, by definition, be owned by anyone who started in the last two or three months (when was Punisher vaulted?) is a really, really **** thing to do (again: good from a macro perspective, TERRIBLE for individuals actually playing the game). Two required characters, period, is also really mean-spirited. There weren't a lot of powered-up characters, which made the nodes a bit harder for more people (although most of them never got too far into "insane" difficulty) and fighting a high-level Juggernaut is really, really annoying (although that's pretty fair - that's really just a challenge as opposed to mean-spirited). And I'm sure this event did not work for some people for some of the reasons I listed above, even though though they were huge positives in my book. But overall, I really wish THIS were the game I'd been playing for the last couple of months. It'd go a long way toward helping me overlook the flaws, and be more interesting and fun to play!
1 - Everyone gets a cover. Given the "by the macro numbers and not what's actually fun for individuals" model of FtP this game seems to be stuck in these days, giving everyone a 3* cover would probably make the current overlords faint. But it's a 100% awesome way to make up for the constant release of new characters, plus it encourages people to collect (which I'm guessing most do anyway), and frankly it sells roster slots. It's a great way to reward the community for participating, as opposed to the ruthless grind you have to do for everything else. Absolutely love it; please make all new characters come out this way! (Also: this event is better than the Sentry event because actually getting the cover is possible for anyone, as opposed to having to get through 10 really hard nodes and one nearly-impossible one to get the free cover.)
2 - An entire story just for this. This was really, really great! Sure, I still didn't get to see all of it, but it was generally coherent, fun to read, and had a crazy fun ending with a spoiler for the NEXT story (which I assume won't happen since this is a repeat) - all in all, one of the best storylines since Deadpool's "eff the story and I'll just tell a bunch of jokes" story. LOVE IT! Can you imagine how much better this game would be if they actually made an entire "book" for each new character? Maybe the workload would even force them to back off a tiny bit on new character releases (joy!).
But honestly it can't be that hard - the art is super simple and other than getting the dialog approved by Marvel (assuming that's required) even a little story here and there would be great. I completely skipped Elektra's release but it had a story too, right? We need more of this instead of just a constant stream of storyless whoevers, cranked out as fast as possible so the macro numbers go up.2 - Only 4.5 days. WHEW! 7 day long events suck because that means you have to try for that much longer in order to do well. Too short means too many people might miss it because they are busy / RL / etc. But About 4.5 days seems to hit a sweet spot - especially when it's over a weekend. Very nice.
3 - Jillions of subs. This doesn't mean as much now that they have watered the sub rewards down to basically nothing, but if the sub rewards were actually rewarding this would make it even more amazing. Plus lots of subs means even the watered-down **** rewards get repeated a lot, AND you get lots of new nodes to grind so it's not so grindy, AND you get new node rewards - which really help the newbies, as opposed to the 10th "20 ISO" in a row from grinding the same nodes over and over. Not sure how the rubberbanding / scaling worked for everyone, but from at least my perspective it seemed well-tuned.
This event still had some drawbacks, true: two required characters, especially when one of them cannot, by definition, be owned by anyone who started in the last two or three months (when was Punisher vaulted?) is a really, really **** thing to do (again: good from a macro perspective, TERRIBLE for individuals actually playing the game). Two required characters, period, is also really mean-spirited. There weren't a lot of powered-up characters, which made the nodes a bit harder for more people (although most of them never got too far into "insane" difficulty) and fighting a high-level Juggernaut is really, really annoying (although that's pretty fair - that's really just a challenge as opposed to mean-spirited). And I'm sure this event did not work for some people for some of the reasons I listed above, even though though they were huge positives in my book. But overall, I really wish THIS were the game I'd been playing for the last couple of months. It'd go a long way toward helping me overlook the flaws, and be more interesting and fun to play!
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Comments
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Good post, and I agree all around. Stories are fun (the first time), PVE's are more fun when not 7 days, and free covers are fantastic. Sentry gives you one as well, I'd like to see more covers given out in easy nodes for PVE events.
(Something something about scaling not letting me read half of the story....)0 -
I agree I really like the event and the free Hulk cover was unexpected and really welcomed by me.
I disagree on the length of the event however, (I'm biased as I got stuck in a Hospital for two days), but it was over before I could finish and get the Luke Cage cover. Even though I did grind it. They should consider stretching things out so that people aren't expected to spend every spare second in the game in hopes of getting the final prize, while still not making it super easy either.0 -
The Hulk was originally run as the intro event for the Hulk, and run twice in a row with different end times. The other event like that is Prodigal Sun, which was the Sentry launch event. Both are looked at as being among the best character introductions the game ever did; the exact opposite of when, say, they released three straight characters in terrible heroic events. which they haven't done since and should never do again.0
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I didn't have a lot of fun with this event. Perhaps I picked the wrong starting time, but every third set of subs started and ended while I was asleep; plus, for a couple of the subs, I hit the nodes in the main event only to find that I had 30 minutes left on the "new" subs. This speaks more to my time management skills, I suppose, but I had a much better time with the Simulator and Enemy of the State events.
Overpowered Dark Avengers aren't enjoyable to fight at all. Ragnarok and his tinykitty green/red power juggling in almost every node; Juggernaut and instant-death Headbutts plus Unstoppable Crash every other turn; Moonstone with purple feeders constantly popping me with Gravity Warp; Yelena being annoying, like a buzzing insect; Daken and his new blue power (have they run this event since he got his blue?) going off whether he's got strike tiles out or not because the AI doesn't know how to use it... I think they really need to look at how 1* and 2* characters scale up when they're overleveled.
The free Hulk cover was nice, though. Now I have 5 / 1 / 5 for him, which is definitely usable. Pulled my first green Punisher from a sub event reward token, and two Captain Marvels from other tokens. So overall I shouldn't complain too much - the RNG gods may have hated me during matches, but they made up for it with token pulls!0 -
The current setup is definitely as you said, a really good event model for introducing a new character, but man, the first time this event was run was not a pretty sight.
Does anyone here actually remember what happened back when the Hulk was first released? Maybe I am getting too old, but here's what I remember off the top of my head.
1. Points in subs were based off of global rubberband. This means that it was literally impossible to win any sub after the first one you played. To give you an idea of how this worked, lets say you're happily grinding subs and its now the middle of the event. Some newbie who has 0 points now starts playing your sub, and gets insane rubberbanding because its global rubberbanding, instantly winning the sub. This means that after the first sub, it was basically impossible to win a sub because there was always some guy who was just starting the event and had max rubberbanding.
2. Global rubberbanding! Playing the event was meaningless until the last few subs.
3. Subs were originally 24 hours, not 12.
4. Back in the day, Demiurge had this really dumb "global point" unlock scheme where the "New Ally" mission and subsequent cache subs were unlocked after some global point threshold was reached. (This was later removed because it added nothing to the game and introduced a logistical nightmare for Demiurge). This of course meant, that when those nodes were unlocked, there were 4 subs running at the same time that you had to grind.
5. This was pre-nerf rags. Imagine trying to beat the current rag + feeder nodes when thunderclap and godlike were both 2 AP each.
6. So everyone was already burned out from grinding this week long event the first time, Demiurge then decides to immediately rerun it for the holidays, giving us 2 weeks of the same broken event, woo.
Demiurge has come a long way since then, and modern PvE events are far better than what we've put up with in the game's younger days.0 -
I didn't play for the original Hulk PvE (or at least, I didn't participate in the PvE), but I did participate in the first Prodigal Son PvE, and I didn't mind the global point thing. It's a gimmick for sure, but it was kind of neat. Almost like a raid boss, because it's a global accolade, but a lot less awesome feeling when you reach it because nothing dies
As for the topic at hand, yeah, The Hulk PvE and Prodigal Son are really awesome character introduction methods - however, I totally see why everyone isn't released that way. I think it would be beat to see more characters released this way, but I also enjoy events like Enemy of the State and Deadpool vs MPQ, and I feel like they kind of get the cold shoulder by a lot of players. These were really neat and fun events.
I am also of the unpopular opinion that Heroic Events are not the devil. I don't think multiple characters in a row should be released in them, nor do I think they should be ran repeatedly, but I actually quite enjoy them.
If we could get a schedule of;
Heroic (giving away a new character) > Re-ran PvE > New character themed PvE (ala Enemy of the State/Deadpool vs MPQ) > Re-ran PvE > New character themed PvE (ala The Hulk PvE/Prodigal Son) > Re-ran PvE > Simulator (giving away a new character) > Re-ran PvE > The Gauntlet > Heroic > rinse and repeat
It would be a lot more refreshing and a lot let frustrating for the player base, even if, for a few rotations, while they work on new content, they re-ran Enemy of the State/Deapool vs MPQ and The Hulk/Prodigal Son in those spots. The more new content they create for events, the more things they have to rotate in and out, and the more fresh everything feels.0 -
GothicKratos wrote:I didn't play for the original Hulk PvE (or at least, I didn't participate in the PvE), but I did participate in the first Prodigal Son PvE, and I didn't mind the global point thing. It's a gimmick for sure, but it was kind of neat. Almost like a raid boss, because it's a global accolade, but a lot less awesome feeling when you reach it because nothing dies
As for the topic at hand, yeah, The Hulk PvE and Prodigal Son are really awesome character introduction methods - however, I totally see why everyone isn't released that way. I think it would be beat to see more characters released this way, but I also enjoy events like Enemy of the State and Deadpool vs MPQ, and I feel like they kind of get the cold shoulder by a lot of players. These were really neat and fun events.
I am also of the unpopular opinion that Heroic Events are not the devil. I don't think multiple characters in a row should be released in them, nor do I think they should be ran repeatedly, but I actually quite enjoy them.
If we could get a schedule of;
Heroic (giving away a new character) > Re-ran PvE > New character themed PvE (ala Enemy of the State/Deadpool vs MPQ) > Re-ran PvE > New character themed PvE (ala The Hulk PvE/Prodigal Son) > Re-ran PvE > Simulator (giving away a new character) > Re-ran PvE > The Gauntlet > Heroic > rinse and repeat
It would be a lot more refreshing and a lot let frustrating for the player base, even if, for a few rotations, while they work on new content, they re-ran Enemy of the State/Deapool vs MPQ and The Hulk/Prodigal Son in those spots. The more new content they create for events, the more things they have to rotate in and out, and the more fresh everything feels.
Yeah, I like heroic events as well, but I could see why they're unpopular for the people who don't have as deep rosters.
For the point thing, it's a neat gimmick, but I can see exactly why they stopped using it. I remember in a lot of TaT events, we were so far off from the point threshold that they ended up drastically reducing it so that the subs would open at the time that they wanted it to open at. This happened so frequently that eventually some smart dev probably just thought "you know, if we wanted them to always unlock these events at this time, why do we have this dumb point system that we have to babysit anyways? Lets just get rid of it and open up the subs on a normalized schedule". This is also probably why you see PvE progression awards being so low now. The first Hulk event only had 200 people get the last Punisher cover from the progression, and people complained (and continued to complain) every time the last prog was not reachable, so eventually the devs just said screw it and designed the events to make all progression awards easily reachable with consistently play, since rubberbanding makes predicting what points the players will end up at a huge nightmare.
The one time I remember the global point thing being interesting was iso brotherhood, where they had iso mountain nodes unlock if the threshold was reached. I remember the hard one only opened occasionally because it was tuned reasonably, so that was neat, but ultimately not worth the effort I guess.0 -
...I liked the original run of the hulk way better than this one. No scaling! No 3 hour refreshes!0
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Well, gotta love snipers feeding unlimited green to juggernaut and watch him cascaded you to death in the hard sub.
Other than that scalling issue it's a great pve event overall.0 -
The thing with heroics - I had the thought that instead of having it be a single event for x number of days where you just redo the same nodes over and over and over, why not combine them all, and treat them as subs? Have them open for 24 hours and to make it even more fun/challenging, switch up the usable characters each sub. We get the challenge of the limited roster, without the boredom of multiple days of the same nodes that we got all the prizes for right away...
I like the concept of the limited roster tournaments - just never how they've done them.....
As for the Hulk - I wasn't here for the initial release, but have always enjoyed it each time it was run - until this time. I don't blame the tourney though, I think I was just burnt out from the previous one.....0 -
One comment to the negative...
Ragnorok + 2 spies feeding him green APs is a _terrible_ combination.
Every. Single. Damn. turn Rags would do at least one Godlike Power.
I wiped my A team, B team, C team and finally got it by waiting for heals, and boosted everything with MNMags and Storm. Even then I barely squeaked through.0 -
I prefer shorter PvEs on the whole, it doesn't feel like such a slog. But Hulk doesn't fit the short-PvE model, I think. There are lots of sub events and they have to be soper short to cram them in. I ended up missing whole sub events due to work or sleep or what have you. Or I'd come back from work and have to frantically grind two new sub events within an hour to get as much as possible from them before they closed, then I'd need to wait 3-5 hours to get the health back on my team to try the newly opened sub event.
This was a much more stressful event for me =/0 -
The problem with Heroics isn't the limited roster - it's scaling being based on your highest character, not your highest _allowed_ character.NorthernPolarity wrote:Yeah, I like heroic events as well, but I could see why they're unpopular for the people who don't have as deep rosters.
Basing scaling on a level 270 Xforce when he isn't usable is not fair.0 -
Bowgentle wrote:
The problem with Heroics isn't the limited roster - it's scaling being based on your highest character, not your highest _allowed_ character.NorthernPolarity wrote:Yeah, I like heroic events as well, but I could see why they're unpopular for the people who don't have as deep rosters.
Basing scaling on a level 270 Xforce when he isn't usable is not fair.
The other problem with Heroics is that they're the most P2W events that the game ever runs; anyone willing to buy health packs and boosts has a massive advantage. Scaling makes the nodes borderline unplayable by about the midpoint, but the big spenders can generally keep playing and keeping the nodes managable longer.0 -
I agree mostly with the OP with the exception that I do like the restricted nodes to have two different characters. I wasn't able to grind nor place high enough to get a Luke Cage, but I do have The Punisher. This allowed me to bag 50% of the bonus points available, which I appreciated.0
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NorthernPolarity wrote:The current setup is definitely as you said, a really good event model for introducing a new character, but man, the first time this event was run was not a pretty sight.
Does anyone here actually remember what happened back when the Hulk was first released? Maybe I am getting too old, but here's what I remember off the top of my head.
1. Points in subs were based off of global rubberband. This means that it was literally impossible to win any sub after the first one you played. To give you an idea of how this worked, lets say you're happily grinding subs and its now the middle of the event. Some newbie who has 0 points now starts playing your sub, and gets insane rubberbanding because its global rubberbanding, instantly winning the sub. This means that after the first sub, it was basically impossible to win a sub because there was always some guy who was just starting the event and had max rubberbanding.
2. Global rubberbanding! Playing the event was meaningless until the last few subs.
3. Subs were originally 24 hours, not 12.
4. Back in the day, Demiurge had this really dumb "global point" unlock scheme where the "New Ally" mission and subsequent cache subs were unlocked after some global point threshold was reached. (This was later removed because it added nothing to the game and introduced a logistical nightmare for Demiurge). This of course meant, that when those nodes were unlocked, there were 4 subs running at the same time that you had to grind.
5. This was pre-nerf rags. Imagine trying to beat the current rag + feeder nodes when thunderclap and godlike were both 2 AP each.
6. So everyone was already burned out from grinding this week long event the first time, Demiurge then decides to immediately rerun it for the holidays, giving us 2 weeks of the same broken event, woo.
Demiurge has come a long way since then, and modern PvE events are far better than what we've put up with in the game's younger days.
I remember the original Hulk event and I believe it was a 2 week event. Maybe I'm wrong and it was only 7 days. From what I remember, I enjoyed it when it came out. Back then, I had no clue about refresh rates or points since none of that stuff was shown in-game at the time.0 -
MikeHock wrote:I remember the original Hulk event and I believe it was a 2 week event. Maybe I'm wrong and it was only 7 days. From what I remember, I enjoyed it when it came out. Back then, I had no clue about refresh rates or points since none of that stuff was shown in-game at the time.
It was long - I think like 9 days - but not two weeks. They ran it twice in a row, though, so it was going on for almost three weeks.0 -
NorthernPolarity wrote:The current setup is definitely as you said, a really good event model for introducing a new character, but man, the first time this event was run was not a pretty sight.
Does anyone here actually remember what happened back when the Hulk was first released? Maybe I am getting too old, but here's what I remember off the top of my head.
1. Points in subs were based off of global rubberband. This means that it was literally impossible to win any sub after the first one you played. To give you an idea of how this worked, lets say you're happily grinding subs and its now the middle of the event. Some newbie who has 0 points now starts playing your sub, and gets insane rubberbanding because its global rubberbanding, instantly winning the sub. This means that after the first sub, it was basically impossible to win a sub because there was always some guy who was just starting the event and had max rubberbanding.
2. Global rubberbanding! Playing the event was meaningless until the last few subs.
3. Subs were originally 24 hours, not 12.
4. Back in the day, Demiurge had this really dumb "global point" unlock scheme where the "New Ally" mission and subsequent cache subs were unlocked after some global point threshold was reached. (This was later removed because it added nothing to the game and introduced a logistical nightmare for Demiurge). This of course meant, that when those nodes were unlocked, there were 4 subs running at the same time that you had to grind.
5. This was pre-nerf rags. Imagine trying to beat the current rag + feeder nodes when thunderclap and godlike were both 2 AP each.
6. So everyone was already burned out from grinding this week long event the first time, Demiurge then decides to immediately rerun it for the holidays, giving us 2 weeks of the same broken event, woo.
Demiurge has come a long way since then, and modern PvE events are far better than what we've put up with in the game's younger days.
I remember playing it, it was the first pve I played, and I loved it and loved the idea, although there were some nodes I just couldn't do. But I rember the rush of taking on a 240 (or whatever) level hulk with essentially a 2* team.
I was fresh enough into the game that the prizes didn't matter, as I wasnt' coming in top 150 no way no how, and when I got killed i resigned to just move on to the next node.
Playing this time around, I still enjoyed the event. There were some annoyances, but there always is anyway.
I also remember tossing my free hulk cover since I wasn't intending on collecting more than a few key 3 * I wanted (very few out by then) and there was NO WAY I was going to pay real money to play a phone game....lol, but here we are many months and quite a few bucks later.0 -
hehe...i remember playing this event more than a year ago with a mostly 1* roster and thinking that i would have to quit the game after i finished all the prologue missions 0
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I remember starting the Red ISO event and getting to the second node and saying "Welp, level 100 characters against my team of 1*s. Guess that's it for me then!" and totally skipped it.
Hulk was, I think, the first event I managed to get anywhere on. Can't remember if that event where Dark Avengers are after Fury was my first event or if Hulk was.
Running for 7-9 days seems about right for this event. 12 hour refresh on sub-events was way too short for me 8S0
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