5* Discussion/Thoughts

wymtime

I like the fact they are extending the game to 5* land. I really like the fact you cannot buy legendary tokens or 5* covers. This will make 5* something you fully have to earn. I like the fact that 5* will be significantly stronger than other characters.

The biggest issue i see with the 5* is health. That is just so much health to deal with in one fight. Eventually when you have 1-2 5* with even 30k health who is going to want to play that match. It will take so long to kill even with 4 and 5* yourself. PVP is about speed and if you have to fight through close to 100k health how many points are you going to lose while you are exposed.
Next is from a PVE point of view once you get 5* levels up could you even play PVE with 3* characters? You will be forced to play PVE with boosted 4* and 5*. 395 in 1/2 of your PVE matches does not sound like a good time no matter how much health your characters have.

GurlBYE

SnagglePuss wrote:

Scaling will be somewhat affected but it may have a bigger impact on MMR.
A couple of our guys were 1*-2* transitioners and naturally they added the 4* covers as they came. This seemed to suddenly put them open to max 166 3* teams in PvP, eventually as their 2* finally overtook the 4* lvl and pushed onwards to lvl94 where boosted characters helped it mattered less. It was hell for about a month or two for them. If something similar occurs where you are suddenly out in the open for 4* teams for having Surfer in the game...

Now they can easily (or maybe not) add some code checking your roster lvl and if you have a 5* or not, possibly for the PvE side as well but.

Also 4* will be boosted later when there are enough 5* in the game, that itself points to a flawed design in the game. Beit from characters that aren't balanced or lack of separation for different levels (PvE/PvP). There shouldn't be a need to artificially boost characters to balance and encourage players unless that was the original design itself.

You sure that wasn't bracket?

I've not only had carnage since he came out, but I've only continually added more 4 stars to my roster, and have yet to fight max teams, mainly because they're all way higher in pvp then I am.

Theres a need to balance because like 3 stars, 4 stars weren't given a blanket power level when created. hence why xforce and thor were nerfed, and why invisible woman, elektra and starlord are seen as meat shield 4 stars as opposed to full on ones.

Psylocke, punisher, and doc oc anlong with plenty of other never quite escaped that fate either. Even after a buff.

Blahahah

I personally see it a different way...

With 5* characters around, we may actually see a deflation in PvP.
What I mean by this is, when you view it as a whole, there will become a gap in PvP, one noticable almost instantly.

People in the area of late 2* through early 4* will remain mostly the same, and while the 2* side will be a bit weak basically anyone in this area of play will likely not be fighting the maxed 4*s or 5*s.

One may ask how this affects the inflation of the game's overall span, but when you consider it, there will be 2 types of players.

Those mentioned above, and a new span of players with higher leveled teams due to the (soon) easier access to 4* and 5* characters. Because getting bigger, better teams is more applicable to the high/top level players, they'll be sprinting to keep up with the wave motion of those players around them. This means the character rosters will look something like this...

Low-table : Level 94 - 166

High Table : Level 250 - 450

Because the 3* players may have some difficulty surviving in a upper 4* bracket, and especially in one with mixed 5*s, they will likely skip those players in favor of maintaining their own positions. This does create some issue, namely the glass ceiling mentality of it all where 3*s lands end where 4* land begins, however it also solves a decent set of problems PvP has been having.

Optimized point stacking, and alliance collusion, for example, get players up into the values of some 20k in some events. One of the reasons for this, outside of cooperation, is because there are fewer players at the top end than in the middle. Players below them provide no threat, and there isn't enough around them that teamwork can't handle. When you add in 4* and 5* players in bigger numbers, however, it becomes harder to control that corner of things. The reason the system works and exists as it is, in all of its admitted efficency, is because the population is small enough to keep contained, and outliers are easier to prevent.

If you add more players, then it suddenly becomes harder to keep a handle on things. Free-lance players might be apt to snipe you, and the entire squad skewering that one person is a strategy used to peg down people who disrupt the harmony. This works if there is, indeed, 1 or 2 or 3 players who are not part of the upper level teams. When there are suddenly 25 or so players unaligned and looking for points, suddenly everyone dropping shields to play damage control becomes a much bigger risk. Likewise, players who manage to scale up faster into the 5* area will undoubtably have more leverage and that can cause strain among the collusion and throw a wrench in things. It might not fix all of the problems instantly, one can argue there is a chance the fuller rosters will make the grip even tighter, however there is no way to introduce new variables and there not be some reaction. If one team manages to gear out some 5*s on all of their members, who is to say they won't make a leap and keep 1st by force, since enemy players might not be able to stop them from doing so? Stricter team requirements might shut out huge swaiths of players and that would simply increase the incidence of free-lance high-capped zombie hordes.

Likewise, now you have the other division of players, those players between the 94 and 166. While they might not be placing in the top sets, they do glean some advantage. For one, something I've seen is either common knowledge or rarely known is your PvP scaling doesn't tend to boost you beyond a certain limit of your current means. Players with level 94 2*s won't be forced to fight 166 3*s usually. 3*s don't have the problem from 4*s usually, but the 4*s will have the 5*s in their brackets. This means the 3*s will only have to contend with other players around them for the points, and thus losing points is probably actually harder than it would be on the higher levels. This also means they will be the most equipped to survive the transition as the players who are going for 4*s will have to slog their points through the mid-lands first.

Takin this into consideration, you might look and wonder "okay, but what does that mean for us? 4* and 5* teams still take the top 100 slots and we are forced to take the bottom ones?"

This is where things get interesting. Because of how prevalent the bracket division will be, it might be the case where, sort of like the 1* teams who attempt PvP, we simply have the placement based against our peers in the same bracket. If a 1* player managed to hit the 500-ish point mark in PvP, they would basically be gaurenteed a 3* cover, simply because at their level and possible match-ups, there exists a very slim margin of players. With a heap of players migrating to the top end of scaling, perhaps the same may occur for the 2*-3*-low 4* area? I'm not sure myself.

But its fun to think about.