Regarding Power Upgrade Purchasing Changes

Stax the Foyer

I do appreciate the feedback. However, I feel that this change was deeply misguided (at minimum) or disingenuous.

The idea that it should be harder to directly purchase upgrades, without corresponding gameplay effort, is a fine one. However, the choice isn't simply between (a) letting people buy covers and (b) distributing the top two tiers of covers on what is essentially a purely random basis. Unless there are significant changes to CP distribution and rewards, you've further hobbled people who want to make steady progress through gameplay (a process that started with the change to the 1300 PvP reward).

How do you expect a player starting the 4* transition to progress, and how much variance between player experiences do you feel is appropriate? Because with this change, the 4* progression has become glacially slow, and it's nearly impossible for a player to offset bad token luck by working hard enough to earn an occasional cover purchase. Do you expect people to struggle through that, while they see people with robust 4* covers who got them before the rope was pulled up behind them?

This doesn't give people more to strive for, it gives people less to strive for, because the only way to progress into and beyond the morass of a 25-character-and-growing 4* tier distributed almost entirely at random is to hop clean over that mess by getting lucky and pulling 5* covers.

This change makes 5*s the only real way to progress in the game, and I don't think that was an accident.

jigawatt

As an actual new player (new as in less than 6 months, way less) this move is terrible. As others have said, if we're coming in with a roster full 1 star and some 2 stars, how long are we supposed to play to get up to a mature 3 star, or 4 star roster? There's a difference between 'longevity' and 'endless grind', and with this they're basically assuming most of their players would LOVE to be locked in to this game for a year or 3 straight. Um, no.

I mean, if they don't want people cover whaling and then quitting, then at LEAST drastically increase the drop rate per 3, 4, and 5* covers so we're actually getting rewarded, instead of just stuck in limbo. The 2* rate is pretty annoying as well, I'm not sure how they think waiting a month for your favorite cover to drop is exciting, but it's not. I guess **** new players, they'll just cater to the 2 and three year whales they have.

Chrono_Tata

While I actually agree with the reasoning stated here, that it is more fun to use HP to buy things that help you to win stuff, rather than buying the prizes directly, the problem is that the change doesn't go both ways, i.e. it's harder now to buy specific covers buy you haven't made it any easier to win specific covers.

Given the huge amount of 3-stars and 4- characters, the transition is extremely slow as you could wait for weeks or months until the covers you need cycle around to be winnable. There really needs to be better methods to win the covers or at least the characters you need without having to wait for the cycle. Particularly annoying is when you happen to not be able to play for a couple of days and miss the rewards you needed.

puppychow

djvkool wrote:

If I am not mistaken, new players should be able to get covers quicker due to the change in the reward system on PVE's now, back in the days, you need to be in top 20 to get two 3* covers, and top 100 to get one 3*.

With the new reward system, top 50 gets you all three 3* covers and top 200 will get you one (and on the PVE with no new character rewards, new players should be able to get top 50 easily)

Agreed. 2/3* covers will continue to become available via pve progression, and even casual players have a shot at those.

As far as extending the life of MPQ is concerned, I think the champion feature is more of a factor than conversion from hp to cp for direct buys. With champions, players can continue to develop their rosters and use the extra covers for something other than iso.

Yes, it is obvious that Demiurge is concerned with making the game interesting to veterans because many of them have quit over the LT exploit last month. So I view these moves as intended to keep the player base, rather than grow it per se. Nonetheless, I think the changes made in the game the past few weeks have been quite positive, and I'm confident quitters will return to the game as positive word of mouth reaches their ears via social media.

batmanone

I must say, the power upgrade change was a rather unpleasant surprise for me today. As a relatively casual player, and an occasional purchaser of HP, I typically scrounge and save it until I think I can use it to get an advantage somehow; lately, I've mainly been saving it and spending it to boost up a few levels here and there on 4* characters who are in the matchup for the legendary DPQ if I think more covers can help me win. Most of my 4* cards have 1-8 covers, under level 100, with only three 4* cards with more than 10 covers. If I had had more warning about the change I would have spent the HP I had saved maxing out covers on my best 4* characters, rather than trying to save for future matchups. But now I will be stuck with several 4* characters at 10-12 covers for a very long time (unless I get lucky with pulls), which particularly hurts especially since a) the champion update highly encourages maxed covered characters, and b) I didn't know that I should be saving CP, so I have virtually zero right now. Certainly no where close to the 360 I need to max out my two best 4*.

whitecat31

I don't really have too much of a problem with this, although it does devalue the Hero points I currently have. I just think the cost in CP is too high for the 4 stars (120 ) and 5 stars (720 ) for that special cover. This is based on how many legendary tokens they could buy. I would like to see something along the lines of half that amount.
In the past to buy a 4 star cover it would cost 2500 HP . Let's say somebody was economical and bought the Stark salary. That is 20,000 Hero Points for 100 dollars.
So somebody was spending 12 dollars and 50 cents to upgrade the 4 star cover. Now they have to spend a lot more. On another note, based on the 6 to 1 ratio for command points I think it pegs the assumed value of a 5 star cover at about 75 dollars. (pre change)

Perhaps you guys could have command point discount events where you can buy covers for cheap.