Cover Expiration Needs To Go Away

Xeonic-Ice

After playing heavily over the past week and trying out the Champion Update, cover expiration needs to be addressed. It either go away entirely or be modified in order to take Champions into account.

Now that championing a character is a thing, every cover has more utility (which is a good thing). The problem is that you have 2 weeks to earn enough ISO to get any single character to it's respective max level before you can even begin the champion process. It made sense in the early days for rewards to expire because it gave meaningful choice regarding which heroes you'd like to level. Once you move into 4* land, earning enough isn't possible.

My current example, I have a level 140 Cyclops (Classic) with a 5/3/5 build. In order to take advantage of the 3 Cyclops covers I'm about to earn from PVE, I need to earn 348,000 ISO within two weeks so that I can champion Cyclops. I can only earn 100-115k ISO each week, and that's from selling everything, so it's literally not possible to earn enough in a two week time frame. It's no longer a meaningful choice on who to focus on. I CAN'T earn enough in time.

By having covers no longer expire, it would allow me to work toward that goal without creating frustration knowing that I'm going to lose rewards that I worked for. It would also solve the problem of earning 10 covers of a single power because you'd be able to hold onto those covers and use them once you find the remaining 8 specific covers needed. Needing to sell something you could use in the not so distant future but not right now, creates frustration.

I'm on day 808 and unless covers for 4* characters start raining down from the sky, a two week time limit to use up rewards is extremely frustrating.

So please, eliminate cover expiration in the cache. At the very least, eliminate it for 4* or higher.

Stax the Foyer

I fully support the idea of 4* and 5* covers not expiring. However, I understand that cover expiration might be a technical constraint (server load issues with managing huge numbers of saved covers) or a business constraint (as an expiring cover drives people to buy roster slots before they expire). Probably some combination of the two. So I'm guessing it's not going away.

Maybe a compromise would be nice for the expiration date to vary based on rarity. So while 1* covers might have a lifetime of 1 week, 4* covers could have a much longer lifetime.

With the advent of championing, it seems like the cover rarity should maybe be based on the amount of time it would take for a player to max out the character corresponding to that cover. With DDQ and some level of PvE play, 10K ISO per day or so seems reasonable, with more ISO coming in the farther along your roster is due to PvP play. Maybe 1*s could have a lifetime of 1 week, 2*s could have their current lifetime of 2 weeks, 3*s could have a lifetime of 3-4 weeks, and 4*s could have a lifetime of 5-6 weeks. Given the rarity of 5*s, maybe those shouldn't expire, so that new players can keep 5*s in their cover list until they're ready to use them.

You'd still be under pressure and would have to make tough choices, because you'll have covers from multiple characters in the queue at any given time. However, this would at least mean you could comfortably grind away for at least one character at a time with a reasonable expectation that you'll max them before the cover expires. If you choose to, you can earn much more than 10K ISO per day, especially on lightning round days, so you could max a couple characters in that timeframe.