How about a "+50 levels" token to help the ISO rate?

SnowcaTT

There is a severe ISO shortage, as everyone knows.

Here is a suggestion I've been running around in my head - why not a token that gives +50 levels? I realize the devs wouldn't want to make this purchasable - it would make the ISO purchase worthless. Which is why you could easily put it in the daily drops, maybe once every fifteen days or so (about the rate of the 4* releases, coincidentally!). It would also be easy enough to put these further along in the daily drop rate - perhaps where it is more useful (in the 3*/4* transition).

Possible problems: if you have a character that is level 84/94, would new players understand you are only getting to level 94 and not champion level 134? If you have a character maxed at level 140, implementation would have to be there to make the token not usable ("can't level more, not enough covers"). The 5*'s cost much more to level than anything else and that's what these would get hoarded for - perhaps make these usable on 3*/4* only?

What it would solve: the characters (both 3* and 4*) that are lagging behind getting ISO would start to get leveled, and this token would mandate the levels go into the characters and not to boosts or other ISO resources. Again, this token would not be purchasable - so all resources would remain at their "balanced" values, and all resources would continue to be purchased.

udonomefoo

Even +20 would be pretty amazing. That last jaunt from 250 to 270 is brutal when you have so many other 4*s sitting at 120-160 that you'd like to put iso into.

SnowcaTT

udonomefoo wrote:

Even +20 would be pretty amazing. That last jaunt from 250 to 270 is brutal when you have so many other 4*s sitting at 120-160 that you'd like to put iso into.

I'd take that for sure. Have a Cyc cover expiring in 9 days and just got him to 250 this morning before LR's.

Just a bit over 70K ISO to go from 250-270 (+10K to champion).
Also 70K ISO to go from 140 (10 or 11 3* covers) -166 (+7500 to champion).

A "70K ISO to level a character only" would be awesome as well, would let you finish off some of those characters just sitting around waiting for play.

Crowl

To avoid considerations like what to do with the additional levels, the obvious answer would seem to just give out 1-ups rather than a heftier one, they could be given out far more readily in that case e.g. drop the crit boosts on nodes for a 1-up token and at the same time you make covers for a maxed champion act as a 1-up token too.

Pogo

Crowl wrote:

To avoid considerations like what to do with the additional levels, the obvious answer would seem to just give out 1-ups rather than a heftier one, they could be given out far more readily in that case e.g. drop the crit boosts on nodes for a 1-up token

I agree with this. Due to the wide range of level costs, 50 would be way too big a chunk to give out at once. If an instant-leveling item was going to be implemented, I think giving 1up and (more rarely) 5up would be much more reasonable.

I pulled some numbers from the Wikia page on Iso-8 costs.
Looking at 3-star costs for the sake of an example (assuming Wikia is accurate and I didn't miscalculate):
The first 50 levels cost about 8700 Iso.
The last 50 levels cost about 97000 Iso.
So the 50up token would be over 10x more valuable than... itself, depending on when you chose to use it. Sure, knowing the right time to use it would be important, but then why would anybody ever use one unless a character was just about 50 levels away from max?

More important is the fact that in this example, the 50up would be worth more than a Mother Lode purchase. Even if it's unpurchasable, the potential value is massively unbalanced. A 10,000 Iso prize is given in taco vaults at the same rarity as a given 4-star cover, Legendary token, or 1,000 HP. Does that mean they're equally valuable? Not really; the value to the player shifts situationally. In any case, 10,000 Iso given out as one big lump is considered a big deal (even though gathering the same amount of Iso from a series of smaller payouts may be trivial by comparison).

A 50up would really only be useful to well-covered 4+stars. It'd wreck scaling if used to break softcaps on a 3-star, and it would be wasteful (considering relative Iso values) to use it on a 1 or 2 star. Yes, the game could do more to take care of its 4-5-star players, but at this magnitude it would be borderline useless to low-level players, which doesn't seem practical.

The last 50 levels of a 4-star cost over 180,000 Iso.
[I think the figures provided for 5-star may be incorrect, as the listed costs fluctuate up and down each level rather than slowly increasing, and the final sum is lower than the 4-star sum]

20up or even 10up would essentially have the same problems but scaled down somewhat.

A 1up would be accessible to all players and all characters. The drop rate could be adjusted (Higher frequency in post-183/post-365 Resupply, Mission rewards for essential nodes, mid-range progressions), and 50 1ups would arguably be better than one 50up, since you could choose how to split them up.

Crowl wrote:

...at the same time you make covers for a maxed champion act as a 1-up token too.

I like this too, though it seems exploitable if a 1up translates equally across all characters. If you have a maxed champion 2-star & you can turn in an extra cover for a 1up, your 250-Iso-value cover is suddenly worth potentially thousands (depending on who you spend the 1up on). As PVP, Tacos, and Standard Tokens push more of your 2-star characters to max champion, new covers will be exponentially more likely to be translated into 1ups, churning out fast levels for any other non-champion character you have, at any eligible rarity. It would definitely alleviate the Iso drought, but I worry that the shift could be too drastic.

Crowl

Pogo wrote:

I like this too, though it seems exploitable if a 1up translates equally across all characters. If you have a maxed champion 2-star & you can turn in an extra cover for a 1up, your 250-Iso-value cover is suddenly worth potentially thousands (depending on who you spend the 1up on). As PVP, Tacos, and Standard Tokens push more of your 2-star characters to max champion, new covers will be exponentially more likely to be translated into 1ups, churning out fast levels for any other non-champion character you have, at any eligible rarity. It would definitely alleviate the Iso drought, but I worry that the shift could be too drastic.

Yeah, this might be a bit much, but while championing they have effectively been worth thousands so them dropping back down to 250 or 500 at that point seems like too much of reduction and maybe they should double the sale value on dupe covers of a max champion.