Old Wallpaper, Game Stagnation, and the 4-gotten Tier

Stax the Foyer

With the changes to LTs, it's now just as easy, if not easier, for a new player to cover a 5* character than it is a 4* character. Given the massive power disparity between 4*s and 5*s, and the comparatively small resource disparity, the clear choice for a new player is to bypass the 4* tier almost entirely.

And that's the smart play, if you can pull it off. I'm not saying that there aren't some helpful 4*s. But if you didn't get them early, whether or not you get them before you have a workable 5* is entirely luck-based.

It didn't used to be that way. 4*s used to be a target worth chasing, with ISO costs that were justified by their benefits (well, some of them, at least). But then the developers released 5* characters with absurdly broken stats, AND pulled up the rope behind people by not letting people effectively buy 4* covers anymore. Along with the removal of the 1300 point fixed PvP cover and the continued addition of 4* characters, the ability to move beyond 3*s has almost completely been randomized.

What should happen? Ideally, a time machine should be used to go back in time and add 4* content when it could have been relevant. Since that seems unlikely, a few other suggestions:

4* PvPs - When 3*s were being released, 3* PvPs were the norm. Now that 5*s are being released, 3* PvPs are still the norm.

Compare the number of Patch PvPs to the number of X-Force Wolverine PvPs. I don't know how many Patch PvPs there have been, but I can tell you exactly how many X-Force Wolvering featured PvPs there have been: One. The same as every 4* character other than Elektra and Dino. If 4*s take drastically more ISO and effort to build, shouldn't we get to use them at least as much as our 3* characters?

With 4* PvPs, the featured packs would give people another chance to get covers for a specific 4*, the rewards could be tailored towards allowing people to move to the 4* tier, and those of us who have spent resources on 4*s could look at them with slightly less crippling regret. Whether they should be done in place of or in parallel with 3* PvPs is something that's been addressed quite thoroughly on the forums, but they've gotta start showing up somehow.

4* Lightning Rounds - Or at least, for the love of Thor, some variety. It's beyond embarrassing that the same 10 characters are still in LRs on repeat, that the developers can't be bothered to take whatever miniscule amount of effort it would take to rotate them. Even if you leave them as 3* characters, there are 30 other 3* characters that it would be nice to use sometimes.

Instead, we spend more time with Ragnarok either as an opponent or a teammate than we do almost any other character in the game. He's the walking embodiment of design inertia and wasted opportunity.

More Fixed 4* Cover Rewards - If you want people to use 4* characters, they have to have a chance to cover them before they move on to 5* land. The only fixed 4* covers rewards in the game are the 1000 point cover in PvP, and the very top progression awards in PvE. The PvP cover lets people cover a 4* at the blistering rate of two covers per year, or so. The PvE ranking rewards are so throttled that only 1% of the playerbase is allowed to earn them. Neither is a realistic path to covering a 4*, and neither is spending CP on anything other than maybe your 13th cover of a given 4*, when that CP has a 50% chance or so of earning you a 5* cover which is better in every way than a 4* cover, no matter which cover it is.

For new players, 4*s are a dead tier, a booby prize for not getting lucky enough to skip the 4* tier and jump right to 5*s. That might change, and it hopefully will, but if those changes happen tomorrow, they'll be happening more than a year too late. The game has already moved past the 4* tier, and yet there's a constant flow of new releases further diluting the 4* pool and making it even harder for people to progress out of the 3* tier.

The developers have piled RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG instead of actually moving the game past 2014. There are flashes of great design with the new boss PvEs, but that just makes the rest of the game look that much more dated in comparison. It's like one room in the house getting an ultra-modern upgrade, but only getting to go into there a few times a year, and spending the rest of the time in the same floral wallpaper and shag carpet that's been there since the beginning.

The incredible stubbornness on the part of whoever's calling the shots has killed the 4* tier. If the developers are willing to tone back their RNG fetish a little bit, and create a little content for the 4* tier, it could help a lot.