Inevitable 6* speculation

ZootSax

Because there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the different classifications, at times, I'm guessing Yelena Belova will be the first "6*". She'll start as the only 1* champion, but you'll be able to add 600-700 champion levels to bring her above any max/champed 5*.

Sure, it's a stupid idea, but then again...

The Herald

An interesting alternative to dumping a new tier over the server COULD be releasing what Magic would call a "vertical cycle".

Release a themed 2*, 3*, 4*, and 5* that all feed each other across champion levels.

Wrecking Crew with their own event, anyone?

You could even release new 1*s, although I would argue the following caveat to bait people into rostering a new 1* would to be give them two passive abilities and a single active utility ability which is great for team ups.

Warbringa

Well we are almost to 40 4* characters (36 or 34 counting Spider Woman and whether you count Devil Dinosaur and Howard the Duck). So 4 (or 6) more 4* characters will only be a few months out at this pace.

What would be more interesting than new characters would be new game modes, new villains, and new PvE events. That would breathe way more life into the game than new characters.

GrumpySmurf1002

Warbringa wrote:

Well we are almost to 40 4* characters (36 or 34 counting Spider Woman and whether you count Devil Dinosaur and Howard the Duck). So 4 (or 6) more 4* characters will only be a few months out at this pace.

What would be more interesting than new characters would be new game modes, new villains, and new PvE events. That would breathe way more life into the game than new characters.

With Spider-Woman it's 38 (36 excluding DD/HtD)

The Herald

GrumpySmurf1002 wrote:

Warbringa wrote:

Well we are almost to 40 4* characters (36 or 34 counting Spider Woman and whether you count Devil Dinosaur and Howard the Duck). So 4 (or 6) more 4* characters will only be a few months out at this pace.

What would be more interesting than new characters would be new game modes, new villains, and new PvE events. That would breathe way more life into the game than new characters.

With Spider-Woman it's 38 (36 excluding DD/HtD)

Never count the joke characters, they're a special bonus.

Three more including Bendis's Bae and we can start trying to infer what direction the devs take next...

Jabrony_Geoff

This is my 6* cover wish list.

Odin
Surter
Grandmaster
Watcher
Zeus
Thanos
Annihilus
Mangog


5* cover wish list

Gladiator
Heimdall
Terrax the tamer.


#nuffsaid

jobob

I think I would finally walk away when 6* hit.

As far as the longevity of this game goes... I think they will try to keep it going for at least another year and a half... and at that point make a call as to whether to release a completely new game during the 2018 buildup to Avengers: Infinity War, or whether they think they can keep the game going for another year and a half to make it through both the 2018 and 2019 Avengers movies. Personally, I have a hard time seeing it going through 2019, so I think the current MPQ will go til around the end of 2017.

Raisse

I'd like to see any future star levels or new lateral progression system use an achievement based system, where you have to do things like "Defeat an enemy team with average level X without allowing them to have a turn" or "Defeat 100 thugs while using only 1 character on your team"

Just have a huge list of goals that fit over the top of the existing game, or add a new section for "Challenges" that can each be completed once, with actually valuable, fixed prizes. Each general challenge would have a trivial/easy/normal/hard/epic difficulty (tuned to be a challenge with maxed 1/2/3/4/5* characters) and reward things like 5k/20k/50k/100k/250k iso. You could complete each difficulty one time ever, but they could release a new chapter once a month or so with a few new challenges. Some challenges could also have required characters, and either wouldn't have difficulty tiers, or could utilize the various Wolverines/Iron Men/Captains America (or even have a node where you can only use the variants of one character). Those nodes could reward specific covers or whatever.

Basically, a new game mode that explores the puzzle side of puzzle quest more than the existing point grinders.

CT1888

If they release a 6* tier, it will be known as the Trophy Tier, on account of the exponentially longer time they will sit, unusable, on your roster.

BraneDedDev

With 6* release they also plan to put some aspect of puzzle and quest into the game.

Just kidding.

There should be no speculation, 6, 7, 8, 9 it's all coming, quickly no doubt.

I'd be more up for speculation on whether or not we'll still be fighting for 70 iso rewards and fighting against the tinykitty dark avengers every day come 6- +

Calnexin

Maybe 6*s will occupy "boss" territory. Like, we get to play as Galactus, Ultron, Thanos... uhhh... Dormammu?

Pylgrim

Phaentom wrote:

BlackBoltRocks wrote:

The Herald wrote:

What does everyone think we will see?

Wolverine (Bone Claws)
Wolverine (Weapon X)
Wolverine (Hugh Jackman)
Wolverine (Red and Brown)
Wolverine (Age of Apocalypse)
Wolverine (Symbiote)

Take your pick

None of them as he is part of the X-men. Unless the pissing war between Disney/Fox ends there won't be any more X-men/Mutants in the game.

The "pissing war" predates MPQ. If it was real we'd have no mutants at all. Hell, ever since the rumours of Marvel aggressively cutting their own comics line just to spite Fox started to go around, we still got like 6 mutants.

whitecat31

ViralCore wrote:

Based on their current tiers releases, it'll happen once there are over a hundred 5*s

Hey there VC, actually, I think you might be right about tier releases, but I was thinking, when the number is more like thirty to forty 5 stars.
so let's say they decide to release a 5 star once every 6 weeks.
So right now there is nine 5 stars. So that's 31 more characters needed to hit a total of 40. So 186 weeks from now might be a target date EXCEPT, we have to look at May 2019, that is the expected release date of what would obviously be the first 6 star when Infinity wars part II is released. You would see an infinity stone gauntlet on Thanos.
So they might slowly accelerate the release of 5 stars, to once a month to coincide with that date or drop the number of available 5 stars .

So how exactly would you get the 6 star Thanos covers.. Oh it won't be easy.
First you would champion the 5 star Thanos that was released the year before to coincide with the first Infinity Wars movie release.
Then to get a single random 6 star cover of Thanos you would have to sacrifice half of all your heroes randomly (Except deadpool of course) This also destroys all of your 5 Star Thanos you might have, because you have a 6 star thanos now.
Oh and that just gets you one cover.
To get another cover, you have to do it again. Champion 5 Star Thanos, kill half heroes randomly, Rinse and repeat until the people at D3publishers choke to death on all that cash.

carrion_pigeons

It seems very likely that they'll do *something*. When the 3* tier was burgeoning to this level, vet engagement started to go down drastically, and we do see that happening now also. DDQ and the development of the 4* meta was the solution. Of course, the devs went and did exactly the same thing to screw up the 4* meta that they did with the 3* one, which kinda suggests that they plan to use the same solution: DDQ-ize the 4* tier and introduce 6*s.

The problem is it won't work nearly as well the second time, because there aren't enough niches for the tiers we currently have, let alone a 6th. If they did just decide to repeat history, 4*s would become irrelevant to progression (since they have almost zero footprint in events and are impractical to level to the point of usefulness), 5*s would lose a ton of ground too, and the whales would find that the 6* tier of play is boring and 1-dimensional, just like the 5* tier has been until quite recently.

Personally, I think they should make a new type of super-rare cover that can only be applied to max champions (i.e. 144 2*s, 266 3*s, 370 4*s) that raise their tier level by 1 star, make 1*s championable, and then start releasing 1*s again. I want a level 550 OBW.

Polares

carrion pigeons wrote:

It seems very likely that they'll do *something*. When the 3* tier was burgeoning to this level, vet engagement started to go down drastically, and we do see that happening now also. DDQ and the development of the 4* meta was the solution. Of course, the devs went and did exactly the same thing to screw up the 4* meta that they did with the 3* one, which kinda suggests that they plan to use the same solution: DDQ-ize the 4* tier and introduce 6*s.

The problem is it won't work nearly as well the second time, because there aren't enough niches for the tiers we currently have, let alone a 6th. If they did just decide to repeat history, 4*s would become irrelevant to progression (since they have almost zero footprint in events and are impractical to level to the point of usefulness), 5*s would lose a ton of ground too, and the whales would find that the 6* tier of play is boring and 1-dimensional, just like the 5* tier has been until quite recently.

Personally, I think they should make a new type of super-rare cover that can only be applied to max champions (i.e. 144 2*s, 266 3*s, 370 4*s) that raise their tier level by 1 star, make 1*s championable, and then start releasing 1*s again. I want a level 550 OBW.

As a vet, day 1013 here, I have to say that even though I thought 5 level chars was a really bad idea when they were introduced, I have to say that for the most part it has motivated me to play more (even though RNG sometimes made me really want to stop playing). The problem is that now that I have 2 champed 5s and 1 max covered one, my progression has stopped completely (RNG is also not helping me much right now). It is very hard to cover the 5s since Spidey. We all focused our pulls in classic LTs so we had a bigger chance of maxing OML and PH, so now our other 5s have a very small number of covers. And every new 5 just makes things worse. I don't want to play for 9 more months to max cover my next 5, I don't want to play just with OML and PH for 9 months!!!!

This problem is reducing my will to play a lot. And I don't think it is easy to solve, specially when placement at my tier of play is impossible. So adding a 5 cover as a reward for 1 in PvP or PvE would not help me at all. It will not be easy to find another way of awarding 5s but just to the players that already have some 5s covered (leagues is maybe the only good solution).

I am still champing 4s, because is the only thing I can do, I just champed Punisher, but this doesn't motivate me at all.

So as I said before, adding another layer would just make things much worse in general, for everybody, but specially for new players. We need something else, this game has lived for almost 3 years based just in new chars, but I don't think this is working anymore. We need new modes and new mechanics.

Pongie

The game has more 2* than 1*, the same is for 3* vs 2*. What makes people thing the number of 4* will stay the same as 3*? They could go on and make twice as many 4* while adding more 5* and it would still be on trend.

carrion_pigeons

Pongie wrote:

The game has more 2* than 1*, the same is for 3* vs 2*. What makes people thing the number of 4* will stay the same as 3*? They could go on and make twice as many 4* while adding more 5* and it would still be on trend.

They could, but nobody really believes it would be good game design. There are already too many 4*s; people are looking for ways to get some hope that there's an end in sight, and the 42 milestone seems like the biggest.

If they release a 43rd character, I think it would be bad for player morale, but honestly even 42 is way too many. The 3* tier is too big as it stands; only now, more than a year after it became fully irrelevant to competitive play, do a majority of players have a good selection of "finished" 3*s. That's just demoralizing game design.

The Herald

Pongie wrote:

The game has more 2* than 1*, the same is for 3* vs 2*. What makes people thing the number of 4* will stay the same as 3*? They could go on and make twice as many 4* while adding more 5* and it would still be on trend.

We're presuming competence until proven otherwise. The 3* tier is just about manageable on a big rotation of boosted characters, PVP events, and DDQ.

El Satanno

I don't doubt a 6* tier. I also don't doubt that it will be even worse than the 5* tier in every imaginable way. Make no mistake: I think the 5* tier is an utter and hopeless mess, top to bottom. And this is me speaking with the arguably best two 5* characters championed.

I think they have been bad for the game in every possible way:

• Restricting your MMR band in PvP only to other 5* players.
• Scaling your Story mode nodes off the charts.
• Effectively forcing you to use only those characters for anything either mode of play.
• Completely negating the utility of the still-developing 4* tier.
• Creating a thoroughly unsatisfying late game experience via RNG progression only.
• Side-stepping that unsatisfying progression (kinda) by making 5* covers purchasable for an exorbitant fee.
• Undermining what little goodwill exists among the dedicated fanbase by very quickly going directly against the claim that they would not be purchasable. (And shame on you for that!)
• Doubling down on that ****, unsatisfying progression by refusing to give any recourse for players who fall far below that average for pulls, and refusing to swap for unusable 6th covers.

I could go on, but you get the point by now. Short of some kind of miracle departure from the design philosophy of new-characters-to-death, I don't see a 6* tier coming in as anything but a frustrating, painful, unbalancing and thoroughly disastrous affair. Count me right the **** out of that.

LLohm

Here's a random thought. Sell a 550 5* for 6* ^^