Feedback from returning player

Lanstro

I'm a semi-casual f2p player who returned to the game about two weeks ago after previously being away since around May 2015. For reference, that was around when Scarlet Witch was just released and a few months after sentry bombing was nerfed.

The good

• the championing mechanic looks like a great idea and well-implemented
• pvp matchmaking seems better than when I left - seems not too hard to find winnable fights all the way up to 800 points or so, rather than before I left when sometimes you'd just hit unexplainable walls of enemy teams over 100 levels above your roster
• good to see steady development of new characters
• crash of the titans looks like a good idea. However, it's clearly aimed at people well into the 4* transition, which is at odds with the 3* DDQ covers being fairly obtainable by players just starting the 3* transition, and the tacos being also obtainable by people in 2* land. It seems it can be made a bit more generous.

The bad
Clearance levels seems like a good idea, but implementation seems quite poor:

• When I first returned my roster had something like six level 166 3*s, around ten other 3*s with 13 covers, and another 10-15 3*s and 4*s with between 1-10 covers. That was only enough for SHIELD level 5, which seemed awfully low for my roster. For reference, SHIELD 5 is only enough for clearance 2, which gives pitiful rewards for someone with my roster. Ranking first in a bracket only rewards a single 3* cover, and second only gives two 2* covers. I contacted Customer Support because it seemed like me being level 5 must be a mistake, but they confirmed that it was correct.
• I have now grinded my way to SHIELD 19, which is enough for clearance 4. Clearance 4 rewards are still poor compared to what used to be up for grabs pre-clearance levels: placing first in a PvE or PvP gets only three 3* covers (no 4* cover) and getting 300 points in PvP or 19k points in the upcoming PvE only gets a recruit cover (seriously?). Given the stated intention of clearance levels was to allow players to aim for rewards that are more relevant to their roster / choose what rewards they want to get, all that it has achieved for me so far is to create an artificial ceiling that makes the game far less rewarding than it used to be for the same effort put in
• In short, I feel punished by the new system for being away from the game. I would've thought the game would want to be more welcome to returning players.
• I'm now at the start of my 3->4* transition, and the main game mechanic that seem to be aimed at helping players like me is the 4* progression reward for PvE at clearance 7, or SHIELD 35. It seems like it's going to be many months of grinding before I get there - again, a demotivation on playing.
• I would greatly appreciate a one-time boost of a few thousand xp to reflect the fact that back when I built my roster, I would have cleared many months of DDQ daily nodes (for 10 xp per node), opened hundreds of heroic tokens (for 3xp each), rostered and sold many 2* covers (for 2 xp each), which were all not calculated when I was assigned shield rank 5
• In future, I suggest a broader range of triggers to reward shield xp. I would have thought that achieving a high ranking, a high progression score and completing a gauntlet stage are all worthy spots at which to reward xp. Certainly more worthy than for example grinding an easy PvE node 6 times.
• 10 clearance levels seems like overkill, would've thought you could achieve much the same with 5 levels and reduce fragmentation
• Enemy scaling doesn't seem to be affected by clearance levels. This is rather un-intuitive.

The ugly
I play on my Samsung S4, and have been heavily affected by the issue described in this thread viewtopic.php?f=9&t=50864&start=60. Having a mobile game not working on a mainstream phone model for so long is just embarrassing. Hopefully the revenue that the game presumably lost as a result is ample reason to make sure it never happens again.