Forum Thread

mpqr7

I'd rather be cover-rich and ISO poor, specifically 5* covers. Right now, I have championed over 30 four-stars already, so I'm basically just spinning my wheels, waiting for the next 5* to be given to me by RNGesus. I get enough ISO to champion another 4* in approximately a week.

amusingfoo1

I think OP is generally right. I was ISO-rich in 2* land, and stayed that way for quite a while as I moved my 3*s up to 120 (I stayed at that level for several months). Since I broke out of that (with ~750k ISO), and started maxing my 3*s, I've been constantly ISO-poor. I always track my ISO needs only by fully-covered characters, and while I have made significant headway since the last Anniversary, I'm back up to 3.9M short as I recently finished covering all my 4*s (and my 12-cover IM46 is crying in the corner over the two unusable red covers currently in queue).

JackTenrec

acescracked wrote:

You guys who say they can't get 4* covers, I don't understand why our game experience is so different. I get 4* covers coming in like crazy.

It takes covers to earn covers. If you're early in the 4* transition, you're either not competitive in PvP or can't clear fast enough with solely a 3* roster to make T10 placement in PvE.

Prior to the introduction of SCLs, I could usually scrape together enough CP for a token once a week. Hitting PvE progression wasn't a given, particularly if my roster was locked out of essential nodes, or if the final nodes hit hard enough that I couldn't make four clears with only 10 health packs.

bbigler

I've played this game since the beginning and I've always been ISO poor and cover rich. I chased after the good covers but my progress has always been limited by ISO. My current situation is a perfect example: I've started hoarding LT and CP over a month ago because I don't have the ISO to level up all my 4*s. For example, I currently have Thoress at 13 covers, but I need 197K ISO to champ her. I've hoarded 25 LTs and 750 CP, so if I want more 4* covers, I can get them. But I'm not going to cry if I don't get the exact cover that I want when I pull a token. The covers will come.

Suddenreal

broll wrote:

GurlBYE wrote:

The better experience is iso poor cover rich.

Iso is inevitable.

Covers are RNG. You could play for the next year and you aren't guaranteed a single cover of black suit spiderman.

However, if you are ISO poor and cover rich you will end up having to sell those covers which are much more valuable with their rarity.

You can sell covers for ISO, you can't spend ISO for covers. Better cover rich and ISO poor than the other way around.

Warbringa

Basically you are iso poor when filling in a tier and then cover poor when transitioning. When I was leveling up my 3* tier I was constantly iso poor. Right now I need more 4* covers as I transition to the 4* tier. I have over 1 million iso banked as a fairly casual player and will probably be able to bank another million before I can get enough 4* covers to have a diversified 4* roster (7+ good and usable characters in my opinion). I only play PvE for the most part so I guess there is no real rush. Once I get those covers.....I will then be iso poor If I am lucky...I can get a few more good 5* covers and maybe skip 4* tier for the most part

Someday I will start not pulling red Carnage and XFDP covers that I can't use. I have probably sold 4 or 5 of each because I can't champ either one and I maxed those covers out a long time ago for them. They really need to address this major issue for transitioners but that is another thread....

Pongie

Back when I was softcapping (transitioning to 4*), I was iso rich. Stash would easily have been close to a million and duplicate covers were being sold to add more iso. Then champion came, and iso disappeared. been iso poor ever since. Always chasing the expiry date.

wymtime

I am more in the ISO poor category. I have 143k ISO currently but have 7 4* that I have 13 covers for. I am also trying to get more 5* where I am cover poor. I am ahead of a lot of people but still have a long way to go. I have hordes some CP while I championed a couple of 4* and now I am ready to pull 800CP worth of LT to try and get some 5*.
I would also say I am HP rich. With 2* farming and all 3* championed I have over 11k HP and that is after buying 2 naughty or Nice 10 packs. HP is flowing strong right now. ISO is better and 4* covers are a lot. 5* are extremly slow and ISO for 5* is deathly slow.

TazFTW

I'm cover poor. I've been iso rich since shield levels were introduced. All 3*s championed except for Strange and Thanos which I need covers to reach 13/13 for both. I have a fully operational 2* farm. Five 4*s championed plus three more with 13/13 covers. I have enough iso to level (from 170-ish) and champion all three but I don't see a need for it until I get a cover for the champion level. I rarely dip into PVP, so I don't see a need to level my 5*.

I currently have five 4* covers waiting in queue because I already have 5 in the color. I have an additional two 3* covers waiting in queue because using them for champ levels now will reward me a 4* cover that I have 5 in, so I'm trying to maximize the time I need to get the 4* to 13/13. It kills me that in the next few days I'm going to turn 2 Iceman, a RHulk, and a Cyke into 4000 iso. If I have a 4* cover in queue then no more LT/CP hoarding for me.

(I'm assuming "cover rich" doesn't mean RNG is still going to mess with you by say giving you 13 purple Iceman in a row)

DFiPL

TazFTW wrote:

(I'm assuming "cover rich" doesn't mean RNG is still going to mess with you by say giving you 13 purple Iceman in a row)

RNGesus is a fickle god. Never assume anything.

That said, "cover rich" should probably be interpreted as "you don't have difficulty getting covers." I'm not as "cover rich" as some, given that I don't play in the PvP pool much, nor do I belong to a T100 (or greater) alliance, but since the introduction of SCLs I've been able to grow my 4* roster sufficiently that, ignoring Carnage (who isn't on my roster), I've been able to win 14 of the first 17 Crash opportunities I've had this cycle.

I didn't have 14 Crash wins in the first three cycles combined. Am I "cover rich"? I don't know, but I'm not in "cover squalor" anymore, either.

Uthgarprime

I am sitting kind of pretty. I am ISO short, but not terribly. I have 3 4*'s over level 200 waiting to champion and over 280k ISO, I am hording ISO until I get the 14th cover of a 4* I can champion. I use some ISO to make Clashes easier. I have Thing ready to champion, but it could be 3 months before I get another cover for him. If I make it to 500k ISO and don't have a cover I need I may champion someone just so they are ready. I don't really care about 5*'s. I use OML for seed nodes in pvp and easy nodes in PVE because he makes them go fast at 5/1/1 with IF. I average about 1 4* cover a day and have 7 championed already. I can't really complain too much about RNGesus. I haven't had to sell a ton of covers. But I champion anyone regardless of how good they are. I only have 1 top 4* championed cause I can't get covers for the others, but I have covers for plenty of others. My highest 4* is Elektra, but I am happy I didn't have to ditch all those extra covers.

DFiPL

acescracked wrote:

You guys who say they can't get 4* covers, I don't understand why our game experience is so different. I get 4* covers coming in like crazy.

Lots of different variables.

Some of it is social - some people are in alliances with people they know, and while the alliance is active, it's not necessarily top-scoring in either PvE or PvP. They may well be personally competitive, but their desire to have a social experience with people they know may keep them from seeking greener pastures.

Some of it is financial - Let's say you have three alliances: One has a sufficiency of people who, when they spend, do it $30 at a time - VIP and a $19.99 HP (or, fine, ISO) buy. Decent trickle of spending-related CP coming in, potentially up to 40 CP/month. Alliance #2 doesn't have anybody who buys the $19.99 packages, but does have several VIPs. Maybe 20 CP/month. Alliance #3 has people who spend $20/month on the game, but they do it $5/week and so there are few, if any, alliance CP rewards. The financial difference isn't THAT great, but the structure of it gives alliance #2 a boost over #3, and #1 a boost over both.

And, of course, the financial aspect bleeds over into PvP, where shields are a thing. Plenty of people hereabouts say "oh, my HP flow without spending is such that I can play PvP competitively and still have all the HP I need," but that won't be true for all.

Maybe you're a long-time player, and your 4* stable grew at a time when you could whale covers for a top-tier character to use in PvP, and you took advantage of that. Having those top tier characters better placed you to more easily earn 4* covers in PvP. Others might have max 4*, but perhaps not the "right" 4* for PvP success. Now, if they want to get there, it's necessary to spend two weeks saving Command Points to buy that rank, where previously $20 would have bought that cover instantly.

Some of it is RNG - what you pulled before SCL and CP accelerated cover acquisition, and what you pull from Legendary Tokens these days.

Some of it is fortuitous choices. For example, I made a conscious decision to level my 3* evenly until Champions became a thing. I could have maxed top-tier 3* prior to that and brought the others along slowly, but because PvE is (even now) the crux of my game, scaling concerns led me to keep my growth even so I didn't throw anything out of whack. Once champions became a thing, I started accelerating my favorite characters first and eventually catching up with the others. That means I have quite a few 3* who are still around 10 covers short of their first 4* reward, and all of the aforementioned factors compounded such that I only just championed my fourth 4*. I'm closing in on day 900. I have four other characters at either 12 or 13 covers in that tier, but virtually ALL of that growth is owed to the introduction of SCLs and champions.

There's other factors as well, but I think those are the biggies. Not everybody's play experience is equal, so cover flow won't be equal for all. It is unquestionably better than it used to be. Going from my strongest 4* being half-covered to having 8 characters at 12+ covers in six months is light-speed compared to what came before.

But I maintain that the "ISO shortage" is really a factor of cover scarcity. The reason people frantically rush to champion 4* is *because* those covers are scarce. If they dropped more frequently - if, for example, there were a specific 4* cover available on a cyclical basis in DDQ as there are for 3* - you might feel the ISO shortage less keenly. You could sell unusable covers with less regret, because you'd have a schedule for when you'd see your next cover of the character. Might only be 1k ISO, but that's still additional ISO.

Like, right now? I don't know when my Ghost Rider will get his 13th cover. His PvE progression got skipped, his PvP was black (which is at 5 for me), and the cover I pulled from Purple Reign was black. Because I don't have any certainty on when I'll see red/green, I'm holding that black cover for two weeks just in case. If I were to pull a red/green before it expires, having sold it would cost me a 4* cover from that Legendary. But not selling it is a thousand ISO that's otherwise not usable.

I'm not saying it's a silver bullet. I am saying that if there were greater predictability, the "cover poor" wouldn't feel as much resentment over unusable covers, and the "ISO poor" would feel greater freedom to champion who they want to, instead of who they feel obligated to, and those excess covers would go straight to the ISO stash instead of hanging around.

Lukoil

acescracked wrote:

You guys who say they can't get 4* covers, I don't understand why our game experience is so different. I get 4* covers coming in like crazy.

Who said that? No one said that. We are talking about what is better for the game. And current situation is better because you can sell covers for ISO but you can not buy covers with ISO (well only standard tokens).

So lets say you have 5/1/1 character and 2 billion ISO you got 4 4 per month (aka low cover gain rate) and one of this covers is cover for the first ability - cool now you need to sell this cover because it will expire in 14 days and you won't be able to finish your chracater in that time frame (only 4 covers per month you know). So now you have 2 billion + 1 thousand ISO and can't spend it! Yay?

With current situation and 10-15 covers per month you actually can spend all you precious ISO.

P.S. I have all 3* championed and currently championing 4* usually it takes 3 casual weeks to champion 1 character for me right now. But i am still missing 1 cover on some of them (hello 5/1/5 starlord)

broll

DFiPL wrote:

But I maintain that the "ISO shortage" is really a factor of cover scarcity. The reason people frantically rush to champion 4* is *because* those covers are scarce. If they dropped more frequently - if, for example, there were a specific 4* cover available on a cyclical basis in DDQ as there are for 3* - you might feel the ISO shortage less keenly. You could sell unusable covers with less regret, because you'd have a schedule for when you'd see your next cover of the character. Might only be 1k ISO, but that's still additional ISO.

This is a fair point and there are certainly people who talk about willingness to sell 3*. However for me, I had just as much of a hard time selling 3* and constantly felt ISO starved because I was constantly racing to champion 3* before I was forced to sell. I still hold that if the sale prices were better, I wouldn't have felt that way. If a 3* netted 10k for selling, 4* 25k, 5* 50-100K I think people generally feel less anxious about selling, even 4 & 5 * because you're at least significantly reducing your 'ISO debt' when you are forced to sell that character and it's making it less likely you'll miss out next time.

Pongie

Lukoil wrote:

With current situation and 10-15 covers per month you actually can spend all you precious ISO.

Base on my revisions in gamependium, the amount of 4* useable covers are way higher than what I expected. Who knows how many I've also sold that wasn't tracked too.

2015
Sept 17 covers - slightly lower than other months because I just started tracking my roster on gamependium part way through the month
Oct 40 covers
Nov 44 covers
Dec 50 covers

2016
Jan 47 covers
Feb 33 covers - stopped opening tokens to avoid the dupes
Mar 30 covers
Apr 37 covers
May 105 covers - spent 2000 command points on classic tokens
Jun 60 covers - pulled the latest tokens
Jul 27 covers - back to hoarding command points but I'm opening latest legendary tokens
Aug 40 covers
Sep 33 covers
Oct 50 covers - this is high, might have been the anniversary?
Nov 32 covers
Dec 65 covers - also high, I did pull a stash of 166 tacos. Though this only accounted for 3

JFisch

Speaking as a FTP, 4* tier player that's about 5.9 million in the hole, I'd rather be ISO-poor. The reason is complex.

We're talking about a match 3 puzzle game with no real endgame to achieve. The actual mechanics and strategy element is relatively shallow. Think about it - unless you're reaching beyond your tier, the challenge is mostly one of time and health pack management. In the absence of a clear "win" condition, you have to define your own goals and fun to keep the game fresh for 1,000+ days.

For me, part of the fun is collecting and advancing a deep roster of Marvel characters. That's why even though I don't use them (like, ever), I have 1* Venom, Yelena, Widow, Spidey, and IM on my roster. It's why I have Mr. Fantastic, Venom, and Elektra championed.

But beyond that, the resource-management exercise inherent in trying to level your characters with finite resources without giving anything up provides a lot of the fun I derive from MPQ. The matches are easy, but the challenges of managing a roster and the hard decisions of who to improve, what to keep, and what to sell is difficult and rewarding when you succeed. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE double ISO and the real feeling of progress that comes with it. But there's something intrinsically rewarding to making a long-term roster plan and either successfully executing it - or rapidly changing it to adapt to a new cover pull/upcoming event and/or resupply reward - that would be lost if the ISO-poor situation went away completely.

DFiPL

broll wrote:

DFiPL wrote:

But I maintain that the "ISO shortage" is really a factor of cover scarcity. The reason people frantically rush to champion 4* is *because* those covers are scarce. If they dropped more frequently - if, for example, there were a specific 4* cover available on a cyclical basis in DDQ as there are for 3* - you might feel the ISO shortage less keenly. You could sell unusable covers with less regret, because you'd have a schedule for when you'd see your next cover of the character. Might only be 1k ISO, but that's still additional ISO.

This is a fair point and there are certainly people who talk about willingness to sell 3*. However for me, I had just as much of a hard time selling 3* and constantly felt ISO starved because I was constantly racing to champion 3* before I was forced to sell. I still hold that if the sale prices were better, I wouldn't have felt that way. If a 3* netted 10k for selling, 4* 25k, 5* 50-100K I think people generally feel less anxious about selling, even 4 & 5 * because you're at least significantly reducing your 'ISO debt' when you are forced to sell that character and it's making it less likely you'll miss out next time.

Couple rejoinders:

1) Less regret is not "no regret." I don't think it's possible to completely eliminate the feel-bad that comes along with selling a cover you can't use, nor, for business reasons, do I think Demiurge/D3 want to. But to use your 3* example, assuming you're into the 3* transition at all, you *know* that every 42 days (currently) a cover for any given 3* will be available. Point blank. No matter how roughly RNG treats you, you know that cover is coming. I would love to have my 3* Strange championed and ready to go. But his first DDQ was his , which is already at 5 covers, and I had no real desire to spend 80 CP just so I could avoid wasting a 3* cover. I'll have another cover for him in 30 days, max. Maybe from Heroics or Elites I'll get some before that. Do I want the Legendary from his first Champion level and to get him going collecting me rewards? Of course! But because I can reliably predict how long it might be before I see another of his covers, there isn't the same now-or-never urgency.

Conversely, I DO feel that urgency right now with my 4* Deadpool, because I just got enough 3* Deadpool covers to push him to 183, netting an otherwise unusable and there's another in the next MPQ event. And then who knows how long it will be before I get another crack at him? There are around 40 4* who could be essential, and I don't know if there's a predictable cycle on that the way there is in DDQ...and even if there is a documented cycle, characters can sometimes get skipped because of special events (hi, Ghost Rider!) or, as in the case of Deadpool, yield a cover I can't use. We don't know how event lengths will get staggered. Will we go a month or two only running 3-4 day events, getting us through half the 4* roster? Will we have some 7-day events in there for leavening, slowing down the return of the needed character? Those aren't answers I have available to me.

2) I could see, if not necessarily those specific prices for 4* and 5*, an argument for a meaningful increase at those tiers, since they lack the predictability and ubiquity of 3*. I think 3* covers, on the other hand, are reasonably abundant to the point that a 20-fold increase in their sale value would cause some pretty massive shocks to the game economy. Lemme put it this way: four clears of all nodes in PvE currently nets me about 10-12k ISO on any given day. That single 3* cover I earn daily from the Big Enchilada would equal my entire daily ISO earnings from PvE.

That's enough ISO to champion a 4* every two weeks without urgency at current level costs. Not that, as a player, I necessarily find that a bad thing! But I'm not kidding when I say "massive economic shock." Would it tamp down on regret from selling unusable covers? Absolutely. But I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the ISO economy (particularly, say, level-up costs) would remain static in the face of a permanent doubling of daily ISO flow.

Again, this isn't meant as criticism toward you personally. As a player, I love the idea of doubling my daily ISO with no negative effects. But I don't think that's reasonable to expect, and in terms of reducing remorse from having to sell unusable covers (at least below the 5* tier), I think the more appropriate response would be some sort of cyclical reliability the way we have with 3* in the Big Enchilada. Would it be daily? Ha, I wish. Not likely. But adding an 'essential' node prior to the Crash similar to the essential node prior to the Big Enchilada would work wonders for that. Have the basic mechanics work the same way - the essential 4* brings two friends to the fight against an AI team of three. The rewards would be semi-reversed. Instead of token followed by cover, you'd have 4* cover followed by Legendary token (which might contain a 5*). People who can't beat the Crash would at least have that reliable 4* cycle to follow for their roster-building, and eventually they'd be able to hit the Crash as reliably as the Enchilada.

Again, I don't think you can completely eradicate lost-cover remorse, but if you introduce predictability on that level, you condition the userbase to be more willing to accept it when RNGesus turns His face from them. Because there's always another cover no more than about 40 days away (for now).

Bumping the ISO flow is great, but at some point you still have to have something to spend it on. If you're getting 10k or 25k for a 3* or a 4* cover but you're not able to invest in your roster because you need covers you can't reliably obtain, I"m not sure how much good that's ultimately doing you. Whereas if the focus is on reliability/predictability of cover acquisition, you can plan your roster growth. The ISO? Will come, eventually. Not as fast as you might hope for, but daily ISO flow is currently far more predictable than 4* cover growth.

Smudge

aesthetocyst wrote:

I expected a fun discussion and it has been but this easy acceptance of burning covers is surprising.

I don't necessarily think that the acceptance is easy; it certainly wasn't easy for me to accept the sale of even 3* covers in summer 2015 when my roster was a fledgling super casual noob roster (started April 2014 and was clueless on the game's intricacies until I started digging into the forums in Nov-Dec 2015).

Now that cover flow has opened a bit more, it's easier to accept the sale of covers. It seriously burns knowing that my 5/2/5 PunMax has 4 covers dying on the vine that I won't be able to rescue, but I've passed through the 5 stages of grief and arrived at acceptance already. After you've tossed your first few 4* covers, you get to that stage much faster. I knew going into Galactus that he'd end up at this point, and I ended up drawing 2 more unusable covers in the meantime.

At the end of it all, I prefer to be ISO poor and cover rich. Covers are what dictate usability. A quick, small ISO dump into a level 70 4* can take it to 127 and net me another easy LT from a DDQ Crash as long as it has enough covers. The same dump can make a huge difference in a boosted 4*'s (with 10-13 covers) utility in a PvE or PvP event. It's not world ending, but it can be game changing. Half the ISO to fully level a 4* took my Bucky to a boost level of 320, and at 4/2/5, he holds his own. He wouldn't be in the same boat at 1/3/2.

Covers, to me, are the preferred resource. It hurts to sell them, but without them, my roster goes nowhere faster than when I'm lacking ISO. The ISO can be injected small pieces at a time - that's my current approach. As my better 4* characters gain more coverage, I'm taking them to 209-250 and still using them until the covers arrive. The lower priority max covered 4*s languish at level 70 until I need them for a Crash (like Reed... I finally got him covered a few weeks back, but I'm still not sure I'll add ISO even when his Crash rolls back around unless he gets a rework).

Evilgenius_9

I am hoarding LT's and CP right now because I am ISO poor. That's a nice thing because when I get the ISO, then I can kind of control the flow of 4* covers coming in. I have 8 champed 4*'s with 4 more at 13 covers, and haven't sold any 4* covers from lacking iso.

TazFTW

TazFTW wrote:

I'm cover poor. I've been iso rich since shield levels were introduced. All 3*s championed except for Strange and Thanos which I need covers to reach 13/13 for both. I have a fully operational 2* farm. Five 4*s championed plus three more with 13/13 covers. I have enough iso to level (from 170-ish) and champion all three but I don't see a need for it until I get a cover for the champion level. I rarely dip into PVP, so I don't see a need to level my 5*.

I currently have five 4* covers waiting in queue because I already have 5 in the color. I have an additional two 3* covers waiting in queue because using them for champ levels now will reward me a 4* cover that I have 5 in, so I'm trying to maximize the time I need to get the 4* to 13/13. It kills me that in the next few days I'm going to turn 2 Iceman, a RHulk, and a Cyke into 4000 iso. If I have a 4* cover in queue then no more LT/CP hoarding for me.

(I'm assuming "cover rich" doesn't mean RNG is still going to mess with you by say giving you 13 purple Iceman in a row)

An update because who doesn't love updates. I've gone from five championed 4*s to nine. One 4* at 13 covers, five at 12 covers, and six at 11 covers. Thanks to pulls from the Strange Sights vaults, 3* Strange is now championed. But I think I'm now crossing over into the Iso poor category. When I made my earlier reply my iso balance would hover between 700k to over a million. After championing Strange, I've now dipped below 200k which is enough to max and champion the lone 13 covered 4* but any 4* after that will be out of luck until I rebuild the reserves.

I'm now considering hoarding LT/CPs until I get more iso to avoid wasting moments of RNGreatness.