Should there ever be more 1* covers?

Unknown

This has been a debate over the months but I don't recall any recent conversation.

Some people have said that since 1*'s are starter characters there shouldn't be any more so they are easy to obtain. I personally think a batch of 5 more wouldn't make it that difficult. Also if like 30-40% of cards were "semi-retired" and permanently put into a collectors pack that would solve this issue and more.

Another argument for me is that the 1* tourneys are boring. I don't have 1*'s but even if I did wanna compete the roster selection is so limited and boring. If there were twice as many to choose from it would be way more fun.

Roster slots are expensive. Ok I get it. You don't wanna buy the roster slots for 5x 1*. Ok I get that, not everyone is a collector and you don't HAVE to have them all you former poke masters.

Design time required - I dunno how to get around this 1. But 1* don't matter as much so a tad bit if sloppiness is no big deal. Just don't throw us no crazy overpowered 230 versions.


Would they be implanted as a batch? Or is this a way to implement pvp new cover rewards. Would you finish top to receive them or still in the bottom, this could create interesting strategy all around. How would you go about this?

This is an outlet to release some variety if characters that aren't as popular, for a recent example iron fist, wasp, and others who received votes but didn't quite make "The List". On the flip side it's a quick way to implement a couple characters from "the list" that weren't initially planned on being implemented.

What's everyone's opinions on if goons such as Maggia and hammer should be added as playable characters?
We already know 10 billion people want devil Dino as a playable character. I appreciate your opinions also but could we please pretty please leave him out if this convo?

Unknown

As a player, my primary concern is roster slots actually. I wouldn't be as inclined to spend 400HP to open a new slot for a 1* character, as opposed to a good 2* or 3* character.

In terms of balance though, I feel that making more 2*s which cover P/U/B colours is better so that not everyone gets pigeonholed into just using OBW with <insert RYG character>. And if the 2* character is designed well enough, it could hold its own (in terms of offense) against non-maxed 3*s.

Furthermore, despite the direction the developers want to take the game too, you have to realise that as of now, there are more Rare (3*) characters compared to Uncommon (2*) characters. It'd give some of us a break as well since there's been a never ending slew of events recently.

Regarding the goons... I know they are bloody imbalanced at L230 but I just don't feel like they should be a part of the roster. I mean, they are neither Hero nor Villain.

Unknown

I'd actually like to see a new 1* with a team heal. But other than that...

No, I don't think additional 1* covers are necessary. They're there to introduce the player to the basic game concepts of color-matching and team synergy, and I don't feel like they would be versatile enough in the long run that the devs would want to sink time and effort into creating new powers or drawing new art assets that will be used so infrequently. The current game revolves more or less around 3* and maybe some 2*, and once you get those guys, the 1* go into storage. The only time I use them is in the lone star tourneys, if I'm looking to tank my MMR, or if I feel like cheesing that desert stage with M. Storm.

I also think that when a 3* is released a lot of people spend real money buying all the covers or purchasing packs to get the new characters. With one-stars, that probably wouldn't happen. So in summation, it's a time and money thing.

NorthernPolarity

Psykopathic wrote:

This has been a debate over the months but I don't recall any recent conversation.

Some people have said that since 1*'s are starter characters there shouldn't be any more so they are easy to obtain. I personally think a batch of 5 more wouldn't make it that difficult. Also if like 30-40% of cards were "semi-retired" and permanently put into a collectors pack that would solve this issue and more.

Another argument for me is that the 1* tourneys are boring. I don't have 1*'s but even if I did wanna compete the roster selection is so limited and boring. If there were twice as many to choose from it would be way more fun.

Roster slots are expensive. Ok I get it. You don't wanna buy the roster slots for 5x 1*. Ok I get that, not everyone is a collector and you don't HAVE to have them all you former poke masters.

Design time required - I dunno how to get around this 1. But 1* don't matter as much so a tad bit if sloppiness is no big deal. Just don't throw us no crazy overpowered 230 versions.


Would they be implanted as a batch? Or is this a way to implement pvp new cover rewards. Would you finish top to receive them or still in the bottom, this could create interesting strategy all around. How would you go about this?

This is an outlet to release some variety if characters that aren't as popular, for a recent example iron fist, wasp, and others who received votes but didn't quite make "The List". On the flip side it's a quick way to implement a couple characters from "the list" that weren't initially planned on being implemented.

What's everyone's opinions on if goons such as Maggia and hammer should be added as playable characters?
We already know 10 billion people want devil Dino as a playable character. I appreciate your opinions also but could we please pretty please leave him out if this convo?

I doubt that the non-forum folk care about having more 1*s since they're generally more casual and don't really think about these things (at least, thats how I view what most non-forumgoers would be), so the audience that we're talking about are the forum people. I'm going to guess that the average forum person has made the 2* transition, so more 1* characters would not develop their roster and basically sit there only to be used in 1* tournaments. This represents a lot of wasted time and effort: the people who could use the characters the most (newer players) don't care about having more because they're happy with opening standard tokens to level up their IM35, and the people who theoretically care (us forumgoers and developed players) would only ever use the characters in a tournament that occurs once a month. The solution isn't to add more 1* characters, its to hold the 1* tournament less often.

The devs should be focusing on 3* characters as they've been doing since that caters most to the players that actually care about new content, and work on polishing the 2* roster to be more balanced. You also have to be careful with introducing new 2* characters because of how the 2* cover acquisition rate has slowed to a drip. With 1 cover given instead of 3 as PvP awards, its going to take players a lot longer to build up 2* characters, and adding more characters is only going to make this harder. You can even see this now: the devs have been giving out only the most popular characters as rewards for the majority of the events that have been run (Ares/Thor/OBW/C. Storm/Wolvie/Cap). The weaker, less popular characters such as Bagman and Moonstone have largely been ignored. The best way to increase 2* roster diversity would probably be to buff the existing lesser used 2* characters: Black/purple buffs on moonstone, and buffs + 3rd color on bullseye could propel them to tier 1 due to the lack of purple/black characters in 2* land, for instance.

When thinking about new features, you guys need to think about the work that goes into adding all of this stuff. Adding new 1* characters would be nice, but time is a precious dev resource and they shouldn't waste it implementing things that don't impact the feature's target audience significantly. The feature also doesn't really make them any money, which is a huge strike against it too coupled with the fact of how it doesn't really make the playerbase that much happier. The time would be much better put to use on making PvE events cooler and things like that.

Unknown

New players can pretty much cover out the current 1* characters in the prologue, so I actually think the "cover lottery" is LESS of a problem with the 1* characters. For people uninterested in the 1* tourney, it's not like the "new" sell-for-100-ISO cover will be any different than the current sell-for-100-iso covers. 2 or 3 more 1*s (I think more than that would be overkill) would make the 1* tourney more interesting, might give us a couple abilities that are interesting but wouldn't scale well, and could give us another "1.5-cover" character like mStorm.

From a gameplay/game mechanics perspective (as opposed to a design/art effort perspective) it seems like all-upside to me

Dayv

I want a second prologue with a whole new batch of 1* characters you have to focus on for the duration. It would liven up future 1-star events and, frankly, I miss having non-competitive PvE to work through for the first time with a brand new team.

Unknown

I support adding to both the 1- and 2-star lineup. More options for "complete" characters is a good thing in my book. Then again, I also collect all, so guess it could mess me up.

Then again, I also endorse the idea of making the first episode permanently available in the game, and then just have 5-6 episodes ahead, with chapters playable. You could still use them to make heroic events.

Unknown

For starters we could retire Yelena and Hawk for good (they could still appear as opponents where now), and add 2 new, actually usable * characters.

The * tournaments could be just replaced with oned having *+select ** population with some buffs/nerfs applied that would level the strength somewhat, so many combinations become viable thus creating a non-boring tournament.

Unknown

pasa_ wrote:

For starters we could retire Yelena and Hawk for good (they could still appear as opponents where now), and add 2 new, actually usable * characters.

The * tournaments could be just replaced with oned having *+select ** population with some buffs/nerfs applied that would level the strength somewhat, so many combinations become viable thus creating a non-boring tournament.

Whaaaaat? 1* Hawkeye was my freaking A-LISTER in the prologue missions. Two abilities that get rid of goon countdowns? He's indispensable!

Unknown

No one has touched the fact that they would be great outlets for some of the less desirable but still asked for covers such as shocker, professor x , vision , iron fist, etc etc. people who barely made the list, the thing , mr sinister, etc etc

Unknown

gamar wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

For starters we could retire Yelena and Hawk for good (they could still appear as opponents where now), and add 2 new, actually usable * characters.

The * tournaments could be just replaced with oned having *+select ** population with some buffs/nerfs applied that would level the strength somewhat, so many combinations become viable thus creating a non-boring tournament.

Whaaaaat? 1* Hawkeye was my freaking A-LISTER in the prologue missions. Two abilities that get rid of goon countdowns? He's indispensable!

The 2 new characters could cover the same role. We could even keep Hawk by name just fill with some content that makes him stay around longer than a week.

Unknown

gamar wrote:

pasa_ wrote:

For starters we could retire Yelena and Hawk for good (they could still appear as opponents where now), and add 2 new, actually usable * characters.

The * tournaments could be just replaced with oned having *+select ** population with some buffs/nerfs applied that would level the strength somewhat, so many combinations become viable thus creating a non-boring tournament.

Whaaaaat? 1* Hawkeye was my freaking A-LISTER in the prologue missions. Two abilities that get rid of goon countdowns? He's indispensable!

Heh, I remember when I was looking at 150-200 level goons in TaT as a halfway-through-the-Prologue new player. I figured that one Tommy Gun would wipe me out no matter what I did, so IM35 wasn't really needed to tank or throw useless (in context) protect tiles. It was all about M.BW, M.Storm, and C.Hawkeye rotating boardshaking, stuns, and spot removal from Hawkeye. 20 minutes of "one mistake is your LAST mistake" later, I would get a couple more points!

Unknown

Psykopathic wrote:

No one has touched the fact that they would be great outlets for some of the less desirable but still asked for covers such as shocker, professor x , vision , iron fist, etc etc. people who barely made the list, the thing , mr sinister, etc etc

LOL, I imagine * Thing shouting "It's CLOBBERING time!" and hits for 325.

Unknown

pasa_ wrote:

Psykopathic wrote:

No one has touched the fact that they would be great outlets for some of the less desirable but still asked for covers such as shocker, professor x , vision , iron fist, etc etc. people who barely made the list, the thing , mr sinister, etc etc

LOL, I imagine * Thing shouting "It's CLOBBERING time!" and hits for 325.

Lmao. I can imagine it and it makes me laugh also. Maybe the big stony grump can be a 2* but you get the idea a somewhat quickly done, that can be tweaked as needed down the road, batch of fun 1* characters could be a cool thing.

Unknown

As an aside, I sometimes wonder when there will be 'too many characters'. With the way the game is structured (where you need 5-10 covers to actually make a character viable) you really endanger yourself in diluting your chances to capture enough covers of a certain hero that you want.

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

As an aside, I sometimes wonder when there will be 'too many characters'. With the way the game is structured (where you need 5-10 covers to actually make a character viable) you really endanger yourself in diluting your chances to capture enough covers of a certain hero that you want.

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

As an aside, I sometimes wonder when there will be 'too many characters'. With the way the game is structured (where you need 5-10 covers to actually make a character viable) you really endanger yourself in diluting your chances to capture enough covers of a certain hero that you want.

That's definitely a point of concern. I may have mentioned it somewhere to an extent. The point when that becomes a problem is the point when standard packs / heroics etc rtc will have to be split into multiple versions. Red / blue / yellow
Classic / modern
Black / white / gold. Blah blah blah whatever.

Unknown

Toxicadam wrote:

As an aside, I sometimes wonder when there will be 'too many characters'. With the way the game is structured (where you need 5-10 covers to actually make a character viable) you really endanger yourself in diluting your chances to capture enough covers of a certain hero that you want.

This is why I think Heroic tokens will eventually be phased out in favor of an array of event-type tokens with limited drop possibilities. With some ability to choose between token types (either "you win a token! pick A, B, or C token" or running multiple simultaneous events with different token awards in each), you can retain a small amount of directed development--still mostly random--with a much larger total roster of possible characters.

Like you suggest, an ever-increasing pool of characters makes transitioning tier-to-tier much more difficult over time, but there's also the new player issue of trying to grow roster size. If every new 2* or 3* drop you get from a token is your first cover of yet another character, you'll be forced to sell first covers or aggressively strong-armed into buying HP to a much greater degree than is currently the case.

Unknown

there needs to be more of everything. the game can never have too many characters!

every team i play against pretty much uses the same characters.

Nonce Equitaur 2

More *common* characters, which you can get ten tokens for a day easily, shouldn't overwhelm anybody. It's the 3* characters that are really hard to collect. It was hard to collect all three covers for a 3* when I started, and the number of 3* characters has doubled since then. One help for collecting covers would be token color-typing

For example, if you're looking for a lot of Purple covers, being able to make the token Purple.
Or if there's a ten pack featuring a guaranteed Punisher, being able to set the pack green, so that you'll get the Green Punisher cover.

Suppose for a basic token, the odds are 90% you'll get a 1*, 8% you'll get a 2*, 2% you'll get a 3*, something like that.
Instead of the New Award screen on triggering a token, you'd get a screen with 7 choices, with a larger button in the center, and 6 smaller buttons around it.

1-6 -- Colors. Get a guaranteed cover of that color, with odds 90% / 8% / 2%. No Hero points.
7 -- Better odds, something like 85% / 12% / 3% instead of 90% / 8% / 2%. Also a small chance of hero points.

7 would be the big button at the center.

If you are looking for a particular character, picking one of their colors would give you much better odds of getting that character.

Unknown

L45TN7 wrote:

there needs to be more of everything. the game can never have too many characters!

every team i play against pretty much uses the same characters.

I don't think that will ever change. There will always be certain characters that are just more efficient at dealing damage than other ones. So, everyone will mostly gravitate towards using them.

OBW is a perfect example of that. She was lightly regarded at first, then the word got around about her advantages and everyone flocked to her.