Too many new characters!

Unknown

While I appreciate they're effort to keep the new characters coming, it's making it very diffiuclt to gain covers, level, or really learn anything about each new character. Psylocke was less than a month ago and I've almost completely forgotten about her because of Black Panther, Thor, Cap, Torch, etc.

I know they're hoping for a few Whales to just drop a ton of cash to level every character but for the average (or above average) player it's just an overload. Thoughts?

Nonce Equitaur 2

Reworking a post from the 1* Covers discussion.

3* characters are getting increasingly 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 a token Purple would help. Or if there's a ten pack featuring Punisher, being able to set the pack green, so that you'll likely get the Green Punisher cover would be helpful.

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

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

Unknown

That's a good idea, although it probably wouldn't work because of the uneven color distribution. Maybe a more feasible idea would be like 1st, 2nd, 3rd based on the characters abilities. So like 1st would get you OBW purple or Hood Yellow or whatever the top one is, 2nd would be the mid abilities and 3rd would be the bottom ones. For characters with 2 abilities both could be available at 3rd. I'm not entirely sure how its managed on the backend, but you could keep the odds of Doom the same on 1,2,3 and for 3 just have secondary roll to determine color at the end.

Unknown

I think those that are trying to figure out better ways to acquire all of these characters are in the right.


If the rate at which new characters are released was decreased it would certainly help us as players get closer to finishing up out rosters. But I'm inclined to think it would also hurt the financial viability of the game.

Think about the two types of in game currency:

Iso for the most part goes to leveling characters, the amount spent on boosts and creating alliances must be miniscule in comparison.

HP for the most part goes to upgrading character abilities, buying roster spots for characters, and buying shields in order to win covers for characters. Alliances have taken a chunk of hp but I imagine it's still very much skewed towards characters. I can't picture health packs and boosts making a dent.

If they need to keep the release rate high in order to make money and keep people involved then so be it.


I know some think it is incredibly discouraging for new players coming in and realizing they are super behind with cover collection but honestly if you were in that position would there would a big difference between 10 or 20 3* characters? Considering the amount of covers involved I imagine that's overwhelming in either case.

I'd rather see a good rotation of rewards and maybe more tweaks in an area like that (or tokens as Nonce has suggested).

Clintman

I like Nonce Equitaur 2 idea as well, what I figure D3 would be more likely to implement would be something like the following:

With the quantity of new 3* characters coming out it is clear by looking at players rosters that while they may have every cover the quantity of covers makes it ridiculously rare to get enough 3* covers to be viable, which in turn keeps them running 2* teams for too long which makes them feel stagnant.

I suggest making heric packs have 4 variations as a choice from a standard heroic token:

Pack 1: Chance of 2*s and punisher, Cmags, Daredevil, Psylocke etc. or 4*s
Pack 2: Chance of 2*s and Spiderman, GSBW, Hulk, Fat Thor etc. or 4*s
Pack 3: Chance of 2*s and IM40, The Hood, Patch etc. or 4*s
Pack 4: Chance of 2*s and Ragnarok, BP, Loki, Dr. Doom etc. or 4*s

Unknown

How about no colour covers?

Essentially, you just level the skill you want.

Puritas

I feel like there's far too few characters being released

I mean unless you're some kind of compulsive collector you have no need to fully cover ever character anyways, and everyone except the thor fans have such a slowwwwwwwwww wait for their favorite char

kalex716

Puritas wrote:

I feel like there's far too few characters being released

I mean unless you're some kind of compulsive collector you have no need to fully cover ever character anyways, and everyone except the thor fans have such a slowwwwwwwwww wait for their favorite char

I don't think you understand how Math works.

We don't want to cover every character, in fact, we just want to cover a few of them. However, each new character that gets added to tables/character pool decreases the chance we'll ever get fully covered in the couple of characters we want to focus on. The more characters in the pool, the longer it will take to max any single one of them (forget about even being picky).

kalex716

I do think the solution will eventually be to break up characters into "seasons". When you get a pack you can pick which season you want to open. They can even do restrictions on events based on these groupings from time to time as well, that way older "season" characters don't become completely irrelevant.

MaxCavalera

Clint wrote:

I like Nonce Equitaur 2 idea as well, what I figure D3 would be more likely to implement would be something like the following:

With the quantity of new 3* characters coming out it is clear by looking at players rosters that while they may have every cover the quantity of covers makes it ridiculously rare to get enough 3* covers to be viable, which in turn keeps them running 2* teams for too long which makes them feel stagnant.

I suggest making heric packs have 4 variations as a choice from a standard heroic token:

Pack 1: Chance of 2*s and punisher, Cmags, Daredevil, Psylocke etc. or 4*s
Pack 2: Chance of 2*s and Spiderman, GSBW, Hulk, Fat Thor etc. or 4*s
Pack 3: Chance of 2*s and IM40, The Hood, Patch etc. or 4*s
Pack 4: Chance of 2*s and Ragnarok, BP, Loki, Dr. Doom etc. or 4*s

Yeah this was similar to the Idea I had the last a time too many character thread was raised. Only I had it broken down into two tiers at the time but probably about 4 or more 3* characters have been released since then. I would break it down chronologically so people starting later could chose from standard and heroic tokens containing 1st gen 2nd gen 3* characters etc. If you started today and were a really big Ironman fan you would need him to be featured in 3 or more PvP events probably to have a chance at getting a IM40 to a use able level and knows how long that could take.

Unknown

Dr Spaceman wrote:

How about no colour covers?

Essentially, you just level the skill you want.

That or can pay something like 100 HP to change the color to what you want.......

Nonce Equitaur 2

kalex716 wrote:

We don't want to cover every character, in fact, we just want to cover a few of them. However, each new character that gets added to tables/character pool decreases the chance we'll ever get fully covered in the couple of characters we want to focus on. The more characters in the pool, the longer it will take to max any single one of them (forget about even being picky).

That's why I've suggested color-typing on tokens. There are 104 different covers in the game. Divided by six, that's about 18 for each color -- see the Color Pie discussion for more exact details.

If I have a 3* token, and I need Doctor Doom's Blue cover, then I'd much rather have a 1 in 9 chance of getting it instead of a 1 in 48 chance.

Unknown

I'd like to see more variety of events. For example if there was typically 6 or so events going on, you could choose to participate in the ones with rewards that you need.

elvy75

Puritas wrote:

I feel like there's far too few characters being released

I mean unless you're some kind of compulsive collector you have no need to fully cover ever character anyways, and everyone except the thor fans have such a slowwwwwwwwww wait for their favorite char

Hmmm, i don't play this game for that long time, but the problem is that we don't want to fully cover every character, but want to do it for a few selected ones, but they are issuing new chars so often and all of them are essential either for next pvp or pve, and not everyone has money to invest into buying HP in order to expand their roster to have all chars that are there.

Konman

SUPERTOM wrote:

While I appreciate they're effort to keep the new characters coming, it's making it very diffiuclt to gain covers, level, or really learn anything about each new character. Psylocke was less than a month ago and I've almost completely forgotten about her because of Black Panther, Thor, Cap, Torch, etc.

I know they're hoping for a few Whales to just drop a ton of cash to level every character but for the average (or above average) player it's just an overload. Thoughts?

The general theme of your post has been the subject of various threads for many months now, and all that has happened since those threads began this discussion, is a steady increase in the number od 3* characters. There doesn't seem to be any indication that its going to stop either.

Exhibit A: When LazyThor was announced, it was widely panned as a bad idea and an unwanted character, yet pretty much everyone did everything they could to acquire the new LazyThor once they were able. So even when no one really wants a new character, when its available, we can't help but fall all over ourselves to collect them anyway.

I've got a roster full of useless *** characters, and some have been that way for a pretty long time.

AdamMagus

Personally, whats keeping me playing is the steady stream of new character releases. I'm by no means a crazy collector with every character maxed out, far from it.

I do however agree that there is a bit of a problem trying to collect the covers you need for the characters you want, I do like Nonce Equitaur 2's solution, it's a nice solution to an annoying problem.

I don't mind occasionally shelling out a few $$ to get a power maxed out when am out of patience, but that gets rather expensive over time, good for the developers, not so good for the player base.

Unknown

Right now the problem with new characters is that there's really no reason to have about 3 to 4 level 141s plus whoever happens to be featured, and unless you're going to regularly lock out entire sections of the character list it doesn't matter if there are a lot of characters out there to use.

They still have to get the base balance right since there's no point to use an okay character when you got 5 other broken ones to choose from. Although the major buff sort of addresses that, that ends up being similar to just locking characters out if you apply it to more than one character (anyone who isn't major buffed can be considered as locked out).

Puritas

kalex716 wrote:

Puritas wrote:

I feel like there's far too few characters being released

I mean unless you're some kind of compulsive collector you have no need to fully cover ever character anyways, and everyone except the thor fans have such a slowwwwwwwwww wait for their favorite char

I don't think you understand how Math works.

We don't want to cover every character, in fact, we just want to cover a few of them. However, each new character that gets added to tables/character pool decreases the chance we'll ever get fully covered in the couple of characters we want to focus on.

Not sure how expecting token system to change as characters get added equals math failure, but w/e floats your boat

Unknown

I like that it's "hard" to max out every character. It keeps fights fresh. Otherwise, we'd all be playing the same 3-6 toons, all at 141, and PVP particularly would get stale, as your fights would all be exactly the same (remember the 2* trifecta we ALL fought ALL the time prior to the Thor/Wolvie nerfs? I like the greater variety this presents, both in levels you face, and in characters you face. The current system gets a lot of people to pump iso into buffed characters for certain events, rather than just leveling 3 and using them ALL THE TIME. I actually think this part of the game is pretty well balanced. That said, yes, I'd love some variation of the color-specific suggestion. It allows me to avoid things like my 10th black hulk pull from Heroics, while still looking for my second Patch red...

Unknown

To the op, this is their way of forcing players to buy HP and ISO packs. If it was easy to level every character you have with the HP and ISO you gain in the game, how exactly would they make any money? Or would it be better if they offered exclusive heroes you can get only get by purchasing them with real money? I am a f2p player and I know I will never have all the heroes I like at 141. Better deal with reality sooner than later.

DrNitroman

Chops wrote:

I like the greater variety this presents, both in levels you face, and in characters you face.

I remembered that IceIX said in some posts that MPQ want actually to promote roster diversity.
New character addition may regularly attracts new players to the game. But, As Chops said, it maintains a level of diversity in the team encountered during tournament. Without this diversity, there's a risk that long-time players feels tired or bored and quit playing.
Plus new characters = reasons to spend iso and HP.

What seems clear, is that MPQ means that * and ** char. are steps to reach ***characters, main game will be more and more centered on ***character fights while four-stars are rarer rewards. IMO, only in the distant future will rosters really evolve towards four-stars.