New Feature: Bonus Heroes! *Updated (3/1/17)

hodayathink

carrion pigeons wrote:

My Magneto and Thor (my two highest level 3*s) are kinda sad that they'll be falling behind now. But I guess whatever. More KK and Cyclops levels are ultimately probably more useful. I may be singing a different toon if we ever get to the point where several of the non-vaulted 3*s are getting maxchamped and I still have multiple champed characters with no potential at all to get champ covers. It would be nice if favorite characters would be added to the pool of regular pulls as well as bonus pools. Seems like that would solve a lot of problems.

Magneto and Thor probably won't fall very behind as long as you're running a 2 star farm, since they both have feeders. Of my top 10 covered 3*, 8 of them are fed ones (the ones that aren't are Gamora and SWitch). And tied for 12th, one level are Storm and Hulk (also fed). And after that is Cap Marvel.

Nick441234

DayvBang wrote:

nick_chicane wrote:

I've seen nothing that says the older 3* and 4*s will never appear in packs again. Clearly, that would be ridiculous. What I'm expecting to see is that all the items will get rotated at various intervals. Until I see that doesn't happen I'm not going to jump to conclusions.

They definitely implied that the 3* lineup would be changing over time.

The implication for 4* characters, however, is that the oldest will be displaced as the new ones go in and it will for the foreseeable future contain only the 12 latest 4* at any given time.

It's a bad move. If they don't walk this back in the next couple of days, I'm probably done. I wish I hadn't renewed VIP this morning.

We all know what D3 are like for not giving us all the required information though.

It would make no sense to not rotate them all as it would stop championing dead.

qandols

TL; DR Today I earned a Standard Token. I opened it and to my surprise it was 3* BWGS AND a bonus IF. That's great! But does it mean I will never have to see 1* from standards anymore?

sinnerjfl

nick_chicane wrote:

DayvBang wrote:

nick_chicane wrote:

I've seen nothing that says the older 3* and 4*s will never appear in packs again. Clearly, that would be ridiculous. What I'm expecting to see is that all the items will get rotated at various intervals. Until I see that doesn't happen I'm not going to jump to conclusions.

They definitely implied that the 3* lineup would be changing over time.

The implication for 4* characters, however, is that the oldest will be displaced as the new ones go in and it will for the foreseeable future contain only the 12 latest 4* at any given time.

It's a bad move. If they don't walk this back in the next couple of days, I'm probably done. I wish I hadn't renewed VIP this morning.

We all know what D3 are like for not giving us all the required information though.

It would make no sense to not rotate them all as it would stop championing dead.

And that might be one of their goals when you think about it. Really, ask yourself, what is the point of vaulting 4*'s?
How does it help anyone but the devs at slowing down championning because its probably giving too many rewards too quickly to their
liking.

This is not bonus heroes. This is vaulting and slowing down championning. But heh, have an insignificant bonus feature
to swallow this very bitter pill.

El Satanno

Wow, 19 pages. Took me a long time to read all that, but it does seem that the Upset People are very much a larger group than the Not Upset People. I'm on Team Upset People.

I've dumped heaps and heaps of Iso into the worst 4* out there, just because the champ rewards will eventually make it worth the investment. For the past two seasons, I managed to only sell off about 3 covers out of over 1500 pulled from tokens. So much goodness flowed from those champions and it felt good to get them all. I'm probably among a very small percentage of the population of this game to celebrate an Elektra cover popping up! This vaulting causes me stress for several big reasons. I'm a little loathe to repeat what's been said earlier in this thread, but I want to vent and continue to focus the spotlight on the detriment here. Here comes a damn wall of text! (And I bet you I won't even need to be moderated, greenies!)

Firstly, I can pretty much kiss champ rewards from about 30 of those characters goodbye. I have most of the Blessed 12 champed already, but that number will rapidly dwindle as they inevitably continue to churn out more 4*s. I guess it's kinda neat that I can focus on however many (although it looks like having more than one at a time as a favorite is a loser's gambit) as Bonus Heroes. However that simply highlights the waste of investing in the non-favorite characters. Yes, I will eventually hit 370 for one character. How long will that take? In the meantime I'll be getting nothing but the rinky-dink rewards from the slew of barely-champed newbies.

And that segues neatly into the next problem I have here: Maybe some people like the increased chances to get new 4*s championed. But how often will they be worth anything to you? Assuming the power creep doesn't start to get out of hand, a game-changer like Peggy Carter is rare. So you can blow all your Iso on mediocre characters, and then enjoy the anemic champion rewards that they spit out in the short window that they remain Blessed 12. Great. After that, you're pretty much not getting anything out of them again.

Oh, and what if you don't manage to get the right combination of 13 covers while they're Blessed 12? Well, if they aren't Peggy-caliber or higher, it's pretty much never going to happen. Why on earth would you sacrifice getting better rewards out of your existing champs to finish a character of dubious value? Under this scheme, I predict the rosters of the future will be an ever-increasing number of fully-covered but completely unleveled characters as people dedicate all their resources to championing the odd character of greatest value and precisely one character In The Abyss. All the new characters that never get finished or championed will never, ever get there. Sounds a lot like fail to me.

Good thing there's no mechanism in place to address the dreaded 6th Cover Syndrome, either. My 1/3/5 Medusa is looking at me with tears in her eyes. She's got that little gold heart, but I'd wager it'll be breaking as I sell even more of those purple covers. (2 of the covers I had to sell off were Medusa purple, for reference.) I reckon that that's something else what's gonna come of this. Increased chances to pull the Blessed 12 with the streaky-**** tendencies of RNGesus means you'd better get ready for a lot of complaint threads about the 0/5/25 Coulsons, 1/30/2 Mordos, and what have you. Fun times.

And last, but certainly not least, my personal favorite: 5* Hell. I've mentioned in plenty of places before how much I hate the 5* tier. Nothing changing here means it still sucks ****. Thanks for that.

Yoik

Overall I like the changes inc the extra rewards for 7 day events. I totally understand most people’s points on this bonus feature. I think it has been made in good faith but is perhaps a little off the mark. It is good for game longevity which perhaps was an incidental bonus for D3 when they instigated all these changes.

For most people it seems this is a bit of the proverbial Richard the Third Sandwich.

That being said. Something im confused on. I need 1 more cover for Drax and Spider Gwen before I can make them Champs. They are not part of the listing Brigby has made. I automatically made these 2 toon's 2 of my bonus choices. When and how will these drop if they are not part of the main token pool?

Obviously I have a chance to win them in events or pvp but where would they drop from on token pools?

Edit: After reading 3 pages in of this thread I get it. I automatically limited my bonus toon's choice to only 3 character's. This has got to be the way forward on this for me to target specifically ones I need to fine tune.

Edit, Edit: Having all 3 stars champed already I feel personally to get the most out of this I feel now that I have to hoard any token that does not give me the chance of getting a bonus chosen 4 star cover I have marked. For me at present that is Spider Gwen, I need 1 cover to champ her. Well 2 for the ledge token I suppose. 250/250 Currently.

If not and if I am lucky enough to get the SG cover I need to champ her straight away, I am immediately in need of Iso to champ her which I currently do not have as I am trying to level up 4Falcon. Even after I level 4Falcon it may not be worth pulling tokens until I have enough iso saved up to champ SG if I am lucky with the pull.

Not opening covers will stifle the amount of iso I currently receive which I use to champ my 4 stars when they are fully cover e.g. 4Falcon at present.

This is all personal ofc and livable, but it just means I will have to tweak how I level for the foreseeable.

So I can pull standard tokens till the cows come home ( no chance of 4 star ) for the additional iso to help me champ toon’s but anything other then that is kind of a time bomb because there’s a chance I will pull a specific toon I have requested but without the iso to level them.

Lol is anyone ever truly happy with anything? Perhaps we should ask the dead.

Alsmir

27/42 3* champed, no 4* champs, most of my 38 are fully covered

Technically I could benefit from new feature, but only if ISO rates were doubled or tripled. In the last 2-3 months I started regularly drawing LTs to build my 4* roster. It was extremely random and quite annoying. My best 4* is Prof X with 10 covers, then 2 guys at 8 covers. In theory chosing 4* Cyclops as bonus hero could be great. Getting extra covers to finish him.

But the vaulting...

3* I don't mind. Most of them are fully covered anyway and I'm just slowly grinding ISO. Bonus rate to finally cover some unlucky guys (damn you Cyclops!) is neat.

4* though...
Bonus rate for 1 guy of my choice (and Peggy) - nice
Everything else - horrible. Freshly released characters are forced upon me, even if I don't like them.

1. How about a feature for least favourite characters?
Pick x heroes that you will never draw from any pack?

2. This whole new feature reminds me what happened in Hearthstone a while ago when new "standard" mode was introduced. The ranked mode was split into two parts: standard and wild.
Wild remained the way the game used to be - all cards available.
Standard format (heavily advertised as the correct way to play HS with lots of tournaments etc.) only uses cards from latest adventures and expansions, anything older can't be used.

What was the unoffficial reason for this?
To force players into buying newest expansion packs, no matter how bad they are.


Don't we have the same thing in MPQ? New characters are dropped every 2 weeks. Plenty of them are terribad, so people don't bother with them and stick to the good, old ones (OML, Cyke, Ice Man, Rulk etc.). You could try to make some new interesting designs (Strange, Peggy, Medusa) or just keep releasing mediocre ones and force people into using them a.k.a. removing everything else from Legendary Tokens.

I don't play Hearthstone anymore. I wonder if MPQ will share the same fate.

Pongie

I completely agree with El Santanno. I spend all of 2016 focusing on my 4* champions (as evident in my roster report and signature). The order were based on which had covers expiring. I completely neglected my 5* progress and hoarded all my legendary tokens and command points. I was sure then that this was the slow and steady progress that would reap me the maximum resources. Now, I'm not so sure that was the right move anymore. The majority of those 4* will never be played, unless required for pve and if I even bother to play pve that event. It was all planned on reaping the rewards that will no longer be flowing. Don't get me wrong, I don't blame anyone but myself for choosing this path. Just going to have to swallow the bitter pill and make do with what it is for what it is.

Bowgentle

Thanks for squishing any hope I had to get away from playing my 5s all the time, every event.

My 4s were coming along nicely, some reaching that magical 330+ mark where they become viable again.

Now they will never get enough champ levels.

"play with your 5s then" you say?
Sure, I will. But with a rate of 4 5s from my last 98 pulls it's kinda hard to keep doing that.

Crowl

Wumpushunter wrote:

So everyone so far that thinks this is a good idea has already championed a ton of characters but those who just started will almost never champion certain great characters. This is an unnecessary change and hurts my interest in continuing with this game.

Actually, if you read the posts, there are a lot of people with a lot of champions who hate this change too because they will stop getting champion rewards and levels for most of their champions.

The bonus heroes thing is a great idea and if it had been introduced without the idiocy of vaulting then the devs would be getting praised by almost everyone for a positive change, but instead they tacked on vaulting which practically destroys the championing system to push us towards a mixed bag of latest characters.

Crowl

Pylgrim wrote:

Do you want a level 370 Rulk? Now it is EASIER to achieve that than before. Take a moment and do the maths for yourself and tell me the estimate of pulls you'd need to get a 100 Rulks under the old model. I'll wait. (And yes, I know that you mean more than just Rulk but still, ask yourself how many of the pulls towards max-champing Rulk and all the other good characters would be "wasted" on the characters that you don't really care that much for under the previous model.)

They wouldn't be wasted though, just less focused, there are also a very large amount of omitted characters that you would want covers for in order to eventually move towards 370, not just one or two and for the others that you are less bothered about, you would still have champion rewards to keep pushing you forward too.

After a year or so of pushing us towards champing even lesser characters in order to reap the benefits of not wasting covers and getting champion rewards this latest change slams on the brakes for that approach and now any character that isn't top tier or in the latest 12 should basically be ignored, which seems like an idiotic approach.

Crowl

zulux21 wrote:

the favorite system is clearly introduced as a way to be able to do the token pool change. a change that has been needed for a long time as the pools are getting to diluted.

yes they could have done something like the favorites on their own and if they did it may have been better. but it's still an in general improvement even for old characters for getting what you want (higher odds than the whole pool being there), and overall an improvement for getting more 3-5* characters.

There is no may about it, adding favourites as the only part of this new feature would have been a massive improvement, you would have had an increased chance of getting the ones you wanted, while still getting the large ongoing benefits of the champion system as a whole.

If they wanted to do something about dilution then a better system would have been to add bonus heroes and let us select the characters we wanted to exclude from the token pools, it would also have the obvious benefit of signposting which ones were in a dire need of a rework too.

spectator

they could have just alleviated the problems they created by allowing us to choose which characters are available in tokens much like allowing us to choose which characters are available as bonus heroes

edit: oops beaten by about an hour

KingDon

I am not sure how I feel about this change.

On one hand, the bonus character is a nice welcome feature and a bonus way to get extra covers for the chars you are chasing.

On the other hand, re-implementing a vault that has removed all but 12 of the 4*s has thrown the largest wrench into my plans.

I have just started the 4* transition, as a casual player (and having only dropped around £50 over 3 years for roster slots during sales) this has been a slow process but in the last few months I have been getting there (with being championed...e.g most of the oldest 4*'s or ones which I had multiple covers expiring)

I have a number of 4*'s which I was planning on championing next ( having 13 covers and were next on the list) with (2/4/5 with a blue to come from mystique champ reward) and (5/3/2 with a blue coming from the daily rewards) (5/3/4) and (3/4/5) not far behind.

My plan was to accrue 1.5m (currently sat at around 1.1m) and then crack open my stash of CP and LT's (this was at 244 CP and 3 x LT) once I hit this mark (or just above with it being around 670k to champ the 2 covered 4*s that I have at 13 covers) to a) see if I get any of the covers for the 4*'s that I have at 13/12/11 covers and to flesh out come of the older ones that I only have a few covers for (such as who is sat at 4/0/0) this would allow me to champ a few 4*'s (covers permitting) and hopefully leave 1 mill in the bank

But now....now.....that has all gone to pot.....I cracked my 3 LT;s when the new vaulting was brought in but these yielded a ) and this just made me sad....I look at the 12 chars in the vault and from them, my best covered of these are MK (2/5/2) and SW (3/3/0) alas my Peggy is on (0/1/0) even if I use my stash, that is only 12 covers so could be just one of each....yes this with process I will not be selling any 4* chars (although I can guarantee of getting multiple pink MK covers) but I would rather have a chance of getting something that I cant use over no chance of getting one at all.

I don't want to spend any of my CP's now as the vaulted chars are just not ones I want/need right now. I know that with the bonus chars I can select my older 4*'s (I have done RH and LT) but this might yield 1 extra token every now and again and I can forget about adding any champ levels to the 4*'s that are champed...

All in all, I am happy for the bonus chars but feel deflated from the vault, I think I will be stashing the CP's until a vault is introduced that old the other 30 odd 4*'s or saving them to buy the last covers to bring them to 13

Wjohnson992

After a nights sleep I think D3 could appease the issue of top 4*'s falling into the abyss.

Open up SCL9 and have its progression consist of 1 3* and 2 4* and alliance reward being the 4* again.

Then the devs should reassure that any of the 12 newest 4* will NOT come up as progression rewards. That way you can still get older 4*'s fairly regularly through pve/pvp.

While the packs will make newer 4* characters useable faster. Avoiding situations like that time War Machine got skipped in Crash since he had never been a reward since his release.

Pylgrim

Vhailorx wrote:

Do you want a level 370 Rulk? Now it is EASIER to achieve that than before. Take a moment and do the maths for yourself and tell me the estimate of pulls you'd need to get a 100 Rulks under the old model. I'll wait. (And yes, I know that you mean more than just Rulk but still, ask yourself how many of the pulls towards max-champing Rulk and all the other good characters would be "wasted" on the characters that you don't really care that much for under the previous model.)

It's the bold part of your sentence where we part ways. I don't just want a single 370. I want a bunch of them. Under the old system, the only characters for whom I "wasted" a cover were those that I would not be able to champ fast enough for lack of iso. I was happy to get a champ level for any 4*. Hell, I even champed Fantastic when I had 6 expiring covers for him and no other clearly superior 4*s waiting to be champed. champing was a fairly player-friendly addition to the game, because it mitigated the downside of RNG token pulls. Now every character could potentially be turned into a useful resource farm with an initial iso investment. And the more you champed characters, the more productive tokens became.

My concern is that the new system will give me a nice 5% boost of targeted covers (yay!) but also turn an extra 15% or 20% of my 4* token pulls into unusable "wastes" because I can't champ the newest characters fast enough. That would be a net negative (Boo!).

Now it's possible that once we are 6 or 9 months into this system, it will turn out that I can collect 13 covers and enough iso to level a new 4* fast enough that I won't be overly burdened by the new system. And if it turns out to be true, then the new system may be more positive than I suspect, but I am a little skeptical. I would not be surprised if, in the long run, the net result of these changes was that where a player may once have had 40 4* champs at an average level of 300, the same player would now end up with something like 5-10 4* champs at level 350, and 30-35 champs at level 280. and I would personally prefer the former.

I reckon you are right about the sudden upheaval that players at our station are about to experience but I am positive that we'll reach the scenario that you theorise.

As for preferring a few high level 4*s over every 4* at a mediocre average... I think we'll have to agree to disagree. If I could convert every cover of Eddie I've ever got into an Iceman or Quake or Peggy, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Now I am basically given that chance. Besides! You don't really need to go to 350! Just take a character to 330 and move to the next. Pretty sure that in the time that the fully RNG previous system would allow me to get my 4*s to level 300, I could get a decent and not too small stable of my favourite 4*s to 330. Yeah, I'll lament the iso that I put into champing Elektra because I don't see myself ever giving her a turn at the wheel of fortune, but such are the vicissitudes of a feature's early adopters.

NMANOZ

I scrolled to Bagman. He is not available, it broke my heart.

apmonte

VIP player with 12 champed 4-stars.

Conceptually I like the change with the bonus system, but agree with most that it needs to be adjusted. Latest Legends draw looks like it should with the 12 latest 4-stars in it. However, the Classic Legends should contain all four stars except the latest legends (like the 5-stars). Why isn't this the case? The newest 12 four-stars certainly aren't classic in any sense of the word. Heroics should contain them all.

I did a bunch of classic pulls to bring up my newer 4-stars (cheaper than latest legends), but am now ISO starved again and will stop pulling for a while. Managed to put six Jessica Drew covers in my queue. Need ISO to get her champed now. Purchasing ISO isn't even remotely an option at current prices.

Quebbster

Guess I am officially ISO starved again. I was planning on saving up Latest Legends so I could have a big opening party and open at least 250 in one go. With 40+ different fourstars available in legendary tokens, that would mean around 5 extra covers for each one on average. Now with just 12 fourstars that means I should be getting 15 covers or more for each one, so I need to be ready to champ as many as possible of them to avoid covers going to waste. An off-the-cuff calculation puts the cost for that Little Project at around 3 million ISO at the moment. I currently have around 2 million ISO stockpiled, so I have some way left to go... and that doesn't leave any ISO for the fivestars. Yay.

8punch

i figured actually out why they used the 12 level 4 card bracket for legends

this way it is much easier for whales to get their level 4 cards max champed. they dont get the old cards anymore, which they already have champed and has no more value for them.