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

spatenfloot

n25philly wrote:

spatenfloot wrote:

One question that has not been addressed:
Will event vaults still randomly contain the characters that were removed from the other tokens?

Yes, this only effects non vault tokens

I still see old characters in the taco vault as well, but wasn't sure if any changes had taken effect yet. If that's the case, there are still plenty of options for getting the old ones.

Wumpushunter

How about a 4 star list that included the consensus best characters and not venom and Riri Williams. I would like to have Iceman, red hulk and Jean Grey just as much as someone wanted them 6 months ago.

Jaedenkaal

That would be pretty counter-productive since, in a perfect world, the designers have a stronger incentive to make all characters as equal as possible, from a gameplay perspective. I realize it's impossible to have all 45+ characters in a tier perfectly balanced against each other, but in any case it would make more sense to attempt to smooth out the tiers rather than making them even worse by skewing drop rates towards over-performers.

In fact, from a money perspective you'd think that they would rather make new characters always better than old characters, so that everyone always wants the new ones (for gameplay reasons). At which point we'd ask them to skew drop rates towards new characters... which they have now done.

n25philly

Jaedenkaal wrote:

That would be pretty counter-productive since, in a perfect world, the designers have a stronger incentive to make all characters as equal as possible, from a gameplay perspective. I realize it's impossible to have all 45+ characters in a tier perfectly balanced against each other, but in any case it would make more sense to attempt to smooth out the tiers rather than making them even worse by skewing drop rates towards over-performers.

In fact, from a money perspective you'd think that they would rather make new characters always better than old characters, so that everyone always wants the new ones (for gameplay reasons). At which point we'd ask them to skew drop rates towards new characters... which they have now done.

It's a lot less work to just force the new ones on you with no choice. One thing you learn by spending time here, the less effort that can be put in by the development team to address any problem, the better.

Jaedenkaal

n25philly wrote:

Jaedenkaal wrote:

That would be pretty counter-productive since, in a perfect world, the designers have a stronger incentive to make all characters as equal as possible, from a gameplay perspective. I realize it's impossible to have all 45+ characters in a tier perfectly balanced against each other, but in any case it would make more sense to attempt to smooth out the tiers rather than making them even worse by skewing drop rates towards over-performers.

In fact, from a money perspective you'd think that they would rather make new characters always better than old characters, so that everyone always wants the new ones (for gameplay reasons). At which point we'd ask them to skew drop rates towards new characters... which they have now done.

It's a lot less work to just force the new ones on you with no choice. One thing you learn by spending time here, the less effort that can be put in by the development team to address any problem, the better.

It would be even less work to stop releasing new characters altogether.
I don't disagree with you that there is a conflict with this feature that involves player choice and control (or the illusion thereof). You can bet it has not escaped the notice of D3/Demiurge that their new feature has met with a lot of backlash for reducing the very thing it was supposed to improve. I'm sure they were expecting a reaction of some kind. Dead air would have been even worse, I think.

Speculating on the motives of the design and development team is not something that will be very productive or constructive, however.

Polares

First repercussions in my day to day play. I was going to champ Carnage, after a lot of time, it was finally his time, with two covers in queue. Then I opened some LTs because, well I don't like to hoard, and I pulled a lot of peggys, wasp and lukes. Peggy is cool because I already have her champed, luke is maxed but not champed, wasp... yeah, wasp. Now I am 'forced' to champ Luke. 5>2 and in the future I will win more of his covers, so that's the clever thing to do.

After Carnage I wanted to champ IW, and that is also not happening, the next one will be Blade.

This is really annoying. I can't chose who I want to champ anymore, all new chars have priority now In fact there is almost no point in champing old good/meh/low tier anymore


Ps: And I don't know why but my pulls show A LOT of repetition, the number of peggys, lukes and wasp I pulled is so much higher than the other chars.

amusingfoo1

I don't have nearly the time to follow through this whole thread, but I definitely have an opinion on all this.

I like the bonus hero idea. Actually, I love it.

Vaulting older heroes, especially 4*s? I kind of like it for latest legends. But extending that to classics and (especially) heroics? Who the hell thought this was a good idea? I have championed every 4* that was available in legendaries before this change (I got Danvers earlier that day), and this is still terrible. Championing rewards are heavily backloaded, and now you can never get to that back end without spending many thousands of dollars to get there before characters are rotated out.

Even if you get every available 4* progression and placement reward, you're still only looking at getting about one cover per season, on average, for any given character. And that's going down as new characters keep diluting the pool further. That's already glacially slow, and it's a whole lot less than that for the 99% of people who aren't placing at the top.

OneLastGambit

amusingfoo1 wrote:

I don't have nearly the time to follow through this whole thread, but I definitely have an opinion on all this.

I like the bonus hero idea. Actually, I love it.

Vaulting older heroes, especially 4*s? I kind of like it for latest legends. But extending that to classics and (especially) heroics? Who the hell thought this was a good idea? I have championed every 4* that was available in legendaries before this change (I got Danvers earlier that day), and this is still terrible. Championing rewards are heavily backloaded, and now you can never get to that back end without spending many thousands of dollars to get there before characters are rotated out.

Even if you get every available 4* progression and placement reward, you're still only looking at getting about one cover per season, on average, for any given character. And that's going down as new characters keep diluting the pool further. That's already glacially slow, and it's a whole lot less than that for the 99% of people who aren't placing at the top.

I'm waiting for the inevitable dev announcement which addresses this by saying
"Hey guys we read that you were upset at missing out on all those awesome backloaded champ rewards...so we have changed all the champ rewards so all the good ones are now frontloaded! Enjoy guys!"

Nick441234

I did have to chuckle a bit when I looked at Ragnarok's pack contents and it features no Ragnarok.

It does seem a little bit bonkers when the guy on the cover isn't actually in any of the packs.

Jaedenkaal

nick_chicane wrote:

I did have to chuckle a bit when I looked at Ragnarok's pack contents and it features no Ragnarok.

It does seem a little bit bonkers when the guy on the cover isn't actually in any of the packs.

You sure? You looked in the 3* section, right? He's the pink-highlighted one in the top left.

Nick441234

Jaedenkaal wrote:

nick_chicane wrote:

I did have to chuckle a bit when I looked at Ragnarok's pack contents and it features no Ragnarok.

It does seem a little bit bonkers when the guy on the cover isn't actually in any of the packs.

You sure? You looked in the 3* section, right? He's the pink-highlighted one in the top left.

Oh yeah, must have missed him. OK, so not quite as bonkers then.

Pinko_McFly

Just posting to voice my reservations against this system.
I have just hit the halfway point with champions 4*s and was looking forward to get to a point where I could stop feeling the need to hoard my CP and open some legendaries (without wasting so many covers) and reap the awards of adding champion levels to my 4*. The latter part is what really ticks me off about this update. We champion them so they are strong but also to get these rewards. Not a fan of you clamping down on this revenue source.

If you had left the classics alone ( or taken out the recent 12 4*s), no one would be complaining and would probably be applauding the change. Instead you vaulted these characters with no chance of release ( a feature the old vault at least had).

Is there a daily 4* DDQ node on the way that will at least give us a steady stream of champion levels? I doubt it since DDQ has 11 months before it's next update, but at least it would have taken the sting out of this clampdown.

Reecoh

wade66 wrote:

This tries to solve to many problems with the least amount of work. People complain about new character releases because it takes forever to get them covered to usable levels, hence the tokens now focusing on the newest ones. While the favorite system is a means to give player control over an infinitesimal portion of the RNG locked progression system without flooding the game to appease the players.

Seems to me that the least amount of work to address this issue would have been to leave the tokens alone & limit the Favorites/Bonus Heroes to the most recent 12 (or whatever). The basic mechanics don't change but we get a small uptick in latest characters for some amount of time after they are released.

The way they have it now seems backwards to me.

Cthulhu

Overall this is a way to fix how many characters were in the packs, pack dilution. Now, you have the latest characters and any number of bonus characters that you select to help determine your draw. My first pull, I was able to get 5 bonus covers of a character I hearted by opening a 40 pack. I know that's a lot of hero points for that particular pack. But the main thing is that now you select the covers that you want from all of the characters so it's more focused on what you need, rather then a huge number of all the characters you may or may not need.

Thank you all for the feedback, please continue to try it out and let me know what you think. I'll do my best to read more comments and answer any questions in this thread.

Moon Roach

Cthulhu wrote:

Overall this is a way to fix how many characters were in the packs, pack dilution. Now, you have the latest characters and any number of bonus characters that you select to help determine your draw. My first pull, I was able to get 5 bonus covers of a character I hearted by opening a 40 pack. I know that's a lot of hero points for that particular pack. But the main thing is that now you select the covers that you want from all of the characters so it's more focused on what you need, rather then a huge number of all the characters you may or may not need.

Thank you all for the feedback, please continue to try it out and let me know what you think. I'll do my best to read more comments and answer any questions in this thread.

Interesting. Isn't the next logical step for this that a pack contains only favourites? Then it would be really focussed.

Nepenthe

Cthulhu wrote:

Overall this is a way to fix how many characters were in the packs, pack dilution. Now, you have the latest characters and any number of bonus characters that you select to help determine your draw. My first pull, I was able to get 5 bonus covers of a character I hearted by opening a 40 pack. I know that's a lot of hero points for that particular pack. But the main thing is that now you select the covers that you want from all of the characters so it's more focused on what you need, rather then a huge number of all the characters you may or may not need.

Thank you all for the feedback, please continue to try it out and let me know what you think. I'll do my best to read more comments and answer any questions in this thread.

So far I've pulled 4 bonus 3*s from elites & standards, 1 bonus 4* from a heroic, and 1 bonus 5* from a classic LT. The lasy was particularly nice because the non-bonus was an unusable black SS for my 1/1/5 SS.
I don't think anyone is complaining about the bonus heroes portion of the change.

The change affects the 4* tier most drastically, because of the ratio of unavailable to available heroes, and because LTs amount for the majority of 4* covers earned by most active players. Wouldn't a better fix for cover dilution in packs be separating them into different types of tokens so players still have a choice? This is what you did with the 5* tier, after all.

Thank you for reading our feedback, and I hope you will consider changes based on it. Limiting which characters were in packs was tried before, with rotating some 3*s out for months at a time, and it wasn't popular then either.

spatenfloot

Moon Roach wrote:

Cthulhu wrote:

Overall this is a way to fix how many characters were in the packs, pack dilution. Now, you have the latest characters and any number of bonus characters that you select to help determine your draw. My first pull, I was able to get 5 bonus covers of a character I hearted by opening a 40 pack. I know that's a lot of hero points for that particular pack. But the main thing is that now you select the covers that you want from all of the characters so it's more focused on what you need, rather then a huge number of all the characters you may or may not need.

Thank you all for the feedback, please continue to try it out and let me know what you think. I'll do my best to read more comments and answer any questions in this thread.

Interesting. Isn't the next logical step for this that a pack contains only favourites? Then it would be really focussed.

Just sell 40 packs of each 4 star.
Profit.

Cthulhu

I understand what your saying. You guys would like a pack of 4 stars that are all older 4 star covers and a pack of new 4 star covers, but what I'm saying is you can select the exact 4 stars you want to focus on and when you get a bonus cover it will be the exact cover you have hearted. Now you can select the 4 stars you want to work on, and get them as bonus draw, so if your working to get covers for a few older 4 stars, just select those few older 4 stars.

Stax the Foyer

Cthulhu wrote:

I understand what your saying. You guys would like a pack of 4 stars that are all older 4 star covers and a pack of new 4 star covers, but what I'm saying is you can select the exact 4 stars you want to focus on and when you get a bonus cover it will be the exact cover you have hearted. Now you can select the 4 stars you want to work on, and get them as bonus draw, so if your working to get covers for a few older 4 stars, just select those few older 4 stars.

You can have as many older 4*s as you want, as long as there's only two of them.

Nepenthe

Cthulhu wrote:

Overall this is a way to fix how many characters were in the packs, pack dilution. Now, you have the latest characters and any number of bonus characters that you select to help determine your draw. My first pull, I was able to get 5 bonus covers of a character I hearted by opening a 40 pack. I know that's a lot of hero points for that particular pack. But the main thing is that now you select the covers that you want from all of the characters so it's more focused on what you need, rather then a huge number of all the characters you may or may not need.

Thank you all for the feedback, please continue to try it out and let me know what you think. I'll do my best to read more comments and answer any questions in this thread.

Another thought, on rereading the part I bolded above: The "main thing" as you call it is the part that only happens 5% of the time. Instead of buying a 40 of heroics, try picking a few favorite older 4* heroes and opening a dozen or so classic legends tokens. Was the main portion of that experience getting maybe 1 or 2 bonus heroes that you had control over, or was it getting a bunch of the newer segregated 4*s you didn't pick and "may or may not need"?

Thanks again.