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

fmftint

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.

Please show me a LT 40 pack

Cthulhu

It's both. You get the new covers mixed with any selected 4 stars that you would like to get.

This is an attempt to allow you to choose what you want and have a better chance at getting what you want.

Nepenthe

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.

And we do understand what you're saying about favoriting older 4*s, BUT:
That kind of works if there's only 1-3 older ones. If there's, say, 10 older 4*s I'd like a chance to get, my 5% chance at bonus hero is divided between them so each has a 0.5% chance. Compared to each of the 12 latest having a 7.08% chance. Big difference.

Felonius

DayvBang wrote:

Vhailorx wrote:

Everyone likes the favorites system. Who wouldn't, it's 5% more covers of our choice. That's great! this game has been absolutely desperate for such a mechanic for years.

The problem is tying that very positive change to the new character vaulting system. Dilution was a real issue. But bonus heroes would go a long way towards mitigating it. Why then ALSO make this massive change to the way tokens work? (A change that just happens to appear likely to substantially slow down the rate at which vets can get their older champs up into the 340+ 4* champ promise land, and also makes long term hoard much less efficient.) Demi is fiddling with a lot of different levers all at once, and IMO the most rational explanation for makings changes this way is that they want to obfuscate of the more player-unfriendly changes by doing everything at the same time.

This, right here. All of this.

Introduced on its own, Bonus Heroes would be a new feature receiving a warm welcome from nearly 100% of players. Tied to a massive and for many players deeply upsetting change in cover availability, it stops feeling like a great new reward stream and starts to look like an inadequate apology for the return of cover vaulting.

I totally agree with DavyBang and Vhailorx.

My biggest complaint about vaulting is that it nukes the resources my champs were generating. Easy solution to dilution? As others have said in this thread, put the newest characters (3x 5* and 12x 4*, for example) into the Latest LTs, and put the remainders into one (or more) Classic (etc.) LTs. Let the players decide which characters they want to chase.

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.

At first I was like: Yay! A RedName, but then I read how he got lucky with 5 bonus heroes in his 40pk, which makes the system Working as Intended, everything is rosy, and I some how got the feeling that these 30-some pages of discussion are being neatly swept under a rug as irrelevant, hands dusted, moving on...

I purchased a 40-pack, and got ZERO bonus heroes (true story!).

>self-edited to remove some extraneous sarcasm...<

Cthulhu

fmftint 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.

Please show me a LT 40 pack

I didn't mention specifically what I opened, I opened the Heroic 40x pack.

Cthulhu

I'm in here on a Friday instead of going home early and sweeping things under the rug. We talked about this thread this morning and I'm explaining what was intended by the entire team. I also mentioned that I will continue to look at feedback and answer questions.

kidicarus

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.

Most of the comments in here are for people angry that they will not be able to pull significant covers for the 4* heroes that they have already championed or really, 4* covers of older heroes.

I honestly doubt that you were able to get 5 bonus 4* heroes by pulling a 40 pack considering the 1:14 odds of pulling a 4* in heroic packs, or 1:20 for the agent Coulson pack. Most of us don't really care about the bonus odds on 3*s.

Also, no 40 packs for legendary tokens to get the improved 1:12 draw rate for bonus tokens.

n25philly

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.

rng inside of rng. Can we add more layers of rng? I think I will be even happier if I have to go through tend layers of rng to get stuff. What you guys doesn't seem to get is that not everyone wants or is really in position to hyper focus on a single character. I don't have any iso to spend so it makes sense to spread things out until I do and cover numerous characters with covers to level later. If I favorite all the 4*'s I already have rostered to do that, the small rng change spreads out really fast.

Also vaulting 3* just takes away champ rewards. Why do I have to depends on 1/22 of 5% to get covers to add champ levels? **** odds again. So this now just lowers the resources I have available to put together to roster and level characters. Oh right, this is to slow us down and take away those resources...

Adding bonus heroes might have been done in conjunction with vaulting but doesn't explain why there is vaulting now matter how many lies and spun or how much you guys want to dance around the question

Nepenthe

Cthulhu wrote:

It's both. You get the new covers mixed with any selected 4 stars that you would like to get.

This is an attempt to allow you to choose what you want and have a better chance at getting what you want.

I appreciate the attempt. I think I understand the problem it was trying to fix, and I even think it partially does fix it. But if it's all about giving us more choice and control, why not still have a choice to pull from the classics pool? When you made latest legends for 5*s, you kept a token type that had the older 5*s too. We have choices. The new favorite part is nice, but 95% of the time my choice doesn't matter.

Cthulhu

Has someone lied? No one is intending to lie to you guys, I certainly haven't lied.

n25philly

Nepenthe wrote:

Cthulhu wrote:

It's both. You get the new covers mixed with any selected 4 stars that you would like to get.

This is an attempt to allow you to choose what you want and have a better chance at getting what you want.

I appreciate the attempt. I think I understand the problem it was trying to fix, and I even think it partially does fix it. But if it's all about giving us more choice and control, why not still have a choice to pull from the classics pool? When you made latest legends for 5*s, you kept a token type that had the older 5*s too. We have choices. The new favorite part is nice, but 95% of the time my choice doesn't matter.

Taking away choices = more choices. What is so hard to understand about that? I love how forcing the latest on everyone is somehow giving us choice

Cthulhu

Nepenthe wrote:

Cthulhu wrote:

It's both. You get the new covers mixed with any selected 4 stars that you would like to get.

This is an attempt to allow you to choose what you want and have a better chance at getting what you want.

I appreciate the attempt. I think I understand the problem it was trying to fix, and I even think it partially does fix it. But if it's all about giving us more choice and control, why not still have a choice to pull from the classics pool? When you made latest legends for 5*s, you kept a token type that had the older 5*s too. We have choices. The new favorite part is nice, but 95% of the time my choice doesn't matter.

Thank you, I will discuss this again with the team.

firethorne

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.

And again, if your want to work on all of the old 4*s, it will take you 20 times the amount of pulls. If you want one cover of one character, it takes ~20 draws. If you want one cover for two characters, ~40 draws. 3 characters, 60 draws. Under the old system, 60 draws gave you a good shot at getting you one of every 4*. Now ~60 draws will get a mere 3 old chars. To get all the classics finished, it is around 7000 draws, up from ~600. Utterly ridiculous! An unfathomable over-correction.

GrumpySmurf1002

Cthulhu wrote:

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.

If this was your intent, then the bonus pull rate should be a helluva lot better than 5%

Edit: To elaborate: Over 100 LT pulls, now we get ~7 of each of the latest, and ~4 of a specific one (or 2 of 2, or 1 of 4). Without the vaulting, we'd be looking at ~2 of everyone.

So either way, two characters you might favorite progresses at roughly the same rate, but progress on ALL other non-latest characters has now been stopped. That's not a win for most forum players.


2nd Edit: Thank you though for walking into this excrement storm.

n25philly

Cthulhu wrote:

Has someone lied? No one is intending to lie to you guys, I certainly haven't lied.

How many times are we going to be told we can pull whoever we want when the majority of 3 & 4's aren't in tokens. For those of us that need and want all these characters locking them behind another layer of rng that only comes into play a small percentage of the time is a total screw job.

More options means forcing 12 characters on us? How is that being honest? How is that giving us choice?

Felonius

Cthulhu wrote:

I'm in here on a Friday instead of going home early and sweeping things under the rug. We talked about this thread this morning and I'm explaining what was intended by the entire team. I also mentioned that I will continue to look at feedback and answer questions.

I apologize for the snark. So often we see that type of post and that's it. No further responses. Clearly, you are actually reading/responding to posts. Thank you for spending the time.

What are your thoughts about our champ "farms" being (from my point of view) nerfed... that our ability to get to the higher level, sweeter, champ rewards has been drastically slowed, now that we'll see fewer covers for the older characters that many (most?) of us already have champed?

Now that LTs are going to be primarily giving us New Characters, we're going to be pressured to champ those, but we have less resources (ISO, primarily, but also HP for slots) now because we're getting fewer rewards from our champs.

rubix_qube

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.

I really think the devs are missing the point here. When the bonus feature kicked off I opened ~150 LT's. Yes I got a lot of the new characters and increased my bonus character, which was Carol Danvers, by 22 levels. No complaints about making her stronger. The biggest problem I ran into is that the new characters were all I was able to get over and over and over again. So instead of getting older, champed characters and making them stronger, while at the same time gaining much needed iso, xp, and perhaps more LTs, all I was getting were covers that I had to throw away for 1k iso. My mistake was opening that many at one time, but I guess I was hoping for something different.

I can certainly check my older 4*s to get the bonuses, but I have 26 of them. So while I wait for the rare bonus I'm still throwing away multiple covers of the new characters because I can't get the iso fast enough to cover them. Maybe the devs can change the time that we can store extra covers from two weeks to indefinitely. Let us decide when we get rid of them.

I might as well add this, my Luke Cage was at 5/0/4 at the start of those 150 pulls, so that means that I opened well over 120 4* tokens. I got a ridiculous amount of Luke Cage, but almost all of them were yellow and red. After all those pulls my Cage is now 5/2/5, so there's that problem too. I promise you that I opened more than 10 Cage tokens.

Maybe this will smooth out over time, but I think there are tweaks that you guys can do that would help the player base. I think in this case the customer is right. A good business has to be able to read these situations correctly.

smkspy

I'd like to just get ONE of these wonderful bonus draws. Instead all I've been able to get us the usual nothing in over 50+ tokens. So much improved and control progress, guess I should $$$$ on 40 packs.

Crowl

Polares wrote:

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.

Relatively small sample size so we will tend to get more streaks, just consider yourself lucky that you have been getting two good characters, so far I have only had gwenpool, wasp and riri with the latter now up to a rather lopsided 3/2/5.

Vhailorx

Hi Cthulhu,

Thanks for taking the time to read our messages and post some of your thoughts on this thread. We REALLY appreciate redname communication, even (perhaps especially) when the conversation is a bit uncomfortable!

Now to the less comfortable portion of my message.

There are basically two major changes that have been implemented here:

(1) Bonus Heroes: players get an extra cover on 5% of their pulls, and better still they can guarantee that these bonus heroes will be from a self-selected list.

(2) Vaulting: Token pools at the 3* and 4* rarity levels (so elite, heroic, event, and legendary tokens) have been drastically shifted. with almost 75% of current 4*s removed from the pool of possible token drops.

Your comments have directly addressed issue (1). Grats on exceptionally good luck in a 40pack draw. 5 bonus heroes is awesome. It's also not representative of the new experience, but I think that most players are very happy about bonus heroes. targeted roster progression is something this game desperate needed.

Unfortunately, your comments did not really address issue (2) directly. Nor did you address the fact that basic math clearly demonstrates that the scale of bonus heroes and 4* vaulting are completely out of proportion. We can get bonus heroes on 5% of token pulls. But for LTs, well above 50% of token pulls are impacted by these changes. It's unrealistic to hold up bonus heroes as an equal offset to character vaulting. They are just on a completely different scale.

Furthermore, I would note that bonus heroes all by itself would go a very long way towards mitigating the (very real) problems created by token dilution. Why introduce both bonus heroes and vaulting at the same time? Won't it be harder to measure the individual effects of both changes?

TL;DR Thanks for posting, but I do think that your comments did not fully address the concerns that have been stated on the forums, and would definitely appreciate additional commentary on the topic.