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

firethorne

smkspy wrote:

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.

That's another fair criticism. I know I was thinking, "Yo dawg, we heard you hate RNG, so we put RNG in your RNG.". Try something that isn't random sometime. I promise, it won't kill you.

n25philly

Vhailorx wrote:

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. 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.

I can answer this one, Bonus heroes makes vaulting palatable. What do you think the response would be if they only introduced vaulting?

Crowl

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.

The problem is that we have had a year of championing which encourages us to have a broader roster, we now have the new ddq which encourages you to at least have every character rostered and now you make this change (with zero notice as always with anything gamechanging) that forces you to abandon breadth of roster in favour of chasing one old character and a bunch of new ones of variable quality.

Your claim that we can select the characters we want is a false one too, with the way the bonus heroes work, if we select more than two we are actually getting those old ones slower than under the old system and that only applies to the bonus covers which are rng and the only assured draws come from a small subset of covers that are being forced upon us.

If you want to let us be focused on what we need/want, the obvious solution would be to let us select the characters we would like excluded as possible results and as a nice bonus you would also have an abundantly clear view of which characters the playerbase considered too **** to collect giving the dev team a focus for reworks.

sinnerjfl

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 your advice is to spend roughly 70$ on a 40 pack to get 5 covers that are possibly vaulted... ... ...

This is not helpful advice.

Cthulhu

Thank you again for all the feedback! I will discuss again internally with the team.

Nepenthe

Cthulhu wrote:

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.

All hail dread lord Cthulhu!
Ia! Ia! Cthulhu ftaghn!

Crowl

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.

Unless you select new characters, we are not getting what we want for the vast majority of the time, people have run the numbers, if you select more than two 4*s as a favourite then you will gain those ones slower than under the old system and that is before the massive loss of champion rewards from the other couple of dozen that you cannot feasibly select.

To try and portray this change as allowing us to focus on what we want is either disingenuous or a misunderstanding of how your own system now works.

fmftint

Cthulhu wrote:

Thank you again for all the feedback! I will discuss again internally with the team.

What we want is true choice, not choice @5/x

Crowl

firethorne wrote:

smkspy wrote:

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.

That's another fair criticism. I know I was thinking, "Yo dawg, we heard you hate RNG, so we put RNG in your RNG.". Try something that isn't random sometime. I promise, it won't kill you.

Maybe they need to steal an idea from Hearthstone and add pity timers to bonus draws and 5* draws so if RNG hates you, eventually that will be offset by the game taking pity on you and giving you the bonus draw or 5* cover that is mathematically overdue by that point.

GrumpySmurf1002

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.

There's an 'easy' compromise here. Let us dilute our own packs.

Keep the 12 latest in there as obviously this is done to help promote those characters and/or drive roster sales.

Let us add whatever we want to the packs. Maybe some want to draw from 13 characters. Maybe some want 20. Maybe some want all. We'd get to choose how much of the tier we want to work on. That works for all.

Second alternative, keep everything as is, and give us a "Favorites" pack. Create the odds of each tier as you see fit, and let us add the characters.

There just needs to be more method to progress all the characters we want, not just the new ones.

sinnerjfl

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.

Yes, this is what we want. The bonus system is great but it doesnt happen often enough to offset the vaulting of 75% of the 4* tier.

Let us pick from one pack or the other, that is true choice. Not some RNG over RNG that gives an impression of choice.

Crowl

Vhailorx wrote:

(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.

Even if they were convinced that vaulting was the right answer to dealing with dilution, the obvious first step would have been to treat 4*s in a similar manner as 3* except with the slight twist of the latest 12, split the classic 4*s into two groups and rotate each group from season to season alongside the current latest 12.

Another alternative if they seriously wanted us to be able to focus on particular characters then let us select characters who would be included in the regular draws of the token and not simply from the bonus, if somebody was entirely happy with the new system they could leave the token with just the latest 12 and for the person that was completely against the change they could simply add in every vaulted character and the token would have reverted to the old system.

Stax the Foyer

I appreciate you sticking around to listen, Cthulhu. It's great to have some engagement on this topic.

The benefits of bonus heroes are not lost on us. It's a nice bonus, and without the associated vaulting, this would have been a universally acclaimed change.

But for many people, the downsides of the vaulting outweigh the benefits of bonus heroes. With the rotating boosts, focusing on 1-3 individual vaulted heroes isn't enough to make a big difference.

It's especially jarring because it represents a massive shift in the focus and design of the game, that came out of nowhere. You just rolled out the new DDQ node a few weeks ago, which requires older 4* heroes, and Crash of the Titans nodes that occur once or twice a week require a fairly developed version of the older heroes.

75% (and increasing) of the content that we use 4* heroes for requires vaulted heroes, making it that much more difficult for players to impact or even play that content.

You'll have to forgive us if we're a little gobsmacked by this unexpected change.

Crowl

Stax the Foyer wrote:

It's especially jarring because it represents a massive shift in the focus and design of the game, that came out of nowhere. You just rolled out the new DDQ node a few weeks ago, which requires older 4* heroes, and Crash of the Titans nodes that occur once or twice a week require a fairly developed version of the older heroes.

75% (and increasing) of the content that we use 4* heroes for requires vaulted heroes, making it that much more difficult for players to impact or even play that content.

Beyond the reasons above, we have also had the championing system in place for a year or so which absolutely pushed us towards having a widely developed roster in order to take full advantage of the champion rewards and that has effectively been thrown out with this change.

Cthulhu

Thank you, this is all great feedback and we will discuss it when everyone returns next week.

monsieurmojo

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.

Cthulhu, first, I commend you for not only stepping into this tinykittystorm, but for sticking around to read and answer a lot of it. Red name communication is always greatly appreciated, never moreso than in times like these.

Second, I opened 40 LTs the day this change went live. Needless to say, I got *exactly* zero bonus covers. Zero, on top of the less-than-advertised 4-of-40 5* ratio. So please forgive me if I don't share your enthusiasm with the feature. Adding another layer of RNG to RNG is not choice.

Vhailorx

Crowl wrote:

Stax the Foyer wrote:

It's especially jarring because it represents a massive shift in the focus and design of the game, that came out of nowhere. You just rolled out the new DDQ node a few weeks ago, which requires older 4* heroes, and Crash of the Titans nodes that occur once or twice a week require a fairly developed version of the older heroes.

75% (and increasing) of the content that we use 4* heroes for requires vaulted heroes, making it that much more difficult for players to impact or even play that content.

Beyond the reasons above, we have also had the championing system in place for a year or so which absolutely pushed us towards having a widely developed roster in order to take full advantage of the champion rewards and that has effectively been thrown out with this change.

I wouldn't say the champion system has been thrown out completely. But a lot of players invested very heavily in tbat system as a way to mitigate the diwnsides of dilution. The new vaulting system significantly devalues that investment. It would be great if demi/d3 could fix that problem.

But it would at least be a good start if they would acknowledge the inherent tension between vaulting and champs, and the fact that this change has retroactively devalued the resource expenditure of many players.

Crowl

Vhailorx wrote:

I wouldn't say the champion system has been thrown out completely. But a lot of players invested very heavily in tbat system as a way to mitigate the diwnsides of dilution. The new vaulting system significantly devalues that investment.

Sorry, I meant the idea of having a broad roster has basically been thrown aside rather than championing as now any character outside of the latest 12 will pretty much grind to a halt, championing has merely suffered a serious setback rather than being thrown aside.

One other thing that has not been brought up so far is how these changes will interact with the plans to base scaling on SCL, that is already a change that will drastically benefit whales anyway and then on top of that they will have the benefit of their older 4*s being maxed while everyone else's have ground to a halt. Now obviously they needed to do something to mitigate scaling woes of 5* rosters but the interaction of that change with this one would push the pve side of the game too much in the other direction when pvp is already like that as it is.

Liftoff

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 understand what you are saying but that isn't what we are saying. Yes we get a chance at the cover we want, but how many of the new covers do I have to pull to get one cover I want? At 5% that is 20 covers to get one favored 4*

My opinion would be instead of 12 new 4s. We could select the 12 4s we would want to pull. That would be greater than 5%.

I understand this is a job, but waiting until next week isn't going to help. We lose Kate and moonknight on Sunday for mordo and coulson. Am I supposed to open my coins now because I would rather have the older two? If you role this back and I used my coins then I am out of getting covers I really wanted

fmftint

Maybe it's time for a true 4 DDQ where we can earn a specific 4 every day



this is really more than a year overdue