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

smkspy

I just don't see how the devs looked at the 5 star method of acquiring characters and thought "hey, let's apply that to 75% of the 4 stars but at an even lower percentage too. Everyone will love being able to acquire those characters in the exact same manner."

I do appreciate trying to put all the new toys in our hands and at a useable level, but if you really wanted to do that there was better ways to accomplish it.

Edit: And another consequence; pvp 900 progression is going to be even more of grueling experience than already is for 4 star covers. Mad dogs in a pit just for extra champ levels.

SleepingKoala

Appreciate that you are reading and considering player feedback Cthulhu.

While the ability to select favourites is great, the inability to draw an older 4* from a LT or 20CP would very much hurt my 4* progression.

I play a fair bit and earn approximately 200-225 CP & 4-5 LTs a month. That's roughly 15-16 pulls/month.

I have 12 4* champed so about a quarter chance or a theoretical 4 pulls go to a champed reward and +1 char level in the old pool (0 pulls to champs in new pool)

Another 20+ older 4* are at 6-13 covers and about a half chance or 8 pulls should go here to help me cover them and get them ready to be champed (again 0 pulls for this lot in the new pool)

The latest 12 4* - I have them at 2-12 covers...a theoretical 4 pulls under the old pool, 16 pulls under the new pool.

And a theoretical 1 pull of my Favourite under the new system.


TLDR: progression on older 4* grinds to a halt. New 4* get too many covers.

fun_and_gun

there are too many pages to sift through so my apologies if this has been suggested...how about mpq letting vip buyers the option to choose 5 or so characters of their choice as replacements to the token pool? I have yet to purchase vip but with this option, I would do so.

Uthgarprime

I think they just made up all this dilution nonsense so they had a way to get new people to buy more hp. I mean if you are new and didn't know any better, you heart your favorite character thinking this is cool. Then reality hits when you get a 3* you don't have and a bonus cover of another 3* you don't have now you have to spend money to get that character rostered.
I like how they are trying to sell us we get so much choice now with the older characters except you see 1 maybe 2 pulled a month, woo, what progress.

Ailbe

Bonus heroes are AWESOME! I've probably cashed in around 75 tokens now since the update went live. As of now I've pulled the following bonus cards:
5x Dr. Strange
4x Thanos (allowing me to champion him just a few minutes ago)
2x Medusa
1x Peggy Carter (taking her to 13/13)

12 bonus cards out of 75ish tokens? Thats an awesome gift the devs have given us. I'll take it. I think the trick is people cash in tokens the second they get them. I tend to save tokens a bunch, so I see bonuses in batches, which helps.

revskip

Uthgarprime wrote:

I think they just made up all this dilution nonsense so they had a way to get new people to buy more hp. I mean if you are new and didn't know any better, you heart your favorite character thinking this is cool. Then reality hits when you get a 3* you don't have and a bonus cover of another 3* you don't have now you have to spend money to get that character rostered.
I like how they are trying to sell us we get so much choice now with the older characters except you see 1 maybe 2 pulled a month, woo, what progress.

Dilution has been one of the most frequent complaints on the forum for a while now. Can't count how many times I have read something along the lines of "Oh great, this new character looks great. Too bad I won't be able to use them for a year."

Definitely wasn't a made up complaint. The final implementation might not be something you like but please don't pretend that the issue that precipitated the change wasn't real.

Uthgarprime

I could have worded it better, what I meant by dilution, is that is the "excuse" they are using. Its a problem, there were other things that could have been done besides vaulting. The rest of my post still holds. I guess we should all be happy to get 1 to maybe 5 of a given old character per year. This totally wrecks how I was enjoying this game. The 5% bonus is so laughable, once again the devs pretend they are doing us a big favor with this. I swear they think 4* covers are worth a ton of real world gold each. To all those that say we get too many 4*'s, why did they add an extra to 7 day progression and progression in general if they didn't want us to have so many.
Look if for once in the history of ever, they would give us a roadmap for what they had in mind that would be probably alleviate some of the complaining. If they were doing something long term in the future that put things in context this could be the greatest change ever, but we have no clue.
Another ftp game I enjoy was having a no communication crisis and the forum was melting down and everyone assumed the game was on the verge of ending. The devs came out and laid out a plan in the for the future. It gave things they wanted to implement with no specifics but you got the idea of where the game was going. The community was very positive and had a renewed hope for great things.
Once again lack of communication leads to the community to assume the worst. This happens every time, this company goes dark with communication. It has been better recently, but its just not enough clearly. We don't need specifics but an idea of what is going on.
I love this game, it feeds my collection addiction, I just don't like how this was done. I want to spend money on this game, but they keep doing things that just put me off.

NewMcG

Uthgarprime wrote:

I guess we should all be happy to get 1 to maybe 5 of a given old character per year.

Say you acquire a Legendary or the amount of CP to purchase one every other day or so, which I'd say is pretty fair for the non-whale, extensively-playing crowd. By June we will be past 50 characters.

Old system would play out statistically this way: If you get relatively even distribution of those 50 characters from your LT pulls, that would put you right around 3.6ish each throughout the year, if you have zero wasted covers.

Take away the 15% (average) or 26-28 LT pulls if luck plays out statistically right, and you're at roughly 155 4* covers from LT, or 3.1 per character. Which is almost dead in the middle of the "1-5" you're upset about. (Except in the new system you'll actually be getting usable newer characters.)

NMANOZ

I would like to see a weekly favourites vault.

There could be 20 covers in it featuring 1 cover from each of your 3 favoured characters.

Maybe give 1 token each day for logging in and playing a match or for doing something specific (like making it a DDQ reward each day).

Uthgarprime

Now it will only get worse, we will get less and less old 4*'s because of dilution. after 6 months the old 4*'s are less in the vault, they will show up in event less often cause there are all those new characters. So after 6 months it will be even less of the old, eventually you will be down to 2 or 1 a year. And it will only get worse over time. See there is still a dilution problem they did nothing to address. Plus unless I want to spend hundreds on ISO I will probably struggle to champion or use the "new" 4*'s before they leave the vault, I have a 2/2/2 Kate Bishop, she will probably never be championed cause it will take 2 years to max cover her. About the same for the next 2 that leave the vault, when does that end? No matter how you slice it this does that address the dilution problem, it just pushes it off to another part of the game.

Nick441234

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 issue with this though is that it brings championing to a standstill, particularly with 3*s. As someone who only raises my 4* levels as my 3*s catch them up through champion levels, my progress will stop drastically now. Its not realistic to add all the 3*s, who aren't in the packs, to my favourites list just so I can continue championing as it completely defeats the point of having favourites. So right now, only a small percentage of the 3*s will progress while the rest are completely left behind. How is this better?

n25philly

Task for the morning: Find a replacement game. Not an easy task as a large part of the draw is the marvel license, but I'm sure I'll find something

mr_X

Really not a fan of this only latest 4* change. Long term player and my 4*farm was starting to pay of with higher level champ rewards slowly helping to shore up my 5* roster. For a while effectively all 4*s have really done for me.

Guess there maybe is winners and losers in this but cant help feeling like my progress just got nerfed.

It would of been nice if they had left up to the player to heart this system or not.

likwid6

Probably the most frustrating thing for me are the number of older 4*s I was just getting close to champing.

Guess my 4/4/4 Deadpool & 4/4/4 Thor won't ever be champed unless: (a) I buy that last cover for 120 CP -or- (b) I get insanely lucky and pull them as a bonus token (haven't gotten a bonus in 8 pulls since Bonus release).

kyo28

Here's my take on the changes and I really hope Demiurge takes the time to read this:

Adding Bonus Heroes : 1 step forward! This helps us push % up for the character(s) we want to champion or keep building up
Limiting Latest Legendary Tokens to most recent 5-4*s : 1 step forward! This helps us build newer characters faster as we have a high rate pull for these covers
Removing older 4*s all together from Legendary Tokens : 7 steps backward! How are newer players with less mature rosters supposed to be able to champ older 4*s now?

Let's go over this last point. There are two options to build up older 4*s for newer players:

Option 1 : Using CP to get the missing covers. As long as you have 1 cover of each, you could potentially do that but that will turn out very costly in regards to CP spent: Imagine you have an older 4* at 2/1/2. That would mean you need 13-5= 8 covers. Now with one cover costing 120CP that means you're looking at 8x120=960 CP. That's just too expensive!

Option 2 : just keep pulling covers and favorite the older 4*s you want to champion. Some users say that this is actually the best course of action and increases your chances of championing your older 4*s as you get 5% chance of getting a bonus character. So short answer: we go from a 1.5% chance to 5% chance. That holds true if you only need to champion 1 older 4*. But younger rosters have multiple older 4*s to champion and thus need to favourite multiple older 4*s which will dilute the pull rate under 1.5%. Another way to get older 4*s is through vaults but those have very low yields (one chance in 80 for PVE event, one chance in 300 for Taco Tokens) and these instances will be further and farther between as more 4*s are introduced and thus the cycle will become longer. Finally, I can get 3 covers by championing 3*s but well, that's just 3 covers, right?

Now let's have a look at my roster, being a 440 day player, so neither new nor veteran, somewhere in between. Here are the older 4*s I really want to champion:
Antman : 5/4/4 > cover missing: 0
HulkBuster: 4/3/3 > cover missing: 3
Red Hulk : 2/5/2 > cover missing: 4
Professor X : 3/4/3 > cover missing: 3
Invisible Woman : 3/5/5 > cover missing: 0
Cyclops : 2/5/2 > cover missing: 4
Jean Grey : 2/2/1 > cover missing: 8
Iceman : 2/1/2 > cover missing: 8

---

Total covers needed : 30

So I need 30 covers that I can no longer get with LT pulls and using CP to get those covers would amount to an insane amount. Favoriting them all will dilute the pull rate to 5%/8= 0.625% which is far less than the 1.5% it used to be. Neither option 1 nor 2 is a viable option to me. And as you can see I still need a lot of covers for some of the top tier 4*s like Ice Man, Jean Grey and Cyclops and now I feel my progress is completely stifled. Yes, I can build newer characters like Riri faster but she is not nearly as useful as a Jean Grey or Iceman.

Serious question to Demiurge: Have you thought about this problem? Did you have transitioning rosters in mind when implementing this new feature? Or were you only thinking about mature rosters will all older 4*s champed?

Possible solutions I can think of:
1. Remove all new 4* covers from Classic Legendary Tokens and replace them with the older 4*s
2. Create multiple Legendary Token Packs. Keep newest as it is but create sub packs for the older 5-4*s with 3 5*s and 20 4*s per pack. That will give good pull rates for each type of cover and every player can choose for which character(s) he or she wants to go for.

I would prefer option 2 but could live with option 1 as well. But the system as it is now is completely broken for newer players, which from a business point of view is also not a good thing because you risk losing newer players because they feel they simply can't create decent 4*-5* rosters anymore.

I play daily, I paid money to buy HP, I paid money to get VIP status ... but if this system remains as it is, I will lose my drive to keep playing and won't spend money on the game anymore. It completely caters to longtime and whale type players and leaves the others hanging dry. The thing that bothers me the most is that Demiurge doesn't have any longterm planning it seems. It's always just mucking about, changing this and that. But really good game creators create a system that is long term viable and appeals both to longterm and new players alike ... This? This is just short term mucking about and I find it very poorly designed.

Warbringa

Ok...so frankly latest legends should be latest 5* and 12 latest 4* characters. Classic should be all other 5* and 4* characters. You are really hampering people's ability to complete older 4* characters. Many of my 4* nearer to completion are older characters and now I am put even further behind the 8 ball as they say since my chances to complete them have dropped even further. Don't give the bonus hero % line either as I will probably open more classic legends tokens than I receive bonus heroes. It doesn't replace the fact that I would like the ability to still go after older 4*s. Just give people the choice instead of removing it entirely. It is one of the things you usually mess up in this game with updates like this.

If you did this in order to make people buy from the stupid limited vaults in order to complete old 4* then you probably just lost me, a long-time player. My only sense of achievement in this game over the past 6 months has been that I am near completion on several older 4* and finally moving into the 4* meta and you just slowed me down....again. Just like you did when you decided to not allow cover buying with HP or introduce Shield intercepts which I can't even get......

broll

So far since its inception I've gotten a single bonus cover. It was a 5* from LTs. I have not received a single one form STs, ETs, HTs, or PvP packs. I don't buy 10 and 40 packs and getting a slightly better percent chance doesn't make me any more willing to buy them (which this seems to be the thing they really want out of the change). I'd be totally fine with everything if none of the characters were vaulted. There are tons of great suggestions on ways to make that happen: new packs, throw the old into classics, etc. Pick one. I won't pay a single cent into the game while characters remain vaulted.

carrion_pigeons

kyo28 wrote:

Here's my take on the changes and I really hope Demiurge takes the time to read this:

Adding Bonus Heroes : 1 step forward! This helps us push % up for the character(s) we want to champion or keep building up
Limiting Latest Legendary Tokens to most recent 5-4*s : 1 step forward! This helps us build newer characters faster as we have a high rate pull for these covers
Removing older 4*s all together from Legendary Tokens : 7 steps backward! How are newer players with less mature rosters supposed to be able to champ older 4*s now?

Let's go over this last point. There are two options to build up older 4*s for newer players:

Option 1 : Using CP to get the missing covers. As long as you have 1 cover of each, you could potentially do that but that will turn out very costly in regards to CP spent: Imagine you have an older 4* at 2/1/2. That would mean you need 13-5= 8 covers. Now with one cover costing 120CP that means you're looking at 8x120=960 CP. That's just too expensive!

Option 2 : just keep pulling covers and favorite the older 4*s you want to champion. Some users say that this is actually the best course of action and increases your chances of championing your older 4*s as you get 5% chance of getting a bonus character. So short answer: we go from a 1.5% chance to 5% chance. That holds true if you only need to champion 1 older 4*. But younger rosters have multiple older 4*s to champion and thus need to favourite multiple older 4*s which will dilute the pull rate under 1.5%. Another way to get older 4*s is through vaults but those have very low yields (one chance in 80 for PVE event, one chance in 300 for Taco Tokens) and these instances will be further and farther between as more 4*s are introduced and thus the cycle will become longer. Finally, I can get 3 covers by championing 3*s but well, that's just 3 covers, right?

Now let's have a look at my roster, being a 440 day player, so neither new nor veteran, somewhere in between. Here are the older 4*s I really want to champion:
Antman : 5/4/4 > cover missing: 0
HulkBuster: 4/3/3 > cover missing: 3
Red Hulk : 2/5/2 > cover missing: 4
Professor X : 3/4/3 > cover missing: 3
Invisible Woman : 3/5/5 > cover missing: 0
Cyclops : 2/5/2 > cover missing: 4
Jean Grey : 2/2/1 > cover missing: 8
Iceman : 2/1/2 > cover missing: 8

---

Total covers needed : 30

So I need 30 covers that I can no longer get with LT pulls and using CP to get those covers would amount to an insane amount. Favoriting them all will dilute the pull rate to 5%/8= 0.625% which is far less than the 1.5% it used to be. Neither option 1 nor 2 is a viable option to me. And as you can see I still need a lot of covers for some of the top tier 4*s like Ice Man, Jean Grey and Cyclops and now I feel my progress is completely stifled. Yes, I can build newer characters like Riri faster but she is not nearly as useful as a Jean Grey or Iceman.

Serious question to Demiurge: Have you thought about this problem? Did you have transitioning rosters in mind when implementing this new feature? Or were you only thinking about mature rosters will all older 4*s champed?

Possible solutions I can think of:
1. Remove all new 4* covers from Classic Legendary Tokens and replace them with the older 4*s
2. Create multiple Legendary Token Packs. Keep newest as it is but create sub packs for the older 5-4*s with 3 5*s and 20 4*s per pack. That will give good pull rates for each type of cover and every player can choose for which character(s) he or she wants to go for.

I would prefer option 2 but could live with option 1 as well. But the system as it is now is completely broken for newer players, which from a business point of view is also not a good thing because you risk losing newer players because they feel they simply can't create decent 4*-5* rosters anymore.

I play daily, I paid money to buy HP, I paid money to get VIP status ... but if this system remains as it is, I will lose my drive to keep playing and won't spend money on the game anymore. It completely caters to longtime and whale type players and leaves the others hanging dry. The thing that bothers me the most is that Demiurge doesn't have any longterm planning it seems. It's always just mucking about, changing this and that. But really good game creators create a system that is long term viable and appeals both to longterm and new players alike ... This? This is just short term mucking about and I find it very poorly designed.

I disagree.

In the long term is exactly where this change is good. You can say you want to champ all those characters so your pool is more dilute than before, but over the long term that won't stay true. You'll eventually pick up the covers you want (faster, even, and with more control than before, if you narrow down your choices to the ones you feel are highest priority and then, you know, just change your favorites after you've hit champ status), and then the character dilution won't be an issue anymore.

On the other hand, if they had kept going the way they were, then dilution was just going to get worse and worse for everyone. Long-term is exactly what the devs were thinking about, with this change.

n25philly

carrion pigeons wrote:

kyo28 wrote:

Here's my take on the changes and I really hope Demiurge takes the time to read this:

Adding Bonus Heroes : 1 step forward! This helps us push % up for the character(s) we want to champion or keep building up
Limiting Latest Legendary Tokens to most recent 5-4*s : 1 step forward! This helps us build newer characters faster as we have a high rate pull for these covers
Removing older 4*s all together from Legendary Tokens : 7 steps backward! How are newer players with less mature rosters supposed to be able to champ older 4*s now?

Let's go over this last point. There are two options to build up older 4*s for newer players:

Option 1 : Using CP to get the missing covers. As long as you have 1 cover of each, you could potentially do that but that will turn out very costly in regards to CP spent: Imagine you have an older 4* at 2/1/2. That would mean you need 13-5= 8 covers. Now with one cover costing 120CP that means you're looking at 8x120=960 CP. That's just too expensive!

Option 2 : just keep pulling covers and favorite the older 4*s you want to champion. Some users say that this is actually the best course of action and increases your chances of championing your older 4*s as you get 5% chance of getting a bonus character. So short answer: we go from a 1.5% chance to 5% chance. That holds true if you only need to champion 1 older 4*. But younger rosters have multiple older 4*s to champion and thus need to favourite multiple older 4*s which will dilute the pull rate under 1.5%. Another way to get older 4*s is through vaults but those have very low yields (one chance in 80 for PVE event, one chance in 300 for Taco Tokens) and these instances will be further and farther between as more 4*s are introduced and thus the cycle will become longer. Finally, I can get 3 covers by championing 3*s but well, that's just 3 covers, right?

Now let's have a look at my roster, being a 440 day player, so neither new nor veteran, somewhere in between. Here are the older 4*s I really want to champion:
Antman : 5/4/4 > cover missing: 0
HulkBuster: 4/3/3 > cover missing: 3
Red Hulk : 2/5/2 > cover missing: 4
Professor X : 3/4/3 > cover missing: 3
Invisible Woman : 3/5/5 > cover missing: 0
Cyclops : 2/5/2 > cover missing: 4
Jean Grey : 2/2/1 > cover missing: 8
Iceman : 2/1/2 > cover missing: 8

---

Total covers needed : 30

So I need 30 covers that I can no longer get with LT pulls and using CP to get those covers would amount to an insane amount. Favoriting them all will dilute the pull rate to 5%/8= 0.625% which is far less than the 1.5% it used to be. Neither option 1 nor 2 is a viable option to me. And as you can see I still need a lot of covers for some of the top tier 4*s like Ice Man, Jean Grey and Cyclops and now I feel my progress is completely stifled. Yes, I can build newer characters like Riri faster but she is not nearly as useful as a Jean Grey or Iceman.

Serious question to Demiurge: Have you thought about this problem? Did you have transitioning rosters in mind when implementing this new feature? Or were you only thinking about mature rosters will all older 4*s champed?

Possible solutions I can think of:
1. Remove all new 4* covers from Classic Legendary Tokens and replace them with the older 4*s
2. Create multiple Legendary Token Packs. Keep newest as it is but create sub packs for the older 5-4*s with 3 5*s and 20 4*s per pack. That will give good pull rates for each type of cover and every player can choose for which character(s) he or she wants to go for.

I would prefer option 2 but could live with option 1 as well. But the system as it is now is completely broken for newer players, which from a business point of view is also not a good thing because you risk losing newer players because they feel they simply can't create decent 4*-5* rosters anymore.

I play daily, I paid money to buy HP, I paid money to get VIP status ... but if this system remains as it is, I will lose my drive to keep playing and won't spend money on the game anymore. It completely caters to longtime and whale type players and leaves the others hanging dry. The thing that bothers me the most is that Demiurge doesn't have any longterm planning it seems. It's always just mucking about, changing this and that. But really good game creators create a system that is long term viable and appeals both to longterm and new players alike ... This? This is just short term mucking about and I find it very poorly designed.

I disagree.

In the long term is exactly where this change is good. You can say you want to champ all those characters so your pool is more dilute than before, but over the long term that won't stay true. You'll eventually pick up the covers you want (faster, even, and with more control than before, if you narrow down your choices to the ones you feel are highest priority and then, you know, just change your favorites after you've hit champ status), and then the character dilution won't be an issue anymore.

On the other hand, if they had kept going the way they were, then dilution was just going to get worse and worse for everyone. Long-term is exactly what the devs were thinking about, with this change.

How exactly would giving us a way to pull the vaulted characters from tokens stop us from getting what we want. The new system forces us to focus too much on the newest so there will never be resources to go back and work on those old characters, especially for those of us that dare not dedicate every waking moment of our live to playing this game. Forced new characters to create a forced treadmill that many can't keep up with, without throwing lots of money at, all with less free resources because they take many champ rewards away by taking away so many characters.

kyo28

carrion pigeons wrote:

I disagree.

In the long term is exactly where this change is good. You can say you want to champ all those characters so your pool is more dilute than before, but over the long term that won't stay true. You'll eventually pick up the covers you want (faster, even, and with more control than before, if you narrow down your choices to the ones you feel are highest priority and then, you know, just change your favorites after you've hit champ status), and then the character dilution won't be an issue anymore.

On the other hand, if they had kept going the way they were, then dilution was just going to get worse and worse for everyone. Long-term is exactly what the devs were thinking about, with this change.

I didn't say they needed to keep things as is, because rightfully so the packs were getting too crowded and diluting took place.

What I am saying is that reminding dilution by limiting players' choice is a poor design choice and not a very workable long-term solution.

Simply put, I think we can all agree that Iceman and Jean Grey are pretty high up the latter on the 4* power scaling. But now newer players are all but cut off from championing those and are forced to turn to 4*s like Riri, who can't hold a candle to those older 4*s. Where is long-term vision in that? Where is the fairness or balancing in that?

Taking away opportunities and choice from players is not a viable long-term solution.

Each is free to do as they want but I will from effective immediately not spend a single cent on this game as long as vaulting is in effect. There are plenty of ways to combat dilution without vaulting characters.