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

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

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).