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

kyo28

whitecat31 wrote:

What I want, is the champion progression of the 20 something 4 star characters I invested millions of ISO into to mean something. Before, I had about a 50% chance of a four star cover to be worth something to me champion wise. Now, I have a 5% chance, plus whatever I have champed out of the current 12 available, which is not many.

Also, this selection of the new 4 star characters IGNORES the player base rating system of what we consider the top 10 Four stars. The only top 10 ten four stars in the selection of 12 characters is Peggy Carter, and Danvers (some people are iffy on that). Five of the 12 available are 5 of some of the worst available in Wasp, Venom, Luke Cage, Riri, and Gwen Pool (assuming you don't play with cheat sheets). Many players don't want to HAVE to invest ISO into these characters, or feel they have to invest ISO into these characters.

This perfectly sums it up.

firethorne

carrion pigeons wrote:

Why are they incompatible?

Tell me which statement you disagree with:
1) We get more 4* covers than ever before with Bonus Heroes active.
2) Bonus Heroes can be leveraged to obtain old covers.

Fallacy of negative conclusion from affirmative premises. The problem is, these two do not combine into "We get more old heroes than ever before."

The old heroes have moved entirely into a place where they are now nearly unobtainable. Before, you drew 20, you got 16 old, 4 new. Now, you draw 20, you get 20 new, plus one old. Yes, 21 > 20. Your premise one is true. But, the problem we're taking about is 1 < 16. Dramatically less.


By the new route, if you want Hulkbuster, the bonus will always be Hulkbuster. Your premise 2 is true... sort of. Because before, that draw 20 may not have given you a Hulkbuster. But if it didn't, it would have given a Maxpun, Iceman, TeenJean, 4thor, Cyclops or 4pool, etc. and invariably more than one. So sure, the bonus hero can be old. That additional bonus you get one out of twenty times can be old. But absolutely nothing else will be. And that is a devastating reduction in overall acquisition rate of old characters.

WelcomeDeath

carrion pigeons wrote:

The old 4*s are full of characters that people didn't really care about. The news that you don't have to sink Iso into them now in order to take advantage of champ rewards in general ought to be good news. Those character were just filling space on rosters, acting as batteries. Now the batteries are still around but there's less than a third as many to have to worry about. Why is this not okay?

The high quality old characters can be farmed up faster than before. Don't tell me they can't. The impact of Bonus Heroes is enough that you can earn covers for a desired character at ~triple the old rate if you want (talking about 4*s specifically). And frankly there just aren't that many that matter. If you have an 8-cover War Machine or something you were excited to bring up, well, now you have a choice to make, but it isn't that different from the old choice that RNG made for you. The only real difference is that now you have to make a choice you know is suboptimal, if you want your War Machine champed, as opposed to letting RNG do it on your behalf.

To the first statement: The older 4s have several 4s people dont care about, but there are many 4s that people really are invested in and use all the time. While I do appreciate not pulling any more Elektra covers, taking rulk, ice, jean, cyke, etc out to make that happen isnt really worth it. Furthermore, its not ok because you miss out on champ levels and newer players miss out on covering them for ddq, essentials, features, boss battles, etc.

To the second : Sure, the old characters can be farmed up faster IF YOU DO ONE AT A TIME. Furthermore, the statement about odds being 3 times what they were needs to be qualified. The latest 4s are 3x+ what they were because there are less than 1/3 of them in packs. That has NOTHING to do with selecting favorites. If you pick just one favorite 4*, youll earn covers on just that one character at twice the rate (not three times!) you used to. If you pick two, its the same rate. If you pick 3 or more, its considerably slower than the old rate.

lomgamer

This is so bad. As a transitioner to 4* field, my roster is full of 3 championed 3 stars and lots of 4 stars that have between 9 and 2 covers. And you know what? You just crossed out half of them. Now, more that half my my champions are useless, because they will never get any significant number of cover to get 4* out of them (But yay, you picked Spider-Man and Squirrel girl)
And my 4 stars? My peggy is pretty happy with this change, because i allready have 8 covers for her, but what about Cyclops,Hulk buster, Red hulk and all those guys, that i decided to to lvl up and keep in roster, because i like them way more and i already had them at 3/4 covers when i got some new hero. It just does not seems fair... you **** half of them in the **** with no lube.

Vladdy

Even after some days thinking about it: I don't like the "vaulting" aspect of "Bonus Heroes".

Getting covers for free at whatever rate is fine of course, there is no doubt about that. I pulled a bonus 5* Thanos!

But I started hoarding for a reason.

Back in the days I hated to have to sell 4* covers I can't use when I pull a Legendary Token. So I decided to hoard Command Points and champion as many 4* as possible to reduce the chance for those wasted pulls.

Before the new bonus feature kicked in I was up to 9 4* left to champion and over 6k Command Points hoarded (yes, Legendary Tokens are my weak point, I can't hoard them). A pretty solid situation when trying to avoid wasting pulls. But now, a moment later, my situation changed. My chance to pull something I have to sell greatly increased. So I have to keep hoarding unless I change my decision and "feel good" about selling 4* covers I can't use.

And hoarding is "fun".

...

Nellobee

So far, I have gotten 1 Peggy from BH. I currently also now have 4 4* covers sitting that I can't afford to roster. Great change.

smkspy

I hope they're smart enough to not put a twelve character as the next simulator progression reward. I have zero reason to finish it today because I know that I'll finish off Riri long before she gets vaulted and I don't necessarily want to champ her over other 4s so plenty of cover will probably get sold off.

Liftoff

Spent all my tokens to try for Kate and moonknight. I now have 8 medusa purple covers and can't champion her. Yep, this makes championing easier.

BraneDedDev

So what we can favorite every missing character to combat vaulting? That totally ruins the point of favorite characters... So what we can RNG the new characters? Most of them suck!

Why didn't you add add a new legends set and a 3* set that has the characters vaulted in it instead of vaulting? Latest legends, New garbage legends, old desirable legends. RNG is reduced and that gives you time to figure out wasted covers and ISO starvation...

Vaulting has killed champions. Champions made people like this redundant game again.

Argon Flame

I think the fix is to change the 5% rate to get a bonus hero. Vaulting will be much more palatable if you were to get a higher chance to trigger your bonus.

Bonus heroes could be limited to only the older characters as well.

Would 10% or 20% bonus rates be detrimental to the game?

Or remove the RNG and just have a progress bar that increases (either for a character or for a specific cover) if you have them favourited. Once you have pulled "X" covers you get your bonus cover , no RNG.


#disclaimer I haven't read the 35+ pages of discussion on this.

Wumpushunter

A solution to the "newer heroes" stink would be buff the newer characters before rotating them off the available list. Cut ap costs of their abilities or somethimg. This way they become more palatable for the community.

Quebbster

Liftoff wrote:

Spent all my tokens to try for Kate and moonknight. I now have 8 medusa purple covers and can't champion her. Yep, this makes championing easier.

There's not much point in chasing covers for Moon Knight and Kate Bishop, unfortunately. We are only days away from them leaving the tokens. Save your ISO for newer heroes you might have a shot at champing.

drayviper32

There is still people posting complaints here??? Getting old. I can't take it!!!

Crowl

Argon Flame wrote:

I think the fix is to change the 5% rate to get a bonus hero. Vaulting will be much more palatable if you were to get a higher chance to trigger your bonus.

Bonus heroes could be limited to only the older characters as well.

Would 10% or 20% bonus rates be detrimental to the game?

Or remove the RNG and just have a progress bar that increases (either for a character or for a specific cover) if you have them favourited. Once you have pulled "X" covers you get your bonus cover , no RNG.

Increasing the bonus rate would be welcome, but would hardly fix the issue, merely make it slightly less detested.

As far as a pity timer mechanism, this game has been crying out for one of those when it came to 5*s for ages, so we probably shouldn't hold our breath for bonus heroes getting one anytime soon.

WelcomeDeath

Have an idea for a very easy fix for the outrage to the vaulting of 4*. Now, heroics and event tokens have actually gotten much better for pulling a specific 4* (about 6 times better if you only have 1 bonus hero). The main issue is with legendary tokens, which is the main source of 4* covers for most. While these did receive a bump of 5%, its not nearly the 17% bump that the same 4* get from heroics. Granted, this is a much higher potential for getting your specific 4*....but shouldn't it be? Heroic tokens and event tokens fall all the time. Legendaries don't fall very often at all, neither does getting 20-25 cp unless youre competing at high levels.

This one tweak in bonus hero odds in one store to make it more consistent with how characters are awarded elsewhere would mean you could actually cover and champ individual 4* at an appreciably quicker speed, and would put bonus 4* back ahead of latest 5* in likelihood to drop. It would also mean you could pick a crop of six "classic" 4* and get about the same rate you got on them before.

Furthermore, this would address the dilution problem for classic 5*, which really hasnt been addressed effectively with the initial rollout. It would basically give a 2.7% increase in likelihood of pulling your bonus 5* if youve only selected one. Combined with regular token odds for a specific 5* (currently 1.5%), thats still only 4% for a specific 5%, which is reasonable compared to the 5% in latests. It would also mean that 5 more characters in, your odds would still be 3.7% and would never drop below 2.7% for your chosen 5*, even with infinite 5* in the game.

Most other solutions for the vaulting, which players clearly dont care for, would likely require all kinds of coding and setting up new systems, etc (even the ones I've suggested previously). This would be one tweak to one number for bonus heroes in one store....but would make a world of difference.

DarthDeVo

I suppose at this point, I'm not really adding anything new to the discussion, other than to voice my support for splitting the token pool for 4*s and 5*s into a Latest and Classics store, where the three latest 5*s and 12 latest 4*s are in the Latest and all other 5*s and 4*s are in Classics. Or something along those lines.

I'm not sure what, if anything, needs to be done with 3*s. Vaulting roughly half of them seems a little unnecessary. They were coming fairly consistently through placement rewards, progression rewards and token pulls. Bonus heroes will help with drawing some of the ones who have been vaulted, but it seems like now the progression for those vaulted and non-vaulted 3*s will become more unbalanced, even with the addition of bonus heroes.

Bonus heroes, by and large, is a pretty good idea. My experience with the 3* tier has been really positive. When the change was implemented, I had only two 3*s not champed: Ragnarok at Level 102 and Thanos at Level 153. For whatever reason, I just never seemed to have much luck pulling Rags. I made him my sole 3* favorite and and was able to champ him on Saturday. So the bonus draw rate for 3*s has been pretty good in my experience.

As far as 4*s and 5*s go, my personal experience hasn't been nearly as good. When bonus heroes was rolled out, Elektra was in the middle of her Crash. Mine was a paltry Level 115 at 3/1/1, but I had gotten really close to winning a few times. I figured if I could get an extra cover or two with the subsequent levels, I could have a much better chance at winning, so I made her my sole 4* favorite and cashed in some CP on pulls. After about 16 pulls from the Latest Legends store (also hoping for the occasional 5trange, Thano5 or 5* BP cover) and several 4*s from Heroic tokens and the stray LT, I still haven't pulled any bonus heroes from either tier (pulled two Thano5 covers with the CP).

I fully realize that isn't the largest sample to work with, and there have been several people reporting opening much larger hordes with zero bonus heroes. Of course, some have been much luckier and received multiple heroes with minimal pulls. At any rate, Hulkbuster (Level 111 2/1/2) and Iceman (a very sad Level 70 0/0/1) are now my favorites, but I don't foresee them getting much love. Although in the previous system they obviously weren't getting much love from RNGesus in the first place, so maybe that's not the greatest example.

I'm currently in the early stages of the 4* transition, and it just feels like this vaulting is really going to hamper my overall progress. Other than my lone 4* champ (Medusa), not a single one of my 4*s had 5 covers in any power, although a few are at 4 covers, so any 4* draw was guaranteed to be useful. Now my draws are limited to the Blessed 12 and while in theory they will get covered much faster, it's at the expense of the progress of 75 percent of the rest of my 4*s. I was JUST getting to the point that some of them were able to start winning their Crash. It seems that progress will now be severely hampered.

Others have mentioned the nerf that this brings to the champion system, and it seems like that's a valid concern. If you pick only one or two 3*s, you can probably plow them through a few levels and then switch to two different characters and repeat ad infinitum and not notice much of a difference, but the 4* tier definitely seems like it will be ****. I only just recently champed my first 4, so I can't speak to how quickly champ levels came at that tier previously.

As others have already mentioned, this seems like a pretty significant barrier to newer players who are encouraged to roster every character in the 2*-4* tier (boosted characters, essential nodes, DDQ nodes). Yes, they can favorite characters who aren't currently rostered, but how quickly can they expect to roster (and more importantly, develop) characters in that manner? We all lament RNG from time to time and with the increasing dilution in the old pool that definitely was a concern, but there were definitely times RNG has smiled on us too, to provide us a character we previously didn't have. Now that's off the table for half the 3*s and 75 percent of the 4*s.

I'll keep playing for a while to see how this all shakes out, but if nothing changes I'll be less likely to renew my VIP, and I certainly don't think I'll be recommending the game to anyone new. This just strikes me as extremely limiting for anyone just starting out and trying to build a varied, diverse roster.

MissChinch

@Cthulhu

Thank you for making it known you're keeping tabs on this thread.

There are a million different ways to tweak progression through the tiers, this one seems to have garnered a lot of torches and pitchforks (I'm personally not a fan of vaulting) So, since I know you're watching I wanted to ask:

Have you/your team considered a mechanic that would adapt pull rates to a players current roster state? Something like:
percent chance to draw tier X heroes from a pack increased by 1-2% for every unique X-1 tier character the player has championed ?

This would encourage wider rosters, a smoother transition curve, championing even the stinkiest turd of a hero even if they're days from getting vaulted and likely more HP purchasing for roster slots.

I'd personally be much happier pulling from classics if I knew each 4* I championed would raise the odds of my next classic or latest legends pull being a 5*... it would give fully developed 4* rosters an advantage in filling out their 5* roster without hoarding and blowing it all on the right 3 heroes in latest legends and at the same time it would give the 4* transitioner incentive to pull classics now in order to fill out the 4* tier without having to worry about deadending in 5* land... The same idea could help smooth the 3-4* transition if applied to heroics, more 3* champions could skew 4* pull rates.

In general I'm a fan of atomic changes, not slapping patches on patches and rushing new functionality out to mitigate current issues, but I wanted to get the idea out as it would personally make vaulting more palatable (I'd see value in championing heroes that were about to exit the current 4* "pullable" set of 12)

Good luck and thanks for listening

Avalanche Kincaid

Wow...when did permanently vaulting 70% of characters seem like a good idea? I spent the past year champing all 3* and most 4*, wherein all I had left were Cap Flap, Electra, Nicky and some of the sucky new 4* (RIRI, GwenP, AgentV). I did this so I could collect my champ rewards without wasting. Now all that work is for nothing. You should of told me last month about the vault nerf and I would of let Drax and Mr. F sit in the corner unfed. Oh yeah, I guess I can focus on some powerful favorites, but while I put 30 levels into Iceman, those sucky new characters are gaining 50 levels. Only pulling 12 newest is a bad idea that will manifest itself later down the road for those that like the feature now.

Second, I spent some good money getting Medusa and Carol champed. If I knew the system was changing, why would I have dropped so much HP on them? (I'm guessing 80K but could be more). Seriously, there is no need to spend like that again, just wait for hero to enter pool, favorite and start pulling your hoard. Or buy 1 40 pack and get 5 bonus characters (I doubt many will see this).

Anyway, I'm going to give this a few months, but if this is the direction the game is going then I have wasted all my time and effort champing and will probably turn into the casual free to play that d3 loves.

Peace! Cash me outside girl!

fmftint

Right now we NEED a true daily 4 DDQ. All of us with majority of the tier champed need a reliable way to keep feeding champ levels to characters we've invested so much into. Only speaking for myself but I'd feel a whole lot better knowing I'd get at minimum 1 cover/month for each than 5/year we're looking at now.

VizMantis

As I recall, in the old days of vaulting, it was just a rotating selection of characters. This was unpalatable when the 3* I wanted to max out was vaulted, but at least I knew they'd be back later.

Am I understanding the new system correctly that it'll always be the 12 most recent characters? So once a character is vaulted, they're basically vaulted forever? That seems bonkers if true...