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

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...

blargrx

Finally finished reading all 36 pages.

Pretty much everything has been covered in terms of analysis both good and bad, while I doubt they'll change the vaulting, the one change I wish they would make would be that the bonus hero has to be a usable cover of your favorited character.

For all of us chasing our final 1-2 covers of an older 4* favorite that is no longer in rotation, the devs suggestion is to favorite them. Well if I'm sitting at 1/5/5, the chance of getting a bonus cover isn't very high... multiply that by 1/3 since I can only use one cover... that makes the new system heartbreaking if I do manage to get lucky

Quebbster

blargrx wrote:

Finally finished reading all 36 pages.

Pretty much everything has been covered in terms of analysis both good and bad, while I doubt they'll change the vaulting, the one change I wish they would make would be that the bonus hero has to be a usable cover of your favorited character.

For all of us chasing our final 1-2 covers of an older 4* favorite that is no longer in rotation, the devs suggestion is to favorite them. Well if I'm sitting at 1/5/5, the chance of getting a bonus cover isn't very high... multiply that by 1/3 since I can only use one cover... that makes the new system heartbreaking if I do manage to get lucky

There's progression rewards or just outright buying the covers you need for CP though. I understand why those options are not particularly attractive though.

Markot

I would suggest simple change which could possibly enable something like situation before bonus heroes as well as situation after it according to individual player's choice. When token is opened choose randomly from union of all currently available characters and bonus characters (only applies to 4* and 3*). Some examples:

Ex. 1.
My favorites: Black Bolt, Iceman, Scarlet Witch
Pull latest LT: 5% chance for each of 3 latest 5*, 85% evenly distributed between 13 characters (Iceman and 12 latest 4*)
- if bonus happens, it is Black Bolt or Iceman
Pull latest or classic LT: 15% distributed between old 5*, 85% evenly distributed between 13 characters (Iceman and 12 latest 4*)
- if bonus happens, it is Black Bolt or Iceman
Pull heroic token: Probabilities for 3* will be as they are now (as SW is currently there), current probability for 4* will be divided evenly between 13 characters (Iceman and 12 latest 4*)
- if bonus happens, it is Iceman or Scarlet Witch

Ex. 2.
My favorites: Black Bolt, All 4*, All 3*
Pull latest LT: 5% chance for each of 3 latest 5*, 85% evenly distributed between 45 characters (All 4* except Dino and Howard)
- if bonus happens, it is Black Bolt or random 4*
Pull heroic token: Probability for 3* evenly distributed between all of them, probability for 4* evenly distributed between 45 characters (All 4* except Dino and Howard)
- if bonus happens, it random 4* or 3*


In this way, who liked the system before bonus heroes can select all 4* and all 3* for bonus and only change he will possibly see is a random bonus hero sometimes.
Who likes the new system can select only 1 hero of each * level and it will be almost as it is right now (if the marked bonus characters are from latest 4* or actually chosen 20 3* it will be exactly as it is now, otherwise, marked characters would be available both as bonus and as standard pull).

I'm sorry for my english and hope you understand my suggestion.

kyo28

Markot wrote:

In this way, who liked the system before bonus heroes can select all 4* and all 3* for bonus and only change he will possibly see is a random bonus hero sometimes.

I'm sorry but this in no way resemble the old system, because for every LT pull I still get much higher pull rates for the 12 newer 4*s whereas the pull rates for all older ones will be astronimically lower. Even just selecting only 8 older 4*s lowers their pull rate to 0.625% ... selecting all of them drives it down to, what? 0.1% or something.
Compare that to the 1.5% they had in the old system!

No, with the new system it's impossible to match the pull rates of the previous system for ALL older 4* ... it's just mathematically not feasable and the main reason is because they can only be gotten through bonus pulls which means you'll need to cram all old 4*s in that tiny 5%. Which is completely insane.

nickaraxnos

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 you see the game only from one prespective.

I am sure that (like in all things we do) at least 80% of the people are playing are low and mid tier players and don't open the big packs. Either because they are F2P and can't get to them or because they don't want to spend that kind of money for something like that.

So you changed the way we were playing the game just for the benefit of the 20% or less.

The majority of the players are opening standarts, elite (can't get 4* from those) and heroics (very small chance obtaining a 4* from there). From this majority another 70-80% can't even get to the 10pack reward from pvp and those of us who can get it, it's mostly 2* and 3* we win from it and it's only once per season!

So are hopes for getting 4* is from legendary tokens. Now again the 80% of the 80% of all mpq players are getting a really hard time to open one of them because they can't get cps due to poor rosters. The rest 20% (i am in it) we can get a legendary token every 4-5 days.
Think of it. They need 20cp at best. If they can't find it from top 10 at pve and can't find it from pvp or ddq they will have to wait from daily supply, their alliances (lol) and sometimes from 1 or 2 (if they have the essential node char) from pve nodes. Wheeeeen they finally get to obtain them they probably won't earn a bh and they will just get a cover from the 12 latest. If that one is one of the chars that be soon removed from the lt is like winning nothing. So they start up again from scratch.
The rest of us we can open one every 4-5 days we ll have to wait about a month for just one bh. All this time we ll be getting new heroes we might not like or dupes we cant use. maybe if we are lucky 1 or 2 good characters

Conclusion? 20% of all players can be happy with the new system. Rest of us can't compete

kyo28

nickaraxnos wrote:

Conclusion? 20% of all players can be happy with the new system. Rest of us can't compete

Exactly. And my guess is this 20% are the biggest spenders hence why D3 probably only had those in mind when implementing this change.
So perhaps the other 80% need to stop spending money on this game (no more VIP, no more buying HP, etc). Perhaps then that loss of revenue will be big enough for D3 to start considering to change the system. 80% low spenders might even dwarf 20% high spenders, who knows. Because in my experience, a company will quickly address issues once consumers start to talk (or complain) with their wallets.

Coubii

As I've suggested in an other topic, why not allowing users to select which twelve 4* we want to see in the legendary pack ? It would solve both dilution and the possibility to champion old characters. Every body would be able to pull only what they want. You have already 5 in one color, here again, don't take the chance to pull a 6th, just remove that character from your list.