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

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Comments

  • sinnerjfl
    sinnerjfl Posts: 1,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    revskip wrote:
    Additionally all those pulls got my very underwhelming 1/2/4 Iceman to 4/4/5 in the span of 2 weeks. Granted I pulled a lot of legendaries but there was no way with the old system that I would have gotten that lucky to fully cover him. Now I can switch to finishing off my 2/5/2 Nova with the bonus heroes. And after I've caught up on the new releases that I plan to champ I'll favorite Iceman again and champ him and then repeat the process with Nova. I still won't be putting ISO into cover maxed characters I don't love which means I'll burn Riri and Agent Venom covers but that isn't really that different from when I would burn the occasional Eddie Brock Venom or Mr. Fantastic cover.

    There has been so much vitriol for this new system but outside of the one really valid complaint of slowing down higher level champ rewards on the vaulted champs the system really isn't that bad. Hopefully they find a way to address that.

    "It worked out for me so this is a good system" is not valid reasoning.

    Meanwhile I have only pulled one bonus hero that was a 4* so far and I also open a lot of LT's.

    I also got a large number of unusable covers because the pool is so small along with a bunch of garbage like Riri or Mordo.
  • Crowl
    Crowl Posts: 1,579 Chairperson of the Boards
    sinnerjfl wrote:
    "It worked out for me so this is a good system" is not valid reasoning.

    Meanwhile I have only pulled one bonus hero that was a 4* so far and I also open a lot of LT's.

    I also got a large number of unusable covers because the pool is so small along with a bunch of garbage like Riri or Mordo.

    It isn't just down to your rng being biased towards the garbage that can cause more waste in this system either, the chance of lopsided characters increases rather drastically under this system too.
  • Wumpushunter
    Wumpushunter Posts: 627 Critical Contributor
    AlluAllu wrote:
    Before vaulting I was ready to retire after champing all 3-stars (halfway done currently). Move to the 4-star land just seemed to require insane amount of time and grinding. Now that there are only 12, I can look forward to having fun in the near future.


    Good luck trying to place in PVP or PVE with those 12 vs older players with far better vaulted 4 stars. That should be loads of future fun.
  • AlluAllu
    AlluAllu Posts: 86 Match Maker
    kyo28 wrote:
    AlluAllu wrote:
    Before vaulting I was ready to retire after champing all 3-stars (halfway done currently). Move to the 4-star land just seemed to require insane amount of time and grinding. Now that there are only 12, I can look forward to having fun in the near future.
    I can see how at short term it might look like that but bear with me as I was in your shoes not that long ago (now I have 3 champed 4*s).


    1. You'll get covers faster for the 12 recent 4*s, but you run the risk of not having them fully covered by the time they rotate out and/or get unusable covers (e.g. a 1/5/5 character and you keep pulling the two colours you don't need)

    2. What was the biggest hurdle for me to jump from 3* to 4* is not the missing covers but the iso8.png . No seriously, that was a major, major issue for me. After pumping some 127.500 iso8.png into a bunch of 3*s, I all of a sudden had to start saving up 378.500 iso8.pngper character! Don't underestimate that effort! Believe me, by the time I had the iso8.png required to champ my first, I had a bunch of CP and LT saved up and had no problem pulling enough covers to champ one, then I started hoarding again. You'll definitely hit that iso8.png wall!

    3. Finally, it might seem fun to build up Wasp or Riri, get their covers faster and pump some iso8.png into them ... until you need to use them to fight Rulk, Iceman, Jean Grey, Cyclops, FemThor, Prof X, etc. You'll be stuck with underpowered, piss-poor 4*s with no iso8.png left and barely a chance to build one of the better older 4*s because their covers are behind lock and key.

    So I understand your intitial reaction: smaller 4*s pool to pull from means faster track to 4* status. But you need to look at the bigger picture and the wider mechanics of the game. It took me about 1.5 years to transition from 3* to 4* as a semi-casual player. But once you get there, you have a strong 3* roster to fall back on while you slowly build your better 4*s. Vaulting will limit your options rather than expand them. Don't rush to 4* status but enjoy your 3*s and experiment with them, is the best advice I can give you ... and in the mean time prepare yourself to make the jump to 4*.

    Thanks for the advice! I am currently hoarding command points and legendary tokens so that I can eventually enter 4-star land in one swoop. That will probably take rest of this year. In that time I should get my 3-stars finished and also build respectable pile of iso. 12 000 hero points should be piece of cake in that time.

    1. By hoarding my resources I should be able to champ my initial 12, especially with bonus heroes. After that you are correct in that I might not be able to keep up the pace. That remains to be seen.

    2. Yeah, I have heard that the iso is a problem. At least I wont have to spend it on every single character.

    3. Lot of people responded to me about that. I'll take your word for it that latest 4-stars are inferior to the old, at least currently. That will likely mean that I wont be able to compete in placement. Perhaps that's ok. Sounds stressfull. But I might get some kicks beating the better characters with my group of underdogs. icon_e_biggrin.gif
  • Wumpushunter
    Wumpushunter Posts: 627 Critical Contributor
    AlluAllu wrote:

    3. Lot of people responded to me about that. I'll take your word for it that latest 4-stars are inferior to the old, at least currently. That will likely mean that I wont be able to compete in placement. Perhaps that's ok. Sounds stressfull. But I might get some kicks beating the better characters with my group of underdogs. icon_e_biggrin.gif

    Do not take just one person's word, take 1051 voters word. This was the four stars rankings by player vote in 2016.

    3zhPMsv.png
  • Quebbster
    Quebbster Posts: 8,070 Chairperson of the Boards
    Wumpushunter wrote:
    AlluAllu wrote:

    3. Lot of people responded to me about that. I'll take your word for it that latest 4-stars are inferior to the old, at least currently. That will likely mean that I wont be able to compete in placement. Perhaps that's ok. Sounds stressfull. But I might get some kicks beating the better characters with my group of underdogs. icon_e_biggrin.gif

    Do not take just one person's word, take 1051 voters word. This was the four stars rankings by player vote in 2016.

    3zhPMsv.png
    Old characters get more votes in the rankings since people have had more time to build them up and try them out. I wouldn't trust the survey as proof older players are better.
  • dr tinykittylove
    dr tinykittylove Posts: 1,459 Chairperson of the Boards
    Quebbster wrote:
    Wumpushunter wrote:
    AlluAllu wrote:

    Old characters get more votes in the rankings since people have had more time to build them up and try them out. I wouldn't trust the survey as proof older players are better.

    Absolutely agree. Sometimes players make quick judgements based on playing a low-covered new character in pve, or the loaner with completely unsuitable partners. I tend to skim the rankings, shrug and move on.

    Gwenpool for instance is ranked at 34 near the bottom, but when buffed she's a one-woman army, and if you bother to keep in mind a few useful codes she can do wonders with board control.
  • Nick441234
    Nick441234 Posts: 1,496 Chairperson of the Boards
    I seem to only be drawing 3* Thanos from my Bonus Heroes now, despite having 5 selected. I've literally drawn 7 covers for him and not had anything else. Its become that annoying I've removed him from my favourites. Is this how BH is supposed to work? You select 5 favourites yet only get covers for one of them? icon_rolleyes.gif
  • spatenfloot
    spatenfloot Posts: 662 Critical Contributor
    RNG is streaky
  • Blergh
    Blergh Posts: 159 Tile Toppler
    nick_chicane wrote:
    I seem to only be drawing 3* Thanos from my Bonus Heroes now, despite having 5 selected. I've literally drawn 7 covers for him and not had anything else. Its become that annoying I've removed him from my favourites. Is this how BH is supposed to work? You select 5 favourites yet only get covers for one of them? icon_rolleyes.gif

    Is that five three stars or five across the eligible star levels?

    If the former, no it should be random among all the three stars you highlighted.

    If the latter, then your bonus hero is drawn from the same teir as your reward. 3* rewards produce 3* star bonus heroes. 4* rewards produce 4* star bonus heroes. And the same for 5*.

    So get bonus heroes on the same level of reward if that makes sense. Seen a few people confused by this, so thought that might be your problem.

    Apologies if it isn't.
  • StarScream
    StarScream Posts: 147 Tile Toppler
    In another thread I said this feature was the good thing this company has done since I started playing. I now retract that statement since I am now only getting bonus heroes that I do not have marked as bonus heroes.
  • Quebbster
    Quebbster Posts: 8,070 Chairperson of the Boards
    StarScream wrote:
    In another thread I said this feature was the good thing this company has done since I started playing. I now retract that statement since I am now only getting bonus heroes that I do not have marked as bonus heroes.
    Do you have favorite heroes on all star levels?
  • StarScream
    StarScream Posts: 147 Tile Toppler
    Quebbster wrote:
    StarScream wrote:
    In another thread I said this feature was the good thing this company has done since I started playing. I now retract that statement since I am now only getting bonus heroes that I do not have marked as bonus heroes.
    Do you have favorite heroes on all star levels?

    Yes.
  • Crowl
    Crowl Posts: 1,579 Chairperson of the Boards
    Quebbster wrote:
    StarScream wrote:
    In another thread I said this feature was the good thing this company has done since I started playing. I now retract that statement since I am now only getting bonus heroes that I do not have marked as bonus heroes.
    Do you have favorite heroes on all star levels?

    Even if you do have favourites on all star levels, there does also seem to be some display issue bug at the moment too, but you do seem to get the right ones.
  • Nick441234
    Nick441234 Posts: 1,496 Chairperson of the Boards
    Blergh wrote:
    nick_chicane wrote:
    I seem to only be drawing 3* Thanos from my Bonus Heroes now, despite having 5 selected. I've literally drawn 7 covers for him and not had anything else. Its become that annoying I've removed him from my favourites. Is this how BH is supposed to work? You select 5 favourites yet only get covers for one of them? icon_rolleyes.gif

    Is that five three stars or five across the eligible star levels?

    If the former, no it should be random among all the three stars you highlighted.

    If the latter, then your bonus hero is drawn from the same teir as your reward. 3* rewards produce 3* star bonus heroes. 4* rewards produce 4* star bonus heroes. And the same for 5*.

    So get bonus heroes on the same level of reward if that makes sense. Seen a few people confused by this, so thought that might be your problem.

    Apologies if it isn't.

    I have Strange also selected from the 3* characters, so yeah, there was more than just Thanos to choose from.
  • revskip
    revskip Posts: 1,001 Chairperson of the Boards
    sinnerjfl wrote:
    revskip wrote:
    Additionally all those pulls got my very underwhelming 1/2/4 Iceman to 4/4/5 in the span of 2 weeks. Granted I pulled a lot of legendaries but there was no way with the old system that I would have gotten that lucky to fully cover him. Now I can switch to finishing off my 2/5/2 Nova with the bonus heroes. And after I've caught up on the new releases that I plan to champ I'll favorite Iceman again and champ him and then repeat the process with Nova. I still won't be putting ISO into cover maxed characters I don't love which means I'll burn Riri and Agent Venom covers but that isn't really that different from when I would burn the occasional Eddie Brock Venom or Mr. Fantastic cover.

    There has been so much vitriol for this new system but outside of the one really valid complaint of slowing down higher level champ rewards on the vaulted champs the system really isn't that bad. Hopefully they find a way to address that.

    "It worked out for me so this is a good system" is not valid reasoning.

    Meanwhile I have only pulled one bonus hero that was a 4* so far and I also open a lot of LT's.

    I also got a large number of unusable covers because the pool is so small along with a bunch of garbage like Riri or Mordo.

    It didn't work out for me so this is a bad system is equally invalid. icon_e_wink.gif

    I had a large hoard of CP and legendaries and really wanted to get Peggy as many covers as possible so I popped 136 legendaries (38 latest and 98 classic). I got a total of one 5* bonus hero out of 14 that I pulled. I guess that is lucky since the expectation at 5% is 0.7 but my draw rate for 5* was still under 15% even with the bonus hero so not super lucky.

    From 122 4* pulls I got 7 bonus heroes. 1 Peggy who I then removed from favorites and 6 Iceman. Just slightly higher than 5%. Again lucky but not super lucky.

    I definitely also had plenty of covers that were unusable but that happened often with the old way too when I opened hoards since I have plenty of older 4*s cover maxed or maxed at 5 colors in a color or two. Not really a big difference there. The only thing that really changed was the priority I champed characters. Newer characters will tend to get more love in the short term until I get a few more of them champed and then I'll start hoarding again.

    So if you pulled a similar amount to what I pulled and only got one 4* bonus I totally empathize. That is a sick run of bad luck since with that many pulls you should be in the range of a 5* bonus and 6.1 4* bonus heroes. I'm sorry you ran that bad, RNG is rough. I'd love to see a streakbuster thrown in there, I'm pretty sure everyone who has played for any length of time has had a few bad runs. And some good ones too.
  • sinnerjfl
    sinnerjfl Posts: 1,275 Chairperson of the Boards
    revskip wrote:
    From 122 4* pulls I got 7 bonus heroes. 1 Peggy who I then removed from favorites and 6 Iceman. Just slightly higher than 5%. Again lucky but not super lucky.

    I definitely also had plenty of covers that were unusable but that happened often with the old way too when I opened hoards since I have plenty of older 4*s cover maxed or maxed at 5 colors in a color or two. Not really a big difference there. The only thing that really changed was the priority I champed characters. Newer characters will tend to get more love in the short term until I get a few more of them champed and then I'll start hoarding again.

    The thing is, 122 pulls equals to 2440 CP... That is quite a long time to hoard honestly, heck it might have been better for you to just buy those covers at 120 CP, would be cheaper.

    5% for all the vaulted chars is just so low... Its everytime you open an LT, 1 in 20 chance it might happen. It could not happen 100 times in a row... Its just not reliable and artificially gates too many characters. The reasoning the developpers have given us makes no sense. Just choosing my bonus heroes is not enough because most of the time, it doesnt trigger.
  • revskip
    revskip Posts: 1,001 Chairperson of the Boards
    sinnerjfl wrote:
    revskip wrote:
    From 122 4* pulls I got 7 bonus heroes. 1 Peggy who I then removed from favorites and 6 Iceman. Just slightly higher than 5%. Again lucky but not super lucky.

    I definitely also had plenty of covers that were unusable but that happened often with the old way too when I opened hoards since I have plenty of older 4*s cover maxed or maxed at 5 colors in a color or two. Not really a big difference there. The only thing that really changed was the priority I champed characters. Newer characters will tend to get more love in the short term until I get a few more of them champed and then I'll start hoarding again.

    The thing is, 122 pulls equals to 2440 CP... That is quite a long time to hoard honestly, heck it might have been better for you to just buy those covers at 120 CP, would be cheaper.

    5% for all the vaulted chars is just so low... Its everytime you open an LT, 1 in 20 chance it might happen. It could not happen 100 times in a row... Its just not reliable and artificially gates too many characters. The reasoning the developpers have given us makes no sense. Just choosing my bonus heroes is not enough because most of the time, it doesnt trigger.

    It was 136 total pulls but a good portion of those were legendary tokens so the actual CP was only 1960. Which was a decent size hoard I hadn't pulled since December. Was planning on hoarding until I had enough to take 300 pulls and try to max cover three 5*s but with the change to the way things worked I just adjusted on the fly to maximize my chance at Peggy covers who I really enjoy playing with. Since most of the characters in the newest 12 were very undercovered I figured that I could maximize my gains in 4* land by pulling everything early. Which in turn means I get to make easier decisions. I champed Spider-Woman and will go Medusa next. So any pulls which give those covers will get me champ levels. Buying all those covers (some of which I couldn't buy with CP since I didn't have the first cover) would have cost a lot more than the CP I spent pulling. I also helped my 5*s a bit with those pulls which also wouldn't have happened spending the 120 CP.

    The thing with this game is that the only real progression is collecting covers and champing characters. A quicker or slower system doesn't actually benefit anyone since there is no real endgame. There is only collecting stuff and using different variations of characters. While you might not feel that 5% is a significant addition it is still more than you were receiving before the change. And vaulting while onerous in the short term might actually benefit the game in the long term.

    I used to hoard because I worried about covers being wasted because of the very wide amount of characters and was constantly chagrined that I would have to wait a really long time to cover newer characters since they didn't drop very many covers. I usually get no more than 2-4 covers on a new release (One through alliance rewards and one or two through placement. Added on to that the progression cover in the next PVE). That meant a long time to actually be able to use the roster slot. This change turns that dynamic on its head. Making the 4* transition a little faster, which having only 12 characters at a time in packs achieves, is a positive change for newer players who prior to the change were at the complete mercy of a much less contracted RNG.

    Now those same players can concentrate on a couple of characters from the tier at a time with the bonus heroes helping to fill in gaps in the older characters. I'd still like to see more done to facilitate the older characters moving along and hope the devs make some changes that make that easier. And the slower progression on older characters means less of a bottleneck at the non-whale end game (having all 4's champed).
  • Nick441234
    Nick441234 Posts: 1,496 Chairperson of the Boards
    I do find it strange that they consider this to requirement this much thinking. Just create a new token with the older characters in and make them available to purchase and win through PVE progression. I cant understand why this would be something that requires weeks of consideration.
  • CNash
    CNash Posts: 952 Critical Contributor
    nick_chicane wrote:
    I do find it strange that they consider this to requirement this much thinking. Just create a new token with the older characters in and make them available to purchase and win through PVE progression. I cant understand why this would be something that requires weeks of consideration.

    It shows that the original decision to implement character vaulting again, along with Bonus Heroes, was something they didn't take lightly. It probably took them just as long to analyse all the data and come up with a plan to accomplish their goals.

    What those goals were seems easy to work out... but there's the ever-present specter of monetisation hanging over every decision they make, which they'll never tell us anything about. This means that the "common-sense" solutions that we come up with are not made with all of the relevant data points in hand, and so may not solve the entirety of the problem.

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